The Virgin Blue (20 page)

‘
Bonjour, Madame
,’ he replied. Though his face didn't move his voice sounded as if he had raised his eyebrows.

I turned to Madame. ‘Madame, I would like twenty of your quiches, please. You know, I adore them. I eat them every day, breakfast, lunch, dinner.’

‘
Twenty
quiches,’ she repeated, leaving her mouth ajar.

‘Yes, please.’

Madame snapped her mouth shut, pressing her lips together so hard they disappeared, and, eyes on me, reached behind her for a paper bag. I heard Jean-Paul quietly clear his throat. When Madame bent down to shovel the quiches in the bag I glanced at him. He was staring into the corner at a display of sugared almonds. His mouth had tightened and he was rubbing his jaw with his index finger and thumb. I looked back at Madame and smiled. She straightened up from the glass case and twisted the corners of the bag shut. ‘There are only fifteen,’ she muttered, glaring at me.

‘Oh, that's too bad. I'll have to go to the
pâtisserie
to see if they have any.’ I suspected Madame wouldn't like the
pâtisserie
; what they sold would seem too frivolous to her, a serious bread woman. I was right: her eyes widened and she sucked in her breath, shook her head, and made a rude noise. ‘They don't have quiches!’ she exclaimed. ‘I'm the only one who makes quiches in Lisle-sur-Tarn!’

‘Ah,’ I replied. ‘Well, maybe at the Intermarché.’

At this Jean-Paul made a garbled sound and Madame nearly dropped the bag of quiches. I'd committed the sin of mentioning her arch rival and the worst threat to her business: the supermarket on the edge of town, with no history, no dignity, no finesse. Kind of like me. I smiled. ‘What do I owe you?’ I asked.

Madame didn't answer for a moment; she looked like she needed to sit down. Jean-Paul took this opportunity to murmur ‘
Au revoir, Mesdames’
and slip away.

The moment he was gone I lost interest in struggling with her. When she demanded what seemed an outrageous sum, I handed it over meekly. It was worth it.

Outside Jean-Paul fell in step with me.

‘You are very wicked, Ella Tournier,’ he murmured in French.

‘Would you like some of these quiches?’ We laughed.

‘I thought we mustn't see each other in public. This –’ I waved my hand around the square – ‘is very public.’

‘Ah, but I have a professional reason to talk to you. Tell me, have you looked carefully at your Bible?’

‘Not yet. Look, don't you ever stop? Don't you sleep?’

He smiled. ‘I have never needed much sleep. Bring the Bible over to the library tomorrow. I've discovered some interesting things about your family.’

The Bible was an odd size, long and unexpectedly narrow. But it wasn't too heavy and it felt comfortable in my arms. The cover was made of worn, cracked leather, rubbed dull and soft and mottled in shades of chestnut brown. The leather was cracked and wrinkled, and an insect had bored tiny holes in several places. The back cover was blackened and burned half away, but on the front an intricate design of lines and leaves and dots stamped in gold was intact. Gold flowers had been stamped down the spine, and a modified pattern of the design had been tapped with a hammer and a pin into the sides of the pages.

I turned to the beginning of Genesis: ‘
Diev crea av commencement le ciel & la terre
.’ The text was in two columns, the typeface clear, and though the spelling was peculiar I could understand the French – what was left of it. The back of the book had been burned away, the middle pages scorched beyond recognition.

At Crazy Joe's Bar Mathilde and Monsieur Jourdain had a long discussion about the Bible's origins, Jean-Paul chipping in now and then. I could only partly follow what they said because Monsieur Jourdain's accent was so hard to decipher and Mathilde's delivery so fast. It was always harder to follow a conversation in French when people weren't speaking directly to me. From what I could gather they agreed that it had probably been published in Geneva, and possibly translated by someone named Lefèvre d'Etaples. Monsieur Jourdain was particularly emphatic about the name.

‘Who was he?’ I asked hesitantly.

Monsieur Jourdain began to chuckle. ‘La Rousse wants to know who Lefèvre was,’ he kept repeating, shaking his head. By then he'd downed three highballs. I nodded patiently, letting him have his little joke; the martinis had made me more tolerant about being teased.

Eventually he explained that Lefèvre d'Etaples had been the first to translate the Bible from Latin into the French vernacular so that people other than priests could read it. ‘That was the beginning,’ he declared. ‘That was the beginning of everything. The world split apart!’ With that pronouncement he pitched forward on his stool and landed halfway across the bar.

I tried not to grin, but Mathilde covered her mouth with her hand, Sylvie laughed outright and Jean-Paul smiled as he leafed through the Bible. Now I remembered that he had studied the page with the Tourniers on it for a long time and scribbled something on the back of an envelope. I'd been too tipsy to ask what he was doing.

To Mathilde's disgust and my disappointment, Monsieur Jourdain had not been able to remember exactly who turned in the Bible to him. ‘It's for this that you must keep records!’ she scolded. ‘Important questions, for someone like Ella!’ Monsieur looked suitably hangdoggish and wrote down the names of all the family members listed in the Bible, promising to see if he could find out anything about them, including those with last names other than Tournier.

I was assuming the Bible had come from around Le Pont de Montvert, but I knew it could have been brought from anywhere, with people moving to the area and bringing things with them. When I suggested this, however, Mathilde and Monsieur Jourdain both shook their heads.

‘They would not have brought it to the
mairie
if they were outsiders,’ Mathilde explained. ‘Only a true Cevenol family would have given it to Monsieur Jourdain. There is a strong sense of history here, and family things like this Bible don't leave the Cévennes.’

‘But families leave. My family left.’

‘That was religion,’ she replied with a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘Of course they left then, and many more families after 1685. You know, it's funny that your family left when it did. It was much worse for Cevenol Protestants 100 years later. The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew was a –’ She stopped and shrugged, then waved a hand at Jean-Paul. ‘You explain, Jean-Paul.’ She was wearing a pink leotard and plaid miniskirt.

‘A bourgeois event, more or less,’ he continued smoothly, smiling at her. ‘It destroyed the Protestant nobility. But the Cevenol Huguenots were peasants and the Cévennes too isolated to be threatened. There could have been tensions with the few local Catholics, I suppose. The cathedral in Mende remained Catholic, for example. They could have decided to go terrorize a few Huguenots. What do you think, Mademoiselle?’ he addressed Sylvie. She regarded him with a level gaze, then stuck her legs out, wiggled her toes and said, ‘Look, Maman painted my toenails white!’

Now I turned back to the list of Tourniers and studied it. Here was the family that must have ended up in Moutier: Etienne Tournier, Isabelle du Moulin and their children Jean, Jacob and Marie. According to my cousin's note, Etienne had been on a military list in 1576 and Jean married in 1590. I checked the dates; they made sense. And this Jacob was one of the Jacobs in the long line that ended with my cousin. He should know about this, I thought. I'll write and tell him.

My eye was drawn to writing on the inside cover that no one had noticed before. It was dirty and faint, but I managed to make out ‘Mas de la Baume du Monsieur’. Farm of the Balm of the Gentleman, clumsily translated. I got out the detailed map I'd bought of the area around Le Pont de Montvert and began looking. I searched in concentric rings out from the village for a similar name. After only five minutes I found it, about two kilometres northeast of Le Pont de Montvert. It was a hill just north of the Tarn, half covered with forest. I nodded. Here was something for Jean-Paul.

But he couldn't have seen the name of the farm the night before or he would have pointed it out. What was he talking about when he said he knew something about my family? I stared at the names and dates, but could only find two things unusual about the list: a Tournier had married a Tournier, and one of the Jeans had been born on New Year's Day.

When I arrived at the library the next afternoon with the Bible in a carrier bag, Jean-Paul made a show of presenting me to the other librarian. Once she clapped eyes on the Bible she stopped looking suspicious.

‘Monsieur Piquemal is an expert in old books, in history,’ she said in a singsong voice. ‘That's his domain. But I know more about novels, romance, things like that. The more popular books.’

I sensed a dig at Jean-Paul, but I simply nodded and smiled. Jean-Paul waited for us to finish, then led me to a table in the other room. I opened the Bible while he pulled out his scrap of envelope.

‘So,’ he said expectantly. ‘What did you discover?’

‘Your last name is Piquemal.’

‘So?’

‘ “Bad sting.” Perfect.’ I grinned at him and he frowned.

‘
Pique
can also mean lance,’ he muttered.

‘Even better!’

‘So,’ he repeated. ‘What did you find?’

I pointed to the name of the farm on the inside cover, then spread out my map and pinpointed the spot. Jean-Paul nodded. ‘Good,’ he said, scrutinizing the map. ‘No buildings there now, but at least we are sure that the Bible is from the area. What else?’

‘Two Tourniers married each other.’

‘Yes, probably cousins. It was not so uncommon then. What else?’

‘Um, one of them was born on New Year's Day.’

He raised his eyebrows; I wished I hadn't said anything. ‘Anything else?’ he persisted.

‘No.’ He was being irritating again, yet I found it hard to sit next to him and talk as if nothing had happened the other night. His arm was so near mine on the table that I could easily brush against it. This is the closest we're going to get, I thought. This is as far as it goes. Sitting next to him seemed a sad, futile act.

‘You found nothing else interesting?’ Jean-Paul snorted. ‘Bah, American education. You would make a bad detective, Ella Tournier.’ When he saw my face he stopped and looked embarrassed. ‘I'm sorry,’ he said, switching to English as if that would soothe me. ‘You do not like my teasing.’

I shook my head and kept my eyes on the Bible. ‘It's not that. If I didn't want you to tease me I could never talk to you. No, it's just –’ I waved my hand as if to chase the subject away – ‘the other night,’ I explained quietly. ‘It's hard to sit here like this.’

‘Ah.’ We sat side by side, staring at the family list, very aware of each other.

‘Funny,’ I broke the silence. ‘I've just noticed. Etienne and Isabelle married the day before his birthday. May 28th, May 29th.’

‘Yes.’ Jean-Paul tapped a finger lightly against my hand. ‘Yes. That is what I noticed first. Strange. So I asked was it a coincidence? Then I saw how old he was. He had twenty-five the next day after his marriage.’

‘He
turned
twenty-five.’

‘Yes. Now, among the Huguenots then, when a man
turned
twenty-five he did not any longer need permission from his parents to marry.’

‘But he was twenty-four when he married, so he must have had their permission.’

‘Yes, but it seemed strange to marry so close to twenty-five. To give anyone doubt about what his parents thought. Then I looked more.’ He gestured at the page. ‘Look at the birth date of their first son.’

‘Yes, New Year's Day, like I said. So what?’