The Eden Inheritance

by Janet Tanner

  She did not make him fed those things now. Somewhere along the line, in the six years of their marriage, they had slipped away from him. The adoration had paled in her eyes, sometimes he felt she almost disliked him, and she questioned his authority and even openly defied him at every turn. Nowadays she made him fed as inadequate as did his father, perhaps more so, because he had always been in awe of his father whilst once, not so long ago, Kathryn had been a child he wanted to pet and protect. The hurt and bewilderment burned sourly in his stomach, spoiling the taste of his father’s good wine, and he found himself thinking, with longing, of Regine, his mistress and the woman he would have liked to marry if she hadn’t been six years his senior and married already. Regine wouldn’t have behaved in this infuriating manner; Regine would not have made him look a complete fool. She would have been there at his side, bolstering his confidence, reassuring him that he was doing the right thing, that there was nothing else he could do, and that anyway, in the end nothing mattered except that she loved him and they were together. He saw her now in his mind’s eye, the thick blonde hair that came tumbling around her shoulders when he pulled out the pins that secured it, the generous breasts that he could bury his face in and suck on as if he were a baby again, and ached with need of her. It had always been the same – from the first moment he had met her he had wanted to drown in her pale yielding flesh and allow her to banish all the demons that haunted him. Regine had been more than just a lover to him, she had been father, mother and offspring all rolled into one, and he had worshipped her. She had taught him to make love as opposed to simply copulating, she had praised his endeavours as well as his successes, she had comforted him and cheered him when things went badly for him, she had even, sometimes, made him laugh. The one thing she had refused to do was leave her husband for him.

  ‘I can’t do that, chéri, you mustn’t ask me to,’ she had said, tenderly stroking his hand.

  ‘Why not? Why not, Regine? It’s me you love!’ He had said it defiantly, but in reality he was seeking her affirmation.

  ‘Of course I love you, but that has nothing to do with it. I am Claude’s wife. I couldn’t leave him and the children. It wouldn’t be right. They would be hurt.’

  ‘And what about me? Don’t you think you are hurting me?’

  ‘A little, perhaps, but that’s the way it is, I’m afraid. And it’s not so bad, is it? We can be together as often as you like.’

  ‘No, we can’t. I want to be with you all the time.’

  She laughed; he saw the rise and fall of her magnificent breasts and wanted her so desperately he thought he would die of it.

  ‘No, Charles, you don’t,’ she said. ‘ You’d soon be tired of me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t! I’d never tire of you, darling Regine. I wish I could be a part of you, so I could go with you wherever you go, every minute of the day. And we could make love all the time – in the bathtub, at the breakfast table, when you are working at your needlepoint, everywhere … anywhere!’

  ‘Be sensible, Charles, I beg you,’ she had chided him, but he knew she was pleased. ‘I can’t do it. You mustn’t ask me. And besides, I wouldn’t do for your wife. It’s one thing to have a mistress who happens to be married, quite another to try to make her legitimate. Think of the scandal it would bring to the de Savigny name. Your father would be most displeased.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ Needing her made him bold. ‘If I had you I wouldn’t care what he thought.’

  ‘Yes, you would. And you also care about providing an heir for the de Savigny line. I can’t have any more children. When I had little Gilbert the doctor was quite definite about it. I was very ill; they told me categorically I can never have another. No, you must find a girl who will make you a suitable wife, Charles, and give you sons to carry on the name. But I will still be here for you, I promise. I will always be here for you.’

  He had begged, cried even, but she had remained adamant and in the end he had seen the sense of what she said. Perhaps, he had thought, he could have the best of both worlds. The line was important to him, it was his duty to ensure its survival – just as long as he could still have Regine too. It was simply a matter of finding the right girl.

  When he had met Kathryn he had thought she was the right girl. Strong enough to give him the sons he needed, young enough to adapt to his ways and not cause trouble, sufficiently in love with him to make him feel masterful, beautiful enough to make him proud of her.

  Regine had thought so too. She had actively encouraged the match. Perhaps, he thought now with hindsight, she had considered Kathryn too naive and inexperienced to be any serious threat to her; perhaps she had thought he would lie beside Kathryn after making love to her and compare her unfavourably with Regine. Certainly in the early days she had asked him how things were in that direction, given advice and encouraged confidences that would have shocked Kathryn had she known about them.

  But she had not known – at least, he didn’t think so – and the arrangement had proved, in the beginning, to be very successful. Until everything had begun to go wrong.

  Regine’s husband, who was a wealthy wine merchant, had decided to move the centre of his operations to Paris and Regine and the children had gone with him. He still had a place in Charente, of course, and they came to stay for weekends and holidays, but somehow nothing could be quite the same. And then the war had come. Regine had been in Paris when France fell and she was there now. Regulations made it too difficult to travel, even their correspondence was curtailed. It was more than a year since he had last seen her and he ached for her with a hollow despair that grew worse rather than lessening as the weeks became months.

  If only she were here now! he thought wretchedly. If only he could go to her, lay his head against her plump shoulder and tell her all his troubles. But she wasn’t here. Somehow he had to bear them alone.

  ‘More wine, Charles?’

  He became aware, with a slight sense of shock, that Guillaume was addressing him. He glanced down at his glass, scarcely touched.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, thank you, Papa.’

  ‘It’s very good wine. There’s no doubt about it, you French know how to do things properly.’

  It was von Rheinhardt speaking. Charles looked at him, mentally appraising the new Commandant of the district.

  Physically he was a fine specimen of Aryan manhood and a far more impressive ambassador of the Third Reich than Buhler, his predecessor. Where Buhler had been a very ordinary-looking man of medium height, von Rheinhardt was tall and powerfully built; where Buhler’s hair had been thinning and mouse-coloured, von Rheinhardt’s was thick and fair. He was better-looking than Buhler, too, with features that bordered on the handsome. But there was something about him that Charles did not care for, and the mistrust went further than simple dislike for a man whose countrymen had humbled his own. There had been something almost ingratiating about Buhler’s manner – which had also irritated in its own way, he had to admit – a strange fawning respect for the aristocracy of the country over which he had power, a desire for acceptance. Von Rheinhardt was quite different. There was an arrogance about him that was apparent in every deceptively lazy moment and Charles recognised it as not only the arrogance of the conqueror. It went deeper than that. Von Rheinhardt, he suspected, came from a priviledged family himself and was in no way awed by the de Savignys. And there was something else that Charles could not quite put his finger on. He thought it might be ruthlessness. The scar did not help, of course, running from the corner of his eye to his mouth and giving him a dangerous look. But it was more than that. There was cruelty in those very blue eyes, a hard line to the set of the mouth.

  Charles noted it all and tried to quell his misgivings. This man wasn’t another Buhler. They were going to have to be very careful not to antagonise him. He could, Charles thought, be dangerous.

  At the moment, however, he was choosing to play the part of the appreciative guest, praising the Baron for his excellent wine.
>
  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ Guillaume replied. ‘I think you will like our cognac even more. And I hope you will allow us to go on producing it as we have done now since my grandfather’s day.’

  ‘Certainly. As long as you are prepared to share it with us, there will be no problem.’ He said it pleasantly enough, but the threat was there all the same, implicit in his words, and Charles knew he did not mean only a bottle or two for him and his fellow officers at the Château François where he had his headquarters, but wholesale consignments for the hierarchy back home in Germany.

  ‘We don’t want the way of life here to suffer more than is unavoidable,’ von Rheinhardt continued smoothly. ‘Hopefully we can all live side by side without acrimony. I don’t want trouble and I am sure you don’t either.’

  ‘No one wants trouble,’ Guillaume replied. ‘ The people around here simply want to be allowed to get on with their lives. General Buhler found that to be the case and I am sure you will too.’

  The very blue eyes narrowed a shade.

  ‘I certainly hope so. The area is not without its problems, though, I am afraid. There will always be those who behave stupidly, those who are too pig-headed to accept things as they are – and will continue to be. General Buhler was a good man but he could be a little blind on occasions. If there are troublemakers here, be sure I shall find them, and they will be dealt with most severely.’

  Charles experienced a chill of disquiet. He knew very well what von Rheinhardt meant by severe dealings. When the Nazis had first come two youths in a nearby village had tried to sabotage their operations by cutting the telephone wires. They had been caught and shot. And stories were rife of the way that any who resisted or tried to oppose the invaders in more insidious ways were treated – they were tortured before they, too, were shot, or taken away, God alone knew where.

  As his father had pointed out, as yet there had been no such incident in Savigny, thanks mainly to the fact that the villagers were following the example of the de Savigny family and appeasing the enemy, but it was almost inevitable that eventually some hothead would step out of line. When one did Charles was sure von Rheinhardt would show no mercy. Unlike Buhler this was a man with a burning zeal for the Fatherland and the coldly clinical will to do whatever he had to in order to ensure everyone who came under his jurisdiction toed the line. What was more, Charles thought, he would enjoy enforcing it.

  ‘It is good, however, to know I have your support,’ von Rheinhardt continued. ‘I am sure your influence will be most helpful to me in maintaining calm. It is also very kind of you to invite me to dinner and afford me the opportunity to visit your charming château and meet the members of your family socially.’ He looked from one to the other of them with an almost regal smile, then his eyes narrowed a shade. ‘I look forward also to meeting your daughter-in-law at last. She is English, is she not?’

  ‘Kathryn is English-born but naturalised French,’ Guillaume said swiftly. ‘I am sure she will be joining us soon, won’t she, Charles?’

  Charles experienced another moment of something close to panic.

  ‘She wasn’t feeling too well earlier, Papa. She was suffering from a headache. I’m not sure if she will feel up to joining us.’

  ‘Really?’ Von Rheinhardt’s tone was silky smooth but the undertones were unmistakable. ‘That is a great pity. I do hope that I am not the cause of her indisposition.’

  There was an awkward silence. Even the centuries-old walls of the château seemed to be holding their breath.

  Then, as if she were an actress making a perfectly timed entrance, Kathryn opened the door and came into the salon.

  ‘Thank God you changed your mind and came down,’ Charles said. ‘He had noticed, you know, and he didn’t like it.’

  ‘Really,’ Kathryn said coldly.

  They were in the bedroom of their apartment. The evening had passed off without incident. Von Rheinhardt had been almost genial, the de Savignys courteous good hosts; though Christian had been quieter than usual and Kathryn had hardly spoken at all, Guillaume had played the diplomat and Louise had been her charming, if rather vacuous self. The dinner, though not up to the standard of excellence offered by the superb cuisine of happier times, had still been imaginative and well presented; Angeline, the cook, had worked miracles with vegetables from the château gardens and some of her wonderful sauces, though they were no longer rich with cream as they had been in the old days, and von Rheinhardt had appreciated the Château de Savigny cognac as Guillaume had predicted he would. There had been a few awkward moments, small silences following unfortunate nuances of speech which might have been misinterpreted, but they had been glossed over and only von Rheinhardt’s thinly veiled warnings had caused any lasting discomfort.

  ‘I understand an enemy aircraft came down about thirty miles north of here a few nights ago,’ he had said, almost conversationally. ‘If the pilot should come this way I sincerely hope no one in the community would be foolish enough to try to assist him.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he have been killed?’ Guillaume enquired blandly.

  ‘We don’t think so. At least, no body was found in the wreckage.’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t survive long in the open country. It’s been wet and bitterly cold.’

  ‘Exactly. Still, if someone is hiding him we shall soon find out, never fear. Then those responsible will be dealt with. We cannot, we will not, allow that sort of behaviour to go unpunished.’

  ‘The poor man!’ Louise had murmured. ‘It must be dreadful to be wounded, hungry and cold in an alien country.’

  Von Rheinhardt had looked at her almost benignly – Louise was quite capable of saying such things and getting away with them – but his reply was unequivocal, just the same.

  ‘You must not think of him as a man like your own sons, Madame – he is not. He is the enemy. I hope you would not be tempted to help him.’

  ‘Oh no, indeed not,’ Louise replied, smiling at him charmingly, and Charles glanced anxiously at Kathryn, afraid of what her reaction might be.

  But Kathryn had said nothing. He knew from the tightening of the muscles in her cheeks and the way she folded her hands together in her lap so that her nails bit into the backs of her hands that she was struggling to keep silent, and for that he was grateful. But he had continued to worry, all the same, that she might still say something unpardonably rash, and the evening had been a tense one for him.

  Now, wearing silk pyjamas, he leaned back against the pillows and watched Kathryn getting ready for bed.

  She sat at the dressing table, a rich peacock-blue kimono that he had bought for her in the East before the war covering her slender figure, but he could see that beneath it her shoulders were rigid and she was brushing her hair with unnecessary vigour.

  ‘You did the right thing, Katrine,’ he said. ‘We all did. There is nothing else we can do.’

  She did not answer; he tried again.

  ‘We have to be sensible, ma chérie. You don’t like it, I know, but what good would it do to have more French blood spilled? Life has to go on.’

  Still she did not answer and he felt the familiar frustration begin to build inside him. How dare she sit there ignoring him? She was his wife, for God’s sake! Surely he was entitled to a little respect? He tried to think of something grand to say, and instead only heard himself ask peevishly: ‘How did Papa persuade you to come down? You wouldn’t listen to me.’

  Kathryn slammed the ivory-backed brush down on the dressing table and swung round. The lines of her throat above the silky kimono were taut.

  ‘He didn’t persuade me. I came because I decided to.’

  ‘Oh really? Then what was it that affected your decision?’

  ‘I suppose I realised I didn’t have any choice – that yes, I could place Guy’s life in danger if I refuse to go along with these disgusting games your family is playing. He’s my son, he’s half English – and the English, at least, haven’t given up the fight. We’re still at war with
cochons like von Rheinhardt and that makes us vulnerable. I don’t care for myself – I really don’t, Charles. Personally I would rather die than kowtow to the Nazis the way you seem to be prepared to. But Guy is just a little boy. I can’t take chances with his safety.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad you’ve seen sense.’

  ‘Are you? I’m not sure I am. I’m afraid for him, yes, and that is why I went along with your repulsive charade. But I can’t pretend I’m proud of myself for doing it. Are you proud, Charles? Are you proud of the French capitulation?’

  ‘I’m doing what I have to do,’ he retorted, stung. ‘I’m trying to save lives; to protect my heritage.’

  ‘Oh yes, your precious heritage! What’s left of it? Tell me that! You’ve chosen to lie down and let those bastards walk all over you and you’ve forced me into a position of having to do the same. And let me tell you, Charles, I find that unforgivable.’

  He looked at her and felt his body begin to stir. She infuriated him, yes, especially when she talked this way, and he longed for Regine’s flattery and soothing touch. But there was also something devastatingly attractive about Kathryn when she was angry, those brown eyes flashing liquid gold fire, muscles taut, breasts heaving. What was it about a woman’s breasts that he found so irresistible? It couldn’t be an Oedipus complex, his own mother was small, flat as a boy in the fashion of the twenties when she had been in the prime of her beauty. No, it was some other half-forgotten memory that pre-dated Regine, pre-dated even his first experiences in the high-class brothels of Paris where he had first been initiated into the pleasures of sex and learned the taste of passion.

  ‘You knew when you married me that you were marrying into a family with traditions to uphold,’ he said testily, annoyed with himself for allowing her to stir him in this way. ‘ You seemed happy enough with the situation then.’

  ‘Did I? Perhaps that was because in those days I was naive enough to have romantic notions. I was stupid enough to think that your traditions, as you call them, included pride and honour. I didn’t realise they meant doing anything, however demeaning, in order to save your own skins.’