Katherine Keenum (15 page)

“Entry through straw and manure,” said Robbie.

“We’ll try the front,” said Amy, unlatching a gate in the wall. Its hinges were rusty, but it opened. A flagstoned footpath ran up to the front of the house, where a thick rose vine was trained over the front door.

“How pretty!” exclaimed Effie.

There was no knocker. Robbie beat his fist on the heavy wooden door. No one answered.

“Try again,” murmured Emily.

When still no one answered, Robbie said, “Too bad,” and turned to leave.

Effie was about to follow submissively, when Jeanette insisted, “We should try around back.”

“This way,” said Amy, and took the lead.

Around the corner in an older wing of the house that faced the service yard, the upper half of a kitchen door stood open. From inside came a woman’s voice singing and the smell of packed earth, wood smoke, and something Jeanette could not quite identify. She sniffed: vinegary old apples. Amy tugged the rope of a thick brass bell. At its clang, a plain young woman in ordinary clothes with a baby in her arms appeared at the door. Amy explained their errand. The woman introduced herself as Mme. Gernagan; she would be happy to show them rooms. When she opened the lower half of the door, they saw a toddler holding on to her apron skirt.

“
Bonjour
, tot,” said Amy, in a friendly, matter-of-fact way, and lightly tapped the top of the child’s head. At once, he leaned harder against his mother, chewing a ball of the apron.

Inside, it was clear that the family lived, ate, worked, and slept in the kitchen. The first thing to catch Jeanette’s eye was a fire burning even in summer; but as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room, she saw an enormous, intricately carved box bed with three tiers of bunks. Near it in a wooden chair sat a tiny, very old woman in Breton dress, from a spotlessly white winged coiffe and earrings down to gray socked feet that would slip into sabots when she rose. Gazing at the newcomers intently, she spoke in Breton to Mme. Gernagan. Jeanette thought a weariness came into Mme. Gernagan’s face as she respectfully hushed her what—her mother, mother-in-law? More likely her grandmother-in-law. Mme. Gernagan said something more, and the old woman slapped her knees. The little boy ran to her.

Beyond the box bed, deep in shadow, a steep stair led upward. In the loft, explained Mme. Gernagan, shifting the baby to her hip, were beds that had always harbored foot travelers. One corner of Robbie’s mouth lifted into a told-you-so sneer.
“Mais, suivez-moi, s’il-vous plaît.”

Amy shot him a glance: So there.

Mme. Gernagan led them into the newer wing’s sitting room, where stout furniture and several crackled but still colorful pieces of Quimper ware spoke of considerable peasant prosperity once upon a time. Use of the room would be included in the rent, and the neglected front door, which opened into it, would give the tenants a separate entrance. The party clumped up a bare wooden staircase directly into a bedroom out of which opened a second; they were furnished with plain iron bedsteads and simple wooden chests and chairs. The larger bedroom, through which the chimney ran, had a fireplace; the ladies could have a charcoal brazier there if they wished to do their own simple cooking. It also contained a very steep staircase into an attic under the eaves. While Amy discussed the practical arrangements and terms, Jeanette climbed high enough to peek into the attic. It had a fully planked floor and was largely empty.

“Take a look,” she said, coming back down. “I think we could use this space if anybody needs privacy.”

“In fact,” said Amy, who took her place on the ladder, “if we move two mattresses upstairs and take apart the bedsteads, we can clear out the big sunny room for a studio.”

“Rot,” interposed Robbie Dolson. “Emily, you can’t stay here. Think of the sort of traveler who might stop on the other side of the wall.”

“Looser morals among your chums at the Voyageurs and Gloanec than here, Mr. Dolson,” said Amy.

“It’s quite a solid wall, and I doubt anyone will come,” said Emily in a soothing voice.

“Oh, my, just look at that garden!” said Cousin Effie.

Jeanette joined her at the window. A back garden was enclosed by the wings of the house and stone walls. Directly below were cutting beds. Knobby hollyhocks climbed hand over hand up spires; beside them marched regiments of gladiolus with triangular pennants of cream, peach, and red. Next came rows of zinnias and dahlias, hot golden marigolds, abundant pink mallows, and a few frothy stocks still holding on at season’s end. Beyond the flowers and easily reached from a kitchen door was a potager laid out in onions, cabbages, lettuce, and herbs. Farther still, outside the back wall, an orchard of fruit trees grew on the lower slope of a steep hill that would hold the afternoon sun.

“Oh, Robbie, it’s my motif,” said Emily.

Amy came over and peeked between them. “Not to mention fresh salad straight from the garden and milk pure from the cow. Just what you need, Emily, to buck you up.”

“Mr. Dolson, do come look,” said Jeanette, turning to him.

“You can’t be deserting me, too,” he said, pleading with soft eyes.

For an instant, she wavered, then shook her head and laughed. “I fear you are faced with three ladies in love.”

“In love but not, alas, with me,” said Robbie.

“A goat!” exclaimed Effie.

“I beg your pardon!” said Robbie, in mock indignation.

“A goat!” repeated Effie. “There’s a goat in a pen nibbling on the bean vines through the fence!”

“Trumps,” said Amy, and went over to Mme. Gernagan to complete arrangements for a four-week stay.

At the window, Robbie spotted Effie’s goat. “Endless entertainment, Miss Pendergrast; I congratulate you,” he said. A wistfulness crossed his face as he continued to survey the scene below. “The view out a window is always a vexed invitation, isn’t it: a barrier and a call. Emily, if you must—”

“Already done, Robbie, my boy,” said Amy. “Anyone can see you’re champing at the bit to be off to Switzerland.”

For a moment, he looked as if he felt challenged to object but backed down quickly. “Too true, Miss Richardson, and why not, with matters so satisfactorily settled here.”

He took Emily by the arm. As he did so, he just brushed Jeanette—deliberately, she thought. Their eyes met. Restlessness and intelligence. He looked as though he still might say something more, but his expression went sad instead, sad and then remote. By evening, he was gone.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Pont Aven

W
hy don’t you like Robbie Dolson?” asked Jeanette.

“Now there’s a long and dreary tale,” said Amy. Seated on a camp stool in front of a portable easel, she was concentrating on a distant headland. “Ah,” she breathed, with satisfaction, when a faraway cliff face loomed forward, brightened by a patch of watery sunlight. “Just the highlight I need.”

While Amy changed brushes and took up a new color, Jeanette, who was sketching her at work, paused to decide how much of the surrounding landscape she should include in her own picture. They had placed themselves on a hillside above a field where a man, a woman, and three children were harvesting grain. Below the harvesters, scrub brush dropped to the water’s edge with Amy’s headland out on the horizon.
Pace
Sonja, the scene was not all gray shoreline.

“Is it just the way he sometimes takes Emily for granted, or the way he’s moody?”

“Still on about Mr. Dolson, are you?” Amy turned toward Jeanette. “You wouldn’t be the first, you know, and you won’t be the last. But I warn you, the most he will ever bestow on you or anyone else is that great charm of his—which, as you have just observed, comes and goes. He is not a generous-hearted man.”

He can be in the right circumstances, thought Jeanette. She might as well have spoken aloud.

“Oh, Jeanette, don’t do this to yourself. Robbie Dolson knows whom he adores, all right; he sees Inamorato in the shaving mirror every morning.”

Jeanette felt sheepish. In her current favorite daydream, Robbie handed her down out of the coach in front of the Voyageurs to an admiring welcome from the assembled art colony of Pont Aven; she shone with the glory of being the first woman to win a major award at the Salon; he insisted on keeping her on his arm. When they quarreled, as they sometimes did, her wit matched his. No doubt her mother would point out that she exalted herself in all her daydreams, but then, who didn’t?

“He wouldn’t see anything in me, anyway—an American girl from nowhere. It’s not as though I were an heiress.”

“Oh, I’ll grant our Mr. Dolson this much: He’ll never marry for money—he has too high a regard for his own ability to get by on nothing a year. Not but what it’s Emily paying dribs and drabs out of her lunch money that keeps his line of credit open with his tailor and tobacconist. He has probably even borrowed from Winkie.”

“Amy, that’s not fair! Winkie lives right on the brink of disaster and Robbie knows it. He wouldn’t.”

“Well, only in sums too trivial to make him a sponge. Nevertheless, I ask you: If one of them were likely to borrow from the other, which would it be?”

“Put that way . . .”

Amy turned back to her board. “As I said, Robbie doesn’t really care for money. He likes being a touch raffish. You may have noticed the antiquarian flavor to his style; he’s the last man in Paris to nose out frippery instead of buying cheap off the rack.”

“Aspiring to English eccentricity at a young age?”

Amy glanced over her shoulder again and stuck out her tongue. She was hiding something, but Jeanette let it drop. Perhaps once upon a time Robbie had broken Amy’s heart—yet Jeanette doubted that was it, or not the whole story. They worked on in amicable silence until the noon Angelus tolled faintly from several directions and the family below broke for their midday rest.

“Drat!” said Amy. “Gnat in the paint.” With the wooden tip of her paintbrush, she pricked the insect out.

Jeanette mentally doodled a cartoon of a giant bug trying to pull its feet out of gluey goo while her
artiste
flung back arms in open-mouthed indignation. She stood up and stretched. From its cool nook among rocks where a small stream splashed down from the hill above them, she fetched their lunch basket and investigated its contents. “Cousin Effie has given us two hard-boiled eggs apiece,” she said, “and some cheese. Brown rolls—oh, good, with butter in a cabbage leaf and a knife. There’s something wrapped in another cabbage leaf—gooseberries!”

“Good show. She does very well by us, your cousin. Do you think she enjoys keeping house?”

Jeanette thought about it as she handed the basket over. “Yes, I think she
is
having a good time. She never complains about what they serve us at the
pension
, not even the gristly stew, but she had years of planning the meals with my aunt Maude’s cook. She enjoys being in charge again here. Hand me your cup; I’ll fill it.”

When Jeanette brought back their water, she stood for a moment, letting her eye follow a snaky irregularity through the heath below the grain field. Halfway to the sea, a fingerlike boulder thrust up.

“Amy, had you noticed that boulder? Could it be a menhir?”

“Too isolated, I should think.”

“There’s a path to it.” Jeanette squinted, straining to read a slight misalignment where the edges of bushes folded over against each other instead of blending seamlessly. “Or maybe it’s a stream. When they’re done cutting, let’s go explore.”

Jeanette was ashamed to admit that she wanted to take a break from endless artistic application. Maybe the problem was that she had not yet found her subject. Amy had come to Brittany with ideas in mind from last year. Emily had set right to work on the gardens and, perhaps thanks to her smattering of Welsh, was allowed by ancient Mme. Gernagan to sketch in the kitchen. Jeanette sketched the farmyard and gardens, the streets and church in town, the water mill clacking, women scrubbing laundry in the river. She put such scenes in letters home, but they were only what everyone drew or painted in Pont Aven. She set down her sketchbook.

“I’m going to climb the hill a way.”

“Anything wrong?” asked Amy, over her shoulder.

“No, but I want to get something straight in my mind.”

Hopping from rock to rock, Jeanette followed the stream up. Near the crest of the hill, it issued from tangled brush. She bent down and forced aside a low-spreading branch with her shoulder. Behind lay a pool of dark water, receding under a low arch in the hillside. Only near the lip, where the stream escaped into its channel, did the water seem to move at all. She pushed in closer and dipped her fingers. The water was cold. Our very own natural treacle well, she thought.

She turned around to run down and tell Amy but caught her breath at the view. From this height, the full mouth of the Aven estuary could be seen widening out into the ocean. If the sun had been bright and the air crisp, she might have flung her arms wide and shouted. Instead, haze softened the rugged landscape and lifted land and sea skyward; distance paled into silvery blue. She crossed her hands to the knobs of her shoulders. Her mind hovered. She began the descent, letting her feet find their own way down. When she reached the point where the bay dropped from sight, she scrambled.

Her excitement induced Amy to follow her back up the hill.

“Here,” she said, at the brushy edge of the pool. She broke some branches and pushed back the resisting bush.

Amy whistled. “Coo, this
is
a find. The stones seem deliberately set. I wonder about that arch.” She crouched to try to see better.

“Do you think it might really be a holy well?” asked Jeanette, kneeling beside her.

“I doubt it. The way the locals tend shrines, if this were known to cure warts or reflect your true love’s face by the light of the midsummer moon, there would be offerings, little strips of cloth tied to the branches.”

“We’ll work magic anyway.” Middle finger to thumb, Jeanette flicked a shower of droplets at Amy. “I’ll asperse you—”

“Wretch!”

“—if you sprinkle me.” Jeanette squealed and backed out of the bush, shielding her face as Amy splashed back vigorously. Jeanette pulled out her handkerchief to dry herself and, laughing, handed it to Amy.

“I’ll tie it to the bush, as a first offering. There,” said Amy. “It will help us find the place again. Come on, let’s climb to the summit.”

“Do you have time?”

“Oh, all work and no play makes Jill a dull girl. Besides, the better you know a place, the better you paint it. It has to seep into your bones.”

They climbed up a stone ledge scoured bare by wind and rain.

“Some of your countrymen live here and paint all year,” said Amy, looking out. “I can see why; I almost could.”

“You wouldn’t find it gloomy in winter?”

“Perhaps—though wait until you see a Parisian winter for everlasting gloom. No, it wouldn’t be the weather.” Amy’s gaze pulled back from the sea to the land below. Somewhere, invisible from this vantage point, her reapers were hard at work again. She turned back to Jeanette with her customary briskness. “No, too isolated. I need the stimulation of other artists—the whole, big, difficult rough-and-tumble of Paris—and Julian’s help. Come on, girl, once more into the breach.”