Barbara Cartland - Escape from Passion

“I think you had better explain your business here first,” Jacques Bouvais replied and suddenly Fleur felt that she could bear no more.

She was so tired, too tired to argue and to explain. She was also afraid, the glare of the sun had made her eyes ache and she felt now as if she could not trust them to read correctly whether it was friendship or enmity that she saw in the face of the man opposite her.

She had put down her wicker basket when she had first come to the door. In her other hand she still held the carpet bag and now it felt as if it was weighing her down, dragging her lower and lower, and she could not resist it. She let it fall and felt the whole earth rocking beneath her, a darkness before her eyes –

“I \m all right,” she heard herself say, “if I could only sit down.”

Even as she said the words, she clutched at her receding senses.

“I have spoken in French,” she thought “I must remember to keep speaking French.”

She felt someone’s arm go around her shoulders, hands were supporting her and then the glare was gone and she was sitting on a chair in the cool dimness of the house.

“Drink this,” a woman’s voice then came.

There was a glass between her lips and drops of cool, almost icy cold water going slowly down her throat. Her vision cleared, the dizziness went and with it much of her weakness.

“I am sorry,” she murmured, “it must have been the heat.”

“You have come from Marie?” a soft voice asked and she looked up to see the gentle face of an elderly woman.

There was no mistaking the kindness of the expression, the tenderness of work-worn hands that still held her arm firmly as if she might be expected to fall from the chair.

“I am sorry,” Fleur repeated, “but I am all right now. Yes, I have come from Marie. She sent me to you. She said you would help me.”

She saw a glance pass between the man standing silent on the other side of the room and the woman beside her. She could not interpret it and could not understand what it meant.

‘Shall I tell them the truth?’ Fleur asked herself. ‘Dare I?’

And because there seemed no alternative, she looked from one to the other desperately and then said in a voice that held a note of despair –

“Marie said I could trust you. She told me that I would be safe here.”

“How do we know that you speak the truth?” the man said suddenly, his voice surly.

Fleur stared at him.

“She did not give me a letter,” she replied, “because she told me that you, if you are her brother, Jacques, could not read. She told me she had heard that your son had been killed, the Priest had written and told her. She described to me how to come here and – ”

Fleur paused for a moment and then went on bravely,

“ – she had my papers made out in your name. I was to come to you as your niece, ‘Jeanne Bouvais’. Here they are.”

She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out the papers which had been handled so often in the last two days. She bent forward and put them onto the table. They looked very crumpled and rather dirty, the edges curling round the blue stamp that had made her whole journey possible.

“I have money,” Fleur went on. “Marie gave it to me. I can pay for staying here if you will keep me.”

It was the woman who spoke quickly,

“She’s all right, she has come from Marie. Of course she has. How else would she have known about François and that the Padre had written for us. Marie sent you.”

She turned and peered into Fleur’s face. “You swear that ? You wouldn’t deceive us?”

“But, of course not,” Fleur replied quickly. “I so need your help. Listen, I will conceal nothing, I will tell you the truth. I am English.”

The woman beside her gave a start and then she looked across the room at her husband.

“ English !” she exclaimed and then quickly, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Shut the door.”

The man moved slowly. He locked the door, put back the bolt which Fleur had heard removed. When it was done, he came back again and stood, as he had done before, immobile and uncompromising.

“But why are you here? Why have you come to us?” the woman asked.

Fleur told them how she had come out to France a few days before the outbreak of war to marry Lucien de Sardou and how he had been killed and how she had stayed on, happy at first to be with his mother and then trapped and unable to leave after the German occupation.

She spoke of Marie’s great kindness to her all through the months when they had lived together, three women isolated in the Château, knowing very little of what was happening in the world outside. Then the Comtesse’s death, Monsieur Pierre’s arrival and her own flight.

“And what do you want now?” the man asked.

Fleur knew even as he spoke that his antagonism had gone. His voice was impersonal but the roughness was missing.

“I want to go back to England. I want to go home.”

She was half-surprised at her own answer. It was the first time that she had formulated the idea to herself, but she knew now that the blue of the sea had called her more insistently than she had been aware.

Such a very few miles between her and freedom, surely such an idea was not impossible or impracticable?

“We shall see.”

The man turned away and left the room. She could hear his footsteps echoing away into the distance.

Fleur then turned towards the woman questioningly.

“It’s all right,” she said reassuringly.

“You mean I can stay?”

“But, of course, Marie has sent you. Come and bring your things. I will show you to your room.”

She picked up the carpet bag and Fleur, carrying the wicker basket, then followed her up some twisting carpetless stairs to the next floor.

The room that she was shown was low, the rafters quaintly shaped over a small diamond-paned window. There was a huge wooden bedstead taking up most of the room and a rough washstand on which there was an earthenware bowl and pitcher.

The place was spotlessly clean and there was the faint sweet smell of hay and of some fragrant herb. She glanced out of the window and then exclaimed.

She was looking out at the back of the house and to her surprise she found that it was far larger than she had at first anticipated.

The door by which she had approached had shown only one small side of the building and behind there were two big wings enclosing a courtyard and from the window Fleur could see many signs of activity.

“I had no idea your house was so big!”

“From the front it looks so small,” Madame Bouvais agreed. “Perhaps it is a good thing. People don’t find their way so easily round to the back, it gives us time if strangers come.”

Fleur understood and noticed on a gate not far from where the cows were being milked an older child was perched, peering this way and that as if keeping sentinel, ready to warn those who were working if anyone should approach unexpectedly.

“It is kind of you to have me,” Fleur said impulsively. “I understand just how much I am asking of you. I know what it means if we are caught.”

Madame Bouvais nodded.

“We have to think of that, we have our family to consider, but my husband is a patriot. He loves France. It breaks his heart to see those sales Bosches and know that they would strip and starve us to feed their own.”

“It is wrong to ask this of you,” Fleur said, “but Marie was so certain that you would have me. I feel ashamed. I ought really to go away and take my chances of finding escape through other methods.”

“It is not easy,” Madame Bouvais replied. “Only last week someone in the village was found sheltering a wounded airman. They were shot – they and their family and one of their friends who had known that they had concealed him.”