Chateau D'Armor

by Rebecca Stratton

  “But you will not give up?” he suggested, and she wished she knew whether or not he was hoping to hear her say she would.

  “Do you think I ought to?” she asked, throwing the onus on to him, but he did not commit himself to a reply, only curved his wide mouth into a ghost of a smile and shrugged his shoulders, as if it was not his concern.

  “You do not consider leaving us?” Madame d’Armor asked, and Jesamine thought how differently she would have asked that same question just a few weeks ago.

  “Not until you want me to, madame,” she told her with a smile. “I enjoy being here too much to give it up voluntarily!”

  Paul, it seemed, still had something to say on the subject and she began to wonder if he would still take the opportunity to persuade her to go if he could. “Do your family and friends not miss you?” he asked, and Jesamine needed no prompting to realise that he asked the question because she had received a letter from James that morning.

  Rather than answer at once she disposed of a mouthful of cheese first, taking her time, while he sipped his wine and watched her at the same time. “No one’s pining for me to go back, if that’s what you mean, Paul,” she told him, and a raised brow suggested he doubted her.

  “No one?”

  His interest in what James had to say to her she found rather surprising, and even a little amusing, so that she could not resist the temptation to play up to him. “Not that I know of,” she assured him in a voice that was as guileless as her gaze, and beside her old Francois chuckled his appreciation of the situation.

  “Why do you not ask if Monsieur Terril in his letter seeks to coax her away from us, mon brave?” he asked his grandson. “Not—how is it?—beat around the bush!” He looked at Jesamine, frankly curious and much less oblique in his approach. “Does he seek to take you away from us, ma chere?” he asked, and Jesamine took a moment to answer.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, putting down her wine glass and looking at it rather than at the curious faces that watched her, “James said he might fly over for a couple of days some time. He’s due for a few days’ break soon, and he rather wants to look around Nantes—he didn’t have much opportunity before.”

  “But he will also want to see you, naturellement?” Francois guessed, and she shrugged with almost Gallic resignation.

  “Almost certainly,” she agreed, and wondered why she was so unenthusiastic about seeing James again.

  It was not that she liked him any the less, but somehow she felt he was bound to interfere with her life as it was now, and she did not want anything to do that at the moment. She was happy doing a job she loved, despite a few moments of panic, and she had a kind of tenuous armistice with Paul that she did not want to see end in the way it almost certainly would if James came back.

  Francois d’Armor was regarding her with his shrewd dark eyes narrowed and speculative, and there was a faint smile on his lips, as if her apparent lack of interest in James pleased him. “You do not sound like the—happy lover,” he said. “Will you not be delighted to see him again after so long apart, ma chere?”

  Jesamine knew exactly what he meant, although he had stopped short of asking the question he really had in mind, and she smiled at him over the rim of her wine glass. “I told you in the beginning, Monsieur d’Armor,” she reminded him, “there’s no romance in James’ and my relationship, none at all. We’re simply good friends, that’s all. I’ve missed him a little during the past weeks, but I can’t honestly say I’ve been pining for him. Nor has he for me, I suspect. James is much too sensible for that!”

  “Sensible!” Francois echoed in a very pronounced accent, and shrugged his thin shoulders despairingly. “Mon dieu! But what has sense to do with romance, mon enfant? What has it to do with l’amour, huh?”

  Jesamine’s eyes were bright with laughter. The old man was such a determined romantic and nothing, it seemed, would change him. He was firmly convinced that James was in love with her and would believe no different. He looked at her and shook his head.

  “You laugh, ma belle,” he accused her with a twinkle in his eye, “but tell me, what has sense to do with l’amour?”

  “Nothing, I suppose, Monsieur d’Armor,” she told him, her laughter bringing a flush of warmth to her face. “But I’ve told you many times, there isn’t anything like l’amour with James and me.”

  “Ah! So you have, ma belle,” he agreed, and glanced quite openly at his grandson as he added, “nor with anyone at all, huh?”

  Jesamine refused to be drawn into anything as dangerous as commenting on Paul’s attitude towards her or hers to him, and she merely smiled and shook her head. “No one at all,” she agreed. “I like it that way!”

  “Mon dieu!” the old man murmured piously. “To think that I should hear a lovely young girl say such a thing!” He put his bony hand over hers and nodded his head as he studied her for a moment. “Maybe another six months of la belle France will teach you better,” he said. “I will not believe otherwise!”

  It was barely credible that the year was well into August, Jesamine thought as she made her way across the parkland behind the chateau. For sure the days were already a little shorter, but they were no less warm and sunny and she was still glad of the cool shade offered by the cluster of trees that sheltered the little chapel of the d’Armors.

  It was more than two months now since she had first come to the chateau, and she felt remarkably at home there. Almost as if she belonged, she thought, and wondered if it was her connection with Charles Louis Vernais that enabled her to fit with such satisfying ease into his environment.

  It was much cooler under the trees and she welcomed the shade after a day spent working in one of the smaller rooms where day long sun made it almost unbearably hot. She had finished work a little earlier than usual and refreshed herself with a bath and a change of clothes, so that she found herself with plenty of time to take a walk before dinner.

  She never grew tired of the lovely walks the extensive grounds had to offer, and she was forever finding new ones. The little chapel in the clearing still remained more or less an unknown quantity for her, for she had never been into it again since that first time, when she had come upon it from the secret passageway and been surprised by Paul. She felt she should not go in again without a specific invitation, although once or twice she had been tempted when she had been walking close by.

  She would like to look more closely at the little shrine for Louise d’Armor for one thing, for the girl still intrigued her, the more so because she had never been mentioned apart from that one brief word from the old priest in the village. It was incredible that she remained such a mystery, and curious that both the priest and the village schoolteacher had so determinedly shied away from contact with her once they knew she was a journalist and staying with the d’Armor family. There was definitely something about Paul’s mother that invoked what Jesamine saw as a kind of loyalty of silence, and on the whole it served only to make her more curious.

  The little chapel looked tiny and so tranquil standing amid its surrounding trees that she stood for a moment looking at it and wondering if she dared steal another look inside while there was no one about. Paul, she knew, was in his room washing off the grime of the vineyards and changing out of his working clothes ready for dinner, and he was the only one likely to have caught her.

  The ancient tombs crumbling amid the trees opposite to where she stood had a slightly discouraging look, but she shook herself free of any fanciful ideas and walked across the clearing. As she opened the low wooden door of the chapel, its ancient hinges creaked and the old wood shushed over the stone floor as it opened so that she glanced over one shoulder, feeling strangely guilty.

  There were yellow roses still before Louise d’Armor’s memorial plaque, and the yellow light of candles flickered over the lighter oval stone set in the ancient walls of the chapel, but she did not go straight to it this time. Instead she walked around the walls, looking at some of the other p
laques, unconsciously seeking those of Charles Louis Vernais, or Raoul Amadis Vernais, whom Paul so much more closely resembled.

  She had just located that of Raoul Amadis when she heard a sound from just outside the little chapel, and looked around in sudden panic. To be caught there again would be unthinkable, and yet there was little hope of concealing herself for very long if whoever it was actually came inside. Once more she felt horribly guilty about being there when she knew that Paul at least would scorn her inquisitiveness.

  Her one object was to get out again without being seen if it was possible, and at that moment she caught sight of the rood screen from the corner of her eye, and remembered that the entrance to the passage was behind it. Hastily, because there were easily audible footsteps on the porch now, she hurried across and ducked behind the screen.

  She twisted the ornamentation that opened the panel, in a frenzy of anxiety when she heard the outside door creak and shush over the stone floor when it opened. She stepped through the opening quickly, with no idea who might have come into the chapel, and the heavy stone swung to behind her. It was only then that she realised she had no form of lighting with her—when she was left in complete darkness.

  It was frightening, appallingly so, but she determinedly fought down the sense of panic that welled up in her, and began to grope her way along the walls of the underground passage. With not even a candle to guide her, she stumbled occasionally and added to her fears, and she was shivering with something more than the cold dampness from the stone walls as she began at last to climb the steps of that interminable staircase leading to the exit on the gallery upstairs.

  Her legs were beginning to ache as she stumbled at last up the last step and stood for a moment trying in vain to pierce the glowering darkness around her. The panel, she thought, had been not too far from the top of the steps, but she found it very hard to judge distance in the darkness and she could not really remember just how far it had been.

  Using her hands to find her way, she searched along the wall beside her, where she knew an iron ring should be. There had to be some means of opening the panel from the inside, either an iron ring like the one into the chapel, or a lever of some kind, but she could find nothing so far.

  She had come much further, she felt sure, than she remembered as the distance from the panel to the top of the steps, and she began to panic when her groping fingers encountered nothing but the harsh cold stone. Until, a little further on, she stopped, standing for a moment, helpless and suddenly terrified.

  There must be some way of getting out, of leaving behind this interminable darkness, if only she could find it, and once more she sternly suppressed the panic that threatened to take over as she moved on again. Relief came from a direction she least expected it, when she was brought up short by the solidity of a stone wall across her path.

  Reaching up with both hands, she sought some means of moving it and at last found a rusty iron ring and clung to it tearfully for a second or two in sheer relief. No matter if it did not take her through into the gallery, at the moment she cared only that she was going to be free at last of the creepy coldness of the passage, and she vowed never to enter it again.

  It required more effort to move than she had needed before and by the time the solid mass yielded at last she was sobbing with anxiety in case it did not work. Then suddenly she was blinded by the influx of daylight, and she put a hand to her eyes as she stepped through the opening.

  She did not stop to wonder where she was in the first instance but leaned back against the wall covering her eyes as the panel slid automatically into place again. Then, grimed and breathing hard from her earlier panic, she put down her hands and looked around her, realising with a start that she was in someone’s bedroom.

  It was a big, bright room, warm with the evening sun, and with a huge fourposter bed right beside where she was standing, its drapes hiding most of the room from her. A massive fireplace occupied nearly half one wall, and there was a desk and an armchair—a slightly untidy, comfortable room, and some discarded clothes over a smaller chair gave her her first clue as to whose it was.

  She stood for a moment or two, too wary to move, and prayed silently that the owner was not still in occupation. It was a definitely masculine room, with no sign of a woman’s occupation, and the only lone male likely to be sleeping in a room of this size was Paul. And that presented a whole new set of problems, if he was still preparing for dinner.

  Her heart was hammering wildly, in a different kind of panic now, as she heard a door open somewhere out of her line of vision, then the soft swish of footsteps over the deep pile of the carpet. The smell of steam and a masculine scent of some kind reached her with the opening of the door, and she could guess that a bathroom led off from the far side of the room.

  There was nowhere she could go now. If she tried to reach the door he would be certain to see her, and she could not bear the thought of his catching her sneaking out of his room. Nor could she face the prospect of going back behind the panel, even had she known how to work it from this side, so she simply stayed where she was, and hoped for an opportunity she knew was unlikely to materialise.

  She could imagine easily enough what Paul would say when he saw her and, in this instance, she had to admit she was scarcely in a position to blame him. To find her, of all people, in his bedroom and looking dirty and dishevelled was the last thing he would anticipate, and she held her breath as she waited for him to discover her.

  He came striding into view suddenly, and it was debatable which of them betrayed the most surprise. Seeing her, Paul stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes blank, stunned by the unexpected. Jesamine, for her part, was not quite sure what she expected, but certainly not the tall rangy figure that appeared in front of her suddenly, clad in little more than a silk bathrobe that clung to his damp skin and barely covered his knees. A virile, forceful figure that, even in the present circumstances, stirred strange and disquieting responses in her.

  His hair was dishevelled and still damp, as if he had come straight from a shower without time to restore it to order, and his feet were bare, planted firmly on the red carpet as he stared down at her, huddled near the head of his bed. The grey eyes lost their glazed look soon enough and the first glimmer of laughter showed in their depths.

  Jesamine’s reaction, as she looked up at him, was a mixture of reproach and challenge that showed plainly in her eyes. He shook his head, ran both hands through the thick dampness of his hair, then stood with them on his hips, looking at her once more, and his mouth twitched with a suppressed smile as he spoke.

  “You honour me, mademoiselle,” he told her with a mock bow. “This is an unexpected pleasure!” He scanned the state of her dress and her face and hands, all liberally smeared with dust and mould from the passage. “But surely, ma belle, you are not always so—careless with your toilette when you rendezvous in a man’s bedroom, are you?”

  As well as embarrassment, Jesamine felt horribly vulnerable suddenly, and she shook her head as she sought to explain. “I came from—”

  “I know where you came from, ma fille!” Paul interrupted shortly, his glance flicking briefly to the panelled wall behind her. “You have been into places where you have no right, yet again—and when I was beginning to believe I had at last trained you to behave!”

  Jesamine flushed. It was quite bad enough to be caught in a situation like this, but to have him speak to her as if she was simply an annoying and inquisitive child was adding insult to injury. His first suggestion had been less insulting, though more provocative. It was not, she recognised, the best time to tell him that she had come through from the chapel, for that would be even less acceptable, so she saw no alternative but to offer nothing but an apology.

  “I’m—I’m sorry,” she said, wishing her voice did not sound so unsteady or so meek. “But you must know that I’d no idea I’d come out in—I’d no idea where I’d come out.”

  “Non?”

  She flushed, h
er hands clasping the tops of her arms tightly, for there was an expression in his eyes as he looked down at her that brought a new, wild urgency to her heart’s beat, and she shook her head slowly, without quite realising she was doing it.

  “You know I wouldn’t—you must know I’d never have come through here if I’d known you were in here,” she told him breathlessly, and Paul said nothing for a moment, but continued to watch her with that steady, disconcerting gaze.

  Then he reached out suddenly and with one fingertip lightly brushed away a tear from her cheek with a touch that shivered along her spine. She had shed tears of panic in that cold dark passage and he knew it, she thought—his next words confirmed it. “You would have come through any door that opened to you at that moment, I think, ma chere,” he told her, soft-voiced, “even had it led you to the worst villain in France. Am I not right?”

  “Perhaps.” She made the admission reluctantly, and Paul was looking at her curiously.

  “Did you know that this was once Charles Louis Vernais’s room?” he asked, and for a moment she forgot her own present position as she became once more involved in the doings of their mutual ancestor.

  “It was?” She looked past him into the big bright room. “I had no idea—”

  “Or you would have come in here before now, hmm?” he suggested, then waved away her half-formed protest before she could voice it. He was smiling, a disturbing kind of smile that sent a warning shiver through her whole body, and made her hastily avoid his eyes. “He was tres seduisant, as we have already agreed,” he reminded her.

  “Very—seductive,” Jesamine translated uncertainly, and he smiled more boldly, wolfishly in that strong brown face.

  “Mais oui, ma chere, you are learning!” He applauded her efforts with a hint of mockery. “He was fond of the girls and Louise Sutton was not his only paramour by any means—he had others in this village too.”