Resourceful fourteen-year-old Odette is on the move again, traveling as a stowaway on a cheese cart with her hapless mother, Anneline.
They are in Burgundy, France, in 1799, fleeing yet another calamity caused by Anneline (who is prone to killing people accidentally). At dawn they find themselves in a town called Nevers, which is filled with eccentric characters, including a man who obsessively smells hands, another who dreams of becoming a chicken and a donkey that keeps the town awake at night, braying about his narrow life. As Odette establishes a home in an abandoned guardhouse, she makes a friend in the relaxed Nicois and finds work as a midwife's assistant. She and Nicois uncover a mystery that may lead to riches and, more important for Odette, a sense of belonging.
Resourceful fourteen-year-old Odette is on the move again, traveling as a stowaway on a cheese cart with her hapless mother, Anneline.
They are in Burgundy, France, in 1799, fleeing yet another calamity caused by Anneline (who is prone to killing people accidentally). At dawn they find themselves in a town called Nevers, which is filled with eccentric characters, including a man who obsessively smells hands, another who dreams of becoming a chicken and a donkey that keeps the town awake at night, braying about his narrow life. As Odette establishes a home in an abandoned guardhouse, she makes a friend in the relaxed Nicois and finds work as a midwife's assistant. She and Nicois uncover a mystery that may lead to riches and, more important for Odette, a sense of belonging.
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Overview
Resourceful fourteen-year-old Odette is on the move again, traveling as a stowaway on a cheese cart with her hapless mother, Anneline.
They are in Burgundy, France, in 1799, fleeing yet another calamity caused by Anneline (who is prone to killing people accidentally). At dawn they find themselves in a town called Nevers, which is filled with eccentric characters, including a man who obsessively smells hands, another who dreams of becoming a chicken and a donkey that keeps the town awake at night, braying about his narrow life. As Odette establishes a home in an abandoned guardhouse, she makes a friend in the relaxed Nicois and finds work as a midwife's assistant. She and Nicois uncover a mystery that may lead to riches and, more important for Odette, a sense of belonging.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781459821651 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Orca Book Publishers |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Sara Cassidy is a journalist, editor and author of over 15 books for young readers. Her books have been shortlisted for many awards, including the Chocolate Lily Award for both Black Gold and Blackberry Juice, the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award for A Boy Named Queen and the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize, Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award and City of Victoria Children's Book Prize for Nevers. Her poetry and short fiction have been widely published. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"Whoa!"
The carriage halts suddenly, startling Odette from a dream in which she was a large wheel of soft cheese about to be rolled off a cliff. She has spent several hours as a stowaway in the back of a dairy delivery carriage, with a block of Comté cheese for a pillow and a ragged length of damp cheesecloth for a blanket. Is it any wonder she is dreaming about Camembert?
Odette listens as the milkman steps down the carriage's creaky steps to the muddy road. Footsteps approach, sucking at the muck. "Bon matin," says the milkman. A man with a gravelly voice responds. The two discuss the unseasonal downpour that occurred just before dawn and fall into conversation about the best remedy for an aching bunion. One swears by boiled chamomile flowers mashed with leopard-slug slime. The other recommends manure from black pigs, collected in a thunderstorm.
The two strike a deal for a dozen wheels of Brie for an impending wedding feast. They then agree that it isn't too early for a glass of wine.
Odette elbows her mother, who snores wetly beside her. "We've arrived somewhere."
Anneline raises her head and scowls at the murky surroundings. She closes her eyes again. Odette raises the carriage's canvas cover a thumb and watches as the milkman hitches his horse to a post and bumbles into the tavern with his friend. Odette tugs her mother's loose braid. "Now."
"Ouch." With much grumbling, Anneline unfolds herself from the crush of cream jugs and butter logs while Odette gathers up their few belongings. Anneline points to a basket brimming with small goat cheeses. "Grab some trouser buttons. And a round of Morbier. That's the one striped with black ash."
"I won't thieve."
Odette leaps down to the mucky road and puts out her hand to help her mother.
Daylight powders the darkness. A woman in rags struggles past, pushing a wheelbarrow heaped with cauliflowers. A man lugs reed cages; inside them heavy rabbits move warily, the X's of their noses twitching for a familiar smell.
"Market day," Odette observes. "I wonder what town this is."
Anneline turns to a man draped in sausages. "Excuse me ..."
Odette grabs her mother's grimy sleeve. "Mother, you can't just ask a stranger, 'Where am I?' "
"Why not?"
"It's the one thing you're supposed to know — where you are."
"I suppose. But I know a lot of things people aren't supposed to know, such as what a man's finger looks like lying on a paisley carpet. That toothy dog was far too protective of me. And the cruelty of nuns. And the sweet ache in a woman's lungs as she exhales her last wretched breath of air —"
"It was not your last breath of air, Mother."
"It could have been."
"Except, of course, you'd flirted with a fireman earlier that day."
"Is it my fault he fell in love? Or that he chose to dive into the cold water to save me?"
"Drowning himself."
"Yes. Poor man."
"And now you've gotten another person killed. I saw legs sticking out from the rubble. Mr. Pannet, I'm quite sure, judging by the expensive shoe leather."
Anneline giggles. "The tax collector. Finally some luck." But then, to Odette's surprise, her mother's face crimps with concern. "Was there anyone else?"
"Crushed? I don't know. I don't think so."
Anneline peels off a white glove and waves it in the air. "I surrender."
Odette grits her teeth. She has little patience this morning for Anneline's potion of charm and helplessness. "Surrender from your life, Mother?" she asks. "Not possible. Not with that dirty glove anyway."
The rising sun has cast the sky in pink, bringing light to the faces of the farmers and artisans preparing their market stalls. The shadow thrust by the massive cathedral at the edge of the marketplace begins to retreat. Odette takes in the buildings around her and glimpses in the distance a wide river busy with boats. She and her mother have arrived in a sizable town.
As they walk through the wakening marketplace, Odette remembers to keep a close eye on Anneline, who has a dismaying habit of taking fruit from the bottom of fruit sellers' carefully stacked pyramids. But Anneline isn't eyeing the fruit. Instead, she is staring up at the cathedral walls.
"Now those are flying buttresses!" Anneline points to the row of high stone arches that keep the cathedral walls from collapsing sideways. "I could have used a couple of them last night."
"Why did you push over that wall?"
"I only leaned against it. I was tired. Light-headed from the wine."
Anneline giggles, but to Odette the giggle sounds forced. Hollow. Does her mother actually feel shame? That would be new. And she hasn't sent apples rolling into the street, nor is she chatting with everyone they pass, flashing her white teeth. Perhaps Anneline is changing. Perhaps, Odette dares to hope, in this unfamiliar city there will be no misadventure, no chaos —
"Thief!"
A bony woman in a dirty pinafore pulls forcefully on Anneline's cloak.
"Let my piglet go!" the woman screeches.
Anneline, rattled, lifts her skirt. A glistening pink snout protrudes from underneath. "Get out of there, you silly beast!" Anneline warbles. But the piglet only disappears again beneath her petticoats.
"The rich are cockroaches," the bony woman squawks to the gathering crowd. "The Revolution did not stamp them all out."
Anneline lifts her skirt again. Odette notices that her knees are scratched from scrabbling in the castle rubble the evening before. The small pink creature snuffles at her feet.
"Oooh. Her ankles must smell like truffles," titters a large man with ink-stained fingers and an impressive nose.
Odette reaches for her mother's hand. "You need to get away from it. Jump!"
Anneline tries to hop over the piglet, but she trips and lands on the small beast, making it squeal like a set of wounded bagpipes. As the creature squirms beneath her, Anneline flails and falls backward. Her head strikes a cobblestone with a CRACK that echoes off the cathedral wall.
"Ohhh," the crowd murmurs.
The skinny woman in the dirty pinafore snatches up her piglet and wags a finger in Anneline's face. "Serves you right!"
But Anneline does not respond. She is unconscious.
A man who has been applying paint the color of the local red wine to a nearby window shutter hurries down his ladder and strokes Anneline's head with his paint-spattered hand. "Her ladyship, so radiant, so ravishing, so shapely," he coos.
"Hey!" Odette yells. "My mother is not shapely."
Anneline stirs. "Actually, Odette, I am. All of my husbands have said so."
"Divine angel," the painter sings. "Do you know where you are?"
Anneline raises her head and looks about, dazed. "No," she says. "I haven't ever been here before."
"I will tell you. You are in the town of Nevers."
CHAPTER 2It is difficult to shake the painter. Odette finally points to the paint hardening on his paintbrush and says, "You'd better get those shutters finished."
The painter looks wounded. "It is true," he admits. "I must return to my labors." He reaches for Anneline's hand. "If you ever need something painted — a room, a wall, a bedstead — ask for Guillaume. I am at your service." He climbs back up his ladder, shouting "Adieu!" from the top rung as Odette and her mother head into a maze of narrow streets.
"What would I want with a piglet?" Anneline complains. "It was a cute little thing, though, wasn't it? Those freckles like soot spots. Oh, my head. What did that odd-looking painter call this town?"
"Nevers," Odette answers.
"It's an English word, isn't it? For nowhere? Or nothing?"
"It means 'not ever.'"
"That sounds promising. Like oblivion or something."
"Oblivion is promising?"
"From the Latin oblivio, meaning 'obliteration,' " says Anneline. Anneline's fourth husband had been a polyglot, a morose one, who taught the children of the wealthy and undertook to teach Odette and her mother Latin and Greek. Odette had done well, but Anneline had not — she had bristled at having to sit like a schoolgirl. "Complete forgetfulness. Wouldn't that be restful?"
"No!" Odette cries.
But maybe it would be. Odette could forget all of the calamities her mother had wrought, and her parade of awful husbands. Maybe she could forget the questions posed by her own lopsided face whenever she caught sight of her reflection, questions about the "ugly husband," as her mother referred to the first husband, who had engendered her. He was a librarian who, though not dashing, was rumored to have had a half ounce of royal blood in his veins. Odette had never met him. Anneline had not learned she was pregnant until the day after he died.
"If we forgot everything, I believe I would be young again," Anneline muses. "I am beautiful now, but you should have seen me at your age, Odette. Once, in the town of Cluny, spying me from high in the tower, the abbey bell ringer was unable to ring the Angelus bell, he was so hypnotized by my elegance. It was the first time in a thousand years the bell was silent ..."
An onlooker might have wondered how mother and daughter could be so at ease walking the streets of a strange town with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their worldly belongings in a single bag — which Odette carried. Inside the bag were their identity papers, a needle and thread, Anneline's face powder and Egyptian oil, Anneline's favorite book and Odette's knife.
The truth was that Odette and Anneline were practiced at being uprooted. "Time to change addresses," Anneline had announced more than a dozen times in the fourteen years since Odette was born.
When she was little Odette had cried and felt fearful when she and her mother had to move along, but for many years now she had accepted her lot. Her mother couldn't help being herself. Moving was expected. Staying was unexpected.
But this time is different. Odette feels it in her bones. The evening before, hiding in the bushes by the castle rubble, she had noticed stunned strands of white in Anneline's black braid and a weariness in her eyes. There was sorrow in her voice, too, possibly regret. Her mother is changing.
Odette always keeps a sharp eye on her mother. Anneline is "a danger," as one husband put it. "Accident prone," said another. She has many times been the cause of injury — or worse. Her second to last husband, a healing-salts magnate, had called her a "saboteur." At a dinner party, the president of a competing salts company had discovered Anneline's love of wine and proceeded to fill her glass over and over until she whispered her husband's recipes into the man's hairy ear. Her husband was bankrupt within a year.
Her most recent husband, Marcel, an archeologist, had thought her merely "clumsy." Well, now he had seen the full extent of her clumsiness.
Odette, Anneline and Marcel had spent nearly a year in the sleepy town of Sigy-le-Châtel, where Marcel had bought the castle ruins overlooking the town. Their restoration was to be his life project, and Anneline his helpmate.
Anneline had overseen a party the night before, which was to raise money to refurbish the ruins. She'd drawn up the menu and hired the band. (She'd arrived home from their first meeting drunk, in a hay cart pulled not by a horse but by a wild-haired musician who periodically blew into a dented French horn, sending magpies flapping out of the trees.)
The party was Anneline's vision, but Odette, of course, had kept it all afloat, delivering the invitations, ordering the food, even swinging a scythe at dawn to clear a field for dancing.
The event had been planned for a full moon, when the ruins would be "bathed in moonlight," a phrase Anneline loved to repeat. It had begun gloriously. Silver trays polished like mirrors. Glistening oysters on thin slices of baguette. Tall glasses of fizzing champagne. Men in tuxedos, their beards trim. Women in gowns and long necklaces.
The crowning glory of the ruins was the remaining side of the castle keep. It towered over the local countryside, its ghostly remnant height enthralling. It was a marvel, nearly miraculous, that the single wall stood, unsupported stone on top of stone on top of stone. Marcel's first planned project was to bolster it. Indeed, the evening would raise the funds to do so.
The musicians were singing "À la claire fontaine":
In the clear fountain As I was strolling by I found the water so lovely That I bathed there.
Long have I loved you.
Never will I forget you.
When they finished, the crowd cheered, then quieted, attentive for the next musical offering. And it was in that moment of expectant silence that a crash like the worst thunder, like a stampede of a hundred horses, like a mountain falling, filled the air. Guests screamed. Birds screeched. Dust billowed thick as smoke.
The great castle wall of Sigy-le-Châtel had fallen. The air throbbed, swirling where it had not for centuries.
Marcel ran toward the rubble and fell to his knees, moaning. Party guests rushed to comfort him (Odette noticed that they didn't kneel in the dirt as Marcel did, but squatted so as to keep their formal trousers clean). Others clambered over the rocks, looking for casualties.
In the midst of the chaos, a length of red silk sailed over the debris. Marcel caught it and clutched it to his chest, launching into louder paroxysms of unhappiness. When Odette asked to see her mother's scarf, Marcel dabbed his eyes with it, then handed her the moist cloth.
Odette recognized immediately that what her mother's seventh husband took as a symbol of Anneline's demise was in fact a message for her, the knot in it tied after the wall fell and just before her mother threw it. As the partygoers scrambled over the fallen rocks, calling her mother's name into the dark openings, Odette sneaked toward the bushes at the edge of the ruins.
Odette was sure her mother would not have perished in such an outrageous accident. Outrageous accidents were how her mother lived. No, Odette had never doubted that Anneline would die at the end of a boring day spent playing shuffleboard and eating mashed prunes. There would be no mayhem, no murder, no mystery — just a slowing of heartbeats, a little more silence between each breath, a little less air and a little more space.
But the people in their evening gowns swinging lanterns over the rubble and crying, "Anneline! Anneline!" were fooled. For in their tidy, sleepy lives, walls did not fall. The world did not perpetually shift sideways, did not zig or zag. This was Odette's life. Turmoil was always on the horizon — when it wasn't under her feet.
Odette put the scarf to her nose and smelled the Egyptian oil that her mother rubbed into her neck each morning as she murmured, "My neck will not collapse, my neck will not collapse. My neck is not the Roman Empire." Sometimes the smell comforted Odette, but now it angered her.
A dove cooed in the bushes, sounding much like the one she and her mother and Marcel had heard that morning while eating breakfast. Only this dove was articulate.
"Coo-coo-Odette," it said.
"Coo-coo-coming," Odette grunted in reply.
Odette pointed across the heap of ancient stones and called out to the thwarted revelers. "Legs! Someone has been crushed!" It was true. As she was clambering over the rocks, she had come upon a pair of lifeless trousered legs sticking out from the wreckage.
The men and women in fancy clothes flocked across the rocks, and Odette backed into the woods until a bony hand clamped onto her shoulder. "Time to change addresses," Anneline said.
Through the dark night Odette had led her mother across fields, over streams and through forests, Anneline complaining incessantly. "My feet are so sore. I didn't eat even one oyster. Why is the moon so faint? Stop. I am out of breath."
But when they did stop, Odette felt the weight of the sky over her and the stars piercing its darkness like knifepoints, urging her to keep going and to never return.
CHAPTER 3Odette and Anneline step into an alley thick with chickens squawking and scrambling over each other as a heavyset man in a cloak made of chicken feathers scatters handfuls of corn. "Feast, beautiful chickens, lucky chickens."
"Excuse us," Anneline says.
The man gazes at her wonderingly, as most men do. "M. Gustave feeds the chickens, and the chickens feed M. Gustave!" he jokes, clearly hoping Anneline will find him clever.
Odette tugs on her mother's cloak, wanting to steer her back toward the main road, but Anneline tosses her head and strides through the clot of clucking chickens.
"Mother," Odette pleads.
"Did you ladies notice the rain early this morning?" The man raises his sturdy paw of a hand. "Drops larger than my thumb! Amazing liquid!"
"Yes," Anneline agrees. "The raindrops were enormous. Large as caterpillars."
Odette bites her tongue. Her mother didn't see the rain — she snored among the cheeses as it fell.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Nevers"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Sara Cassidy.
Excerpted by permission of ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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