Conscience Point

Unbridled Books

Chapter One

It Began in France on a May morning of their lovely stolen holiday. They sat, she and Nick, on the terrace of an inn shoehorned into George Sand's country estate, reveling in the morning sun, the silvery warble of merles. Air that felt Breathed for the first time. When Nick nosed their Avis Renault into the driveway the evening Before, they might have crossed into an earlier century....

"Do you get many visitors here off-season?" he asked the innkeeper. Scoping out the terrain. He'd just signed up a book on Sand's Beloved Berry region, a quilt of dreaming farm fields and dark hedgerows, in 1997 still little known to tourists.

"Not as many as now," said the innkeeper, a woman with '40s-style marcelled hair. "Though we did have a writer here all winter, working on a screenplay about George Sand and Chopin-and Sand's daughter. There's a girl knew how to make trouble."

Nick frowned, Maddy uncertain why. The innkeeper continued to hover. Not the first time Maddy noticed how she and Nick acted as attractants; they must give off a musk. She watched the woman's gaze linger on Nick: the wolf-grey eyes, longish space between nose and lips, tawny weave of hair. The tastiness of him. Humbly, she demishrugged at the innkeeper. Never flaunt happiness. Hide.

"Just think, it's this time of year we first met," she said when they were finally alone.

He circled an arm around her chair. "Have I told you you're nicer now? Back then you were kind of ... thistle-y."

"Damn right. You were ogling me naked on the beach."

"You're prettier now, too." Blind-Nick the hypercritical-to the faint seam imprinted by the pillow on her cheek and other stunts of her morning face. He shifted his chair closer and planted tickly kisses down her neck and she laughed giddily. "Mmm, wanna go back to the room?"

"Might kill us."

"Uh-huh."

Last night Nick vexed at himself, at odds with his own body. Then, this morning, he'd surprised them both. Early farm sounds beyond their window, pails clanking; gamey barnyard smells. She imagined them wartime lovers hiding out in the countryside. Her face twisted away, throat arched ... wait, wait ... fingers at the hard ridge of muscle on either side of his spine. Their cries mingling with a rooster's below. They'd arrived at breakfast overflowing with the goodwill born of coming from the pads of your toes to the roots of your hair.

Their waiter, carrot-haired and fey, laid out breakfast with balletic flourishes: flesh orange juice and a basket of tartines, glazed earthenware crocks of apricot preserves and sweet butter, two white pitchers of steaming coffee and milk. They dug in.

"I been thinking, if they want, I dunno ... Video Kitten, to hell with Chronicle, Nick said, picking up an earlier debate. "I mean, you give concerts and do the show-you give good value." Grimacing at his own expression.

"Nicky, the suits don't dote on me quite like you."

"Well, who does?" He smiled and daubed a crusty tartine with chunky preserves. "Anyway, I been thinking, maybe you should pare down a little, do just the piano. Give us a little wiggle room. More of this." He nodded toward the terrace. "Though maybe you enjoy"-raising an eyebrow-"working like a galley slave?" Maybe; how well he knew her. "Multitasking, as a new editor in my office would say," Nick continued. "She also 'transitions,' when she isn't 'partying' ... or 'impacting.' ... Never met a noun that couldn't be a verb. The other day she flipped her hair in my face."

At some point they'd descend into old-fart-dom, Maddy thought contentedly. But not yet. A clock chimed the hour from an ochre Romanesque church across the square. They listened, transfixed, the metal clangor seeming to summons the faithful from down the years. Nick fished the Michelin guide from the flayed pocket of his chinos. "So. We'll check out Sand's chteau first, okay? Hmm, says here she scribbled her novels all night on a dropleaf shelf in a wall cupboard.... Then we'll drive to La Chatre for lunch. After that"-his finger traced a road-"Bourges! I've always wanted to show you the cathedral. The musician angels in the side chapel ... the archangel Michael ..." As guide to the world's treasures, Nick had no equal. She sat back, luxuriating in his voice, a baritone dashed with boarding-school drawl, and the newly minted air and warbling merles, rolling and rerolling notes as if telling a crystal rosary. What more could there be than this? Let nothing change. She wanted to stop here at the vertical ray of the sun.

"What luck, we've got the joint to ourselves!" They stood in the courtyard of Nohant, as the estate was called, surveying the manor house where Sand had hosted a running house party for geniuses.

"Place really makes you believe in spirits," Nick said, glancing around. In fact, something animate about the weathered rose facade and pale blue shutters, dreaming at attention. "Uh-oh, don't look now."

Two yellow buses came chuffing up the driveway, raising a cloud of chalky dust. They air-braked to a stop before the chteau and spit out a cargo of twittering adolescents in shorts and knee socks. Maddy wrinkled her nose. "And they're German."

"For godssake, during the war they weren't even born."

She and Nick cultivated friction, she suspected, to certify they were two separate people.

The kids pooled in the courtyard. A boy with a platinum crew cut abruptly flung himself on a dark, gangly girl and kissed her with puppyish abandon. The other kids aimed cameras at the chteau or thumbed guidebooks, ignoring the passion in their midst. It went on, the kiss, gnawing, slurpy, desperate. Both comic and arousing.

Maddy shifted her attention to Sand's chteau, the large atelier-style window projecting from the second story. "Nicky, look, that must be the studio Sand built for Delacroix." No response. She turned to see Nick staring at the junior lovers in horror, as if sighting a pair of revenants. "Darling, don't gawk." She elbowed his arm. "Imagine, Delacroix and Chopin used to walk around here talking Art capital A. 'Serenaded by nightingales,'" she read from the guidebook. "'In the azure of the transparent night, a sublime melody arises.'"

If Nick heard, he gave no sign.

Maddy slipped her arm through his and smiled at his clench-jawed profile. "Doesn't that child have a touch of Laila?" The same starved-cat allure.

Nick unstuck his attention from the couple. "Oh, Laila's a lot prettier!"

Nick doted on her adopted daughter, endowing her with a beauty she didn't quite have. That they'd knitted into a family was among Maddy's greatest pleasures-though she winced when Laila playfully called him "Uncle Nick." "Reminds me, I want to get Laila a present in La Chatre. Maybe a Cacharel blouse-to wean her from the homeboy look." She sighed. "If only we could wean her from Jed Oliver."

"Classic mistake to interfere, just make him seem more desirable," Nick said in a prissy voice.

The lovers surfaced from their kiss. They looked around with the glutted eyes of beasts after a kill. The guide had arrived, dangling a giant metal key. Everyone traipsed after her into the vestibule, its stone walls exhaling a chill harvested over centuries.

They shuffled tourist-style into a dining room dominated by a Venetian chandelier of blue and pink...