Читать книгу Escape from Passion - Barbara Cartland - Страница 4

Fleur stood outside the little Railway Station and looked about her in a dazed manner. She was feeling so utterly weary that it was difficult to realise that she had really reached her journey’s end.

In the far distance she could see the sea, shining a dazzling blue in the hot sun. Seagulls, squawking noisily, were looking for food among the overturned earth in the adjoining fields.

She had arrived at last and reached Ste-Madeleine-de-Beauchamps after a journey which seemed to have lasted interminably.

Marie had warned her not to ask questions of anyone at the Station.

“They will be curious about you,” she said. “Walk straight on down the road towards the sea for about a mile and then turn left.”

“For about a mile!”

It seemed to Fleur now an insupportable distance.

She looked at the white dusty road along which several passengers who had disembarked at the same time as herself were already receding.

‘If only I could sleep,’ she mused.

She had spent part of the previous night sitting on a hard bench at a Railway Terminus. The waiting room had been closed and locked, German orders, she supposed. Several times during the night Officials had walked in, staring disdainfully at the waiting groups of chilled but patient travellers.

The innumerable times that she had shown her papers! Always the same questions and the same explanations.

Once or twice her heart had beaten faster and she had been afraid when she had thought that some inquisitor was staring at her too closely. But the drunken Officer who had signed the permits for Monsieur le Maire had been of high standing.

Each time, after disparaging remarks as to the impropriety of travelling long distances at such a time, her papers were returned and she would take them thankfully, conscious that yet another obstacle was passed and another barrier negotiated.

Now, at last, incredibly, she had attained her goal, but was too tired to feel anything save an utter exhaustion. The road stretched ahead of her.

Well, there was nothing for it, she had to go forward.

She walked on, dragging her feet, her luggage impeding her progress as if it contained lumps of lead rather than clothes.

It was hot and she could feel the sweat gathering beneath the stiff band of her hat and trickling down her forehead.

Perhaps it will remove some of the dirt, she thought indifferently, knowing how travel-stained and begrimed she was. The carriages in which she had travelled had been filthy, the floors covered not only with dust and dirt but with pieces of decaying food, paper and ash.

She walked on. Now she could smell and feel the tang of salt in the air. There was a fresh invigorating breeze blowing in from the sea and suddenly she was then overwhelmed with a longing for England and for home.

On, on, the dust rose with every step she took. On, on, would the road never come to an end?

More than once she stopped, putting down her luggage, half-tempted to leave it behind and go on without it and trusting to find it again.

She would have done so but for the fear that someone might open it and be surprised at the contents.

The road twisted, the fields on both sides were deserted and Fleur saw that now she was walking away from the village.

And she wondered how much further she must drag herself before she reached the farm.

“You can’t miss it,” Marie had said and yet she had begun to wonder if she had got her instructions right and if she was indeed going in the right direction.

Then, quite suddenly, it lay before her. A turn of the road, the rounding of a great clump of poplar trees and there it was, a small untidy building, its walls, once white, now cracked and weather-beaten, a gate swinging back from its broken hinge and a yard deserted save for a tortoiseshell cat sleeping on a wooden bench.

Fleur put down her luggage and stood gazing at the house. Only the cat reassured her that someone was at home. She was half-afraid from the general air of desolation and quiet that the place might be uninhabited.

Resolutely she picked up her luggage again and was rehearsing to herself the words she would say.

She crossed the yard and abruptly, deep within the house, she heard a dog bark, a sharp insistent bark as if of fear.

She was conscious then that she was being watched and next someone looked through a window swiftly and furtively and was gone again. There was the sound of a voice, too far off to be intelligible, nevertheless a voice calling and once again silence, Fleur reached the porch, she waited a moment and then half-fearfully rapped on the door.

She could hardly hear the sound she made herself and she rapped again, this time louder.

After what seemed to be a long time she heard footsteps. They came nearer the door and paused. Someone whispered, she was certain it was a woman and there was the sound of a lock being turned and a bar being lifted.

The door was opened and a man stood there. Fleur looked at him and knew at once that this was Jacques, Marie’s brother. They were very alike. He had the same shaped face, the same eyes of Norman blue and the same square sturdy figure.

He was not a young man, his face was deeply scarred with lines and he had too the quiet sad expression which is often characteristic of those who live near to the soil and learn to accept the vagaries of nature with a fatalistic melancholy.

“What do you want?” Jacques Bouvais spoke slowly, his voice deep and gruff, and to Fleur there was something unfriendly in his attitude.

“I have come to you from your sister, Marie.”

She looked at him as she said the words, expecting an instantaneous response and change of expression. But, if he was surprised, there was no sign of it on his countenance, only the same look of patient resignation and the same impression of unyielding antagonism.

“Well?”

It was a question.

Fleur felt frustrated.

“May I come in?” she asked. “There is so much to explain.”

She felt suddenly afraid. Supposing Marie had been wrong, supposing her brother was also one of the collaborators with the German conquerors? In that case she was giving herself completely over to the enemy.

And yet what could she do? She had come so far.

“I think you had better explain your business here first,” Jacques Bouvais replied and suddenly Fleur felt that she could bear no more.

She was so tired, too tired to argue and to explain. She was also afraid, the glare of the sun had made her eyes ache and she felt now as if she could not trust them to read correctly whether it was friendship or enmity that she saw in the face of the man opposite her.

She had put down her wicker basket when she had first come to the door. In her other hand she still held the carpet bag and now it felt as if it was weighing her down, dragging her lower and lower, and she could not resist it. She let it fall and felt the whole earth rocking beneath her, a darkness before her eyes –

“I \m all right,” she heard herself say, “if I could only sit down.”

Even as she said the words, she clutched at her receding senses.

“I have spoken in French,” she thought “I must remember to keep speaking French.”

She felt someone’s arm go around her shoulders, hands were supporting her and then the glare was gone and she was sitting on a chair in the cool dimness of the house.

“Drink this,” a woman’s voice then came.

There was a glass between her lips and drops of cool, almost icy cold water going slowly down her throat. Her vision cleared, the dizziness went and with it much of her weakness.

“I am sorry,” she murmured, “it must have been the heat.”

“You have come from Marie?” a soft voice asked and she looked up to see the gentle face of an elderly woman.

There was no mistaking the kindness of the expression, the tenderness of work-worn hands that still held her arm firmly as if she might be expected to fall from the chair.

“I am sorry,” Fleur repeated, “but I am all right now. Yes, I have come from Marie. She sent me to you. She said you would help me.”

She saw a glance pass between the man standing silent on the other side of the room and the woman beside her. She could not interpret it and could not understand what it meant.

‘Shall I tell them the truth?’ Fleur asked herself. ‘Dare I?’

And because there seemed no alternative, she looked from one to the other desperately and then said in a voice that held a note of despair –

“Marie said I could trust you. She told me that I would be safe here.”

“How do we know that you speak the truth?” the man said suddenly, his voice surly.

Fleur stared at him.

“She did not give me a letter,” she replied, “because she told me that you, if you are her brother, Jacques, could not read. She told me she had heard that your son had been killed, the Priest had written and told her. She described to me how to come here and – ”

Fleur paused for a moment and then went on bravely,

“ – she had my papers made out in your name. I was to come to you as your niece, ‘Jeanne Bouvais’. Here they are.”

She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out the papers which had been handled so often in the last two days. She bent forward and put them onto the table. They looked very crumpled and rather dirty, the edges curling round the blue stamp that had made her whole journey possible.

“I have money,” Fleur went on. “Marie gave it to me. I can pay for staying here if you will keep me.”

It was the woman who spoke quickly,

“She’s all right, she has come from Marie. Of course she has. How else would she have known about François and that the Padre had written for us. Marie sent you.”

She turned and peered into Fleur’s face. “You swear that ? You wouldn’t deceive us?”

“But, of course not,” Fleur replied quickly. “I so need your help. Listen, I will conceal nothing, I will tell you the truth. I am English.”

The woman beside her gave a start and then she looked across the room at her husband.

“English!” she exclaimed and then quickly, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Shut the door.”

The man moved slowly. He locked the door, put back the bolt which Fleur had heard removed. When it was done, he came back again and stood, as he had done before, immobile and uncompromising.

“But why are you here? Why have you come to us?” the woman asked.

Fleur told them how she had come out to France a few days before the outbreak of war to marry Lucien de Sardou and how he had been killed and how she had stayed on, happy at first to be with his mother and then trapped and unable to leave after the German occupation.

She spoke of Marie’s great kindness to her all through the months when they had lived together, three women isolated in the Château, knowing very little of what was happening in the world outside. Then the Comtesse’s death, Monsieur Pierre’s arrival and her own flight.

“And what do you want now?” the man asked.

Fleur knew even as he spoke that his antagonism had gone. His voice was impersonal but the roughness was missing.

“I want to go back to England. I want to go home.”

She was half-surprised at her own answer. It was the first time that she had formulated the idea to herself, but she knew now that the blue of the sea had called her more insistently than she had been aware.

Such a very few miles between her and freedom, surely such an idea was not impossible or impracticable?

“We shall see.”

The man turned away and left the room. She could hear his footsteps echoing away into the distance.

Fleur then turned towards the woman questioningly.

“It’s all right,” she said reassuringly.

“You mean I can stay?”

“But, of course, Marie has sent you. Come and bring your things. I will show you to your room.”

She picked up the carpet bag and Fleur, carrying the wicker basket, then followed her up some twisting carpetless stairs to the next floor.

The room that she was shown was low, the rafters quaintly shaped over a small diamond-paned window. There was a huge wooden bedstead taking up most of the room and a rough washstand on which there was an earthenware bowl and pitcher.

The place was spotlessly clean and there was the faint sweet smell of hay and of some fragrant herb. She glanced out of the window and then exclaimed.

She was looking out at the back of the house and to her surprise she found that it was far larger than she had at first anticipated.

The door by which she had approached had shown only one small side of the building and behind there were two big wings enclosing a courtyard and from the window Fleur could see many signs of activity.

“I had no idea your house was so big!”

“From the front it looks so small,” Madame Bouvais agreed. “Perhaps it is a good thing. People don’t find their way so easily round to the back, it gives us time if strangers come.”

Fleur understood and noticed on a gate not far from where the cows were being milked an older child was perched, peering this way and that as if keeping sentinel, ready to warn those who were working if anyone should approach unexpectedly.

“It is kind of you to have me,” Fleur said impulsively. “I understand just how much I am asking of you. I know what it means if we are caught.”

Madame Bouvais nodded.

“We have to think of that, we have our family to consider, but my husband is a patriot. He loves France. It breaks his heart to see those sales Bosches and know that they would strip and starve us to feed their own.”

“It is wrong to ask this of you,” Fleur said, “but Marie was so certain that you would have me. I feel ashamed. I ought really to go away and take my chances of finding escape through other methods.”

“It is not easy,” Madame Bouvais replied. “Only last week someone in the village was found sheltering a wounded airman. They were shot – they and their family and one of their friends who had known that they had concealed him.”

Fleur shuddered.

“I have no right to ask it of you,” she said again.

“You must be careful, that is all. You are clever, mademoiselle, and at the moment you would deceive many people.”

Fleur glanced in a small mirror hanging on the wall and laughed.

“I look terrible,” she exclaimed. “But it is thanks to this dress that I am here, so I must be grateful, Marie lent it to me.”

Madame Bouvais came nearer and touched it.

“I thought I recognised it. It was Marie’s best. She bought it when she was betrothed.”

“What happened?” Fleur asked. “She told me that it was for her trousseau, but never said why she had not married the man.”

“She never told you?” Marie’s sister-in-law repeated enquiringly. “Poor soul! Perhaps she is shy to speak of it. She was engaged for a long time, oh, many years before I married Jacques and came here to live.

“Marie is his eldest sister, but her sisters married before her although she was the first to be betrothed. The young man’s father was an old friend of the family. That Marie should espouse his son was arranged while they were children. But there were difficulties. Marie’s fiancé was a fisherman and the seasons were bad for years and the Wedding was postponed. Marie’s dot was complete, her trousseau was ready, but the young man could not complete his side of the bargain.

“Then at last everything was settled and the date fixed. Marie was excited, she had been afraid if she waited much longer she would copy Saint Catherine. But Grand-père, Marie’s father, was a gambler. He loved to take a chance, you understand. He would gamble on many things, on which boat would bring in the best catch and on whose bitch would pup first.

“He was many things, fisherman, farmer, Mayor of Saint Madeleine, but always, always, he was a gambler and nothing could stop him. He had been well off, for he had inherited a great deal of land, but he gambled a good part of it away. Only this farm remained and that too I believe would have gone if he had not died.”

“And Marie?” Fleur asked, sensing the inevitable end of the story.

“Marie’s dot went one evening in June. It was on a race, a race of boats as to who could round the buoy the quickest. The old man was so certain that he had chosen the right one.

“There was an Advocate, nearly as bad as he was himself, living in the place then. He was a greedy man and he would always take a bet in cash not kind. He incited Grand-père, taunted him and jeered at him until the old man came back here and, taking Marie’s dot from its hiding place beneath his bed, carried it down to the quay. No one realised what he was doing until it was too late and the money was wagered and lost.”

“And because of that Marie’s fiancé would not marry her?” Fleur cried in horror. “How despicable and how mean!”

“But how could he without her dot? He had depended on it, you see, the sum had been arranged. And there was another girl who had always wanted him. She was wealthy and her parents were anxious for the match.”

“They were married within three months and then Marie went away to service to the Comtesse. She was lucky to find such a position and we have often envied her.”

“Envied her!” Fleur exclaimed. “When she might have been married with a home of her own. How could you?”

“It was a privilege to serve anyone so gracious as the Comtesse. Often she would send us little messages. Once, when my children were ill, we received a present of money and fruit from the estate. We were very proud of the connection. Marie certainly did well for herself.”

Fleur knew that there was nothing she could say, but she felt as if the dress that she wore was the expression of a tragedy beyond words, a tragedy of a life broken and ruined by greed.

“And now, mademoiselle – ”

Fleur interrupted Madame Bouvais.

“Is it not unwise to call me ‘mademoiselle’?” she asked. “Perhaps while I am here I had better be just ‘Jeanne’.”

“It seems wrong somehow, rather too familiar.”

“Not really,” Fleur replied. “Not when you think of what you are doing for me.”

Madame Bouvais smiled and her smile was curiously sweet.

“We are glad to do it,” she said quietly, “even though you must forgive me if it makes me sometimes a little afraid.”