“You’re finally here!” the children piped. “How long will you stay?”
“Calme,” he told them, embracing them like he wanted to do Brielle. “Introduce yourselves toMademoiselleFarrow first.”
The girls curtsied charmingly while the boys mimicked his previous bow. Suddenly quiet, they looked to Brielle as if waiting for her to release them from the polite silence.
“Tell me your names,” she said with a smile.
Oldest to youngest, they obliged.
“I shan’t remember at first so you’ll have to help me,” she told them, repeating each. “Madeleine, Talbot, Morgan, Amélie, Jolie, and Corbin.”
“There’s anotherbébécoming at harvesttime,” Madeleine announced as Sylvie left the kitchen and joined them. “Right,Maman?”
Sylvie nodded. “Garçonorfille… which will it be?”
“Boy,” Corbin, the eldest, said confidently. He’d grown a foot since last meeting. “And his name must be Bleu.”
“Non,a girl!” Amélie insisted, her freckled face pink. “Primevère!”
“Primrose?” Bleu asked. “What sort ofabsurditéis that?”
The girls giggled and the boys groaned as Bleu motioned for Titus to join them, dripping water and all.
“I hope you will be especially kind to our guests,” Sylvie told them, inviting Titus to eat in the kitchen. “They have come a long way and need rest.”
Madeleine laced her arm through her uncle’s. “Will you stay in the cottage or here in the house? I ask becauseMamanhad the cottage redone and even papered the walls. I think Miss Farrow would find it quite nice.”
Bleu winked at his nieces and nephews. “We’ll decide who is to be where once we weather the storm of you.”
14
That night on Sylvie’s porch, Bleu looked down on the cottage where Brielle had settled with Titus, the windows framed in candlelight. Alone with his sister on the porch, the children abed, he felt a rare contentment creep in, rubbing away the calluses of the outside world.
“So what do you think of Miss Farrow?” he asked, his voice so low he didn’t think his sister heard him as it took her a moment to answer.
“She’s lovely—astonishingly so,” Sylvie told him in low tones. “And I have a great many questions.”
“You’ve recovered from the shock of our arrival?”
“What I haven’t recovered from are your words to me at introduction.”
“When I told you she is my future bride but may not know it yet?”
“Exactly.”
“Given we met so recently, I would give her time.”
“I don’t think she needs time. Her every look at you tells a different story.”
Did it? Uncertain, he shifted in his chair though his eyes didn’t leave the cottage.
“And I see how you look at her…” She leaned in as if aware they might be overheard. “Tell me why, when no other womanhas ever turned your head, you have suddenly lost your head to someone you’ve only known briefly?”
He lifted his shoulders, the mystery beyond him. “Some might say it was a bad beginning.” Though he didn’t like to remember that black Sabbath, he told her about the raid and Sylvie’s delight changed to dismay. “When I first saw her she was lying on the ground and I thought she was among the dead.”
“She’d fainted?”
He nodded. “Despite everything, when she came to and looked at me it was like lightning.” He remembered the charged moment so vividly it was like reliving it all over again. “It doesn’t hurt that she is, as you said, astonishinglybelle. But it goes far beyond that.”
