And then there’s Alice, who’s his opposite. I had to make her a bit fatter than she really is, because peg-dolls can only be so thin. I tried taking some wood off the sides of the doll, and that worked OK until I cut my finger with the penknife, and Zozie had to bandage it up. Then I made her a pretty little dress out of a piece of old scrap lace, and whispered, Alice, you’re not ugly and you need to eat more, and gave her the fish sign of Chantico the Fast Breaker, and put her next to Nico in the Advent house.
Then there’s Thierry, wrapped in gray flannel and with a wrapped sugar lump painted to look like his mobile phone. I couldn’t get hold of a strand of his hair, so instead I took a petal from one of the roses that he gave Maman and hoped that might work instead. Of course I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. I only want him to stay away.
So I gave him the sign of One Monkey and put him outside the Advent house, with his coat and scarf on (I made them out of brown felt), just in case it gets cold out there.
And then, of course, there’s Roux. His doll isn’t finished yet, because I need something of his, and there isn’t anything I can use—not even a thread—that belongs to him. But I’ve made it look like him, I think, all in black, with a piece of orange furry stuff glued on to look like his hair. I gave him the sign of the Changing Wind, and whispered Roux, don’t go away—though so far we haven’t seen him at all.
Not that it matters. I know where he is. He’s working for Thierry at Rue de la Croix. I don’t know why he hasn’t come back, or why Maman doesn’t want to see him, or even why Thierry hates him so much.
I talked to Zozie about it today, as we sat in her rooms as usual. Rosette was there, and we’d been playing a game—quite a noisy, silly game, and Rosette was excited and laughing like mad, with Zozie being a wild horse and Rosette riding on her back, and then suddenly, for no reason, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I looked up and saw a yellow monkey sitting on the mantelpiece, as clear as I sometimes see Pantoufle.
“Zozie,” I said.
She looked up. She didn’t seem all that surprised; it turns out she’s seen Bam before.
“That’s a clever little sister you’ve got,” she said, smiling at Rosette, who had got down from her back and was playing with the sequins on a cushion. “You don’t look at all alike, but I guess looks aren’t everything.”
I hugged Rosette and gave her a kiss. Sometimes she reminds me of a rag doll, or a flop-eared bunny, she’s so soft. “Well, we don’t have the same dad,” I told her.
Zozie smiled. “I guessed,” she said.
“But that doesn’t matter,” I went on. “Maman says you choose your family.”
“She does? ”
I nodded. “It’s better that way. Our family could be anyone. It’s not about birth, Maman says. It’s about how you feel for someone else.”
“So—even I could be family? ”
I smiled at her. “You already are.”
She laughed at that. “Your evil aunt. Corrupting you with magic and shoes.”
Well, that set me off. Rosette joined in. And above us, the yellow monkey danced and made everything on the mantelpiece dance too—all Zozie’s shoes, lined up like ornaments, but so much cooler than china figurines— and I thought how natural it seemed, the three of us, all together like that. And I felt a sudden pang of guilt about Maman downstairs, and about how, when we’re up here, it can sometimes be easy to forget she’s there at all.
“Did you never wonder who Rosette’s father was? ” said Zozie suddenly, looking at me.
I shrugged. I’ve never seen the point. We always had each other, of course. We never wanted anyone else—
“It’s just that you probably knew him,” she said. “You would have been six or seven at the time, and I just wondered. . . .” She looked down at her bracelet, playing with the charms on it, and I got the feeling she was trying to tell me something, but something she didn’t want to say.
“What? ” I said.
“Well—look at her hair.” She put a hand on Rosette’s head. Her hair is the color of sliced mango, very curly and very soft. “Look at her eyes.” Her eyes are a very pale green-gray, just like a cat’s, and as round as pennies. “Doesn’t that remind you of someone ? ”
I thought about that for a little while.
“Think, Nanou. Red hair, green eyes. Can sometimes be a pain in the arse.”
“Not Roux? ” I said, and began to laugh, but all at once I was feeling jittery inside and I wished she wouldn’t say any more.
“Why not? ” said Zozie.
“I just know.”
As a matter of fact I’ve never really thought much about Rosette’s dad. I suppose that at the back of my mind there’s still the idea she never had one at all; that the fairies brought her, just like the old lady always said.
Fairy baby. Special baby.
I mean, it’s not fair what people think—that she’s stupid, or retarded, or slow. Special baby, we used to say. Special, as in different. Maman doesn’t like us to be different—but Rosette just is, and is that so bad?
Thierry talks about getting help for her. Therapy, speech coaching, and all kinds of specialists—as if there might be a cure for being special that a specialist would be bound to know.
But there’s no cure for being different. Zozie’s taught me that already. And how could Roux be Rosette’s dad? I mean, he’s never seen her before. Didn’t even know her name—
“He can’t be Rosette’s dad,” I said, although by then I wasn’t sure.
“Well, who else could it be? ” she said.
“I don’t know. Not Roux, that’s all.”
“Why not? ”
“Because he’d have stayed with us, that’s why. He wouldn’t have let us go away.”
“Well, maybe he didn’t know,” she said. “Maybe your mother never told him. After all, she never told you.”
I started to cry then. Stupid, I know. I hate it when I have to cry, but I couldn’t make it stop, somehow. It was like an explosion inside of me, and I couldn’t figure out if I hated Roux now, or whether I loved him even more—
“Shhh. Nanou.” Zozie put her arms around me. “It’s OK.”
I put my face into her shoulder. She was wearing a big old chunky sweater, and the cable knit pressed into my cheek hard enough to leave marks. It isn’t OK, I wanted to tell her. That’s just what adults always say when they don’t want kids to know the truth; and most of the time it’s a lie, Zozie.
Adults always seem to lie.
I gave a great big shuddery sob. How can Roux be Rosette’s dad? She doesn’t even know him. She doesn’t know that he takes his hot chocolate black, with rum and brown sugar. She hasn’t seen him make a fish trap out of willow, or a flute out of a length of bamboo, or know that he hears the call of every bird on the river and can copy them so that even the birds can’t tell the difference—
He’s her father, and she doesn’t even know.
It’s not fair. It should have been me—
But now I could feel something else coming back. A memory—a familiar sound—a scent of something far away. It was getting closer now, moving in like the pointing star in a Nativity scene. And I could almost remember now—except that I didn’t want to remember. I closed my eyes. I could hardly move. I was suddenly sure that if I moved even a little bit, then all of it would come rushing out, like a fizzy drink when someone’s been shaking the bottle, and that once opened, there’d be no going back—
I started to tremble.
“What’s wrong? ” said Zozie.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak.
“What are you afraid of, Nanou? ”
I could hear the charms on her bracelet moving, and the sound was almost exactly the same as that of the wind chimes above our door.
“The Kindly Ones,” I said in a whisper.
“What does that mean? The Kindly Ones? ” I could hear the urgency in her voice. She put her hands on my shoulders then, and I
could feel how much she wanted to know; it was trembling all through her, like lightning in a jar.
“Don’t be afraid, Nanou,” she said. “Just tell me what it means, OK? ”
The Kindly Ones.
The Magi.
Wise men bearing gifts.
I made the kind of noise you make when you’re trying to wake up from a dream but can’t. There were too many memories crowding me, pushing me, all wanting to be seen at once.
That little house by the side of the Loire.
They’d seemed so kind, so interested.
They’d even brought gifts.
And at that moment I opened my eyes very suddenly and very wide. I didn’t feel afraid anymore. At last I remembered. I understood. I knew what had happened to change us; to make us run away, even from Roux; to make us pretend we were regular people when we knew at heart we could never be.
“What is it, Nanou? ” said Zozie. “Can you tell me now? ”
“I think so,” I said.
“Then tell me,” she said, beginning to smile. “Tell me everything.”
✶
✶
PART SIX
The Kindly Ones
✶
Monday, 10 December
And now at last, here it comes, that december wind, screaming down the narrow streets, stripping the year-end rags from the trees. December, beware; December, despair, as my mother always said. And once again, as the year draws in, it feels as if a page has turned.
A page—a card—the wind, perhaps. And December was always a bad time for us. The last month; the dregs of the year; slouching toward Christmas with its skirt of tinsel dragging in the mud. The dead-end part of the year looms; the trees are stripped three-quarters bare; the light is like scorched newspaper; and all my ghosts come out to play like fireflies in the spectral sky—
We came on the wind of the carnival. A wind of change, of promises. The merry wind, the magical wind, making March hares of everyone, tumbling blossoms and coattails and hats; rushing toward summer in a frenzy of exuberance.
Anouk was a child of that wind. A summer child; her totem, the rabbit—eager, bright-eyed, and mischievous.
My mother was a great believer in totems. Much more than just an invisible friend, a totem reveals the secret heart; the spirit; the secret soul. Mine was a cat, or so she said—thinking perhaps of that baby bangle and its little silver charm. Cats are secretive by nature. Cats have split personalities. Cats run scared at a breath of wind. Cats can see the spirit world and walk the line between light and dark.
The wind blew stronger, and we fled. Not least because of Rosette, of course. I’d known from the start I was carrying a child, and like a cat, I bore her in secret, far away from Lansquenet—
But by December the wind had turned, taking the year from light into dark. I’d carried Anouk with no difficulty. My summer child came with the sun, at four-fifteen on a bright June morning, and from the moment I set eyes on her I knew she was mine, and mine alone.
But Rosette was different from the start. A small, limp, fretful baby who wouldn’t feed and who looked at me as if I were a stranger. The hospital was on the outskirts of Rennes, and as I waited beside Rosette, a priest dropped by to counsel me, and to express surprise that I would not have my daughter baptized in the hospital.
He seemed a calm and kindly man, but too like so many of his kind, with his well-worn words of comfort and his eyes that saw all of the next world, but none of this one. I gave him the usual litany. I was a widow, Madame Rocher, on my way to live with relatives. He clearly did not believe this; looked at Anouk with suspicious eyes and upon Rosette with growing concern. She might not live, he told me earnestly; could I bear to have her die unbaptized?
I sent Anouk to a hostel nearby while I recovered slowly and watched over Rosette. It was in a very small village—a place called Les Laveuses, on the Loire. And it was to there that I fled from the kind old priest as Rosette’s strength dwindled and his demands became more insistent.
For kindness can kill as readily as cruelty; and the priest—whose name was Père Leblanc—had begun to make independent enquiries regarding any relatives I might have in the region, including who might be looking after my eldest daughter, where she had received her schooling, and the fate of the imaginary Monsieur Rocher—enquiries that I did not doubt would eventually lead him to the truth.
So one morning I took Rosette and fled by taxi to Les Laveuses. The hostel was cheap and impersonal; a single room with a gas fire and a double bed with a mattress that sagged almost to the floor. Rosette was still reluctant to feed, and her voice was a pitiful plaintive mew that seemed to echo the wail of the wind. Worse still, her breathing would sometimes falter, stopping for five or ten seconds at a time, then hitching back with a hiccup and a snuffle, as if my baby had decided—if only temporarily—to rejoin the land of the living.
We stayed in the hostel for two more nights. Then, as New Year approached, the snow arrived, dusting the black trees and the sandbanks along the Loire with bitter sugar. I looked for somewhere else to stay and was offered a flat above a little crêperie run by an elderly couple called Paul and Framboise.
“It’s not very big, but it’s warm,” Framboise said—a fierce little lady with berry-black eyes. “You’ll be doing me a favor, keeping an eye on the place. We’re closed in winter—no tourists here—so you needn’t be afraid of getting in the way.” She looked at me closely. “That baby,” she said. “It cries like a cat.”
I nodded.
“Hm.” She sniffed. “You should get it seen to.”
“What does she mean? ” I asked Paul later as he showed us our little two-room flat.
Paul, a gentle old man who rarely spoke, looked at me and shrugged. “She’s superstitious,” he said at last. “Like a lot of old people round here. Don’t take it to heart. She means well.”
I was too tired then to enquire further. But after we had settled in, and Rosette had begun to feed a little—though she remained very restless and barely slept—I asked Framboise what she had meant.
“They say a cat baby’s bad luck,” said Framboise, who had come in to clean the already spotless kitchen.
I smiled. She sounded so very like Armande, my dear old friend from Lansquenet.
“Cat baby? ” I said.
“Hm,” said Framboise. “I’ve heard of them but never seen one. My father used to tell me the fairies would sometimes come in the night and put a cat in place of the real baby. But the Cat Baby won’t feed. The Cat Baby cries all the time. And if anyone upsets the Cat Baby, then the fairies will sort them out for sure.”
She narrowed her eyes menacingly, then just as suddenly smiled. “Of course, it’s only a story,” she said. “All the same, you should see a doctor. Cat Baby doesn’t look well to me.”
That at least was true enough. But I’ve never been easy with doctors and priests, and I hesitated to follow the old lady’s advice. Three more days elapsed, with Rosette mewing and gasping throughout, and eventually I overcame my reluctance and called to see the doctor in nearby Angers.
The doctor examined Rosette with care. She needed tests, he said at last. But that cry confirmed it in his mind. It was a genetic condition, he said, most commonly known as cri du chat, thus named for that eerie, mewing cry. Not fatal, but incurable; and with symptoms that, at this early stage, the doctor was hesitant to predict.
“So she is a Cat Baby,” said Anouk.
It seemed to delight her that Rosette was different. She’d been an only child for so long; and now, at seven, she seemed at times weirdly adult. Caring for Rosette; coaxing her to feed from a bottle; singing to her; rocking her in the chair Paul had brought from their old farmhouse.
“Cat Baby,” she crooned, rocking the chair. “Rock-a-Cat Baby, on the treetop.” And Rosette did seem to respond to her. The crying stopped—at least some of the time. She gained weight. She slept up to three or four hours at night. Anouk said it was the air of le s Laveuses, and put
down saucers of milk and sugar for the fairies, in case they called by to see how the Cat Baby was doing.
I had not returned to the doctor in Angers. Further tests would not improve Rosette. Instead we watched her, Anouk and I; we bathed her in herbs; we sang to her; we massaged her thin little pipe-stick limbs with lavender and tiger balm and fed her milk from an eyedropper (she would not take a bottle).
A fairy baby, Anouk said. She certainly was a pretty one; so delicate with her small shapely head and her wide-spaced eyes and pointed chin.
“She even looks like a cat,” said Anouk. “Pantoufle says so. Don’t you, Pantoufle ? ”
Ah, yes. Pantoufle. At first I’d thought maybe Pantoufle would disappear, once Anouk had a baby sister to care for. The wind was still blowing across the Loire, and Yule, like midsummer, is a time of change; an uncomfortable time for travelers.
But with the arrival of Rosette, Pantoufle seemed, if anything, to get stronger. I found I now saw him with increasing clarity—sitting beside the baby’s crib; watching her with button-black eyes as Anouk rocked her and talked to her and sang songs to quiet her.
V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’ joli vent
“Poor Rosette doesn’t have an animal,” said Anouk as we sat together by the fire. “Maybe that’s why she cries all the time. Maybe we should ask one to come. To look after her, the way Pantoufle looks after me.”
I smiled at that. But she was in earnest; and I should have known that if I didn’t address the problem, she would. And so I promised we’d give it a try. Just this once, I’d play the game. And we’d been so good for the past six months: no cards, no charms, no rituals. I missed it, and so did Anouk. What harm could come of a simple game ?
We’d been living in Les Laveuses for nearly a week, and things were beginning to get better for us. We’d already made some friends in the village; I’d grown very fond of Framboise and Paul. We were comfortable in the flat above the crêperie. With Rosette’s birth we had more or less missed Christmas, but the New Year was approaching, full of the promise of new beginnings. The air was still cold, but it was clear and frosty, and the sky was a vibrant, piercing blue. Rosette continued to worry me; but we were slowly learning her ways, and with the help of the eyedropper, we were able to give her the nourishment she needed.