§ § § -- December 18, 2004
They had just come out of the room when the door to Leslie's old room opened and Christian looked out on them, with Susanna in his arms. "I thought I heard voices up here. Tobias is taking all day, as usual, but with luck we'll be able to get going soon. I really have to get back to work in any case."
A burp sounded from the room behind him, and the Latignon children broke into laughter. Christian grinned and turned around as Leslie's voice remarked, "Well, it's about time, young man, you're holding up the whole show here. Christian, my love, it looks like you'll have to go back and put up with Jonathan and Julianne again after all."
Laughing, Christian gently bounced Susanna, who gurgled happily, and met the gaze of a smiling Roarke. "I think we can move the departure schedule up by a few minutes. I assume Leslie's taking our guests here on a tour?"
"Yes, I thought perhaps they would like to see their father's museum in particular, and also to visit his grave. There are still a few people here who recall the days when Tattoo was in my employ, and Leslie knows who they are, so there's some small chance that she and the children—yours and Tattoo's—will be late for dinner here."
"Well, I'll try not to be," Leslie said humorously, joining Christian at the door with Tobias in one arm and Karina in the other. Karina yawned, then squalled when Tobias hit her in the act of flailing an arm, and Leslie rolled her eyes. "Good grief, sibling squabbles already! The next eighteen years are going to be a struggle at this rate, my love."
"Discipline, my Rose, that's the key," Christian teased, kissing her. "I expect they'll probably fall asleep while you're showing Patrick, Antoinette and Mireille around the island, so that will help take care of the fighting issue. Suppose we get downstairs and strap the triplets into their car seats, and then you can get going."
"Do you want us to drop you off at your office?" Leslie offered.
Christian snorted, "There won't be any room for me in the car! In any case, I need a little exercise after sitting there holding Susanna. I'll just take the path from the back of the house into town. Much as I wish I could accompany all of you and hear more stories about Tattoo, I'm afraid there's a good bit of work awaiting me at my office. If you run out of places to go and people to see, drop in if you like."
"We'll keep that in mind," Leslie said, and they kissed again. "Let's get started."
Several minutes later, with the triplets in their car seats, Antoinette and Mireille in the back behind the babies, and Patrick sitting up front with Leslie, they got on the road, waving goodbye to Roarke and Christian. "You and Prince Christian have such a lovely romance, cousine," Antoinette observed enviously. "I hope that happens to me one day."
Leslie grinned. "Maybe someday we can introduce you to one of Christian's younger nephews," she suggested teasingly. "That aside, I think our first stop should be the museum. We had it built shortly after your father's funeral here, and it contains nothing but his work. It's been a while since we've had time to go visit, and I expect I'm overdue, so having you guys here is a great excuse."
"We can help you carry babies, too," Mireille put in excitedly.
"That you can!" Leslie agreed, grinning at her in the rearview mirror. "The museum isn't very far from here, so don't get too comfy back there."
Just past the Japanese garden and teahouse, the road curved inward a bit, away from the coastline, and at the point where it straightened out again they came upon a circular building constructed of columns of large, polished gray stone shot through with burnt-umber veins. The spaces in between each column bore windows with arched tops; a small portico jutted out from the circle at the entrance, and the marble façade over the doorway read, FANTASY ISLAND ART MUSEUM. The building was topped by a skylight-studded dome of white marble. "Is that Papa's museum?" Mireille asked.
"That's it," Leslie said, swinging the car off the road and into a small parking area that currently contained a few bicycles. "Even with all the paintings of your father's that are already hanging in there, it's not full yet, so the ones you sent us should fit in here just fine, Patrick…assuming they stay." She killed the engine and released the seat belt.
Patrick eyed her in confusion. "Why wouldn't they?" His dark eyes grew suspicious. "What would you do with them, then—sell them?"
Leslie paused and regarded him in silence, just long enough to make him drop his gaze, his cheeks flushing. Then she said gently, "Patrick, you have to know we'd never do a thing like that. But with your mother and LeNoir on their way here, if something can be worked out, maybe you'll be able to take them back home with you."
Patrick met her gaze with a skeptical look. "We'll see about that. I think they'll be safer here even if somehow we do talk Maman into dumping that monster."
"That's to be seen," Leslie said. "You guys have a few days before you have to think about that anyway, remember? Come on, let's take a look inside."
She and the Latignon children got out of the car, and Leslie unstrapped the triplets from their car seats, lifting Tobias out first and depositing him into the arms of a delighted Antoinette. "He has three teeth!" she exclaimed, enchanted, when Tobias smiled at her.
"You're telling me," Leslie snorted and gave her a look. "I breast-feed, you know."
Patrick and Antoinette looked at each other with wide eyes, then both laughed at the same moment. Mireille made a face but giggled as well, and happily accepted Susanna when Leslie got her loose from her restraints. "Which girl is she?"
"That's Susanna," Leslie said. "Patrick, are you interested in being baby transportation, or do you prefer to wait a while?"
Patrick laughed. "I'll wait. Whenever Antoinette gets tired of amusing Tobias, I'll be glad to take him. Let him try to bite my tough old fingers."
"He will bite," Leslie warned, grinning, undoing the last strap and snuggling a sleepy Karina into her arms. "Be warned, Antoinette. Let's go on in. Oh, poor baby," she murmured gently to her daughter as they crossed the parking lot. "All sleepy, huh?" She nuzzled the top of Karina's head and settled the drowsy infant onto her shoulder, following the Latignon children into the entrance and pausing beside the commemorative plaque mounted at their right. "Look here, before you go inside."
Patrick, Antoinette and Mireille stopped and stared at it. It was a bronze bas-relief of Tattoo, the way he had looked during his later years as Roarke's assistant, and bore a legend beneath it in raised capital letters:
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF TATTOO
VALUED ASSISTANT
EXTRAORDINARY ARTIST
CHERISHED FRIEND
Antoinette read this aloud in a slightly trembling voice. "Did you say every painting in this building is by Papa?" she asked.
"That's right," Leslie said, nodding. "Come on in and you can see for yourselves."
Inside, they stood on a marble floor that matched the carved façade over the entrance. There were five or six other visitors here, all of them vacationers, and the building was quiet as they drifted around the perimeter examining the paintings. Leslie waited near the vestibule, feeling Karina relax into slumber against her shoulder, silently watching Tattoo's offspring taking in the body of their father's work. Susanna was quiet in Mireille's arms, with an entire fist stuffed into her mouth and her wide eyes—turning hazel to match Christian's, like her sister's eyes had done—absorbing the bright colors in the assorted Parisian scenes that Tattoo had so enjoyed painting for a few years. Tobias seemed uninterested, finding the topaz studs in Antoinette's ears of more interest, and Leslie grinned resignedly and caught up with them. "You'd better let Patrick take him," she suggested quietly, mindful of the sleeping Karina. "He likes your earrings."
Surprised, Antoinette turned her head to see Tobias still in the process of reaching for her ear, and smiled indulgently at him. "Non, non, petit bébé," she scolded gently, "that would hurt if you tried to take out my earring. Go and see Patrick, maybe he'll let you bite his finger." They all laughed quietly as Patrick cheerfully lifted Tobias from his sister's arms and settled the little boy's rump snugly into the crook of his arm.
By the time they had nearly finished circling the interior, Susanna had dropped her head on Mireille's shoulder and was dozing off, while Tobias was happily chomping on Patrick's thumb. Both seemed unaware of the babies they held, their full attention riveted on their father's works. Antoinette, realizing she stood in a patch of sunlight, examined the floor, then the painting she stood in front of, and then turned in a slow circle with her head tilted back, staring at the skylights. "Doesn't the light fade the paintings?" she asked.
"All the glass in the windows and the skylights is specially treated," Leslie explained. "It filters out ultraviolet rays, but it lets in natural light so that the paintings can be properly seen. You can thank Father for that. He wanted to be sure that Tattoo's work was displayed to its best advantage, but protected from the elements at the same time."
"Mr. Roarke thinks of everything," Patrick remarked. "I guess Papa was right, they did think of each other like brothers, in a way."
Leslie nodded. "They always had a close friendship. There were a couple of occasions when it was nearly broken, but it bounced back—they'd known each other too long and too well for that bond to succumb to outside influences." She cradled Karina's head, absently smoothing the baby's hair with her thumb. "They always came to each other's defense in a heartbeat if anyone ever said a harsh word or made a threatening gesture. In fact, I can think of a few occasions when Father more or less saved Tattoo's life, and Tattoo never forgot. If anyone ever tried to denigrate Father in any way, he was the first one to refute it."
"Did you ever see any of those times?" Mireille wanted to know.
"Oh, a few, here and there," Leslie murmured, smiling a little as memories washed over her. "There was a time before your parents met each other, when Tattoo decided to have his own fantasy granted…to become a love god." Patrick's and Antoinette's heads shot around at that, and all three of them gawked at her. She focused on them and giggled. "You can ask Father if you don't believe me. He got it all right, and he was having a great old time for a while…and then the natives who thought he was their god started losing their belief in him, and he actually had to escape from them. Father and I went out there to bring him home, and found him paddling the living daylights out of a canoe, trying to elude a bunch of pursuers. We threw him a line and towed him away."
Patrick laughed helplessly, making Tobias giggle in reply, and Antoinette groaned, while Mireille tried to dam up her own glee for the sake of a dozing Susanna. "I guess you could say that was saving Papa's life," Antoinette said, grinning despite herself. "What else?"
Leslie glanced around the building and smiled. "How about we wait till we get in the car. You haven't quite finished in here, and there's a special painting you should see."
She watched them complete their circuit of the interior, then brought them into the vestibule and pointed out the painting that hung on the wall opposite the bronze plaque they had seen coming in. "This was the last painting your father ever did—he wasn't able to finish it. Do you recognize who's in it?"
"That's us, isn't it?" Patrick asked, staring. The painting depicted Patrick, Antoinette and Mireille as children, playing together on an expanse of green grass, with part of a fence and some tree trunks in the background. It had never been completed, and it was the only unsigned canvas in the building. At the bottom of its frame Roarke and Leslie had had a small plaque attached that read, "Tattoo's Final Masterpiece."
"Mm-hmm," Leslie murmured with a nod. "Solange enclosed a note with that when it arrived here with all these others. She said she discovered it sitting on the easel the evening of the day your father passed on, and when she realized what the subject was, she sat on the stool there and cried for an hour."
There was silence for a moment, then Antoinette hung her head and muttered, "If only she had so much regard for Papa's things now!" Her brother rested his free hand on her shoulder; Mireille just gazed at the painting with big, sad eyes.
"Let me know when you're ready," Leslie murmured and left them to look as long as they wanted. She took Karina back out to the car and gently settled the sleeping baby into her car seat once more, carefully securing her in it. When she stood up again and glanced back at the building, she saw Mireille coming out with both Susanna and Tobias.
"Patrick and Antoinette wanted to stay a little more," she said as she reached Leslie, who lifted Tobias out of Mireille's grasp and put him in his car seat. "I couldn't bear to look anymore, so Patrick gave me Tobias and I brought them both with me."
"Thank you, Mireille," Leslie said, smiling. "We have plenty of time, we'll let them stay as long as they want. Oh no…Tobias Lukas Roarke Enstad, you and that teething ring! Look what happened to it!" she scolded gently, securing her son in his seat and picking up his discarded teething toy from the floor of the car. Dirt and tiny pebbles and hairs stuck to it. "Yuck!" She made an exaggerated face and Tobias giggled energetically.
Mireille laughed too. "I can wash it off in that water fountain over there," she volunteered as Leslie backed out of the car.
"Terrific, thanks, Mireille," Leslie said, handing her the teething ring and taking Susanna, whose doze had deepened. It was a relief for Leslie to see the girls both asleep; she'd noticed them beginning to display signs that they too were teething, and both Susanna and Karina had grown more fretful than usual. She had a funny feeling they wouldn't be nearly as amenable through the teething process as their brother had been.
Mireille came back as Leslie finished strapping Susanna in. "Cousine…" she began, handing the teething ring to Tobias, who instantly began gnawing on it.
"Something wrong?" Leslie prompted when the girl hesitated.
Mireille looked away, bit her lip, then shrugged. "Nothing," she said. "Maybe I'll ask later. Here come Patrick and Antoinette, finally."
Her older siblings both looked downcast and withdrawn, and Leslie frowned as they approached. "Are you two all right?" she asked.
Antoinette only lowered her head farther, and Patrick glanced up. "We're fine," he said in a monotone, "but if you don't mind…we'd like to return to our bungalow."
Leslie wrestled a moment with trying to get them to talk, but something in Patrick's eyes told her she'd fail. "Okay," she said, unwillingly giving in. Maybe seeing their father's works, gathered here like this, had been too much for them…
"I don't want to go back to the bungalow," Mireille announced defiantly. "You two can go if you want, but I'm staying with Leslie and the babies."
"That's okay," Patrick said lifelessly. "Go ahead." They got into the car, both electing to sit in the back, and Mireille took the front passenger seat beside Leslie. No one said anything all the way back to the bungalows; Patrick and Antoinette got out of the car in silence and retreated without a word of farewell. Leslie sighed quietly to herself, wondering exactly what had caused them to retreat like that.
"Maybe it was the painting," Mireille said suddenly from beside her.
Leslie thought for a moment, remembered the haunted look in Antoinette's eyes before she'd shielded her face from view and the dead look in Patrick's. "I think you're right, Mireille," she said and sighed. "Well, let's do something happy, how about it? Christian did say we should stop in and see him if we ran out of places to go."
"Are there any left?" Mireille asked.
"Well, yes, but I think it's better if all three of you see them together," said Leslie. "So we'll wait till Patrick and Antoinette are feeling better. And anyway," she added, "I want to see exactly how busy my husband really is." Mireille giggled at that, and Leslie grinned back, putting the car in gear.