Gabriel was silent for a few moments, then he said in a different, less jokey voice, “Speaking of upsetting people, how do I fix my faux pas this morning at breakfast?”
“Oh, that was nothing. Just a misunderstanding.”
“A bad one if the hackles rising all-round the table were anything to go by. Cook nearly smacked me with the bread.” His light-hearted voice was back.
Pierre laughed. “She’d never do that. Cook is one of the kindest women I know.”
“So why is she called ‘Cook’?”
“Because she is the cook.”
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“Watch where you’re going,” Pierre warned as his bike weaved dangerously.
He turned his eyes back to the road. “Doesn’t she have a normal name?”
“Yes, but no one knows it. She’d very proud of her role as feeder to all in the house.”
The breeze had picked up, and tall grasses swayed either side of the lane. Up ahead, a small stream crossed their path. They slowed down to go over the arched stone bridge.
“Okay,” he said when they came off the bridge. “Are you going to tell me what’s the hullaballoo with the Pierre, Rapunzel, Persephone thing?”
“Hullaballoo?” It sounded funny in his voice.
“Your word.”
“Do you always use other people’s words?”
“Are you going to answer the question?”
“Okay, okay.” She laughed. “There is no confusion. Rapunzel was your name for me. I never lied to you. And Persephone is Lord M’s…He likes to…”
They were coming up to the apple orchards. “We have to go this way through the orchards. It’ll save us thirty minutes.” She leaned into the turn taking the bike off the lane into a rougher path.
It had taken her months to become as good a cross-country cyclist as she was now. Gabriel, still not used to a lot of cycling, lagged a bit behind her, negotiating the grassy bumps in the path. When he finally caught up to her, he prompted her, “And Pierre?”
“That’s my name.”
“Don’t be infuriating. What’s your real name?”
“Pierre-Marie Ashley.” She assured him. “Do you want to see my birth certificate?”
It usually frustrated her to answer questions about her name. But when, after a moment, he didn’t press the issue, she decided to tell him more. “My mother named me after Pierre Louÿs, a 19thcentury French poet she’d had a secret crush on while pregnant. She hoped for a boy and my father who hated anything to do with the French threatened to divorce her if she called his first-born son a ‘froggy name’. When the ultrasound showed she was pregnant with a girl, my father, unwisely gloated.”
“So, she called you Pierre to spite him?”
“Yes.”
“And he had to accept it?”
“He divorced her.”
“Oh,” he said.
“To be honest, I think the divorce would have happened even if she had called me the most traditional English name in the world. Their marriage was like a trip on a rusty bike up a rocky mountain towards a boring view.”
“I suppose that explains the crush on a famous French poet,” he said after a moment.
