He blinked and leaned back in the chair. “Musée Jacquemart-André,” he said without hesitation.
“So intimate, yet so elegant.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Where else could I see
That lip twitch was definitely an attempt at a smile. “I shouldn’t be surprised to find an art lover in a studio.”
“And I shouldn’t be surprised to find one in a soldier.” My pencil smoothed in the lines of his missing cheek. “As a girl, I visited France. It only takes once to fall in love.”
“That it does,” he said with a touch of wistfulness. His pencil scratched softly.
“What are you sketching?” I finally asked.
“Just that.”
“France?”
“Love.”
I didn’t ask to see what was on his page. “There,” I said. I turned the sheet of paper around to him. “Where should I make adjustments?”
He stared for a moment, then quietly offered a few suggestions—eyes a little wider, nose narrower, a tiny divot in his chin.
“Fine,” I said, my pencil already flashing. He waited, watching. And I drew. But something wasn’t right. Everything felt shifted to the left, off-kilter. The angles didn’t match up.
I set down my pencil and wiped my fingers on the sides of my skirt. “I need an accurate portrait of your face before…before now.” His eyes flashed understanding. “Would you allow me?”
Without waiting for his assent, I closed my eyes and reached forward.
My fingers found his face, the one side smooth, the other rough beneath my fingertips. Gently, I traced up along the edges of his face, along his cheekbones and the curves of his eye sockets, down the bridge of his nose. I ignored the scars and the jagged edges for what was beneath. With light fingertips, I felt the lines of his face. I opened my eyes.
He sat motionless, breathless, eyes wide-open and on me.
I flushed. “I’m sorry. It’s the way I learned to create a face.”
His only reply was a deep, ragged inhale.
Mrs. Ladd always said I was too familiar, that I should keep my fingers on the sketchbook. That these soldiers, voluntarily cut off from their families for years, weren’t used to touch. But I wasn’t sure how one could remain true and accurate without feeling the bones of what they were drawing.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He breathed a sigh, then said, “You didn’t. At least not in the way you think.”
Confused, I looked back down to my drawing.
“Please,” he whispered, “what is your name?” He’d spoken in English.
“Ross. Clare Ross.”
He leaned back and swallowed. “Clare Ross,” he repeated. Then straightened. “Mademoiselle Ross, you feel your art.”
“I had an excellent teacher,” I said softly.
Something tensed in his face. “And where is your teacher now?”
“I’d give everything to find out.”
“Please excuse me.” He stood abruptly.
As he walked away, my pencil hurried, filling in adjustments, adding what I’d felt beneath his skin. Wondering if the answer would appear on my paper.
When it did, I froze. Those eyes, they were always so serious. That mouth used to smile when I least expected it. And that little scar on the top of his right cheek, the souvenir of a long-ago tennis match. I traced the lines on the page, smudging them beneath my fingertips until it was as hazy as a dream. These days, that’s all he felt like.
“Mrs. Ladd,” I said, eyes still on the page. “The soldier I was drawing, did he have an appointment? Did he leave a name?”
As she wiped her hands on her smock and went to the book she kept in her desk, I flipped over the sketch that the soldier had left behind. I no longer needed her reply.
On the page he’d left behind was my face. Not the face of the woman I saw each morning in the mirror, but of a fifteen-year-old girl, lonely, scared, leaning out of a tower window wondering if she’d ever be strong enough to fly away.
I didn’t need Mrs. Ladd to tell me his name, because it was on my tongue, tasting like oranges and rain and the scent of roses. Years of memories, tasting like summertime.
Luc.
There was a time I thought about Clare every morning. There was a time I mentally catalogued everything beautiful so that I could write to her about it at the end of the day. But as the years passed, it faded. She never wrote back, and soon her tiptoes through my dreams were only occasional. Those mornings I’d wake up not remembering a thing, but blushing. She’d been there.
And then Chaffre died and I dragged myself, bleeding, from that cellar. I never dreamt about Clare after that day. All I had now were nightmares.
But she was here, in Paris. Grown up, but with those same clear eyes, that corkscrew of hair on her forehead, those insistent, gentle fingers. How could I not recognize her?
