“Jean-Luc?” his wife called from the other side of the door, her voice mixing with the familiar morning sounds of clanging dishes and the crying baby. “Won’t you have any breakfast before you leave?”
“Coming, Marie.” The lawyer pushed himself away from the desk in the corner of the bedroom. Standing, he rolled up his papers and loaded them into his satchel. He crossed the small room in two strides, reaching for the vest and threadbare jacket that she had set out for him. When he had dressed in his plain gray suit, he checked his reflection in the filmy glass of the cracked mirror. Was that a gray hair he spotted? He leaned in closer, sighing. After the year he’d had, he wouldn’t be surprised if there were quite a few gray hairs streaking his dark ponytail. His hazel eyes now stared back at him from within a thin web of unfamiliar lines, a new one seeming to appear each week.
In the other room, the chamber that served as kitchen, dining room, and living room all in one, Marie stood with the baby balanced on her hip. She smiled when she spotted Jean-Luc in the door. “Will you take some coffee?”
“Hmm?” He leaned in and kissed them both, first his wife and then his son.
Marie leaned her head to the side, lifting the pot with her free hand.
“Oh, right. Coffee, yes. Please.” Jean-Luc sat at the table before a plate of black bread, the remnants of yesterday’s loaf, and a square of hard cheese. Marie served him watered-down coffee as he cleared the papers that he had left strewn across the table. She had every window open, but the air in their top-floor flat hung stale and oppressive from the months of thick heat.
“You were tossing and turning all night.” Marie shifted the baby and sat down across from her husband at the small table. “Trouble sleeping again?”
He swallowed a piece of the hard bread, nodding. Outside, the old Grocque woman still hollered at the dog, the beast yelping in response to another swipe of her broom. Marie looked from her husband to the open window and rose to close it.
“No, leave it open.” He reached for her hand and kept her at the table.
“Next time you decide to work in the middle of the night, you might try moving out here to—”
“I know. I should come out here so that I don’t wake you and Mathieu. I’m sorry.” He sipped the thin coffee as she sat back down. “Will you forgive me for imposing my accursed sleeplessness on you?”
She narrowed her eyes and reached for a piece of his cheese, which she broke off between her fingertips and began to nibble. “I suppose. But it’s getting worse, you know.”
“What is?”
She leaned her head to the side. “Your accursed sleeplessness.”
“I know,” he replied. They sat opposite each other in silence, he eating his breakfast, she nursing the baby. After several minutes, he propped his elbows on the table and cleared his throat. “I think I’m going to take the Widow Poitier’s case.”
Stroking the baby’s cheek, Marie lowered her eyes, and Jean-Luc waited for her reaction. After a pause, she said: “She can’t pay, can she?”
He shook his head, no.
She looked up at him, her brown eyes serious. “You’re a good man, Jean-Luc St. Clair.”
He took his coffee in his hands, concealing his grin. Her approval, these days so difficult to get, always elicited that grin from him. He looked at her now, her arms full with his baby, her eyes holding his own steadily. “So then, my beloved wife, you’ve forgiven me for removing you from your beloved south and bringing you to languish in this cramped garret?”
“Forgiven you?” Her lovely eyes widened, her lashes fluttering a few times, reminding him of the girl who had bewitched him. How glorious she was, still. “Who said anything about forgiving you?” She offered half a grin, and he couldn’t resist the urge to lean forward and kiss her.
He had moved her from the south of France just over a year ago, only a few months after they had been married. Her father had a steady, if not excessively lucrative, legal practice just outside of Marseille, not far from the village where Jean-Luc’s family had owned a small plot of land since the time of the Sun King, Louis XIV.
The St. Clair family had sustained the comfortable farmhouse on the small but fertile plot for centuries. It wasn’t until his father’s assumption of the property that the fortunes of the family—and indeed of the region, and all of France—had deteriorated so drastically. They had been forced to sell off most of the property, keeping only a half acre with one milk cow, a handful of chickens, and the house for the widower and his son, Jean-Luc. It wasn’t from a lack of industriousness that Jean-Luc’s father had lost the family land; old Claude St. Clair had been a faithful steward of his family’s assets. He was simply another victim of the droughts and crippling financial circumstances that had plagued the rest of the country under the latest Bourbon king, the heir of the Sun King’s heir, the most reviled man in France: Louis XVI. Yet, His Majesty could not be considered the most reviled monarch in France; that moniker went to his Austrian-born wife, Marie-Antoinette.