What could I say to that?
CHAPTER 5
I was shown round the chateau before dinner, and Laurent – over our second gin we’d agreed to exchange Christian names – gave me the guided tour. He explained that the original chateau had stood on this site, and next to it the ancient windmill which one could still see in old representations of the town. In the early days the house had been merely a shooting box, being so near to the dunes and La Chasse, but in the Eighteenth Century, as wealth spread from Paris to the seaports, the newly created marquis – the earlier Frigecourts had been vicomtes –decided to make it into a grande maison.
A great deal of reconstruction had gone on since the house had first been built. As in many old houses, one room led into another, so that separate corridors and doorways had had to be made. The tiled hall was one vast coat of arms. I meant to ask Laurent about this, but at that moment the children came decorously downstairs – up to then I’d never seen them merely walk – followed by Mademoiselle Jeanne, who gave me a friendly smile.
The children were dressed for dinner, the boys in dark shorts, white shirts and ties, and Noelle in a long frilly dress. I was glad I’d put on the silk caftan. Assembled in the dining room the children nodded at me gravely and then bowed their heads for grace, which Laurent said in Latin! The table was beautifully set with silver candelabra, Sevres plates and cruets, and crystal glass for the adults; the meal was simple and excellently cooked: soup, mussels in a green garlic sauce, roast chicken with pommes de terres and green beans, cheese, and ice cream. The children ate heartily, Fabrice being occasionally reprimanded for his manners, but the other two were the embodiment of the best upbringing. Mademoiselle Jeanne ate sparingly, I noticed, and seemed always to have her eyes on one or another of her charges. I did think the children’s behavior unduly restricted – there was an almost uneasy feeling about the meal, as though everyone were on unnaturally good behaviour.
When Laurent made his next remark, it produced the same impact on me as a boulder heaved into a mill pond.
“So tell us, Mrs. Trafford, about your book on Jeanne d’Arc.”
I looked at him, my mouth falling foolishly open. “You know I’m writing a hook about Joan of Arc?”
“But yes” – he looked about him, surprised – “Didn’t you tell me your book was about Joan of Arc?”
“No, I don’t think I did.”
“Well, someone did; I don’t think it’s important.” He waved his arms about airily. “I’d like to know what new things you have to say about her. You know she was connected with the old chateau that used to stand here?”
“Yes, I know, she was imprisoned there for a month. There were four turrets, and she was imprisoned in the tour du roi.” I proceeded smoothly with my history lesson, to which all listened attentively; but mentally I was churning over in my mind this apparently trivial remark of Laurent’s. It so happens that I’m very secretive about my work and what books I’m writing. One reason is that academics are the most awful thieves and won’t hesitate to snitch an idea from someone who has already done all the research. The only people whom I’d told about my book were my supervisor and Tom, and neither, I knew, would ever have breathed a word to another soul, certainly not so far as Port St Pierre, Picardy. Madame Gilbert had been keen to know the subject, but all I told her was that it was about medieval France and I muttered something about Edward III and John of Luxemburg, who had fought at Crecy nearby.
Now that it was out, of course, one had to make the best of it. But how had he known? How could he possibly have known? The only one from the chateau who’d been inside my house had been Rose. Even supposing she’d had time to nose about my study – and I couldn’t believe it possible while I’d been in the kitchen – she’d never seen Laurent again before her death.
Then, given this as a reasonable hypothesis – that I’d left something around that Rose had seen – whom had she told? The children? Jeanne? But if I started questioning them, they would know that Rose had been to my house, and if they did, wouldn’t they think it odd I hadn’t mentioned it already?
Suddenly my food tasted like sawdust, and I wondered if I were under inspection, if they all wanted to know why I’d concealed the truth?
But looking at them nodding intelligently, eating, drinking, it was hard to think they could be other than what they seemed, even Jeanne. They appeared to be friendly, agreeable people who liked each other and liked me.
“Yes, it is a bad chapter in our history,” Laurent observed when I’d finished my little treatise. “Joan sold to the English by the French, very shameful.”
“But Monsieur,” Jeanne said quietly, in a subdued voice that nevertheless seemed to vibrate with emotion, “Jeanne d’Arc was not sold to the English by the French, but by the Burgundians. It is not the same thing.”
“Oh, yes, it is,” Laurent replied. “They were French.”
“They were not French, Monsieur le Marquis. They were traitors!”
“But ...” Laurent began, then seeing Jeanne’s face seemed to reconsider. I must say her expression amazed me. It was as though someone had said something either obscene or offensive about her or a close member of her family. She kept her voice very low, but I thought that if he pursued the subject, she would either start screaming or leave the room.
I think he thought so too, and he turned to me to help him.
“The history of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy is complicated,” I said smoothly. “They were always at odds with the French crown and indeed sided with the English almost throughout the Hundred Years War.”
“They were not French at all,” Jeanne hissed.
“Mademoiselle, they were related to the French king, but in the sense that they created their own state and perpetually sought a crown from the Holy Roman Emperor, perhaps you are right,” I said, and Laurent gave me a grateful smile. The subject was dropped and the rest of the meal consumed while we talked about other things.
Immediately after dinner the children were taken upstairs by Jeanne, kissing their father and politely shaking hands with me. Cecile came in with coffee and then said that if that was all she would be going.
Laurent nodded and smiled, and Cecile bobbed awkwardly and retired.
“You have only daily staff?” I asked him, “except for those who look after the children?”
“Well, we never spent more than a few months a year here at the most. Madame Barbou cooks for us when we’re here and helps at one of the hotels when we’re away; the same with Cecile. We’re very lucky they’ve been able to stay with us this year. May I give you a brandy with your coffee?”
I declined his offer and he got a whisky for himself, settling back in the sofa with a deep sigh. “So, what do you think of Mademoiselle Jeanne this evening?”
“You mean her outburst about the Burgundians?”
He nodded, puffing at a cigar, his eyes narrowed, watching me. Had his faith in Jeanne been shaken?
“It was awfully strange,” I began. “I must say her reaction surprised me. But if she is an historian ...”
“It seemed almost personal to me.” Laurent went on puffing. “She appeared to resent something very deeply.”
“Interestingly enough, I had the same feeling,” I said, “as though something offensive had been said about her.”
“Exactly. It worries me a bit.”
“I shouldn’t worry,” I said, longing again to tell him about Rose, “if you are otherwise satisfied with her.”
“It worries me that she is solely in charge of the children. Alone here with them.”
The children aren’t safe, Rose had said. I felt myself go cold, despite the warm room.
“You see,” Laurent went on, “my family is descended from a branch of the royal Burgundian line. Jeanne must know that.”
I felt excited, apprehensive.
“Why must she know?”
“It’s often talked about. Our coat of arms ...”
“Of course, I’d
meant to ask you about that.”
“You must have seen it in the hall, the Burgundian lion and the bar sinister. We are directly descended from John the Fearless, second of the four Valois Dukes of Burgundy.”
“Yes, they did get around, didn’t they,” I murmured. “Especially Philip the Good; he had at least twenty-three natural children.”
“Oh, at least.” Laurent laughed. “Well, his father, John, who murdered the Duke of Orleans, wasn’t much better, progeny-wise. One of his favourite mistresses was Isabeau of Ponthieu, a girl of noble stock whose father was one of John’s councillors. It was apparently a real love affair, and she bore him three children. But all the Valois Burgundian duchesses were women of some account in their own right; they frequently looked after their husbands’ property while they were fighting, and John’s wife Margaret of Bavaria was no exception. She was quite happy to turn a blind eye to John’s many affairs, but Isabeau, especially after three children, was turning into a problem and Margaret seems to have seen her as a threat. Accordingly, Isabeau was married off to one of the knights in John’s court, the Sire de Frigecourt and the family ennobled.
“Her eldest son by the Duke of Burgundy was also named John, or Jehan after his father, and he became a considerable soldier, fighting for Philip the Good, who succeeded his father after he had been murdered by the Orleanist faction at Montereau ...”
“This is just my period!” I exclaimed delightedly. “Philip the Good defeated Joan at Compiegne.”
“Of course. I’d forgotten you were an expert.”
“They definitely met,” I said, “though few knew what transpired between them except that Philip was mighty pleased with his captive.”
“Well, his bastard brother, Jehan de Frigecourt, made a lot of enemies, too, because he was warlike and aggressive, but after becoming a considerable landowner he prospered and lived to a ripe old age. Ever since his time, we’ve been able to trace our line quite clearly, and in the Eighteenth Century Louis XIV made the then Vicomte de Frigecourt a marquis, as we know how he liked to flatter his courtiers and keep them about him and out of harm’s way at Versailles.
“The de Frigecourt family first lived at Hesdin where the Valois dukes had a castle, now long since vanished. When the ancient chateau that was on this spot was no longer used as a prison, it was taken over by another seventeenth-century de Frigecourt – Hesdin being not so far away – who wanted a house by the sea. He tore most of that existing structure down and built what is the present chateau.
“Incidentally, Clare, seeing that you are so interested in this period, you will have heard of the famous booty of the last Valois duke, Charles the Bold.”
“Oh, the Burgunderbeute!” I exclaimed, “the fabulous jewels and treasures he carried about with him, as they did in those days.”
“Exactly, even onto the field of battle! Well, after he was slain at Nancy by the Swiss, most of the Burgunderbeute disappeared and was never seen again. But” – here Laurent gave me his disarming smile –“legend has it that another de Frigecourt, also on the same battlefield, made off with the treasure when he saw his Lord Charles was dead and fed it slyly into the family coffers. Both my mother and grandmother used to refer to it wistfully; they believed that it still existed somewhere, and they yearned to see and wear the fabled jewels.”
“Here?” I said excitedly. “Buried treasure?”
Laurent laughed. “Hardly. The chateau has been knocked about so much since the Sixteenth Century, I should have thought it would have been found before now. No, he probably sold it – if the story is true – and used the money to increase his temporal possessions.”
“It’s a fascinating story,” I said. “I’m very interested in your relationship to the Valois dukes and the connection with St Joan. Especially considering that the place where she was subsequently imprisoned became de Frigecourt property. That is an extraordinary coincidence! It alone makes my trip worthwhile. It also makes Jeanne more mysterious; her outburst was odd, almost vindictive.”
“Maybe she’s a royalist spy!” Laurent joked. “The only one left. No, I’m not worried about Jeanne; she is honest and reliable, of good peasant stock, the backbone of France.”
“A bit like her namesake,” I said, struck by the comparison.
“Pardon?”
“St Joan of Arc. Good peasant stock; come to think of it, she may even resemble her, though we have no clear idea what Joan looked like despite all that has been written about her. It’s just a notion.”
And one that continued to intrigue me as, after our farewells and my promise to keep an eye on the family, I drove myself slowly home. Jeanne did intrigue me. It seemed farfetched, but could there, possibly, be a connection between her and St Joan and the ancient de Frigecourts?
I brooded about the de Frigecourts and Jeanne, but on the whole I managed to get on with my work. Then two days later I had a letter from Tom, which I’d wanted, but then resented. That unsettled me, so I gave up work for the day and decided on a long walk with perhaps a swim at the end of it, if the tide was right.
I walked briskly into the country, with the aim of exercising my mind and body. Both were tired. I’d only been a month in Port St Pierre and already I was up to my neck in the affairs of a strange family. Now Tom wrote saying he thought we had made a mistake and should get together again. He was having a sabbatical too, and when it had been planned last year we’d thought we’d take it together, maybe go to America, where Tom, as a research psychologist, could catch up with the latest American work.
“I think we should give it another go,” Tom wrote in his scrawling hand. “I can’t bear the thought of what has happened and that it may be irreversible.”
I had assumed it was irreversible. Goodness, five years of marriage, and neither of us getting any younger, especially me. After all, the female breeding mechanism did have a shorter life span than that of a male, and for very good reasons, too. But if my marriage to Tom was a failure, then I might want to try again and have a family. I did like children and didn’t want to confine this to other people’s. When we were first married, we decided to postpone a family in order to pursue our demanding careers; then as we started to bicker and disagree we knew it was unwise to try and make children mend a bad marriage.
What worried me, as I walked along on that glorious day, the colours turning to browns, coppers, and reds, was that I had missed Tom, but I couldn’t decide whether it was the strangeness of separation, the absence of sex, or a real feeling of loss.
My road was leading to the bay – all roads round here led to the bay –and I could see the tip of Le Hourdel as I came round a bend and saw the dunes that were between me and the sea. I’d come well round the bay, and Port St Pierre was only a remote gleam in the sunshine. Here it was wild and desolate – the venue for La Chasse. Every now and then I heard the phut-phut of a gun. The French were wild about La Chasse; the de Frigecourt ancestors certainly were. Philip the Bold, father of John the Fearless, had caused two great works on hunting to be written especially for him – Gace de la Buigne’s Delight of the Chase, in verse, and Book of the Chase by Gaston Phoebus. I started to walk across the dunes, taking care to be on the right side of the notice which warned of the awful things which would happen to those who didn’t take heed of the hunters.
The truth was that Tom and I were two emotionally immature academics in their early thirties who’d been married five years. I always admired people who could make up their minds and stick with it. Tom and I both came to a firm decision one day and changed it the next. In the end, I’d been the one to break up the marital nest and now I was regretting it. I remembered that morning with our flat in a tip and a crestfallen Tom reluctantly carrying my things down to the car. I’d had to harden my heart.
A sudden sharp gust of air and a sting made me stagger, and ahead of me the sand spattered. Dazed, I stopped and held my hand to my cheek, starting to tremble when I found it wet. Slowly lowering my hand, I knew what I would see.
Blood. I’d just missed being shot. The horror of it had me sitting on the sand, shaking violently, not even trying to take cover. A stray shot, but from where? Except for the birds, the air was very still. Surely someone must have known a shot had misfired and they’d nearly killed me! But the phut-phut of the guns was very far away and all around me was silence. I suddenly leaned forward and was violently sick; then I lay on the sand for a few minutes until my heart rhythm and my breathing returned to normal. I think my face was only scratched because the blood flow soon stopped. Still, no one came. I couldn’t believe that anyone would be so callous as not to offer help.
It was despicable, but it was human. I rose unsteadily to my feet, glanced round apprehensively, and set off toward Port St Pierre feeling uneasy and far from the security of home.
I called first upon Madame Gilbert, who was most concerned. She made me sit down and thrust brandy to my lips, though I had recovered somewhat during the hour-long walk. Then, despite my protests, she despatched me across the road to Dr Bourdin to seek a dressing.
Dr Bourdin had obviously been awakened from his siesta – it being just after three – and grumbled about it not being surgery hours. However, when he learned the reason and saw my face, he became more solicitous.
“Tiens, Madame, you were lucky the shot was not higher.” He went to his steriliser for his instruments.
“You mean I could have been killed?”
“Of course. A bullet is a bullet.” He was looking closely at the wound, cleansing it with an iodine pad he held with forceps. “You should have been more careful.”
“I was careful!” I protested, wincing at the sting. “I was on the beach and well away from the notices.”
“Eh” – he shrugged – “then someone was careless that is rare, here, anyway. Now I will give you a tetanus injection, just to be sure.”
He gave me a kindly smile – the smile of a comforting, ageless family doctor, a bit slow, but capable and honest.
“You must be more careful next time, Madame, and keep well away from the notices.”
Rose, Rose Where Are You? Page 5