A Gown of Thorns: A Gripping Novel of Romance, Intrigue and the Secrets of a Vintage Parisian Dress (2 page)

‘
S
hauna
?’ A woman wearing a boho-style turban over dyed black hair called her name as Shauna slowly entered the courtyard. She looked to be in her late sixties or early seventies. So could it be…?

‘Madame Duval?’

‘Indeed I am!’ A cotton kaftan, beaded at the neck, and colourful, ethnic earrings were far removed from the chic look Shauna had ascribed to Madame Duval. As she approached Shauna, she leaned heavily on an ebony cane and when she spoke again, her voice rasped as if walking were painful. ‘
Salut, chérie!
’

‘I’m Shauna. I’ve come to work for you.’ Waking in the meadow with a jolt like an electric shock, Shauna had been convinced she’d been about to plummet into gun fire. The scene had been terrifyingly graphic. Returning to the château had felt like swimming through celluloid. She must look wild-eyed, her hair full of grass seed. With the dying sun picking out its copper and bronze highlights, she probably resembled a traffic light. Red and amber.

‘My dear, how rude you must think me, but Rachel said nothing of your arrival.’ Madame Duval kissed Shauna on both cheeks, gripping her arm with her free hand. ‘I saw the estate car parked near the stables where it stood since yesterday, so I supposed you had been delayed. Rachel did not tell me she had taken the pony and trap!’ She pushed her turban higher up her forehead, as if to inspect Shauna better. ‘How like Elisabeth you are, pink as a peach! She could never stand the heat, but I think it is more than that.
Oh, mon Dieu!
’

Shauna’s legs gave way. Madame Duval bent as low as she could, taking Shauna’s chin in her fingers. For the second time in that courtyard, Shauna felt that she was being studied ten layers deep. ‘You have sunstroke! How could that happen?’

‘Not sunstroke,’ Shauna muttered. She felt safer sitting on the cobbles, and just lucid enough to explain, ‘Heat exhaustion. My fluid and salt levels have dropped. I need water and electrolytes.’

‘Electrolytes? I don’t know… But you can stand? No? Wait here.’

Shauna flinched as a cacophony ripped the air. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Madame Duval with her arm inside the 2CV, the alarm yawping like a siren warning of chemical attack.

‘Laurent! Laurent!
Viens ici, vite, vite,
’ Madame Duval pitched urgently, repeating herself until running feet could be heard, and a male voice answered, ‘What’s up?’

Somebody else – the old man Shauna had met earlier? – added his voice: ‘What the devil is this racket? Why is this girl still here,
la rouquine
? Who invited her?’

Shauna tucked her head into her chest, wanting to avoid the old man’s unnerving gaze. She kept her eyes shut as a shadow fell across her, a shadow that held the scent of horses and citronella. Somebody was reaching down. A strand of hair tickled her cheek. Then arms linked around her and a moment later she was being carried like a bride over a threshold and set down on a divan. Finally, she opened her eyes, and the room was spinning.

‘You feel pain? Where – head, neck?’ The voice was low, carrying a note of true concern, and Shauna felt tears well up. It was the man from the railway station. She recognised his hair, longer than current fashion, with neatly razored sideburns. His gaze held hers unblinkingly, as if searching for something he might recognise. His mouth was beautiful, narrowed in concentration, a charcoaling of stubble around it. Something deeper than gratitude flooded her and she reached for his hand. Missed and grasped his wrist. His flesh was warm under its sprinkling of hairs, his pulse steady and unflustered. ‘Have you had cramp?’ He used the phrase ‘
crampe musculaire
’.

‘No, but my head aches.’
My heart too
.

‘When did you last drink water?’

It took her a moment to assimilate his meaning and to muster the correct phrases to answer him. ‘Um, an hour ago. Maybe two hours... Well, not since I was on the train.’

‘You are dehydrated, do you think?’

He was asking good questions and he wasn’t trying to stare into her soul, she realised. He was checking for dilation of the pupils. Whatever she was experiencing by being so close to him, he wasn’t feeling it back.

‘She asked for electrolytes,’ Madame Duval interjected. ‘Do you know what they are?’

‘Salts,
Tante
Isabelle, like magnesium, calcium and potassium. I’ll get some from the lab. Meanwhile, give her plain water and find a fleece blanket. She’s flushed, but feels cold. More like shock than sunstroke, which is strange.’

‘A blanket.
Oui, docteur
,’ Isabelle Duval said teasingly, though with evident affection for the young man who was ordering her about.

Tante
Isabelle? So this Laurent was Madame Duval’s nephew. And yes, though he dwarfed his aunt, he had the same eyes, dark as a shot of espresso. When he gently unlatched Shauna’s hand and took her wrist to find her pulse, she glimpsed a bold tattoo on the underside of his arm. A thorn twig with barbs that would hurt if you got on the wrong end of them in real life.

Shauna blinked in confusion – she had the identical symbol tattooed on
her
arm, just below her left shoulder.

I
t took
Shauna three days to fully recover and four before she met the children she’d come to look after. Isabelle Duval tended her all that time, mortified at the part she’d inadvertently played in Shauna’s rough reception. ‘That wretched Rachel Moorcroft! I was going to ask Laurent to collect you from the train station because he had an appointment in Garzenac but Rachel volunteered to go herself.’ Madame Duval was pouring peppermint tea. They were in her drawing room, the windows open to the breeze. The view was of lawns and rose gardens giving way to meadow and eventually, the massing fringes of the forest. ‘I presumed she would take the Peugeot Estate, which she uses to pick up visitors to the winery. But no! She takes a horse and cart as though we are… What are those people?’ Madame Duval’s earrings shook as she squeezed her brains for the word she wanted. Her hair, freed from its turban, hung in page-boy bangs and she could have passed for a fairground fortune-teller. ‘You know, those Americans who do everything in the seventeenth century?’

‘Amish?’

‘
Exactement
. The pony cart does tourist rides, but never at the hottest time of the day. Laurent found the poor little animal in a bad state and he is incandescent.’ Rachel’s job, Isabelle Duval went on to say, was to escort visitors on horseback rides through the vineyards and the woods. The girl had overstated her role in describing herself as ‘running the tourist side of the business.’ Her domain was the stables. ‘Chemignac is famous for its white horses, and though they make little money, they bring visitors in. People come to ride, and buy wine afterwards! Laurent employed Rachel because she’s English, like most of the guests, and he thought she would aid communication. Ha!’

Rachel was English?
‘But… She sounded like a native Frenchwoman.’

‘She’s from London. Why must she speak French to you at all? Showing off! Or perhaps it was one of her not-very-funny jokes.’

Not at all funny
, Shauna agreed.
And why direct her to a non-existent rose-pink door?

‘To trick you into clanging Monsieur de Chemignac’s bell. Poor
Oncle
Albert! He was taking his siesta, and you know, he is nearly eighty. He is angry too.’

Yes
, Shauna thought,
but not with Rachel
. She sipped the fragrant tea, ruminating on the fact that, through complicated degrees of cousinhood, she and that curmudgeonly old man were also related. What would Albert de Chemignac make of that? Not very much, Shauna decided.

Just that morning, Isabelle had drawn Shauna a family tree, showing that she and Shauna’s mother were third cousins once removed. Isabelle’s great-grandmother was Elisabeth Vincent’s great-great grandmother. They’d hardly been aware of each other’s existence, Isabelle had told Shauna, but that was hardly surprising as Elisabeth’s mother had married an
Anglais
and moved to the north of England. ‘But then, one day I get a letter. Elisabeth is coming to study in Paris and wants to meet her mother’s family. I invited her to my magazine office by the Seine, then took her to lunch. She had a terrible French accent and was very shy.’

Nevertheless, Isabelle had taken to the redheaded Elisabeth and, though there was an age gap of twenty-three years between them, an enduring friendship had formed. Shauna had been astonished to learn that Elisabeth had met her, Shauna’s, father right here in Chemignac. ‘They met in Ireland, I always thought.’

‘No, no.’ Elisabeth had joined Isabelle one summer at Chemignac. ‘I think it was 1973.’ She’d come to help with the
vendange
, the grape harvest. On her first day, she’d glimpsed a handsome lad among the vines. He was from Dublin, earning his holiday money as a harvest-hand. ‘
Un coup de foudre.
Love at first sight!’

Isabelle said now, ‘When you have drunk your tea, would you like to help me prepare the vegetables for dinner?’ She reached for her stick. ‘We’re having
Sobronade
– a casserole of white beans, ham and pork – to a family recipe. The
petits sauvages
are back at six and will be ravenous.’

‘Course I’ll help. Your poor grandchildren have had to tiptoe around because of me these last few days.’

‘It is good for them. Good for children to learn to think of others. I speak from experience and wish I had mastered that lesson earlier myself. I was a wilful, horrible child.’ Isabelle got up with a drawn-out ‘Ooooh’. She had broken her femur in a car crash two years before and the fracture had been slow to mend. Then, just a couple of weeks ago, as she was due to leave Paris for Chemignac, she’d tripped on a kerbstone and badly bruised her knees. No longer able to act as daily chauffeur to her grandchildren – her customary role during the long summer holiday – she’d sent a panicky email to Elisabeth, asking her cousin to cast around for an au pair. ‘A nice girl who can drive on our side of the road, who can coach my brats in English and is free right away.’

Elisabeth had looked across at Shauna, seeing her daughter wan-faced and on the cusp of depression, and uttered the fateful words, ‘You will fall in love with Chemignac. I did, years ago, and so did your father.’

S
hauna followed
Isabelle out of the drawing room, gently swinging her arms, testing her balance. She felt fine, no lingering symptoms of heat exhaustion. Rest and peppermint tea had done the trick. Nor had that unsettling dream come back.
Better give Mum a call
, Shauna thought as she waited at the kitchen table to be given a job. Isabelle had telephoned England to let Elisabeth Vincent know that her daughter had arrived safely, but that she was a little unwell. It felt strange to have gone four days without contacting the outside world. Grace was probably convinced by now that she
had
been abducted. Shauna was also anxious to know if Mike Ladriss, the senior professor of her university faculty, had messaged her. He’d promised to alert her to any suitable research posts that crossed his radar. Their last meeting had been deeply emotional – for her anyway – and she’d said things she now regretted. A friendly text from him would put her mind at rest.

‘Where’s the best place to get a mobile phone signal, Madame?’

Isabelle, standing in front of an open fridge, gestured vaguely. ‘Garzenac, in the churchyard, the highest part of town. That is the only place my phone works, though Laurent uses a different network with a better range. Shauna, please call me Isabelle, not “Madame”. I know I am old, but I don’t like to feel it. Would you open the back door? It is so hot! These Dordogne summers kill me, yet I keep coming back.’ Reaching into the fridge, and almost to herself, she added, ‘Nobody who loves Chemignac ever really leaves it.’

Opening the door onto the courtyard, Shauna breathed in the musk of ripening cantaloupes. Chemignac seemed pretty much immune to modernity, yet as a wine estate and tourist attraction, it must have a computer somewhere. Or at least a fax machine. Or maybe Laurent would let her borrow his phone, or would it be too pushy to ask? He hadn’t called on her since that first evening, even though he, too, lived in the château. The back wall of his apartment was twenty strides away. He’d telephoned for updates on her condition, according to Isabelle, but that wasn’t the same as coming to see her.

She found a way to introduce his name. ‘Does Laurent run the vineyard by himself?’

Isabelle was dicing pork. ‘He has two helpers to do the work in the
clos
alongside him, though one of them, Raymond, is often unwell. His back has gone, poor thing. Hardly surprising as he’s been labouring since he was ten years old, and he’s older than I am!
Oncle
Albert also tries to help, but he can’t do much now, either. And of course there is Rachel, and a couple of part-time stable-hands, but they keep to their own tasks. Come harvest, Chemignac turns into a factory and we’re flooded with
vendangeurs
.’ Harvest-hands, she explained. ‘But Laurent thinks that if he rests, some pest or disease will attack the vines and, you know, there are ten hectares of them to watch. This month he will clean and service every piece of equipment because when the grapes are being picked you cannot afford for anything to go wrong. And then there is eternal paperwork – this is France! He works through the night sometimes, and collapses into bed for three or four hours’ sleep. He worries me.’

‘Sounds tough,’ Shauna said, settling down to scrape potatoes. Was it totally inappropriate to wonder if Laurent collapsed into bed alone?
Yes
, she decided,
inappropriate and a bit crazy.
Face it, she’d seen him twice and both times she’d been thoroughly over-heated. The occasional fantasy wouldn’t hurt – so long as they stayed in her head. She wasn’t ready for fresh hurt and she’d become something of a disappointment-magnet lately.
During her third year at university, she’d fallen headfirst for a post-grad student. They’d moved in together, planning their future to the last detail to allow both of them to achieve their career potential while enjoying family life. Doctorate for her, a professorship for him, two children, a travelling sabbatical each, a mortgage, happiness, prosperity and a dog. Then, without consulting her, Jason had taken a job in America. A month in, an email. He’d met somebody else…