Collecting Thoughts

by Irene Davidson

  Chapter three

  With effort, Darcy dragged her frazzled mind back to present-day France and the immediate task of finding the gîte that she and the children were to stay at over the next week. It had not been possible to move directly into their accommodation, a small cottage attached to stables at the chateau as it required cleaning and airing prior to their taking occupation.

  Chateau de Belagnac, -pronounced with a silent ‘g’- she had been informed by her new employer’s personal assistant, and its out buildings had been unoccupied for years and would not be ready for occupation for some time. Darcy had been told this during her interview but one of the provisos of her taking the job had been that making their cottage liveable for her and the children would be top priority.

  Mademoiselle Clement, the PA, had assured Darcy that this was so through a phone call the week before in which she outlined where they would stay in the interim. As the new owner would be out of the country on a business trip for the first two weeks of her employment directions to a nearby gîte, or holiday cottage, would be left pinned to the door of the church in the village of the same name. Non Madame, this spoken in what Darcy thought of as hoity-toity tones, it was quite ‘impossible’ to miss the village church. It was, after all, directly adjacent to the stables and their adjoining cottage where Madame and her children would be living after the cleaners had finished their job.

  Madame would understand, the assistant had said, as if reassuring a particularly dim-witted child, it was a very small village and in the unlikely event of Madame becoming lost she had only to ask directions from the local inhabitants…as everyone thereabouts knew where Madame Guillot’s gîte was located. And ‘non Madame’, sending the directions by fax or email was totally unnecessary as, repeated once again for the idiot child; the church was ‘absolument impossible’ to miss. Darcy had ended the conversation thinking that if she was called Madame in that condescending, snotty tone one more time she would not be responsible for her actions.

  Twenty minutes of driving later …“Absolument impossible, my aching un-French fanny.” Darcy muttered darkly.

  Passing an intersection that she was sure she’d seen not less than ten minutes previously she became aware that her almost spotless record of not getting lost was about to become completely tarnished if she didn’t find the correct village and the church pretty soon. She must have taken a wrong turn somewhere back there between the exit from the route nationale and the village. She was fairly sure that she’d been driving round in what now felt a lot like a roughly shaped circle for the last ten to fifteen minutes trying to find ‘Belagnac-with-the-silent-g’ and there wasn’t a single handy knowledgeable villager anywhere in sight for her to ask directions from. It appeared they were not as hardy a breed as the PA had intimated and less than inclined to hang about in the pouring rain to give travel tips to disoriented foreigners.

  It was a pity, Darcy thought wearily, that their hire car hadn’t come with a working GPS or at the very least, a decent road map, but she guessed that’s what you got for low-budget rental. She knew she should have bought the map booklet she’d picked up and leafed through at their last assorted-caffeinated-beverages-and-bathroom stop but aware of just how laden-down the car was she had replaced the thick map book back on the rack. Not such a clever move, she now thought with the advantage of 20/20-vision hindsight.

  The showers had not so much stopped as called a short truce to regroup and gather forces, but from the occasional patter of fat dollops of water on the front windshield she could tell another cloudburst was not far away. Darcy peered through the droplets on the car’s front window, noting that, on the positive side, the glass was now washed clean of the bug splatter it had collected on the earlier part of the drive. Looking through the gathering gloom of dusk come early she saw something that attracted her attention enough to have her sitting straighter in her seat. There, over the trees to the south, or was that north? West? East?

  Oh whatever, she thought despairingly. For someone who normally had a fairly good sense of direction she really had no idea which way was which anymore. Giving up on compass points she went for simple; -there …to her …right, that looked like a church spire and not too far away. Hoping she had found the missing village she drove along for another minute, keeping the spire in view above the trees, frightened that if she lost sight of it she might be driving around for the rest of the evening. The scene expanded as she drove out from between a long avenue of dripping green lime trees to a section of hedgerow that had been removed for replanting.

  …Well, she thought triumphantly, she might not have found the village church but she had found Chateau de Belagnac. Woohoo! She recognised the chateau from photos the ever-so-helpful assistant had attached to an earlier email prior to the job offer.

  Hopefully, that meant that the church couldn’t be too far away, given that it was right next to the chateau’s stables as the assistant had repeated, slowly and loudly, several times. Or did it? she wondered, feeling uncertainty creeping into her musings. After all, the chateau sat in nearly three hundred acres of grounds.

  No, she reasoned, the stables surely wouldn’t be that far away from the chateau proper… please, please, pretty please, let that be true. As she made this plea, Darcy was taking peeks through the new hedgerow planting. The spectacle of the chateau was mesmerising. Putting all thoughts of getting to their destination aside, she checked behind for traffic before indicating right and pulling off the road into a gateway alongside the narrow sealed pavement. Rain or no rain, she was getting out and having a proper look at the place she’d left home and hearth for, dragging her children along with her. A bona fide chateau to live in and practically a blank canvas, she’d been told in the interview, to re-landscape. Well, she wrinkled her nose with the thought, to live next to, more precisely, but that was just as good.

  She took a quick peep into the back seat. Yep, the children were still out to it. No point in waking them up when they’d see it tomorrow anyway. And, although it might be a teensy bit selfish, Darcy knew she really wanted to have this first impression all to herself. She’d dreamed of a job like this for years. A total re-design of the landscape of a deserted chateau that hadn’t been touched by anyone else in over fifty years. Living on site and a budget to die for, -not that she was absolutely sure what the budget was as yet but the owner was sufficiently wealthy that Darcy didn’t imagine penny-pinching would be an issue. Under happier circumstances it would have been utter bliss but even in her present predicament it was way better than average.

  She unclipped her seat belt, grabbed her jacket from the pile of discarded clothing that took up the front passenger seat and opened the car door, shrugging into the warm fleece-lined jacket as she got out.

  “Brrr”, it was considerable colder here than the temperature had been in London. And getting out of the car, as her city street high-heeled shiny leather boots sank into the mucky ground, she concluded that a pair of wellies would be high on her shopping list this week.

  Darcy squelched over to the gate, carefully choosing the spots that were least muddy for her unsuitably shod feet. The gate was a solid affair, comprised of rusty crafted steel with a crest of sorts set into panels placed either side of its central upright bars and set between tall solidly built brick pillars. One its far side a semi-gravelled lane led away across the paddock into woods and what appeared to be an avenue of tall trees, disappearing from her view after about fifty yards.

  Directly on the other side of the gate was rough looking pasture. Even if the weather had been more conducive to exploring, Darcy doubted that she’d be attempting to climb over the chained and padlocked gate. Watching her with wary eyes from inside the field and only yards away from her, yes, she rattled the heavy chain to check; thankfully the thing was firmly locked, were a dozen or so feral-looking French cattle. All of them sported lengthy horns with what looked like, from this relatively safe (she hoped) distance wickedly sharp points that could have given a Texas
Longhorn a run for its money. Those horns and the territorial look in the nearest beasts’ eyes were sufficient deterrent to keep her outside the barred gate.

  Still she wasn’t out here in the weather to look at a herd of cows… it was the rather forlorn-but-still-undeniably-beautiful building in the middle distance beyond the trees that caught Darcy’s attention. Slim turrets at either end of the symmetrical and roughly rectangular rosy-red brick chateau took the structure from the banal into a realm inhabited by those buildings of a more praiseworthy quality. This chateau was tall, Darcy counted five levels, if she included the basement, which appeared to be half-above, half-below ground, and the large central tower, which rose above the rest of the roofline, flanked to either side by tall chimney stacks.

  White timber louvered shutters blocked every stone-edged window and with five floors there were a profuse number of them. Darcy did a quick count, noting as she did so that the building’s proportions and styling leaned towards the more feminine and dignified end of the spectrum of chateaux that she had seen. Unlike many old buildings this seemed to all of the same era with no additions.

  Using her raised finger to count windows, she muttered, “six, seven, eight, nine,” with nine tall narrow windows on either of the main floors, “times two,” that made eighteen, less one for the door in the centre of the above ground floor, its flights of stone steps to the left and right leading directly down to the pasture that was seventeen.

  She saw that the chateau was divided into multiples of three; three windows either side of the central tower, three making up the tower with two lots of three stacked above, that was another six, …twenty three so far. Those at the very top of the middle tower were smaller dormers set into the dark slate roof and finished with decorative arched stone pediments.

  But the finial atop the right hand turret leant drunkenly to one side and the steep mansard roof with its prettily shaped round windows –one to either side of smaller rectangular windows, also with arched pediments, appeared to be more a mossy shade of green rather than the slate grey that Darcy see could nearer the ridgeline where the weather had kept the dark grey slates clean. Also, she was pretty sure that the dirty grey of the lighter stonework surrounding the windows would have been creamy white if it was clean. It was not.

  All the structure lacked was a mantle of briars, or possibly, if her son had his way, a dragon, Darcy decided and it could definitely qualify for its own fairy-tale princess. She knew that Rosie, who was still in that Barbie-doll-and-princess phase, would absolutely love it.

  Whew she’d got distracted and lost count;…she went backwards, once more using her index finger to count the windows off and adding as she went…seventeen, plus those six in the tower, that’s twenty three, plus two times three to either side…that makes, twenty nine…then she noticed there were more windows on each floor of the end turrets but by now the rain shower that had been threatening for the last quarter of an hour decided to do more than threaten.

  The spits were quickly turning into sizeable drops that were falling with more force. Darcy made a dash for the shelter of the car, managing to splatter her boots with mud in the process. Time, she knew, to find the church, the directions and the gîte.

  …Fortunately the church proved easily found. The road curved gently to the right, skirting what she presumed were the chateau grounds until Darcy came to the village of Belagnac. There was a small school to her left and as she drove past Darcy glanced towards the building that was to be their new home.

  Another gate in an overgrown hawthorn hedge led into the chateau with a suggestion of a gravelled drive running along the front of a long two-storied building. Maybe that was their stable cottage on the end closest to the road? That portion of the building was in red brick while the remainder was plaster with timber detailing and a red tiled roof, setting it distinct from the rest. Even from a brief glance, it wasn’t worth stopping to explore as solid dark brown wooden shutters covered all the windows so Darcy decided to ignore the chateau’s buildings for now and pulled into the church car park next door, just as the bells tolled the hour. They were lovely, ringing out clear tones across the village, but also very loud and she couldn’t help but wonder if they tolled every hour, day and night.

  Hmmm, she thought, that might be interesting living there practically right beside them in the shadows of the church. She hoped she and the children weren’t in for sleepless nights.

  A few cars were parked in front of the building but none of the villagers were to be seen. Huh. Darcy wished the PA had been here to see. Still, she had the sense of being watched as she opened the car door and ran over and up a couple of steps to unpin the scrap of notepaper from the sheltered doorway of the church.

  She hopped back into the driver’s seat to read the written instructions and roughly-drawn map in the warmth of the car. Great. The printed directions said to go back the way she’d come and turn off the first road to the right …drive two kilometres, over a bridge, up a slight rise and the gîte would be signposted at its gateway. She tucked the paper into the driver console’s cup holder and started the car.

  This had better be as easy as it sounded, she thought, as she reversed to turn. She had absolutely no energy left for second tries.