The Seven Stars (23 page)

The
beams from the powerful lamps converged as their heads turned to follow her pointing finger, giving a harsh theatricality to the scene.

Lying
in the corner formed by the rough buttress, still clad in rags stiff with dirt, still with a pair of rotting sandals grotesquely clinging to its bony feet, its skull empty-eyed and grinning hideously, was a human skeleton.

They
did not pause to take in details, did not even speak. With one accord, like the frightened children they so nearly were, they turned and fled.

On the day after Lindy's ordeal, Juliette Darke was lying on a rug in the orchard of her grandmother's house in Ambys, near Limoges, feeling the heat of the sun soak into her, gently loosening all the knots of tension. Already her olive skin — sallow under the cool northern skies — was turning gold.

Overhead,
the dappled shade of the apple trees cast patterns of shadow on her half-closed eyelids, though in the still heaviness of the Sunday afternoon the leaves were barely moving and even the crickets' grating cry seemed muted.

In
the dark interior of the shuttered house she could hear the sounds of Grandmère stamping about her kitchen, swearing at the cat and the stove, clattering pots and plates, as she assembled her speciality,
Civet
de
Lapin
au
thym
, for the family meal this evening. Everyone would be there, Elise Daubigny's wiry black hair was showing signs of grey and her small bony frame had started shrinking but her will was as strong as ever and not one of her large sons would have had the courage to defy a maternal edict. Altogether there would be twenty-three people of three generations gathered in Juliette's honour around the long table on the terrace, spread already with a starched tablecloth so white that looking at it in the strong sunlight was almost painful.

The
dark little mews house in London which had insidiously become Juliette's prison seemed strangely insubstantial in her mind, like a nightmare from which she had drifted back into this comfortable, drowsy state.

I've
left him for ever, she said to herself, shaping the words with her lips as if to reassure herself that this, at least, was no dream. It's all over. I've escaped.

She
had planned it with infinite care, so that he could have no suspicion. She had packed an item at a time, always with an excuse ready to explain if need be why she should be going into the cupboard where the suitcases were kept.

Then,
when he had gone to his weekly meeting at the headquarters of the computer company which employed him to work from home, she had broken a window, hoisted her luggage through it and fled. She had left no note; he would be able to see what she had done on the surveillance cameras when he came home. She had been icily calm until she reached the airport; then she had started shaking so much that she couldn't hold the medicinal glass of brandy she had prescribed for herself.

‘Tu
ne
lui
as
pas
dit
?
'
Elise Daubigny had said, her thick black brows shooting up almost to her hairline, when her granddaughter explained briefly the reason for her sudden visit. 'You haven't told him?'

She
was astonished, but so pleased that for once in her outspoken life she didn't say too much. She nursed a consuming hatred for the English who in the name of freedom had destroyed her native city of Limoges and killed her parents, and it pained her to think that Juliette, her favourite among the grandchildren (largely because she didn't see her often enough to notice the flaws she regularly pinpointed in the others) was making the same mistake as her mother in marrying one of the swine. And Juliette was very like her mother, with the same creamy olive skin, oval face and delicate features; if her eyes had been brown instead of dark blue, she would have been Marguerite all over again.

Elise's
mouth still twisted with bitterness when she thought of Marguerite, the precious only daughter in a family of boys, who had defied her widowed mother by going to work in England, been fool enough to marry a perfidious Englishman with blue eyes like Juliette's, and had come home sick and heart-broken — as Elise had bluntly warned her that she would — only to die.

That
was fifteen years ago, and Marguerite's memorials were a plaque in the family vault and this child who, apart from her eyes, had little that was English about her appearance. She was pretty like her mother, and foolish like her mother too, courting inevitable disaster with an English husband when there were honest Frenchmen like her third cousin Valery — Elise liked to keep marriages within the extended family — who had only taken plump, stolid Anne-Marie when it was clear he couldn't have Juliette.

It
was three years since she had last seen Juliette, and it was all too clear what that marriage had done to her. The sparkle had gone; she was nervous, too thin, and sorely in need of good food and good wine and the soothing village tranquillity in which Ambys had basked for the past six hundred years.

`If
you had not left him, he would have killed you. They are all murderers, these English. Like your father,' she said mercilessly. 'Here in France you will recover.'

So
Elise, who was up every morning by half-past six, and who disapproved of sunbathing, or indeed almost any form of leisure apart from sitting down outside the front door in the cool of the evening and commenting acidly on the antics of one's neighbours, had left
la
petite
to sleep late this morning, and spread the rug under the tree herself so that Juliette could rest after a proper nourishing lunch of Elise's good soup, bread from M. Moreau's bakery and the cheese that Mme. Bouchet made herself with milk from her little herd of goats.

Banished
from the kitchen, Juliette lay in the orchard with her eyes half-closed and thought about the past and the future.

Juliette had run away from Jay Darke once before. She had loved him as long as she could remember, but as student life drew to a close she found herself becoming more and more uneasy about his possessiveness.

She
couldn't explain, even to her own satisfaction, why she shouldn't be happy enough to be possessed; there was certainly no one she had ever met who was as fascinating as Jay, no one else who had such crazy, off-beat, brilliant ideas. He was clever as well as having the sort of dark, dangerous, Heathcliff looks which meant that there were plenty of girls at university who would have been more than ready to take her place, if Jay had ever shown the slightest interest in anyone except Juliette.

He
never had. He depended on her, confided in her; `my other self’, he called her, only half-mocking, and the phrase had started to haunt her. She felt stifled, sometimes, as if he was leaving no space for her own personality.

With
his First in Artificial Intelligence, he had accepted a golden 'hello' from a computer firm in Sheffield. Juliette, with her sound degree in French and Italian, allowed him to believe that she was job-hunting in Derbyshire. She could never have told him about her misgivings; he had only to fix her with his compelling hazel eyes and she knew she would weakly capitulate.

Her
father was more than happy to assist her in deception. Harry Cartwright was a tough-minded, hard-nosed self-made man who, if he didn't precisely worship his creator, was certainly pretty satisfied with what he'd made out of the raw material.

There
was nothing wrong with the raw material, in fact; Harry had a good sharp mind and, if not exactly handsome, he was what they termed locally 'well set up' with a stocky build, fair hair, a pugnacious jawline and dark blue eyes which had misled more than one young woman into thinking him romantic.

A
miner's son, Harry had grown up in a cottage with an outside privy in the Peak District village of Burlow; the house he had now was still in Burlow, but it had four bathrooms, three of them
en
suite
. In his uncertain youth, he had modelled himself on the men he saw cutting the big deals, the men with the flashy cars and the big cigars, the hard men who knew how to handle themselves and ruthlessly carved him up the first couple of times he was brash enough to take them on. But Harry was a fast learner, quick to adopt the style as protective coloration for the business jungle, and now, in the way of these things, the clichés had become the man himself.

He
saw nothing wrong with that, played up to the image, even. He'd always known what he wanted, and he'd got it, too. He'd made only one serious error — losing his head over a tasty little French
au
pair
who might as well have come from another planet for all she understood about being the wife of an up-and-coming man in Derbyshire — but he'd put that right afterwards with Debbie. She knew how to enjoy herself, did Debbie. He liked that in a woman.

Being
unreflective himself, he was wary of intellectuals and never quite knew what to make of Juliette, his clever only child. He loved her of course — and God help anyone who mucked Harry Cartwright's daughter about — but he understood her not at all. He certainly didn't understand her infatuation with Jay Darke, going as far back as their schooldays in Burlow.

Darke,
where Harry was concerned, was a weirdo, too clever by half He hadn't liked the Darke parents — the father a fly-by-night who had callously abandoned the family when the boy was eight, the mother a wispy woman who sighed a lot — and he disliked everything about Jay, from the length of his hair to the way he kept himself rigidly aloof from lesser mortals.

‘
Darke by name and dark by nature,' was another of Harry's pronouncements, but he had long ago given up hope that his daughter — flattered, like any woman, by unswerving devotion — would see sense. Hearing her say that she wanted to do a translator's course in London and that she didn't want Darke to know her whereabouts was the best news he'd had since Lomex dropped their opposition to his takeover bid.

Juliette
was almost superstitiously careful about covering her tracks, and it took Jay three years to find her, working from home in a flat in Putney which she shared with three other girls. They were out all day; it was lonely work, translating trade publications into French, and by now the novelty of being independent and living in the capital had worn off.

There
had been a number of men in her life, but somehow none of them managed to exorcise the ghost of her first love. They might be kinder, or more demonstrative, or less demanding, but the long association with Jay, rich with shared experience, made these new relationships seem shallow, superficial. As one after another they faltered, she found herself increasingly reluctant to begin again on the long, wearisome process of personal discovery — hip-hop or Hindemith or Haydn, pasta or potatoes, rages or sulks — when at heart she knew it was never going to come to anything anyway.

So
when Juliette opened the door and saw Jay standing there, with his hair short now but so sweetly familiar in every other way, looking quizzical rather than angry — as he had every right to be — she had fallen into his arms with a sob of relief.

There
was no need to ask about his tastes (Hindemith and pasta) or try to discover his true nature. Juliette knew it already, knew all about his perfectionism and his rages. She knew better than anyone how to handle them; after all, she had been talking him down since she was eleven years old. His possessiveness, which still troubled her, was a compliment, after all. They belonged together. She knew Jay as she knew herself.

Or
so she had thought.

Harry
accepted their engagement with resignation. Debbie, a buxom bottle-blonde with whom Juliette had nothing except Harry in common, threw herself into arranging a wedding suitable for Harry Cartwright's daughter.

Jay
had been surprisingly accommodating. 'Don't worry,' he had said, when she apologised for the number of local councillors on the guest list. 'Why should I care about one day, when you're mine for the rest of our lives?' And Juliette, God help her, had thought that was romantic.

Mercifully,
her French relations refused
en
masse
; Juliette shuddered at the thought of Grandmère and Debbie in the same overswagged marquee. She submitted to all the horrors docilely enough. It was by way of being her parting gift to her father since she could see that in her married life with Jay he was unlikely to have much of a place.

What
she hadn't quite realised was that neither would anyone else.

She
had offered to come back to Sheffield, though not Burlow. Certainly not Burlow, with its small-town atmosphere. But Sheffield would be all right; her translating could be done anywhere, and with the gilt of London wearing thin, she was rather looking forward to picking up the threads of her earlier life, from university and even from school. There was Kate Cosgrove, for instance, one of her school friends; she was a solicitor in a top Sheffield practice now and running for parliament as a Liberal Democrat in the constituency round Burlow. And there was dear Abbie Bettison, her first-ever best friend, married to one of the local farmers. And Dave and Jan Brooks, good mates from university…