We are used to loving.
Finally they were together and safe. In the protection of the pines.
Her gaze traveled, inevitably, up the hill to the bench where Armand and Clara sat quietly. Not talking.
“What do you think they’re not talking about?” asked Myrna.
The large black woman took the comfortable wing chair across from Reine-Marie and leaned back. She’d brought her own mug of tea from her bookstore next door, and now she ordered Bircher muesli and fresh-squeezed orange juice.
“Armand and Clara? Or Ruth and Rosa?” asked Reine-Marie.
“Well, we know what Ruth and Rosa are talking about,” said Myrna.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” the two women said in unison and laughed.
Reine-Marie took a forkful of French toast and looked again at the bench on the top of the hill.
“She sits with him every morning,” said Reine-Marie. “Even Armand’s baffled.”
“You don’t think she’s trying to seduce him, do you?” Myrna asked.
Reine-Marie shook her head. “She’d have taken a baguette with her if she was.”
“And cheese. A nice ripe Tentation de Laurier. All runny and creamy—”
“Have you tried Monsieur Béliveau’s latest cheese?” asked Reine-Marie, her husband all but forgotten. “Le Chèvre des Neiges?”
“Oh, God,” moaned Myrna. “It tastes like flowers and brioche. Stop it. Are you trying to seduce me?”
“Me? You started it.”
Olivier placed a glass of juice in front of Myrna and some toast for the table.
“Am I going to have to hose you two down again?” he asked.
“Désolé, Olivier,” said Reine-Marie. “It was my fault. We were talking about cheeses.”
“In public? That’s disgusting,” said Olivier. “I’m pretty sure it was a photo of Brie on a baguette that got Robert Mapplethorpe banned.”
“A baguette?” asked Myrna.
“That would explain Gabri’s fondness for carbs,” said Reine-Marie.
“And mine,” said Myrna.
“I’m coming back with the hose,” said Olivier as he left. “And no, that’s not a euphemism.”
Myrna spread a thick piece of toast with melting butter and jam and bit into it while Reine-Marie took a sip of coffee.
“What were we talking about?” Myrna asked.
“Cheeses.”
“Before that.”
“Them.” Reine-Marie Gamache nodded in the direction of her husband and Clara sitting silently on the bench above the village. What were they not talking about, Myrna had asked. And every day Reine-Marie had asked herself the same thing.
The bench had been her idea. A small gift to Three Pines. She’d asked Gilles Sandon, the woodworker, to make it and place it there. A few weeks later an inscription had appeared on it. Etched deeply, finely, carefully.
“Did you do that, mon coeur?” she’d asked Armand on their morning walk, as they paused to look at it.
“Non,” he’d said, perplexed. “I thought you’d asked Gilles to put it on.”
They’d asked around. Clara, Myrna, Olivier, Gabri. Billy Williams, Gilles. Even Ruth. No one knew who’d carved the words into the wood.
She passed this small mystery every day on her walks with Armand. They walked past the old schoolhouse, where Armand had almost been killed. They walked through the woods, where Armand had killed. Each of them very aware of the events. Every day they turned around and returned to the quiet village and the bench above it. And the words carved into it by some unknown hand—
Surprised by Joy
* * *
Clara Morrow told Armand Gamache why she was there. And what she wanted from him. And when she was finished she saw in those thoughtful eyes what she most feared.
She saw fear.
She’d placed it there. She’d taken her own dread, and given it to him.
Clara longed to take back the words. To remove them.
“I just wanted you to know,” she said, feeling her face redden. “I needed to tell someone. That’s all—”
She was beginning to blather and that only increased her desperation.
“I don’t expect you to do anything. I don’t want you to. It’s nothing, really. I can handle it on my own. Forget I said anything.”
But it was too late. She could not stop now.
“Never mind,” she said, her voice firm.
Armand smiled. It reached the deep crevices around his eyes and Clara saw, with relief, that there was no longer any fear there.
“I mind, Clara.”
She walked back down the hill, the sun on her face and the slight scent of roses and lavender in the warm air. At the village green she paused and turned. Armand had sat back down. She wondered if he would pull out that book, now that she was gone, but he didn’t. He just sat there, legs crossed, one large hand holding the other, self-contained and apparently relaxed. He stared across the valley. To the mountains beyond. To the outside world.