Chapter 7
Seven
Cheers
L’Hostel Borvo bustled for a weekday night.
The inn and tavern was no jewel of Cordeliers, sporting unremarkable food and warped floorboards from the thermal underground.
Only the wine selection was anything worth a nod.
Still, the patrons had made the social house as comfortable as it was merry, and it bore the stamp of Saint-Mitre alongside odes to its Celtic namesake and traditional Provencal decor.
A window cradled a tiny shrine to Saint-Mitre himself, and grapevines were as common a motif as references to the waters.
The walls were plastered with Eflamm’s sketches.
The tavern was the chosen hub for the social hour after confraternity meetings in the cathedral, which, depending on who was asked, was the actual meeting.
The gathering before this respite had been as dull as the others over the last few weeks, which came and went in a summer haze that made it hard to remember what had even been done, or said.
What wasn’t done and what wasn’t said was more the theme.
A club accomplished nothing, a physician got up to nothing, and an assistant condemned the idea of nothing.
Dorotèa’s hell wasn’t the hours she spent running Oste’s laundry, making meals, or organizing his days.
It was coming by every day and seeing him either sound asleep or looking at the wall with a glass of wine after too-long shifts at the hospital.
None of her calculations had told her that he would become worse.
Dorotèa stuck close to the counter and leaned against its wooden frame, a position from which she stared daggers at Oste across the tavern.
The handful of Saint-Mitre women usually started there and separated; their numbers and the presence of their husbands or married women amongst them made them free to linger.
At the night’s end, she always left under the guise that she and Jeanne would walk home together, but the two of them knew Dorotèa had no need of an escort.
Jeanne, lovely as ever in black jacquard, hovered close by, even though the other women had broken off.
Gingerly did their wine go down. Dorotèa couldn’t taste it.
She couldn’t taste anything. Oste drew all her focus and her ire, and his own sulking at the corner table made her assume that he felt as miserable as she.
Good. Maybe he ought to be a little miserable.
The confraternity’s frustrations had been building, and that tension had to go somewhere. Maybe he’d make an effort if he—
“Dorotèa,” Jeanne spoke, “you’re going to crack your glass.”
She jumped at the interruption and sloshed the red inside of it. When she looked down, she realized she did have the stem in a death grip, and had smudged the old glass with vengeful, warm fingerprints.
“Look at him,” Dorotèa hissed under her breath. “Look at how little he does. At ease, glowering…”
Jeanne followed her line of sight to land on the sulking Oste seated across from a diligently sketching Eflamm. “Wine tends to have that effect on him.”
“He has some nerve.”
“To?”
“To show his face,” she huffed. “He’s three glasses in. Three glasses, and he… he…”
“Tèa.” Jeanne offered a sheepish grin and put her free hand on her friend’s shoulder. “If you’ve something to say, don’t leave me guessing.”
She let go of a steady exhale and looked down. “I arranged an appointment for him in one of the private thermal pools just today. The nice one, under the apothecary, so he could be alone. He didn’t go. He’d rather drink wine and do nothing.”
“Did he agree to it?”
“It was my idea, but I said—” Dorotèa’s voice caught. “I said it’d be good for him. I really thought he’d go. I mean, he prescribes it for his own patients.”
“Did you spring it on him?”
“He knew days in advance. I knew he could go; he doesn’t do a damn thing outside of working, Saint-Mitre, drinking, and sleeping. He had the time. He could fit it in.”
Jeanne held her smile and softened her voice. “He’s stubborn, love. Same as you.”
Dorotèa raised her chin. “It’s foolishness. Doesn’t he hear himself coughing, or see himself?”
“You’re being sour.”
“Am I?” Dorotèa frowned and redirected her glare at Jeanne. “The confraternity wanted this, and I’m, what, ten days into my efforts, and there isn’t a sliver of progress. Does he not want to do all the things he liked?”
“Tèa,” Jeanne spoke in a low voice. She let her own smile fall. “Has it not occurred to you that he hurts because he does?”
She flinched behind her furrowed visage. “Then why isn’t he trying?”
“What reason other than that he must not feel like he can? Have you not thought to ask what bothers him during your attempts to move him like a marionette?” she asked sharply.
“Be grateful that you can’t even fathom such exhaustion and idleness.
Congratulations on your strength. You’re one of the few. ”
Dorotèa recoiled. She blinked rapidly, feeling flustered and dizzy, like she’d been slapped.
She’d witnessed Jeanne’s edge on more than one occasion, but she’d never been on the receiving end, even when they crossed blades.
Her neck heated as she first bore the words as an insult and a wound.
The embarrassment she felt shrank her down to a smaller size and made her heart burn with a fresh anger.
Surely she’d have seen him make a push. Surely she’d not have made bad choices, or been wrong…
Damn her father, who taught her to carry stones in her pockets and call them feathers.
“I know you have the best intentions,” Jeanne muttered, “but have a care about where you put them. Do you want to fence with Oste, or do you want Oste to fence?”
Dorotèa choked on the saliva that sat, stagnant, in the back of her throat, and she chased it down with a sip of wine that gurgled the entire way down. She coughed after, and her shoulders slouched as she shrank even smaller. Her skin felt hot and cold at the same time.
“That’s not fair,” Dorotèa breathed, feet planted.
“I didn’t realize anything about this was fair.” Jeanne took a dainty drink from her own glass.
“Obviously not,” she shot back. “It’s not remotely fair. It never is.”
“Then we’re in agreement on something.”
“Sure, but you’re being a… a… you’re being a pox about it!”
“Ah,” Jeanne drawled, “a pox. How original and clever. I’ve touched a nerve.”
“This is unlike you. Perhaps you need a rest.”
Jeanne swirled the wine in her cup, nonplussed. “I certainly do. I’m not actually sure I slept last night. Little Lucie kept me up; her ‘toof’ hurt.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“I am.”
Dorotèa set her glass down. Her whole body blazed. “I care because I—I like him a lot, Jeanne.”
She smiled again. “I know. Me too. A lot of people aren’t worth it, but he’s one of the good ones.”
“He is,” Dorotèa affirmed. Her gaze dropped to the floor, and she swallowed. Her words were painful when she let them fall. “I got frustrated. I am frustrated. I took it out on you.”
Jeanne snorted. “Lucie behaved similarly, on account of her ‘toof.’”
“But I’m twenty-four, and Lucie is six. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not particularly bothered, love.” Jeanne shook her head, then tucked one of Dorotèa’s loose waves back behind her ear that had dislodged from the rest beneath her chaperon. The out-of-style headwear was a confraternity tradition. “I just want you to think about what I’ve said.”
Dorotèa ground her molars together. “I’m… trying to.”
“I’m going to have a word at the table, and then I’m going to take Eflamm home and see about page fourteen from On Liberation. You should talk with Oste yourself after we’re gone.”
Dorotèa’s cheeks reddened. “Page fourteen?”
“Mmh.”
“People actually do that?”
“Why not?” Jeanne shrugged, then pushed off from the counter and strode across to the silent table. “I can let you know how it goes.”
Dorotèa covered her mouth with her hand and tried, poorly, to recover.
Oste hadn’t moved. While the Saint-Mitre members did their mingling, he’d plopped himself down across from Eflamm and stayed there.
Occasionally, he’d trace his index finger over the rim of his glass or flop his head over onto a different arm splayed over the wooden table.
He found that setting his chin atop his folded hands was the most comfortable and gave him a good view of the whole of Borvo’s—as people shortened it to—so he settled like that for the better part of the night.
Eflamm had a glass of his own, but it remained untouched.
He was too busy scrawling in his sketchbook.
He valued, more than he knew how to describe, the fact that Eflamm was the sort of person who could provide company and not say a single word over the course of several hours. Oste had borrowed the famed artist on more than one occasion to simply accompany him somewhere and stand there.
It was some wonder that he was the bastard son of a man more powerful than them all who could make anyone stop and listen.
But this wouldn’t be a silent night. The pencil stopped scratching, and Eflamm looked up.
His long eyelashes batted back at Oste, and even in the dim, balmy tavern, the artist looked the part of a veritable angel, like always.
His shaved face exposed clear, peachy skin, framed by curls that almost wanted to be a shade of red instead of blond, each one deep and shiny like molten gold.
He looked so lovely that people hardly cared that he was a bastard from a Breton mother, or that his habits were peculiar.
He had his beauty and the man in red as a father, and that was enough for him to be seen as a saint in his own right.
There was a time when Oste thought he was the most innocent man in Aix like everyone else, naught but a talent sent from heaven, until he came to realize how wrong he was.