Whatever is hiding inside the clock is not all that keen on coming out again. I'm relieved when David's fingers disappear into the open door, and he doesn't immediately scream in pain. Nothing is trying to eat him alive or drag him inside.

Apparently, only my luggage is prone to that kind of behaviour.

He is struggling, though and after a minute, he asks me for the steak knife I'm still clutching at the ready. I surrender my weapon to him and retrieve the rolling pin from the floor, happy that it didn't break when I dropped it earlier.

David patiently prods and pries with the tip of the knife, and I finally see the edge of something browned with age appearing over the lip of the small doorway. I admire his patience; I would have smashed the clock by now... well... maybe. It is a rather beautiful clock. Even a savage like me might've actually taken my time getting it out.

It looks like a thick wad of folded paper, and when David finally pulls it free, it starts to unfold itself from its forced compression, and a hard object pops out, landing with a vibrating clang on the stone worktop. Neither of us jumps with fright this time; apparently, we're becoming used to things popping out of other things.

It's a key! Oh, hurrah! I don't have enough of those yet!

"Enough with the keys, already!" I groan, and I don't blame David for giving me a questioning look. I consider explaining to him the complexities of my recent development of a serious key phobia but give up on that idea when I think about all the Belle weirdness I'll have to confess; therefore, I just shrug and give him an enigmatic smile. 

Guys like mysterious women, don't they?

"Wonder what this is for?" Just like with the clock, David is more interested in the mysteries of the key than the mysteries of me.

"None of the rooms in this house, I can assure you."

Actually, I cannot assure him because I haven't found the dining room yet. I haven't even seen its door, but...

"It's too small to be a room key. Maybe a box or a cabinet or something."

Awesome! There is not a gazillion of those in this house!

"Perhaps there are instructions in there?" I say, indicating the thickly folded paper David placed on the counter when he picked up the ornate little key.  "A diagram showing hidden footpaths running through caves, mysterious pouches in Matryoshka dolls and how to shut clocks up that aren't supposed to be alive... you know... normal things like that."

I do believe that David is starting to question my sanity, but that is just because he probably doesn't know La Belle Pêche as intimately as I do. 

Wait, wait! What am I talking about? 

I do believe that David is now convinced of my lack of sanity. He is looking at me with narrowed eyes, and he seems to be a little worried. I am glad I kept it hypothetical and didn't try to tell him that I'm speaking of actual things in this house.

I was just testing the water.

To his credit, he doesn't say anything, he just unfolds the paper, and when he realises that it is an envelope with a broken seal on the back, he opens it and pulls out what appears to be a letter.

"Hmm," he says, glancing at me after scanning over the first page. "How good is your French?"

"Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" I give him a dazzling demonstration of my vast linguistic talents.

"What?" he says, and he flashes that blinding lightning smile of his again, paralyzing me for a few seconds.

"I-It's from a very old song. It has some kitsies and yah-yahs in it as well. I heard it somewhere when I was a kid and used to say the chorus part often in conversations because I really wanted to be able to speak French." 

Maybe I should not have told him this story and just shook my head and said that I don't know any French. My mouth always runs away from my brain! 

"One day, my mother explained to me what it means, so I stopped saying it and gave up on speaking French."

"And what does it mean?" David asks, and I can see that he is once again fighting the urge to laugh.

"Do you want to sleep with me tonight?"

He is blinking at me now; his smile stuck to his lips. He is going to explode if he doesn't laugh soon.

"I'm not asking! It's just the only French I know," I hurry to add, and then I tilt my head and give him what I hope is a haughty look. "Why?"

Chuckling, he shakes his head and hands me the letter.

The script is a little hard to decipher, the letters flowing into one another in a rather pleasingly fluent way. I am able to recognise some of the words. Je, peux, les, des, que, dois, avec vous. I have no idea what they mean in context with the other words, but seeing them, I can identify the language as French... and so did David.

"There are apps that can translate written words when you scan them," I suggest, and then I pull a sceptical face and give the letter back to David. "But the writing is not all that clear. It will probably not work."

"We could try to figure it out and type it into Google Translate," David says, glancing from the pages in his hands to me, sitting on my seat again, sipping my cold coffee.

"That will definitely work," I say, but I'm not relishing the idea. I didn't bring my laptop because it has even more distractions on it than my phone, and typing on my phone is such a pain. The letter is about three pages long, smudged and faded in parts. It is not going to be fun to decipher. 

But I'm curious...

"Would you like some fresh coffee? It's gone cold."

He smiles at me and hands me his mug when I rise. "Please," he says. "I don't agree with Craig; I rather liked your coffee."

I laugh, ridiculously pleased to hear that, though I know he's just being polite. My coffee is quite awful.

"Who is Craig?" he asks casually, and for a moment, I'm tempted to say that he's my boyfriend to see if David is at least a little bit disappointed, but I open my mouth and, of course...

"My cousin. His idea of good coffee is when your spoon stands up in your cup, and you have to use a food processor just to mix the sugar and milk into it."

David chuckles, running his eyes over me again in the way he did before, and suddenly I'm not sure how to use a kettle or a spoon. The water boils much faster than I expected it to, and I quickly silence the kettle before it can crack our eardrums again.

"I can make out this part," David says, once again looking at the letter. "It looks like... uhm... 'vous trouverez tout ce qu'il faut savoir sous les pieds de Coppélia'. I may be wrong, but I think it means something along the line of 'you will find everything you need to know under the feet of... uhm... Coppélia.' I'm not sure, and the rest is just too smudged, and I don't know the meaning of most of the words. What's Coppélia?"

He looks a little startled when he lowers the letter to look at me again and finds me blinking at him in naked horror.

"What?!" he gasps, glancing behind him in alarm.

"You know all that, but you didn't know what voulez vous coucher yada yada meant?"

"Oh, I knew," he grins.

I roll my eyes and hand him his mug of coffee, and now I'm the one chuckling softly. "Pest."

I take my own coffee and slide back onto my seat. "Coppélia is a ballet about a man who loses his daughter and creates a doll to take her place, and then a guy falls in love with the doll, and his girlfriend has to rescue him from the crazy dad."

"Oh..." David says, taking a slow sip of his coffee. "Sounds... uhm... yeah... Maybe the key is to a music box with a ballet doll on it..."

That sounds plausible.

"I could take the letter to my grandfather later this week and ask him to translate it," he says, putting the mug down after a few more sips. "His French is really good."

We've come this far together, fought dead wooden birds, and angry clock sounds to get where we are now, and now, he just wants to run off to his grandaddy and keep the letter to himself?! I smile, and I nod, but he must see the disappointment on my face or decide for himself how unfair that suggestion is because he suddenly adjusts the letter's position on the kitchen island and smooths out the folds.

I watch him slip his phone from one of his jeans' pockets and take carefully focused pictures of each page.

"I'll send him this," he says, working on his phone. "And ask him to translate as soon as possible."

My smile grows in brightness, bathing the kitchen in soft light, painting a beautiful golden halo around David's face. It could, of course, very possibly also just be the sun finding its way through the clouds and the thick ivy blocking most of the windows that is creating this vision of beauty.

Who knows?

"Would you like another cookie?"

☼☼☼

https://youtu.be/Tn0-6n_dng4