A Gown of Thorns: A Gripping Novel of Romance, Intrigue and the Secrets of a Vintage Parisian Dress (5 page)

She found a patch of shade, intending to re-read the notes she’d just transcribed. Frustratingly, her laptop battery was running low and it closed down on her after a couple of minutes. So, locking it away in the Renault’s trunk, she set off towards a track that she glimpsed through the trees, which seemed to follow the course of a river. Lush summer leaves filtered the heat from the air, and the sadness provoked by memories of her dad mellowed into wistfulness. He’d have loved this walk – come to think of it, he might once have strolled through this forest with Shauna’s mother. Young lovers, sipping at the prospect of a life together.
You’ll fall in love with Chemignac.

‘All right, Mum,’ she acknowledged. ‘It
is
beautiful here, but I won’t be losing my heart.’

She stopped at a fork in the path. Which way? Straight on would be safest. Or she could take the stone bridge that spanned the little river, heading into the verdant heart of the forest. ‘“Stay on the path at all times”,’ Shauna quoted, mindful of
Little Red Riding Hood
and the dangers of dark woods. Though she was unlikely to encounter wolves. Wild boar were the more probable danger. For all that, she veered towards the bridge. There was a man standing on it, staring down into the water. A man she recognised. ‘Laurent, what are you doing here?’

Though he made no answer, she kept going. She knew the profile, the dark grazing of sideburn hair, the resolute jaw. Only when she was a few paces from the bridge did she hesitate. The clothes were wrong. This man wore a wool-weave jacket typical of a farmer or huntsman and serviceable blue trousers. Every tractor driver and field worker she’d seen since arriving in the region wore trousers or overalls of a similar shade.
Bleus de travail
, they were called. Literally ‘work blues’. The heavy combination was so unlike Laurent’s casual style… He must be sweating! She called to him again but he moved off, taking the path up the slope with easy strides.

He kept effortlessly ahead of her, a charcoal-sketch slipping between the trees. He lured her on, pausing just often enough to make her believe she could reach him. Breaking into scout’s pace – half walk, half run – she ploughed on, panting, ‘Fine. I’ll play your game. Just don’t drag me into the depths of the forest and disappear.’

The track was narrowing, now a pathway only in the most generous interpretation, and it was getting steep. Her footwear – loafers and ankle socks – was inadequate against stones and low-growing bramble. Several times, she stumbled. Laurent had melted away and Shauna dropped to a walk, thoroughly pissed off with him. She turned this way and that, imagining he was hiding nearby.

As her ears absorbed the rustling of leaves and birdsong, she wondered how far she was now from habitation, from phone signal. A crunching sound warned her that something was advancing on her, scuffling through the dry undergrowth. She prepared for Laurent to leap at her shouting, ‘Fooled you!’ Or maybe she was about to meet her first wild boar… Were you meant to freeze, or drop? Her captive breath burst out in laughter as a male blackbird hopped from under the skirts of a myrtle bush. How could something so small be so noisy? All it had been doing was pecking for grubs in the leaf mould. But perhaps it hadn’t really been that loud. Fear was fiction’s greatest muse, she reminded herself. ‘Where are you, Laurent?’

No answer. She peered up, searching for the sun through the leaf canopy to establish the approximate time. She’d left her phone in the car and wasn’t wearing a watch. The kids would be coming to the end of their lesson shortly and they still had one last appointment to get to before the day’s marathon was done. Giving up on Laurent, she picked her way back down the slope, skidding to a stop as she saw something she’d missed on her way up.

It was a cave, partly obscured by saplings, and it yawned from the base of a sandstone outcrop. Its mouth was just high enough for her to pass through without dipping her head. As she stepped into its sandy interior, she thought she saw a shoe print. Too late to be sure; she’d stepped right on it. ‘Laurent?’ she called again. Maybe he wanted to show her something he’d found. Cave paintings maybe. This region was a cradle of Neolithic culture and remnants of Stone Age habitation had been found just a few kilometres from here. Or maybe he wanted to show her the living quarters of some rare lizards or bats. Most girls wouldn’t be thrilled by that, but then, she wasn’t most girls. The atmosphere buzzed with suppressed secrets, the dense dark suggesting hidden clefts and fissures. A torch would have been useful. ‘I know you’re here!’ No echo, so clearly, this was no deep cavern. If Laurent were somewhere ahead, he’d be hearing her perfectly. ‘I’m going to count to three, then leave.’

She’d reached ‘two’ when a gust from the cave’s innards made her stagger and shield her eyes. A dust-devil of fine sand enveloped her.

W
hat passed
through her felt like air filtered through ice. She turned and ran for the exit, her shoes filling with sand as she stumbled into daylight and pelted down the slope. Her body seemed to split apart as she ran, her consciousness separating from her physical self. Mind clear, body numb, a bizarre and terrifying feeling. Clanging through her mind, the conviction – ‘They’ve got me!’ A metallic sound filled her skull followed by a scream that was not from her own throat. She tripped and fell, sharp stones bedding in her palms which became quickly bloody. ‘Laurent, Laurent, help me!’ An appeal broadcast in fragments because she was shuddering, short-breathing. The only way she could describe what she’d run through was
death
.

‘Shauna? What the hell? What have you done to yourself?’

The hands on her shoulders felt real, as did the smell of olive soap and horse sweat as somebody crouched beside her and supported her. She rested the side of her face against a forearm, making out the shape of a thorn tattoo, and thought –
People died here
.
Running. Panicking. Head over heels in their own blood.
‘I – I found a cave.’

Her voice was dry powder. There was sand in her eyes.

‘What sort of cave?’

‘Dark…’ She made a feint of pointing. ‘Up there.’

He helped her up and wiped the grit from her cheeks with the front of his shirt, which he’d freed from his belt. She grabbed the fabric. ‘You’ve changed your clothes,’ she accused. He was wearing boot-cut Wranglers, rubbed pale inside the thigh, and his shirt was white poplin cotton, yet just minutes ago, he’d been dressed like a farmer. She wouldn’t have mistaken those thigh-moulding Wranglers for baggy work trousers, not even in the uncertain light of the woods. And what about the jacket? She asked what he’d done with it.

Laurent looked mystified. ‘It’s far too hot for a jacket. These are my riding clothes.’ Two horses, white as cloud, stood a short distance down the path, shaking their heads nervously. Rachel sat astride the smaller horse, holding the reins of a strapping male animal that Laurent had presumably just dismounted from.

‘Is she putting it on?’ Rachel’s lip curled as she waited for Laurent to step away from Shauna. ‘She spends more time on the floor than on her feet.’

‘You should feel her heart pounding,’ Laurent threw back.

‘I’ll take your word for it. You’re practically taking her pulse with your tummy button.’

‘Take the horses back to the yard.’ Laurent spoke impatiently. ‘I’ll help Shauna.’ When Rachel cocked a disobliging eyebrow, Laurent’s tone gained an edge. ‘If you can’t ride one and lead the other, just tie Héron’s reins to a branch.’

‘Laurent, darling, I can ride and lead with my eyes closed. I’ve won prizes for driving four-in-hand; I could probably give Charlton Heston in a chariot a run for his money. You walk Goldilocks home if you want. Bye-bye.’ For all her boasting, it took Rachel a minute or more to turn the horses and get them walking calmly away, two abreast. Even as they went, they snorted and shied, their ears laid flat as if something in the air spooked them.

Only when Rachel was gone did Laurent speak again, and this time his voice carried an undertow of excitement. ‘I’ve always known there was a cave in this part of the wood. For years I’ve been trying to find it.’

‘You changed your clothes,’ Shauna insisted stubbornly. ‘You weren’t on horseback before.’

‘Before what? I worked until lunchtime in the
chai
, then checked the Semillon vines. Rachel suggested a hack through the woods. The horse you saw her on has been misbehaving lately. Sometimes it helps to bring a timid one out in company with a well-behaved companion.’

‘You were wearing old, blue trousers. I followed you from the car park by the riding school. Where I parked the Clio.’

He shook his head. ‘You cannot have followed me. Rachel and I rode from Chemignac, over the meadows. We came that way.’ He jerked his thumb, presumably indicating the direction of the château. ‘I heard you shouting my name, and we left the main path to find you.’

‘I saw you on a bridge. You were wearing a tweed coat and I followed you.’

‘I’ve never worn tweed in my life!’ Accepting that she wasn’t going to back down, he examined the palms of her hands, where traces of sand were mixed with blood. He brushed them gently with the pads of his fingers and painstakingly picked the remaining pieces of grit from her skin. ‘Can you show me that cave? Do you feel able?’

He sounded so fixed on it that she reluctantly started back up the slope. She stopped at the outcrop of rock whose face shone like cinder toffee in the afternoon light. No sign of a cave. All she could see was greenery – myrtle, wild vine, boxwood and fern – though she’d swear she’d seen the opening right here, between two bends in the path. ‘We must have passed it,’ she said, seizing the excuse to turn back. This place rippled with invisible violence, its untouched serenity a lie. Laurent seemed oblivious to the atmosphere, but to Shauna it felt like a singing in the blood. ‘It’s gone.’

‘Where does a cave go? If you saw it, it
must
be here.’ Laurent walked on up the slope and passed out of sight, just as his blue-and-brown lookalike had done earlier. When he returned to her, his expression was a cocktail of disappointment and doubt. ‘Did you walk right up to the ridge, further than you think?’

‘No.’ She told him she must get back to the car park. ‘The children will think I’ve abandoned them.’

O
live and Nico
emerged through the white gates moments after she reached the car. They’d been delayed, and the explanation was muddled. It sounded as though Nico had tried to make his horse jump a fence without being authorised and, having seen her brother do it, Olive had leapt her horse over an even higher one. Shauna deduced they’d been given a telling-off by their instructor.

‘You’re idiots,’ was Laurent’s opinion. He’d accompanied Shauna to the car park and, seeing how her fingers shook when she tried to unlock the Clio, had taken the key from her. ‘You’ve no right jumping horses who haven’t been properly warmed up first. That’s how tendons and ligaments get pulled.’

‘They were warmed up,’ Nico came back sulkily. ‘It was boiling hot in the sand school.’

Like Laurent, the children smelled of horse sweat and expensive saddle leather. If they noticed that Shauna was pale and rather distant, they made no comment. It was Laurent they wanted to shower with the minutiae of their day’s experiences.

‘I have to go back to work,’ he said after he’d listened to several minutes’ breathless telling. ‘You have to go on to your next venue, no?’ Without waiting for an answer, he pressed them into the back seat like a policeman confining a pair of suspects. Then he turned to Shauna, who was standing at the driver’s door, filling and emptying her lungs as a yoga student might.

‘Are you fit to drive? I cannot believe you have more crazy activity to cram into the day.’

‘I’m fine, honestly.’ She got into the car, fired the engine and lowered the window. ‘Next stop, Bergerac, for two hours’ gymnastics. Oh, and sorry about the non-existent cave. You probably think I’m certifiable, but I’m not normally this emotional. I’m suffering from Sudden Holiday Syndrome.’

Laurent rested his hand on the window sill, keeping her from driving away. ‘Is that a recognised ailment?’

‘It ought to be! Thing is, I’ve been studying flat out for five years. In what passes for spare time, I had to supplement my student loan with whatever jobs I could get. No vacations other than the occasional weekend at my mother’s.’ When she’d arrive exhausted and sleep till Sunday. ‘Now, I feel as though I’ve fallen off a boat and washed up on a strange shore. I like Chemignac,’ she said quickly, as hurt flashed in Laurent’s eyes, ‘but the world has stopped too quickly. Everything’s different, all at once.’ She tapped her head. ‘Too much space up here and I’m filling it with phantom geese, caves in the woods, lights in the tower – yes, I know,’ she cut him short, knowing he was going to say something about that. ‘Wires short-circuiting. You will have an electrician check it out?’

‘Don’t go up there, not without me. You hear?’

‘I hear.’ Wow. He meant it.

‘I don’t want you hurt, Shauna. I don’t want more misfortune to rain on Chemignac.’ He took her left hand from the steering wheel and brushed her bruised palm with his thumb. After counselling her to watch out for farm vehicles hogging the roads between here and the D936, he stepped back. As she reversed out of her space, she saw him take the path that would eventually lead him back to his vineyards. Dappled shadows soon absorbed him.

At the urban sports centre on Bergerac’s outskirts, Shauna left the children to grapple with the balance beam and parallel bars and went for a swim. Her chance to don a sports bikini and dispel her brain-fog with fast lengths of front crawl. The chlorinated water cleaned any lingering grit from her hands. Arriving back at Chemignac just before six, she parked the Clio by the winery and walked with the children to their grandmother’s kitchen door. She was spent, but she still had two hours of J.R.R. Tolkien to come – language lessons via Middle Earth. The smell in the courtyard of roast dinner was divine, however. Letting the children run ahead of her, Shauna’s eyes consulted briefly with the tower window. The glass behind the shutters was blank. Inert. ‘I don’t need to know what’s switching lights on and off,’ she told the window. And that was true. She didn’t need to know. But part of her wanted to, very badly.