Chateau of Echoes

That week I dedicated to making confiture, or jam. I’d put foundation correspondence on hold, canceled my regular trip into town, and decided to skip the week’s regional flea markets. September is the traditional month for jam making in France. In fact, in the 1700s, when the revolutionaries renamed the months of the calendar, September became Fructidor, identifying it with the fruit processing done during the month. In case of questions regarding my cooking diploma, I do adhere to the laws of jam making. (In France, birthplace of bureaucracy, you cannot doubt that there are laws governing this skill.) For to make jam is not to make marmalade; neither is it to make compote. Jam is composed of great quantities of both sugar and fresh fruit, whole or juiced. Marmalade, of course, includes gelatin and puree, while compote violates the jam rules by including very little sugar.

My boxes of fruits verger, or orchard fruits, covered every available space of the kitchen. There were apples, pears, peaches, plums, figs, gooseberries, and black currants, as well as a mound of lemons, a pile of vanilla beans, and bag after bag of sugar. I also had a selection of hazelnuts and chestnuts to add to several of the jam mixtures, and I had an assortment of jars and lids.

Standing back to survey the work before me, I suddenly felt very tired. Over an espresso I organized my work according to the ripeness of the fruits in front of me. The prep work wouldn’t take too much time: squeezing the lemons, crushing and chopping the nuts. The more perishable fruits I would process first: peaches, pears, gooseberries. The others could safely be left for the end of the week.

After my espresso, I rearranged the boxes in accordance with my plan of work: Those I would process first were nearest my work area; the rest were placed farther away toward the back door.

I’d made sure I’d taken no reservations that week, and I’d stocked the freezer with food from Picard… but that was my little secret. The Picard frozen food grocery chain sold anything one could imagine from sauce bearnais to coquilles St. Jacques. And the preparations were extremely well done. Serving Picard wouldn’t damage my reputation in the least. I only hoped it wouldn’t help it!

It was in the middle of my jam week that things began to rearrange themselves. At first I assumed it was Cranwell, so I mentioned it at dinner on Wednesday evening. We were enjoying filets de pintade aux cepes et aux girolles-so much that I’d almost decided to let Picard do my cooking more often. The fowl was perfectly moist, and the sauce that accompanied it, studded with mixed mushrooms, was divine.

Between courses, I got up to check on a batch of jars and happened to realize how stained my white tank top and pants were; at that point in the evening, it wasn’t worth changing clothes. And besides, Cranwell didn’t care. And that was what reminded me.

“Cranwell? If you need to move my boxes when you take Lucy out, could you remember to replace them afterward?”

“What boxes?”

“The ones by the back door. The fruit. I lined them up in the order I’ll be needing them.”

He turned on his stool to take a look at them. “We haven’t been going out that way. I didn’t want to interfere in your production line.” He turned back around to face me. “What’s been going on?” The color of his burgundy crew- neck sweater was echoed by the color of the wine we were drinking. As he took up his glass and put it to his lips, the color was reflected by a glint in his eyes.

I swallowed. “Nothing. It’s probably just me.” I picked up the baguette and sliced a piece for myself. But the problem was, it wasn’t me. I knew myself, I knew my work habits, and I knew exactly how I had laid out the boxes. They were no longer in the same order I had placed them.

“Maybe Severine cleaned down here and moved them around.”

My brow couldn’t be stopped from wrinkling into a frown. “She never cleans down here. The kitchen is my responsibility. She helps me serve meals and clean up after them, but that’s it.” But even as I was speaking I remembered that I had come upon Severine in the kitchen at an odd time earlier that day. It had been in the mid-afternoon, long after lunch had been put away and hours before she was due for dinner. I had gone out into the garden to do some weeding but then decided to snip some basil for dinner while I was thinking about it. I gathered some leaves and returned to the kitchen to put them in the refrigerator.

As I came through the back door, I saw Severine crouched along the bottom of the kitchen wall by the stairs.

Pausing in my step, I almost lost my balance and cried out. Severine whirled around and came up to her feet, a dinner knife in her hand.

She’d said something about wanting a baguette and dropping the knife when she had been buttering it. At the time, I remember being surprised: The French only butter their baguettes at breakfast. Now that I’d remembered, I decided to ask her about it.

But when she came down for dinner, Cranwell plied her with questions. She was still responding as she made her way back up the stairs.

“How broad was education during Alix’s time? I know that she was a scholar. Would she have read books in Latin, French… Arabic, Hebrew, Greek?”

She paused on the staircase. “We know she read Latin and French. Arabic is not popular. With the Crusades, the church is not so pleased with the Arabs. All their knowledge is thought stained by their religion, and so they keep their sciences and their maths to themselves. Hebrew is difficult. The Jews of course know Hebrew, but they have been chased from France in the fourteenth century. Before this, there have been many in this region. But they must leave and settle in the Kingdom of Provence and in Spain and Italy. There are no official Jewish populations in France during the fifteenth century. There are people in France who are Jewish who pretend that they are not. Understand? But we have no documents written in Hebrew and no schools of Hebrew because they are not allowed. And Hebrew is difficult whatever is the case because at that time it is used as both alpha and numeric. Each letter represents also a number. I will show you this.”

She came back down the stairs, set her plate on the table, and took a pad of paper and pencil from my desk. “By example, the letter Y and the letter A. The tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Yod, may be used like our letter J or like Y. And Aleph, like our A, is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.” She drew what looked like an N with a wavy line on top of it. “In Hebrew these are also the numbers ten and one. So you might add them together and make eleven. And the fun is that an eleven such as this might be just the number eleven or it may be a symbol.”

“A symbol?” Cranwell looked thoroughly confused.

“Yes. The ancient language is read on many different levels. Some numbers were special and some were not. Twelve by example is a complete number and very significant. Eleven misses one, and because it is not quite twelve, it symbols for not complete. You see?”

“I think so.”

“Bon. As for Greek, according to her journals, Alix did not know this. I have answered your question?”

Cranwell nodded.

As Severine continued her ascent, my eyes dropped to the place I’d seen her crouching earlier. The mortar between the stones looked as if it were crumbling. Either that or I had mice. I grabbed a broom and swept up the debris. As I was sweeping, I thought of Severine picking up that dropped knife and then using it to cut and spread a pat of butter. My nose wrinkled. After dumping the crumbled mortar in the wastebasket, I decided to throw away the butter Severine had used. No point in contaminating food with what might be mortar mixed with mice droppings. I opened the refrigerator, found the butter dish, grabbed it, and took it to the sink. When I took off the lid, I was surprised to see that it was still wrapped in paper. It had never been used.

Why would Severine have lied to me? And what had she been doing with the knife?

The next week brought a conference to my chateau. It was sponsored by the French Ministere de la culture et communication and it was meant to address the significance of Alix’s journals to the current record of late-medieval French history. Mostly it was a chance for six professors from the University of Rennes II and the University of Paris IV (the Sorbonne) to come together and debate their interpretations of the journals.

The significance to me? It was the first conference I’d ever hosted.

During the restoration of the estate, I had made the decision to put off restoring several of the outbuildings as well as the stable that I currently used as a garage. I could have easily added another six guest rooms to my total, but I wanted instead to narrow the scope of my efforts. I had also been tempted to close off the council room on