How was she supposed to keep track of all that?
Was it her fault that somehow, when she’d finished her lunch a few minutes ago, she’d gotten it into her head that today was Friday, not Thursday, and had gone to her geology classroom instead of the art studio?
And that, having realized her mistake, she got lost trying to find her way to her art class, and was now running around like a rat in a maze? Lost! After living in the castle for two and a half weeks! Madame Snowe was not going to like hearing that she’d been late to a class.
Caitlyn swore under her breath and dashed up the southeast spiral staircase; or at least she hoped it was the southeast staircase. There were four grand stone stairways in the castle, one in each corner, and she still wasn’t sure which was which.
She blamed her mental breakdown on the horrible
salade Périgourdine
she’d had for lunch. For each meal, the Fortune School students took their plastic trays and filed through the kitchen at the end of the Great Hall. A menu, in French with no translation, was posted on the wall, and it was each girl’s choice what she wanted to order. The cooks were local women with limited English, and a gruff impatience with girls who timidly mispronounced
cassoulet
or
soupe de chou-fleur
, or who asked what
ris de veau
was. Caitlyn quickly learned to get in line behind confident French speakers and copy whatever they said. Getting unknown food was better than holding up the line while a stocky, red-faced woman repeatedly said, “Eh?”
And thus the
salade Périgourdine
. The plate of lettuces, walnuts, tomatoes, dark meats, a slice of something that looked like light brown cheese, toast, and the little cup of jammy-looking stuff had seemed enticing. She’d sat down by Brigitte and dug in, spreading the soft brown cheese and jam on a piece of toast and taking a big bite.
Only, the brown stuff wasn’t cheese. The taste of liver had filled her mouth, its texture as unctuous as butter. Caitlyn had gagged, but at Brigitte’s questioning glance she twisted her grimace into a smile, chewing with what her grandmother had called “long teeth.” It didn’t stop the oozing liver from finding its way into every corner of her mouth, though, and the jam—a chunky fig concoction, the fig seeds popping loudly between her molars—was little help. At long last she swallowed, rinsing it down with half a glass of water.
“What is that?” she asked hoarsely, pointing to the remainder of her tan “cheese.”
“It is
pâté de foie gras
. The best in France comes from here, the Périgord.”
“But what is pah-tay deh fwah grah?” Caitlyn asked, mimicking Brigitte’s pronunciation.
“It is a sort of paste of fatty goose or duck liver. Delicious,
non
?”
“Fatty liver?” Caitlyn chewed her lip, looking at the
pâté
still on her plate. “Do you want mine?”
“Oui!”
Brigitte scooped it up with the point of her knife, then ate it off the blade. “And that is
magret de canard fumé
,” she said, pointing to the paper-thin slices of meat still on Caitlyn’s plate. “Smoked duck breast. And that,” she said, pointing to small chunks of meat, “you must try that. My brother Thierry used to love it, and made me bring him cans of it whenever I came home.”
Caitlyn warily stuck her fork into one of the chunks. It looked innocent, like regular meat. She put it in her mouth and chewed, and was immediately thrown back to childhood, when one Thanksgiving she’d been curious about what was cooking on the stove and, lifting the lid of a small pot, had stuck her nose into the steam and taken a huge sniff, only to discover that it was a collection of giblets being boiled for the cat.
“
Gésiers
!” Brigitte cried happily.
“Geh-zee-ay,” Caitlyn repeated unhappily. It could only mean “gizzards.”
“You are so lucky to come to the Périgord Noir for school. You will eat very well! None of your American ’amburgers and ’ot dogs here, only duck, duck, duck!” Brigitte quacked, and dissolved into giggles.
Hungry and with no prospect of normal food anytime soon, and with an apparently insane dining companion, Caitlyn had wanted to cry. It was the final straw in her load of culture shock. After that, was it any wonder that she hadn’t been thinking straight, and got the days confused, and then gotten herself lost in the castle while trying to find her art class?
Caitlyn came to a tiny landing stuck to the side of the curving staircase wall and pushed open a heavy old oak door, its age-blackened beams banded with hammered iron. She jogged down the stone hallway beyond, looking for the double doors into the art studio.
She eventually reached the end of the hall, but there weren’t any double doors. She squeaked in frustration and dashed halfway back down the hall, double-checking. Had she been mistaken about the double doors?
And where was everyone? She couldn’t hear a single voice.
Caitlyn chose a random door and pushed it open. Gray light from the windows revealed a storage space packed with dusty bookshelves, boxes, and a dozen of the school’s wooden chairs with attached small tables for taking notes.
Caitlyn whimpered. No wonder she couldn’t hear any voices. Where the heck was she? She dashed through the furniture to the window, hoping to orient herself, her heart thudding in her ears.
The window looked out on the courtyard. The château was shaped like a hollow square, the cobbled courtyard taking up the middle. A few cars were parked there, and an elaborate stone well with an iron frame to hold the bucket sat toward one corner. The entry arch pierced the center of the east wing, and from the looks of things that arch was three stories down and directly beneath her window. The south wing of the castle, to Caitlyn’s left, had a series of immense skylights in one section of the slanting roof that faced the courtyard.
The art studio.
Her heart lurched and thudded. “Crap!” She was in the wrong wing altogether! Her heart raced with panic, the sound of it filling her head and seeming to vibrate in her skull—
thu-THUMP, thu-THUMP!
—and then her vision dimmed, and she started to see stars.
Caitlyn dropped to her knees and put her head down, resting her forehead on the cool stone of the floor, hoping to prevent a faint. For a moment her heartbeat seemed to expand, the sound so loud that it felt like it was coming from
outside
her body, as if the heart belonged to someone else. She sensed a presence in the room, living inside that impossibly loud heartbeat …
and it was coming for her.
Caitlyn whimpered again and squeezed her eyes shut, wrapping her arms over her head.
A deafening
thu-THUMP
filled the room, and then an utter silence that rang in her ears. A moment later Caitlyn’s heart seemed to regain its usual quiet beat, and she released her pent-up breath. The feeling of light-headedness went away, and she cautiously peered out from under her arms. When she saw nothing but the storage room full of furniture, she got back to her feet, her hands shaking.
What had
that
all been about? What had that presence been?
As soon as she thought it, she started to doubt it.
A presence? Really, Caitlyn? It’s probably just a panic attack.
But reason couldn’t chase the chill from her flesh. She scampered from the room, glad to shut the door behind her.
Five minutes later, out of breath but relatively composed, she slid between the double doors of the art studio and tried to blend into the milling herd of her classmates, who were adjusting easels and gathering drawing boards and paper from a rack.
“It’s good of you to join us, Caitlyn,” Monsieur Girard said without turning from the plywood platform where he was arranging a chair and pillow. He was a squat man with a round face and curly brown hair that made a thick doughnut around his bald spot. Like all her teachers except her French instructor, he spoke in English, it being the common language of the international student body.
“Sorry. I got lost.”
He made a show of looking at the clock. “Lost in the woods, perhaps? Or on the road to Paris?”
“Sorry,” she murmured again, shoulders hunched.
He sniffed dismissively. “Get set up,” he said, and turned back to the chair and pillow.
“
Oui
, Monsieur,” she agreed, relieved that a disdainful sniff was the limit of the repercussions for her tardiness. She looked around, trying to figure out exactly how she was supposed to be setting up. A couple easels to the left, Daniela was smirking at her.
Caitlyn looked away. She ate dinner every night with Amalia, Brigitte, and Daniela, and of the three Daniela was the only one who made subtly snarky comments apparently designed to keep Caitlyn in her place. Instead of being eager to broaden Caitlyn’s experience, as Brigitte had proved herself to be at lunch, Daniela mocked her lack of sophistication. “You have never been to the Louvre?” Daniela had said. “You cannot count yourself a human being until you have spent at least a week there.” “You do not ski? So what do you do in winter? Do you content yourself with building snowmen with children?” “English is a language lacking in poetry. It is a pity your native tongue is not beautiful, like Spanish. At the very least you should learn to speak French properly. Your accent is atrocious.” Caitlyn couldn’t decide if Daniela saw her as a threat to be neutralized, or a weakling to be tortured with the same glee with which a little boy would pull the wings off a fly.
The other students in the class hailed from Japan, Laos, Dubai, New Zealand, Sweden, France, and Bermuda. A girl with smooth ebony skin and hair in hundreds of tiny, waist-long braids caught Caitlyn’s confused gaze. “Here, take this easel by me,” the girl said in an English accent. She was from Ghana. Caitlyn could remember everyone’s home country better than their names.
“Thanks!” she said gratefully.
“I’m Naomi.”
“Caitlyn.”
Naomi grinned. “So I hear.”
Caitlyn groaned. “Why is Monsieur Girard so grumpy?” she whispered.
“You haven’t noticed? It’s his natural state.”
Naomi showed her what she needed to set up. The last three sessions had been anatomy lectures and PowerPoint slide shows on art history; Monsieur Girard hadn’t let them do any art. “So we’re drawing today?” Caitlyn asked.
“Monsieur feels that we need to stop talking about art and start doing.”
“It’s about time! I’ve been dying to start drawing. It’s about the only thing I’m any good at.”
“Pride goeth before the fall,” Naomi said wryly. “According to Monsieur Girard, no one can draw. Last term we did still-life drawings, and you should have seen his fury over an improperly shaded sphere.”
Caitlyn swallowed hard. “So he’s not the gentle, supportive sort of art teacher.”
Naomi laughed. “No.”
Monsieur Girard turned and glared at them, pinching his fingertips together in a Shut-it! gesture.
Caitlyn shut her mouth and exchanged a sidelong look with Naomi, whose eyes widened in a mock I’m-scared! look.
Caitlyn smothered a giggle.
Monsieur Girard closed the shades on the skylights and turned on a spotlight aimed at the platform, throwing the lines of the chair and the pillow into dramatic lights and shadows. The lighting simplified the lines and masses, and Caitlyn felt a spark of hope that she might not make an utter fool of herself trying to draw the chair, no matter how critical Monsieur Girard might be.
The door to the studio squeaked open, admitting one of the plump, middle-aged cooks from the kitchen. She was dressed only in an old cotton bathrobe, her hair still in its lunchroom bun. Caitlyn stared at her, alarmed. Had the woman gone mad?
Monsieur Girard welcomed the cook and then addressed the class. “We begin with thirty-second gesture drawings. I shall demonstrate. Madame Dupont,
s’il vous plait
?”
Madame Dupont took off her robe, laid it on a stool, and stepped naked onto the platform. Caitlyn goggled, her mouth dropping open in shock. Madame Dupont’s expression, however, was as blandly unconcerned as if she were fully clothed and standing on a street corner waiting for a bus.
Caitlyn was too stunned to do more than gape as embarrassment washed over her. She kept her eyes glued to Madame Dupont’s face, but then the cook made eye contact with her, and Caitlyn felt herself flush an even deeper red. Her gaze skipped wildly over the danger zones of the cook’s body, settling at last on the relative safety of her feet.
“Allez,”
Monsieur Girard said. Go.
Madame Dupont stuck one leg in the air and spread her arms like an oversize bird in flight, utterly unconcerned with her exposed body. She didn’t seem to care that the folds of her belly were out for all to see, that her breasts were unsupported, nor that her dimpled thighs had taken on a pitted look from the high contrast spotlight.
Caitlyn slowly shook her head in disbelief. This was
so
not like her high school art class back home.
“Changez,”
Monsieur Girard said.