CHAPTER 66
Hal insisted on signing for dinner. As she watched him, Meredith wondered if his uncle would make him settle up, given he technically owned half the place. Straight off, her worries for him came flooding back.
They left the restaurant and walked out into the lobby. At the bottom of the staircase, Meredith felt Hal’s fingers wrap around hers.
Hand in silent hand, they walked up the stairs. Meredith felt totally calm, not nervous or ambivalent at all. She didn’t have to think about whether this was what she wanted. It felt good. They didn’t even need to discuss where to go, automatically both understanding that Meredith’s room was better. Right for them, right now.
They reached the end of the first-floor passageway without bumping into any other guests. Meredith turned the key, loud in the hushed corridor, and pushed open the door. Almost formal, they walked in still holding hands.
Slats of white light from a harvest moon shone in through the windows and patterned the surface of the floor. Rays refracted and glinted on the reflective surface of the mirror, on the glass of the framed portrait of Anatole and Léonie Vernier and Isolde Lascombe, propped on the desk.
Meredith reached out to put on the light.
‘Don’t,’ Hal said quietly.
He cupped his hand behind her head and drew her to him. Meredith breathed in the smell of him, just like at Rennes-les-Bains outside the church, a mixture of wool and soap.
They kissed, their lips carrying the trace of red wine, softly at first, tentatively, the mark of friendship moving into something else, something more urgent. Meredith felt comfort give way to desire, a heat that spread through her, up from the soles of her feet, between her legs, the pit of her stomach, the palms of her hand, to a rush of blood to the head.
Hal bent over and picked her up, sweeping her into his arms in one movement, and carrying her to the bed. The key dropped from Meredith’s hand, landing with a heavy thump on the thick pile carpet.
‘You’re so light,’ he whispered, kissing her neck.
He placed her carefully down, then sat beside her, his feet still firmly planted on the floor, like a Hollywood matinée idol under fear of the censor.
‘Are you . . .’ he started, stopped, then tried again. ‘Are you sure you want—’
Meredith laid a single finger across his mouth. ‘Ssshh.’
Slowly she began to undo the buttons of her shirt, then guided his hand to her. Half invitation, half instruction. She heard Hal catch his breath and then the rise and fall of his breathing in the dappled silver light of the room. Sitting cross-legged on the edge of the mahogany bed, Meredith leant forward to kiss him, her dark hair falling over her face, the difference in their heights eliminated now.
Hal struggled to remove his sweater and became tangled as Meredith pushed her hands beneath the cotton of his T-SHIRT. They both laughed, a little shy, then stood up to finish undressing.
Meredith didn’t feel self-conscious. It seemed totally natural, the right thing to do. Being in Rennes-les-Bains, all of it felt like time out of time. As if for a few days she had stepped out of her regular life – the person she was, thinking of consequences, life running on in the same kind of way – to a place where different rules applied.
She removed her last piece of clothing.
‘Wow,’ Hal said.
Meredith took a step towards him, their bare skin touching, top to toe, so intimate, so startling. She could feel how much he wanted her, but he was happy to wait, to let her lead the way.
She took his hand and pulled him back to the bed. She lifted up the covers and they slipped in between the sheets, the linen crisp and cool and impersonal against the heat generated by their bodies. For a moment they lay side by side, arm to arm, like a knight and his lady on a stone tomb, then Hal propped himself on one elbow and with his other hand started to stroke her head.
Meredith breathed deeply, relaxing under his touch. Now his hand was moving lower, smoothing over her shoulders, the hollow of her throat, skimming her breasts, winding her fingers with his, his lips and his tongue whispering over the surface of her skin.
Meredith felt desire burn in her, red hot, as if she could trace it along the lines of her veins, her arteries, her bones, every part of her. She raised herself towards him, her kisses hungry now, wanting more. Just when the waiting was becoming intolerable, Hal shifted position and lowered himself into the space between her naked legs. Meredith looked up into his ice-blue eyes and saw every possibility reflected, for an instant, in them. The best of her, and the worst.
‘You’re sure?’
Meredith smiled and reached down to guide him. Carefully, Hal eased himself inside her.
‘It’s OK,’ she murmured.
For a moment they lay still, celebrating the peace of being in one another’s arms. Then Hal began to move, slowly at first, then a little more urgently. Meredith placed her hands firmly on his back, her body filled with the hammering of her own blood running through her. She could feel the power of him, the strength in his arms and hands. Her tongue darted between his lips, wet and devoid of speech.
Hal was breathing harder, moving harder, as desire, need, the ecstasy of the automatic movement drove him on. Meredith held him to her, tighter, rising to meet him, possessing him, also caught by the moment. He cried out her name, shuddered, and they both fell still.
The rushing in her head faded away. She felt the full weight of him come back, squeezing the air from her body, but she did not move. She stroked his thick black hair and held him in her arms. It was a moment before she realised his face was wet, that he was silently crying.
‘Oh, Hal,’ she murmured in pity.
‘Tell me something about yourself,’ he said a little later. ‘You know so much about me, what I’m doing here – too much probably – but I know next to nothing about you, Ms Martin.’
Meredith laughed. ‘How very formal, Mr Lawrence,’ she said, moving her hand across his chest and lower.
Hal grabbed her fingers. ‘I’m serious! I don’t even know where you live. Where you come from. What your parents do. Come on, tell.’
Meredith knitted her fingers through his. ‘OK. One résumé coming right up. I grew up in Milwaukee, stayed there until I was eighteen, then went to college in North Carolina. I stayed on and did postgrad research there, had a couple of teaching jobs at graduate colleges – one in St Louis, one outside Seattle – all the time trying to get funding to finish my Debussy biography. Fast-forward a couple of years. My adoptive parents upped sticks, left Milwaukee and moved to Chapel Hill, close by my old college. Earlier this year I was offered a job in a private college not far from UNC and, at last, a publishing deal.’
‘Adoptive parents?’ said Hal.
Meredith sighed. ‘My birth mother, Jeanette, was not able to take care of me. Mary is a distant cousin, a kind of aunt a couple of times removed. I’d spent time with them, on and off, when Jeanette was sick. When things finally got too bad, I went to live with them for good. They formally adopted me a couple of years later, when my birth mom . . . died.’
The plain, carefully chosen words did not do justice to the years of late-night phone calls, the unannounced visits, the shouting in the street, the burden of responsibility the child Meredith had felt for her damaged and volatile mother. Nor did her matter-of-fact recitation of the facts hint at the guilt she carried with her still, all these years later, that her first reaction on hearing her mother was dead was not that of grief, but relief.
She couldn’t forgive herself for that.
‘Sounds tough,’ Hal said.
Meredith smiled at his British understatement and shifted closer against his warm body beside her in the bed.
‘I was lucky,’ she said. ‘Mary is an amazing lady. It was she who got me started on the violin, then the piano. I owe everything to her and Bill.’
He grinned. ‘So you really are writing a biography of Debussy?’ he teased.
Meredith hit him playfully on the arm. ‘Sure am!’
For a moment, they lay in companionable silence, still and touching.
‘But there is something more to you being here than that,’ Hal said in the end. He turned his head on the pillow towards the framed portrait across the other side of the room. ‘I’m not wrong about that, am I?’
Meredith sat up, pulling the sheet up with her, so only her shoulders were uncovered.
‘No, you’re not wrong.’
Picking up she wasn’t quite ready to speak, Hal sat up too and swung his legs to the floor. ‘Is there anything I can get you? A drink? Anything?’
‘A glass of water would be good,’ she said.
She watched as he disappeared into the bathroom, emerging seconds later with two tooth mugs, then grabbed a couple of bottles from the minibar, before climbing back into bed.
‘Here you go.’
‘Thanks,’ Meredith said, taking a mouthful from the bottle. ‘Until now, all I knew about my birth mother’s family was that they might have come from this part of France, during – or just after – World War I and settled in America. I have a photograph of, I’m pretty sure, my great-grandfather, in French army uniform, taken in the square in Rennes-les-Bains in 1914. The story was he ended up in Milwaukee, but since I didn’t have a name, I couldn’t get much further. The city had a large European population from the early nineteenth century. The first permanent European resident was a French trader, Jacques Veau, who established a trading post on the bluffs where the three rivers, the Milwaukee, the Menomonee and the Kinnickinnic, meet. So, it was plausible enough.’
For the next few minutes, she gave Hal a skeleton version of what she’d discovered since arriving at the Domaine de la Cade, keeping to the hard facts, all pretty straightforward. She told him about why she’d taken the portrait from the lobby and the piece of music that she’d inherited from her grandmother, Louisa Martin, but did not mention the cards. There had been more than enough uncomfortable discussion in the bar earlier, and Meredith sure didn’t want to remind Hal of his uncle now.
‘So you think your unknown soldier is a Vernier,’ Hal said, when Meredith had talked herself to a standstill.
She nodded. ‘The physical resemblance is overwhelming. Colouring, features. He could be a younger brother or a cousin, I guess, but taking the dates and his age into consideration, I’m thinking he could be a direct descendant.’ She stopped, letting a smile break out on her face. ‘Then just before I came down to supper, I got an email from Mary saying that there was the record of a Vernier in the graveyard at Mitchell Point, Milwaukee.’
Hal smiled. ‘So you think Anatole Vernier was his father?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the next step.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe Léonie’s son?’
‘Then he wouldn’t be a Vernier, would he?’
‘He would if she wasn’t married.’
Hal nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
‘So, here’s the deal. Tomorrow, after we’ve visited with Dr O’Donnell, you help me do a little research into the Verniers.’
‘Deal,’ he said lightly, but Meredith could feel he’d tensed up again. ‘I know you think I’m making too much of it, but I’d really appreciate it you being here. She’s coming at ten.’
‘Well,’ she murmured softly, feeling herself growing sleepy. ‘As you said, she’s more likely to talk with another woman there.’
She was struggling to keep her eyes open. Slowly, Meredith felt herself drifting away from Hal. The silver moon made her progress across the black Midi sky. Below in the valley, the bell tolled the passing of the hours.
