A Gown of Thorns: A Gripping Novel of Romance, Intrigue and the Secrets of a Vintage Parisian Dress (15 page)

T
he following morning
, after a sparse breakfast of yesterday’s bread, toasted, Laurent drove out of Chemignac with his aunt. Their destination, the district hospital, where Louette lay in a deep coma. They’d spent most of the previous evening there until the staff had persuaded them that their presence was of no benefit to Louette.

Halfway along the avenue, Laurent pulled in to allow the haymaker’s tractor to pass. ‘I’d forgotten he was coming to cut the meadows today,’ Laurent muttered. The world had changed overnight. The roads around Chemignac were no longer empty arteries in a tranquil backwater. They were in the grip of harvest, tractors thundering about, trailers bouncing behind. ‘Life goes on, even when you wish it would stop.’

Isabelle turned a blotched face to him. ‘It does, and you must pick your grapes in spite of Louette.’

‘I will.’ Though actually, he’d already telephoned the agent who supplied his pickers to warn him that Chemignac’s
vendange
would be delayed. As they approached the hospital, Isabelle began to cry.

Louette had suffered superficial burns along with severe head and chest trauma. For reasons inexplicable to her family, she’d neglected to fasten her seatbelt. Isabelle had said in bewilderment to the surgeon, ‘My daughter usually refuses to turn on the ignition until all her passengers have confirmed that they’re strapped in. We always tease her about it.’

After escorting Isabelle to Louette’s room and getting her a coffee from the machine, Laurent returned to Chemignac, where he updated Shauna on Louette’s condition. According to the first policeman at the scene, she’d been pulled from her burning car by a group of cyclists while a passing lorry driver doused the flames with his fire extinguisher. Thankfully, the fuel tank hadn’t exploded, though everything in the trunk and on the car’s rear seat was destroyed. An antique suitcase had been reduced to ashes and scorched brass fittings. ‘She overtook a tractor on a blind stretch,’ Laurent said, ‘and had to pull in to avoid a car coming head on, hit the verge and rolled. Poor Isabelle thinks it’s her fault.’

‘Why?’

‘They argued over the Gown of Thorns. Isabelle accused Louette of coveting it for herself. And she was right.’ Rachel had witnessed Louette packing it, Laurent said. In fact, Rachel herself had loaded the suitcase into Louette’s car and it had been a deadweight. ‘Louette was taking the entire contents of the tower room wardrobe home to Paris with her.’

‘As you hoped she would, Laurent. Will you eat?’ Shauna had made salad baguettes, rather hurriedly, and the filling was oozing out. Lunch reflecting life, she thought.

‘I wanted the dress gone, but God knows, not like this.’ Laurent gnawed a finger until Shauna stopped him. He’d draw blood. ‘I’m wondering if that’s why she was driving like a mad woman,’ he said.

‘The dress infecting her mind? Isn’t it more likely she was just anxious to get home to her kids?’ Shauna conceded, ‘I admit, that dress has a weird effect when you put it on. I can’t explain why, but it does.’

‘That tells me you are beginning to understand Chemignac. This land holds its men and imprisons its women – until it kills them.’ Laurent sighed. ‘Now I’m talking like Albert.’ He took a baguette, and mayonnaise slopped onto his shoes. He made a rueful face and grabbed kitchen towel, then kissed Shauna’s cheek. ‘Thank you for holding the fort. Will you make up some beds? I have to fetch Louette’s husband from the airport.’

‘Course. I’ll also make more lunch, in case anyone wants it. You’d better get going.’ She didn’t want him rushing. ‘Watch out for those insane tractor drivers.’

A
t Bordeaux airport
, Laurent met Hubert Barends. He’d caught the first available plane, bringing the children with him – they’d refused to be palmed off on friends and were anxious to see their mother. To Shauna’s astonishment, the children ran straight to her when she met them in the château’s courtyard. She put her arms around them and relived the moment, thirteen years ago, when she’d arrived home from school to find an ambulance outside her house. At her front door, she’d learned from a neighbour that her dad had died. So she knew what Olive and Nico were going through. ‘We’ll be all right,’ she said to the children, forcing conviction into her voice. ‘We’ll keep busy, OK?’

I
t took
three days for Louette’s condition to stabilise. Her medical team then advised moving her to a specialist trauma unit near Paris. Laurent bought a return flight for Hubert, whose indecisiveness and impracticality dominated every interaction, and a ticket for Isabelle too. Lacerated by guilt, Isabelle vowed to keep vigil until her daughter opened her eyes. ‘And somebody must keep Hubert company because he falls too easily into despondency,’ Isabelle told Shauna. The children chose to stay at Chemignac. They’d been given compassionate leave from school and, in a display of maturity that astonished Shauna, declared they would be more use helping with the wine harvest than moping in Paris.

Against Albert’s advice, Laurent delayed the harvest by a further day, letting September 11th slide by and perhaps sacrificing the moment of perfect ripeness of the Sauvignon Blanc.

However, when they woke in Shauna’s bed just before dawn on the 12th, his first words were, ‘Clos de Chemignac has produced wine through two world wars. I will call in the pickers.
Chérie?
’ He scooped her into his arms, pulling her on top of him. ‘Ready for the hardest physical work of your life?’

‘I’ve had more subtle invitations to a roll in the hay.’

He laughed gently. ‘I meant the
vendange
. I’ll phone the agent now. He won’t mind.’

‘At four twenty in the morning? Nobody’s that good-natured. I say this next hour is ours.’ She kissed him, dragging her lips across his morning stubble to find the hollow of his throat. He gave in instantly, stretching out in arousal, his neck arching. They had been sharing a bed since Isabelle’s departure. The children had wanted Laurent near them, and Isabelle had told him, ‘Use my room, though of course, my bed lives in the dining room these days. You’ll have to dismantle it and lug it upstairs –’ At that point, she’d begun to cry, recalling her irritation at Louette’s interference, which now, of course, she would have welcomed.

So, Laurent had shifted his clothes and CD player into Isabelle’s room, joining Shauna in hers once the children were asleep. The bond of responsibility they now shared lent their nights a concentration Shauna had never before experienced. She’d not known that such imaginative, unhurried love existed. Or that her climax could go on so long or send its echo so deep.

Laurent, too, was enchanted. ‘It is different with you,’ he told her in the breathless flow that cascaded from him each time he climaxed. ‘With you, I feel I am cutting blocks to build a future.’

She wasn’t sure the image was wholly flattering, but she took his meaning. This wasn’t a holiday affair. They
were
building a future. And though they both took care that ‘the future’ did not, for now, involve her getting pregnant, they began to casually refer to a time when they were ‘a family’. Shauna couldn’t shake the idea that they were completing something that had been torn apart in other lifetimes. Along with her career plans, she was jettisoning her scientists’ scepticism, willing to challenge the tradition that all de Chemignac women had unhappy lives.

As Laurent drifted back into sleep, his arm across her, another realisation landed like a drop of iced water between her eyes. The Gown of Thorns had been burned to a frazzle in Louette’s car, almost taking Louette with it. Whatever bitterness and sorrow lived in its fibres must have gone too. Sliding into sleep herself, she was jolted awake by a chippy voice in her ear:
‘It isn’t over yet. Keep your promise. I won’t rest until I get justice.’

Shauna closed her eyes tight. The stress of the last days had wiped Yvonne’s name from her mind, but Yvonne was not going to go quietly, it seemed.

I
n a hospital ward
across the channel, Miss Thorne stared, dry-eyed, at the vinyl ceiling tiles.
Who drew up the cleaning rota at Dakenfield General?
Who thought it a good idea to switch on vacuum cleaners at first light? And would that person enjoy a similar wake-up call each morning?

One small blessing, the tea trolley would be along soon. With luck, it would be the friendly tea-lady doing the rounds today, the one who helped her sit up and turned her tray towards her. Miss Thorne had been dreaming about the Gown of Thorns. Its cold kiss had woken her. Even after all these years, its power was undiminished. Like the sloe berries from which its colour had been derived, it was a thing of beauty with a bitter heart. If only Henri had destroyed it before they met. Before she’d seen it, and reached for it.

A Delphos gown by Fortuny, fashioned to cling like cobwebs. What warm-blooded woman could have resisted? And what man would resist the woman wearing it? Henri’s eyes as she walked into his arms wearing it… If obsidian could catch fire…

Darling Henri had paid dearly for her vanity. But
only
that
. Whatever else they said of her in France was unjust and she couldn’t bear the thought of her life ending without vindication. Without redress. When the tea arrived, she frightened the woman pushing the trolley by screeching, ‘Tell them I cannot die until my name is carved on that stone.’

W
hile Shauna made
coffee and scrambled eggs, Laurent telephoned the agent who supplied temporary labour and said, ‘Send me all you’ve got.’ After that, he called his neighbours. By mid-morning, camper vans belonging to itinerant New Zealanders and Australians were parked on the newly shorn hay meadow. Vehicles with Portuguese and Spanish plates soon drew up alongside. Local pickers arrived on foot, middle-aged women mostly, who had worked on neighbours’ vineyards all the last week. Shauna joined Laurent in the
chai
and watched him and Raymond sterilising the press with carbon dioxide gas, ready for the first trailer-load of grapes. The other full-time worker, Armand, was giving the tractor a final check over.

She’d have loved to have had a go at spraying the snowy gas into the press, but she had her hands full. Many of the jobs that would have fallen to Isabelle were now hers, and she had to keep an eye on the children too. Reluctantly, and with Rachel’s grudging help, she made her way to the vineyard and set up trestle tables which she laid with drinking water and plastic cups, sunblock, insect repellent and bite-relieving cream. Armand brought along a box of small, sharp scissors. There were dozens of plastic buckets and, alongside them, a stack of
huttes
– conical baskets that three or four of the stronger workers would wear on their backs. Pickers emptied their buckets into the
huttes
, which in turn would be tipped into half-barrels on the back of the trailer.

By midday, Shauna and Olive were busy preparing lunch for the
vendangeurs.
Over the
sizzle of mushroom and red pepper omelettes came the rev and throb of the tractor engine. Armand was giving it a run up the sloping Sauvignon Blanc
parcelle
, their target for this afternoon. The casual workers were milling about in the courtyard, waiting to be fed. Afterwards, work would begin.

Shauna and Laurent were drinking a last cup of coffee and conferring over the afternoon’s schedule when Rachel drifted over to them. ‘Pardon me for butting in – again.’ Raising her brows at the coffee pot on the kitchen table, she added, ‘You two need to cut down on the caffeine. You’re staring at each other like a pair of lizards.’

‘How can I help you, Rachel?’ Laurent asked.

‘More, how can I help
you
? With Isabelle out of the picture, there must be jobs to do.’

Laurent looked momentarily stunned. ‘Well, we always need extra help among the vines.’

‘Sorry.’ Rachel held up her hands, implying ‘no go’. ‘I’m allergic to whatever it is you spray on the leaves.’

‘They haven’t been sprayed for nearly two weeks.’

‘Even so… I was thinking of taking over the kitchen. You’ll need somebody to do the honours at the
fête de vendange
, won’t you?’

‘Audrey is doing that, and Shauna will help. With Isabelle’s blessing.’

Rachel raised her eyebrows even higher, then smiled, accepting the fresh rebuff with apparent good grace. ‘Who’s to bring in the last trailer-load and be queen of the harvest?’

Laurent gave that a bare moment’s consideration. ‘This year – nobody. Out of respect for my cousin, who’s still in a coma.’

‘I suppose so.’ Rachel headed for the door. ‘Perhaps I can parade along the rows and keep up morale.’

‘Workers only among the vines. But look’ – Laurent’s voice turned serious – ‘it would really help if you could just look after the stables and the customers and if any pickers need accommodation, help them out. You know who offers rooms in the village.’

‘Sure. I’ll call on all the village witches, see if they prefer Spanish or Portuguese guests.’

Laurent sucked in a sound of irritation. ‘I appreciate it.’

‘Well, you always used to, Laurent. See you later.’ Rachel kissed her fingers at them both and went away with a sway of the hips that must, Shauna couldn’t help thinking, really get in the way of her stable chores. ‘That girl hasn’t given up on you.’

‘Oh, come on, Shauna. I told you it was a short-lived thing and a mistake.’ ‘Does she know that? I mean, the way she brushes her upper lip with her tongue when she says your name…
Laurent
.’ Shauna demonstrated in a smoky voice.

Laurent shook his head. ‘What happens in the past should stay in the past. No? Or would you like to tell me about the men you slept with at university?’

She blushed, her pale skin betraying her once again. ‘Point taken. It’s good of her to offer to help.’

‘I hope she means it. Rachel’s very good at offering her services only to make herself absent when you most need her.’

That, considering the conversation they’d just had, wasn’t reassuring.