When Louis woke again, it was still dark, but the whisper of dawn played upon the horizon. The sky was deep blue, anticipating morning proper, but the woods that sheltered the two travelers was still heavy with night. The stars had diminished considerably and the moon hung far over, ready to begin its journey to the other side of the globe.
Louis rose and noted the wind had picked up, passing cold over his weary limbs. The branches above and around him swayed as he fetched water from the natural faucet nearby. He shielded his lamp and boiled a sufficient quantity for a thin chocolate drink. While not rich, it was comforting.
Modestine stood chewing on some grass. Louis gave her a hunk of bread for breakfast but declined more for himself than the chocolate. He listened but heard only the growing sounds of daybreak—birds shrilled wakeful, flitting through the still-dark forest. Soon, he would hear the ox-carts moving uphill to fetch their quarry of wood for the winter, and wanting to avoid them, he hurriedly packed his things and the two continued their upward trek.
Though the path would sometimes reward their diligence with a respite of level ground, it never lasted very long and up, up they were again sent. Eventually, the path beneath their feet disappeared and they tread upon a simple terrain marked only, again, by the standing stones for winter travel. Small birds hopped from stone to stone, and it seemed to Louis that they were the same birds for miles, following him along, his destination theirs. It was warm and Louis had removed his coat, walking in only his knitted vest, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows.
Finally, they reached a summit that distinguished itself from the smaller peaks they’d rolled over. Even if one closed one’s eyes as they breached it, one would sense its majesty. Le Pic de Finiels, about which Louis had heard so much, stood 5,600 feet above sea level. From here, through the hazy afternoon, Louis could make out lower Languedoc all the way to the Mediterranean.
It was spectacular, but Louis was tired. And he did not relish that his next stop, probably for the night, was the dreaded Pont de Montvert.
He goaded Modestine, who had stopped, assumed he’d want to spend more time, and made for the nearest grassy spot for a snack. She huffed a disappointed sigh and shuffled on, down this time. A little while later, the standing stones they’d been following disappeared and Louis stopped to look around.
Not far down, he could see a trail begin—it looked very steep and seemed to spiral down the slope.
“Are you ready for that?” he asked Modestine, who only blinked her answer in return.
Down they went. The path turned so tightly and so vertically that Louis insisted Modestine go first, for if she started to roll, she’d surely crush him despite her tiny frame. She took the lead happily enough, almost trotting, and while it had looked like a rather long drop from above, it was only a matter of a few minutes before they spilled from the corkscrew onto a straight, flat plain. First Modestine, and then Louis, separately and in opposite directions, jogged to a dizzy stop before halting to collect their balance and rejoin one another on the path.
Oddly, or so Louis thought, the path continued along the trickle of a brook, with the waterway flowing zigzagged back and forth over the walkway, so that as they progressed, Modestine refreshed her tired hooves in the water while Louis sure-footedly stepped over. They found themselves in a green valley dotted abundantly with rocks. In due course, the path grew into a road and the trickle grew into a stream, which diverted to the side. Their course advanced over a slight, but regular rise and fall through the vale, flanked by a forest of oak on either side.
With each step, the watercourse they raced grew bigger and bigger, soon a foaming tributary eager to throw its contents against stones, the banks, and itself. Rapids formed as its width expanded to eventually become the strong-flowing Tarn River.
Just under the raging, babbling current, Louis heard a sound, and looking up and forward to a break in the valley walls that spread meadows left and right, he saw a little boy, who waved enthusiastically to Louis. This was the first sign of le Pont de Montvert.
* * *
As they came into the town—over a stone hump-backed bridge that took them across the Tarn and ended on the other side with a medieval tower—it struck Louis that it had been exactly a week since he’d left Monastier. Pont de Montvert was all bustling with the Sabbath post-church activities—people buying a day’s or a week’s worth of necessities at the vendors that gathered loosely along the main thoroughfare, lined with one- and two-story stone houses.
Louis peered about them suspiciously, looking for a familiar face, listening for the singing voice that harassed him in the night amongst the trees of Mont Lozère, but there was nothing. Citizens moved about, jostling him, Modestine, and each other, an undulating sea of ruddy faces and muted color, though the eyes and mouths smiled at a day’s rest.
They made their way to the nearest public house, where Louis planned to hole up for the day and night, until events either played themselves out or enough nothing happened to warrant a feeling of safe passage. But Louis did not expect his stay to be without incident, and so he left Modestine in the stable with strict instructions to the stable boy to watch her carefully, then headed into the inn to wait it out.
There was a considerable crowd at the table for the mid-day meal, at least a dozen, including himself. The server called herself Clarisse—she was a buxom young woman: her hips and bosom ample, her face round, her eyes and nose small. She had curly yellow hair that spiraled over her shoulders, her cheeks were naturally rosy. Clarisse moved about the crowded dining area deftly, despite her size and the speed at which she went.
Louis took an empty space between a middle-aged, well-dressed man and a dowdy, timid woman of roughly the same age as his other neighbor. Across from him sat two women who chatted animatedly to each other. They were both handsome, which Louis counted as a special treat as he swore he had not seen a beautiful woman since leaving Monastier, and even then, he could remember no female face from that village aside from the pamphleteer’s ancient mother he’d endlessly sketched. The remaining travelers beyond this immediate group held no interest for him.
The two lovely women, as it turned out, were sisters—both married—traveling with the man to Louis’s right, a cousin. They were meeting their husbands—railroad surveyors currently in Chasseradès—in a few days, before moving on to another town to spend a few weeks with their widowed mother.
“I know them!” Louis exclaimed. “Well, that is to say, I passed a magnificent evening with them just two days ago.”
“They are well, then?” one of the sisters asked.
“Oh, indeed,” Louis said, “very well.”
Stoneware plates were filled with stewed vegetables, beef, and bread. Cutlery clicked together and against teeth. Clarisse moved about the room, plate to plate, and rested by the stairwell in the corner until her service was again required.
“Are you familiar with the village, sir?” the man to his right inquired.
“This village? No, I am not. Though I mean to be. I am writing a book.”
And the conversation followed as such. The sisters fawned over Louis—having discovered a writer in their midst—and they all asked for the details of his travels so far. Louis did his best to leave out anything grisly—anything related to wolves or murder—and largely succeeded. This pleasant exercise gave him hope that his journal notes weren’t all for naught and that he might—if he made it to Alès alive and back into the arms of his friends and family— still have a book from all this mess.
Clarisse suddenly appeared beside him, heaping a second helping of beef upon his plate before he’d even half-finished the first, and she was gone again in a flash. Louis hadn’t had this much sensory excitement in weeks. Perhaps months.
“And, so the brothers of Our Lady of the Snows,” a sister began, “there is no vow of silence?”
“Ah, no, see,” Louis explained, piling the beef onto itself. “It is merely an economy of words. Nothing unnecessary nor impractical.”
He saw his shy neighbor to the left had drained her cup and he neatly refilled it without losing his thought.
She tried weakly to refuse, but then acquiesced for the sake of good manners and presented Louis with a wan smile. She styled her dark hair parted concisely down the middle and combed back in a low bun; she wore a small, modest cameo taut on a humble ribbon around her neck. It had a look about it that spoke of something handed down, possessing significant personal value. She was clearly not of the party immediately surrounding them.
“Where are you going to, Mademoiselle? Where are your people?” he asked warmly, trying to help her feel included.
Her face reddened with the attention. She smiled and tried to wave it away, but he persisted.
“Florac,” she finally answered. “To see my sister.” Louis had to lean close to hear her, as she spoke barely above a whisper, and this caused her to blush further.
“If your sister is half as lovely as you, Mademoiselle . . .” he began.
Clarisse now appeared to his other side, laying down another roll, though his sat yet untouched. And, again, gone.
“Have you published other books?” one of the sisters across the table interrupted, and the little mouse to his left looked more relieved than spurned, so Louis turned his attention back to the beautiful women.
“I have had a book out this past spring,” he answered, and then opined appropriately on An Inland Voyage, which had met mixed reviews.
The sisters gushed, and Louis noted that they wore fairly low-cut chemises, with hanging necklaces that drew attention to their busts, quite unlike his easily embarrassed neighbor. He took an opportunity to offer her more bread, which she declined. He got a closer look at her.
Her eyes were almond shaped and her brows neat and even; her face was the shape of her eyes and beginning to show just the first faint lines of age. Her mouth was not overly cheery, nor was it too firm. Louis judged her to be about as old as Fanny, about ten years his senior. In fact, once one tallied the merits of this woman’s features as a whole, she was actually rather pretty.
He again turned to the laughter of the sisters in front of him and joined them in their joviality, but also reexamined their virtues. Their hair—tawny and blond, respectively—was curled and set with pins. Their cheeks blossomed with what he believed to be a powder of some sort. Their lips were also tinted.
They tittered on about the novels they were currently reading, which Louis should have been keen to hear about but was instead lost in a reverie of his own conclusions. He thought perhaps his modest neighbor could just as easily be as bland as the women before him, in character and in taste, that is, but she didn’t open her mouth enough for that judgment. The sisters, however, exhibited a veneer that promised interest, when, in fact, they overflowed with tediousness in every breath. They were also both closer to his age, and if Louis had learned nothing else of his own inclinations in his short life, he learned that it was a mature voice that held his attention.
He was about to turn his mind back to his modest neighbor when the sisters’ cousin started up.
“I’m in the quarry business,” he said. And while the man talked of the astonishing difference in stone and their application, the woman to his left presently finished her meal and quietly excused herself from the table to no one in particular.
Louis pretended to hear the man, nodding when it seemed necessary, and focused most of his attention on his plate, systematically filling his thin frame with the stuff. When he ate as much as he could and pulled his napkin from his lap, he excused himself. As he looked up, his eyes happened to fall across the room to Clarisse, standing beside the stairwell, hand on her hip. She was staring at him.
Sock it to me...