The French Promise

by Fiona McIntosh

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘It was by his own hand.’

  ‘You’re not innocent of his death, Luc, no matter how you want to view it.’

  ‘I don’t care. At last I’m free.’

  ‘Are you?’ He frowned.

  ‘Has it brought back anyone?’ she asked evenly.

  Luc scowled at her. ‘I didn’t do it to—’

  ‘Stop lying to yourself. You’ve managed to convince yourself that by seeing this von Schleigel off you’ve somehow atoned for something that was never your responsibility, Luc. The war was not about you and it was not your fault either. Blame the inactivity of the Allies to stop the Holocaust, blame the sea, blame Hitler! But you can’t change anything. And now there’s one more death to add and another family in mourning. Those were the lunatic days of war and it makes beasts out of men. What happened between 1939 and 1945 should stay locked away.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  She sighed. ‘Yes. I want to put the war behind me. All I can believe in is that you walked into my empty life and filled a dark space with a bright light. You made me fall in love with you, with Jenny, and then you ruthlessly punished me by walking out of my life, nearly dying in the bargain.’

  Luc didn’t know what to say. After a difficult pause he murmured, ‘Who fixed me?’

  She gave a sad gasp of a laugh. ‘A fine young man I met just a few days ago – your friend Robert. He’d seen his fair share of bullet wounds and seemed to know exactly what to do with very few supplies. We found you on the floor downstairs, passed out. He was worried about infection, I was worried about the cold, Jenny was just horrified by the amount of blood but you’d done a good job stemming the flow.’ She gave a sad twist of her mouth, aware that she was praising him when she wanted to be angry with him. ‘Robert stitched you, dressed you with hands that were steady and sure. You will have to see someone, Luc, but Robert has probably saved your life.’

  ‘Again.’

  She nodded. ‘He pointed out the clean exit of the bullet so we know it passed straight through and miraculously missed everything important.’

  ‘It was point-blank. I virtually chose the spot,’ he said with bleak humour. ‘Is everyone all right? Max …?’

  ‘Oh, those three are getting on famously. Jenny’s in seventh heaven to have two handsome young men waiting on her every whim; they’ve both been brilliant with her, treating her like a little sister. It was touch and go when Robert was looking after you and you were murmuring feverishly about Lisette, about someone called Wolf and getting to a station platform in Lyon. Jenny was understandably frightened and I must admit, I nearly called the hospital but Max and Robert begged me not to. They seemed to understand you were on a ridiculous personal crusade and you wouldn’t want any authorities involved.’

  She’d let go of his hand, but he took it again.

  ‘It’s not ridiculous.’

  ‘It is, Luc, when you threaten other lives. It wasn’t just yours in the balance. If you’d been killed by this old Nazi, imagine what you’d have done to Jenny’s life, or Max’s. And how do you think I would have felt?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered honestly. ‘How do you feel?’

  She shook her head, looking sad. ‘You frighten me. I’ve never felt like this about anyone before and I barely know you and that’s the problem. I know so little about you – and now I discover you’re a madman with a death wish.’

  ‘You know more than that …’ he appealed.

  ‘All right, you have a beautiful, clever, young daughter who desperately needs your guidance; two young friends who adore you and both seem like lost boys searching for a father figure, which may well be your role to fill. I know you hold grudges – lifelong ones. I know when you love someone you love them hard. I know you make me laugh but you also make me cry because you hold so much back. Your life hasn’t been easy or simple but tell me a person your age who can claim otherwise – everyone’s been touched darkly by the war. But the tough people, I believe, are those who move away from it and walk on.’

  She stood. ‘Make us enough, Luc. Jenny should be all that you worry about – and Robert, Max … Everything else – especially the past, because it’s done now – is irrelevant. You can’t change it. But your behaviour now can change Jenny’s life in a blink. Some of us would give a limb to have a daughter like her. And what did you expect Max to do with a grieving child?’

  His mind was clouding thickly again but Luc only needed to listen to Jane’s tone to feel the sting of her reprimand.

  He’d been selfish, martyrish, and Max’s revelation about finding von Schleigel had given him the excuse to unleash all the years of guilt he’d obviously carried around. It was true also that his guilt was unfounded. None of the events that had turned him into this vengeance-seeking vigilante had ever been even vaguely under his control. Not the six members of his family that he’d lost, not Laurent or Fournier, not Wolf, not Kilian, and certainly not Lisette or dear Harry. They’d all died, yes. But he couldn’t have saved any of them.

  He lay in his parents’ bed, memories erupting and Jane’s confronting words echoing, along with the laughter of childhood days at the back of his mind and, above all, the smell of lavender scenting his thoughts.

  Luc wept, feverishly and helplessly, releasing years of tightly held anguish while Jane held and cried alongside him.

  EPILOGUE

  June 1965

  Luc stood on the hill overlooking Saignon and welcomed the breath of the early evening mistral whispering past him, carrying murmurs of distant voices from below and a heady scent of fragrant herbs. And it was as though the war that came stomping into his village in 1942 was finally a memory that could fade. It had been more than six months of recuperation for him but Luc finally felt strong again and the dusky pink house in Saignon moved to a familiar rhythm, which was like pure oxygen to the fire in his soul.

  Once more the swallows lifted from Saignon’s eaves and spiralled and swooped above her rooftops. The soft sigh of the evening wind stole down the narrow lanes to stir the freshly starched crewelwork cotton drapes when the shutters were opened each dusk. And through those freshly painted blue shutters could be heard the voices of a family with its bursts of laughter and merry music.

  On those summer evenings Jane’s vegetable garden was like an open box of jewels: plump, shiny tomatoes, achingly bright lemons that oozed the sharp tang of their oil once touched, the pungent aniseed of the basil and the white and green beans hanging tantalising from their vines. Jane’s potager was crammed with produce, which she joyously reaped for their evening meals. She had returned to England – alone and only once – simply to finalise her affairs and pack up her belongings, some of which she sent to Provence but most of which she’d given away. A fresh start, was her catchphrase for all of them now sharing the household.

  Luc looked over at her now; she was walking the wild rows of the Bonet lavender fields, laughing with Jenny, and he felt his throat catch. His gaze then shifted to Max, deep in conversation with Robert. Max commuted between his grand house in Lausanne and the farm at Saignon, which he now regarded as his second home. He was threatening to move to Provence permanently and he and Luc were well advanced in their plans to work together on a major project to take Bonet’s into the perfume industry.

  It was Robert who had stoked the fire of Luc’s dream to go beyond farming the lavender. Quiet, hardworking, elusive Robert, who loved the loneliness and beauty of the fields as much as Luc and who had learnt fast. Here he was a king, showing an enviable green thumb for lavender. Robert lent weight to Harry’s dream, querying why the Bonet family had always been growers and not moved to the next stage of being perfumers.

  ‘You extract the oil but you give it to the greedy chemists in Grasse, who make ten, maybe twenty, times what you do,’ he’d observed. ‘Make your own perfume. You have the raw product and can buy in the knowledge. I’ll grow it for you, Luc, while you and Max have the brains and fund
s to set up the new operation.’

  He was right. This was the challenge Luc needed. And Max was excited at the notion of putting his excellent new business skills – as well as part of his fortune – to use in setting up the new enterprise. It was decided that while he worked out the business plan Luc could perfect the distillation process, sending over the most pure extract from Australia. The raw product was free from pesticides and the choking hybrids that had begun to spring up all over Provence, as French manufacturers at Grasse couldn’t produce perfume quickly enough for the greedy market that wanted new, bright and varied scents each year.

  The teenager in their midst, whom they all loved deeply, was usually away at school in Lyon. Jenny was flourishing in her studies, loving her new life, and spoke French like a native. She’d won; worn Luc down, with the help of Jane as her ally. And despite the traumatic and teary phone call that had to be made to Launceston, she had chosen not to return to Australia to wish Nel and Tom farewell. She refused to say goodbye because she intended to visit often. Nel had wept bitterly.

  Jenny planned to go to finishing school in Switzerland – Max was insisting – but Luc didn’t mention it. ‘Are you ever coming home?’ Nel asked him.

  ‘I’ll be returning to Launceston, I promise.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon. September, probably – in time for the next season.’

  ‘The place won’t run itself, you know,’ she warned and Luc felt the sting of her bitterness.

  But he knew better about lavender; he believed he could run the farm from a distance with the right workers in place. ‘All will be well, Nel,’ he said, hoping to placate her. ‘We’re going to start exporting from next year, I hope.’

  ‘Strike me, Luc, whatever are you drinking over there? Or did you bump your head when you had your accident?’

  He laughed; let her have her jest. ‘It makes perfect business sense. The quality of our extract is far superior than that of the French.’

  ‘Bloody hell, that must hurt to admit,’ she said.

  ‘Not really. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. We’re going to make perfume.’

  ‘Yep, you bumped your head for sure,’ she’d accused.

  And he’d smiled and forgiven her, because he knew how much she was hurting.

  That conversation was already four months past and Luc was making plans to return to Tasmania – but he’d now decided to take his new family with him. All of them would go, and Bonet’s at Nabowla would ring with the sound of happy voices again.

  He closed his eyes and sniffed the scented air. Lavender was all around in an iridescent pool of shifting blue. Luc turned to the highest point of the hill, where the original ghostly patch of white lavender had first appeared three decades earlier, and it was as though Lisette’s spirit was with them, reaching across the oceans from her resting place on another hill, on another continent.

  ‘Luc!’ A voice interrupted his thoughts from the far distance and he turned at Jane’s call. She waved to him. ‘Come on. Dinner! Everyone’s hungry.’

  He lifted a hand in acknowledgement and watched as the golden-haired figure of Max fell in alongside the smaller, dark-headed shape of Robert and matched his slower gait, slinging an arm around him as a brother might. In that moment Luc saw himself and Laurent as youngsters, coming home from a day in the fields, and he swallowed back the knot in his throat. Jenny waited for them and they affectionately took a hand each and walked with her back down the hill.

  Jane turned once more, as though wondering at Luc’s slowness. She was smiling, a hand shielding her eyes. He never tired of watching her – willowy as ever on those long legs, which were tanned now, her skin smooth and burnished, her arms always quick to hug, her lips soft on his.

  Luc blinked, feeling momentarily frozen by his own happiness. Was it wrong for his heart to feel this full? He cast a look over his shoulder, back to the field of ghosts. And there, as if she caught his heartbeat of angst, the heads of the white flowers bowed once as a small gust of wind bent their stalks and it was as though Lisette agreed. She approved of his life and the peace he had finally found.

  The lavender keeper nodded, silently whispered farewell to all the ghosts that roamed that hill, before turning to walk towards his new life filled with promise.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The research for this novel took me from the ever-beautiful streets of Paris, and always-brilliant museums of London, to Krakow, my departure point for the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and back to sweltering, lavender-scented Provence in southern France where the original story began. Mostly my research was light-filled but I experienced some harrowing times learning about the Holocaust and I would urge anyone visiting Paris to give half a day over to the museum of vigilance - the Memorial de la Shoah in the Marais district. It is deeply moving and important. Even more daunting is the deserted death camp at Oświęcim. I expected it to be profoundly disturbing and it was, but I believe it was relevant background to this story and important for us to be reminded of this horrific part of our history.

  Recreating Launceston of the 1950s presented an unexpected challenge but I had a troop of dedicated seniors in northern Tasmania who allowed me to plumb their memories so I could learn about life in a much sunnier, happier part of the world in post WWII. I would like to thank the Members of the Launceston Historical Society as well as Gail Murray and especially Hugh and Tony Denny, whose family were the original farmers of the famous Bridestowe Lavender of my story - thank you all. Big kisses to Tony Berry and John Wallace in Hastings, Sussex who know their English south coast and its history, and who took me on a whirlwind tour of Eastbourne to experience everything from chips and curry sauce on the Pier to striding over the windswept south downs so I could get those scenes just right. I grew up on Brighton Beach so it all felt suddenly familiar and wonderful to be writing about a landscape that is in my soul.

  Pat Gumbrell and Gerry Douglas-Sherwood taught me a great deal about lighthouse keeping. I’m sorry most of what I learnt didn’t get into the main pages but wow - it gave me such an insight into Luc’s life. Meanwhile the wonderful Malcolm Longstaff gave me the SS Mooltan and its background as a suggestion for the passenger ship in the story.

  The hotel in Paris needed to be spot on too and standing in its foyer in 2012 it needed vision to bring back the 1960s in a property that has been revamped many times. So merci beaucoup to Carole Rodriguez from the hotel for arranging a meeting with Daniel Bellache, chief concierge at the Concorde Opera who was a bellhop in the era I was writing about and for his extraordinary ability to recall the finest of details.

  The other location that felt daunting to depict accurately was the American Express headquarters on rue Scribe in Paris, now fabulously expensive retail space. But with the help of my cousin, Jonathan Patton, I was connected me to Ira Galtman, corporate archivist for American Express in New York. It was Ira who outlined the rough sketch of the office in the sixties, so I could paint it for readers. Thanks to all in the US for their generous assistance.

  Kathrin Flor, Head of Communications in Bad Arolsen, gave me so much incredible information about the International Tracing Service and I am also indebted to Klaus-D. Postupa from the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Germany for teaching me about researching Nazi records. And sincere thanks to Nicolas Gsell in Strasbourg for being a terrific guide.

  Draft readers Pip Klimentou, Judy Bastian - thanks for having my back.

  To Susie Dunlop and her fine team at Allison & Busby, my sincere gratitude for bringing this story ‘home’ for me.

  And so to you lovely readers. I wish I could meet you all individually and say it face to face but I hope, for now, my written thanks to you and all the marvellous booksellers across Britain will suffice.

  Finally to family … Ian, first reader, harshest critic - love always, and to Will and Jack who, as I write this, are dreaming of summer holidays in Tasmania but waiting for third-year university results. Bonne chance, mes amours … x<
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  About the Author

  FIONA MCINTOSH was born in Sussex, and spent her early childhood in West Africa. After working in PR in London, she moved to Australia in the 1980s and together with her husband set up her own consultancy company, which later evolved into a travel publishing house. She is constantly roaming the world to research her novels and seeking new storylines, hence the authentic and fascinating detail found in her books.

  www.fionamcintosh.com

  By Fiona McIntosh

  The Lavender Keeper

  The French Promise

  ALSO BY FIONA MCINTOSH

  Provence, 1942. Luc Bonet, brought up by a wealthy Jewish family in the foothills of the French Alps, finds his life shattered by the brutality of Nazi soldiers. Leaving his abandoned lavender fields behind, Luc joins the French Resistance in a quest for revenge.

  Paris, 1943. Lisette Forestier is on a mission: to work her way into the heart of a senior German officer, and to infiltrate the very masterminds of the Gestapo. But can she balance the line between love and lies? The one thing Luc and Lisette hadn’t counted on was meeting each other. Who, if anyone, can be trusted – and will their own emotions become the greatest betrayers of all?