In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

fresh air. Under the high vaulted ceiling and mottled plaster wall was a
high blackened stone fireplace. Heavy furniture was placed sparingly
around the room: a few carved chairs, a low chest, a bed covered with a
fluffy white eiderdown and a red marble table above which hung a tiny
Gothic Madonna. This monastic spareness contrasted sharply with the
overblown baroque of the main house.
Penny walked up to the little painting. Inside filigree arches, a
girl of maybe ten or eleven sat pensively on a bench holding a book,
encased in voluminous tubular folds of carmine velvet. A white bird
hovered above her head. Behind her, beyond the lace stonework of the
arches, stretched a vast and minutely detailed landscape. Blue
mountains. In a cave, an old hermit was beating his chest with a rock in
front of a crucifix. Trees grew like lace and blue green fields cut
awkward little rectangles around a cluster of hovels around a black
steeple. Grass flanked roads meandered away with little people on
donkeys or little people carrying farm tools to dilapidated farmhouses
surrounded by tiny pigs and chickens and a cow or two. Worm holes
dotted the bottom where the surface was eroded away and from which
a white lily grew, crisply faceted.
He drew the window's velvet drapes and said, "Do you like this
room? It has not changed since 1690, when this part of the house was
built. The plaster is original, that is why it is stained, but the roof above
is new. The little door there is to the bath. The rope next to the bed is
for the maid, but you can use the phone, also, press two. And that door
over there goes to the library and then to my room. The glass doors
here go to the balcony over the garden. If the chickens do not wake
you, then the birds in the pear tree will."
She smiled and muttered something.
"Allora. Buona notte, Penelope, sleep good."
He smiled wearily as he closed the door, and she heard his
slippers pad down the hall.
Chickens? Did he mean a rooster? In the middle of Paris?
She was woken up not by the buzz of her Palm Pilot alarm or
by a rooster, but by the riot outside the window. The pear tree, almost
leafless now, was covered with twittering, bickering, birds. Hanging
from one of the limbs was a feeder, so the tree was like the
neighborhood café. The variety of birds was astounding, probably
many were migrating. She identified, besides the sparrows, several types
of finch, including the red breasted chaffinch, all of which were
indigenous. From the top limb, a dapper jay screeched at a red headed
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