Place Of Storms

‘Oh, there is,’ Clare said flatly. ‘I can write and tell him to go to hell.’ She gave a little shudder. ‘Oh, Andy, there’d be the most dreadful row. If there was a court case, it would be in all the papers. It would destroy Mummy and Daddy. They’ve worked so hard to keep our private lives —private.’ Her eyes widened as another dreadful thought occurred to her. ‘They might even find out about Jacques and drag him into it.’

Andrea’s thoughts were troubled as she descended the staircase to the hall. Although she had resented Clare’s words, they had struck home, she was forced to acknowledge. Her own parents were dead, her father when she was a small child, her mother more recently. But this large London house had been a second home to her for as long as she could remember. Without a hint of patronage, neither Uncle Max nor Aunt Marian had ever allowed her to want for anything. Nor had she felt any sense of obligation—until now.

She reached the bottom of the stairs and stood for a moment, rummaging in her bag for her car keys. Whatever happened, it was essential that the news of Clare’s folly should be kept from her uncle, she thought. She had been in London when he had suffered that first attack, and had stayed with her aunt, and she knew better than Clare just how precarious his health was, and how entirely necessary it was that he should have a considerable period without stress or worry.

She gave a little restless sigh, and stood turning the keys in her hands, her eyes fixed unseeingly on the parquet floor. If Peter had been a different sort of man, she thought she might have gone to him and pleaded for Clare. But as things were, she knew Clare was right to keep it from him. His conventional soul would be shocked to its core, and he would possibly decide that all his mother’s none too subtle hints about Clare’s unsuitability as a wife were well founded. In all justice, Andrea supposed that Lady Craigie had right on her side. Clare’s sowing of her wild oats had been pretty blatant at times, and Jacques, of whose existence Aunt Marian and Uncle Max were fortunately unaware, had been one of many. Clare had teetered on the edge of disaster on a number of occasions—Andrea recalled with a shudder an abortive plan to move in with a pop singer shortly before her mercurial cousin had taken off for Paris—and it was a miracle that she hadn’t been involved in more than one set of unsavoury headlines before now.

And yet for all her wildness, there was something very sweet about Clare. At times, she could be almost touchingly naïve and trusting, and Andrea had often consoled herself over Peter’s dullness with the thought that his reliability and worthiness might be the shield from her worse self that Clare needed.

She was brought back to earth with a start as the drawing door opened and Aunt Marian came out.

‘So there you are, dear. Clare is naughty to keep you all to herself. Max has gone to bed early, and I’ve no one to drink my chocolate with. Come and keep me company.’

Andrea complied with less than her usual willingness. Aunt Marian was no fool, and she was not convinced of her own ability to keep her inner disturbance to herself. She sank down on to one of the luxurious sofas and took the cup she was handed.

‘Have you been talking weddings?’ Aunt Marian busied herself with the tall silver pot. ‘Max said today he was thankful that Clare was our only daughter. He didn’t think he could bear to live through all this uproar a second time.’ She smiled across at Andrea affectionately. ‘But he’ll make an exception for you, dear. When can we start planning your wedding?’

Andrea smiled back constrainedly. ‘Oh, there’s no one at the moment—no one serious anyway,’ she said. ‘I think Uncle Max has a few more years of peace ahead of him still once Clare is off his hands.’

‘Hmm.’ Aunt Marian’s eyes studied her for a moment, taking in the slim yet rounded figure, the creamy skin and the soft, vulnerable girl’s mouth. ‘I don’t understand today’s young men at all. When I was a girl, you’d have been snapped up in your first season.’

Andrea sighed. ‘Maybe I don’t want to be snapped up,’ she pointed out. ‘I do have a career.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Aunt Marian’s tone made it clear what she thought about careers. ‘I’m just thankful that Clare seems settled at last. I can speak frankly to you, dear, and I think you know how worried your uncle and I have been over the past two years. We’ve never wanted to interfere—to stop her living her own life, but there have been times when I’ve been so frightened for her—frightened that she’d take some disastrous step that she wouldn’t be able to recall. Some of the men she’s been involved with …’ Aunt Marian shuddered slightly. Her eyes looked shrewdly at Andrea. ‘I know you don’t think Peter is very exciting, dear, but he’ll be so good for Clare, believe me he will.’

Andrea forced a smile. ‘Yes, I do believe it. I just wish that he was a little more …’ she paused, searching for the right word.

‘Demonstrative,’ her aunt supplied. ‘I thought so too at first, but now I’m not so sure these outward displays of affection mean a great deal. Clare seems perfectly happy with the situation. She says Peter is shy, and she may be right. It would certainly explain his rather stiff manner sometimes.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Andrea, setting her cup down on the small table in front of her. ‘How is Uncle Max?’

‘Behaving very well—avoiding stress and doing what he’s told,’ his wife said affectionately. ‘And Clare’s happiness has helped his peace of mind as well. He’s even talking of giving up the board altogether and retiring early. He would like to have more time to devote to his charity work, and I’m all for it.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I don’t suppose I should be telling you this, but there’s talk of a knighthood in the next Honours list—something he’s always dreamed of.’

‘But that’s wonderful!’ Andrea forgot other worries momentarily in her pleasure for her uncle who had given so much of his time for children’s charities in recent years. ‘And of course, I won’t mention it to a soul. Is it definite?’

‘Almost, I would say,’ her aunt conceded smilingly. ‘As long as nothing happens to spoil it for him.’ She sighed. ‘That’s one of the reasons I’m so delighted about Clare. Your uncle’s very old-fashioned in some ways, you know, and he has very strong views on the honours system and all it stands for. He wouldn’t countenance anything that might bring it into disrepute. And I’ve always known that if Clare had ever done anything really—foolish, something that might cause a public scandal—these gossip columnists can be quite unscrupulous, dear—then he wouldn’t accept the knighthood.’

‘You can’t be serious.’ Andrea stared at her aunt, her brows wrinkled frowningly. ‘Uncle Max can’t still regard himself as responsible for Clare’s dottiness. She’s a grown woman.’

Aunt Marian gave a slight smile. ‘If she were a grandmother, I don’t think it would alter his attitude in the slightest degree. He doesn’t approve of this decline in morals they talk about. He feels people in public life should set an example—he always has done.’ She sighed. ‘Of course, I’ve never breathed a word of this to Clare herself. I didn’t want to burden her with that kind of responsibility, but I don’t know whether I was right. Anyway, she’s found Peter, so I no longer have any worries on that score.’

Andrea looked at her aunt for a long moment, registering the air of serenity that hung almost tangibly about her. Could she really sit back and see that destroyed? she thought despairingly. Clare was a fool, but marriage to Peter might be the salvation of her, after all.

She got up, forcing a smile.

‘Excuse me, will you? I’ve just remembered—there’s something I have to tell Clare.’

Andrea pulled the car into the side of the road, applied the brakes and sat for a moment with her eyes closed. Then she twisted round in her seat and stared back grimly, assimilating almost with disbelief the road she had just ascended.

The late October sun hung low over the valley, and she could see the road like a thin white ribbon winding along the valley side, disappearing at intervals into sheltering clumps of bare trees. On one side of her there had been a towering wall of forbidding black rock, on the other an unfenced drop down to the gleam of the river far below her. She was thankful that the long drive from Paris had given her a chance to at least familiarise herself with the car before she was faced with these conditions, and she had clung to the wheel with grim determination as she mounted through a succession of hairpin bends, praying she would not meet anything coming in the opposite direction.

She looked at the heavy clouds massing in the west and grimaced. All during the drive, the weather had been perfect—golden and autumnal. She had put to the back of her mind all the things she had heard about Auvergne—a place of storms, she’d read somewhere, where the weather was eternally in conflict with itself. Judging by those clouds, war would soon be declared once again!

She reached for her road map and sat studying it, her brows furrowed slightly. Blaise Levallier was making few concessions to his future wife, she thought, asking her to make her own way to this inaccessible place. In itself, this seemed to contain an element of warning, silently conveying the amount of courage and self-sufficiency it would require to survive in this bleak mountain region with its dead volcanoes, and buildings that seemed to have been hewn from solid lava. Yet, in spite of her nervousness, Andrea had to acknowledge its strange compelling beauty. And of course, she told herself, she was not going to be asked to survive here. She gave a slight mischievous grin as she imagined what Clare, a nervous driver at the best of times, would have said when confronted with the valley road she had just traversed. That might have been one way of solving the problem, she thought, stifling her mirth. How would the unknown Blaise Levallier have coped with a bride who applied her handbrake and stubbornly refused to budge? Anyone as determined as he seemed to be would probably have hired a tractor from one of the hill farms and had her dragged to St Jean des Roches.

She sobered slightly as she put her map away. She had only a few kilometres to go to her destination, and the thought was singularly unappealing. A warning voice inside her seemed to be saying it still wasn’t too late to turn the car around and drive back to the comparative sanity of Clermont-Ferrand. She could leave the car there and get a train back to Paris. If Clare had been her sole consideration in all this, she might just have done it, she thought as she re-started the car.

She had made that brutally clear to Clare as well, not just that first night when she had reluctantly agreed to go to St Jean des Roches in her cousin’s place, but during the subsequent discussions that had taken place. Clare seemed convinced that the incriminating papers would be quite easy to find, but Andrea was not so sure.

‘Ask to see them,’ Clare had suggested. ‘Say you’re not too sure about the wording—oh, you’ll think of something.’

‘I’ll have to,’ Andrea conceded rather drily.

She had read Blaise Levallier’s letters, especially the last one, a dozen times, until she felt every word was imprinted on her memory, and as she read, a slow anger was kindled. Who was this man who thought he could threaten the people she loved and damage their happiness and well-being with impunity? He was simply not going to get away with it. Clare might have been an utter fool, but at least she had seen the error of her ways in time, and he should have had the decency to release her from the ludicrous promise she had made him when she asked him to. Was he so unfeeling that the thought of life with a girl he had literally forced into marriage and for whom he could have no emotional attachment could actually seem tolerable?

If so, his reasons for wanting this hasty marriage must be extremely cogent ones. She had questioned Clare closely about them, but Clare had destroyed the earlier correspondence with him long ago, and was aggravatingly vague about their contents. She maintained, however, that he had not been at all specific, except about the urgency of his need for a wife at least on paper. That he had said it was ‘a legal necessity’ was almost all Clare could recall. Andrea had brooded about those words, but they still conveyed very little to her. She had also tried to probe further into the reasons for Martine’s family’s strong disapproval of their distant cousin, but she’d met with no more success here. The most Martine’s parents had let drop were veiled hints, Clare said. But if he regularly made a habit of blackmailing people to get his own way, he was far from being a desirable connection for the eminently respectable Montcours, Andrea thought.

The more she considered what lay ahead of her, the more her apprehension grew. She must be as crazy as Clare to imagine she could get away with this. Just what kind of a man was she going to find waiting for her at St Jean des Roches? she asked herself. Apart from being simply undesirable, had he been guilty of some crime, that he was so reluctant to show his face in more civilised places, and had to find himself a wife by correspondence? And if he was such a villain, what chance did she have to outface him? Andrea sighed. It had never seemed more certain that she was heading for big trouble, but she seemed to be committed now. If she did not arrive at the chateau, Blaise Levallier would undoubtedly set enquiries in train as to her whereabouts, and this would lead to all the problems she had come here precisely to obviate. No, she had to go on. Get in, get the papers, and get out, she told herself. In theory it sounded simple.

She groaned slightly as the first raindrops spattered against the windscreen, and set the wipers in motion. That was all she needed—a strange road, and a rainstorm.

She wondered what Blaise Levallier had thought when he received Clare’s meek letter, accepting his terms and telling him the date of her arrival. They had expected some kind of response, probably gloating, but there had been none. She had half hoped that the promised car would not be at the airport so that she would have a golden excuse to take the next plane back to London, but her hope had not been fulfilled. Blaise Levallier might waste no time on unnecessary letters, but his arrangements were efficient enough.

One of the major difficulties confronting her was that she had little idea precisely how much Clare had disclosed about herself during this brief early correspondence she had had with this stranger. It was fortunate that she and Clare had always been on such close terms, she thought, but she still felt anxious. Once again, Clare’s memory had been vague, but she insisted that she had not mentioned her parents, or her background. Her letters had concentrated more on the good time she was having in Paris. Andrea wrinkled her nose. Clare’s idea of a good time was not always hers, she reflected, and she would have to explain away any discrepancies with the excuse of a poor memory. She also realised that Clare’s personality emerged through her letters to a certain extent, and that she would have to act a part for some of the time at least. It was an unnerving thought, but she told herself that if she was very lucky, she might have completed her task and got away from the chateau before any potentially embarrassing explanations or situations arose.

It was suddenly much darker, the friendly sun hidden now by the threatening clouds, and in the distance she heard a low rumble of thunder, curling away. It’s a good job I’m not superstitious, she thought, or I might think it was an omen.

The rain had settled to a steady downpour by the time she reached St Jean des Roches some half an hour later, and her neck and shoulders ached from the concentration needed to hold the car on the winding and unfamiliar road.

The village looked little different from others she had passed through on the way, a huddle of houses around a main square with a central fountain. A pale-washed campanile reared itself towards the lowering skies. Beyond the square, the road led upwards again at a gradient which set her nerves twitching. Whoever had christened this place had not been mistaken, she thought. The village itself seemed to have been literally carved out of the side of a rock and she supposed the chateau must be perched dizzily at its summit, somewhere above her.

Her headlights picked out a building of sorts ahead of her and she slowed, peering through the windscreen, uncertain that she had reached the right place. It appeared to be a gatehouse, arching over the road, but the gates themselves were missing, she realised as she drove cautiously through the narrow opening.

For a moment, she thought her lights picked out a face at one of the gatehouse windows, staring down at her, and then her attention was totally diverted by what lay ahead of her. She braked and switched off the engine. Then she sat, staring around at the scene illuminated before her. Slowly and incredulously, she thought, ‘But it can’t be true … this can’t be the place!’

A chateau in Auvergne, Clare had said, but the picture she had formulated in her mind bore no resemblance to this—ruin she was faced with. How many years of neglect had been needed to produce this effect? she wondered as her eyes wandered over the dark bulk of the building, and the graceful pepperpot tower which rose at one side of it like something from a mediaeval fairytale. There had been a wing once, jutting from the other end of the building, opposite to the tower, but much of it seemed now to consist merely of tumbled masonry. And the main building was dilapidated in the extreme. There were tiles missing from the sloping roof, and on the first floor, some shutters hung crazily from the windows.

She tried to tell herself it was a mistake, and that no one actually lived there, but a thread of smoke hanging above one of the chimneys told her she was mistaken.

Andrea felt anger rising slowly within her. How dared anyone have let this little jewel of a place decay like this? she thought wildly. And was this really where Blaise Levallier expected gay, comfort-loving Clare to live through the bitter Auvergne winter? It would be like asking a hothouse orchid to flourish at the North Pole. She switched off her lights as if the sudden darkness that descended could also obliterate the reality.

Could he, when he had traced Clare, have learned that she was a considerable heiress? Was this why he had tried to force through their strange marriage so high-handedly? Perhaps Clare’s money was intended to restore all this crumbling glory of the past. A sudden gust of anger overcame her and with it a new determination to outwit this man, and she slammed down her hand on the horn, waking the echoes with its blare.

For a moment nothing happened, then the great central door swung open and a woman appeared carrying an enormous black umbrella. Andrea watched her for a moment as she struggled across the weed-strewn courtyard, avoiding the puddles that had rapidly collected in the broken flagstones, then, setting her chin, she collected her handbag and threw open the driver’s door.

The wind had risen, she realised, as a sudden gust caught at her, dragging her hair free of the chiffon scarf which confined it at the nape of her neck. She had to catch hold of the car to steady herself.

‘Mademoiselle!’ The woman had reached her side and was struggling to hold the umbrella over her head. ‘Permettez-moi. Je vous souhaite bienvenue à St Jean des Roches.’