6:31 p.m.

‘Fabrienne… Fabrienne…’
Raoul snatches the finished device from her. She moves a hand towards it but he pushes her away. ‘I can’t let you hold it again until I know why it has this effect on you.’
He puts the device in the empty clock-case at the end of the bench, locking the door against the fine bronze gears and gleaming dials.
‘What happened to you? Where did you go?’
‘I didn‘t go anywhere.’ She knows the lie will register through the touch of her fingers on his skin… and hopes that he will allow her this small deception.
The vision of a high sun over ochre dust and small rocks had been too complete… there had been other people… other voices… she pushes her fingers through her long blonde hair, shaking it out.
Raoul leans back against the bench. ‘When I touch it, the whole mechanism seems to spin at random and I can make no sense of it. Wherever it is your mind decides to take you, it seems you must go alone.’
‘That’s because…’
The rest of the statement eludes her. It has disappeared along with the voices and the visions when Raoul took away the device.
In the place the mechanism had taken her to, she felt she had already owned the answer. The key to that must be somewhere between now… and there.
‘Raoul… I need to hold it again.’
‘You know that I can’t let you.’
‘You are my brother… not my keeper.’
‘I am both.’
In her vision, she had experienced a sensation of hands pushing through hair, again and again, displacing a weight and lustre unlike her own.
She stares at her fingers in the poor workshop light.
There is a fine ochre dust in the webs between.
‘I may not be alone, Raoul.’
‘I will always be here.’
‘Of course you will.’
Her smile masks an earlier vision, also shown her by the device, of a bullet carving a slow path through the air. It is copper-coloured and the airstream through which it flows draws a cloak of silence behind it.
With the part of her brain still connected to the device, she wonders why the bullet is not rotating.

August 17th
TUESDAY

5:32 a.m.

Fabrienne has woken early and dressed in silence. The device had called her again from her childhood room in Maman’s.
She has made her way quietly to Rue Coste Chaude where Raoul is still sound asleep in Artus’ old bed in the house that cradles the workshop.
She takes the device from among the rafters where Raoul has hidden it, but for now it remains silent in her hands. She replaces it in its hiding place.
She sweeps through sawdust and filings on the bench, clearing a familiar patch. Under her fingers a faded black stain describes the rough shape of a cross. She presses until her arm aches. This stain and her memories are all she has left of Artus… but his blood soaked into the bench has always seemed to be the real bond.
He had shown it to her many years before, trying to explain in the way a child might understand that while it remained, so would a part of him.
She stares upwards in an appeal to the dust of time layered on the rafters and shelves but the whole workshop is silent tonight. The drawers are lipped shut, the window tight and impenetrable.
‘Artus… I need another pair of shoes… I have been shown a journey. One I must make without you or Raoul.’
She opens her eyes again, searching for the sign she knows has been left.
In his time, Auguste Godenot had left the drawings. She has always wondered if he could have known… but no… that seems impossible.
Hanging from a nail behind the door is a sheet of oak-tanned leather. Cut from it were the soles of the shoes that Artus had repaired for her when she first visited Oriel. He had wanted to use it for other things but she had asked him not to… the holes being reminders of the emptiness created by her silent years. She takes it down, noticing two larger shapes drawn on the leather. Dropping it to the floor she places her bare feet inside the patterns. They fit exactly. She looks up, and begins to read aloud the carved sampler the leather has been hiding.
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire…
She knows exactly where the key to the Chapel padlock hangs… she has stolen it many times.

 

Chapelle de MAIRIE
Rue EUGENIE IMBERT
La Roque-sur-Pernes

August 17th
TUESDAY

6:48 a.m.

The candle is so vast that decades have accumulated in frozen waves of wax around its base. Fabrienne lights it with one of Raoul’s boiler matches. The plaster saints are more than real in this shifting light… bat-wings of emotion flickering their painted eyes as she moves around.
Behind the altar is another statue, much smaller than the others.
Inscribed at its base are the words:

The Ecstasy of Santa Teresa De Àvila
After the style of Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Auguste Godenot
1939

She sets the statue on the altar where the candle sheds its glow.
There is something about the face of Santa Teresa that seems familiar to Fabrienne. The painted eyes of grey-blue… the gold-leaf of her hair… but her expression is what now seeks all of Fabrienne’s attention.
The Angel inflicting her pain is tall, handsome and remorseless. The strength of his arm so assured… the spear in his hand so informed by the way the Saint offers her heart for piercing that he has little need for aim.
Fabrienne blows the dust from it.
The tip of the spear is bright red… the only relief from the dusty wood and the verdigris of the brass. She scrapes at it with a fingernail. It is hard and polished under the dust.
She holds a match to it and sealing wax flows like blood across the Saint’s breast.
Beside the Angel’s fingers are two small wings, she grips them and the spear slides easily from his hand. Held in the light it is fluted unevenly along its length. The tip she has uncovered is hollow and smooth with a bevelled edge… the way she has suspected that it must be.
The wings fit inside her own fingers like the head of a key.
Raoul will take this from her if he finds it… but now, not even for his sake… could she wish to be rid of it.

L'atelier de Raoul
Rue Coste Chaude
La Roque-sur-Pernes

7:20 a.m.

Raoul has never been good at secrets. Fabrienne has always known where he has hidden the device. It has called out to her so often across the early hours, dragging her from sleep to read again the old magazine article Auguste had stashed away along with his notes and drawings.
Taking it down now, she inserts the key she has found fully home, prodding the wheels into alignment as it passes.
As it reaches the farthest point the light above her is extinguished.
Fabrienne stares upwards to find nothing but an echo of the bulb behind her eyes… but in that nothing there seems to be everything… the pain that Raoul had to embrace… his taking of another life to save hers and that of Maman… and somehow that pain is sweet and she recognises the desperation and goodness contained within his gift… and the selfishness of silence which was all she’d had to offer by way of return.
She turns the key.
‘Fabrienne… No!’
Culled from sleep by a sudden compulsion of voices, Raoul prises the device from her fingers.
‘You promised me. What kind of a sister breaks her promise to…’
‘Raoul there is something here… but I don’t know what it is.’
‘It is a nothing, Fabrienne. And if it is anything it is called danger. A thing you have always failed to recognise.’
‘But I have never shied away from.’
‘I know you are not safe alone with this. I will look after it while you accept the archeology place you were offered at Uni. Perhaps the roots of this future you think you see are buried somewhere in the past.’

L‘Université de Nîmes
Languedoc-Roussillon
France
2006

May 23rd.
Tuesday

9:30 A.M.

‘Professeur Henri, I have to leave…’
‘But Fabrienne, your graduation… and the dig on Antikythera you requested with André Barnard… I have a letter only this morning. He has agreed and the papers are due back from the Cretan Authorities in one week.’
‘I can be back by then.’
Henri’s reply carries the concern she has lately come to expect. Since she had asked him to clarify a date for her, he has become attentive in a way she finds uncomfortable.
‘He has taken on a new assistant already this week. Do not let this opportunity slip away.’
‘I had a phone call today. My brother, Raoul… he has been…’
She hesitates for the words she doesn’t want to speak, scanning the length of the path and the oaks that line either side where they cast light and shade, but finds no further inspiration. These years away from Maman and Raoul have seemed an eternal winter.
Henri Lefevre intrudes into her thoughts.
‘There has been an accident?’
‘No… a fire in his workshop.’
‘Is that not the same thing?’
‘I can’t say. I just know my brother. He is a lot of things but not careless. I need to find out what happened.’
‘Can you not leave that to the police?’
‘The police? What makes you think of the police?’
‘I don’t know. Would that not be a natural assumption?’
‘Professeur… Raoul and I… there are things the police would never understand.’
Even after all the time he has spent with her, Henri Lefevre finds himself unable to penetrate the ages that seem to layer and shift within her face behind the twenty-six years of her perfect skin, the subtle geometry of her nose and the arc of her lips.
His question stalls at the pale, grey-blue surface of her eyes, with their single green fleck almost hidden in the left iris.
‘Such as?’
‘I cannot tell you that, Professeur. It would not be fair.’
‘Fair to whom?’
‘To you.’
He steers her away from the path, walking them beneath an oak where the leaf-shadow ripples the blonde of her hair, all the while fighting to combat the emotional gravity of her attraction.
‘Can you not let me be the judge of that?’
‘No.’
‘Then you must make your own judgement. I only hope it leads you safely back here in time.’
As he reaches out to take her hand, the movement triggers pain in the freshly-stitched wound across his ribs.