A Gown of Thorns: A Gripping Novel of Romance, Intrigue and the Secrets of a Vintage Parisian Dress (18 page)

A
lbert didn’t so
much invite her in as retreat into his apartment, allowing her to follow. Shauna entered rooms of dark, low beams, old furniture and lighting as yellow as a Dickensian Christmas scene. In a rear sitting room was Laurent, uncomfortable on a sofa, contemplating the messy surface of a coffee table. He’d changed out of his work clothes and showered. His hair held a moist gleam. His white hoodie with its surfing brand logo looked as if it had shrunk in the wash. Or maybe he’d expanded since he last took to a surfboard… He looked up.

‘Where were you?’ They both said it at the same time.

He answered first, ‘Walking the vines. You weren’t in your room. I thought you might be here.’

She said, ‘Likewise, pretty much. What’s all this?’ The coffee table was spread with black–and-white photographs. She glanced at Albert, who, in a zip-up cardigan and the suit trousers he wore on Sundays for mass, looked simply like a lanky old man and less the perennial woman-hater he normally was. It gave her the confidence to add, ‘My legs have had it,’ and to plump down next to Laurent.

The photos had an old-fashioned matt finish and white borders. They looked sharply professional, though they smelled of dust and long-term storage. One showed a young lad of around twelve or thirteen grinning sheepishly. The backdrop was the courtyard outside.
That
hadn’t changed at all. There was portrait of a young woman wearing a headscarf and a tired-looking dress, her youth and sweetness a reproach to her threadbare clothing. She held the hand of a very little boy. In other pictures, she and the sheepish lad stood together. In others, a young girl performed ballet steps in the sunshine.

‘Isabelle,’ Shauna said. ‘She had the perfect build to be a dancer.’ Nobody contradicted her.

Laurent had laid four pictures in front of Shauna, silently inviting her comment. Two were of the same woman, seated on a dining chair in the courtyard. Slim, with runner’s legs, she was reading a book, or trying to. Geese were clustered around her, whether greeting her or pecking her, it wasn’t clear. The third picture was of a good-looking man standing in front of the door that now belonged to Albert. Shauna recognised the brass bell. The man’s demeanour was brooding, as if he wanted to swear at the camera. The last photo captured the same man and woman together. Something about their expressions, the shape of their mouths, told her they’d either just been kissing or were wishing the cameraman would go away so they could start.

‘I don’t understand.’ But she was beginning to comprehend that her ‘understanding’ – her consent – was not required. The past was encroaching on the present. Change the hairstyle and the clothes, add a few years, and the woman reading the book, surrounded by geese, could be her. And the man in the photo – he was the spitting image of Laurent.

T
he boys
she’d met on espionage training courses had all said that danger ‘was like a drug’. Yvonne couldn’t comment – the nearest she’d ever been to drug-taking was a strong cup of tea and an aspirin. Danger, to her mind, was a most unpleasant stimulant, of which the sole benefit was a radical sharpening of focus. Standing in the drop field, her eardrums near to bursting from the incessant crossfire, she made a mental note to tell her colleagues, if she ever saw them again, that their idea of danger was a meaningless cliché. The reality was savagely physical. Her pulse felt like a runaway train. Her legs wanted to sag, her hands felt clammy. Yet when Écharde said, ‘One, two, three – Run!’ she grabbed Cyprien’s wireless set and flew across the meadow like a hunted hare, her limbs fuelled by undiluted adrenaline.

Away from the moonlit fields, concealed in the woods, they rested a moment. The intervals between bursts of crossfire were growing shorter, suggesting the battle was reaching a climax.

‘What about your friends?’ she panted. ‘And can I stop calling you Écharde? Seems idiotic, as I know you’re Henri de Chemignac.’

‘Call me “Monsieur” and I will call you “Madame”. My friends are trained soldiers, prepared to die – but always hopeful of escape. Our tactic is to keep firing volleys from the front rank while the men at the back slip away one by one. The last remaining choose their moment to retreat, then split up. Nobody wants to get caught. Your colleagues are in safe hands. Would you like me to carry that radio set? It must be heavy. Ready?’

The next hour consisted of hacking through woodland, field and scrub, sprinting in short bursts with rests between. Adrenaline depleted, it was absolute murder in bandaged-up shoes, with so many layers under her flying suit. She fell more than once. Just as she glimpsed the comforting bulk of walls and a square tower, Henri informed her they were doubling back into the woods. ‘In case we are followed.’

So, instead of the fireside and tot of cognac she’d been promised, she got to stumble along yet more deer paths, followed by a sit down in a cave mouth. Though this was no mere cave, it transpired. Following her guide into its womb-like recess, she discovered a gap between the rocks. They were to squeeze through, apparently. It was narrow enough to bruise her ribs and she was finally glad of her padding.

‘Our tunnel,’ Henri whispered, ‘leading straight to the château tower, under the meadows. I hope you are impressed.’

‘Do the others know about this?’

‘Never mind that. Your friends will be brought this way, if it’s safe. Ready? Once in the tunnel itself, bend low or you’ll strike your head on the roof. I will let you see where you are, but then we must go in darkness. We can’t afford to consume too much oxygen.’

In the flare of his cigarette lighter, she saw that it really
was
a tunnel, like a mine-shaft with props. Like something out of a
Boy’s Own
comic. Her flying helmet was a life-saver as she misjudged the height and clonked her skull on the roof. ‘Take care and follow me closely,’ Henri told her as he secreted Cyprien’s wireless set in a recess and dropped the flint of his lighter. ‘Let’s go.’

The air was thin. Soon, her lungs and her back muscles were aching. As they rested part-way along, Henri told her that the tunnel had been excavated in the twelfth century by the castle’s chatelaine, a native Gascon, as a guard against siege by the French king. ‘My ancestor was an ally of the English, who were sovereign in this part of France at that time. I cannot applaud him for his choice of allies, but his burrowing was exemplary. If you are trapped in your castle by a hostile army, it is helpful to have a way out into the woods.’ The passage had fallen into ruin over the centuries, Henri added, but had been hastily re-dug and shored up at the outbreak of the Terror, in 1793. A much later ancestor, he told her proudly, had led his family to safety when a revolutionary mob surrounded Chemignac. ‘And ever since, we have kept it in good repair. One never knows when a new enemy might come. A good tunnel,
hein
?’

‘Every home should have one,’ Yvonne quipped, though even that sapped her breath.

It
was
good as tunnels went, but her back was ready to break by the time Henri hushed her and said, ‘We are here.’ After a silence, during which no sounds of impending ambush reached them, he used a wooden staff to push open a trapdoor. Hauling himself out, he reached down to help her, then flicked his lighter to show her the interior of a round tower, stone steps rising steeply, a studded oak door to one side. Four barrels stood by the trapdoor, arranged in a square. Yvonne tapped on the lid of one of them. ‘D’you know, I never tasted wine until I was twenty.’

‘What a tragic life!’ Henri unlocked the oak door and led her into a room with dark, farmhouse beams. Immediately, she reeled at the ammonia smell of animal dung. From behind a partition came the noise of disturbed creatures.

‘Geese,’ Henri told her as he led her out into a courtyard. ‘Every night, we shut our flock up in that part of the château.’

‘Inside your house?’

‘I don’t use that section, and it’s the lesser of two evils. Their presence discourages the Germans from requisitioning any more of my home, you see?’

‘Not really.’

‘Our enemy likes to goose-step, but he does not like to step in goose droppings.’ Henri chuckled at his own joke.

‘You’ll need a big clean-out one day.’

‘One day. One glorious day.’ At another door, Henri gave a brass bell a single clang, damping the sound instantly. The door was opened by a youthful figure who hung back as if he didn’t want to be seen.

Henri said, ‘Go inside, Madame, and welcome to my home.’

At last, Yvonne got to crouch in front of a glowing stove while Henri introduced her to the young man who’d let them in. ‘My brother, Albert.’

She’d assumed the spotty, lanky boy must be his son.

‘I can tell what you’re thinking. He really is my brother, and yes, there are many years between us. He was my parents’ wild card.’

Young Albert de Chemignac seemed fascinated by Yvonne’s leather helmet and grass-streaked parachute suit. Uncomfortably, she felt that he was trying to see through it to her body beneath. Perhaps thinking the same, Henri abruptly sent him to make coffee.

‘Dreadful stuff, I apologise in advance for it. We cannot get true coffee any more. First, though, let me pour you a cognac which, I am happy to tell you, is the best. You will take a glass, Madame? There is also bread and cheese and soup in the kitchen. Albert, bring food for our guest!’

As if used to taking orders from his brother, while also resenting it, the young man made a face. But he left the room, returning after a short interval, bringing a crock of broth and a plate of bread and cheese.

Henri asked, ‘Will you partake, Madame?’

‘I’ll say.’ Gratefully, Yvonne took the platter and set it on the hearth. ‘But must we keep up the “Madame, Monsieur” thing? Call me Yvonne, please. Excuse me one moment–’ At last, she could take off her flying helmet. ‘You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to do this.’ Tipping her head forward, she unbuckled her headgear and raked the itches from her hair, forgetting that Venetian gold melts to amber by a fire. It was only when she raised her head that she saw she was being devoured. By two men, though not in the same way. Albert stood some way behind his brother, riveted. Henri was pouring the cognac, while his eyes rested on her.

His gaze was warm. Arousal was there, with an undercoat of surprise, as if he was only just seeing the woman beneath the packaging. His voice remained urbane, however. ‘It seems we are guarding a lioness.
Salut
, Madame. Ah,
votre pardon
.
Yvonne
.’ He passed her a glass of tawny liquid, and the momentary fusion of their fingers brought a smile to his lips. Which, with that film-star moustache, made him look wicked and unutterably sexy.

‘
Salut
, Henri-Écharde,’ she answered. It wouldn’t do to show too much. Frenchmen, in her experience, expected admiration. It made them untrustworthy. ‘Why that code name, by the way?’

‘Écharde fits, my family being a splinter in the side of whoever threatens us. A dangerous habit, but incurable.’ His eyes never left her. They’d never really left her since the moment they met. Even when his back was to her, he’d become her eyes and it had felt as if they were welded together. She liked him. Loved him, for being there. For being part of the terrain that had absorbed her and would hide her until it was safe for her to leave. She smiled.

She removed her outer clothing, had a quick hand-wash at the kitchen sink and had just finished her food when a muted clang at the door signalled the arrival of others. It was the veteran, Jean-Claude, who limped in first. He dragged one foot, clamping his obvious pain behind gritted teeth. His knees and shins were filthy, indicating he’d crawled through the tunnel. Behind him came wounded, whimpering Cyprien, who had been half-carried, half-dragged by two of Henri’s Resistance colleagues. These men were introduced simply as Luc and Michel. They shook hands with her and with Henri, crowing with the exuberance of successful warriors. In fast vernacular, they described the outcome of the battle. Deaths on both sides, but a victory for them because the
Milice
had finally broken and run. All through this, Albert hung back, Yvonne noticed. Not a man’s man. Not a fighter. She went to Cyprien and began to unbutton his jacket. He flinched and muttered something.

‘You’ll live,’ she told him, while thinking that the bandages that had been wrapped around her ankles would come in useful. Impossible to know how badly hurt Cyprien was. The blood loss suggested that a bullet might have torn a blood vessel. It might still be embedded in him.

Luc and Michel stayed long enough to warm themselves and down a glass of cognac – and offer an admiring toast to Yvonne – before returning to the tunnel. Henri invited her to help see them off. Cyprien had been laid in front of the fire, his head on a cushion. A probing of his injuries had revealed that the wound was in his arm, and there was no bullet lodged in his flesh. A slug of cognac had tipped him into blessed unconsciousness.

As she helped Henri secure the tunnel’s hatch behind the two departing Frenchmen, Yvonne asked, ‘Will your friends return to their homes?’

‘Not for a while.’ Albert joined them just then and Henri said, ‘Good. You can help me get the barrels back.’ Yvonne realised then that the purpose of the four casks was to conceal the tunnel entrance and, presumably, prevent anybody accessing the château from below unless by previous arrangement. With much grunting and truncated swearing, the brothers ‘walked’ the barrels one after the other onto the trapdoor. They couldn’t be more than half full, Yvonne thought, judging from the slap of liquid inside.

At last, Henri blew out a breath and continued where he’d left off. ‘My friends will take paths through the woods that only the hunters know, find their way into Périgord Noir’ – Black Perigord – ‘and lose themselves for a while in the oak forests. We’ll see them again, eventually.’

‘If they don’t get caught,’ Albert proffered.

‘Go to bed,’ Henri told him. ‘Though not to your own, I’m afraid. Our wounded English friend will take yours. You must sleep in the kitchen.’

Yvonne waited until Albert had slammed a couple of doors behind him before asking, ‘Will
you
be safe?’ As Comte de Chemignac, Henri was a sitting duck. Forget code names and secret tunnels. He must be one of the best-known men in the district, as much trapped by his fortress as protected by it. ‘Doesn’t everyone know where to find you?’

‘Naturally. But I keep in with the Germans and with all the local
Milice
commanders. I supply them their wine. They consider me to be a good, collaborating fellow and I do nothing to disabuse them.’

‘They won’t guess you’re Écharde?’

‘Never! Écharde is a rough fellow, a bumpkin who wouldn’t know good wine from pigswill.’ Laughing, he kissed her hand and she flinched pleasurably. She’d never before been kissed by a man with a moustache, on any part of her. The touch of hair was as disturbing as it was thrilling.

‘
T
his is
where I’m to sleep?’ Yvonne asked as Henri conducted her up curving tower steps. She counted them until she reached fifty, at which point she gave up, with one flight still to go. When Henri ushered her into a room, she saw immediately that she’d landed better quarters than Jean-Claude, who was to sleep on a pallet bed on the ground floor, among the geese.

Their light was a stub of candle no bigger than Henri’s thumb and Yvonne’s eyes strained to translate the shadows. A bed. A real bed, and large. The room seemed ancient though, reminiscent of the Tower of London. ‘Is this where you confine errant wives?’

‘Not personally, no.’ Henri set the candle down on the floor, where it guttered, throwing chrysanthemum shapes on the ceiling. ‘This and the gatehouse are what remain of our ancient stronghold, and this was where the guard was billeted in olden days. The last modern occupant was my mother’s favourite maid. She slept here and did her sewing, and took care of the clothes. My mother’s evening gowns are still here.’ He opened the wardrobe door, releasing a whiff of preserving oils that made Yvonne sneeze. ‘My late wife would come up here sometimes, to be alone.’ He ended on a note that discouraged the obvious question.
Why did your wife feel the need to be alone?
He further confused her by taking a small key from the top of the wardrobe and locking the door. ‘Marie-Louise was fanatically private about her clothes. It would have upset her to think of another woman ever touching them.’

Yvonne thought of her own clothes back in England, the few she owned. ‘Fair enough. I locked my wardrobe too, before I left. My landlady’s daughter had her eye on my finery.’ As Henri slipped the key into his jacket pocket, she looked around. ‘Not much fun up here by yourself, nothing to do. Am I allowed to put on the light?’

‘Never.’ Henri pointed to the shuttered window, which, he told her, looked out over the courtyard. ‘The apartment opposite is where my parents lived when they were alive. Last year, it was commandeered for the use of a German industrialist who oversees the supply of timber to the Atlantic ports. Fortunately for us, he is rarely here, but he has two French lads who supposedly keep the place aired and exercise his gun dogs. We don’t trust any of them, not even the dogs, so you must take great care.’