I ordered the relevant sets of records held in the building that fell between the dates she mentioned. I wasn't sure what would appear: I'd been using the term ‘record’ loosely, expecting some sixteenth-century equivalent to my own neatly typed birth certificate or marriage licence. Five minutes later the woman brought over a few boxes of microfiche, a book covered with protective brown paper, and a huge box. She smiled encouragingly and left me to it. I glanced at her as she went back to the desk and grinned to myself at her platform shoes and short leather skirt.
I began with the book. It was bound in greasy off-white calfskin, its cover painted with ancient music and Latin text. The first letter of each line was enlarged and coloured red and blue. I opened it to the first page and smoothed it out; it was thrilling to touch something so old. The handwriting was in brown ink, and though it was very neat, it seemed to have been written to be admired rather than read: I couldn't read a word. Several letters were virtually identical, and when I finally began to make out a few words here and there, I realized it didn't make any difference – it was all in a foreign language.
Then I began to sneeze.
The woman came over twenty minutes later to see how I was doing. I had gotten through ten pages, finding dates and little by little picking out what seemed to be names.
I looked up at her. ‘Is this document in French?’
‘Old French.’
‘Oh.’ I hadn't thought of that.
She glanced down at the page and ran a pink fingernail over a few lines. ‘A pregnant woman drowned in the River Lot, May 1574. Une inconnue, la pauvre,’ she murmured. ‘These deaths are not so useful to you, are they?’
‘I suppose not,’ I said, and sneezed on the book.
The woman laughed as I apologized. ‘Everyone sneezes. Look around you, handkerchiefs everywhere!’ We heard a tiny sneeze from an old man on the other side of the room and giggled.
‘Take a break from the dust,’ she said, ‘Come for a coffee with me. My name is Mathilde.’ She held out her hand and grinned. ‘This is what Americans do, yes? Shake hands when they meet?’
We sat in a café around the corner and were soon chatting like old friends. Despite her rapid-fire delivery, Mathilde was easy to talk to. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed female company. She asked me a million questions about the States, California in particular.
‘What are you doing here?’ she sighed at last. ‘I'd go to California in an instant!’
I tensed, trying to think of an answer that would make it clear I hadn't simply followed Rick to France, as Jean-Paul had implied. But Mathilde went on before I could answer and I realized she wasn't expecting me to explain myself.
She wasn't at all surprised that I was interested in distant ancestors. ‘People look into family history all the time,’ she said.
‘I feel a little silly doing it,’ I confessed. ‘It's so unlikely I'll find anything.’
‘True,’ she admitted. ‘To be honest, most people don't when they're searching that far back. But don't be discouraged. Anyway the records are interesting, aren't they?’
‘Yes, but it takes me so long to understand what they say! All I can really find are dates and sometimes names.’
Mathilde smiled. ‘If you think that book is hard to read, wait till you see the microfiche!’ She laughed when she saw my face. ‘I'm not so busy today,’ she continued. ‘You keep reading your book and I'll look through the microfiche for you. I'm used to that old handwriting!’
I was grateful for her offer. While she sat at the microfiche machine I tackled the box, which Mathilde explained was a book of compoix, records of taxes on crops. It was all in the same handwriting and almost incomprehensible. It took the rest of the day to look through. By the end I was exhausted, but Mathilde seemed disappointed that there wasn't anything else to look at.
‘Is that really all?’ she asked, flicking through the inventory once more. ‘Attends, there's a book of compoix from 1570 at the mairie in Le Pont de Montvert. Of course, Monsieur Jourdain! I helped him take inventory of those records a year ago.’
‘Who's Monsieur Jourdain?’
‘The secretary of the mairie.’
‘You think it's worth the trouble?’
‘Bien sûr. Even if you don't find anything, Le Pont de Montvert is a beautiful place. It's a little village at the bottom of Mont Lozère.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Mon Dieu –I must pick up Sylvie!’ She grabbed her bag and pushed me out, chuckling as she locked the door behind me. ‘You'll have fun with Monsieur Jourdain. If he doesn't eat you alive, of course!’
The next morning I started early and took the picturesque route to Le Pont de Montvert. As I began to climb the road up Mont Lozère the landscape opened out and brightened while also growing more barren. I passed through tiny, dusty villages where the buildings were made entirely of granite, even down to the tiles on the roofs, with hardly a touch of paint to distinguish them from the surrounding land. Many houses were abandoned, roofs gone, chimneys crumbling, shutters askew. I saw few people, and once I got above a certain point, no cars. Soon there were just granite boulders, broom and heather, and the occasional clump of pines.
This is more like it, I thought.
I pulled over near the summit at a place called the Col de Finiels and sat on the hood of the car. After a few minutes the automatic fan cut out and it was wonderfully quiet; I listened and could hear a few birds and the dull roar of the wind. According to my map, to the east across a small pine forest and over a hill was the source of the Tarn. I was tempted to go and look for it.
Instead I drove down the other side of the mountain, zigzagging back and forth, until one last turn brought me coasting into Le Pont de Montvert, passing a hotel, a school, a restaurant, a few shops and bars on one side of the road. Paths branched off the main road, winding among the houses built up the hill. Above the tops of the houses I could see the roof of a church; a bell hung in the stone belfry.
I caught a glimpse of water on the other side of the road, where the Tarn ran, hidden by a low stone wall. I parked by an old stone bridge, walked onto it and looked down at the river.
The Tarn had changed completely. No longer wide and slow, it was twenty feet across at most and racing like a stream. I studied the pebbles in deep reds and yellows gleaming under the water. I could hardly tear my eyes away.
This water will flow all the way to Lisle, I thought. All the way to me.
It was Wednesday, ten a.m. Jean-Paul could be sitting at the café, watching the river too.
Stop it, Ella, I thought sharply. Think of Rick, or don't think at all.
From the outside the mairie – a grey building with brown shutters and a French flag hanging limply over one of the windows – was presentable enough. Inside, though, it looked like a junk shop; the sun streamed through a fog of dust. Monsieur Jourdain was reading a newspaper at a desk in the far corner. He was short and plump, with bulging eyes, olive skin and one of those scraggly beards that peters out halfway down the neck and blurs the jaw line. He eyed me suspiciously as I picked my way through battered old furniture and stacks of paper.
‘Bonjour, Monsieur Jourdain,’ I said briskly.
He grunted and glanced down at his paper.
‘My name is Ella Turner – Tournier,’ I continued carefully in French. ‘I would like to look at some records you keep here at the mairie. There's a compoix from 1570. May I see it?’
He looked up at me briefly, then continued reading the paper.
‘Monsieur? You are Monsieur Jourdain, yes? They told me in Mende that I should speak to you.’
Monsieur Jourdain ran his tongue around his teeth. I looked down. He was reading a sports newspaper, the pages open to the racing form.
He said something I didn't understand. ‘Pardon?’ I asked. Again he spoke incomprehensibly and I wondered if he was drunk. When I asked him once more to repeat himself, he waved his hands and flecked spit at me, unleashing a torrent of words. I took a step back.
‘Jesus, what a stereotype!’ I muttered in English.
He narrowed his eyes and snarled, and I turned and left. I sat fuming over a coffee in a café, then found the number of the Mende archives and called Mathilde from a pay phone.
She shrieked when I explained what had happened. ‘Leave it to me,’ she counselled. ‘Go back in half an hour.’
Whatever Mathilde said to Monsieur Jourdain over the phone worked, because although he glared at me he led me down a hall to a cramped room containing a desk overflowing with papers. ‘Attendez,’ he mumbled, and left. I seemed to be in a storage room; while waiting I poked around. There were boxes of books everywhere, some very old. Stacks of papers that looked like government documents lay on the floor, and a big pile of unopened envelopes was scattered on the desk, all addressed to Abraham Jourdain.
After ten minutes he reappeared with a large box and dumped it onto the desk. Then without a word or glance he walked out.
The box held a book similar to the compoix in Mende, but even bigger and in worse shape. The calfskin binding was so ragged it no longer held the pages together. I handled the book as carefully as I could, but even so bits of corners crumbled and broke off. I hid the fragments furtively in my pockets, worried that Monsieur Jourdain might find them and yell at me.
At noon he threw me out. I'd only been working an hour when he appeared in the doorway, glared down at me and growled something. I could only work out what he meant because he tapped his watch. He stumped down the hall to open the front door, shutting it behind me with a thud and drawing the bolt. I stood blinking in the sunlight, dazed after the dark, dusty room.
Then I was surrounded by children, streaming out from a playground next door.
I breathed in. Thank God, I thought.
I bought things for lunch in the shops just as they were closing: cheese and peaches and some dark red bread the shopkeeper told me was a local specialty, made from chestnuts. I took a path up through granite houses to the church at the top of the village.
It was a simple stone building, almost as wide as it was high. What I took to be the front door was locked, but around the side I found an open door, the date 1828 carved over it, and stepped inside. The room was full of empty wooden pews. Balconies skirted the two long walls. There was a wooden organ, a lectern and a table with a large Bible lying open on it. That was all. No ornamentation, no statues or crosses, no stained glass. I'd never seen such a bare church. There wasn't even an altar to distinguish the minister's place from the people's.
I went over to the Bible, the only thing there with a use beyond the purely functional. It looked old, though not as old as the compoix I'd been looking at. I began to leaf through it. It took awhile – I didn't know the order of the books in the Bible – but at last I found what I was looking for. I began to read the thirty-first psalm: J'ai mis en toi mon espérance: Garde-moi donc, Seigneur. By the time I reached the first line of the third verse, Tu es ma tour et forteresse, my eyes were full of tears. I stopped abruptly and fled.
Silly girl, I scolded myself as I sat on the wall around the church and wiped my eyes. I made myself eat, blinking in the bright sun. The chestnut bread was sweet and dry, and stuck in the back of my throat. I could feel it there for the rest of the day.
When I got back Monsieur Jourdain was sitting behind his desk, hands clasped in front of him. He wasn't reading his paper; in fact it looked like he was waiting for me. I said carefully, ‘Bonjour, Monsieur. May I have the compoix, please?’
He opened a filing cabinet next to his desk, pulled out the box and handed it to me. Then he looked closely at my face.
‘What is your name?’ he asked in a puzzled voice.
‘Tournier. Ella Tournier.’
‘Tournier,’ he repeated, still scrutinizing me. He twisted his mouth to one side, chewing the inside of his cheek. He was staring at my hair. ‘La Rousse,’ he murmured.
‘What?’ I snapped loudly. A wave of goosebumps swept over me.
Monsieur Jourdain widened his eyes, then reached over and touched a lock of my hair. ‘C'est rouge. Alors, La Rousse.’
‘But my hair is brown, Monsieur.’
‘Rouge,’ he repeated firmly.
‘Of course it's not. It's –’ I pulled a clump of hair in front of my eyes and caught my breath. He was right: it was shot through with coppery highlights. But it had been brown when I'd looked at myself in the mirror that morning. The sun had brought out highlights in my hair before, but never so fast or so dramatically.
‘What is La Rousse?’ I asked accusingly.
‘It's a Cevenol nickname for a girl with red hair. It's not an insult,’ he added quickly. ‘They used to call the Virgin La Rousse because they thought she had red hair.’
‘Oh.’ I felt dizzy and nauseous and thirsty all at once.
‘Listen, Madame.’ He rolled his tongue over his teeth. ‘If you want to use that desk there –’ He gestured toward an empty desk across from his.
‘No thank you,’ I said shakily. ‘The other office is fine.’
Monsieur Jourdain nodded, looking relieved that he wouldn't have to share a room with me.
I began where I'd left off, but kept stopping to inspect my hair. Finally I shook myself. Nothing you can do about it right now, Ella, I thought. Just get on with the job.
I worked quickly, aware that Monsieur Jourdain's new tolerance could only be relied on for so long. I stopped trying to work out what the taxes were being levied for and concentrated on names and dates. As I got toward the end of the book I became more and more despondent, and began making small bets to keep myself going: there'll be a Tournier in one of the next twenty sections; I'll find one in the next five minutes.
I glared at the last page: it was a record for a Jean Marcel, and there was only one entry, for châtaignes, a word I'd seen often in the compoix. Chestnuts. The new colour of my hair.
I heaved the book into its box and walked slowly down the hall to Monsieur Jourdain's office. He was still sitting at his desk, typing fast with two fingers on an old manual typewriter. As he leaned forward a silver chain swung out of the V in his shirt; the pendant at the end of it clanked against the keys. He looked up and caught me staring at it. His hand moved to the pendant; he rubbed it with his thumb.
‘The Huguenot cross,’ he said. ‘You know it?’
I shook my head. He held it up for me to see. It was a square cross with a dove with outspread wings attached to the bottom arm.
I set the box on the empty desk opposite him. ‘Voilà,’ I said. ‘Thank you for letting me look at it.’
‘You found anything?’
‘No.’ I held out my hand. ‘Merci beaucoup, Monsieur.’
He shook hands with me hesitantly.
‘Au revoir, La Rousse,’ he called as I left.
It was too late to go back to Lisle, so I spent the night at one of the two hotels in the village. After supper I tried calling Rick but there was no answer. Then I called Mathilde, who had given me her number and made me promise to give her an update. She was disappointed that I hadn't found anything, even though she knew the odds were against me.
I asked her how she got Monsieur Jourdain to be nicer to me.
‘Oh, I just made him feel guilty. I reminded him you were looking for Huguenots. He's from a Huguenot family himself, a descendant of one of the Camisard rebellion leaders, in fact. René Laporte, I think.’
‘So that's a Huguenot.’
‘Sure. What were you expecting? You mustn't be too hard on him, Ella. He's had a difficult time lately. His daughter ran off with an American three years ago. A tourist. Not only that, a Catholic too! I don't know which made him angrier, being American or being Catholic. You can see how it's affected him. He was a good worker before, a smart man. They sent me over last year to help him sort things out.’
I thought of the room full of books and papers I'd worked in and chuckled.
‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Did you ever see t
he back office?’
‘No, he said he'd lost the key and there was nothing in it anyway.’
I described it to her.
‘Merde, I knew he was hiding something! I should have been more persistent.’
‘Anyway, thanks for helping me.’
‘Bah, it's nothing.’ She paused. ‘So, who's Jean-Paul?’
I turned red. ‘A librarian in Lisle, where I live. How do you know him?’
‘He called me this afternoon.’
‘He called you?’
‘Sure. He wanted to know if you had found what you were looking for.’