Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics (9 page)

Chapter 12.

Phoebe had been totally wrong about the sandwiches.
Room service in a hotel like this was like nothing she’d ever seen before, or even heard of. What happened was that a bellman brought up a folding dining table and set it in the middle of the room and moved two armless chairs that had been positioned elsewhere in the room which were the perfect height for the table. Another bellman arrived and set the table with pale pink linens, china, flatware, and candles. He lit the candles and left.

It was extremely romantic to be sitting in the
beautiful room at a candlelit table next to a roaring fireplace in a château with a handsome man. Phoebe commented on it and J.J. said, “These rooms are mostly booked by newlyweds. The château hotels are popular wedding venues nowadays and the best rooms are honeymoon suites. It’s helping many families save the old homes.”

Phoebe smiled at the difference in the term
old
in White Oak and in Saint-Symphorien-le-Château. In White Oak, the old houses they were trying to save were usually one-room log cabins. She tried to think of her community in French terms, White-Oak-Le-Log.

The next arrival was a waiter
with the first course of what would end up being a full two-star feast, carried up one course at a time, each one cooked perfectly and at just the right temperature. Clearly the food wasn’t prepared until the waiter indicated the diners were ready for the next course.

At first Phoebe was disappointed with the small amount of food, but then she realized it was just the appetizer. I
n between courses, when the waiter was gone, Phoebe asked J.J. what was going on. “I thought you were ordering something simple.”

“It would insult Mr.
Brissac if we came to his Michelin two-star restaurant and ordered tuna sandwiches. I made every effort to steer us away from foods that would have seemed strange or repugnant to you. I’ve noticed you seem to be a vegetarian, so I kept it to vegetables as much as possible. I’m certain we’ve still managed to horrify the chef, but he’s too professional not to enjoy the challenge of astonishing such difficult patrons as we appear to be.”

“I am a rube,” sai
d Phoebe. “And I’m not ashamed.” After she said it, Phoebe realized that sounded like an introduction for Rube-aholics Anonymous.

“You are
not
a rube, you are a naïf, and there’s a difference.”

* * *

J.J. had ordered baked camembert, buckwheat crepes filled with something she couldn’t identify, soupe à l’oignon, sole meunière, and cheese soufflé. For dessert, the waiter left an array of beautiful fruit tarts. The strawberry and raspberry were Phoebe’s favorites. “Thanks for ordering the tarts,” she said. “I could live off tarts and milk.”

“
I’ve noticed your sweet tooth.”

“You notice a lot of things,” Phoebe said. “
You’re a different kind of man than the ones I’m used to.” His observational skills were even more unexpected because he couldn’t see, but Phoebe didn’t say that.

* * *

Every time things slowed down, Phoebe had to struggle to catch up with where she was and what she was doing. It was like something out of a fantasy. Except she didn’t have the concepts for any of it before she actually saw it, so she couldn’t have dreamed it up on her own. She couldn’t wait to get back home and tell her friends about everything. She knew they’d find it entertaining, but not particularly enviable. People in White Oak enjoyed living simply.

“
Now I understand about the warming room in the pavilion and the tunnel from the kitchen in the Petit Trianon. I mean I get it now, about wealth and luxury in connection to food service,” Phoebe said. “It’s wonderful. This is the best meal I’ve ever had.”

* * *

Sometime in the middle of the meal Phoebe realized that J.J. had wanted to eat in the room so he could relax. She hadn’t understood how difficult it was for him to eat a formal meal in a strange place. He had beautiful table manners, but on account of his blindness he often needed to touch what he was eating in ways that weren’t considered strictly polite, and he dropped food more frequently than a sighted person would.

She guessed h
e’d been worried that his style of eating would embarrass her in a fancy restaurant. Not for the first time Phoebe marveled at how cruel the world could be.

In
the medical world your attitude needed to be
it is what it is
. The impracticality and self-centeredness of having an opinion about a person, or their injury or ailment, or about how they got it, was obvious. It was a stupid waste of time and an impediment to getting on with an important task that had to be done in a timely fashion, no matter what you might think about it. Having an opinion was so absurd you had to either get over the tendency or get out of the profession.

Phoebe could see why
Caterina and the Boss had impressed on her that the most important aspect of religious training was learning to drop all subjective opinions and judgments. They were counter-productive.

In fact,
it was the source of much of the evil in the world. Phoebe thought about the wars over culture or religion, genocide, oppression, jihads, and crusades. It was endless. And J.J. apparently had reason to know that it went all the way down to the pettiness of,
I paid a lot of money to eat in this restaurant and I don’t want to have to look at a blind man spilling peas off his fork while I’m trying to eat.

People.

* * *

Phoebe slept on a super-comfy rollaway bed near the fireplace. She insisted that J.J. take the bed. She went to sleep almost immediately after lying down. When she awoke
many hours later she was startled to find herself looking up toward a high ceiling that was round. At first she didn’t remember where she was and was frightened. Only after she sat up and saw J.J. sleeping across the room did she remember.

It was strange to share a room with a blind man. She had to constantly remind herself that he couldn’t see her. It didn’t matter what her pajamas looked like or her hair.
Nothing
about her looks mattered. She would never have wished for him to be blind, but it certainly added a handy dimension to a close working partnership.

Phoebe
got up as quietly as she could and peeked between the long curtains. It was dawn and there were two swans floating on the moat below. A light mist hung over the grounds. The scene was heartbreakingly beautiful.

* * *

She went into the bathroom and got ready for another day. When she came out. J.J. was sitting up in bed. He didn’t have his sunglasses on and she saw the scars from his accident. It wasn’t a happy sight, but it wasn’t terrible either. She knew the doctors would’ve done the best that they could for the little boy.

With his sunglasses on you saw only a handsome
, well-built man. Without them, you saw his vulnerability. It was like a brave soldier sitting up in bed before putting on his prosthetic legs.

“The bathroom is yours now,” she said.

“Did you fog the mirror?”

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t worry, I can shave without it.”

She laughed at his joke.

He got out of bed and stood in an old t-shirt and a faded pair of pajama bottoms. He went to his suitcase and pulled out a bag for toiletries, clean underwear, jeans, and a fresh shirt.

When he came back out he
asked, “Do I match?”

“Yes,” Phoebe said, “You look p
erfectly respectable.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, “At least I ho
pe not. That would mean I’ve gotten old.”

“Well, you looked a lot more rakish before you shaved. You know the style now is to have a stubble.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“You can try it while you’re away if you like. No one will ever know. My lips are sealed.”

He smiled. “Maybe I will. Remind me tomorrow morning,
do not shave
.”

“It’s a deal.”

* * *

T
hey checked out of Esclimont and attempted to pay for the room and the meal, but were told their bill was zero. All efforts to pay were politely refused.

J.J.
asked the man at the reception desk if he would mind writing a note to Mr. Brissac for him. He dictated a thank you note in French, which Phoebe could mostly follow. He thanked him and invited him to visit Hawaii and offered him the use of the Lanai house.

On their way out they took
the time to tour the exterior of the château. Phoebe described the brickwork and the turrets and the swans in the moat. There was a small pond in the middle of one of the lawns. As they approached it Phoebe got a feeling of horror and halted their approach.

J.J. could tell something was wrong from the stiffness in her arm. “What are you looking at?”

“It’s a little pond.”

“And?”

“At least one person has drowned in it, maybe more. It wasn’t an accident either. Someone or maybe several people were dragged out of the house and pulled down here and drowned on purpose.”

“Ah….”

“I can’t see any of it, but I can feel it.”

“With a house
this old, so close to Paris, unless you have some specific indication of the date, it’s hard to pinpoint when such a thing could have happened,” J.J. said. “It might’ve been during World War II, or the Revolution, or any number of times before that. This land is in an area prone to conflict and the house would’ve inspired great avarice.”

“It’s so strange to me,” said Phoebe.
“I can’t help but know these things and be affected by them, but apparently other people aren’t. They can come out here and enjoy the view. I don’t understand how or why I know it and they don’t. They can go places and have fun, but I can’t always do that.”

“Any trait we have is always a double edged sword,
” J.J. said, “a gift and a burden at the same time. Everything’s like that—intelligence, physical beauty, wealth, poverty.”

Or blindness
, she thought.

“Our life is one long opportunity to learn to
become wise enough to stay in the middle of the road, so we don’t get swept away by any one thing. Easy to say, hard to do.”

They walked back the way they came and with every step away from that pond Phoebe felt more optimistic about human nature.

Since they’d found nothing at Versailles, J.J. suggested they try Chambord next. CR was said to have been given rooms there for his use. There were all sorts of crazy rumors about him creating flawless gemstones and manufacturing precious metals in a laboratory in the château. More than one 18
th
century account mentioned seeing him in possession of remarkable jewels and making gifts of expensive stones to Madame P.

Phoebe
started the little Kia to let it warm up and pulled out her map to plan the route to their next stop. It was a little over a hundred kilometers, or about sixty miles, to Chambord. They could take a big road that went through Orleans or smaller roads that went via Blois. They decided to use the smaller roads through the more rural areas.

Phoebe was shivering
as she consulted her guidebook. The Kia was not putting out any heat yet. “Chambord is the biggest château in the Loire Valley,” she read. “There are 440 rooms, 282 fireplaces, and 84 staircases surrounded by a 13,000 acre park enclosed by a twenty-mile-long wall. It’s the largest enclosed forest in Europe. The area inside the walls is the size of the City of Paris!

“Good grief,
” she marveled, “can you imagine building a wall around your house that’s twenty miles long?”

“If you
’re a king, it’s a job’s program,” J.J. said.

“The name Chambord come
s from Cambo-Ritos which means
the ford at the bend
in the Celtic language. The guy who built it, King François I, or King Francis of the Large Nose, stayed here several times for hunting, but all in all, he occupied the place for a total of seventy-two days.

“That’s
so pitiful,” Phoebe said, “he only got to stay in his big new castle for two and a half months.”

“Maybe after he saw it, he didn’t like it.”

“I wonder if anyone ever called him King Francis of the Large Nose to his face?”

“Probably not,” J.J. laughed.

“If you were a king, what do you think they’d call you?” Phoebe asked.

“That’s too easy,” he said. “Jean-Jacques the Blind. What would they have called you?”

“I don’t know,” Phoebe lied. She was glad she hadn’t been a queen because she was pretty sure her title would’ve been
Queen Phoebe of the Large Buttocks
, to put it politely. Before he could press her for an answer she resumed reading from the guidebook. “During World War II, the art from the Louvre and Compiègne museums was stored here, including the
Mona Lisa
and the
Venus de Milo
.”

“That’s interesting,” he said.