As she watched, the professor turned his considerable attention to her.
It was like seeing a mighty ship in a storm. Steady, strong, calm. It would survive not because it was anchored in place, but because it wasn’t. It could adjust. In that calm there was immense self-control. And with that, she realized, came power.
He was more powerful than anyone she’d ever met because he wasn’t at the mercy of the elements.
Now he stared at her and waited and she knew he was capable of waiting forever.
“Velut arbor aevo,” Amelia mumbled.
“That’s right, Cadet Choquet. And do you know what it means?”
“As a tree with the passage of time.”
It was the most she’d spoken since she’d arrived.
“Oui, c’est ?a. But do you know what it means?”
She was about to make something up. To say something either clever or, failing that, crude. But the fact was, she didn’t know and she was curious.
Amelia looked at the board behind the Commander, and the words he’d written there. About the chiefest point of happiness.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t.”
“Would you like to know?”
Amelia hesitated, sensing a trap. But she gave one curt nod.
“Let me know when you figure it out,” he said. “And see me after the class, please.”
Well, fuck him, she thought, sinking down in her chair and feeling the other students’ eyes on her. She’d exposed herself, shown ignorance and worse. She’d shown interest.
And he’d told her to go figure it out for herself.
Well, he could go fuck himself and fuck the academy while he was at it.
He was about to kick her out, she knew. For insolence. For her tattoos, her piercings, the stud in her tongue.
Whenever there’s talk of demons
these come in handy.
He was about to toss her overboard.
And she realized then, watching him at the front of the class, listening closely to some student drone on, that he wasn’t the ship. This apparently calm man was the storm. And she was about to drown.
At the end of the class, Amelia Choquet gathered her books. When the other cadets had left, she went to the front, where Commander Gamache was standing behind his desk, waiting for her.
“Mundus, mutatio; vita, opinion,” he said slowly.
She cocked her head to one side and stopped fidgeting with the skull ring on her index finger.
“My Latin isn’t very good,” he said.
“Good enough,” she said. She understood perfectly. “The Universe is change. Life is opinion.”
“Really?” he said. “That’s not what I meant to say. I thought I said, Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
He brought a thin book out of his satchel. Studying it for a moment, he extended his hand, offering her the tattered volume.
“What we say and what we mean can sometimes be two different things,” he said. “Depending on what we want to hear.”
“Yeah, right.”
“The quote came from here,” he said. “I’d like you to have it.”
She looked at the book in his hand.
Marcus Aurelius. She read the tattered cover. Meditations.
“No thanks. I already got the message.”
“Take it,” he said. “Please. As a gift.”
“A parting gift?”
“Are you leaving?”
“Aren’t I?”
“I asked you up after the class to invite you to join me and a few others for drinks in my rooms tonight.”
So that was it. She could stay, but there would be a price. Amelia could guess who the “few others” would be.
She’d pay off the scholarship one way or another. She dropped the book on the desk. Amelia wanted no further debt to this man.
Commander Gamache picked it up and placed it in his satchel. As he left the classroom, he pointed to the very first quote he’d put on the blackboard.
The one that stayed, even as the others came and went.
It was from some Buddhist nun. The other cadets had snickered at that, but Amelia had written it down. They were the very first words in the very first notebook.
Don’t believe everything you think.
CHAPTER 7
A fire was laid and lit in the rooms Commander Gamache kept at the academy.
Most nights he drove home to Three Pines. It was only an hour away, and a pleasant drive. But a blizzard was forecast, and so he’d decided to stay the night. Reine-Marie had driven in with him, bringing with her a box of her own work and a package wrapped in brown paper.
When they got into his rooms at the academy he pointed at the parcel. “A new chair?”
“You are a detective,” she said with exaggerated admiration. “Actually, it’s a pony.”
“Ach.” He shook his fist in frustration. “I was going to say that.”
She laughed and watched him walk down the corridor to start the day.
Reine-Marie spent her day going through old documents from the archives while he taught and saw to administration, of which there was a staggering amount. The former commander had ignored most of the paperwork, and Serge Leduc, the second-in-command, had had his own agenda, which did not seem to involve the effective running of the S?reté Academy.
But mostly what Armand Gamache had to manage were the personalities of the remaining professors and the senior cadets. To say they were resistant to the changes he’d brought in would be a gross understatement.
Even those happy to see the old guard go were overwhelmed by the scale of change.
“Maybe you should do it more slowly,” advised Jean-Guy.
“Non,” said Professor Charpentier. “Give bad news swiftly, and spread out the good news. Machiavelli.”
Charpentier was one of Gamache’s recruits and taught tactics, for which Machiavelli’s The Prince was compulsory reading. It was, in effect, a course not so much on tactics as manipulation.
Beauvoir looked at the boyish man with deep suspicion.
Charpentier was perspiring freely, as though each word had been wrung out of him. He was young and thin and frail and often relied on a wheelchair to get around.
“We make the changes at once. Swiftly,” Commander Gamache had decided, and had called a staff meeting to announce them.
And so began the term, and so began the struggle.
They were a week into it now, and while a rhythm and routine had been established, his authority was being challenged every hour of every day. Commander Gamache was seen not as a breath of fresh air, but as a willful and ignorant child knocking over building blocks, even by those who admitted the blocks were rotten.
“Give it time,” he told Jean-Guy at the end of a particularly trying day.
“Time, patron,” said Beauvoir, shoving books into his case, “is one thing we don’t have.”
It was true, thought Gamache. And Jean-Guy didn’t know the half of it.
But that evening, the end of the first week, might help change the charged atmosphere. At least, he hoped so.
As soon as he returned to his rooms, Armand got out of his suit and into slacks, an open-necked Oxford shirt and a cardigan. Reine-Marie was in a cashmere sweater with a silk scarf and a skirt that fell to just below her knees.
Sitting on the Eames chair and putting down his mug of tea, Armand reached for the parcel.
“Do you know what it is?”
“I don’t,” said Reine-Marie. “Olivier gave it to me this morning as we were leaving. Said it was for you. Please don’t shake it.”
He always shook parcels, for reasons she could never understand. Surely not to make certain it wasn’t a bomb, since that would set it off.
He shook it. Listened to it. Sniffed it.
By now Reine-Marie was pretty sure he was doing it for her amusement.
“It’s not a pony,” he announced with regret.
“If only your students knew what a fine mind was teaching them.”
“I think they suspect.”
Opening the package, he stared at it for a moment.
“What is it?” she asked.
He turned it around and she smiled.
“Dear man,” she said.
“Oui,” said Armand.
It was the old, odd map they’d found in the wall of the bistro. Olivier had had it framed. Attached to the back was a card.
So you’ll always find your way home.