DTLD 3

Chapter 3

A Grown-Up Color

“Sacha Vinoc’h!”

Enzo Vinoc’h, now fifteen years old, caught his little sister just as she was sneaking over the lemon-colored gate and growled at her.

“I lied to Mother that you were asleep. If she’d caught you sneaking out, you wouldn’t have dreamed of going outside for another ten days.”

“Thanks, Enzo.”

The smell of chocolate wafted from Sacha’s mumbling lips. He’d told her to wait at home eating chocolate, and she’d gone and wolfed down just that and snuck outside on her own? Dumbfounded, Enzo pressed a hand to his forehead. He seriously wondered whether this child was even aware that she had nearly died not long ago.

“What about the homework I gave you?”

Surely she hadn’t gone out after finishing it all. Enzo’s eyes narrowed.

“I really wanted to do it too, but the workbook accidentally flew away in the wind.”

“All of it?”

Enzo crossed his arms and asked slantedly. Sacha nodded without a shred of hesitation.

“Every last bit!”

“If you’re going to lie, at least show some effort.”

As Enzo’s glaring eyes flashed like a snake encountered at night, Sacha, sensing danger, hurriedly tried to change the subject.

“Never mind that—listen. I met someone I’d never seen before in the forest today. He was wearing a uniform.”

“A uniform?”

Enzo urged her to tell him more. Only after hearing Sacha’s explanation—that the person she’d met in the forest had worn a black uniform with a blue collar and gold buttons—did he relax.

“That’s the uniform of the Sarcassay Military Academy. The son of Count Lafayette, who attends the academy, must be staying at the castle. It’s his last summer vacation before graduation.”

Somehow Enzo’s tone felt like a scolding for not even knowing that, so Sacha puckered her lips for no reason. Even she knew that the count’s son here attended Bricenne’s finest institution of higher education. She just hadn’t known what that school’s uniform looked like.

“So the person I met is Count Lafayette’s son?”

“Of course not. What did you just hear me say? The count’s son stays at the castle. He must be a school friend who came along, or a guest.”

“I see. I didn’t know what school he attended.”

Looking closely, Sacha was unusually excited. Her round cheeks were red as cherries, and her big eyes sparkled with curiosity she couldn’t hide. Enzo, who had been stroking his chin, stopped and asked.

“That person didn’t frighten you, did he?”

“No. He wasn’t interested in me at all. I asked if he was lost, and he ignored me and fell asleep.”

Perhaps recalling being ignored, Sacha immediately drooped. Her downcast eyes were large and clear, seeming to take up half her face. As the still-flat bridge of a child’s nose wrinkled, her white, plump cheeks rose with it. She looked exactly like a rabbit caught by the ears. Enzo put his hands on his hips and swallowed the sigh that escaped on its own.

Sacha was a very lovable child, and she knew it well. In difficult situations, she was a master at actively using her charm to slip out of trouble—whether by intentional action or unconscious reflex. Because of that, Enzo had recently been struggling to sit her down and teach her.

“Sacha. You want to go out to the forest to play again tomorrow, don’t you.”

Sacha, who had been squirming and looking for a chance to escape, apparently tired of the nagging, stopped dead at those words. Enzo, who had been thinking hard, had a glint in his eye. He’d thought of a way to tame this tomboy.

When she returned to her room and flopped onto the bed, it made a thud. Lying there looking at the ceiling, Sacha tried to find something in her room that matched the color of the hair of the man she’d met earlier.

Sacha’s room was full of all sorts of odds and ends. All of them were either old hand-me-downs, things she’d picked up in the Forest of Manoli, or things she’d made herself. Her most treasured item was an old paraffin lamp that looked at least fifty years old, passed down from Grandmother Elodie.

“This is the most peculiar taste in a room I’ve ever seen. It looks like a bird’s nest that was just raided.”

Grandmother Lolo’s blunt assessment was cold,

“What a wonderful room, Sacha! It’s like a mysterious, venerable museum of antiques.”

But Grandmother Elodie’s admiration was a small comfort to Sacha’s heart. Both of them were good people, anyway.

Remembering the bundle of purple cockscomb she’d picked on the way home, Sacha sprang up from the bed.

‘Where would it look best?’

After much deliberation, she put them in her favorite glass bottle and placed it on the windowsill where the sun shone well. The shell-shaped bottle with the pink ribbon was a perfume bottle Mr. Vinoc’h had bought for his wife in Laurant. It was also the empty bottle Sacha had whined for as a birthday present last year.

Sitting on a tasseled cushion that had been fashionable ten years ago, Sacha thought about the boy she’d met today. He looked to be Enzo’s age. At any rate, he felt far more grown-up than Sacha. His hair was a color she’d never seen before in her life. It was like the chocolate she’d forgotten about during the day, or like the fir trees she’d seen in the forest. But it wasn’t brown. It was a very soft black.

‘Now that I think about it, what color were his eyes? Were they blue? If I saw them just one more time, I think I could tell for sure.’

She wished tomorrow would come quickly so she could go back to the forest. Enzo had promised that if she finished her homework in the morning, he’d let her go for a walk in the forest in the afternoon. He’d said that if the boy was a cadet at the Sarcassay Military Academy, he’d stay here until summer vacation ended. Of course, even so, no one knew whether he’d come to the forest again.

If he was a guest of the Lafayette family, he’d be staying at the count’s castle. Maybe today he’d simply stopped by the forest on a whim. So there was no guarantee he’d come to the forest again. Even so, somehow Sacha felt as though the boy would be lying in the same spot tomorrow. She couldn’t say why—it just felt that way.

Something on the desk caught Sacha’s eye as she tilted her head back at a precarious angle—one that would have earned her a scolding if the grandmothers had seen. At the bottom of an envelope bearing a lion design was an elegantly scrawled initial. It was a letter from the Hawthorn Manor. Enzo had told her to tear it up immediately, but Sacha hadn’t.

It had been last spring that a boy—the nephew of the village doctor, Mr. Bresson—had come to the Manoli villa. Long before he arrived, the people of Manoli had called that red-roofed house with the large hawthorn tree planted in its yard the Hawthorn Manor.

“You can’t come out of the manor? Why not?”

“Because that child is very ill.”

Sacha listened closely as Mr. Bresson explained that the boy at the Hawthorn Manor stayed indoors because his health was poor.

“Sacha. You’re a girl anyone would adore. If a child who smiles as well as you talks to him at his side, he’ll perk up in no time.”

The doctor, asked to find a friend for his nephew, had come first to the Vinoc’h household. Because Sacha Vinoc’h was the child in Manoli who knew how to smile the prettiest. Sacha gladly accepted the offer. The couple—a famous lawyer couple from Laurant—paid generously. And Sacha knew that Mr. and Mrs. Vinoc’h were worrying themselves sick trying to save up money for Enzo’s studies abroad.

On a day in early summer, the eyes of the boy she first met beneath the hawthorn tree were greenish-gray. They were similar to the color of seawater on a heavily clouded day. Sacha loved that color, so she believed that a boy with such a color must be a good person too.

But he was truly a little tyrant who resembled the sea on a cloudy day. One moment he’d be kind, and the next he’d shout if something displeased him even slightly, then apologize afterward. He was a person impossible to figure out.

“Can’t I just not go to that house anymore? I just want to go play in the forest.”

On a day when it had grown hot enough for sweat to trickle down her back, Sacha confessed at the dinner table that she no longer wanted to go to the Hawthorn Manor. Hearing that, Mr. and Mrs. Vinoc’h were troubled. Doctor Bresson had praised Sacha for contributing greatly to curing the boy’s illness. He had also relayed that the boy cherished and adored Sacha like a little sister. So he had asked whether they might continue sending Sacha.

“It’s just a child’s fuss, isn’t it. If we reason with her gently, she’ll say she’ll go again in no time. Sacha is a good child, after all.”

Mr. Vinoc’h, sweating profusely, was taken aback by the doctor’s earnest attitude as he made his request. Mr. Bresson was the family’s benefactor, having once treated Enzo’s tuberculosis. And Sacha hadn’t exactly said she hated it in a serious manner. Mr. and Mrs. Vinoc’h concluded that Sacha had merely made a light complaint. Sacha agreed too. It was just that going to the Hawthorn Manor every day was tiresome, and that saying she didn’t want to go to that house had been a lie—