The House with Blue Shutters

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Authors: Lisa Hilton
Tags: Literature
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boys. Monsieur François Boissière might well be from Toulouse, but she had taken her diploma in Paris, and was more than equal to him. If he thought she was going to waste her education teaching crochet and catechism he would have a surprise, that was all.
    So Mademoiselle Lafage went to lodge up at Aucordier’s with that poor child Oriane and her idiot brother. LaurentNadl came with a chalky bucket and distempered the walls of the best bedroom, which Oriane had the sense not to mention was where her father had twitched and raved to death. Mademoiselle Lafage’s possessions were dragged up from Castroux on a cart.
    They included the artistic blue and yellow curtains that Mademoiselle had sewn and hung herself, and which she couldn’t see were deserved by the new teacher. For the first time in Oriane’s memory, a fire was lit upstairs. Mademoiselle Lafage arranged her books, hung up the framed copy of her diploma, and unpacked, to William’s joy, a large elongated bellows of an instrument that she explained was called a bassoon. She let it be known that she would take her evening meal at the small table in her own room, and afterwards, if William did not become too excited, she allowed him to stand in the doorway as she practised, her legs stretched out in front of her, toes in their black shoes straining to a point on the high notes and her eyes squinting with concentration behind her glasses. The schoolmistress provided her own coffee and sugar, and washed her underthings in the flowered china basin that had belonged to Oriane’s grandmother.
    Oriane felt neither obliged nor ungrateful to Mademoiselle Lafage, though she was thankful for the simplicity of her presence.
    William was now able to wash and dress himself, and in the early mornings she allowed him to watch the coffee on the fire as she went about the yard, releasing the hens, stuffing bread and hay through the bars of the rabbit cages, watering the goats. On cold days, the little animals were reluctant to leave their warm, pungent stall, and she set William to chase them, flailing his arms and making a strange deep
    lowing noise that never failed to startle the silly creatures and send them hopping out into the wind. Sometimes Mademoiselle Lafage would look out of her window, a scarf tied around her sheared brown hair, and laugh as William pursued the goats enthusiastically into the mud. Oriane peeled the vegetables for the soup and left them in a pot of water, wiped coffee and mud from William and set off with him in her clogs, her clean apron rolled up in a bag.
    William hated cold days, the wind slashed painfully at his ears and he yelped, rubbing his palm against the vulnerable holes.
    Oriane tried to protect him by tying a shawl of their mother’s around his cap, so that his head bobbed monstrous large in the silver mist. In the unpredictable time between January and March, when dense, icy fog was succeeded by days of startling brightness, the sky as rich as ink, the braziers were lit in the dawn orchards. Some were oil stoves with lids to protect them from the wind, some just little clay pots filled with coals, which glowed orange all along the valley, around the chateau hill and up over the brow at Saintonge. Stumpy figures stood around them, wrapped into mushrooms, with the tips of their noses poking out of their scarves. They could be frightening, Oriane thought, these strange little goblin fires, if their purpose was not so tender. If the blossom was not saved, there would be no fruit, so the men of Castroux, even men like Camille Lesprats who got drunk in Dubois’s and beat his own grandchildren, rose in the dark and coaxed the precious heat from the braziers, watching the newborn flowers until the sun rose as if they believed they could warm the trees by their own human presence.
    Madame Nadl, Papie, Laurent and Cathérine were all kind.
    William spent each morning at Murblanc, though Oriane feared at first that he would be in the

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