A Gown of Thorns: A Gripping Novel of Romance, Intrigue and the Secrets of a Vintage Parisian Dress

by Natalie Meg Evans

  A rapid knock interrupted her thoughts. No time to get the dress off. The door opened, a girl stepped into the room. Louette shrank into herself.

  ‘You! What do you want?’ Dignity withered under Rachel Moorcroft’s mocking smile.

  Well, now, said the smile. Fancy catching out grand Madame Barends in private vanity.

  ‘Pardon, Madame, I happened to be passing Laurent’s laboratory just now and heard the telephone ringing in his office.’

  ‘Not true,’ Louette snapped. ‘I know perfectly well that you can’t hear the telephone from outside the laboratory, not through stone walls. You were in his office. Why?’

  Rachel shrugged. No blush, no denial. ‘So… I picked up the phone and took a message.’ Before Louette could question her, Rachel tilted her head to examine the Gown of Thorns. ‘How old is that dress?’

  ‘It was made in 1914, on the eve of the Great War. By repute, the silk was dyed here at Chemignac.’

  ‘Is it valuable?’

  Louette managed a disdainful laugh. ‘It’s by the Italian designer Mariano Fortuny, who worked in Paris until his death in the 1940s. There are very few left of this age and in this condition.’

  ‘Condition? You mean, stretched out like a net of oranges? It would look fabulous on the right figure.’

  It was all Louette could do not to step forward and slap the girl. The dress felt suddenly alive on her, shimmering like a fish dropped into water after a suffocating moment on land. ‘You brought a message?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Rachel made a show of recalling her reason for being there. ‘It was your husband. There’s been an accident. I could hear the children in the background, yelling.’

  Louette felt panic knife her. ‘What kind of accident?’

  ‘A burning, apparently.’

  ‘Fire?’

  Rachel searched for the right phrase. ‘More, um, a “scorching”. Oh good heavens, I don’t mean your house has burned down. Oh, your face, Madame!’ Her expression became, if anything, more innocent. ‘It happened just now – your husband was trying to cook some kind of pasta dish and turned the gas up too high. He forgot it and now the sauce is black and smoking. They’re going out to eat. For the third time this week. The message is – hubby wants you home.’

  Suddenly indifferent to Rachel’s gaze, Louette hauled off the dress, tossing it into the steamer trunk on top of the rest of the tower-room garments. She then banged the lid down and clicked the latches as if caging a wildcat. Facing Rachel in just her slip and tights, she said, ‘I’ll tell Mother I’m leaving right away. She’s next door with Monsieur Albert. Would you take my luggage out to my car?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Rachel answered. ‘But may I be brutal? You don’t look up to a day and night on the road. Shouldn’t you take a train instead of driving?’

  ‘I have to get home,’ Louette intoned through clenched teeth. Pushing her legs into her slacks, she broke the side zip in her desperation to be dressed and on her way.

  Shauna pushed the 2CV’s speed whenever she hit a straight stretch of road. She wanted to get this confrontation with Isabelle, Louette and Albert over with. Never a spirit drinker, at this moment she felt she could appreciate a swig of raw gin. She turned into the auburn tunnel that was Chemignac’s walnut tree avenue and immediately pulled hard on the wheel and jammed on her brakes. In spite of her quick reactions, she scraped the door moulding of the white Citroën speeding past like a rally car. Recognising Louette, she opened her driver’s door and got out, expecting the other woman to stop and do likewise. But Louette didn’t and Shauna was in time to see the white car veer into the lane, stones spitting from its wheels as it screeched away.

  Laurent arrived home shortly after four thirty, riding with the delivery truck driver. He too had seen Louette. Or rather, Louette’s car, a smoking, crumpled mess on the main D road into Garzenac. An ambulance had passed him at speed, on its way, he had correctly presumed, to an emergency unit.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The following morning, after a sparse breakfast of yesterday’s bread, toasted, Laurent drove out of Chemignac with his aunt. Their destination, the district hospital, where Louette lay in a deep coma. They’d spent most of the previous evening there until the staff had persuaded them that their presence was of no benefit to Louette.

  Halfway along the avenue, Laurent pulled in to allow the haymaker’s tractor to pass. ‘I’d forgotten he was coming to cut the meadows today,’ Laurent muttered. The world had changed overnight. The roads around Chemignac were no longer empty arteries in a tranquil backwater. They were in the grip of harvest, tractors thundering about, trailers bouncing behind. ‘Life goes on, even when you wish it would stop.’

  Isabelle turned a blotched face to him. ‘It does, and you must pick your grapes in spite of Louette.’

  ‘I will.’ Though actually, he’d already telephoned the agent who supplied his pickers to warn him that Chemignac’s vendange would be delayed. As they approached the hospital, Isabelle began to cry.

  Louette had suffered superficial burns along with severe head and chest trauma. For reasons inexplicable to her family, she’d neglected to fasten her seatbelt. Isabelle had said in bewilderment to the surgeon, ‘My daughter usually refuses to turn on the ignition until all her passengers have confirmed that they’re strapped in. We always tease her about it.’

  After escorting Isabelle to Louette’s room and getting her a coffee from the machine, Laurent returned to Chemignac, where he updated Shauna on Louette’s condition. According to the first policeman at the scene, she’d been pulled from her burning car by a group of cyclists while a passing lorry driver doused the flames with his fire extinguisher. Thankfully, the fuel tank hadn’t exploded, though everything in the trunk and on the car’s rear seat was destroyed. An antique suitcase had been reduced to ashes and scorched brass fittings. ‘She overtook a tractor on a blind stretch,’ Laurent said, ‘and had to pull in to avoid a car coming head on, hit the verge and rolled. Poor Isabelle thinks it’s her fault.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They argued over the Gown of Thorns. Isabelle accused Louette of coveting it for herself. And she was right.’ Rachel had witnessed Louette packing it, Laurent said. In fact, Rachel herself had loaded the suitcase into Louette’s car and it had been a deadweight. ‘Louette was taking the entire contents of the tower room wardrobe home to Paris with her.’

  ‘As you hoped she would, Laurent. Will you eat?’ Shauna had made salad baguettes, rather hurriedly, and the filling was oozing out. Lunch reflecting life, she thought.

  ‘I wanted the dress gone, but God knows, not like this.’ Laurent gnawed a finger until Shauna stopped him. He’d draw blood. ‘I’m wondering if that’s why she was driving like a mad woman,’ he said.

  ‘The dress infecting her mind? Isn’t it more likely she was just anxious to get home to her kids?’ Shauna conceded, ‘I admit, that dress has a weird effect when you put it on. I can’t explain why, but it does.’

  ‘That tells me you are beginning to understand Chemignac. This land holds its men and imprisons its women – until it kills them.’ Laurent sighed. ‘Now I’m talking like Albert.’ He took a baguette, and mayonnaise slopped onto his shoes. He made a rueful face and grabbed kitchen towel, then kissed Shauna’s cheek. ‘Thank you for holding the fort. Will you make up some beds? I have to fetch Louette’s husband from the airport.’

  ‘Course. I’ll also make more lunch, in case anyone wants it. You’d better get going.’ She didn’t want him rushing. ‘Watch out for those insane tractor drivers.’

  At Bordeaux airport, Laurent met Hubert Barends. He’d caught the first available plane, bringing the children with him – they’d refused to be palmed off on friends and were anxious to see their mother. To Shauna’s astonishment, the children ran straight to her when she met them in the château’s courtyard. She put her arms around them and relived the moment, thirteen years ago, when she’d arrived home from school to find an ambulance outside her house.
At her front door, she’d learned from a neighbour that her dad had died. So she knew what Olive and Nico were going through. ‘We’ll be all right,’ she said to the children, forcing conviction into her voice. ‘We’ll keep busy, OK?’

  It took three days for Louette’s condition to stabilise. Her medical team then advised moving her to a specialist trauma unit near Paris. Laurent bought a return flight for Hubert, whose indecisiveness and impracticality dominated every interaction, and a ticket for Isabelle too. Lacerated by guilt, Isabelle vowed to keep vigil until her daughter opened her eyes. ‘And somebody must keep Hubert company because he falls too easily into despondency,’ Isabelle told Shauna. The children chose to stay at Chemignac. They’d been given compassionate leave from school and, in a display of maturity that astonished Shauna, declared they would be more use helping with the wine harvest than moping in Paris.

  Against Albert’s advice, Laurent delayed the harvest by a further day, letting September 11th slide by and perhaps sacrificing the moment of perfect ripeness of the Sauvignon Blanc.

  However, when they woke in Shauna’s bed just before dawn on the 12th, his first words were, ‘Clos de Chemignac has produced wine through two world wars. I will call in the pickers. Chérie?’ He scooped her into his arms, pulling her on top of him. ‘Ready for the hardest physical work of your life?’

  ‘I’ve had more subtle invitations to a roll in the hay.’

  He laughed gently. ‘I meant the vendange. I’ll phone the agent now. He won’t mind.’

  ‘At four twenty in the morning? Nobody’s that good-natured. I say this next hour is ours.’ She kissed him, dragging her lips across his morning stubble to find the hollow of his throat. He gave in instantly, stretching out in arousal, his neck arching. They had been sharing a bed since Isabelle’s departure. The children had wanted Laurent near them, and Isabelle had told him, ‘Use my room, though of course, my bed lives in the dining room these days. You’ll have to dismantle it and lug it upstairs –’ At that point, she’d begun to cry, recalling her irritation at Louette’s interference, which now, of course, she would have welcomed.

  So, Laurent had shifted his clothes and CD player into Isabelle’s room, joining Shauna in hers once the children were asleep. The bond of responsibility they now shared lent their nights a concentration Shauna had never before experienced. She’d not known that such imaginative, unhurried love existed. Or that her climax could go on so long or send its echo so deep.

  Laurent, too, was enchanted. ‘It is different with you,’ he told her in the breathless flow that cascaded from him each time he climaxed. ‘With you, I feel I am cutting blocks to build a future.’

  She wasn’t sure the image was wholly flattering, but she took his meaning. This wasn’t a holiday affair. They were building a future. And though they both took care that ‘the future’ did not, for now, involve her getting pregnant, they began to casually refer to a time when they were ‘a family’. Shauna couldn’t shake the idea that they were completing something that had been torn apart in other lifetimes. Along with her career plans, she was jettisoning her scientists’ scepticism, willing to challenge the tradition that all de Chemignac women had unhappy lives.

  As Laurent drifted back into sleep, his arm across her, another realisation landed like a drop of iced water between her eyes. The Gown of Thorns had been burned to a frazzle in Louette’s car, almost taking Louette with it. Whatever bitterness and sorrow lived in its fibres must have gone too. Sliding into sleep herself, she was jolted awake by a chippy voice in her ear: ‘It isn’t over yet. Keep your promise. I won’t rest until I get justice.’

  Shauna closed her eyes tight. The stress of the last days had wiped Yvonne’s name from her mind, but Yvonne was not going to go quietly, it seemed.

  In a hospital ward across the channel, Miss Thorne stared, dry-eyed, at the vinyl ceiling tiles. Who drew up the cleaning rota at Dakenfield General? Who thought it a good idea to switch on vacuum cleaners at first light? And would that person enjoy a similar wake-up call each morning?

  One small blessing, the tea trolley would be along soon. With luck, it would be the friendly tea-lady doing the rounds today, the one who helped her sit up and turned her tray towards her. Miss Thorne had been dreaming about the Gown of Thorns. Its cold kiss had woken her. Even after all these years, its power was undiminished. Like the sloe berries from which its colour had been derived, it was a thing of beauty with a bitter heart. If only Henri had destroyed it before they met. Before she’d seen it, and reached for it.

  A Delphos gown by Fortuny, fashioned to cling like cobwebs. What warm-blooded woman could have resisted? And what man would resist the woman wearing it? Henri’s eyes as she walked into his arms wearing it… If obsidian could catch fire…

  Darling Henri had paid dearly for her vanity. But only that. Whatever else they said of her in France was unjust and she couldn’t bear the thought of her life ending without vindication. Without redress. When the tea arrived, she frightened the woman pushing the trolley by screeching, ‘Tell them I cannot die until my name is carved on that stone.’

  While Shauna made coffee and scrambled eggs, Laurent telephoned the agent who supplied temporary labour and said, ‘Send me all you’ve got.’ After that, he called his neighbours. By mid-morning, camper vans belonging to itinerant New Zealanders and Australians were parked on the newly shorn hay meadow. Vehicles with Portuguese and Spanish plates soon drew up alongside. Local pickers arrived on foot, middle-aged women mostly, who had worked on neighbours’ vineyards all the last week. Shauna joined Laurent in the chai and watched him and Raymond sterilising the press with carbon dioxide gas, ready for the first trailer-load of grapes. The other full-time worker, Armand, was giving the tractor a final check over.

  She’d have loved to have had a go at spraying the snowy gas into the press, but she had her hands full. Many of the jobs that would have fallen to Isabelle were now hers, and she had to keep an eye on the children too. Reluctantly, and with Rachel’s grudging help, she made her way to the vineyard and set up trestle tables which she laid with drinking water and plastic cups, sunblock, insect repellent and bite-relieving cream. Armand brought along a box of small, sharp scissors. There were dozens of plastic buckets and, alongside them, a stack of huttes – conical baskets that three or four of the stronger workers would wear on their backs. Pickers emptied their buckets into the huttes, which in turn would be tipped into half-barrels on the back of the trailer.

  By midday, Shauna and Olive were busy preparing lunch for the vendangeurs. Over the sizzle of mushroom and red pepper omelettes came the rev and throb of the tractor engine. Armand was giving it a run up the sloping Sauvignon Blanc parcelle, their target for this afternoon. The casual workers were milling about in the courtyard, waiting to be fed. Afterwards, work would begin.

  Shauna and Laurent were drinking a last cup of coffee and conferring over the afternoon’s schedule when Rachel drifted over to them. ‘Pardon me for butting in – again.’ Raising her brows at the coffee pot on the kitchen table, she added, ‘You two need to cut down on the caffeine. You’re staring at each other like a pair of lizards.’

  ‘How can I help you, Rachel?’ Laurent asked.

  ‘More, how can I help you? With Isabelle out of the picture, there must be jobs to do.’

  Laurent looked momentarily stunned. ‘Well, we always need extra help among the vines.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Rachel held up her hands, implying ‘no go’. ‘I’m allergic to whatever it is you spray on the leaves.’

  ‘They haven’t been sprayed for nearly two weeks.’

  ‘Even so… I was thinking of taking over the kitchen. You’ll need somebody to do the honours at the fête de vendange, won’t you?’

  ‘Audrey is doing that, and Shauna will help. With Isabelle’s blessing.’

  Rachel raised her eyebrows even higher, then smiled, accepting the fresh rebuff with apparent good grace. ‘Who’s to bring in the last trailer-load and be queen of the harve
st?’

  Laurent gave that a bare moment’s consideration. ‘This year – nobody. Out of respect for my cousin, who’s still in a coma.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Rachel headed for the door. ‘Perhaps I can parade along the rows and keep up morale.’

  ‘Workers only among the vines. But look’ – Laurent’s voice turned serious – ‘it would really help if you could just look after the stables and the customers and if any pickers need accommodation, help them out. You know who offers rooms in the village.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll call on all the village witches, see if they prefer Spanish or Portuguese guests.’

  Laurent sucked in a sound of irritation. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘Well, you always used to, Laurent. See you later.’ Rachel kissed her fingers at them both and went away with a sway of the hips that must, Shauna couldn’t help thinking, really get in the way of her stable chores. ‘That girl hasn’t given up on you.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Shauna. I told you it was a short-lived thing and a mistake.’ ‘Does she know that? I mean, the way she brushes her upper lip with her tongue when she says your name… Laurent.’ Shauna demonstrated in a smoky voice.

  Laurent shook his head. ‘What happens in the past should stay in the past. No? Or would you like to tell me about the men you slept with at university?’

  She blushed, her pale skin betraying her once again. ‘Point taken. It’s good of her to offer to help.’

  ‘I hope she means it. Rachel’s very good at offering her services only to make herself absent when you most need her.’

  That, considering the conversation they’d just had, wasn’t reassuring.

  ‘You do want to help with the feast?’ he asked. ‘It’s our way of thanking the workers and ensuring they come back next year. So if you think you’d rather not—’

  ‘My cooking’s not that bad! I’ve been talking it over with Audrey. She’s got everything planned as far as traditional fare goes and I suggested doing a barbecue as well, and she quite liked the idea. My devilled drumsticks are to die for. Stop!’ Laurent had begun to argue that nobody ever had a barbecue at a fête de vendange. ‘Life moves on. Greet change or you’ll end up like Albert.’ Let your worries show, and we’ll have Rachel barging in, she added silently. Though not if I have anything to do with it. Petty, but then jealousy always was.