Invitation to Provence by Elizabeth Adler
PROLOGUE
NOTHING MUCH ever changes in the village of Marten-de-Provence. The terrace café now has plastic chairs instead of tin, and the awning is green instead of blue, but the Café des Colombes is the same, still owned by the Jarré family who’ve run it for decades, and the simple menu hasn’t changed much in thirty years either. Alliers grocery shop under the arched arcade is still there, its fresh fruits and vegetables in wooden crates arranged tidily out front with hand-chalked price tickets. The fountain with the stone drinking trough drizzles lazily and a couple of dogs lounge in the shade next to the old men in berets, sitting on wooden benches, sticks clutched in their gnarled hands, watching their small world go by. The doors to the little peeling pink stucco church are open and a woman in a yellow summer dress climbs the worn steps carrying an armload of bright flowers. The village even smells the same, of coffee and roasting chicken, of crushed thyme and ripe melons and horses.
A long mellow-stone wall bordering the chateau grounds runs along the lane next to the square, from which small houses wind up the cobbled streets into the hot rocky hillsides. And stuck on top of the loftiest hill of all is Saint-Sylvestre, a village perché, a mini fortress of old, its walls dug deep into the rock. Now it’s a haven for artists and the cultural tourists who come to its annual summer music festival in the former monastery, set among fields of lavender, and whose great bronze bell still tolls the passing of time.
Poplar trees line the lane that runs alongside the chateau’s grounds, their branches forming a tunnel of green overhead through which sunlight filters like scattered gold coins. The big pillars topped with carved stone griffins marking the chateau’s entrance are still there, their features worn from centuries of gusty mistral winds, and beyond them, through the big iron gates, is the long cypress-lined driveway that leads, straight as a die, to the Chateau des Roses Sauvages.
Tree-studded lawns sweep away to the left with a glimpse of the lake glittering silver in the sunlight, then the chateau comes into view, soft as an ancient fresco against its background of rocky hills, with the spiked ridges of purple mountains as a backdrop.
The house glows ochre-yellow in the evening sunlight, its tiled roof dipping and curving. Water spills musically from a fountain on the flowery terrace, and chestnut trees cast their welcome shade. Of course, in summer the big doors are always left open to catch the breeze, and also, once upon a time, to welcome visitors.
Now Rafaella Marten stands alone in the chateau’s sunlit hall. A bird trills outside, then all is silent. Leaning on her cane, she stares out on the magical vista, at the allée of century-old chestnut trees that leads to the lake and the fantastical Japanese bridge, built by her great-grandfather, connecting to a small island. On hot summer nights when she was a girl, she would wander across that bridge to sleep naked in the little gazebo, safe from prying eyes, with a soft breeze to tantalize her restless young body.
…Ah… youth, Rafaella thinks, smiling at the memory, so long ago … when everything seemed possible.
It is a hot day but the faded parquet floor feels cool under her bare feet, for even now she still like to go barefoot. Her gypsyish red skirt swirls around her ankles as she walks, the very same skirt she had worn the day she met the man who became the love of her life and who most certainly was not her husband.
She glances ruefully at herself in the long gilt rococo mirrors spaced along the hall: at the mass of silvery hair pinned into a loose bun and the lined parchment-skin, at the strong nose that even in her youth had given her an arrogant look, and the soft, full mouth that gave lie to it. Only her eyes are the same, heavy-lidded and the blue of the Mediterranean, which is not so many miles away and where, once upon a time, she had swum every glorious day of summer.
Rafaella lives alone at the chateau now, with only Haigh, her English butler and dearest friend and companion, to look after her. Haigh is a little bantam cock of a man, short with spindly limbs and the thin, deprived face of a poor Cockney boy. He’s been the Marten family butler for over fifty years and is almost as old as Rafaella.
There’s nothing Haigh doesn’t know about Rafaella. He’d been there when she was young and vital, commanding her small empire—the chateau and its vineyards. He’d been there through the good times and the bad. She has no secrets from him.
Once this house had rung with children’s laughter, the splashes and happy shrieks coming from the swimming pool, the plop of tennis balls on the red clay court, the tinkle of ice in cocktail glasses as the sun set red as fire over the white stony hills. But now the doors are locked, the rooms behind shuttered, the lovely old furniture shrouded in dustcovers. The family is long gone, scattered to the four corners of the earth, shattered by scandals over money and women and by a mysterious death.
Rafaella leans on her cane, listening for sounds of the past. A grandfather clock ticks. A bee buzzes, trapped in the window. Loneliness hangs in the air along with the scent of the wild roses that give her chateau its name.
It seems to Rafaella that the chateau is dying of that loneliness. It needs youth and energy, love and laughter. It needs a family to overcome the past and to bring it back to life.
Her mind finally made up, she walks back through the house, whistling for the dogs. They come running, claws skittering on the cool parquet, the massive brown-and-white Bernese mountain dog she’d named Louis because his floppy ears and soulful eyes gave him the look of one of the old French kings. Mimi scrambles behind him, a miniature black poodle, a mere fraction of Louis’s size, though she seems not to know it. By now, in dog years, they are almost as old as Rafaella.