The Luckiest Woman Ever

Chapter 2

Chapter TwoThe next day was even colder. I knew Castillac wasn’t exactly the south of France, Molly was thinking, but I did think it was south-ish. She put on a heavy jacket and went out to the woodpile, grateful that at least the wood was dry. Constance had generously vacuumed the living room yesterday, and here Molly was dropping bark and sawdust all over the floor again.

That’s life, huh? An endless cycle of tidying up the mess you’ve made.

She stoked the fire, put on some blues, and settled on the sofa with a blanket and some gardening catalogs she’d brought with her from America. It was less than practical to pack catalogs she wouldn’t be able to order from in France, but Molly loved looking at the photographs and imagining the plants in various combinations in borders on her property. She wasn’t shopping; she was looking for inspiration.

Certain plants she loved deeply: all the artemisias, definitely baptisias, most of the roses. And for some reason, other plants made her feel slightly ill to look at them—kniphofia, amaranth, and especially astilbe. She didn’t understand why this was so, because the revulsion she felt couldn’t simply be a matter of aesthetics, could it? Yet the aversion was pretty powerful. Half of them she’d only seen in catalogs anyway. Maybe if she saw them in a garden she would feel differently.

A slow hour passed. She put more wood in the stove, fiddled with the air intakes, swept up the mess. Had another cup of coffee. Thought about inviting her neighbor, Madame Sabourin, over for a cup of tea. Except Molly didn’t like tea. She considered calling Lawrence in Morocco but remembered he had said something about turning off his phone, taking a break from the electronic world. There had been a moment—and a night—when she thought maybe something had sparked between her and Ben Dufort, the chief gendarme, but the moment seemed to have passed and she didn’t know what to make of that.

Not that she was looking for romance anyway.

She had come to France in part to recover from a divorce. She hadn’t been especially happy in the marriage, but still, its ending had knocked her for a loop. And this French winter, with everyone hunkered down in their own houses and the village quiet as a tomb, it let some of those crummy post-divorce feelings come back, like a high tide leaving a line of detritus on the beach.

Thank God Frances is coming. I desperately need some distraction.

Eventually she shoved the catalogs under the sofa and went out for a walk around her property. She had two hectares, just shy of five acres, with a small patch of woods and a sloping meadow in addition to the lawn and gardens around the house. It was difficult to imagine lush gardens in that chilly weather, so she thought about buildings instead. At the moment she had only the one cottage to rent out, but to get anything close to financial security, she needed more buildings with beds in them. An old pigeonnier—where some former owner had raised pigeons for dinner—was starting to crumble but would make a charming gîte to rent out, if she could find a good mason.

When she returned to the house and peeled off her coat and scarf, she realized she’d forgotten to put more wood in the stove before going out, and now the living room felt like a freezer.

This is ridiculous, I might as well have stayed in Massachusetts!

But she had not moved to France for a change in climate. She had wanted calm and peace and pastry, and she couldn’t find them in her Boston suburb, where the crime-to-bakeries ratio was all wrong.

But the truth was, now that she had calm, she didn’t want it. She wanted stimulation and excitement. Maybe not as exciting as finding a corpse in the woods.

But something.

Josephine could not sleep. It was one of the insults of getting older, and she did not take it well. She got out of bed, took off the nightgown her husband had brought her from Paris, let it drop to the floor, and wandered around the house naked. The heat was turned way up so she was not cold, and the shutters were closed so she had privacy, with only the faintest moonlight coming through the slats to see by.

She was looking for something, but she had no idea what it was.

No one ever calls. All those cousins who live in Paris, do they ever come visit? No. My sister barely even calls anymore. All I’ve got is that mewling excuse for a nephew who has never amounted to anything at all.

She came into a sitting room on the second floor, a room where her husband Albert used to work on his inventions. Back then it had been a big mess of tools and parts and boxes of strange things he had ordered from somewhere, and books and papers in towering stacks, threatening to suffocate the man.

What a bore Albert had been, she thought. Always working. Always had his head in some manual or something. Never paying me, his wife, the attention I deserved.

After he died—out of nowhere, a heart attack and he was dead on the spot, she had no warning or time to prepare at all—Josephine had ordered all of his junk taken out of the room. Every last wire, every nut, every bolt. And she had bought a pair of sumptuous love seats and a stuffed ostrich, put candelabra on the mantel and tables, and hung thick brocade curtains at the windows. Following the transformation she found it an agreeable place where she liked to sit and feel tragic about being widowed when she was still so young.

She had been fifty-two when her husband had dropped dead—not exactly a dewy ingenue, but it was true that fifty-two felt like a very long time ago now.

Josephine went to a small antique desk, bought long after Albert died. She opened the bottom drawer and took out three letters tied with a pink satin ribbon. They were tucked in yellowing envelopes without name or address. She slid the top letter out and began to read:

Ma belle,

I am not a poet and words are not easy for me but I want so much to tell you how much our time together means to me. You are so lovely and I find myself thinking of you when I should be studying.

All my love,

A.

The old woman’s eyes burned with tears. She put the letter back in its yellowed envelope, retied the satin ribbon, and put the packet back in the bottom drawer of the desk. Though tears were spilling down her wrinkled cheeks, her eyes glared and her mouth turned down. On her way out of the room she caressed the stuffed ostrich’s neck, which was showing some signs of wear. She wished the candles were lit but did not want to search for matches.

She could not sleep.

Suddenly she clapped her hands and went down to the kitchen. It was four in the morning. She had not been in the kitchen in several years, so at first she had to turn on a light and rummage about, deep in the pantry, until she found what she was looking for.

Ah! I knew they must still be here!

And then she stood in the kitchen, fingers stroking her chin, pondering just where to set the rat trap so that Sabrina would catch her fingers in it.