She glanced at Matthieu Rosier to find him gazing at her and not the walls. Of course, he would be used to the walls. Her, he must find a very strange creature. Her breath shortened at the look, and she didn’t think it was from the climb.
“Why is it yours?” she asked suddenly. “The valley? Out of all the cousins?”
“Technically, most of it is still my grandfather’s. He’s only deeded part of it over to me. But he rewrote his will right after my father died, and so it’s been intended for me since I was five years old. And he’s ninety, you know. That doesn’t mean he’s entirely ready to let go, but mostly I run it and have since I got out of school.”
“Like the oldest prince for an aging king?”
The oddest expression crossed his face. “We’re really an old peasant family. We’ve been working the land since the Renaissance. I think prince might be a bit of an exaggeration.”
His definition of paysan might be a little different from her definition of peasant, she decided. Little signs of luxury abounded. The nice cars Tristan and Damien drove, the watch on Damien’s wrist. Matt himself dressed in worn jeans and T-shirts, with no jewelry, not even a watch, but he was heir to an entire valley off the French Riviera, and he’d just told her what a few small acres of that land were worth.
“Are you the oldest of the cousins, then?” She followed him under the thick arch onto cobblestone streets. An apartment was built into the very wall itself, no wider than her armspan, but with an old wood door and a little window, veiled with a lace curtain, geraniums growing in a pot before it.
“No, Raoul. Then Lucien. But my father was the oldest son. If he’d lived, it would have come to him first, and I might have been a grandfather myself before it came to me. But…” His lips winced downward, and he shook his head, turning onto a steep, shadowed stair-street that ran up along the houses built against and into the old medieval walls. A great, ancient vine, thicker than a man’s wrist, ran up the stair-street almost like a banister.
“What happened to him?”
A bleakness settled over his face and then a kind of stoic blankness. “He and my mother went out shopping for my birthday. And they…they were found later at the bottom of one of those cliffs. They don’t know if my dad lost control or someone hit their car and knocked it off.”
Her stomach tightened at the sudden, horrible vision of a little Matt, tousled black curls around his face, staring uncomprehendingly at some adult in tears, maybe his grandfather, telling him his parents were gone. She reached out and caught his hand before she could even think, holding it tightly. “I’m so sorry.”
He looked down at her hand a moment, and then slowly closed his around hers and held on, a little too hard. “It was a blow to my grandfather. No one expected it. And after that, he focused on me. He and my grandmother took over raising me.”
It must have been a blow to him. Her strong, capable left hand that could play even the most difficult chords, help produce the most amazing sounds, looked too small and inadequate for this task. She squeezed his hand, to try to give him more. “I’m really sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
She kept her hand tight around his. One thing about a guitarist’s left hand—she had a very strong squeeze.
“I don’t really remember that much,” he said finally, low. “Just…the shock of it, you know? Like a bomb had gone off, and you couldn’t hear anything or think anything for the longest time. There was just this ringing in your ears that seemed to go on forever and ever. And afterward you try to be…careful, about the other people around you. Not to take it for granted that they’ll be there the next day, too.”
You, he kept saying, as if he couldn’t say I. He had to keep that verbal distance, still to this day.
She stared at their hands, feeling very grave. Conscious suddenly of her own transience in his life. She was a wandering minstrel, right? The “wandering” part was as inherent to who she was as the “minstrel”…right? From a family of recent immigrants, war-torn and displaced, to a child of divorce with a father only erratically present in her childhood, to the pressures of touring now. Even that happiest period of her life, traveling around the U.S. in her little van, busking around Europe, she had been footloose and fancy-free. Matt might be all roots, but she was all wings.
But surely nothing about their vacation flirtation mattered in this discussion. There was no way she could possibly even imagine herself having the importance in his life that his own parents would have had when he was five. When she left, it wouldn’t matter, as long as she didn’t take his land with her.