Olive and Nico issued a simultaneous groan.
‘She did, and that’s no problem, if you don’t mind them ending up with a northern accent.’
‘We all have a regional accent,’ Isabelle laughed. ‘I promised their mother they’d finish the holidays well ahead in their studies. Two hours a day, nothing but English.’
‘What will we talk about?’ Nico’s eyes burned with anxiety.
‘You can show me Chemignac and the vines,’ Shauna suggested. ‘I’d like to see them.’ And Laurent, just possibly.
‘They’re boring.’ Nico wrinkled his nose. ‘Lumps of green with silly grapes on them. All of Chemignac is boring, apart from the horses.’
‘My grandchildren are sports mad, as you must have noticed. But like you, they can read and study when they set their minds to it.’ Isabelle got up to cover a plate of food with silver foil, explaining, ‘I’m taking this next door. Oncle Albert won’t eat with me while the children are here. He cannot bear modern manners. Olive, go fetch some books to show Shauna. Nico, fetch the apple tart from the pantry. Shauna, help yourself to another glass of wine. It’s our 2001 Sauvignon Blanc. What do you think? Not a bad year.’
It tasted exquisite to her, though to be fair, pub Chardonnay was the limit of her experience. Shauna watched the children doing their grandmother’s bidding and knew that she liked them.’ Should have boned up on Arsenal and Chelsea, though.
Olive came down with Le Seigneur des Anneaux – the French translation of The Lord of the Rings – announcing that J.R.R. Tolkien was the best writer in the universe, ever. Recognising common ground, Shauna said, ‘Why don’t we get hold of the English version and read it together?’
‘Laurent has an English copy,’ Nico piped.
‘Repeat that in English,’ Shauna commanded. They might as well start as they meant to go on. Nico struggled through the sentence, then reverted to French. ‘Let’s go find him. He’ll be in the chai.’
‘What’s—’
But the children were already outside. They moved fast, Shauna was discovering, out of sight before she’d put on the straw hat Isabelle had found for her.
Shauna guessed the direction the children were heading in. Leaving the courtyard by a side gate, she found herself on a track lined with the spindle-shaped cypress trees that were the predominant vertical feature in this landscape of vines. Ahead stood a huddle of stone outbuildings and she saw the children dash into one. Presumably the chai – pronounced ‘shay’. She found the door they’d left half-open. Breathing deeply as butterflies took off in her stomach at the thought of seeing Laurent, she stepped inside and – before she could catch herself – said, ‘Wow!’
Built of venerable old stone in keeping with the rest of Chemignac, inside the chai was as slick as any modern food-processing unit. Its walls were panelled with fibreglass sheets and its concrete floor shone wet, evidence of a recent hosing. Hearing the pulse of water hitting a hard surface, she followed a snaking hosepipe. As she approached the source of the noise, she began to understand that Clos de Chemignac was no small wine-making concern – not if the ten or so towering silver vats were all full at once. A line of handsome oak barrels stole her attention, but she didn’t count them because she saw the children just then. They were peering inside the porthole of what looked like a concrete bunker, their voices echoing over the hiss of water.
‘Laurent!’ they shouted. ‘Laurent! She’s here!’
Glancing over Nico’s shoulder, Shauna got a spray of cold water in the face. Laurent was inside the bunker, which was a couple of feet taller than him – about the dimensions of a very small bedroom. Noticing her, he grinned. The first smile she’d had from him and it turned her blood to warm syrup. Get a grip, girl. He was absolutely drenched. Barefoot, too. Water spewed out of the sluice holes onto the giggling children. ‘Go turn off the tap!’ Laurent yelled at them, and the children ran to do it. When the jet ceased, he asked Shauna, ‘Have you come for a wash?’
Bereft of a witty retort, Shauna said, ‘I’ll pass, thanks.’
Olive skidded up to them, asking Laurent, ‘Can we borrow your Lord of the Rings?’
‘Sure. Though I thought you were too busy whacking the life out of tennis balls to read. It’s in the bookcase by…’ But the children had gone, like a pair of greyhounds. Laurent climbed out through the tank’s porthole and twisted the hem of his T-shirt, shedding droplets. ‘I hope you’re strong now, Shauna, or they’ll exhaust you.’
‘I’m fine. Thanks for electrolytes by the way.’
‘You’re welcome. I keep two stocks, one for my workers and one for my horses.’
‘Which did I get?’
‘They’re pretty much the same, though the dosage is different.’ Laurent’s next smile crinkled his eyes. He waited for her to say something.
‘Um, thanks anyway. For scooping me up…’ Shauna could hear herself urgently filling the silence, ‘and thanks for lending the book. Or agreeing to, anyway. It’s about nine hundred pages, isn’t it? Should keep us all out of trouble. They’re really nice kids. I just wish I knew more about soccer.’
‘Soccer… You mean English league football? Why?’
‘For Nico’s sake.’
‘Oh, Nico doesn’t care about football. He’s interested in footballing stars.’ Laurent began to wind up his hosepipe. ‘Any sports stars, actually, because that’s what they intend to become. Nico in tennis, Olive in gymnastics. Or show jumping, if that brings in the prizes faster. They could make it, I think. Their parents spend a fortune on their training.’ It was said without rancour or judgement, but with an edge Shauna couldn’t wholly translate.
‘Lucky them,’ she said, watching Laurent fix the hosepipe on to its bracket. Water belched out of the nozzle. ‘Having such dedicated parents.’
‘I think it’s more to make up for sending them to their grandmother all summer. To make up for handing them over to an au pair.’
And she’d thought him so friendly! He’d said ‘au pair’ like ‘serving-wench’. ‘I still say they’re lucky,’ she swiped back. ‘This is such a beautiful place.’
‘Beautiful, but cruel.’ Laurent took a broom to the puddles that had collected outside the concrete tank, sweeping them towards a drain. The hands that had felt her pulse and tested her temperature were tense and she kept getting flashes of his thorn tattoo. She wondered what he’d say if he saw hers.
Troubled, she sought a change of subject and rapped her knuckles against the tank’s concrete side. ‘Is this the staff hot tub?’ She winced. Always a bad sign when she made jokes.
Laurent seemed to take her seriously, even more worrying. ‘It’s a holding tank for white juice, and a vat for red. After we’ve pressed our main red crop, Cabernet Sauvignon, we pipe it in there and let fermentation start. After the malolactic stage, we pump it into the steel containers. Malolactic means—’
‘The conversion of mallic acid into lactic acid, which gives wine its pleasant flavour.’
‘You understand viniculture?’
‘No, I’m good at pub quizzes.’ She left, not waiting to see Laurent’s response. Outside the chai, she let the evening air erase the goose pimples she’d walked out with. They’d sprung up as Laurent spoke the word “viniculture”. That husky French accent! She mustn’t fall for it or she’d never get out of here unscathed. For a while, she watched the swallows hoovering up midges as they darted between the roofs. In the lyrical trill of a song thrush, she heard an echo of her mother’s promise: you’ll fall in love with this place.
Elisabeth had fallen for green-eyed Tim Vincent among Chemignac’s vines. It won’t work for me, Shauna told herself fiercely. I’m ‘reyt bad’ as they say where I come from, and all out with the world. Laurent had just paid the price, getting his head bitten off in exchange for an innocent remark. She half hoped he’d come after her as she trudged back to the château, but he didn’t.
As she entered the courtyard, she saw a light flickering at the top of the tower.<
br />
Shauna’s bedroom was on the ground floor of Isabelle’s wing of the château. Though shadows had never worried her before, she found it hard to succumb to sleep that night. Her snarkiness with Laurent went round in her mind until she was sick of the memory of her own voice. After what seemed to be hours spent kicking her duvet, she drifted off, only to be jolted awake by the strangest of sounds. She sat up, her eyes trying to unravel the dark. Had she really just heard a gaggle of geese?
Her room lay on the meadow side of the house, and as she listened for a repeat, she imagined a white-winged advance from the fringes of the wood. Chemignac’s walls, picturesque during daylight, seemed suddenly threatening. Scuffling mice and the occasional house spider were one thing. Imagining she was about to be surrounded by powerful necks and pecking beaks… That was truly disorientating.
Pulling her quilt up to her chin, she drew her knees to her navel and closed her eyes. A moment later, she was sitting bolt upright as the same honking sound bubbled up behind her bedhead, seeming to come from within the wall itself. Geese, inside? Shauna stifled her breath, reminding herself that this was an old, old building. Its frame swelled in the day’s heat and contracted as the air cooled. What she’d heard could simply have been the settling of dry timbers. Or even the doves under the eaves.
She wasn’t convincing herself, though. During a holiday job on an organic farm in Wales, her morning task had been to let the birds out of their fox-proof coops and dole out the grain. The racket made by twenty-four Brecon Buffs flapping to be first to the feeders was engraved on her mind. She had heard geese. Well, the only way to prove it so she could get back to sleep was to look. She groped for her bedside lamp and as the low-energy bulb warmed into light, she got up and flung open her door – stubbing her toe as she stepped into the hallway. Empty. Dark. Silent.
Muttering, ‘Weird,’ she returned to her room, but not to bed. Instead, she opened her window shutters and leaned out. A chrome-bright moon lit an empty landscape.
‘Maybe sound carries across vineyards,’ she murmured, then jumped in alarm as a cry sliced through the night. In spite of her clashing heartbeat, she stretched further out of the window to investigate. The sound came again and she released her breath. It was owls hooting, playing catch among the winery buildings, by the sound of it.
Now thoroughly churned up, she gave up on sleep, rooting through her drawers for something warm to put on. Hauling on tracksuit bottoms and a jersey, shoving her feet into a pair of comfy loafers, she crept through the sleeping house and out through the kitchen door. The night air tasted of warm cakes and, as in the old carol, all was calm, all was bright. But something made her look up. Light flashed erratically behind the tower’s louvred shutters. Not dazzling, but as if a lightbulb pulsed behind greased paper. Could somebody be up there, working in torchlight? Surely not. The moon at the peak of its transit told her it was two or three in the morning. The children would be fast asleep, Isabelle too. Besides which, Isabelle never climbed the tower, she’d said so. Albert? From what she’d seen of the old man, it seemed vanishingly unlikely that he’d attempt the stairs either. Laurent? But if he was still working, wouldn’t he more likely be in the chai or in his office, catching up on admin? There had to be a simple explanation. A lightbulb about to blow? Or a perished cable sheath creating a short circuit, or inadequately fused wiring?
Which might overheat and catch fire…
She headed back inside, obeying a reluctant need to investigate, only to find the door between the kitchen and tower firmly locked. Keys hung from a rack next to the refrigerator, but none of them fitted, so she gave up, making a note to raise the matter in the morning. Fed up with worry and with her bed holding no appeal, she decided to take a walk and perhaps watch her first dawn break over Chemignac.
Owls screeched a welcome as she stepped outside again and Shauna set off to see if she could get sight of them. She hadn’t gone many steps along the cypress tree track when she noticed the steady glow of light in the winery. She’d had a patchy night’s sleep and somebody hadn’t even begun his.
Chapter Four
Opening the door of the chai noiselessly, Shauna peered inside, blinking in the glare of the strip-lighting. Laurent had his back to her and she watched him move slowly along the row of oak casks. At each one, he bent down and she heard liquid trickle into some kind of container. Conscious that she was lurking, she called out, ‘Hello. Good evening – or morning. I’m not sure which it is.’ She moved forward, anticipating his surprise. ‘I saw lights and thought – have you been working all night?’
‘I suppose.’ Laurent frowned as if he couldn’t work out how she’d manifested in front of him. A plastic jar in his hand brimmed with red liquor and Shauna’s nostrils caught fruit-filled, leathery richness. It affected her senses and she blurted out, ‘I’m sorry I was rude earlier.’
Laurent shook his head. ‘You were rude? To me?’
‘I stormed out!’
‘You did?’
So he didn’t even notice her when she had a hissy-fit! But now she was close enough to him to make out the bubbles on the surface of his test jar. Their faint tremor suggested Laurent’s grip was not quite steady. Was he exhausted? His outer clothes, drenched several hours ago, had dried against his body like shrink-wrap. She saw once again how muscular he was, though in the unobtrusive way of someone who fuels himself well and burns it off in continuous manual labour. Her lovers had always been fellow academics, soft-limbed men, often hopelessly impractical. What would it feel like to hold this taut form in her arms, to rouse him and satisfy him while teasing out the intelligence of his mind?
‘Shauna?’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Her voice slipped gear as she explained, ‘I made that catty comment about pub quizzes and slammed out. Well, not slammed, exactly. Stomped.’
‘Ah.’ Laurent’s brow cleared. ‘At the time, I did not understand… Not sure I do now, but thank you for apologising. Not that you need to. Being lumbered with the dynamite duo would fray most people’s tempers.’
‘You mean Olive and Nico? I don’t know why you’re so down on them. They’re great kids.’
‘I think so too, but greater proximity has taught me that they’re also demanding and needy. Don’t get me wrong, I love them very much and if I’m angry, it’s with others, not with them. You will come to understand the situation better in time, but I warn you, you have entered the terrain of emotional trip-wires. No amount of kindness can supply what they need most.’
That didn’t sound promising.
He bent his mouth in sympathy. ‘Isabelle hopes you will make them happy, but my little cousins are fundamentally not happy. I should know, I recognise myself in them. You will try your best, but they will wear you out. Chemignac will wear you out.’
That sounded an even less joyous prospect, but Shauna managed to laugh. ‘I don’t flinch at a challenge. I’ll make it work.’ Had she said the wrong thing again? His expression hardened and his reply slashed at her confidence.
‘Shauna, you’re a stranger here. No –’ he corrected himself, ‘a visitor and you don’t yet perceive the complicated strands that weave us together. You were offended when I called you the “au pair”?’
‘Of course! You implied that the children were being palmed off on a lesser being.’
‘Not at all!’ Red liquid splashed on Laurent’s feet as he raised his hands, forgetting he was holding a jar. He was still barefoot, Shauna noticed, and ruby tears rolled between his toes. ‘It wasn’t an insult, just plain fact. Nico and Olive spend all summer here and Isabelle loves to have them, but she is getting too frail to properly supervise them.’
‘Are you suggesting their parents are over-compensating for sending them away? Making up for it by filling their days with training?’
He nodded. ‘Lavishing expenditure on them with a promise that one day they will be superstars. By the way,’ he went on, ‘“Au pair” means “equal”. In English, you use the word “peer” as in “
peer group”, no? The words have the same origin. I do not think of you as a lesser being. D’accord?’
‘All right. I overreacted. I can see we both have the kids’ interests at heart. Truce?’
‘Are we at war?’ His gaze softened with concern. With question. ‘Why are you gliding around at this hour, like a wraith? Do you sleep-walk?’
Shauna explained about the owls, choosing not to mention the mysterious honking. However, she did tell him about the electrical anomaly in the tower. Laurent looked as if she’d given him an unwelcome message.
‘I’ll check it out, though it’s probably to do with the appliances in Isabelle’s kitchen causing a voltage fluctuation. When the tower was wired in the 1920s, there weren’t such things as fridges or electric ovens.’
‘I suppose not.’ It made sense, but didn’t wholly cure her unease. In for a penny… she described the strange noise that had woken her. ‘Geese, believe it or not. I was convinced they were right outside my room.’
Laurent stared at her, then bit his lip in automatic denial. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘I agree. I checked and they definitely weren’t there. Not so much as a feather. I dreamed them, Laurent.’
‘That seems the most likely explanation. And now you can’t sleep.’
‘May I ask why you’re working all night?’ She tapped his plastic jar with a fingernail. ‘Testing it or drinking it?’
‘Both.’ He seized on the change of subject. ‘And I’d better finish.’ Turning from her, he topped up his jar from one of the casks then held the phial up to the light, examining its gemstone colour. ‘This is last year’s blended Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, which we sell as “Tour de Chemignac”. I’m taking a random sample to find out if it’s ready to bottle.’ He moved across to a kitchen workstation where screw-top capsules were lined up. Shauna watched him decant a small measure of wine into each, then label them.
A Gown of Thorns: A Gripping Novel of Romance, Intrigue and the Secrets of a Vintage Parisian Dress Page 3