Chateau D'Armor

by Rebecca Stratton

  “Apparently I do, Monsieur d’Armor!” she said. “Although the traditional gallant Frenchman is a dying race, it seems!”

  She had meant the jibe to go home and she saw the swift flick of one brow, as if her response was unexpected, and he watched her steadily, his fair head angled in the same arrogant way as the man in the portrait, his mouth curved into a half smile.

  “You do not speak French, of course, mademoiselle,” he remarked, and from his tone it was evident that he considered it a defect in her make-up. “It is evident from the way in which you pronounce my name,” he explained without giving her time to reply, and Jesamine frowned.

  She could find nothing wrong with the way she pronounced his name, and no one else had complained. Having her accent criticised so pointedly on her first morning there was not a good beginning, she felt, and she was instinctively on the defensive. It occurred to her that possibly this was to be his way of discouraging an unwelcome visitor, but if it was then he would find her not so easily discouraged, and she faced up to him squarely, questioning his criticism.

  “I wasn’t aware of anything wrong with my pronunciation of your name, monsieur,” she told him. “Monsieur Francois d’Armor hasn’t mentioned it, and I’ve been pronouncing it the same way ever since yesterday!”

  “I observed as much during dinner last evening.” Paul d’Armor remarked coolly. “You consistently used the expression for, ‘of love’, but I refrained from commenting at that time because you were a dinner guest and there at Grandpere’s invitation.”

  “I see!” She was prepared to argue his grandfather’s right to invite her, had he raised the question, but he did not. Instead he continued, as if she had not spoken.

  “This morning, however,” he went on, “I realise that it is possible you will remain our guest for several days, and I cannot tolerate hearing myself wrongly addressed for an indefinite period. Our name is d’Armor, mademoiselle, not d’amour— the ‘r’ is pronounced!”

  “I’m grateful for your instruction, monsieur!”

  She had meant her remark to be sarcastic, but either he did not recognise the fact, or he chose to ignore it. “Then will you oblige me by using the correct pronunciation, s’il vous plait, mademoiselle?” he suggested, soft-voiced, and his grey eyes noted her flushed cheeks and glittered a challenge. “Grandpere is too gallant to correct you,” he added smoothly, “I am not!”

  “I’d noticed that, Monsieur d’Armor!” Jesamine told him shortly. She resented the effect of those grey eyes almost more than she did his correcting her, and she had seldom felt more uncertain of herself before. It was not a sensation she enjoyed. “I apologise for my accent,” she went on a trifle breathlessly, “but French is not one of my languages, as I told you yesterday!

  “Ah, mais oui!” He seemed to find the recollection amusing, for he was smiling, and she remembered a similar smile when he had lectured her yesterday on the dangers of driving on the wrong side of the road. “You refer to our meeting on the Grosvallee road, n’est-ce pas?” he asked.

  “When you accused me of driving on the wrong side of the road,” Jesamine said. “Which I wasn’t!”

  “No?” He laughed shortly and shook his head.

  “No!” Jesamine insisted firmly. “I explained how that happened, Monsieur d’Armor—I almost missed my turning and took the corner wide.” She looked at him reproachfully, and the small pout she made was quite unconscious. “I was quite shaken by that near collision!”

  “And you thought me a brute sans coeur, hmm?” he guessed, apparently unconcerned. “Because I asked you for assistance in freeing my auto!”

  “And which I gave willingly once I knew what I had to do!” she reminded him.

  “So you did, mademoiselle!”

  He was regarding her again with that same frankly speculative glow in his eyes that she had seen yesterday, and she turned hastily back to her study of the portrait. She found Charles Louis infinitely less disturbing at the moment than his descendant.

  “I’m not a mechanic,” she said, without looking at him.

  “Mais non, mademoiselle!”

  Once more she suspected he was laughing at her and she looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes bright and resentful. “I even hurt my hand on your wretched car,” she complained, and extended her hand with a bruise still faintly visible across her knuckles.

  Before she could withdraw it he reached out and took her hand in his own hard, strong fingers, looked at it for a second or two, then conveyed it to his lips. The warm pressure of his mouth on her fingers was so unexpected that it set the blood pounding in her head and she did nothing for several seconds but stare at the top of his bowed head.

  “Monsieur d’Armor,” she said, but he raised his head then and she fell silent once more.

  “You thought me ungallant, mademoiselle,” he reminded her. “I must try to remedy that.”

  The eyes that watched her seemed much too brightly glistening to be apologetic and Jesamine shook her head, suspecting mockery. “Please don’t bother, Monsieur d’Armor,” she told him. “As a journalist I’m quite used to a certain amount of—” She shrugged, unwilling to openly accuse him of chauvinism. “Besides,” she added, “I’m here to write the story of Charles Louis Vernais, not to be concerned with your lack of gallantry, Monsieur d’Armor.”

  Paul d’Armor looked at the portrait for a second, one brow raised queryingly. “Does not his lack of gallantry concern you, mademoiselle?” he asked, and she too glanced briefly at the portrait. “He did not marry the lady,” he reminded her, “even though she was—” Expressive hands conveyed Louise Sutton’s delicate condition at the time of Charles Louis’s departure, and Jesamine shook her head.

  She turned yet again and looked up at the strong, arrogant features of their mutual forebear, but she was even more tinglingly aware of the latest of his line standing immediately behind her. She would have to keep her rather disturbing awareness of Paul d’Armor firmly under control if she was to do her job properly. Her present sensitivity was something new to her and she disliked its effect on her normally clear-headed character.

  “Has it never occurred to anyone that he might not have known anything about the child?” she asked.

  In her mind she had already written the feature as the tender and touching romance of two young lovers, parted by circumstances beyond their control, and she disliked having Paul d’Armor suggesting that his ancestor had been doing nothing more than amusing himself while in a foreign land. It reduced her romantic theory to a mere sordid episode, hardly worthy of note, and she refused to see it as no more than that.

  Paul d’Armor’s grey eyes watched her steadily with a hint of malice that suggested he knew what her own theory was and would delight in proving her wrong. “Has it occurred to you, mademoiselle,” he said quietly, “that he did not care?”

  “No!”

  He raised a brow at her vehement denial. “You feel you know him so well?” he asked.

  “I feel I know him better than that!” she retorted, determined to stick to her guns. She looked again at Charles Louis and met the same dark, mocking look in his brown eyes that she saw in Paul d’Armor’s grey ones. It gave her a qualm of uncertainty, but she refused to recognise it.

  “I believe I know him better, mademoiselle!” he said, and Jesamine looked at him once more, trying in her mind to dissociate the two characters—that of the man in the portrait and the one beside her. It was incredibly difficult to do, much more difficult than she would have believed.

  “And you—you think he would have deserted her?” she asked, doubt making her sound uncertain at last. “You think he’d have come back to France and left her, knowing she was having his child?” She looked at him steadily, as if his morals were in question rather than those of a man long dead. But somehow she felt he would know exactly why Charles Louis had acted the way he did. “Would you?” she asked a little breathlessly, and he did not reply at once.

  Then a faint sm
ile tugged at one corner of his mouth and he shrugged lightly. “It is not I who has to answer your charge, mademoiselle,” he told her. “And he is not here to be judged!”

  “No.” She looked up at the portrait and sighed, trying to keep her mind on history rather than the man who stood beside her.

  “You find him wanting?” Paul d’Armor suggested, and she would have denied it hastily, but then she was unsure whether Charles Louis Vernais was any different from the way she had always pictured him. A rogue perhaps, but a charming and attractive one who must have found little Louise Sutton an easy conquest. “You are not sure!” he said, and once more his smile mocked her.

  “No, I’m not sure,” Jesamine admitted, instinctively on the defensive. “Women will forgive a man like—like him a great deal, and even a country girl like Louise Sutton must have known that she was playing with fire when she took him for her lover! Just the same—”

  “You would like to have known him!” Paul d’Armor guessed, and her look dared him to find that amusing.

  “I mean to know him before I leave here, Monsieur d’Armor,” she told him. “He and Louise Sutton are the main characters in my story, but he, I think, will be the more interesting of the two from the reader s point of view.” She sighed again for the task ahead of her. “For one thing,” she said, “why, if he was called Vernais, do you— your family use the name d’Armor?”

  She did not really expect him to answer, for she expected little or no help from him if his attitude so far was any indication. It would not have surprised her if he had simply shrugged off the question. Instead he answered her without hesitation, albeit rather shortly.

  “Because it is our name by right, mademoiselle,” he told her. “When he—Charles Louis Vernais, returned to France, he was destitute, deprived of everything but his pride and, since he was not allowed to use his title for fear of his life, he made it his name. When Henri, his son, contrived to regain the lands and the house many years later he continued to be known as d’Armor, and it has remained so ever since.”

  Jesamine was interested, even intrigued, and she could not deny that she found the fact of Paul d’Armor being her informant even more intriguing. In fact there was a sense of satisfaction about his having volunteered the information. “I see,” she said, turning to face him once more. “So to all intents the title is still yours!”

  “Precisement!” The grey eyes quizzed her narrowly for a second. “You perhaps think it false pride, mademoiselle?” he suggested, but went on without giving her time to answer the challenge. “Do you know that the original name for Brittany was Armor?” he asked, and Jesamine shook her head. “We are a very old family, mademoiselle, you must allow us our pride!”

  “Oh, but of course I do,” Jesamine assured him. “In fact I suppose I could feel some of the same pride myself, since we share a mutual ancestor.”

  That had been reckless of her, Jesamine recognised that even before she finished speaking. She should not have laid such determined claim to kinship with the proud and wealthy d’Armors. Paul d’Armor would dislike such presumption, possibly more than anyone, being the man he was. He was looking at her now with a steady and disturbing gaze, much as he might have regarded a specimen of lower life who had dared to presume kinship.

  “Your own frail connection scarcely warrants it, mademoiselle,” he observed. “The liaison, although productive, was, I beg leave to assume, no more than casual, and Mademoiselle Sutton’s enfant d’amour never bore our name!” His disclaimer was even more harsh than she had expected and Jesamine felt the flush of colour flood her cheeks. “I believe he loved her!” she insisted, refusing to abandon her romantic theory in favour of his more earthy one. “I’m sure he must have loved her!”

  One light brow expressed vague amusement at her romantic supposition, and Paul d’Armor’s eyes gleamed. “Hence your insistence on d’amour instead of d’Armor?” he suggested, and laughed softly. “How romantique, mademoiselle!”

  Jesamine said nothing for a moment. She stood facing him with her eyes downcast while she struggled with the beginnings of a temper that could be quite formidable if she was pushed too far. She had no wish to begin her stay like this, by crossing swords with old Francois’s grandson, but she could hardly stand there and let him make fun of her the way he was.

  “You seem determined to be unfriendly towards me, Monsieur d’Armor,” she told him, after a moment or two, “and I can’t think why.”

  Her voice was not as steady as she would have liked, and possibly he suspected it was caused by approaching tears rather than the anger that really motivated it. For he put a hand under her chin suddenly and she almost flinched from the strong fingers that lifted her face to him so that the steel grey eyes searched her face slowly for a second or two before he spoke.

  “I am not unfriendly, mademoiselle,” he said, in a voice that was much softer and lower in pitch than he more normally used. “I merely wished to point out to you that a casual affaire is not of necessity an affaire de coeur.”

  Jesamine was trembling, and the knowledge that it was something to do with Paul d’Armor holding her the way he was, not only amazed her but annoyed her too, and she drew back from that strong but strangely gentle hand, looking up at him with bright, defiant eyes.

  “I assume you make the observation from experience of both, monsieur,” she said pertly, “since you speak with such confidence!”

  She saw the gleam that betrayed anger, but it showed only briefly then his eyes glistened with that disturbing laughter again, and she hastily lowered her own gaze. “Did you doubt it, mademoiselle?” he challenged.

  All day Jesamine spent time making notes, building up a background. She had walked down to the little village of Grosvallee and sat for a while beside the same stream that ran at the bottom of the grounds of the Chateau d’Armor. So far she had spoken to no one except to acknowledge a few friendly ‘bonjours’ as she passed by, aware that the eyes of men and women alike followed her progress with interest.

  It was interesting to speculate how much the people in the village could have told her about the more recent history of the d’Armor family, but she had no intention of prying into things that did not concern her and possibly raising discomfiting ghosts.

  Her reason for staying out of the house for most of the day, she admitted, was to avoid seeing too much of Paul d’Armor, for she found him the most disturbing man she had ever met, and she resented the effect he had on her without being quite sure why. He was not good-looking, and he was more mature than most of the men of her acquaintance, but there remained that disturbing, sensual aura of challenge. It made her not only alarmingly aware of him as a man, but wary too, in case he should suspect how she felt.

  She knew that during the week he would be spending most of his time in the vineyards or the cellars, so she would not have to contend with his disturbing presence. On Sunday, it seemed, her only escape was to go out herself, for he had not left the house all day.

  She found herself facing him across the dinner table, but had managed to engage his grandfather’s attention for most of the meal, so that she could in part ignore the ever alert grey eyes that occasionally caught hers and narrowed briefly with silent speculation.

  The meal over, they sat in the big bright salon, good food and wine having induced a state of pleasant euphoria in which everyone was more relaxed. Jesamine, seated beside old Francois, tried not to look at his grandson, but inevitably her gaze was drawn to him, sitting beside his grandmother on the elegant gilded sofa.

  The old man had invited her to sit near him so that they could talk more easily, and she had no objection at all, except that from there she had Paul constantly in sight. He looked arrogantly at ease with his long legs crossed one over the other, and his grey eyes narrowed against the smoke from a cigarette.

  A cream shirt seemed to blend rather than contrast with his tanned face and neck, and a light grey, expensively tailored suit emphasised the broadness of his shoulders a
nd the rangy leanness of the rest of his body. Since they left the dining table he had never once looked at her, and yet Jesamine sensed his awareness of her and shivered inwardly.

  “You will, of course, know more about Mademoiselle Sutton than we do, mademoiselle.” Francois d’Armor’s voice brought her hastily back to earth, and Jesamine shook her head.

  “I’m afraid not, Monsieur d’Armor,” she denied, careful to give the name its correct pronunciation. “Sad to say she wasn’t really important enough to warrant having her history recorded—we don’t even have a picture of her.”

  “C’est dommage,” the old man said, shaking his head. “It would have been interesting to see this lady whose love brought our two families together, n’est-ce pas?”

  “It would,” Jesamine agreed. “But actually the only written recollection we have of her is in the diaries of my great-great-grandfather, James Warden. He was Louise Sutton’s great-grandson and he apparently took an interest in the family history. It was through him that we heard of her at all. He discovered the miniature in an attic, according to his diaries, along with a box of love letters. It was the letters, apparently, that gave the first indication that Louise had never married and that her child, her only child, was her lover’s.”

  “D’amour!’ Paul d’Armor murmured, and Jesamine flushed when she recalled their conversation that morning.

  “As you say, monsieur!” she retorted, but hastily avoided his eyes.

  Francois d’Armor looked momentarily puzzled by the brief exchange, then shrugged, apparently having more immediate things on his mind. “You speak of a miniature, Mademoiselle Arden,” he reminded her. “Of whom was it a likeness, if not of the lady herself?”