9. Rumple
She didn’t get the servants, I noted as I flew high over the hovel where Feather now lived in Normandy. She was ten years old now, and had no living parents. She did have four older brothers, though, who doted on her as if they were her servants, and there was a hammock in the small wood behind the dilapidated cottage where she lived.
Of all her lives, this one had the most auspicious beginning. If only she had a dog. Though if she did, it would have been too perfect. Too close to the wish she’d made.
She’d been pulled into this life, and I’d been dragged into the Abyss only moments after she’d mumbled her dream aloud. I hadn’t been able to check in on Bernard again, though I’d looked. He and Charles had moved on from the chateau, and no one spoke of the man, or the dog.
A few years afterward, I’d found the chariot being pulled by a miniature Shetland pony for a traveling circus outside Burgundy. The new owner had told a tale in an inn about a man with an enormous dog who had gone to Italy to start a bakery that gave half its daily bread to the city’s poor, called Les Empreintes de Fou Fou . Fou Fou’s Footprints. “Can you believe? Fellow was crazy, pulling his dog around in a golden chariot, spending all his dead father’s money on les pauvres .”
I wondered if the dog had known that taking on the man’s smut would make such a change in the world.
“Coco!” her oldest brother shouted out as he stomped across the yard, a basket in his hands. “I brought ya somethin’.”
“It better not be more oysters to shuck, Gerard,” she shouted back from inside the cottage. She appeared, her hair tied up in a scarf, her skinny arms and legs coated with soot and dirt.
Her brother held out the basket. “I found them down by the shore, actually. Someone dumped them?—”
Before he could finish, she had the basket open and was sitting on the ground, three chocolate brown pups rolling around on her skirts, her laughter filling the sky.
There was nothing otherworldly about these dogs, nothing any more wonderful about them than any other puppies. Except maybe that they were the color of chocolate. And that they made my Little Sacrifice, who had known so much pain over the past century and a half, and who knew as well as I did that worse lay ahead, laugh like the world was a glittering treasure.
Like her dreams would all come true, one way or the other, in the end.