The Wild Land

by Isobel Chace

  The solicitor welcomed her easily, using a mixture of English and French that she somehow understood quite well.

  “And does Monsieur Rideau know you are buying this land?” he asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “Nobody knows yet.”

  The solicitor’s hands flew out.

  “I must confess that I should feel happier had he done so. Monsieur Clement is not an easy man to deal with,” he warned her. “His daughter will not be pleased to hear that he is selling yet more land.”

  “But you will act for me?” Emma pressed him.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I shall carry out the purchase for you, mademoiselle. But I must earnestly advise you to inform Monsieur Rideau of your intentions before we complete the purchase.”

  Emma hesitated.

  “I will,” she agreed. “Or, at least, I shall tell my grandmother.”

  The solicitor nodded.

  “You could do that. But Madame has certain prejudices about the use of land on the Camargue—”

  “Prejudices that I fully share,” Emma declared proudly.

  The solicitor’s eyes twinkled.

  “If that is so, mademoiselle, I can sympathize with your reluctance to take Monsieur Rideau into your confidence. He is having a great struggle to modernize the manade.” He laughed openly. “You must walk carefully, mademoiselle, or you will find yourself taking sides, and that would never do!”

  Why not? Emma wondered. But try as she would his words came back to nag her again and again in the next few days.

  It seemed no time at all before Easter was upon them, and the usual flurry of last-minute preparations began. Emma, who was accustomed to the more stolid English Easter, was mildly surprised at the rush and confusion.

  “This reminds me of Christmas more than Easter, or at least it would if the weather weren’t so gorgeous.” Madame stopped sorting odd bits of material from her scrapbag and gazed, remembering, into space.

  “You should have seen the Russian Easter,” she said. “That was something! Ah well, do you help me with the eggs?”

  They took the scraps of material down to the kitchen and busied themselves with wrapping eggs in herbs, nettles, pieces of cloth, anything that would give them a colored pattern on their shell, neatly fastening them with a rubber band.

  “Do you miss Russia?” Emma asked suddenly. “I mean really miss it, all the time?”

  “Why should I miss it?” Madame asked. “It is part of me, a pleasant memory of a happy childhood and a very happy marriage. But my life is now here. Why should I feel homesick for something that no longer exists?” Her shrewd eyes looked at Emma’s anxious face with open amusement. “It is never the place that calls to a woman’s heart in the last resort,” she said dryly. “It is the people—or a person!”

  Emma finished the last egg and began to put them into the enormous saucepan that was already boiling on the stove.

  “Goodness knows when we shall eat so many!” she exclaimed.

  “They are decorative. We shall have them on the table and the children who come to visit will eat them. It is surprising, but they always go.”

  “I think I’ll take some to Marie-Françoise,” Emma said thoughtfully.

  Her grandmother was non-committal.

  “If you will,” she said.

  It took twenty minutes before she was allowed to take the eggs out, boiled hard and with a variety of pretty patterns firmly imprinted on their shells. She put a dozen or so into her saddle-bag and swung herself carefully up on to the mare. She didn’t feel her ankle at all now, but the incident had made her a little nervous of taking any liberties with her mount.

  But the mare seemed disposed to behave herself. She was skittish and inclined to dance round the yard, but once they were out on the open land she settled down into an easy loping stride, carrying Emma in the general direction of the house where Marie-Françoise lived.

  It was the first time Emma had visited the French girl, and she was shocked by the sudden change in the land as she approached the house. The land at the Mas Camarica was wild, but it was loved; this was merely unkempt and poor. Even the protecting trees were spindly and stunted and there were large gaps in the line where the trees had died and had not been replaced.

  Emma went first to the front door and rang the bell. It must have been years since the door had last seen a coat of paint, and it soon became apparent that the bell wasn’t connected. After a few minutes she went round to the back door and hammered on it as loudly as she could.

  She was quite unprepared for Marie-Françoise to come from the stables, looking almost stunned with fatigue. Her trousers were saturated and covered with mud, and for the first time Emma saw her without make-up and stripped of the jaunty character that she presented to the world.

  “Looking for me?” she asked.

  Emma nodded.

  “Why don’t you invite me in and I’ll make you some tea?” she suggested. “What have you been doing?”

  Marie-Françoise smiled.

  “Tea? The English panacea, n’est-ce pas? I am afraid we haven’t any. But it is kind of you to offer. Come in.”

  She pushed open the door and stood for a moment transfixed in the doorway.

  “You must not mind our untidiness,” she said at last.

  Emma followed her in in silence. The kitchen was dark, blackened by years of soot from the stove, but the table was white from scrubbing, even if somebody had spilled coffee on it recently, and the curtains had been washed, threadbare as they were. Marie-Françoise got a cloth and wiped the table without comment.

  “Will you have some wine?” she asked.

  Emma nodded, putting the eggs she had brought on the table.

  “I brought you these,” she said. “Grand’mere and I did far too many for our needs!”

  Marie-Françoise looked at her suspiciously.

  “Was this your idea or hers?” she asked bluntly.

  “Mine,” Emma confessed.

  The French girl smiled suddenly.

  “I thought so. Madame Yourievska never comes to our house, and she would be unlikely to send you here. We don’t entertain any more.”

  She put out two glasses, cut-glass and beautiful, and Emma was shocked to see that her hands, usually so beautifully kept, were lined with mud and blood.

  “What have you been doing?” she asked.

  The French girl shrugged.

  “We have a bull in the mud. I was trying to get him out, but I’m afraid he’s too heavy for me. I came back for the gun.”

  Emma blanched.

  “But your father—”

  A bitter smile crossed the other girl’s face.

  “He doesn’t care,” she said hopelessly. She rolled up her sleeve and revealed a long, painful gash where the bull’s horn had caught her. She stared down at it for a long moment, and then she burst into tears. “I can’t go on any longer,” she whispered passionately. “What am I to do?”

  Emma was haunted by the idea of this girl struggling with the bull in the mud and coming back for a gun to put the beast out of its misery, the same girl who had so admired Sam for throwing a half-grown bull at the ferrade. Was this the side of her that Charles saw?

  “Shall I dress that for you?” she asked in matter-of-fact tones.

  Marie-Françoise got down the first aid box from the shelf where it was kept and held her arm under the tap, wincing as the cold water rushed down her arm.

  “What am I to do?” she repeated.

  “Wouldn’t Charles get it out for you?” Emma suggested.

  “No!” She hesitated. “He has done too much for me as it is, and whenever he comes my father is so rude to him. You—you would not understand.”

  But Emma thought she did understand, only too well. If you were in love with a man you didn’t want him to know about these things.

  “Perhaps I could help you,” she suggested timidly.

  Marie-Françoise considered the idea.

&nbs
p; “We could try,” she said dispassionately. “If you are not afraid?”

  That made Emma laugh.

  “I’m shaking in my shoes!” she said in English, and Marie-Françoise must have understood, for she smiled too.

  “And you will not tell Charles,” the French girl insisted. “I do not wish him to know that Papa does no work at all now. When I marry him, then it will be his affair as much as it is mine. But if he knew now he would not think that I would be a good wife to him, no?”

  Emma didn’t answer. Charles would be more than capable of dealing with the old man, she thought, and wondered why the idea should make her so miserable. Charles was nothing to her. She had put him out of her mind and her thoughts. And if she hadn’t quite succeeded in putting him out of her heart as well that wasn’t because she hadn’t tried.

  She bandaged the French girl’s arm and went outside with her to get the tridents and the sedains, the ropes made from the manes of horses and stronger even than nylon. They mounted up and rode out slowly.

  The trident was difficult to manage. It was all of six feet long and the three-pronged head on it weighted it awkwardly. Emma tried it across her saddle, holding it like a lance of old, and even over her shoulder, but it was too heavy really for her small hands to grasp firmly enough. But, even so, obscurely she was grateful to it. The thought of the bull appalled her. She was afraid of it, more afraid than she had ever been in her life before. Her mouth was dry and her knees decidedly shaky.

  It looked smaller than she had imagined, however, when she saw it thrashing about in the mud. Between them they managed to hold its head above the mud with the tridents.

  “Hold it steady,” Marie-Françoise instructed. “I shall get a rope round him.”

  She threw the rope with skill round the bull’s horns and pulled it tight, attaching the rope to the saddle of her horse. She took the other rope and threw it too, but the bull was beginning to panic again, making a fearful noise that frightened both the girls and the horses.

  Emma prodded him with the trident and he turned on it in a fury, lowering his head in a futile attempt to charge.

  “Again!” Marie-Françoise cried. “Again! And I shall have the sedain on him.”

  They sighed with relief when they had both ropes safely round his horns. Marie-Françoise took a firm grip of the horses’ bridles and headed them away from the bog.

  “Force him to help himself,” she called out to Emma. “He can’t be far out of his depth.”

  Emma trod cautiously into the edge of the mud. With both hands she found she could manage the trident quite well and with careful prodding she guided the bull towards the nearest firm ground.

  “What do we do when he’s free?” she panted. “He looks ready to charge anything!”

  She sounded almost as frightened as she was inside. Marie-Françoise looked round and grinned.

  “Do you want to mount?” she asked.

  Emma gave the bull a final prod in the right direction and pulled herself out of the mud, looking ruefully down at her feet. What a muddy mess? She stuck her boot firmly into one of the caged stirrups and swung herself off the ground. The mare whinnied nervously, keeping one eye on the floundering bull. She was frightened too.

  Marie-Françoise jumped into her own saddle and urged her horse forward with her heels. There was a slight sucking noise behind them and they saw that the bull had regained his feet. He stood shoulder-high in the mud, tossing his head and furious.

  “He can find his own way out now,” she said. “I’ll try to loosen the ropes.”

  She rode right into the edge of the bog, flicking the ropes to loosen them. Emma rode with her and, at the critical moment, hooked them up with her trident, and the bull stood free.

  “Are you sure he’ll be all right?” she asked doubtfully.

  The French girl nodded.

  “They’re bred to the Camargue. They know the dangers and how to cope with them. He’ll get out.”

  She wound the ropes into neat coils, sagging a little in her saddle.

  “Come,” she said. “We’ll go home and clean you up before your grandmother sees you.” She smiled briefly. “How does it feel to be a true gardienne?”

  Emma eased herself in her saddle.

  “Tired and hungry!”

  She looked back at the bull and was relieved to see that he was indeed dragging himself out of the deep mud. He struggled to the solid ground, shook himself violently and with vicious temper charged the nearest tamarisk bush, tearing it out of the ground.

  Emma shivered. These were not animals to be played around with. They were both strong and violent, with uncontrollable tempers and, she thought, very little sense. Marie-Françoise should not be allowed to work with them. Certainly not alone without any help from her father.

  They rode back to the homestead in silence, too tired to hasten their horses, who plodded along beneath them. Little swirls of dust made patterns on the track before them and somewhere on the left a nightingale sang despite the time of day. It was peaceful, drowsy with heat, and strangely beautiful.

  “We could eat some of your eggs,” Marie-Françoise suggested when they had unsaddled the horses and given them a rough brush down. “It was kind of you to bring them. I think I did not thank you properly.”

  She led the way into the kitchen, looked about her and relaxed visibly.

  “It is all right,” she said. “Papa has gone out.”

  The eggs looked pretty on the table with the long French loaves and the slender bottles of wine. Marie-Françoise even produced some butter, with a sly glance at Emma, remembering her distaste for eating dry bread.

  “It will be enough?” she asked doubtfully, surveying the meal.

  “More than enough!” Emma exclaimed. But she wondered what the French girl would have eaten if she had not brought the eggs.

  They peeled four of them and ate them with butter in the American way. They were good, with rich, yellow yolks and hard shells, and the bread was fresh and crusty.

  “My grandmother says your father is going to try Spanish bulls,” Emma said, uneasily aware that she was fishing for information. “She didn’t approve!” she added with a chuckle.

  Marie-Françoise made a face.

  “That would be my father,” she said gloomily. “He talks and talks, but as he has sacked the labor—such as it was!—how would we possibly manage?”

  “But you can’t do without any help at all!” Emma said with dismay.

  “No,” Marie-Françoise agreed. “I can’t, can I? But what am I to do? I must make money for my father and me to live—or I must marry.”

  “Marry Charles?” Emma made herself ask the question, surprised that it should hurt so much.

  “Marry Charles,” Marie-Françoise nodded. “Who else?”

  So it was all set up! And what could be more ideal? She, Emma, didn’t want to marry a Frenchman anyway! Did she?

  “Why don’t you grow rice?” she heard herself asking. Well, really! she thought to herself. Am I too starting to think that that would be answer to everything? But she found herself waiting for the answer all the same.

  “I wanted to!” the French girl exclaimed. “We quarrelled about it. I wanted to sell the land to the cooperatives, but he would not agree. I think a great deal of it is mortgaged to Charles.” The defeated look returned to her face. “I would rather anyone else than Charles!” she declared bitterly. Then she smiled suddenly. “You will not tell your grandmother, will you?” she asked prettily. “She would not approve of his helping us, I’m afraid. For you it is different. You are not one of us, and so it is easy to talk to you. A stranger does not care very much, n’est-ce-pas?”

  No, Emma thought, a stranger wouldn’t care. But she had ceased to be a stranger long ago. She had become a part of the wild land. She had bought herself a stake in it—and she cared a great deal. And shouldn’t her grandmother know? If she and Charles owned the Mas Camarica jointly, wasn’t it partly her money that was being us
ed?

  “No,” she said slowly, “I shan’t tell anyone.”

  She bit into another piece of bread and butter, wondering why the confirmation of something she had always known should make her feel so miserable. It was an admirable arrangement that Charles should marry Marie-Françoise, and that was that!

  There was a slight disturbance outside and a hen ran squawking round the yard, Marie-Françoise blanched.

  “C’est Papa!” she whispered.

  Emma looked up with interest. She was curious to see the French girl’s father for herself. But nothing had prepared her for the man who entered the kitchen throwing open the door and scowling at the pair of them.

  It was Monsieur Clement.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  OF course she should have known! She had no reason for not knowing. But even so it came as a shock to her. He had nothing in common with his daughter, nothing at all!

  “Monsieur Clement!” she repeated stupidly.

  “Mais oui.” His smile was frankly contemptuous. “So the little granddaughter didn’t know!”

  Emma pulled herself together and straightened her shoulders.

  “No,” she said carefully, “I didn’t know. Somehow I had never heard Marie-Françoise’s surname.”

  The French girl put her hand up over her mouth and looked at Emma through wide eyes.

  “Is it possible? I had thought all the world knew!”

  Emma smiled without amusement.

  “That’s probably why no one thought to tell me,” she said bitterly.

  Monsieur Clement found that amusing. He sat heavily on one of the kitchen chairs, laughing unpleasantly as he did so.

  “Get me some coffee,” he said to Marie-Françoise, “and hurry up about it! I see you have no trouble finding a meal when I am not here!”

  Emma flushed angrily.

  “I brought the eggs, monsieur,” she said quietly.

  Marie-Françoise put the coffee pot on to warm on the stove and got a clean cup and saucer from the dresser. Silently, she placed them in front of her father and sat down again. She looked tired and considerably older than her years.