The Unfortunate Son (23 page)

“It’s lovely. We were happy here before. We will be happy again.”

Pons had lagged behind. When his horse caught up on the hilltop, he turned to his sister.

“Is that the place?” he asked.

Mattie nodded.

As the sun set, Pons watched the distant hills go from gold to blue. He scanned the valley and turned to Bertrand, a wide smile spreading on his old face.

“Thank you.”

Bertrand smiled, and taking the reins in one hand, he gestured across the horizon, from left to right, with an outstretched palm. “Home.”

WHEN BEATRICE WAS a child, she and Mattie had shared a small, sunny room in the manor. Now, Bertrand led Beatrice to a different chamber, a large room with a tall chest, a high wooden bed, and a glazed window that overlooked a green meadow with a ragged brook.

Mattie and Pons were settled into a cottage near the kitchen garden. Mattie was delighted to find a stack of fruitwood, a new set of tools, and a bench outside where she could work on fine days. Bertrand had propped a fishing pole against the cottage door.

“Bertrand says there’s a stream with trout as big as my arm,” said Pons, picking up the pole; his voice cracked.

“He’s a good man,” said Mattie.

Pons nodded.

“Generous and easy,” said Mattie.

Tired from the long journey, Mattie, Pons, Beatrice, and even Cadeau slept soundly that night. The next morning, Beatrice was strolling in the kitchen garden with Bertrand when Mattie and Pons, carrying the fishing pole, joined them. Bertrand was showing his niece the herbs, stumbling to identify the plants. Beatrice supplied the correct names for him.

“Our Beatrice knows her herbs. She is a wonder in the garden,” said Mattie.

Bertrand nodded. “I am beginning to gather that, Mattie. Are you and Pons well settled?”

Mattie answered, “Gloriously. But it’s strange to be back.”

Pons just stood twirling the fishing pole and nodding.

Bertrand said, “The count invited all of us to come to the castle to hang Mattie’s carvings.”

“Surely not today?” said Mattie. “I’m weary, and I can’t see my brother climbing back up on a horse without more rest.”

“Of course. Louis can wait a few days more, though to tell you the truth, he has been most impatient to hang the carvings.”

Beatrice said nothing.

A few more days passed, and one evening Bertrand and Beatrice shared a simple late supper with Pons and Mattie in the manor house kitchen. With its two sleeping
chambers, and its hall with four glazed windows, the house was far grander than the fishing cottage. There were also several tenant cottages and a massive stone barn. But the large kitchen was the heart of the manor, and the place where meals for the servants and the master were eaten. The kitchen shelves were filled with crocks and baskets; sausages and hams hung from hooks on the rafters along with braids of garlic and bunches of drying herbs. Most evenings, everyone gathered by the kitchen hearth, with Bertrand in the only high-backed chair.

Beatrice dragged her hand along the polished table edge; she looked up at Mattie, who watched from across the table. When Beatrice began picking at a hangnail, Mattie covered the girl’s hand with her own.

“I won’t go. I can’t return to the place my father was murdered,” said Beatrice. “I still have nightmares about that morning. I’ll never go back there.”

“I understand,” said Mattie.

Beatrice snapped her fingers under the table, and Cadeau lumbered over and put his head in her lap. She patted him. Bertrand cleared his throat but let the matter drop without a word.

The next morning, Bertrand, Pons, and Mattie set off. The manor house was a half morning’s ride from the ancient Muguet castle. Long before they arrived, Bertrand pointed in the distance to the tall feudal towers that had been begun four centuries earlier by the first Count de Muguet when he returned from the first crusade. The party
rode on, through an arched gateway into the infamous courtyard that Mattie, like Beatrice, dreaded seeing again. Everything had been altered, and Mattie was relieved to find a garden covering the courtyard and large new windows added to the château. The wide door was open. Out bounded the brown-and-white dog and his tall owner, Louis, Count de Muguet.

“Welcome,” he said.

Three grooms in dark-blue tunics rushed to take the horses.

“Where is Beatrice?” asked the count.

“She’s tired from the journey,” said Bertrand.

“Still?” asked the count. “Perhaps next time.” He turned to Mattie and Pons. “Welcome to my home. I haven’t opened the bundles of your carvings, Mattie. I’ve waited for you. You must see the room I have prepared. Come.”

As Mattie stepped inside the great hall, she stopped. She looked up and around, and she shook her head. The château was still a part of a vast ancient fortress, but light from the new glazed windows played across recently tiled black, rose, and cream floors. Mattie stepped into a pool of shimmering sunlight. She touched the bright new tapestries that hid the cold stone walls. She smelled beeswax and flowers. The place was the same but different, as different as this son was from his father. Louis beckoned, and they hurried along the hall to a staircase that spiraled up a round turret. Iron wall torches lit the way.

Louis climbed only three steps before he turned. “Forgive me, I should have asked if you were thirsty, but I wanted you to see the room. Shall we take refreshment first?”

“No, my lord,” said Mattie with a chuckle. “Let me see where my fish will swim.”

Louis rushed up the tower stairs taking two steps at a time and, at the top, he stopped at a small doorway. Pons and Mattie were breathless from the climb.

Bertrand brought up the rear. “Well, my friend, I don’t think I have seen you this excited since we were boys. Open the door.”

Louis turned to Mattie. “Please Mattie, I’m not good with words, but your fish are a treasure. I started to prepare this room as soon as I heard you would be moving. I prayed you would let me buy your carvings.” Louis sighed and shook his head and sighed again. “That they are now mine, that perhaps one day I will have children who—well, I …” And he opened the door.

No one said a word. The round room was small, but its walls were pierced with large windows. The windows had leaded panes of turquoise, sapphire, cobalt, sky, and pale-blue glass. The floor was sand-colored tile, and the blue-painted ceiling was hatched with pegged wooden beams. Sunlight dappled the stone walls and the floor with all the blues from the windows, and the room glimmered.

“Pegs to hang the fish,” said Louis, pointing to the ceiling. “Is there something else I should do?”

Pons was wide-eyed and speechless, but Mattie watched the count and began to laugh.

“This room won’t do at all, my lord,” said Mattie, stifling her laughter and wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

The count went pale. Bertrand’s jaw dropped, and he removed his jaunty cap.

“You can’t be serious, Mattie,” said Bertrand, stroking his hat feathers.

“I can’t be serious?” asked Mattie. She laughed again, harder. “I’m not even a bit serious. This is the most wondrous place I have seen in my long life. It’s like standing on the floor of the sea. All you need is a mermaid.”

“A mermaid? Can you carve one?” asked the count.

Mattie jammed her tongue in her cheek and looked up at the ceiling. “For now, let’s get the fish swimming.”

With Mattie’s direction, three servants began to hang her carved fish, using blue silk thread. Pons squeezed himself against a wall, but Louis and Bertrand kept getting in the way, and Mattie banished everyone except the servants. The count and Bertrand took Pons to see the castle and the grounds.

When the three men returned, Louis dashed up the stairs and pounded at the tower door.

Mattie answered, “Not yet, sir. I’ll send one of my helpers to fetch you.”

“How much longer?” asked Louis.

“Soon, my lord, soon,” said Mattie.

“But—”

“Before the sun sets; trust me.”

Pons and Bertrand waited at the bottom of the tower stairs and followed the count into the great hall, where he dropped into his favorite chair. The spring day was warm, so there was no fire burning. Instead, the hearth was spread with sweet greens and flower petals.

Wine and fruit were set out on a table. Pons had never been in a place like the château, had never met a nobleman, other than Sir Guy, but as the day wore on, he liked the young count more and more. Louis had asked the old man about fishing in the sea, and he had taken Pons to see where he fished for trout. The old man was fascinated by the eel pond, and the count had delighted in showing him the gardens and parkland around the castle. Now Pons sat in the hall, cutting an early peach, listening and nodding his head, as the two younger men tried to engage him in their conversation.

“My father increased our holdings significantly, but the castle has been in our family beyond memory, just as the manor always belonged to Bertrand and Beatrice’s family,” said the young count, smiling at Pons.

“It’s been a long while since anyone added to my family’s holdings. And Étienne gambled away all that was left,” said Bertrand, sitting down in the other chair by the fireplace.

“My father made it easy for a man to lose,” answered Louis. He stood and began to pace about the hall.

Bertrand twirled his feathered hat in his hands and watched his impatient friend. Louis sighed and dropped again into his chair across from Bertrand.

Bertrand stretched over and patted Louis’s shoulder. “You are a good man.”

Count de Muguet held his goblet with both hands and sipped his wine. He looked over at the windows in the hall. “The light is beginning to fade. I hoped to see the room in daylight today. I like the way the sun hits the windows.”

A smiling servant appeared in the hall and announced that the room was finished; Louis bolted up to the tower room, where Mattie stood outside the closed door. She curtsied and opened the door.

Louis clapped his hands, and everyone—Mattie, Pons, Bertrand, and the servants—began to clap and cheer. The room was a wonder.

SALAH WAS FAILING. His mind remained sharp, but, even with help, he was no longer able to walk. Each morning, Bes and Luc propped Salah in his room on a carpeted platform with bolsters and pillows. As word of his decline spread, there were fewer visitors and patients, but neither Salah nor Luc was sorry, as the old man’s diminishing energy was spent teaching the boy. One sunny morning in early July, Luc was showing Salah new tricks he had taught the parrot.

“How would you like to live with Bes?” he asked the bird, which was perched on his finger.

The bird spread its clipped wings and flittered to the carpet next to Salah. It rolled onto its back with its feet in the air and was still.

“You would rather be dead?” asked Luc, bending down to the bird.

The parrot hopped back onto Luc’s finger and nodded enthusiastically.

“Show Salah where you want to go.”

Clasping the boy’s finger with its feet, the bird rotated in a full circle; when it was again upright on Luc’s finger, it puffed out its chest and sang out in Arabic, “Around the world!”

Salah clapped his right hand to his thigh. “Wonderful,” he whispered.

The parrot fluttered up to Luc’s shoulder and nuzzled the boy’s cheek with its gray beak.

“Such a smart creature,” said Salah. “Bes is envious. He cannot make friends with that parrot. But you have a way.”

“I have a secret,” said Luc, dumping the contents of a sack into his palm, displaying a handful of shelled nuts and dried bits of fruit.

“I should have known,” said the old man.

Bes appeared at the doorway with a visitor. Luc was startled to recognize the captain of the dhow, the slaver who had stolen him from his old life. He blinked and breathed deeply.

The captain bowed to Salah, and then he pointed to Luc.

“The blond boy has grown a cubit. I should have bargained harder.”

Salah answered, “He was underfed and filthy.”

“That is how I found him. In a broken-down boat with a worthless old man.”

“There is always an answer, but it is not always correct,” said Salah.

The captain took a step back. “May we speak in private, Hakim?”

“Leave us, Luc,” said Salah with a wave of his hand.

With the parrot on his shoulder, Luc backed out of the room and found Bes in the kitchen.

“Did you invite that slaver here?” asked Luc angrily. “Are you still trying to have me sold?”

“No,” said Bes. “I had nothing to do with his visit. He came to the door and asked to see the master. But he came about you.”

“And why do you think that?” rasped Luc.

“Because he asked me if the slave with one ear was still here. He asked many questions, all about you.”

“Like what?”

“He wanted to know if Salah was happy with you.”

“And your answer?”

“I said you were slothful and as stupid as a walnut.”

“For once you have done me a favor.”

“I have done many favors for you, locust.”

Bes poured goat’s milk into a shallow bowl and set it down for Cat. Luc collapsed to the floor, wrapping his arms about his knees and putting his head down. The parrot sat on his shoulder and started to hum.

Bes spit on the floor. “Quiet, stupid bird.”

“Shhh,” said Luc to the parrot. Then he looked at the little man. “Am I in danger, Bes?”

“What kind of danger?”

“The old man promised me my freedom. He wouldn’t sell me, would he?”

“I don’t think he’ll sell you, but what do I know?”

“More than you say,” said Luc, turning the metal band on his ankle.

Bes winked at the boy. “I’ll see what I can learn.”

“I may need your help.”

“You have always needed my help. But the old man needs you. I need him. You need me. We are a circle.”

“A strange circle.”

“Old man, short man, freak.”

Luc frowned.

“I’ll go to the market later. Maybe I’ll find that giant Berber with the kola teeth.”