Шоколад / Chocolat

” I made my voice casual, disinterested. “It happens all the time.”

Josephine looked at me for a second, suspiciously, then sensing no malice, relaxed a little.

“This is good.” Sipping the chocolate. “Really good.”

“I make it myself,” I explained. “From the chocolate liquor before the fat is added to make it solidify. This is exactly how the Aztecs drank chocolate, centuries ago.”

She shot me another quick, suspicious glance.

“Thank you for the present,” she said at last. “Chocolate almonds. My favourite.

” Then, quickly, the words rushing out of her in desperate, ungainly haste, “I never took it on purpose. They’ll have spoken about me, I know. But I don’t steal. It’s them”– contemptuous now, her mouth turned down in rage and self-hatred – “the Clairmont bitch and her cronies. Liars.” She looked at me again, almost defiantly. “I heard you don’t go to church.”

Her voice was brittle, too loud for the small room and the two of us.

I smiled.

“That’s right. I don’t.”

“You won’t last long here if you don’t,” said Josephine in the same high, glassy voice.

“They’ll have you out of here the way they do everyone they don’t approve of. You’ll see. All this”– a vague, jerking gesture at the shelves, the boxes, the display window with its pieces montees – “none of this will help you. I’ve heard them talking. I’ve heard the things they say.”

“So have I.” I poured myself a cup of chocolate from the silver pot. Small and black, like espresso, with a chocolate spoon to stir it.

My voice was gentle. “But I don’t have to listen.” A pause while I sipped. “And neither do you.”

Josephine laughed.

The silence revolved between us. Five seconds. Ten.

“They say you’re a witch.” That word again. She lifted her head defiantly. “Are you?”

I shrugged, drank.

“Who says?”

“Joline Drou. Caroline Clairmont. Cure Reynaud’s bible groupies. I heard them talking outside St Jerome ‘s. Your daughter was telling the other children. Something about spirits.” There was curiosity in her voice and an underlying, reluctant hostility I did not understand.

“Spirits!” she hooted.

I traced the dim outline of a spiral against the yellow mouth of my cup.

“I thought you didn’t care what those people had to say.”

“I’m curious:” That defiance again, like a fear of being liked. “And you were talking to Armande the other day. No-one talks to Armande. Except me.”

Armande Voizin. The old lady from Les Marauds.

“I like her,” I said simply.