Читать книгу The Adventures of Mademoiselle Mac 2-Book Bundle - Christopher Ward - Страница 6

As the wind picked up, so did the pedestrians’ pace along the Quai des Grand Augustins (no just plain Elm Street here); I hustled along with the crowd, my backpack bouncing behind me. Looking over the wall to the River Seine below, I saw barges and tourist boats passing under bridges and kids with guitars taking shelter ahead of what felt like a coming storm. Booksellers unravelled plastic wrap over tables of books and posters. Just beyond them I spotted a beautiful old bridge with stone half-moon shapes on it and a statue of a man on a horse.

“A little lost, ma petite?” A bookseller who looked as old as the bridge itself called out to me. At that moment the sky opened, and a wild rain crashed down upon us. He quickly began closing up his bookstall. “Here, you’ll need this today,” he said and handed me a tattered umbrella with the head of a duck on the wooden handle.

“Thank you,” I said and struggled to open it as the wind tried to gather me up. “Who is the statue of and what bridge is this?”

He pulled his coat around his neck and continued closing his stall. “That’s Henri the Fourth, one of the great kings of France, and this is the Pont Neuf.” He smiled at me through a bushy white beard. “That means ‘new bridge,’ although it’s actually not so new; it was built about four hundred years ago. It’s the oldest bridge in Paris.”

A rivulet of rain slipped through a hole in the umbrella and ran unnoticed down my face. I must have looked a bit like a statue myself.

“C’mon, I don’t want you to catch a cold on your first day in France, little one. Rudee’s waiting at the cabstand. It’s Mac, isn’t it? I’m Jerome.”

There was only one taxi idling at the corner, and in the time it took the bookseller and me to reach it, the driver had waved away a businessman with his briefcase on top of his head and a tourist couple trying to stuff a wad of bills through the crack in the window.

Jerome tapped at the cab window and leaned in to speak with the driver, who turned to look at me intensely.

“Good luck, Mademoiselle Mac,” Jerome said as he waved and disappeared into the rainy street.

The door was barely closed before the cab took off over the Pont Neuf. I think I would have felt safer on the back of Henri the Fourth’s horse.