Mary Stewart: Nine Coaches Waiting

She was sitting with shut eyes. I thought as I looked at her that I had been right. She looked both tired and preoccupied, though nothing, it seemed, could impair her rather chilly elegance. She was, I supposed, about fifty-five, and was still a beautiful woman, with the sort of beauty that age seems hardly to touch. Bone-deep, that was the phrase; it was in the shape of her head and temples and the thin-bridged, faintly aquiline nose with its fine nostrils; it was only at another glance that you saw the tiny wrinkles etching eyes and mouth. Her skin was pale and clear, and expertly tinted; her brows delicately drawn and arched with a faint arrogance above the closed lids. Her hair was sculptured silver. Only her mouth under the curve of its expensive rouge, and the hands which lay grey-gloved and still in her lap, were too thin for beauty. She looked expensive, a little fragile, and about as approachable as the moon.

I sat back in my corner. In front of me were the square shoulders of Madame's chauffeur. Beside him, equally square and correct, sat Madame's maid Albertine. If I-as the classic tales of governessing led me to expect-was to be insecurely poised between the salon and the servant's hall, at least I was now at what might be called the right end of the car. For which I was grateful, as I didn't much like what I had seen of Albertine.

She was a dark sallow-faced woman of perhaps forty-five, with a sullen, secretive expression and ugly hands. Although she had been most of the time about Madame de Valmy's rooms last night when I had been there, she had not once spoken to me and I had seen her watching me with a sort of stony resentment which had surprised me, but which I now realised was probably habitual and without meaning. She sat rigidly beside the chauffeur, gripping Madame's jewel-case tightly on her lap. Neither she nor the man spoke. Neither, as far as I could tell, was remotely aware of the other's presence. They seemed so admirably suited that I found myself wondering, quite without irony, if they were a married couple; (I found later that they were, in fact, brother and sister). Bernard, the chauffeur, had impeccable manners, but he, too, looked as if he never smiled, and he had the same dark-avised, almost resentful air as the woman. I hoped it wasn't a common Savoyard characteristic… I stole another look at Madame's still face. It didn't look as though, for gaiety, there was going to be much to choose between the drawing-room and the servants' hall…

Well, after all, the schoolroom was to be my domain. I looked out of the window again, to wonder a little about Philippe, and more than a little about Léon de Valmy, the cripple, whom his wife had hardly mentioned, and of whom Daddy had said, indifferently: "It's a pity he didn't break his neck."

I hadn't noticed the road-barrier until the car slowed to a sliding halt, and two men in uniform emerged from a green-painted hut and came towards us.

Héloïse de Valmy opened her eyes and said in her cool high voice: "This is the frontier, Miss Martin. Have your passport ready."

The frontier-guards quite obviously knew the car. They greeted Madame de Valmy, flicked a casual glance across my passport, and I heard them joking with the chauffeur as he opened the boot for what was the briefest and most formal of glances at the luggage there.

Then we were moving again, across the strip of no-man’s-land that divides the two countries, to pause once more for the same formalities at the French barrier.

Soon after this we reached Thonon, where our road turned south towards the mountains. The main part of the town lies fairly high above the Lake. As we climbed, the ground fell sharply away to the left, spilling a huddle of bright roofs and budding fruit-boughs down towards the belt of trees that bordered the water. Through the mist of still bare branches showed, here and there, the chimneys of some biggish houses. One of these-Madame de Valmy surprised me by rousing herself to point it out-was the Villa Mireille, where the third Valmy brother, Hippolyte, lived. I could just see its chimneys, smokeless among the enveloping trees. Beyond, mile upon glimmering mile, stretched Lac Léman, lazily rippling its silk under the afternoon sun. Here and there a slim sickle of white or scarlet sail cut the bright field of water, and clear on the distant shore I could see Montreux, etched in faint colours like a picture-book town against that eternally dramatic background of towering snows.

It was a warm afternoon, and the little town through which we drove was gay in the sun. Pollarded trees lined the streets, linking pleached branches where buds were already bursting into green. Shops had spilled their goods onto the pavements; racks of brightly printed dresses swung in the warm breeze; red and green peppers shone glossy among last season's withered apples; there was a pile of gaily-painted plant-pots and a small forest of garden tools in brilliant green. And at the edge of the pavement there were the flowers; tubs of tulips and freesias and the scarlet globes of ranunculus; box after box of polyanthus, vivid-eyed; daffodils, sharply yellow; the deep drowned-purple of pansies; irises with crown and fall of white and ivory and blue and deeper blue… oh, beautiful! And all packed and jammed together, French-fashion, billowing and blazing with scent as thick as smoke in the sunlight.

I must have made some exclamation of pleasure as we slid past them and into the square, because I remember Madame de Valmy smiling a little and saying: "Wait till you see Valmy in April." Then we had swung to the right and the road was climbing again through a sparse tree-crowded suburb towards the hills.

Very soon, it seemed, we were in a narrow gorge where road, river, and railway, crossing and re-crossing one another in a fine confusion, plaited their way up between high cliffs hung with trees. After a few miles of this the railway vanished, tunnelling away on the right, not to reappear, but the river stayed with us to the left of the road, a rush of green-white water that wrestled down its boulder-strewn gully, now close beside us, now dropping far below as our road wound its way along the cliff under the hanging trees. The gorge was deep; the road was most of the time in shadow, only the higher trees netted the westering sun in branches where the faintest green-and-gold hinted at the spring. The cliffs closed in. Ugly grey bulges of some pudding-like stone showed here and there between the clouds of shadowed, March-bare trees. The road began to climb. Away below us the water arrowed loud and white between its boulders.

A grim little valley, I thought, and a dangerous road… and then we rounded the bend called Belle Surprise, and away in front of us, like a sunlit rent in a dark curtain, lay the meadows of Valmy.

“That's Soubirous," said Madame de Valmy, "there in the distance. You'll lose sight of it again in a moment when the road runs down into the trees."

I craned forward to look. The village of Soubirous was set in a wide, green saucer of meadow and orchard serene among the cradling hills. I could see the needle-thin gleam of water, and the lines of willows where two streams threaded the grassland. Where they met stood the village, bright as a toy and sharply-focused in the clear air, with its three bridges and its little watch-making factory and its church of Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts with the sunlight glinting on the weathercock that tips the famous spire.

"And Valmy?" I said, as the car sailed downhill again and trees crowded thickly in on either side of the road. "We must be near it now?"

"Those are the Valmy woods on your left. They stretch most of the way back to Thonon. The Merlon-that's the name of the river-marks the boundary between Valmy and Dieudonné the estate to the right of the road. We cross the river soon and then"-she smiled faintly-"you'll see Valmy."