Page 56 of Miss Desirable
“You should put up a marker,” Catherine said. “For your Mignon.”
“I would not know where to put it.”
“Put it anywhere. On a pretty spot in your vineyard, in the yard of the château’s chapel, if that’s still standing. The important thing is to make a gesture that acknowledges the loss.”
“You speak from experience.” And she spoke quite emphatically.
“When I left Rome, I was a heartbroken mess. I’d been angry before, in the sullen, powerless way many frustrated young people are, but I left Rome furious. My mother worried for me, and I worried for me, but I did not know how to part from my bitterness. Young women are ruined every day. Young men flee their creditors even more frequently. But I was stuck fast, convinced my sorrow and outrage were the worst betrayal ever visited on any undeserving fool.”
“You were innocent.”
“I knew better.”
“I knew better too, Catherine. I knew better than to leave Mignon in France.” Saying the words aloud brought pain, but not the burning sorrow of fresh grief. What had been self-castigation was now a lament, a prayer for the dead.
Catherine sat up. “No, you did not know better. Nobody can predict the future, much less in time of war, Fournier. Gabriella apparently managed the vineyards competently. Why wouldn’t you trust her to manage motherhood as conscientiously? You must get past this.”
“By putting up a marker?”
Catherine was quiet for a time, and Fournier schooled himself to patience.
“When I left Rome in near hysterics, Mama was desperate for a way to ease my torment. She suggested we cut up the dress in which I’d first met my… I don’t know what to call him. I thought he was a suitor, but he was just another lying scoundrel.”
“When you met the perfidious, lying scoundrel, then.”
The carriage slowed for a toll gate, while Catherine stared at her bonnet. “Perfidious, lying, randy scoundrel. He wasn’t even a decent kisser. I know that now. In any case, he’d complimented me on that dress, and I wore it the first time he had it off me.”
God help the scoundrel if Catherine ever decided to seek revenge. She had the means now, the standing, the family connections, to ruin anybody.
“So how did you put up your marker,mon coeur?”
“I cut that dress to ribbons, snipped until my thumb burned and my palm had a blister. I cut and cut and cut, and then we threw the whole mess into a pile of brush the gardener was burning in the stable yard. All that beautiful fabric and exquisite workmanship—Mama and I had done the embroidery ourselves—turned to ashes. A sacrilege, to simply burn it, but the sight eased something in my heart, Fournier, as did the sound of the scissors slicing the fabric and the pain of that blister on my thumb. I could look forward after that and look beyond myself.”
She subsided against him. “It’s not as if the dress fit me by then, but Mama’s suggestion was a way to put the past behind me. When I am exceedingly vexed, I think of that acrid black smoke curling into the blue summer sky, and it settles me. The affair ended in humiliation, but my life went on.”
Fournier pulled the shades down and wrapped his arm around Catherine.
“I did not think you a woman suited to drinking the Cahors, you know. All refined and poised, full of dignity and self-possession. Cahors is too bold and vivid for such a woman. Too earthy and proud.”
Catherine slid her hand inside his jacket to rest against his chest. “But?”
“But I see more clearly now. I never did deliver the case you ordered.”
“Bring it around on the staff’s next half day.”
She’d made him smile, which should have been impossible, given the seriousness of the discussion. “As Mademoiselle wishes.”
He would also start shopping for a ring and think about having a marker put up, not only for Mignon, but also for Gabriella.
“There’s a reason I like the Cahors, Fournier.”
“Cahors is a wonderful wine, though underappreciated.”
The sound of the coach wheels acquired the hard rumble of a vehicle navigating one of the Thames’s bridges.
“Not only that,” Catherine said. “We can put up markers and burn dresses to settle the past, but I sample the Cahors when I can find it to celebrate and mourn the present.”
Catherine’s earlier comment, about the dress no longer fitting her by the time she’d destroyed it, popped into Fournier’s head, as did his first impression of her. A woman made cautious by bereavement, as a widow might be.
