Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [8]
—TO MONSIEUR DE GRIGNAN, JUNE 1672
LYDIE WAS AWAKE at dawn the next morning. Michael slept beside her. His back was tan and muscular, his light brown hair tangled on the pillow. She watched him, trying to tell whether he was dreaming. She pressed closer to him, their bare bodies sticking slightly with sleep’s sweat. She kissed his shoulder.
She thought of her date with Patrice today, and for the first time she thought that maybe coming to Paris was the best way to forget. She had resisted coming, to put it mildly, at the beginning. The destination, Paris—imagine!—had paled compared to what she was leaving: one despondent mother and her father’s grave. Yet she had always wanted to live in a foreign country. It had seemed her destiny. The pretty accents of her parents and relatives, her mother’s stories about Clew Bay and her father’s about Dublin had constantly reminded her that the world went beyond her block in New York.
Lydie had visited Ireland, at sixteen, with her parents. Ireland, although beautiful, had frightened her. From her parents’ tales she had expected soft edges: verdant pastures, gentle rain, cozy priories, friendly people who earned their livings as farmers and stonecutters. Instead, she was struck by the feeling of danger: by the coastline, steep and intricate as a Gothic steeple, by gray stone churches, grim, in every market square, by an undercurrent her parents had not prepared her for.
There were people who still remembered her parents, people Lydie had heard about her whole life, who seemed at once gentle and fierce. The combination had alarmed her. Her mother’s people were intense when it came to their memories, to Ireland, to the Church. Her father’s people, in Dublin, no longer attended mass, and they were intense about that.
Lying in bed, Lydie remembered the time she and her father had climbed Ireland’s holy mountain. The memory, vivid and exact, was one of her most powerful. Croagh Patrick, named for the saint, overlooked Clew Bay and the countryside outside Westport, where Lydie’s mother had grown up. The ascent had been fun: a lark. Lydie had pretended to be Maria von Trapp crossing the Alps in The Sound of Music. At the various holy points along the way she had interrupted her fantasy to do the requisite Catholic rituals like walking seven times around the statue of Saint Patrick while saying seven Hail Marys.
At the summit she and her father had picnicked on salmon they had caught fishing with her uncle in Sligo the day before. After lunch they had prayed together. Lydie remembered saying the rosary out loud. It was then that Lydie started feeling terrified. The prayers had given her the idea she might fall off the mountain. After all, wasn’t the purpose of prayers to shorten your time in Purgatory? To speed you into heaven? But to get to heaven, didn’t you have to die first? It was late in the day; they began to descend. She remembered walking through clouds, down the jagged, precipitous trail. Thousands of feet below there were green pastures leading to the rocky shore and the glittering bay, the green and blue as true as colors in the spectrum. With every step Lydie had grown dizzier, more breathless. She stumbled, and in her memory she saw one foot step off the mountain’s edge. Her father had hugged her tight, holding her face against his wool coat, damp from clouds and the salt air. “Steady there,” he had said. “Are you scared? You know your mother and I climbed this mountain every year when we were young. Everyone in Ireland does. It’s the safest place on earth to be—the saint will look after you. Especially you.”
Lydie had wanted to believe it was true. Wasn’t her uncle a priest in Dungannon? Hadn’t her mother washed the cardinal’s clothes? But she had a terrible vision of her father falling off the mountain. She saw him hurtling through the air, the father she loved, and not even Saint Patrick could save him.
On that trip, Lydie knew that she wanted to live in a foreign country, but not Ireland: one that was southern, sensual, rich with cathedrals, tapestries,