The Charmers: A Novel(51)

I told them I was three months pregnant and was afraid I’d lose my baby, so they took me back to the Villa Romantica and summoned a doctor. It was thought the hospital was too public a place and privacy was essential if the case was not to be tainted. For when I went to court, they meant. Accused of two murders.

I was healthy. I was famous. I wasn’t even a widow because we had not been married, though I’d meant to propose to him when I told him about our happy event, that was no longer so happy. I had killed my baby’s father. I had no right to that baby. Iron Man Matthews had given me his heart and I had taken his life.

How does one live with such a burden on one’s soul? How do you come to terms with the death of the man you loved, when you were the cause of his death? Of course, there was no way.

It was Rex, my ex-lover, my honorable man, who came to my aid, who mapped out my defense and exactly why I would never have shot any man, especially one I loved. I was not just “any woman,” I remember him telling the courts. I was Jerusha. It would be impossible for any man to cheat on me. And, he added, he should know.

Stunned, the court took him at his word. They respected his courage in standing up in court, a man like him, with his background, for a woman like me, with my background. Jerusha was already a household word, and now he became one.

After it was over, I thanked him, of course, briefly, in private, in a small bleak room behind the court that smelled of stale coffee and cigarettes. The walls were institutional green, the overhead lighting harsh and unflattering, but still Rex told me I was beautiful.

“I’ll never forget,” he said as he kissed me first on one cheek, then the other, and then a third time, as we did in the South of France.

“That one is for memory,” he said, smiling as he departed.

I shall always love him for that.

In a quick decision, a judge found me guilty of the murder of the unknown woman and of my lover. But, this was France and this was a crime passionelle, a “love crime,” where it is believed the balance of one’s mind is disturbed. Add to that, not only was my lover said to have been cheating on me, I was also carrying his child.

They were lenient. I would not die for my crime. I would not even go to jail. I would be taken to some safe place in the country where I would bear my baby in secret. It would then be taken from me and given to the sorrowing members of the father’s family, to raise, in England. I would never be allowed to see my child again.

It was the cruelest punishment they could ever have thought of. No woman could ever have done this to me. This was men’s justice.

She was beautiful, my tiny baby. Well, at least I thought so, but then doesn’t every woman on first seeing her newborn, exclaim how beautiful she is? I named her for her beauty. Jolie. French for pretty. She was always, forever after to be known as Jolly. And I never did see her again.

I remained in France while she was to live in England with the large Matthews clan that loved her and cared for her and saw she was happy. To her, her mother was dead. Rest in peace. I know they would have told her that and I feel sure she nodded sorrowfully. I think she would have liked to have had a mother. I hope she would have liked me. I know I would have liked her.

I left the Villa Romantica and went to live in the lower mountain regions of the Luberon, where I bought a small farm, nothing more than a homestead really, a few hectares, a few animals, goats that butted me and made me laugh; a cow splotched black and white that gave me milk that I sold at market, with so much cream it would make anyone gain weight. I found a little brown dog in the window of a store with beseeching eyes that told me he was as lonely as I was. I named him Enfant, child in French, which got me some stares when I called for the child and a dog answered. The joke made me laugh at least. The gray cat who had adopted us at the villa came with me and soon acclimated himself, the way cats can, to his new surroundings. His devotion was first to his home and second to me, but I settled for that.

The canary was part of a traveling circus troupe that came through the small town. He walked across a wire singing his song while people applauded. I swear that, like myself, that bird never got over his moment of fame. He loved an audience. But I could not bear his life of servitude so I paid a small fortune, as it seemed to the owner, and took him back to his new home, where he sang every day—and sometimes nights—for my enjoyment, as well as his own.

So there we were, me and my new little family, making the best of what we had, who we were, content, happy even, in each other’s company. The past, with a great effort, was put behind us.

And then the war came and changed everything.





42

The real war, the hand-to-hand fighting, the tanks, the bombing, did not come immediately to the South of France. For a while, life seemed almost normal. The market opened every morning, the fishermen delivered their catch, though admittedly now smaller since they did not venture out as far; the purveyor of fresh eggs rode her bicycle, fragile bags dangling from the handlebars, then sat sipping her usual mug of cold coffee topped up with a slug of crème de menthe, “to keep out the morning chill,” as she told us, each and every morning.

At first, I kept to myself, as was my custom, but then I was sitting with my usual glass of red and a slab of St. André cheese, which I liked because of its semisoftness. It was not runny, but had just enough texture to get your knife through, to smear a little onto a piece of the excellent—baked at six A.M.—“baton,” which is the same as a baguette, only thinner, which gives more crust.