‘Did you…’ She was afraid to ask. ‘Did you rescue your man from the prison wagon?’
‘It was a woman, actually. Yes, but I lost two friends in the attack and their families may now pay a heavy price. For their sakes, for the sake of every man and woman who gives up their life for this cause, we have to make this work. Stay indoors, please.’
She bowed her head. ‘I just hate being up in that room. It makes me uneasy and…’ She groped for something that didn’t sound silly or far-fetched. She’d woken so many times in that big bed feeling she wasn’t alone. Once she’d even hissed, ‘Albert? Is that you, you viper?’ convinced he was leaning over her. Except it couldn’t have been Albert. It couldn’t have been anyone, because she always locked her door from the inside. This morning, the light through the shutters making piano keys across her bedspread, she’d thought she heard gunshots and heavy boots. A minute of heart-arrest, listening with one foot on the floor, had reassured her that it was only the morning congregation of geese. She’d lain under her covers, trying to reach Henri with her mind, when the wardrobe door had whined open, bathing her in its strange, spicy breath. A dress had slipped off its hanger in a plop of violet silk. Utter despair had stolen over her.
The recollection of it made her temper surge. ‘You spend your days striding among the vines or going off on sorties, yet you think I should sit day and night tending an invalid and counting the cracks in the ceiling? I’m trapped here and bloody miserable.’
He said stiffly, ‘If you would prefer to sleep down here, we will bring a mattress into this room.’
She looked around. Where they stood must once have been the household’s laundry. A tarnished copper boiler dominated one wall, a line of stone sinks spanning another. Some years since any washing had been done here, of course. ‘Stay with me in the tower. I don’t want to be alone.’
‘Yvonne.’ The two syllables communicated reproach, desire, exasperation. ‘You are my guest.’
‘What are you saying? That we can only make love outside? I didn’t feel like ‘your guest’ the other night.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘We’re not doing anything wrong. You’re not married and neither am I.’
‘I have my children to think of. They visit sometimes. I cannot push a lover in their face.’
Something froze inside her. ‘If you’re ashamed of me, you’d better say it.’
‘I am not ashamed, but I am afraid. Days away from you have shown me how much I stand to lose.’
‘Then let’s make the most of the time we have. Henri, don’t glower at me. The wind might change and you’ll stick like it, as my mother used to tell me.’ She cupped his face. ‘Smile? You must have run out of fury by now.’
He groaned and their mouths met, neither of them aware who moved first, who closed the gap faster. Yvonne shut her eyes. When she heard the scrape of boots in the courtyard, she guessed that somebody was there, peering in at them through the window. She knew who it would be. So be it. She minded being spied on, but danger was a drug, so they said. So was the taste of Henri’s mouth and the restless exploration of his hands.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Shauna took Laurent’s hand and pulled him out of the apartment, bidding Albert ‘Goodnight!’ Out in the courtyard, she squealed in astonishment as Laurent blocked her progress and locked her against the house wall. ‘Who is he?’ he demanded. The animosity he’d displayed in Rachel’s presence was back.
‘Who is who? Laurent, don’t cram me. I don’t like it.’
‘No? What do you like, this?’ His lips were against hers then, marauding, demanding. There was so much strength in him, she couldn’t escape or even bend away. All she could do was reach up and grab the drawstring neck of his hoodie and pull until he had to break off for air. Then she slapped him, hard enough to bring him back to his senses.
‘Shauna?’
‘That was like being mugged in a back alley. Oh, wait a minute… You’ve been with Albert. Has he been filling your mind with his brand of progressive feminism?’
Shauna remained ready to fight, until the pattern of Laurent’s breathing changed and she knew the person she loved was back with her.
He said, ‘It’s not Albert—’ He broke off to touch her face. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘You haven’t shaved, so you sandpapered me.’
‘I’m sorry. I won’t ever do that again.’
‘Well, that would be a shame.’ She drew him to her and kissed him, murmuring, ‘Uh-uh’ when he tried to take over. ‘I don’t mind implacable passion, so long as I know who the man is behind it.’ Her tongue found the sensitive places behind his lips, the roof of his mouth. He writhed, straining against her, but she still wouldn’t let him take over. Her lips moved around his lips, his throat and cheekbones, the prickly sideburn hair, the lobe of an ear, until he was lost, pushing her back against the wall, unable to stop himself. Responding to his arousal, her loins ached and nothing would have stopped the primal act taking place there and then – until Shauna happened to glance up at the tower.
‘My God, there, see that?’
Most unwillingly, Laurent followed her gaze. The light at the top of the tower was flickering on and off.
‘I told you about that, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘Your wiring’s faulty.’
‘I have it checked every year, for the insurance. Shauna, don’t leave me in pain, please.’ He raked her thigh, his hand beneath her dress, urgent, tantalising, but she pushed him away, aware all of a sudden that they were in the courtyard where anyone might see them.
Laurent said heavily, ‘Rachel tells me you’re leaving, that you’ve accepted a job offer. There’s someone else at home. An older man. Your professor, she said.’
So that’s what had triggered the storm!
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Shauna?’
‘Because it isn’t the case. Rachel’s lying. About the man, anyway. There is a job… Well, there was. Truth is, I’m not sure I want it now.’ Shauna put her arm around Laurent to steer him towards Isabelle’s door and ultimately to bed. But whatever tormented him made him stubborn. ‘I am not leaving Chemignac,’ she said, each word emphatic. ‘Not unless you tell me to. Rachel is dishonest. She’s had a grudge against me from day one, as you well know. Anyway, at this moment she’s locked in her bedroom with Adão, not a stitch between them. Laurent?’
She felt him shudder, waiting for his answer. That frisson had felt to her like jealousy but he made no reference to Rachel, saying slowly, ‘You must not leave, Shauna. Not until we’ve learned the end of Henri and Yvonne’s story. He was so afraid of losing her.’
‘And when we’ve learned it?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t see past them. Every emotion I feel is magnified. I have no control and I can’t go through this alone. In Albert’s room, I was Henri. What did you feel in there with Albert? What did you make of the photos?’
She admitted, ‘I was in Yvonne’s head. I came here and I took a lover. Henri. I was a pretty fast mover!’
‘And I wanted you from the moment I saw you in your goggles and overalls. I can’t get enough of you. As Henri, I couldn’t get enough of you and now I feel I’m making up for lost years.’ His smile, absent for much of the day, lit up. She reached up to stroke his mouth and felt his teeth close lightly on her finger.
‘It’s our story too, isn’t it?’ She’d denied the idea for so long as being outside rational possibility, but consciousness of an alternative reality had been growing for a while. Indelibly, like the shadow on an x-ray plate. To negate it in the face of so much proof would be illogical. Lights still flickered on and off at the top of the tower. She took a deep breath and told Laurent that the Gown of Thorns was back in its wardrobe.
‘How?’
‘I found it in Isabelle’s cupboard. Rachel, again! Anyway, I decided it ought to go back to its lair. Sorry.’
‘No – you did right. I wouldn’t want it anywhere near the children. That dress betrayed Yvonne and Henri.’
‘The dress corrupted Yvonne. Albert swears it was a woman who brought the Germans to Chemignac. He accuses Yvonne.’
‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Yvonne would never betray Henri, not willingly.’ She grasped Laurent’s hands, squeezing them in time to her words. ‘He was her soulmate. She’d never have used that word, but that’s what they were. Soulmates. She’d never sacrifice him unless she was under such duress she couldn’t hold out.’ Men and women break. Henri had said it to her, through Yvonne. I don’t want to know if Yvonne broke, she thought. But I’m going to know. The room was signalling to them. On-off. On-off. Summoning them. ‘Laurent, do you have what it takes to find out what happened to Henri and Yvonne?’
Laurent folded his hands over hers like pigeon wings. Whose touch was the colder? ‘I don’t think we have any choice, do you?’
In Dakenfield, Miss Thorne lay in her curtained niche, staring at a fog of sleepless dots. Strip lighting through pimpled glass panels meant that the ward was never properly dark.
There’d been talk of sending her to a rehabilitation unit, and then – just perhaps – home. Did she have family, they’d asked? There had to be somebody to check on her at least twice a day in case she fell again.
She had no family, she told them, though that wasn’t entirely true. She had a half-brother, Paul, who had done his all to keep the ties between them alive, but even he had given up when she’d sent a Christmas card back to him marked ‘Return to Sender’. After the war, she’d wanted desperately to vanish, and that’s what she’d done.
Any children? A male nurse had asked her that. Thirty-five years a schoolteacher, she could still slap down impudence. ‘Young man, I am Miss Antonia Thorne. I don’t know what values you hold to, but in my day, respectable women did not breed out of wedlock.’ To herself, she acknowledged, ‘No children.’ How could there be?
What a series of blunders her life had been. What a failure of an existence. Not long now, she thought. She felt such a strong connection to Henri – to Chemignac – she was more often there in her mind than here these days. She didn’t even have to wait for dreams. She just closed her eyes… Soon, soon, she would melt away and be with Henri for always.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The sputtering lights had died at some point during their ascent to the tower bedroom. Dark serenity greeted them.
‘Let’s get into bed,’ Shauna murmured. Under the satin coverlet, they could share body heat and, besides, standing about, she’d feel she was waiting for something awful to happen. Stripping to her bra and pants, she climbed under the covers. The mattress creaked as Laurent got in beside her and, for a while, they competed in shivering. As warmth finally stole over them, Shauna directed Laurent’s hand so it lay over her tattoo. She slid her hand inside his sleeve and grasped his forearm, and the image of the thorn. A circle, thorn on thorn.
‘What are we trying to do?’ he muttered.
‘I’m emptying my mind to start the film show again. I’ll tell you if I see anything.’ She tried to clear random thoughts, but the proximity of the Gown of Thorns acted as a disturber. Like having the TV on when trying to meditate. Her eyelids grew leaden and she thought, I give in. I’m going to sleep, when Laurent murmured, ‘It was an error to let the children visit.’
‘They need to be here,’ Shauna answered. ‘Can you imagine the atmosphere in the Paris apartment, their father veering between despair and depression, and their grandmother constantly blaming herself for what’s happened to Louette? They’re much better off with us.’
‘Not those children. Isabelle and my father. Their nanny brought them here while the British agents were in hiding. That was the mistake.’
‘They saw things they shouldn’t?’
‘My father was at the toddler-talking stage, babbling his own language, so it didn’t matter what he saw. But Isabelle was eight. Bright and opinionated, much like Olive, and deeply…’ He tailed off.
‘Deeply what?’
‘Attached to me.’
‘I know that. After Nico, you’re her favourite male.’
‘Who is Nico? Attached to me, their father.’ Laurent sounded as though he was speaking through a layer of wool. His breathing was too shallow for him to be falling asleep. She waited.
‘Isabelle is attached to me and it is why I’ve sent her away, and the boy.’
I have sent… What decade was he in? Laurent’s voice, always deep, had grown huskier.
‘Am I speaking to Henri?’
‘That’s who I am.’
‘You sent your children away because it was – I mean, is – safer?’
‘Naturally. They have no mother and at the Valle’s farm, they are well cared for. The Valles are trustworthy and Audrey makes a good nursemaid for all she is young.’
‘Audrey as in “Raymond and Audrey”?’ Whoa, where was this going?
‘The Valles are my tenants and Audrey is their daughter. She loves Isabelle and Pierre-Gaston, and plays with them like an older sister. A good solution for motherless children, don’t you think?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it.’ Shauna stroked Laurent’s arm and put her lips to his knuckles, testing his reactions. He didn’t respond. ‘Did they – I mean, do the Valles know what you do at Chemignac?’
‘Other than make wine?’ Laughter made his ribs bounce. ‘They know about the “guests” I take care of, but they don’t speak of it any more than they would of a neighbour’s ailments or infidelities.’
She had to ask again: ‘Am I speaking to Henri de Chemignac?’
His arms tightened around her and his answer came in the form of a kiss, deep and demanding, and her breathing grew shallow too, a yielding moisture between her thighs, her nipples responding as Laurent – was it still Laurent? – cupped her breasts, chafing their peaks. She remained aware of herself as Shauna, in the tower room with a man who wanted to make love. She unhooked her bra and his lips instantly sought her exposed flesh. When his fingers invaded her, she succumbed to waves of pleasure that went on and on until she thought she would lose her senses. Her mind seemed to dilate, her inner vision travelling super-fast through darkness. Like a camera bedded in a bullet passing through the barrel of a gun, her inner eye kept pace until, like a lucid dreamer, she touched down in a different reality. She was Yvonne, but also Shauna. The man with her, whose clothes she was helping to remove, was Laurent and Henri.
Yvonne stretched her arms behind her, linen bed sheets falling away like a spillage of cream. It was late afternoon, the day’s heat touching its zenith. Henri had opened both windows, west and east. The room would have been unbearable otherwise. If anybody saw him up here, he’d explain that he was airing the place. She must stay on the bed, meanwhile.
‘I suspect your motives,’ she told him. ‘“Stay on the bed, don’t move. Don’t put your clothes on…”’
They had dined on bread, the local goat’s cheese called Cabécou, and preserved walnuts. Henri had uncorked a bottle of the previous year’s Cabernet Franc, complementing the simplest, and one of the best, meals she’d ever tasted. Afterwards, they had made love with the slow intensity that they had perfected. Her limbs soft and sated, Yvonne thought dimly of the job she’d come to do. In three or four days, Henri had informed her, somebody would hustle her on to the next location. A safe house in Bergerac had been secured, a short journey by train. After that, she’d be conducted to Bordeaux and an anonymous town centre apartment where she’d get on with the job she’d been dropped for – running messages between Resistance personnel and SOE wireless operators – one of whom was certainly jumping up and down for those replacement radio crystals right now. Jean-Claude would be taken to his next location. Cyprien would remain here until he had fully recovered.
Her life would become one of clandestine meetings and messages relayed back to London. Whenever she ventured outside, she’d walk on metaphorical eggshells, eyes staring out of the back of her head. No more love in the afternoon, no more night-time liaisons in the vines. If she had any sense, she’d put Henri de Chemignac out of her mind and tell him to forget her.
Might as well tell the doves to stop cooing or command the grapes not to ripen.
She heard Henri swear, saw him put a finger in his mouth. He was repairing the oil painting’s hanging wire, having noticed it was fraying. It looked like he’d driven the end of it into his finger.
‘It’s a hideous picture,’ she said.
‘That’s why it’s up here. My wife had it removed from the drawing room after we married. She hated it too, and before you say anything else rude about it, the painter was English.’
‘Of course. Only English water-meadows could be so dank-looking on what must be a summer’s evening. One could catch fever of the lungs staring at it too long.’ Then, because she was so mindful of her imminent departure, and because she hated the idea of secrets between them, she asked to know more about Marie-Louise.
For a while, Henri said nothing and she supposed she’d offended etiquette. But it seemed he was concentrating on twisting the ends of the picture wire. ‘Marie-Louise died in June 1940. She’d been in Paris when the Nazis invaded and was trying to get home. She was with her maid, and both women were killed. Murdered, I should say. The last trains had already left Paris, but they got a lift in a van as far as Orléans. From there I believe they went on foot, heading for Chateauroux where the maid had family. As far as I know, they were shot by German pilots, who strafed refugees on the road at low altitude.’
‘The shits. No wonder you’re so angry, Henri. No wonder you do what you do. Did you…’ Love her? She cleared her throat. ‘You said that she left her children. That seems…’ Cruel? Unnatural? Hardly her place to cast judgement, so she substituted, ‘Were you a happy couple?’
A Gown of Thorns: A Gripping Novel of Romance, Intrigue and the Secrets of a Vintage Parisian Dress Page 21