Chateau of Echoes

English.

M. Mailly wanted to reinspect the building. To think of a French stable as a barn would be incorrect. The two buildings have always served very different purposes. This stable was not original to the estate, but dated from the late 1600s. As such, it displayed the characteristics of the period; of stone construction, the one-story building had a rather large entry area, for storing conveyances, and one long, wide central hall, lined on both sides with stables. Each stable had a door on the wall that opened to the outside. The floor was pieced of stone cobbles which could be easily cleaned with a wash of water. It still smelled musty from generations of straw and excrement that had been ground between the stones.

Cranwell and Lucy accompanied M. Mailly and me on our investigation. Several times, I saw the contractor frown as he tapped on a wooden door or glanced up to see light filter through the roof. At last he finished his prowling and we stepped outside to talk.

“Le probleme est que c’est une ecurie.” He glanced at Cranwell as he said this and stopped to repeat it in English. “The problem is that this is a stable. One has gaps in the stones. One has holes in the roofs. One has doors which do not fit correctly.”

“Mais c’est peut-etre… it is perhaps less difficult to convert because one must tear down for that we can build up. And this is easy to tear down.”

M. Mailly and I spent a good hour talking about the feasibility of my plans. And all that time, Cranwell refused to leave. I finally ignored him and tried to help M. Mailly do the same by keeping the conversation in French. It would have taken twice as long to translate every phrase into English. And besides, Cranwell had no stake in the matter.

It was decided that M. Mailly would contract an architect to draw plans for splitting the stable into a garage and a residence. He thought that the beamed ceilings could stay and that the stone pavers could be removed, the ground cleaned and leveled and the pavers replaced in a concrete foundation. He warned that the walls would need insulation and more windows would need to be added-at least in the residence area. I agreed with all of those suggestions. I did, however, want to keep as many of the doors as possible.

The contractor asked if he could check the attic in the chateau. I remembered that during renovations, he was concerned that there might be leakage in the roof if work was not properly done in the varied angles around the towers. Although we’d blocked access to the attic in my bathroom, we’d decided to install a door in Severine’s bathroom that would allow direct inlet to the area which had most concerned M. Mailly.

As we walked back to the chateau, I recalled that Severine was in Rennes, working at the University. I grabbed the master key and led M. Mailly up the central stairs to her bedroom. I had misgivings about going into her apartment without her knowledge, but I decided I could let her know later that evening. It wasn’t as if we were being deliberately nosy.

Walking into the apartment felt like walking into another world. I had decorated my chateau in period furnishings from different eras in French history. Severine had decorated her space much as I imagine it would have looked in Alix’s time. There were several oriental rugs hung on the walls, there was a fur on the floor in front of the fireplace. She’d hung blueberry-colored drapes around her bed to match the duvet. The only thing marring the illusion was her study area. It was barricaded by piles of books, most of which looked to be about the legend of King Arthur. Fixed to the walls were charts, maps, and drawings in a handful of different languages. Some were on gemstones, others seemed as if they detailed foreign alphabets. Another was a map of the Foret de Paimpont, punctured with a scattering of map pins. I’d thought she was researching Alix. King Arthur, if he’d ever lived at all, had died centuries before. While I was extremely impressed with the depth of her research, I decided not to mention our foray into her room.

M. Mailly crawled around in the attic for a quarter of an hour before reporting that he was satisfied with the condition of the roof.

He left around 1:00 p.m. Just in time for Cranwell and I to have lunch. I made it easy on myself and served croque-monsieur sandwiches and a tossed salad with mustard vinaigrette.

After discussing the latest draft of Cranwell’s manuscript, he asked me about M. Mailly. “He seemed very competent.”

“He’s the best. At least in this part of France.”

“So what did he say?”

“He’s going to have an architect draw plans for making part of the stable a residence and leaving part of it as a garage.”

“Practical.”

“I think so. The next time someone like you comes, they can have the whole place to themselves.”

“Do I bother you that much?”

“No! It’s just that I was thinking you-or someone like you-could get more work done if you had your own space.”

Cranwell shrugged and picked up his croque-monsieur. “I’ve never seen you speak French before. You’re fluent.”

“I’ve had lots of lessons. And my grandmother was French.”

“You become a different person when you speak it. You hold yourself differently, your tone is different. Even your lips move differently.”

“Different how?”

“More confident. More secure.”

“It was business. And the French use muscles differently when they talk. If you look at older French women, they have a lot of wrinkles between their nose and their lips. American women wrinkle more toward the corners of the mouth.” I had noticed myself doing this a lot lately: contributing my observations to Cranwell’s pool of general knowledge.

We ate in silence for a minute before Cranwell spoke again. “Maybe you should make that stable into a manager’s apartment.”

“Why? I like my room just fine.”

“Not for you. For a professional hotel manager. You could hire someone to run this for you. It would give you freedom. I’m sure it would get you more business.”

“But then what would I do?”

“Whatever you wanted.”

At that point, the chateau was my life. I couldn’t imagine what I would do without cooking, without keeping it for guests, even when I didn’t especially want them. Some people dream of a life of leisure. I was not one of them. The prospect of a calendar filled with long blank days filled me with dread.

They were what I had left Paris to escape.

The beginning of the end came the following Wednesday. The weather was nasty. We had news of an unusually strong wind that would blow a storm in from the sea that night. It was one of Severine’s days at the University and as I thought, that afternoon, of her long drive back to the chateau, I began to worry about her. The road from Rennes wound through the countryside, and while not normally dangerous, it could easily become treacherous in a strong wind and driving rain.

The only thing I could do was to call her and tell her to stay in Rennes, but first, I had to find her number.

After having spoken to at least four unhelpful phone operators, I was finally transferred to the University switchboard, at which point I was passed to the Department of Celtic Studies.

When I asked for Severine, there was a long silence from the woman on the end of the line.

She transferred me to the head of the department.

“M. Dubois a l’appareil. Je peux vous aider?”

“Bonjour, Monsieur Dubois. Ici Mme Farmer. Je cherche Severine Dupont.” M. Dubois and I had met when I had given Alix’s books and journals to the University. He was a scholarly gentleman of about seventy years and had held his place on the faculty for at least half of his life.

“Ca fait longtemps qu’on n’a pas parle. Et vous cherchez Mlle Dupont. Pour quel raison?”

I explained about the coming storm and how I just wanted to tell her to stay put.

“Mais, elle ne travail plus ici depuis six mois.”