Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [118]
“I don’t think Didier would like his ball spoiled by the police,” Lydie said, though she took a certain pleasure in imagining Anne hauled off to the big house.
The orchestra started playing a waltz. Clothilde and Fulbert strolled toward the dance floor, leaving Lydie and Michael alone under the trees.
But is it not cruel and barbaric to regard the death of a person one dearly loves as the starting signal for a voyage one passionately desires to make?
—TO FRANÇOISE-MARGUERITE, GOOD FRIDAY, 1672
IT WAS NEARLY dawn before Michael and Lydie reached Paris. With Michael driving, Lydie slept. She, who could never sleep in a moving vehicle, slept through that entire trip, the dreamless sleep of someone at peace. Only the sound of lorries, rumbling down the slow lane from the Rungis market, wakened her. A golden, cloudless sunrise shimmered over the city.
“Good morning,” Michael said, glancing over as she stretched.
“We’re already here?” she asked, smiling. “Are you exhausted?”
“I’m not tired at all,” he said. Instead of driving into Paris through the Port d’Italie, Michael continued along the Périphérique.
“Where are we going?” she asked, as they left the Eiffel Tower behind.
“Let’s not go home,” he said. “Let’s keep driving.”
“To where?” Lydie asked.
“Normandy.”
He replied so fast, Lydie wondered whether he had been there with Anne, found the perfect romantic hideaway. Was that where he had gotten tan? But, after last night, what would it matter? Her skin tingled with the memory of what she had viewed down the gun barrel. “Why Normandy?” she asked.
“Because we can drive there and back in one day. Because it’s on the sea, and you love the sea.”
“Oh,” she said, still half-asleep, not quite ready to fully waken. She longed to dream, as if further answers could be found deep in her unconscious. While she dozed again, Michael stopped at a boulangerie and brought croissants and café au lait out to the car.
They drove north in silence. At one point, Michael reached across the seat, covered Lydie’s hand with his. The sun rode low in the sky. Every field seemed full of cows. The flatlands around Paris gave way to rolling hills crowned with poplars. Every so often they drove through tiny towns, blinks of civilization that resembled each other: church, butcher, baker, café-tabac. On the open road old men rode bicycles. Workers hoed fields. Laundry flapped on clotheslines outside farmhouses. In every town, stout women and small children walked home with baguettes.
“The ball was beautiful,” Michael said after a few miles. “You did a great job.”
“I think Didier was pleased,” Lydie said. Didier hadn’t even known about Anne until it was over. Michael had tracked down an aunt, who had called Anne’s doctor, who had booked her into a clinic in Anjou. “Didn’t Patrice save the day with Anne Dumas?”
“Two people who can quote Madame de Sévigné at the same party,” Michael said. “It’s bizarre.”
“Well, Patrice has read Anne’s book about a hundred times,” Lydie said. “But why did her quotation snap Anne out of it?”
Michael shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it was the shock of hearing someone else speak her language.” Then, so obviously wanting to change the subject he didn’t even bother to pause, he asked, “Where should we have lunch? Which town?”
“There’s always Honfleur …” Lydie remembered the little port rimmed by crooked half-timber houses, the bar they had visited on their first trip outside Paris.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Michael said.
The smell of apples came through the open windows as they neared the coast; the orchards were thick with them, and with pears. Lydie felt the breeze turn chilly. “We’ll need sweaters,” she said.
“Let’s drive straight into town and find a place with tables on the quai,” Michael said.
“Okay,” Lydie said. They parked their car on the hill near St. Catherine’s, the wooden fifteenth-century church. A market was in progress, the vendors selling cheeses, milk, live chickens, linens, honey, herbs, apples, cabbages,