“Marvelous!” whispered Nancy looking seaward. The sands of St. Michel, those treacherous sands through which the tide can rip and roar in minutes, seconds almost, shone far below them now, peacefully dry, almost lavender in the sun, creating a false horizon for the fringe of little houses along the shore.
“Let’s get a guide,” suggested Nancy turning back. “I detest them as a rule. But this place is a perfect labyrinth, and besides you can pick up so much information the guide books don’t give you.”
At the entrance gate, where a few francs bought admittance, they found that a group would start through the abbey in about twenty minutes. Preferring to wait outside they braced themselves against the wall where the sun was pleasantly warm and watched their fellow tourists assemble.
A little old lady and her husband, both very winded from the long climb. “From Ioway,” Cynthia bet Nancy in a whisper. “And on their wedding anniversary trip.”
“Heads you win, tails I lose,” said Nancy scornfully. “But these are Britishers, I’ll bet my new tube of Prussian blue.”
Sober hats set high on the head, bright complexions, and, as they drew nearer up the stair, broad A’s and clipped G’s proved Nancy to be right. Next three French sisters in black and white, from some religious order.
“Probably from a convent in Canada,” hazarded Nancy, listening to their French. “They come on holiday to visit the churches in France. Mother and I have crossed with groups of them several times; they are always so picturesque and so jolly. And here’s a pretty girl for your sketch book, Cyn.”
It was the girl from the restaurant, the girl with the buttercup hair. And her young man. The girl seemed to half recognize Cynthia, for she gave a little tremulous smile, then turned abruptly away as though she wasn’t sure whether they had met or not.
“Mesdames et Messieurs ...” began the guide in shrill tones and, fumbling with an enormous bunch of keys, unlocked the great door to the abbey. For the next hour he led them through cloisters twelve hundred feet above the ocean, through the refectory and the ancient church, through banqueting halls in which kings and princes had feasted. “They say Harold the Saxon was a guest and a prisoner here of William of Normandy before William became the Conqueror,” translated Nancy.
Beyond her the young man also translated for the benefit of the girl with him. Between them Cynthia managed to pick up most of the guide’s information. They were in the banqueting hall, that long gray drafty hall with its many pillars, and Cynthia, gazing about her, tried to transform it to the way it must have been when Harold was the unwilling guest. A place of flaring torches, lords and ladies in silks and velvets, in trailing veils and sky-pointing hennins, lifting their heavy trains from the rushes that covered the floor. There would be tapestries, rippling along the walls as the drafts caught them, painted ceilings that had long ago faded to gray and stone color, minstrels to make music, great dogs to lie about on the rush-strewn floor, and the delicious scent of long forgotten foods from those great fireplaces in the kitchens beyond. Yes, the far off times must have been fun too. She wished she had been here then.