He shrugged. “Don’t worry about my leg anymore, Nurse. You are off duty, remember?”
11.
We walked slowly, because of my bare feet and Stefan’s leg, and because the world around us seemed so sacred and primeval, like Eden, filling with pale new light, fragrant with pine and eucalyptus. There was a long straight allée leading directly to the fort, and we saw nobody else the entire way. “There are fisherman in the village,” Stefan said. “They are probably setting out in their boats. And there will be a lot of tourists later in the morning and the afternoon.”
“I’d rather wake up early and spend time with the fishermen. I’d rather see the place as it really is, as it used to be lived.”
“Yes, the tourists are a nuisance. Have you been to Pompeii?”
“No. I’ve never been to Italy at all.”
“We must go there someday. You would like it very much. It is as if you have walked into an ordinary old village, except you begin to walk down the street and you see how ancient it is. There are shards of old pottery littering the ground. You can pick one up and take it with you.”
“Don’t they mind?”
“They only really care about the frescoes. The frescoes are astonishing, though they are not for the faint of heart.”
“Are they violent?” I asked, thinking of the gladiators and the casual Roman lust for blood.
“No, they are profoundly erotic.”
A bird sang at us from within a tree somewhere, a melancholy whistle. The low crunch of our footsteps echoed from the woods.
“There are also casts,” Stefan said. “They found these hollows in the ash, the hardened ash, and so they had the good idea to pour plaster of Paris into these hollows, and when it dried and they chipped away the molds, there remained these exact perfect casts of the people who had died, who had been buried alive in the ash. You can see the terror in their faces. And that, my Annabelle, is when you realize that this thing was real, that it actually happened, this unthinkable thing. Each cast was a living person, two thousand years ago. These casts, they are proof. They are photographs of a precise moment, the moment of expiration. They are like the resurrection of the dead.”
“How awful.”
“It’s awful and beautiful at once. The worst was the dog, however. I could bear the sight of the people, but the dog made me weep.”
“You don’t mind the people dying, but you mind the animals?”
“Because the people knew what was happening to them. They knew Vesuvius was erupting, that the town was doomed. They couldn’t escape, but at least they knew. The dog, he had no idea. He must have thought he was being punished.”
“The people thought they were being punished, too. That the gods were punishing them.”
“Yes, but we humans are all full of sin, aren’t we? We know our mortal failings. We know our own culpability. This poor dog never knew what he had done wrong. Here we are.”
A wall appeared to our right, behind the trees. I looked up, and the dawn had broken free at last, gilding the peaks of the fort, which had somehow, in the course of our conversation, grown into a forbidding size and complexity. Ahead, the trees cleared to reveal a paved terrace.
“Can we go in?” I asked.
“We can try.”
The sun had not quite scaled the rooftops yet, and the terrace was in full shade. We walked up the path until an entrance came into view, interrupting the rough stone of the fort walls: a wide archway beneath a modest turret. There was no door, no impediment of any kind. A patch of white sun beckoned on the other side.
“Are there any soldiers about, do you think?”
“No, the garrison was disbanded some years ago, I believe. It is now a—I don’t know if there is some particular term in English—a monument historique. I suppose it belongs to the people of France.”
“Then it’s mine, because I am a person of France, after all,” I said, and I walked under the archway and up the stairs to the patch of light that squeezed between the corners of two buildings.
“But you are not simply a person of France, are you?” said Stefan, coming up behind me. “You are a princess of France.”
“That doesn’t mean anything anymore. We’re a republic. We shouldn’t even have titles at all. Anyway, I’m half American. It’s impossible to be a princess and speak like a Yankee.”
“It suits you, however. Especially now, when the sun is touching your hair.”
I stopped walking and turned to Stefan, who stopped, too, and returned my gaze. He was almost a foot taller than I was, and the sun had already found his hair and eyes and most of his face, and while he could sometimes look almost plain, because his bones were arranged so simply, in the full light of morning sunshine he was beautiful.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like you want me to kiss you.”
“But I do want you to kiss me.”
Stefan shook his head. “How can you be like this? No one in the world is like you.”
“I was going to say the same about you.”
He lifted his hand and touched the ends of my hair, and such was the extraordinary sensitivity of my nerves that I felt the stir of each individual root. “I don’t know how I am going to bear this, Annabelle,” he whispered. “How am I going to survive any more?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to disturb the delicate balance, one way or another. I took a step back, so I was standing against the barracks wall, which was already warm with sunshine, and Stefan followed me and raised his other hand to burrow into my hair, around the curve of my skull. His gaze dropped to my lips.
“Alles ist seinen Preis wert,” he said, and he lowered his face and kissed me.
I held myself still as his lips touched mine, lightly at first and then deeper, until he had opened me gently to taste the skin of my mouth. I didn’t know you could do that, I didn’t know you could kiss on the inside. I thought it was all on the surface. He tasted like he smelled, of champagne and cigarettes, only richer and wetter, alive, and I lifted my hands, which had been pressed against the barracks wall, and curled them around his waist, because I might never have the chance to do that again, to hold Stefan’s warm waist under my palms while his mouth caressed mine. He cradled the back of my head with one hand and the side of my face with the other, and he ended the kiss in a series of nibbles that trailed off somewhere on my cheekbone, and pressed his forehead against mine. I relaxed against the barracks wall and took his weight. A bird chattered from the ridgepole.
“All right,” he said. “Okay. Still alive.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t really know how to kiss.”
“Don’t ever learn.”
I laughed softly and held him close against my thin nightgown. The new sun burned the side of my face. I said, “I suppose your mistress wouldn’t be happy to see us now.”
Stefan lifted his head from mine. “As it happens, I do not give a damn what this woman thinks at the moment, and neither should you. But come. The groundskeepers will be coming soon, and then the tourists. It will be a great scandal if we are seen.”
“I don’t care.”
“But I do. I will not have Annabelle de Créouville caught here in her nightgown with her lover, for all the world to stare.” He gave my hair a final stroke