Do you want to borrow the car and return it later?’
‘There is no problem,’ he assured her. ‘By the road, it seems a long way, but I need only to walk a kilometre across the fields beyond the farm. It is nothing.’
Following his indication, Sabine realised with a hollow feeling that all they’d done was skirt the hill where the château stood; that Les Hiboux in fact stood beneath La Tour Monchauzet, but on its other side—and still in its shadow.
I could have done without that, she thought, and the short-cut past the farm.
‘M’sieur Rohan will wish to know where I have brought you, mademoiselle,’ Jacques said uncomfortably. ‘He will not be pleased to know you are here, but I cannot lie to him.’
‘Then tell him the truth,’ Sabine said with bravado.
Jacques’s brow became increasingly furrowed. ‘He is a good man, mademoiselle—all the world would tell you so—but he has had to be strong—to bear everything on his shoulders. It has not been easy—and he does not like to be crossed.’
She thought, I knew that before I met him.
She shrugged, forcing a faint smile. ‘I’ll take my chance.’ And paused. ‘Before you go, can you tell me where I can get supplies? Without being disloyal to M’sieur Rohan, of course.’
There was a palpable hesitation, then he sighed. ‘There is an Intermarché in Villereal, mademoiselle. Now goodbye—and good luck.’
He sounded convinced she would need it, Sabine thought as he trudged off. She looked up at the hill, but the château was invisible from this angle behind its enshrouding of trees. But it was there, just the same, like prying eyes peering round the corner of a thick curtain.
And he was there too. She was starkly aware of it. A man it was not wise to cross, whose angry scorn had already bruised her. And a man to whom she had just thrown down a deliberate challenge.
She said again, ‘I’ll take my chance,’ and walked towards the archway.
SABINE didn’t know what to expect. This had been her mother’s house, after all, and Isabelle had left it over twenty-two years ago, and not been back since.
She was half anticipating having to fight her way through a jungle of undergrowth to reach the front door. But she was totally mistaken. A neat flagged area confronted her, flanked by the wall of some storage building on one side and the length of the house on the other. There were narrow flowerbeds in need of weeding on both sides, and in the sheltered corner between the store and the wall a tall rose lifted imperious petals like flames.
Beyond the store, the garden opened out into an untidy sloping lawn, with trees and shrubs, and the flags narrowed to a terrace. Sabine saw that the arched motif had been repeated in the french windows all the way along the front of the house and the stout wooden entrance. The rooms seemed bare, she thought, peering in through the dusty panes. Directly in front of the door was a small ornamental pool, with a fountain, although, naturally, it wasn’t playing at the moment.
Once again Sabine had the curious sensation that time had stopped and run back.
But she was just being over-imaginative, she chided herself. Some kind soul had just been keeping the garden under reasonable control—that was all.
She tried the key in the lock. To her surprise, it turned easily, and she stepped inside. She found herself in a large square hall, with a pair of half-glazed doors ahead of her leading directly into the kitchen, and wooden double doors to her left, giving access to the rest of the house.
She tried these first. The room she entered ran the width of the house, with windows at both ends. She opened them and threw back the shutters, letting light flood in. The floor was tiled in a deep terracotta shade, but there was no furniture apart from a black enamelled stove standing in one corner on a raised hearth.
There were two doors in the far wall, and she opened each in turn. One was bare, but the other contained a range of old-fashioned fitted wardrobes, and a vast wooden bedstead, the head and footboards elaborately carved.
Sabine stared round her. The house smelt damp, of course, and there was a thin layer of dust everywhere, but there was none of the squalor and decay she had feared.
She went into the kitchen. A big scrubbed table stood in the middle of the room, and a vast dresser almost filled one wall. There was an old-fashioned sink under the window, and a new-looking electric cooker, with cupboards on both sides. A stable-type door led to the rear garden.
A further door led off to the right, with a tiled passage taking her to the bathroom, and another large square room at the end, which was probably the dining-room. From this a spiral staircase led upwards to a similar-sized room with windows on all sides, and Sabine realised she must be in the tower she’d noticed on the way in.
The tower and the rose, she thought as she descended cautiously. I can’t seem to get away from them.
She went slowly back to the kitchen. Only two sounds disturbed the silence—a fly buzzing desultorily against the window, and a tap dripping into the sink.
Well, at least that meant the water was turned on. She tried the light switch by the door, and discovered there was power too. That was odd, she thought, when the house was unoccupied. But it made it habitable, for which she was grateful. She would have hated it if she had to admit defeat, and crawl off to a hotel somewhere. She’d included a sleeping-bag in the luggage she’d brought with her, so she could manage.
She unloaded the car and carried everything in, dumping it all in the middle of the salon. Then she retrieved her map, plotted the route to Villereal, and made a list of what she wanted to buy.
Villereal was charming, and busy too, with its narrow streets and central square with a timbered-covered market. But exploration would have to wait. She had more pressing matters in hand. And the supermarket Jacques had mentioned was sited on the outskirts of town, she discovered.
Cleaning materials were the first priority, and enough china, cutlery and glassware for her own use. It was doubtful, she told herself wryly, whether she would be doing any entertaining.
After that, she could have fun. She wandered round the aisles, filling up her trolley with cheese, sliced ham and wedges of terrine, lingering over the huge butchery section, where the cuts of meat looked so different from those she was used to.
Finally she chose a plump boiling fowl, in deference to that great Gascon King of France, Henri Quatre, whose ambition it had been to see that all his subjects were well fed enough to have a chicken in their pot each week, and had made La Poule Au Pot a loved and traditional name for restaurants. Perhaps, she thought, her poule au pot, made as Maman had taught her, would make her feel less of an alien.
Her choice made, she went back for vegetables to accompany it, recklessly adding a demi-kilo of the huge firm-fleshed tomatoes, as well as nectarines, oranges and a punnet of strawberries to her collection. Her last purchase should have been bread—she picked a flat circular loaf rather than a baguette—but she succumbed to temptation and bought one of the plastic containers of the local vin ordinaire, amazingly cheap and good for its price, and several bottles of water too.
Driving back to the house through the small back-roads was more difficult than she’d anticipated, and she took a couple of wrong turnings. She could have cried with relief when at last she passed the war memorial with the crucifix and realised the next track led to the farm.
And the house no longer seemed to be on the defensive, she realised as she parked the car. The late afternoon sun lent a warmer, more welcoming glow to its washed stones, and that exterior wall wasn’t a barrier, but a promise of security. She thought, I’ve come home.
It took several journeys to unload her provisions from the boot. She put everything away in the