‘You were doing a public service, lad, ridding the world of Rannaldini,’ went on Gablecross, almost caressingly.
There was a long pause, just the faint whisper of the turning tapes and the sound of a late-night drunk kicking a beer can along a pavement. Then Tristan realized he was being set up.
‘I am not that public-spirited,’ he said flatly, and continued to deny everything.
‘If you’re not prepared to help yourself…’ snarled Gablecross.
As his cell door banged and he was left alone with the script of
Hercule
, which he would never now make, Tristan was kneed in the groin by desolation. He thought of Aunt Hortense gasping her last, of sunflowers, cicadas, frogs and tractors, their lights going back and forth like low shooting stars in the night. He’d never see her or France again.
The honeysuckle was filling his cell with sweetness, like Lucy’s slow, shy, warm smile. Since he had been in prison, the thought of her had kept drifting into his brain like an aria. Now he couldn’t trust her any more. With a sob of despair, he picked up the sprig of honeysuckle and ripped it to pieces.
69
Lucy was speechless with admiration for the way Wolfie calmly hijacked Rannaldini’s Gulf and, ignoring furiously waving policemen and ground staff, flew off to the south-west of France.
‘I learnt to fly before I could walk,’ he explained. ‘Grisel saw us leaving so the whole unit will think we’ve sloped off for a dirty weekend.’
‘Cause a lot of gossip.’
‘Let it,’ said Wolfie cheerfully. ‘Might make Tabitha jealous.’
Valhalla had been hot, but the Midi seemed a hundred times hotter. The wind, blowing like a hair-dryer about to fuse, whipped Lucy’s curls into a frenzy.
‘Now I know how a frozen chicken feels when it’s shoved into the microwave,’ she grumbled.
Stupid from lack of sleep, she was passionately grateful for the cool efficiency with which Wolfie hired a car, located the village of Montvert and booked into its best hotel, appropriately named La Reconnaissance.
Having departed in such haste, Lucy was dismayed she hadn’t packed deodorant, a hairbrush, or base to tone down her shiny, increasingly flushed face.
‘At least we’ll get a decent dinner this evening,’ said the ever-practical Wolfie, who was consulting the menu and the wine list as she came down. ‘And there’s the château,’ he added, pointing up at the disdainful back of a large grey house nestling in woodland on top of the hill.
‘The Montigny family never forgave the villagers for burning the place down during the French Revolution,’ said Lucy, as they got back into the hired car, and she eased her bare legs gingerly on to the scorching leather seat. ‘When the family returned from exile, they pointedly built the new château facing away from the village and overlooking the Pyrenees. Oh, what a sweet dog. Can I ring Rozzy to ask if James is OK?’
‘Certainly not. She’d want to know where we were and promptly grass to her friend Gablecross. We don’t want Interpol muscling in. Anyway, we’ll be back tomorrow.’
As Wolfie swung off the main road and headed for the mountains, Lucy groped for her dark glasses to ward off the dazzling golden glare of the sunflower fields.
‘Am I too under-dressed?’ she asked nervously, glancing down at her orange T-shirt and grey shorts. ‘Hortense sounds a martinet. Tristan says she’s been having little heart-attacks for ages, growing more and more eccentric. She used to play golf with the Duke of Windsor and once smashed a Louis XIV chandelier demonstrating some iron shot. Evidently she cuts up
Le Monde
every morning and lays all the stories she wants to read on chairs so no-one can sit down.’
‘She’ll need a fleet of sofas to accommodate the coverage of Tristan’s arrest,’ said Wolfie.
‘Probably been kept away from her, if she’s so ill. I do hope she’ll see us. Tristan also said she was terribly mean. The estate’s next to a golf course, and she rushes out, grabs any lost balls and wraps them up for her nieces and nephews for Christmas. Tristan realized she was losing it last birthday when she sent him a blackboard with the letters of the alphabet round the frame.’
Wolfie stopped Lucy’s rattling by asking her irritably if she remembered everything Tristan had ever told her.
‘Probably.’ Lucy flushed an even more unbecoming shade of red.
Wolfie noticed the anguished way she glanced at every farm-building they passed as if she was expecting some horrific content of battery hen or veal calf.
‘Oh, no,’ she wailed, as he slowed down behind a lorry, ‘they’ve got lambs in there. I bet they haven’t been watered for yonks.’
Nearly removing the side of the hired car, as he shortened her misery by overtaking the lorry, Wolfie snapped that she’d got to toughen up.
‘You can’t suffer for every squashed earwig in this world.’
‘Hortense suffered,’ protested Lucy. ‘She claimed that the best years of her life were spent fighting for the Resistance, despite being captured and tortured by the bloody Krauts— Oh, Wolfie, I’m sorry.’
‘I’m used to it,’ said Wolfie calmly. Then, catching sight of two fat men towing trolleys and sweating in plus-fours, ‘Here’s the golf course, and there’s the château.’
To repel intruders, two hissing stone Montigny snakes were chained to the pillars on either side of the big iron gates. Ahead at the end of an avenue of limes and flanked by ancient arthritic oaks stood a grey, square house with its pale grey shutters closed against prying eyes and the afternoon sun.
The good news was that all Hortense’s greedy relations had temporarily pushed off to another family house in Brittany to celebrate the sixty-fifth birthday of Tristan’s eldest brother Alexandre, the judge. With them, leaving the coast even clearer, had gone the even greedier Dupont, who was already carrion-crowing at the prospect of a large cut of Hortense’s estate.
The bad news was that Hortense, who’d kept such iron control of her life, was now lying upstairs under a mosquito net, morphinised up to the eyeballs, recognizing no-one.
‘Yesterday, she was convinced the Bolsheviks had taken over the château,’ sighed Florence, the kind, plump housekeeper, who was almost as old as her mistress. ‘Today the Nazis have moved in, and she’s back in the Resistance. So I’m afraid you won’t be very welcome,’ she added apologetically to Wolfie.
‘But Tristan could be in prison for life,’ begged Lucy. ‘The police think he killed Rannaldini to stop him spreading some vicious tale about his parentage.’ If she hadn’t seen a flicker of fear in Florence’s faded grey eyes, Lucy might not have persisted. ‘Hortense is the only person who might know the truth,’ she went on. ‘Please let me stay in case she regains consciousness.’
Florence was wavering when there was an imperious skidding crunch in the gravel and Rupert, resplendent in a pale yellow suit and grey striped shirt, emerged from a cloud of dust and a hired Mercedes. Apparently unaffected by the heat, he made Lucy feel plainer and hotter than ever.
‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped.
‘Resisting arrest, disobeying the orders of Gablecross, casing the joint.
Bonjour
, Madame.’ Slipping into effortless French, Rupert turned all his charm on Florence.
Absolutely bloody typical, fumed Lucy. She’ll take one look and roll over. But fortunately it seemed that Aunt Hortense loathed men, particularly those who looked like blond Luftwaffe pilots, almost as much as Germans. Rupert was sent packing as summarily as Wolfie.
Lucy, who was allowed to stay on for a little while, couldn’t hide a suspicion that both men were glad of an excuse to escape.
‘We’ll go back to La Reconnaissance and chivvy ambassadors,’ said Rupert, sauntering towards the Mercedes. ‘Join us for dinner if you can get away.’
‘We’ll leave everything in “your loyal hands”,’ quoted the ever-pragmatic Wolfie, clearly delighted at a chance to ingratiate himself with Tabitha’s father.
Frantic with thirst, Lucy gulped down a whole jug of
orange pressé
. Heat was coming in great waves through the kitchen window. Only endless sprinklers kept the garden green. Beyond, like purple shagpile, stretched fields of lavender.
Once the maid had disappeared to shop in Montvert, Florence relented and got out the family scrapbooks she’d kept since Tristan was a little boy. It wrung Lucy’s heart to see him always hovering at the edge of family groups, like an outfielder desperate not to miss a smile that miraculously Étienne might one day throw him.
At least the later scrapbooks were crowded with Tristan’s cuttings. Florence had already pasted in the marvellous reviews of
The Lily in the Valley
, dominated by the luminous beauty of Claudine Lauzerte.
To stop herself falling asleep, Lucy begged to be given a tour of the house. Downstairs big high rooms papered in cranberry reds, Prussian blues and deep snuff browns were the ideal setting for the Impressionist collection, acquired ahead of fashion in the late nineteenth century, and for Étienne’s great powerful oils, but not to lighten the heart of a little boy. Everywhere frayed tapestries of hunting scenes hung above cabinets lovingly painted with fruit, flowers and birds. Leggy gold tables and chairs seemed poised to race through the french windows into a park shimmering with heat-haze. You couldn’t see the mountains for dust.
The great hall housed the family portraits.
‘That was Louis who died at Crécy, and Edouard who was wounded at Agincourt, and there’s Blaize,’ Florence ran her finger inside the frame to test for dust, ‘who died in Spain on a secret mission. He was murdered by the Spanish Inquisition.’
Lucy peered at Blaize in excitement. Handsome, hawk-faced, with dark cynical watchful eyes, he was definitely a Montigny, and one of the reasons Tristan had embarked on
Don Carlos
.
‘And there’s Henri, painted by David,’ said Florence proudly, ‘Such a great general that Napoleon coaxed him out of exile to fight at Austerlitz and Borodino. The Montignys have always been a great military family.’
Soldier-citizens of the world like Posa, thought Lucy.
‘Tristan’s brother Laurent was brave, wasn’t he?’
‘More hotheaded,’ said Florence, somewhat disapprovingly. ‘A
pied-noir
builder fell off a ladder here one day. Madame Hortense rang six doctors but none would treat him. Laurent jumped in the Jeep, drove to the nearest, put a shotgun to his temple, and didn’t remove it until he’d come back and set the leg.’
‘How romantic,’ sighed Lucy. ‘No wonder Tristan hero-worships his memory. Why isn’t there a painting of him?’
Florence glanced round nervously.
Laurent’s portrait had hung in the hall, she admitted, smiling a welcome to everyone coming through the front door. But Étienne was so devastated when he was killed, the painting was locked away with everything else in his room.
‘But surely after Étienne’s death…’ protested Lucy.
‘He left instructions in his will that the door was to remain locked.’
‘At least let me look at Tristan’s room.’
‘It was very small.’ Florence looked unhappy. ‘When Tristan went to university Étienne turned it into an
en suite
bathroom.’
Don’t show your anger, Lucy had to keep telling herself.
‘There
should
be a portrait of Tristan. He’s the handsomest of the lot,’ she said crossly.
In answer Florence looked up at the gilt Montigny snake chained to the lintel. ‘“Seek not to disturb the serpent,”’ she whispered, her face creasing into a hundred folds of anxiety.
‘I’m only seeking to disturb the wretched thing’, Lucy was nearly in tears, ‘because I want to find out the truth. Tristan was desperate to question Hortense about his parents, but he was too busy with
Carlos
to fly out, and now it may be too late.’
‘It was a secret, Madame swore to Étienne she would take to the grave.’ Florence glanced up at a gold Empire clock, which featured Neptune brandishing his trident. ‘The nurse will be going in ten minutes. You can sit with her instead of me.’
Aunt Hortense had blurred, weather-beaten features and wild white hair, like a gargoyle caught in a snowstorm. She lay without covers, her long nightgown rucked up to show purple bruised shins and a plaster on every toe. Beside her on the bed were two marmalade cats and a tiny brindled Italian greyhound, which one of her gnarled, ringed, gardening-begrimed hands repeatedly caressed.
Opposite the bed, filling the wall, was a ravishing Rubens of milkmaids tending a herd of paddling red cows and chatting up a swain driving a horse and cart.
‘We hung it there last week,’ whispered Florence. ‘Madame wanted something beautiful to look at.’
To the right hung a small photograph of a young Hortense being handed the Croix de Guerre for her courage during the Resistance. With her boyish brown curls, her deep-set dark eyes and quick smile, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Tristan.
Perhaps? wondered Lucy. But Hortense would have been too old at fifty-five. Could she have had an illegitimate daughter? She must have a story to tell.
In moments of consciousness, Aunt Hortense played
la grande dame
for all her worth. ‘I wouldn’t dream of discussing family matters with a complete stranger,’ she told Lucy coldly.
‘I just wanted to talk about Tristan.’ Carefully Lucy explained the situation. That Tristan had been arrested for two murders that he hadn’t done.
Hortense, however, was only interested in why he hadn’t come to her party. ‘I broke totally with protocol and put him on my right and had to talk to air all lunch. I suppose his film and Claudine Lauzerte were more important.’
‘He sent you a lovely present,’ said Lucy, recognizing Rozzy’s gift-wrapping on the Louis XV desk. ‘You haven’t even opened it.’
‘Why d’you stick your nose into everything?’ snapped Hortense. ‘Are you a journalist?’
‘Tristan stayed away from your party because he felt a fraud,’ said Lucy desperately. ‘Rannaldini had just told him he wasn’t a Montigny, that Étienne wasn’t his father at all.’