One
The dawn light was only just filtering through the curtains, but Emma Taylor was already wide awake. She had been lying sleepless for at least an hour, determinedly keeping her eyes closed, trying to ensure her mind remained empty, and failing. Now, giving up all pretence that she was going to go back to sleep, she got up, shrugged on the retro velvet dressing-gown Mattie had lent her, padded over to the window and drew back the curtains.
The bedroom looked out over the garden at the back of the house, and in the gold and pink of early morning, its overgrown vegetation assumed a fleetingly magical quality. The garden wasn’t large, but it had once packed a great deal of beauty into not much more than a hundred square metres. There had been soft grass to sit on, a big wisteria against one wall— you could still see it, even now— rosebushes and hydrangeas, and carefully tended beds bright with flowers from spring to autumn, as well as a few edibles such as tomatoes and herbs. The garden had been her grandfather Alain’s pride and joy, but since his death two and a half years ago, it had been slowly neglected to the point where now, overtaken by weeds and rank long grass, it would take quite a lot of work to get right again. Her grandmother Mattie simply hadn’t had the heart to tackle it.
Emma opened the window, breathing in the fresh morning air. The sounds of Paris waking up came floating above the high wall of the garden. Sounds that she’d already become accustomed to, even though she’d arrived jet-lagged from the other side of the world only a week ago. It was a cocktail of mechanical noises: the hum of early-morning traffic on the boulevards, the underground rumble of trains in a nearby Metro station, the swish of street-sweeping machines, the muffled thump of van doors as shop deliveries were made, and the distant sirens of police and ambulances. But interwoven with that was a glittering thread of birdsong: blackbirds, warblers, robins, thrushes and wrens, taking part in the dawn chorus. Emma could hear them but couldn’t see them, for they were hidden in the garden below and the surrounding trees.
As she stood there, an image came into her mind of her mother as a girl, standing at this very window, listening to the birds. A lump formed in her throat, and she was about to turn away when her attention was caught by a flash of red in the garden below. ‘ Monsieur Leroux took up residence here last autumn,’ Mattie had told her on her first day, ‘but he doesn’t keep regular hours, so you can never be sure when he might appear.’ This was the first time Emma had seen him since she’d arrived.
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