Page 17 of The Wandering Season

Week Two: France

January 22

Beynac-et-Cazenac, Dordogne, France

Night had fallen on the village, but the ample moon and antique streetlamps illuminated our path as we navigated the narrow streets in our rental car. The medieval buildings of Beynac-et-Cazenac were uniform in their humorless beige-and-brown stones but found joy in the vines that had made their purchase on the fa?ade and the flower boxes that would host a bevy of color when the seasons obliged.

We were both wilted with exhaustion, having spent the last thirteen hours in transit. The trip from Westport entailed a three-hour drive to Dublin, two flights, a train, and a rental car to reach the little village in Dordogne—an ordeal I hadn’t been fully prepared for.

Avery had reserved an entire five-hundred-year-old cottage, as the offseason rates were reasonable, so it saved the trouble of altering the accommodations to include Niall. Avery had alerted our host to the addition of another guest, and to her credit, she hadn’t pelted me with questions. Just an “atta girl”

and a winky emoji that elicited an eye roll from me she probably could have seen all the way in New York.

Niall had volunteered to drive since he was far more accustomed to maneuvering around the narrow, serpentine streets than I was. Both of us sagged in relief to find the cottage and a minuscule parking spot that barely accommodated the compact Peugeot. The instructions Avery gave on how to get the key were a bit cryptic, but a note on the door directed us to the bookshop three doors down.

Niall made a grunt of disapproval. Greeting guests personally was a point of pride, and he invariably showed guests to their rooms and made sure they had what they needed before he left them to their own devices. He strove to find the balance between attentive service and intrusiveness.

Blearily, we stumbled down the road to the address on the sign. It was a building made from the same stone as all the others, with deep maroon shutters to defy the insistent beigeness of it all. Not a garish shade of violet or vermilion, but a deep burgundy that skated the lines between staid and splashy. The sign read Fermé, but the light was on, and a woman sat in a plush chair in the corner in a shell-pink dressing gown, a long gray braid draped over her shoulder and a book open on her lap. Her head tilted back and her mouth was slightly agape in sleep, and I felt a pang of remorse knowing she’d tried to stay awake waiting for us. In slumber she looked shrunken and frail like a dried leaf in autumn.

Niall rapped gently on the store window until she was roused from her chair. She wiped the sleep from her eyes and padded across the shop floor, then unlocked the door and ushered us inside.

The bookstore was a cheerful jumble of tomes, mostly used, with a small table of recent releases at the front. The centerpiece of the room was a massive fireplace framed in intricately carved wood. The scent of the smoldering fire and book dust hung in the air laced with a faint twinge of vanilla. Green velvet armchairs, deep and lush, flanked the fireplace, inviting guests to peruse the books in comfort. It was in one of these the elderly woman had been napping.

“Forgive me for falling asleep on duty. You must be the charming American couple coming to claim the keys to the cottage, oui?”

I glanced over to Niall, trying to assess if I ought to correct the American part or the couple part first. He just shook his head, his meaning evident: If you try to explain anything, she’ll ask a million questions, and it will just delay our access to a hot meal and warm beds. I turned to her and smiled. “Yes, thank you.”

“How lovely. I am Madame DuChatel. I do hope you’ll enjoy your stay. It’s not the most exciting time of year, but you’ll get to enjoy our little village in peace and quiet.”

She walked slowly to a massive wooden desk and fiddled with the drawer until it finally tugged open. She rummaged through its contents, ostensibly searching for the keys to the cottage, but seemed to be coming up empty.

“I’m sure we’ll have a delightful time. We’ll be excited to explore in the morning. Quite the long day of travel, you know.”

My eyes were pleading silently for her to find the key so we could fall into bed.

“Oh yes, you must be simply done in, poor dears.”

Her acknowledgment didn’t seem to inspire any haste in movement, and I could feel Niall groan inwardly, impatient as I was to get some rest.

“Exhausted, yes.”

I let the desperation seep slightly into my voice, hoping it might hurry her along.

She clucked her tongue in sympathy, still rummaging in the drawer. At long last she held up a key, held it up to the dim light of the bare light bulb that hung from the ceiling, and placed it back in the drawer, shaking her head. “My daughter Sylvie has taken over all this from me, and she doesn’t manage things quite like I used to. Since it’s so quiet this month, she asked me to take the reins again while she’s on holiday in the Canary Islands. She needed some sun. I don’t blame her, but I couldn’t bear to travel so far these days.”

Niall rubbed his eyes and forced a smile as she continued her digging, and I felt the room coming in and out of focus as fatigue enveloped me. After a few moments I cleared my throat. “Can we help?”

“No, no, they— Oh that’s right. She left them in the envelope on her kitchen counter upstairs. This old brain isn’t what it once was. I won’t be a moment.”

She began to teeter her way across the room, each step shuffling slowly toward the staircase, but I intercepted her before she got more than a few steps.

“I’d be happy to grab them for you if you tell me where they are. I’d hate for you to have to take an extra trip up the stairs.”

She turned back and smiled gratefully. “I hate to ask it of you, but my old knees would be grateful. I keep a room on this level, behind the shop, so I don’t have to bother with them anymore and can leave Sylvie to have her peace and quiet upstairs. The kitchen is to the left at the top of the stairs. There should be an envelope in plain sight on the counter.”

“Not a problem at all.”

I walked quickly, though my urge to dash for the keys was tempered by my fatigue. I got the very strong feeling that the apartment upstairs had been Madame DuChatel’s home for many decades, even if she’d resigned herself to the rooms downstairs in her old age.

I stopped in my tracks at the sound of a low disembodied growl. The creature wasn’t imminently menacing, but his cold expression told me he could quickly become so if trifled with. I turned into the kitchen where an enormous cat with a resplendent long gray fur coat sat on the counter next to the coveted envelope. The fur on his head and legs was shorter and darker, like black velvet, which gave him the appearance of a black cat wearing a gray fur coat, perhaps fashioned from the fur of another cat who had wronged him. The snarl died in his throat, and he stared at me for a long moment, then blinked slowly. A sign of trust.

I reached hesitantly for the envelope. “I feel like I need to answer a riddle for you before I take the key, but I hope you don’t mind if we skip the formalities this time.”

He didn’t move to bite or swat my hand. Just offered a questioning meow. Emboldened, I moved to stroke the fur on his head, and he permitted my touch, apparently accepting my intrusion on his evening.

“You’ve quite the gatekeeper upstairs,”

I said, once I’d returned to Madame DuChatel and Niall, holding the envelope up in triumph.

“I hope Maximillien didn’t bother you. He isn’t often fond of strangers. I ought to have warned you.”

“Not at all. He’s magnificent. The perfect bookstore cat.”

She blinked, bemused as if I’d said I’d found him driving away in her car. “He rarely ventures down here when we have guests. Hisses and yowls at them when he does. Grumpiest old man of a cat I’ve ever encountered in my eighty-odd years. He rarely allows me to pet him, never mind that I’ve fed the little ingrate every meal he’s had these past ten years.”

My eyes widened, but I decided not to tell her he’d allowed me to pet him, worried it would wound her feelings.

“Now, my dears, you must come back to see me when you’ve had a rest. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I can tell you where to go and what to see. And if there is anything amiss, my telephone number is next to the phone in the cottage.”

She held the door open for us and waved us from the shop.

“I think Madame DuChatel is as old as the cobblestones,”

Niall whispered as we walked up the dark, narrow street back to the cottage. “I hope everything is as it should be. I’d hate to think how long it would take her to fetch towels.”

I giggled. “We’ll manage. Sweet old thing. We should visit her again before we go. She probably gets lonesome with her daughter gone.”

Niall tentatively wrapped an arm around me. “You’re a kind soul, Veronica Stratton.”

I loved how familiar, how comforting, his touch was. I leaned into the embrace just a bit. “I do try. And I’ve a soft spot for bookstores.”

He smiled. “Especially the cozy kind with cats?”

“Especially those, though I think Maximillien fancies himself a guard cat rather than a lap cat.”

We reached the door to the cottage, and mercifully the keys Sylvie had placed in the envelope worked in the lock while Niall fetched our bags.

The door swung open to reveal a cottage that had been lovingly restored and gently brought up to date. The furniture was understated, chosen to blend in so the scarred wooden floors and the rough stone walls could speak for themselves. They called it a cottage, but it was what I thought of as a town house: narrow and two stories. The main level had the kitchen, living area, and a primary bedroom suite. The top floor had another, larger bedroom suite and a quaint little sitting area, which Niall offered to me and I accepted without complaint.

“Whoever is up first has to get pastries and coffee from the corner bakery, Miss Stratton. I may be a gentleman, but I’m all about equal opportunity when it comes to being wakened gently with coffee and pain au chocolat.”

“It’s a deal. And if you’re up first, I prefer brioche with jam or Nutella.”

“It takes all kinds, I suppose.”

He leaned in and brushed a kiss on my cheek, lingering a heartbeat longer than was decorous.

I smiled as I shut the door behind me. Closing my eyes, I rested my back against the wall and absently let my hand rise to my cheek.

When I went to open my eyes once more, the room became a whirlwind of color . . .