The Ghost’s Lady

After the exhausting night before, Kristina slept until almost noon; a deep, rich sleep with no dreams. Amelie must have let herself in and gone out again, for when Kristina entered the kitchen there were piled on the table a stack of notes, as well as several newspapers already opened, with thick black circles drawn around several of the articles.

Some of the notes were even from subscribers, and one was from de Carnac himself, a few sentences praising her rendition of Gounod's work, and conveying a compliment to whoever was teaching her at the moment. Alberich will like this. I'll have to show it to him.

Then she saw the thick, creamy envelope embossed with the de Coucy crest. What would Mirella say if she knew that Etienne de Coucy had written to her? However, upon opening it, she discovered that it was not from the Comte de Coucy at all, but from his young brother, Louvel.

My Dear Christine," it went.

You will forgive me presuming upon our childhood friendship, and addressing you informally and by your Christian name. Since I first heard you sing Smeton in Anna Bolena, I have been smitten, you might say. Wait! Please don't let a childish pun consign this conveyance of deep devotion out of your fair hand.

My brother, the Comte de Coucy, and myself have been following the meteoric rise of your star at the Eclectic Theater, and we are among many subscribers who have asked why we have not seen more of you, and in more prominent roles.

Let me offer also my deepest concern for your health. I hope you have fully recovered from your swoon. My heart broke for you, seeing you lying so pale and wan in your dressing room. Do not think me too bold if I ask that we may renew our friendship in more congenial circumstances.

I remain your obedient servant and childhood friend, Louvel.

So that was the short, roundish young man who stood in the corner of the dressing room, at least until the doctor threw him out. Kristina tried to recollect his features, but could see only Louvel as a boy, all light-colored hair and tan skin, his sweet features atop a slightly clumsy boy's body.

Anneke had marked a few articles. "A Valkyrie Among the Angels," one banner proclaimed. Another, a review by a critic notorious for savaging singers, said, "In the past she called down great draughts of glacial Northern air, but now some thaw has mellowed her voice. The only warmth we can think of strong enough to melt that blizzard of ice is love. Mlle. Sigurdsdotter sings as if the flames of love have melted her frozen heart for the first time."

A hot creeping sensation climbed up from her stomach to her shoulders like a monkey up a ladder. She could imagine what Anneke or Amelie would say about this one. There were more:

"This reviewer wonders why such a treasure has been withheld from Opera subscribers for so many months."

"Mlle. Sigurdsson looks like a soubrette, but pours forth the sizeable volume of a Valkyrie.” Kristina gave an exasperated sigh at the mangling of her name. Then she gave a start. Amelie had missed this one, a cheap gossip column that spared no one.

"The rising star of the Eclectic Theater is a largely mysterious figure, who makes this writer's life difficult by not frequenting the usual cafes and bistros favored by the theater crowd, and where he can more conveniently tease pearls of wisdom from singers' lips. Of great interest to all concerned is the identity of this second Swedish nightingale's new teacher. Theater staff report hearing her in the early morning hours rehearsing with some unknown personage, who coaches his songbird in the Singer's Salon. Or perhaps she is being tutored by the notorious ghost of the theater himself, that spirit rumored to haunt the building since its earliest construction, when a young workman drowned in the mysterious Roman bath beneath its auditorium. One doubts, however, that the spirit of a simple workman could lift our ingénue to such ethereal heights."

Her first instinct was to rip the paper into shreds. What did he know about working men, or music, or the angel that inspired it? What a fool she had been, to think that her comings and goings were invisible to the hundreds of eyes all around at the theater, or that her meetings with Alberich could have gone unremarked, or that her failure to get an "official" voice teacher would have gone unnoticed.

She folded up the offending article and stuffed it into the top bureau drawer before leaving for the theater. One of the notes had been a stiffly worded summons to pick up the flowers delivered for her. They'd been placed in the Singer's Salon instead of Dressing Room Seven, to avoid disturbing the doctor while he examined her.

The hothouse blooms improved the sadly neglected Singers' Salon, but they looked fragile, and a good many of the roses had already curled around the edges. Kristina neither wanted to drag them down to Room Seven, nor spend an hour hunting for a porter, so she decided to take them down to the ballet studio.

She didn't have to wait long for a break in the lesson, as it was nearly tea-time. The intermediate ballet master was a tall, lean man whose promising career had been cut short by a torn knee. The girls called him "M. Frou-Frou" behind his back but loved him in the studio, as he filled each one with the hope that she too could soar from lowly ballet rat to row leader, and perhaps even higher. His movements flowed with fluid strength from the line of his neck down to the long arch of his arm.

"Ah, Mlle. Sigurdsdotter," he announced. "The lady of the hour, and bearing flowers at that. How can one resist?" He waved impatiently at the two tallest girls. "Take those vases and set them down over on the side table. Would you let Mademoiselle struggle like that?" Then he made a great show of kissing both of Kristina's cheeks.

"There are more in the Singer's Salon," she said. "I'll go get them."

"No, no, let these great galumphing girls do it." He dismissed the class and a wave of tarlatan-clad girls broke against her. They cooed over the flowers, and wanted to know who brought them. Dodging their nimble fingers, Kristina picked out a few cards and put them into her pocket. "My secret admirers shall remain secret," she said. However, one little jackdaw got ahead of her and had the card in her little claws at once, opening it before Kristina could stop her.

In a sing-song voice the ballerina read, "It says, 'Many congratulations on your triumph. With deepest affection, your Louvel, who holds our summer days always close in his heart."

"Who's Louvel? Who's that?" a few chimed in.

"Ooh, in his heart, that sounds serious.”

The ballet master grinned wickedly at Kristina's discomfort.

Then one of the smaller girls, about ten, said, "She can't have a beau. Lisette's mamma says that she's the ghost's lady."

The room grew very quiet. "What? What does she say? Tell me at once!" The girl darted a nervous glance at Kristina but said nothing. “It's all right, little one, I'm not upset,” Kristina said. “It just took me by surprise, that's all. I'm as interested in your 'ghost' as you are," and gave the girl a winning smile.

One girl said to another, "Lisette said that the Ghost's lady listens to him play his violin in his special box. The lady left a lace handkerchief and a pair of opera glasses."

So that's where the glasses went.

"That's not the first time the Ghost has had a lady in his box," said a bigger girl with reddish hair. "Lisette herself told me that her mother said that sometimes you could see a lady sitting in the ghost's box during performances. But that only happened two or three times."

"Oh, really?" Kristina asked. "Someone actually saw a lady there? That's very interesting.” Interesting indeed. “Could you ever see the ghost himself?"

"No," the redhead answered, "Because he kept his box dark and sometimes closed half the curtain."

“He's a sly one, isn't he?” Kristina said.

The ballet master clapped his hands so loudly that everyone jumped. "Time for tea, girls, so thank Mademoiselle for the flowers," he said in his penetrating voice, and in the flutter and general confusion Kristina managed to escape.

* * * * * * *

That evening Anneke returned from Marseilles. She had left earlier than she had expected, because in the course of her extended visit, other people's grandchildren had become too tiresome. "I never thought I would long for the quietness of Paris," Anneke said as she and Kristina coped with a whirlwind of trunks, bags, and wraps. Finally, the two women settled down with tea and talked for awhile of babies. Then Kristina hesitantly showed her the reviews (except for the one that remained in her drawer), as well as a few invitations to sing at private concerts.

"What I do on the boards is work," she explained to Anneke. "But to sing at a party or at an embassy, that's real fun. Yes, they make you feel like one of their servants, but that's when I get to try out parts that I wouldn't be given otherwise. Besides, it's intimate, very personal when I can look directly into people's eyes, and watch their faces as I sing."

Anneke came to the one review, the one Kristina had thought of concealing. "So he thinks you sound like you've just fallen in love? Well, have you?"

Once Anneke had a cat more nervous than cats usually are. If Kristina would walk past it and brush it with her skirt, it would rear up with arched back, and hiss at whomever disturbed its composure. The simple directness of Anneke's question put her back up in the same way. "Of course not! Where would I have time to fall in love?"

Anneke gave a dry laugh. "I'm sure you're around dozens of eligible men every day."

"My tenor counterpart is fifty and a father of four. The actor who sang Mephistopheles in the gala thinks he has every chorus girl in his pocket, and he's usually right. There are ten ballet girls to every boy, and half of the boys prefer each other’s company. The rest are too busy picking and choosing among the ballet girls. There is the one set carpenter who teases me, but other than jokes, we don't have a lot to say to each other. So no, no love.”

She hated hiding things from Anneke, yet couldn't help herself. It was too new, and she was afraid that if she said anything, it would all blow away like smoke in a strong wind.

“You don't mention friends much,” Anneke remarked. “But you never seemed to miss them if you didn't have them.”

“Well, there is my understudy, Camille. I haven't figured her out yet. She smokes long thin brown cigars and alternately hates me, making the rudest remarks, or puts her arm around my shoulder as if we were the best of friends, or likes to squeeze my hand during rehearsals. The theater is a mad place, Anneke, especially backstage. Don’t even get me going on the married gentlemen in fine dress who swarm all over the dancer's lounge and the corridors outside our dressing rooms."

Anneke's lips compressed into a thin line. She had never shared Kristina's father's obsessive pieties, but on that she and he had agreed - when it came to the theater, innocence lasted about as long as a crocus in the June sun. It wasn't that Anneke was naïve; it was that she and Dr. Sibelius had inhabited a different musical world. Theirs had been one of well-run and polite lessons; of teas with reverent boys and their parents; of orderly, smooth rehearsals and recitals, unmarred by high-strung singers who ripped off their wigs during dress rehearsal and tramped them underfoot because they hated the color. Anneke had never walked into the prop room and surprised two lovers with skirt up and trousers down, who didn't even turn to the sound of an opening door. "I hope you're steering clear of all that," Anneke finally said, with a wave of her hand indicating exactly what "all that" meant.

Now guilt weighed on Kristina, who had never deliberately concealed anything from Anneke, not even in those months after their move to Paris, when Pappa and Anneke fought, and young Kristina had hated her for criticizing him. Amelie could have easily just opened the younger woman's top drawer, and shown Anneke the article. Better to have left it in plain sight. Amelie, who devoured gossip, had probably read it anyway. Nonetheless, Kristina held onto her secret as tightly as she had held Alberich's arm the night before.

* * * * * * *

He tapped on the door of Room Seven precisely at 8:00 the next morning. Kristina had already straightened, dusted, massaged her throat with long strokes, and warmed up. Uncorseted in Anneke's old, loose dress, she waited for the knock to come, excited and exhilarated.

He entered, carrying a large wooden box, sat down on the floor, and opened it like a toy. Out folded a keyboard, and the levers and stops. On the back was a collapsible bellows, very like an accordion's. The surface was a rich red wood, with intricate carvings and mother-of-pearl inlay. She knelt down beside him and rubbed the satiny wood with her fingers. “What is it? A toy?”

“Hardly. It's a portable harmonium.”

“So clever. Where did you get it? I've never seen one like this.”

“I didn't get it anywhere. I made it.”

“So tiny!”

“Actually, it's larger than usual, with five octaves instead of three. I like the greater range."

"What a clever little bellows. How do you play it with both hands, if you have to give it air from the back?"

"I have a foot pedal adjuster, but I didn’t bring it. It’s made so that someone else can press the bellows. Since you're here, you can do it for me, if you didn’t mind, that is. This one's a sample, to show off the design. My friend Timurhan takes a few to Constantinople when he visits his relatives, and he always manages to sell them.”

He adjusted a few stops, and signaled Kristina with a nod to begin. The bellows had surprisingly little resistance, and as she pushed, Alberich played a little tune that sounded exactly as if it were sung in a young girl's high-pitched voice. He went off into a folk melody, and sang in wordless harmony with the voice. Then he adjusted the stops again, and played the same melody, but now with tones like a high baritone or low tenor.

"Can you make it do two voices at once?" she asked.

He looked pleased as he played a tenor and soprano together, one of the bantering love duettas from Romeo et Juliette.

"I can almost hear them!" Kristina crowed. "This is really remarkable. How do you do it?"

"Each key has four reeds, which is more than usual, and it's also in the way the four reeds are shaped, and how they're arranged in a bank. No one's ever done it that way; I patented it. It started out when I was playing alone. I wanted a voice, a female voice to accompany me, and so I built one.”

Kristina wanted to ask, why not find a singer? Why not find someone to sing with, and then she realized that indeed, he had, and she grew flustered.

“Listen to this,” he said, and if he was aware of the reason for her silence, he didn’t let on. “I can even simulate three voices, a soprano, tenor, and bass," and indeed they did sound remarkably like human voices. He pulled one stop, then another, and made them harmonize in a trio.

"It's remarkable. If you could only make them say words."

"Wouldn't that be something?" he asked, and his intense face gladdened as he talked on about the shape of the mouth, and the throat, and how complicated the mechanism would have to be to create even the simplest babblings of a child. "It can sound like a more conventional organ, too," he added, playing some Bach-like air as Kristina continued to pump the bellows.

“Can you do a cello? It’s my favorite among all the strings.”

“It would take some doing, to make a reed that could imitate a cello.”

"I can hear a little of it in the male voice, though. It’s in the undertones."

"That's right. But you must be getting tired.”

“A little, yes. I just need to stretch.”

He stood up stiffly, and she did likewise. A wild thought came to her, unplanned yet suddenly full of compulsion. Nervousness almost closed her throat, but she cleared it and said, "I have something to show you, too.”

“Shall I sit back down for this?” he said, almost smiling.

From the small chest of drawers she took an old battered folio. "This was my Pappa's. I brought it up here to use it in practice. He played the violin beautifully, but this was the only music of his that ever got transcribed. I had to follow him around one afternoon, nagging him to do it. He would play it and say, 'Isn't that enough? How many times do you have to hear it?' Finally I gave up, and just added in the parts I missed."

“Funny,” he said. “My father would do almost the same thing. In the same annoyed tone of voice. As if I should have remembered it perfectly from the first, just as he did.”

“Is that where you learned to play? From him?”

He nodded. She motioned him to sit at the small table, and he took the papers carefully in his hands, looking them over one by one. She leaned over, close, to see it too. The old-paper smell and his scent hung in the air, and before she knew it, she was breathing deeply, taking it all in. “Here, let me see how this sounds. If you don’t mind giving me some more air, that is.” As he played, he nodded his head in time to some silent beat. “It sounds like Schubert,” he finally remarked.

“My Pappa loved Schubert, especially his Lazarus oratorio. He wanted to finish it, write the rest of it, all the parts that were lost, and to turn it into a whole story. The part you just saw, that was supposed to be where Jesus meets Lazarus later, to see how he liked being alive again. But like Schubert, he never finished it, either.”

“It’s sad. Not what you would expect.”

“Pappa used to say that Lazarus was disappointed. He thought that everything would change for him, but actually nothing did. He still had to go to work every day as a weaver. He still had to listen to his sisters bicker. Pappa worked on it every day for awhile, but I think it did make him sad, and that’s why he finally stopped. But when he played the old tunes, the folk tunes, that was when he was happy. He was a baritone, like you. He sang in the church, at home,” and then she hesitated, reined in by an old grief. “Until he stopped going, that is.”

He gave her a penetrating look. "At home?"

"On our farm. Outside of Uppsala. It's the only place I really call home, even though it's long sold and gone."

"I wish I had something like this, by which to remember my own father.”

Kristina looked up, surprised at the tender expression on his face. “You mean, music?”

“Anything of him which would remind me of him. There’s nothing of him I can point to exactly in the Rennes cathedral, for instance. Did he repair this lintel, or that one? Which wing on which gargoyle did he replace?”

“But he must have built something unique, something for your family.”

“There was the house,” he mused.

“See?”

“But it doesn’t say the same thing. Not like the act of having a thought, and bringing it into being.”

Kristina tossed her head, a little impatient and confused. “Stone lasts longer than most music. And music won’t keep the snow off your head, or the wind off your back.” Bitter memories welled up suddenly, and she pushed them down. Better to change the subject. “When did your father die?”

“It's been ten years, but I'm still not used to it. He was quite old, but still cutting stone until a few weeks before he passed.”

“So we're both orphans,” she said.

He didn't answer at once. Instead, he twiddled the stops on the harmonium, and then played some random plangent chords. She wondered why his face reddened slightly, as if he were embarrassed. “So how did you come to Paris?” he finally asked.

She started slowly, wanting to open up to him, yet not sure how much. “Dr. Sibelius and his wife took us in when we were wandering the streets of Uppsala, when I was a girl. We had no coal in our garret rooms, and I was wearing felt slippers while Pappa played on the streets. We might literally have starved without him. He took a shine to Pappa, and his wife liked me. They never had any children, you see, and Pappa became the Doctor's 'project.' I think he had fond dreams of turning Pappa into some kind of 'discovery.' But Pappa had other ideas."

She started to shake, visibly, and stopped because of the catch in her throat. He moved as if to take her hand, and then checked himself. "It's all right," he said, and then paused as if struggling to think of something else to say. “I could work on it, try some things, add that as a piano part, and include a cello as well. Would you like that?”

"Would I like that?” she said. “What do you think?” She could hear herself chattering as if from very far away, but couldn’t stop herself. "On the other hand, you would have to take it, wouldn't you? Or I would have to copy it out. But just the thought makes me tired, as it was so much work to transcribe it in the first place. Then I have double rehearsals next week, and I haven’t any paper. That would mean a trip to the shop …” It frightened her a little, too, to think of handing over the last relics of her father, besides a few daguerreotypes and his rosary, to … to whom? She didn't even know where Alberich lived. If he disappeared, she might never get the folder of music back.

He saw her apprehension. "You can trust me with this. What I'll do is copy it out, and give you back the original. I'll hear it in my mind as I copy it, anyway, so you could say that half the work will be done simply in the act of copying."

"M. Niemann, I do trust you. It's just that … I don't know where you live, and if you … if you forgot, or something like that … if it slipped your mind … Oh, forgive me, that makes it sound like I don't trust you at all … " Suddenly it all felt clumsy and awkward, and she had to fight to snatch back her father’s portfolio of sheet music.

He looked away, saying nothing. Something terrible came to her mind, and her stomach clenched in nausea as in a small voice she said from across the room, "M. Niemann, I have to ask you this. Please don’t be affronted, but are … are you married?" It was the only thing she could think of to explain his reticence about himself, to explain his love of secrecy. And to give her Pappa’s music to a married man seemed in some way worse than even giving over her body.

His eyes flew open and he laughed out loud, a deep, booming laugh from the very core of his body. "Oh, dear God," he said. "No. Absolutely not. Please rest assured that I have never been married, and please forgive me if I did anything to give you that very wrong impression."

“Thank you,” she whispered. “I’m so relieved.”

He gathered together the sheets of Kristina’s father’s music and handed them back to her. She reached her hands out to take them, and while their fingers didn’t brush, she felt a tiny rush of warm air across her hand. “No, take it,” she said with sudden resolution, pushing the portfolio back. “Please. Make it into something beautiful for him.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “But it will take longer than the three days it took Christ to bring forth Lazarus. Although I do have an idea, if you would like to hear it, and don’t mind working the bellows again.”

He started to play, and Kristina forgot that she was hearing a small tabletop instrument. The lead melody, the resurrection theme swelled up, but it was dampened by a countermelody, sad and just a little dissonant. It was Lazarus, not sure about being alive, and more than a little disappointed. The melody swirled a little, as if a shroud were being unwound. But rebirth wasn’t what Lazarus expected, and Alberich’s experiment ended incompletely, on a note unresolved.

Tears stood in her eyes. “He would have loved it.”

“It’s just a sketch. Give me some time to work it out.”

“It made me miss him. I haven’t felt like that in a while. He will have been dead three years come next Friday. He’s laid to rest in Ploumanac’h, and I suppose I will have to go this year.” He sat silently, his eyes warm in his impassive face, and again she had the sense of chattering too much, but still she went blindly on. “I don’t really want to. I had pleurisy last year and missed it. The year before that, I had examinations. It’s such a long ride on the train, and then you have to take a coach from Lannion, which takes another hour. But Pappa said that it was a religious duty, to visit the grave on the day of a person’s death.”

"Your father emphasized religious duties?"

She spoke slowly, as if realizing something for the first time. "My father was never happy, not in running the farm, not with my poor sick mother, not with me. There was always some sunset he had to chase. For him, leaving the village church, becoming a Catholic was just another sunset, only one he actually caught."

"What about you?"

"I wanted to go to school more than anything. I was almost twelve when we came to Paris, and at first Pappa didn't want to send me to school. Anneke had been taught by her father as a young woman, back in the days when girls in Sweden almost never went to school beyond learning to read the Bible and to figure the household accounts. She beat Pappa about the ears so thoroughly that he agreed to send me to school. But it had to be a Catholic one. So I took the instruction, and one thing led to the next."

"Do you believe any of it?"

"I don't know. I don't know if Pappa did, even. In the last few years of his life, it was as if he lived in a dream. Some days the dream was beautiful, but others were days full of black terrors. Sometimes the nuns’ stories wove themselves into his dreams. He would wake at night, crying out in fear. And some I think he just made up on his own. I know he was terrified of hell. He used to go to Mass every day, and he would have gone to confession every day too, or even twice, until one morning a priest told him that it was too much. He said, Sigurd, you're tearing yourself up with it, and told him not to come back until the following Saturday. ‘How can a priest keep me from the holy sacrament?’ Pappa asked me one day. He sat at the kitchen table and cried, even more than when we lost Mamma.

"Anneke was so exasperated, she snapped out that if he truly were a good Catholic, he would listen to the priest and shut up. It was a cruel thing to say, but I think she got through to him even where the priest didn't. Pappa limited himself to every Saturday after that, but I could tell he really wanted to go more often.

"But to get back to your question … I don't know what I believe. Right now, I think if I believed in anything, it is my own experience, in what I see and understand. So, I know that I like fresh-churned butter rather than that I buy at the market. I know that the sun comes up, and sets, and when it sets the moon rises. It’s so beautiful … doesn’t there have to be something grand and magnificent behind it all? But as for going all that way to Ploumanac'h to have a Mass said for my father, out of ‘religious duty?’ I suppose I have to do it out of love, without understanding. But certainly you must know all this. M. Niemann, I thought you were a Catholic?"

"I was baptized, but my mother wouldn't take me to hear the Mass. She was ashamed of my face, she said. My father never went."

Kristina's heart grew hot. “A mother who wouldn't take a child to church, for such a foolish reason as that? What was she ashamed of? She didn't make your face the way it was.”

"She thought she did," he replied. "She used to sit in the kitchen and cry that it was all her fault; that God had cursed her. My nurse sounds a lot like your Anneke; she used to snap at my mother to go to confession if she had something on her soul, and be done with it. But Mother wouldn't go to confession, either. The cathedral in Rennes had burned years before, and my father and his men were rebuilding it. When I was about ten, Father took me to the Rennes cathedral to work with him, and I would hear the priests chanting. Sometimes I would stand in the back, looking down the long nave aisle, listening to the cathedral choir rehearse the solemn High Mass, and the sound soared up lighter than air."

It was too terrible for her, this image of a tiny child outside the house of God, all because of his face. "Please forgive me, for I wouldn't want to insult anyone's mother, but how can one keep a child shut away from God and man because you don't like the way he looks?"

He stared for a second into the dressing-table’s threefold mirrors, turned away from his image, and with nowhere else to look, cast his eyes down towards his shoes.

She poked him lightly on the arm. "The answer's not down there. If something's wrong, it's best to say that it's wrong."

He shrank a little from her touch. "She used to try to force me to wear a mask, or so my old nurse told me when I was young, but my father made her stop. Mother always acted as if I reminded her of something, something dreadful. If I was out of the way, she would sing while she worked in the kitchen with the maid, or hanging up the laundry, or cutting vegetables. She had a voice like a clear bell, not like yours, with your richness, but instead a thin one, light and beautiful. To hear her sing I had to hide in a corner, or not come into the room, because if I did, she would stop whatever she was doing, and just cry.

"It was when I was old enough to get a sense of what she meant when she went on about 'God's punishment' that I began losing my interest in the Mass, and started thinking about the music instead. Or to be more specific, thought about the mathematics of the music. My father had just bought me some textbooks of the geometry of Euclid, and through listening to music, I could experience those structured shapes coming to life. But the words came to mean less and less to me. No one could tell me what was wrong with me, with my face. No one could tell me what was wrong with my mother. I refused, however, to accept it as 'God's will,' even if everyone else did." He stood up abruptly. "Kristina, this is what I believe: that every day one decides all over again to live, rather than to die, represents a substantial victory."

He called me Kristina, she thought. He just stood there, looking at himself without emotion in the dressing-table mirrors. She rested her hand gently on his sleeve, careful to touch only the cloth and not caress the flesh underneath. The muscle of his arm made a slow twist under her hand, like a large fish turning lazily at the bottom of a green lake.

He breathed in slowly, as if steeling himself for some especially difficult task, and then asked, "Would you like me to meet you in Ploumanac'h? I know the region well. We can visit your father's grave together." His arm was so warm under his coat, and she didn't want to let it go. So she held on, and he continued, "I wouldn't think of asking you to travel with me. But I will meet you, if you want."

"Alberich, I would like that. I would like that very much."

"I will look for you after your father’s Mass, then, in the churchyard."

(Continued…)