In This Hospitable Land Read Online Free PDF

protruding in concentration. Ida’s younger sister Christel, who had turned two the previous Sunday, raced to join the sibling she idolized and adored. Small for her age, Christel shared the family’s wavy chestnut-colored hair, clear white skin, and glow of good health. Smiling her cherubic smile by her sister’s side, she clutched the well-hugged doll she took everywhere.
    Their cousins Katie and Philippe had come across from their villa next door a little earlier than usual. Katie, who would turn six the next week, brushed her soft dark hair with her ever-present hairbrush, avoiding the clips holding the longest strands behind her small, delicate ears. Adorable-looking fourteen-month-old Philippe, the only male Sauverin in the next generation, held his sister’s hand and clutched one of the miniature lead cars and trucks that absorbed him. They were wonderful children whose faults—hers to whine when she didn’t get her way, his to act the pampered prince—were due to their parents’ indulgence.
    Denise took pride in them all. How lovely the girls looked in the dresses she had sewn for them and how handsome Philippe was in his beloved sailor suit, which she had made by hand.
    Overseeing this happy scene, Rose Sauverin, André and Alex’s sixty-one-year-old mother, hardly looked her age despite a few slight wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her dark eyebrows and long lashes surrounded ever-bright hazel eyes and her thin smiling lips were made up prettily with just a hint of red. Rose possessed an especially fine sense of style and retained much of the beauty attested by her wedding pictures.
    Denise found her father-in-law Louis munching gaufrettes in the kitchen. Tickled as always to see him, she was shocked to discover Geneviève at the counter in her nightclothes compulsively gobbling fresh strawberries—a rare, prized item.
    “Geneviève! After all the trouble I went to get those for your birthday dinner tomorrow, why are you eating them now?”
    Mouth half full, Geneviève answered flatly, “Ask him,” nodding toward her husband.
    Denise locked eyes with Alexandre Sauverin’s blazing eyes and stifled a cry.

     
    Like his brother, Alex had awoken that morning in the dark. After a week and a half in his rented villa he still wasn’t sleeping well, unable to adjust to the murmurous crash of the surf though used to Brussels’s street noise, ever present in his grand apartment on the fashionable Avenue Émile Duray and in the smaller place on the Rue du Magistrat he and his family had moved to before coming here.
    Annoyed, Alex got up and pulled the drapes aside, careful not to rouse Geneviève who, always sensitive and delicate, was still weak from a bout of scarlet fever. Running his fingers through strands of brown hair thinning less quickly than those of his two-year-older brother, Alex watched the sea wash against the beach, listened to the harsh winds buffet the stuccoed walls of the villa, and worried about the grievous international situation. What would this day bring? Anything? Nothing? No matter. Alex needed distraction, which he always found in work as a dealer in rare and fine stamps, particularly the French Empire and Swiss Canton issues in which his expertise was unsurpassed.
    Focusing on his work improved his humor slightly, but Alex was constitutionally irritable. Alex couldn’t help it if the world was mostly comprised of fools!
    “Excuse me. Monsieur Alex?”
    Speaking of fools: the temerity of the maid breaking his concentration by coming in from next door without even knocking, and speaking Flemish, a sound he recoiled from even though it was his father’s native tongue. Not that Juli had a choice.
    “I was about to start breakfast,” she continued, oblivious of Alex’s anger. “Is there anything you would like?”
    “Privacy and quiet!” Alex snarled.
    The maid left with newly risen Katie and Philippe in tow, but Alex still couldn’t concentrate. He turned on the radio