Chapter Fifteen
Sitting high on a rocky outcrop overlooking Maubec, Saint Orens—with its white limestone ramparts, ancient rectangular walls, and bell towers—was even more spectacular up close.
“What’s the church’s denomination?” I asked Bastien as we approached the large and imposing front gate.
“Like most churches in this region, Catholique. You know, this chapel used to be a formidable Catholic defense site during the religious wars.” He pointed up at the flared profile of the bells’ bronze curves. “One of the two, I’m not sure which one, how do you say ... commemorates? ... the courage of the Maubec villagers who were massacred during the war.” Bastien took my hand and led me to the church’s arched entranceway. “In fact, symbolic characters and animals can be found carved into most of the limestone walls.”
I glanced around the space. There were so many little details and flourishes. You could spend days here and not capture them all. “I love how people honor their history here. Back home, we’re just flitting from one thing to the next. Me included. These days, I don’t seem to stick anywhere for too long.”
“Can I ask you a question? What happened last night with the paparazzi and you being ambushed like that, does that sort of thing happen to you a lot?”
I made my way around the perimeter of the church, admiring the old biblical scenes etched in colorful stained glass. “Not as much as it used to. But it still happens enough to make for a scary situation, especially when I’m not expecting that kind of attention.”
“I cannot even imagine what it must feel like to be hunted like that,” Bastien said sympathetically. “You are very brave, Plum.”
Nobody had ever called me that before. Certainly not as it related to my public exploits. “To be fair, over the years, I’ve given the paparazzi plenty of reasons to chase me and seek me out for a salacious story. I’m not even sure I should step into this church, I might vanish into a pillar of salt,” I joked.
“You know, anyone at all can seek sanctuary at a church, at any hour, day or night. That is the beautiful thing about churches. They never lock the doors. They’re never closed to those who need them. I really love this one,” he said, pointing to a stone carving of a lion surrounded by a pack of hyenas etched into the wall between two large arched windows. “Look at the fear and desperation in the lion’s eyes. It is so realistic, non?” Bastien pulled a piece of paper and pencil out of his pocket. He kneeled down and placed the white sheet up against the carving. “If you rub the pencil over the image like this,” he said, dragging the point back and forth over the deep lines in the stone, “the outline transfers onto the page.”
He passed me the pencil, and I stooped down beside the image. Bastien put his hand over mine and moved the pencil forward and back, his warm breath making all the baby hairs on my arm stand up. I watched in amazement as the entire scene slowly appeared on the paper.
“There you are,” he breathed. His fingers moved across the paper with a fluid grace, as if they possessed a language of their own, one that communicated desire and connection without words.
“There is an expression in French, ‘les murs contiennent des souvenirs,’ which roughly translates to ‘walls have memories.’ Now, ma chérie, you have a memento, of the church, and of our adventure.” Bastien helped me off the ground just as Elliott came around the last bend in the road leading to the church’s entrance, red faced, sweating profusely, and completely out of breath, which for a man who went running every morning was really something.
“Hey, are you doing okay over there?” I asked him.
“I’m fine,” Elliott said, struggling to wipe the sweat that was pouring off his forehead as he was bent in half.
“Here, let me help you,” Bastien offered. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a kerchief. Elliott grabbed the bandanna from Bastien’s hand, sweeping it over his drenched face before attempting to hand it back to him.
Bastien’s eyebrow lifted, and his lip curled. “Non merci, you can have it.”
Elliott nodded and stuffed it into his back pocket. “Do we just go inside, or should we like knock first?”
“We can go inside,” Bastien answered, never taking his eyes from my face as he pushed open the massive wooden double doors. “As I just explained to Plum, churches are never locked.”
I broke away from his gaze and saw Elliott was already heading inside the chapel to find someone who could direct us around. After he spoke with a cloaked clergyman passing through the church’s nave from the pulpit, Elliott walked back up the aisle to rejoin us at the front door.
“Bad news, Father Fran?ois was called away to visit a sick parishioner earlier this morning and hasn’t returned yet. We’ll have to film this on a different day, although I’m not sure when we’ll have time, the schedule is already pretty jam-packed,” he explained.
Bastien held up his hand. “Give me une moment, I’ll go and have a word with the clergyman.” Then he whisked himself away with an enviable sense of confidence.
“He’s wasting his time and ours,” Elliott said once Bastien was out of earshot. “Nobody’s allowed in the archives without Father Fran?ois.”
A few minutes later, Bastien clapped his hands together, the sound echoing off every wall of the chapel. He turned and gave us a big thumbs-up.
I elbowed Elliott. “Nobody, huh?”
“Maybe something I said earlier got lost in translation,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.”
Bastien hurried up the aisle. “Father Timothée agreed to chaperone us into the archives. We can poke around all we want, we just cannot take any of the items with us.”
“Can we film?” Elliott asked.
Bastien pulled the release out of his pocket and waved it around proudly. “I got his Thomas Jefferson right here.”
“Thomas Jefferson? Do you mean his John Hancock?” Elliott said.
Bastien shrugged. “Who’s John Hancock?”
Elliott added the release to his clipboard. “You know what, it really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s signed.”
We followed Father Timothée past the altar, down a long hallway, to a set of stairs leading up to a newly constructed addition to the church. Its modernity was in stark contrast to the ancient walls that otherwise surrounded us.
“This space has been a passion project of Père Fran?ois for a long time,” Father Timothée explained. “He wanted a place where the history of the region would be well preserved. It’s taken most of his lifetime to collect enough money to build l’annexe, but here we are,” he said, pushing open the heavy door.
We squeezed behind him into the archive room. A mahogany table sat in the middle of the room like an island surrounded by a sea of filing cabinets. Elliott turned on the camera’s overhead light, which practically lit up the whole space.
Father Timothée jumped up and down, waving his arms in the air. “Non, non! The light can harm the artifacts.”
Elliott turned it off and set down the camera. “I don’t have the right equipment with me to shoot without proper lighting.”
I interjected, “If you have a C100 you should be fine. Just switch out the 24-105 for the 18-135 lens.”
“I guess that could work,” he said, his voice tinged with disbelief at my knowledge of camera equipment.
But you didn’t grow up on film sets and not pick up a few things. More than a few things. I used to spend every spare second I could with the EVERLYday crew, far more interested in what was happening behind the cameras than what was taking place in front of them. “It’ll work. Trust me.”
“This whole outing’s been a bit of a bust. I’m hot and hungry and tired. What do you say we just wrap?”
“Wrap?” Bastien asked. “What do you mean wrap?”
“Call it a day. Go home,” Elliott answered impassively.
Bastien’s brows drew together. “Why would we do that? We can still learn about Chateau Mirabelle without the camera, n’est-ce pas?”
Elliott picked his bag up off the floor and turned to me. “I’m gonna start making my way down to the van. I have a bunch of calls to make back at the inn.”
“You know what, I think I’ll stay here with Bastien,” I said. “I have my phone and can shoot some footage if we come across anything interesting.”
Elliott scoffed. “It’s not really the same thing. I wouldn’t even bother.”
“Between all my social media accounts I’ve actually gotten pretty good at it.” I took out my phone and quickly showed Elliott a clip I took from when we first drove into Maubec captured with a dramatic time-lapse and overlaid with édith Piaf singing “La Vie en Rose.” The combination of stunning visuals and the iconic song created a compelling story, and Elliott’s skepticism seemed to waver just a bit as he watched the enchanting scene unfold.
“Suit yourself, but I don’t expect we’ll be able to use much—if any of it,” he said before turning on his heel to leave.
After he was gone, Bastien and I dove into the research, pulling out every last artifact related to Chateau Mirabelle from the cabinets and spreading them out across the table. One photograph in particular caught my attention: a handsome young man in a dark suit and a striking woman in a lace wedding gown standing arm in arm in the middle of the chateau’s massive vineyard. I turned it over, and scribbled across the back were the words Luc and ImèneAdéla?se, 1931.
I took out my phone and hit record. “Is this them? The last owners of Chateau Mirabelle? Luc and Imène Adéla?se?”
Bastien took the picture from my hand. “Oui, this must be their wedding day.”
“It’s strange, other than the clothes, and the fact it’s in black and white, this picture could have been taken yesterday.”
“Being young and in love is ageless, I suppose,” Bastien said. A profound sense of recognition washed over me, as if Bastien had somehow tapped into an age-old truth, shining a spotlight on a truth many spent too much time forgetting.
I leaned in closer to the photo. “They really look like they were ... in love, I mean?”
“Hard to know, but by all accounts, I believe so.”
I turned off the recording. “Makes what happened to them all the more tragic.” I picked up another photograph from the table, Luc and Imène standing arm in arm with two other couples in the chateau’s grand foyer. On the back of the picture, I saw the letters DP in clear, distinct capital letters.
“DP? Do you know what that stands for?” I asked him.
Bastien took the picture from my hand. “I am not sure. A mystery, non?” He handed the photo back to me.
“Wait? Is that the same foyer we were standing in yesterday? And this room,” I said, flipping to another picture, “with the lion clock on the mantel underneath the painting there? What room is that? It’s so beautiful.”
He glanced down. “I believe it is the grand salon. Trust me, it will be beautiful again if we have anything to do with it, ma belle. You see the staircase. We can take reclaimed wood from the region and re-create it in all its original splendor. Maybe even better than before.” Bastien collected the photos from the table, carefully placing them back in their plastic storage bags. “Renovation not only restores the house, but the story of the home and the people who lived there. Trust me, you will see, we’ll bring them all back to life. Are you hungry?”
“What?” I was so caught up in his beautiful words I lost my train of thought.
“Hungry? Are you hungry?” he repeated.
My stomach had been rumbling the better part of the last hour. “Maybe a little.”
“There’s an ice-cream shop down the hill that makes the most incredible lavender ice cream. I promise, you’ve never had anything quite like it.”
I thought back to the conversation with my father by the barn the last time I was home. He’d mentioned a small ice-cream shop by a beautiful Proven?al church, where he ate the most delicious lavender ice cream before getting down on one knee and asking for my mother’s hand in marriage. Even though the idea of lavender ice cream still sounded kind of unappetizing, somehow, the way Bastien suggested the treat—with his sexy accent and unabashed enthusiasm—made it sound so much more tempting.
“So what do you say, Plum,” Bastien repeated. “Want to give lavender ice cream a chance?”
“Yeah, you know what? I think I do.”