The Lost Carousel of Provence Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Letters from Paris

  “Blackwell seamlessly incorporates details about art, cast making, and the City of Light . . . [and] especially stuns in the aftermath of the main story by unleashing a twist that is both a complete surprise and a point that expertly ties everything together.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Bestselling author Blackwell brings us another captivating tale from the City of Light. . . . This romantic and picturesque novel shows us that even the most broken people can find what makes them whole again.”

  —Booklist

  “Blackwell paints a picture of Paris that is both artistically romantic and realistically harsh . . . a compelling story of Paris, art, and love throughout history.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Blackwell has woven a great tale of mystery, artistry, history, and a little romance. With plenty of backstory and tidbits about Parisian life in the nineteenth century, there’s something for everyone in this recommended read.”

  —Library Journal

  PRAISE FOR

  The Paris Key

  “A charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Light.”

  —Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I’ll See You in Paris

  “[A] witty, warm, winsome novel . . . [Blackwell’s] generation-spanning tale combines intrigue and passion with a flawless ear for language and a gift for sensory detail.”

  —Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One

  ALSO BY JULIET BLACKWELL

  Letters from Paris

  The Paris Key

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Julie Goodson-Lawes

  Readers Guide copyright © 2018 by Penguin Random House LLC

  Excerpt from Letters from Paris copyright © 2016 by Julie Goodson-Lawes

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Blackwell, Juliet, author.

  Title: The lost carousel of Provence / Juliet Blackwell.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018012406 | ISBN 9780451490636 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780451490643 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women photographers—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | Merry-go-round art—Fiction. | Americans—France—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION/Contemporary Women. | FICTION/Historical. | FICTION/Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.L32578 L67 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012406

  First Edition: September 2018

  Cover art: Carousel lights by Alicia Bock/Stocksy; lavender buds by Elizabeth Watt/Getty Images

  Cover design by Katie Anderson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To CJ

  You held me up when I could not stand

  Carried me when I could not walk

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks are due, always, to my wonderful editor, Kerry Donovan. It’s been quite the odyssey so far, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us next! And to my ever-supportive agent, Jim McCarthy: It’s a wonder to have you in my corner, always.

  Special thanks to the incomparable artist Lise Liepman for sharing her expertise in the art of carousel renovation—as well as her personal library on the history of the carousel. Thank you to Jessica H. and LaShawna J. for sharing their personal experiences in the foster care system. Thanks to Marc-Antoine and Corinne Stauffenegger for opening their home to me and showing me around Avignon, and introducing me to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, to la Sorgue, and to the rest of Provence. Special thanks also to Sylviane Lacroix and the gang in Saint Pargoire, and in Paris.

  This book required a great deal of research from too many sources to mention, but of particular use were Frederick Fried’s A Pictorial History of the Carousel (Vestal Press, 1997) and Anne Sebba’s Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016).

  A very special thank-you for writer friends who kept me sane this past year, especially Rachael Herron, Sophie Littlefield, Chris Logan, Faye Snowden, Nicole Peeler, and Muffy Srinivasan. And to Anna Cabrera, Mary Grae, Bee Green Enos, Pamela Groves, Jan Strout, Wanda Klor, Bruce Nikolai, Sharon Demetrius, Suzanne Chan, Susan Baker, Kendall Moalem, and Karen Thompson. To Hanna Toda for letting me call her “daughter.” To new seaside friends Dan and Denise Skinner, and to the Mira Vista Social Club. And finally, to Steve McDonald: We miss you.

  Thanks are due to my father, Robert Lawes, a proud veteran who has taught me so much and has never, ever left me feeling unloved. And to my sister, Susan, who shares the family love of reading and art, and who preorders all my books! And with much love to Eric Paul Stauffenegger, who corrects my French, shares his wine, makes France feel like my second home, and suffers life with a writer.

  And to my beautiful son, Sergio. Always.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Juliet Blackwell

  Also by Juliet Blackwell

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

 
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Author’s Note

  Readers Guide

  Excerpt from LETTERS FROM PARIS

  About the Author

  Mi alma es un carrusel vacío en el crepúsculo.

  My soul is an empty carousel at sunset.

  —PABLO NERUDA, CREPUSCULARIO

  (Ediciones Revista Claridad: Santiago, Chile, 1923)

  CHAPTER ONE

  1901

  PROVENCE, FRANCE

  CHTEAU CLEMENT

  Josephine Clement

  No one has seen.

  The château’s usual ranks of gardeners and servants, grape pickers and kitchen staff, have been joined by Monsieur Bayol’s crew of men hammering, sawing, sanding, and painting the newly arrived carousel. The cats, dogs, pigs, and rabbits were carved, painted, and gilded in Bayol’s factory in Angers, but it has taken nine men to transport the pieces by rail, then by steam traction engine from the station to the château, and then to assemble the machine on-site. It will take another two weeks, perhaps a month, to complete the elaborately decorated salon that will house the carousel.

  Josephine wishes it would take longer. She would be happy if they stayed forever. Especially the carver’s apprentice.

  She and the apprentice have placed confidence in each other; they will keep each other’s confidences.

  Josephine knows her neighbors think of her as secretive and scheming because she was not born here. She comes from faraway Bretagne, and yet she stole the heart of their local favorite, the eligible Yves Paul Clement, heir to Château Clement. Bretagne and Provence were meant to be part of France now, but deep-seated regional stereotypes and allegiances do not respect random borders.

  She understands. After all, before Yves brought her to Château Clement as a young bride, Josephine had always believed the Provençal people to be lazy, unfriendly, and afflicted with a harsh accent.

  She has found the accent and unfriendliness to be apt, but though her husband is accustomed to taking a sieste every afternoon, he is anything but lazy. Yves rises early to capture the light of dawn on his camera; he works late into the night in his darkroom. He is an educated gentleman: He reads in his library, he composes poetry, he draws. Unlike most in the region, he does not hunt. Instead, he observes and makes note of the birds that perch on the limbs of the plane trees and olive orchards: the short-toed lark and tawny pipit in spring, the red-crested pochard and moustached warbler in fall.

  Yves’s keen eyes observe the forest creatures, the turning of the leaves, the changing quality of the light throughout the day, throughout the seasons. By virtue of the incessant clicking of his cameras, he records the world around him.

  And yet, he does not see.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PRESENT DAY

  OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

  Cady Anne Drake

  Cady had never realized how many empty platitudes people voiced when confronted with grief, how they felt compelled to say something, to say anything, in response to a situation that had no answer, no response. No solution.

  In point of brutal fact, there was nothing to say. Maxine had died.

  One moment she was there, Cady’s ever-present rock in the shifting sands of life. And the next she had fallen to the floor behind the register, struck down by a sudden heart attack. Maxine had disappeared into the ether, just like that, along with her snarky comments and wise eyes and calm, slightly haughty demeanor that never failed to assuage Cady’s inner demons. She was gone. No one else in this life would be lucky enough to know Maxine Caroline Clark.

  All that remained of the old woman was her shop, called Maxine’s Treasures, its junky (or artsy, depending on your perspective) inventory, and the back room, where Cady had set up her photography studio and darkroom. Even though Cady had no intention of taking over and managing Maxine’s antiques store, she wasn’t ready to give up her studio. Not to mention that she’d been living in the back room of the shop—which was not strictly legal—since she’d lost her relatively affordable apartment to a condo development several months ago.

  What now? Where would she go? What would she do?

  Maxine was family. She was all Cady had.

  A desperate, breathless weariness reached out its icy fingers to grip Cady’s bones. And it wasn’t the strain of carrying her wooden carousel figure, Gus. She saw reproach in the rabbit’s glass eyes as she maneuvered him into the shop; could this last shred of hope gone be her comeuppance for having tried to sell him?

  Maxine had given Gus to her ten years ago, on Cady’s wedding day. The marriage hadn’t lasted long, and the only thing Cady took from it—besides bitter experience—was Gus-the-rabbit.

  It was embarrassing to admit, but Gus had always made her feel . . . loved.

  According to Maxine, Gus was a genuine piece of carousel history, hand-carved by the famous French sculptor Gustave Bayol. Which would have meant he was worth thousands—maybe tens of thousands. But this morning Cady’s last-ditch financial dreams had been dashed by an earnest young man named Scott Ripley. Peering through a huge magnifying glass, the Antique Forum’s acknowledged expert in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European carvings had examined the rabbit’s loosening joints, noting how the bands of basswood had pulled away from one another at the tops of the legs, and the gap where the neck section met the body. Carousel figures are hollow, built like boxes with slats of wood joined, laminated, then carved, and primed to conceal the joints. Not only were the sections falling apart—Gus’s ears were now barely connected to his slightly tilted head—but the bright paint and gold gilding were flaking off, with gesso primer showing through in patches.

  At long last Ripley had straightened, shrugged, and pronounced: “It’s not a Bayol.”

  “You’re wrong,” Cady said. “Look again.”

  “Your rabbit is most probably European, and from Bayol’s era, at the turn of the twentieth century. In some ways, it is very much in his style; Bayol carved farmyard animals with sweet expressions like this one, so that fits. But a hallmark of Bayol’s carvings was their simplicity. His work almost never included flourishes like the lily of the valley here,” he said, pointing to the offending flower. “And this rose carved in high relief, with the detailed thorns? I don’t even know what to say about that.”

  “But Bayol did custom work, right?” Cady replied. “Couldn’t a client have asked for the flowers?”

  He shook his head. “I know Bayol’s work well; I’m also very familiar with the American carvers Dentzel, Looff, and Carmel. Like all artists, carousel carvers leave their imprints on their work, like signatures. Also, Bayol nearly always attached a small plaque to the saddles of his carved animals, and yours doesn’t have one. Your rabbit might have been carved by one of Bayol’s apprentices, or a competitor—if you could establish its provenance, it would be worth more.”

  Cady’s impulse was to argue with Ripley, to rail at him and cast aspersions on his professional qualifications, not to mention his parentage.

  But
it wasn’t his fault. Maxine had been wrong. It wasn’t surprising: Maxine always had insisted upon seeing possibilities in the junk other people threw away.

  So Cady had concentrated on reining in her emotions, fighting an almost overwhelming, and wholly uncharacteristic, urge to burst into tears.

  Get it together, Drake, she had scolded herself. We’ve been in worse situations than this one. Much, much worse. We’ll just have to come up with another plan.

  As a child Cady had developed the quirk of using the royal “we” when talking to herself; otherwise the only “we” in her world was wishful thinking. Later, the “we” came to mean Cady and Maxine, and finally, now, Cady and Gus-the-rabbit. It was a silly, childish habit, but Cady had more important things to worry about these days, such as where she was going to get the money to escape the wildly expensive San Francisco Bay Area, to move to a town where normal people could work a regular job and afford a decent place to live, and where she could become a foster mom, or maybe even adopt a child. The thought of change terrified her, but she was desperate to create the sort of family that she’d always wanted for herself. True, being a photographer wasn’t the best career option in a small town, but she didn’t care what she did for a living. She wasn’t proud.

  The important thing was to start over. To reinvent herself. Cady yearned for the anonymity of a second chance, a clean slate, a tabula rasa. To make a home someplace where no one knew where she came from, where no one knew she had nothing and no one.

  No family connections, no Maxine, no . . . baby.

  Without volition her hand went to her stomach. The only bump there now was from stress-eating her way through countless bags of potato chips and boxes of Petit Écolier cookies—scraping off the chocolate in an embarrassingly juvenile ritual—as she sat on the couch for weeks, watching endless reruns of Hoarders.

  The nurse in the emergency room had smelled of antiseptic and was very nice in the impersonal way of a kindhearted person saddled with far too much to do. She had instructed Cady to finish the round of prophylactic antibiotics, to abstain from sex for six weeks (no problem there—Cady couldn’t imagine being intimate, ever again, with anyone), to get plenty of rest, and to be prepared for sudden hormonal shifts as her body adjusted to what her medical chart referred to as an “SAB”: spontaneous abortion.