old-fart-dom, Maddy thought contentedly. But not yet. A clock chimed the hour from an ochre Romanesque church across the square. They listened, transfixed, the metal clangor seeming to summons the faithful from down the years. Nick fished the Michelin guide from the frayed pocket of his chinos. “So. We’ll check out Sand’s château first, okay? Hmm, says here she scribbled her novels all night on a dropleaf shelf in a wall cupboard. . . . Then we’ll drive to La Chatre for lunch. After that”—his finger traced a road—“Bourges! I’ve always wanted to show you the cathedral. The musician angels in the side chapel . . . the archangel Michael . . .” As guide to the world’s treasures, Nick had no equal. She sat back, luxuriating in his voice, a baritone dashed with boarding-school drawl, and the newly minted air and warbling merles, rolling and rerolling notes as if telling a crystal rosary. What more could there be than this? Let nothing change. She wanted to stop here at the vertical ray of the sun.
“WHAT LUCK, WE’VE got the joint to ourselves!” They stood in the courtyard of Nohant, as the estate was called, surveying the manor house where Sand had hosted a running house party for geniuses.
“Place really makes you believe in spirits,” Nick said, glancing around. In fact, something animate about the weathered rose facade and pale blue shutters, dreaming at attention. “Uh-oh, don’t look now.”
Two yellow buses came chuffing up the driveway, raising a cloud of chalky dust. They air-braked to a stop before the château and spit out a cargo of twittering adolescents in shorts and knee socks. Maddy wrinkled her nose. “And they’re German.”
“For godssake, during the war they weren’t even born.”
She and Nick cultivated friction, she suspected, to certify they were two separate people.
The kids pooled in the courtyard. A boy with a platinum crew cut abruptly flung himself on a dark, gangly girl and kissed her with puppyish abandon. The other kids aimed cameras at the château or thumbed guidebooks, ignoring the passion in their midst. It went on, the kiss, gnawing, slurpy, desperate. Both comic and arousing.
Maddy shifted her attention to Sand’s château, the large atelier-style window projecting from the second story. “Nicky, look, that must be the studio Sand built for Delacroix.” No response. She turned to see Nick staring at the junior lovers in horror, as if sighting a pair of revenants.
“Darling, don’t gawk.” She elbowed his arm. “Imagine, Delacroix and Chopin used to walk around here talking Art capital A. ‘Serenaded by nightingales,’ ” she read from the guidebook. “ ‘In the azure of the transparent night, a sublime melody arises.’ ”
If Nick heard, he gave no sign.
Maddy slipped her arm through his and smiled at his clench-jawed profile. “Doesn’t that child have a touch of Laila?” The same starved-cat allure.
Nick unstuck his attention from the couple. “Oh, Laila’s a lot prettier!”
Nick doted on her adopted daughter, endowing her with a beauty she didn’t quite have. That they’d knitted into a family was among Maddy’s greatest pleasures—though she winced when Laila playfully called him “Uncle Nick.” “Reminds me, I want to get Laila a present in La Chatre. Maybe a Cacharel blouse—to wean her from the homeboy look.” She sighed. “If only we could wean her from Jed Oliver.”
“Classic mistake to interfere, just make him seem more desirable,” Nick said in a prissy voice.
The lovers surfaced from their kiss. They looked around with the glutted eyes of beasts after a kill. The guide had arrived, dangling a giant metal key. Everyone traipsed after her into the vestibule, its stone walls exhaling a chill harvested over centuries.
They shuffled tourist-style into a dining room dominated by a Venetian chandelier of blue and pink glass. Nick, slightly behind, kept his hand at the small of Maddy’s back. The room and air felt untouched by time, alive with presences, ghostly chatter, deaths and entrances. Chopin could have walked in, coughing.
The guide pointed out a sinister-looking drawing by Sand’s son. “These peasant women are killing their illegitimate babies,” she explained, first in French, then in German. Maddy pressed in for a closer look. The little murders of love, okay—but kill your child?
They moved toward the dining room table, a long oval set as if for this evening’s dinner. Maddy circled it, reading place cards: Flaubert . . . Turgenev . . . Delacroix . . . Franz Liszt. To think these titans had eaten and schmoozed around this table. An old dream floated up: Why not create their own version of Nohant at Conscience Point—even if titans, in 1997, were in short supply. They’d restore the main house, invite musicians, painters, writers. . . . Yeah, she was high on country coffee all right—and the spell of this place. Still, over the years they’d flirted, she and Nick, with the idea of an art colony on his estate. There might come a time when they’d be happy for such a refuge.
She leaned into him and he smiled without looking at her and slipped a hand beneath her linen jacket and then under the waistband of her pants. The press of his fingers at her hip dialed up a delicious moment from earlier. A bonus of sex with Nick was reliving it all day. A little afternoon siesta might be just the thing. . . . They all funneled into a narrow corridor leading to Sand’s marionette theater. On some impulse, she looked around for Lolita. There she was, at the head of the line. Lolita turned and peered at her and Nick. By a trick of light over her brow and mustache, the girl resembled a jackal, and Maddy wondered how she could have seen in that face anything of Laila.
BEFORE DINNER THEY wandered the carriage roads around Nohant, she fitting her step to Nick’s rolling sailor’s gait. Cows observed them in silence from a darkening field like the evening’s eyes. A chalky moon hung overhead and lightning bugs flashed green points in the air perfumed by turned earth and flowering hawthorn. The road circled back to Sand’s family graveyard. A tall angel beamed down a blind smile; its wings, the feathers finely etched in stone, shone lavender in the lingering light. On me croit mort, je vis ici, read the legend. “I’m believed dead, but I live on here,” Nick translated. With a shiver, Maddy saw herself gazing up at another stone angel on a May afternoon. . . .
Since the morning in Sand’s château, Nick’s mood had darkened, like a sudden squall. He wore his out-to-lunch face, a cartoon character with cross-hatched eyes.
He’d busted out of the château just before the marionette theater, pleading suffocation; pale, upper lip misted with sweat. She’d feared a heart attack or stroke—though it had been awfully close in that narrow corridor. A panic attack, she’d decided. A real pity he’d missed Chopin’s room upstairs . . . In the afternoon they’d roamed La Chatre, looking in shop windows and enjoying being tourists. She bought Laila a flowered Cacharel blouse, and then a miniature squirrel couple with parasol for Laila’s collection of figurines. They climbed to a main square that spilled down from a central axis, as if the earth had shrugged. They stopped at a café, and bellied up to the cool zinc of the bar, and sipped syrupy limonades. A street photographer took a snapshot. Caught Nick doomy and glamorous in the amber light, she with her broad cheeks and almond eyes he called her “Khirgiz eyes.” Wearing her smile, the smile of a woman with all the luck. On the way to the car, they saw the German schoolkids troop across the square into a patisserie. Lolita, the champion kisser, was not among them.
Nick’s moods were an old story (and pain in the ass), part of the package; maybe a mild form of the taint that he claimed marked his family, the whole tribe an argument against inbreeding. I’m a moody bastard, he’d say afterward and apologize extravagantly. Experience had taught her to lay back. The funk would work its way out of him like a splinter.
She could absorb a patch of funk, they had much to celebrate, she and Nick. Friends were getting downsized and put out to pasture, losing mates to a rogue cell or a ski instructor, getting plucked too early from the party. She and Nick were both at the top of their game; Nick’s imprint a holdout against the dumbing-down of publishing, she with her dual act of pianist and arts reporter. And darling Laila: spooky wise, her angelic nature the envy of friends whose children were mall rats or slackers. She’d even skipped the