Wildfire Quest

by Jane Arbor

  Now at last she ventured a question of her own. ‘I might have been out for the evening. What made you come to look for me?’ she asked.

  ‘Out—leaving all your lights on and your doors unlocked?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t I even switch off? But how did you follow me up, or guess I might be out on the marais?’

  ‘I didn’t, until I heard a shout out there.’

  ‘Yes, I was calling Mackerel—’

  ‘But before that you, or some female, had left traces behind.’ Raoul dragged from a pocket a dank silk square, its corner torn. ‘Yours? Yes, I thought I recognized it. It was caught on a tree and wet, which seemed to say you had passed that way—and maybe in a hurry, or you would surely have hauled it down yourself. It wasn’t flying too high to reach. Then, a little later, I heard you. But something else needs explaining too. Where is Lois? Why are you alone here tonight? I noticed her car was not in the port, but what time is she coming back?’

  Maryan stared at him. ‘Lois? She isn’t—I mean, don’t you know she is away?’

  Raoul frowned. ‘Away? Where? Leaving you on your own? For how long?’

  ‘I think she plans to be back tomorrow. But I supposed she would have told you. She—’ Maryan paused, remembering the primary cause of Lois’s call to him on the morning she left—‘she telephoned you, I know.’

  ‘Last Tuesday, yes, though without a word about this plan. Why, where has she gone?’

  ‘For a week’s holiday. I thought she might have told you or that you would have heard through Madame Barbe, who must have known Lois wasn’t here.’

  Raoul said shortly, ‘Ninon and I have had other matters on our minds this week. Anyway, where is Lois?’

  ‘On the Rhine. At a little resort, Rudesheim, in the heart of the wine country. Professor Maddern went there from here, you know, and he invited Lois to visit him. They—’

  It was Raoul’s turn to stare. ‘Lois? Not you? Why not?’

  ‘Because he wanted Lois, not me. They—they’ve fallen in love, and I think Lois may come back engaged to Arnold. I’d wondered and hoped for some time, but Lois only confided in me on the night before she left, that they had been writing to each other ever since he went to Germany ... love letters, I think,’ Maryan added shyly.

  Raoul’s brown eyes snapped. ‘Indeed? Love letters to Lois; love-in-the-moonlight with you. Who’d have thought the worthy Professor was such a Don Juan success!’ he sneered.

  ‘What do you mean? Arnold Maddern has never even kissed me—in the moonlight or anywhere else!’ Maryan denied.

  ‘No? What about the night of our day—yours and mine, when we picnicked in the plantations? I stayed in Bayonne to get the news of Vernier at the hospital. Ninon drove me back for my car the next day, and, walking her dogs in the gardens overnight, she had seen you with her own eyes—necking in the shadow of the carport!’

  ‘She did nothing of the sort! If there was any necking in the carport that night, it wasn’t between me and Arnold. If Madame Barbe saw anyone, it must have been Arnold and Lois after they came back from Perigueux. In fact—’

  As Maryan checked, remembering Lois’s new, unwonted femininity of that night, she was slightly mollified by the shadow of doubt which crossed Raoul’s face. He muttered, ‘But when I questioned that it was you, Ninon said it was certainly one of you, and was it exactly likely that it was Lois? If so, pigs might fly—But you are saying that it could have been Lois—even then?’

  Maryan nodded. ‘Even then. I think it had begun for them before, but they didn’t know it until that day—or night. When Lois came in she didn’t say anything to me about Arnold then or later. But somehow she changed. Very subtly, but I’d have told you my feelings about her if you—hadn’t left for Bordeaux and Paris just then.’

  Raoul regarded her shrewdly. ‘Don’t you mean— if I had given you the chance to say anything to me when I collected my car the next day?’

  ‘Yes ... perhaps. I sensed that you had avoided me.’

  ‘And you know now why? Because—Straight from me to that compiler of encyclopaedias? I thought. Just how many merry little playmates does she want in so many hours? I thought. Who does she think she is? That was the kind of pique I took away with me and it wasn’t until Paris that I had second thoughts. Who is competing with whom? I asked myself. Who is being allowed to get away with poaching a Leduc claim? So I relented and sent you that postcard which you said you understood. Did you?’

  ‘At the time I—thought I did.’

  ‘Then you must also have known what I wanted of you when poor old Gaston Vernier did his interrupting act? When I said to you “Come here”— that too you had understood ... Giroflee?’

  Maryan looked down at her hands. ‘Wh-what did you want?’

  There was a long beat of silence. Then, ‘To stake my claim,’ Raoul said softly.

  ‘A claim to me?’

  ‘To an exasperatingly elusive schoolgirl whom I’d had to teach how to kiss.’

  ‘That—that’s nonsense. I’m no schoolgirl!’

  ‘Agreed, not now. But you were, I think, when I gave you your original lesson in kissing. Around seventeen or so, at a guess?’

  Maryan’s heart gave a great thud, almost choking her before it quietened. ‘You mean you had known me; had recognised me from—that other time?

  He nodded, watching her through narrowed, amused eyes. ‘Of course, though the Leduc vanity was pretty badly stung when it seemed you hadn’t remembered me.’

  She blushed. ‘But I had! It was you who looked at—and then through—me.’

  ‘Only after you had looked through me,’ he retorted.

  ‘I didn’t! I was on the point of—But you guessed I knew later?’

  ‘Not for certain, though I was encouraged by the little frisson you gave when I called you mignonne again. Then I began to hope I had only to bide my time—’

  ‘To stake your claim, as you call it; to add me to the list of all the others who—?’

  ‘Who had kept me amused, as I hope I had entertained them, until you came back.’

  ‘How can you pretend that it mattered to you whether I came back or not? You aren’t merely amusing yourself with Ninon Barbe.’

  He frowned. ‘As you say, my business with Ninon has been something quite different; as hers has been with me. But that’s a story that can wait until—’

  He rose and came round the littered table to stand above her. A finger and thumb tilting her chin, he went on, ‘Until I try once more for the ... unattainable. You’ll allow me at least the attempt, mignonne?’

  But though with every nerve she longed to respond to him, she dared not, while the ugly reality of his distrust and injustice made a mockery of his appeal.

  She stiffened, not answering him, and as if he sensed her recoil he stood back and took another chair, though this time close at her side.

  ‘So—’ he said, ‘you make it clear the story must come first.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘The one I came to tell you tonight. You’ll remember I told you I came in search of you, not Lois.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘You weren’t listening. I had to come. I couldn’t wait. Though now—’ he gestured emptily, ‘I hardly know where to begin. It’s about Feu-Follet, of course; about your claim to it which Ninon assured me could be proved to be valid; that you knew it was, which was why you had stayed on, in order to continue your spying on the whole scene.’

  ‘And you believed her, rather than me!’

  ‘With some reason, until it proved otherwise. For one thing, there was your inexplicable failure to mention it. For another, Ninon’s private snoopers —not her regular firm of advocates—had turned up an early claim by a man named Vaile, which hadn’t been disproved, but which had escaped my own lawyers’ probe.’

  Maryan started. ‘Vaile? Yes, my great-grandfather. I remember now that at our first meeting Ninon questioned my name as being familiar, then said she had been mistaken. But th
at was only a verbal promise which was never carried out. My father had always refused to believe that it hadn’t made Feu-Follet rightly his, and to investigate his claim was why we came to Peyrolle that first time. Before he died, he made me promise to look into it further, but Maitre Druot was able to prove to me that it had no legal weight at all.’

  ‘Which surely he could also have proved to me— if you had let him?’ Raoul interposed.

  ‘I felt I had the right to expect that you would take my word,’ she said dully.

  ‘Too proud to parley, him? You’d let me go, rather than put me in the way of the truth? Charitable thinking, mignonne! Anyway, mightn’t you have relished the spectacle of its being forcibly fed to me?’

  ‘No, I—Besides, there was something else I didn’t—don’t—understand. Feu-Follet is yours. You have owned it for years. So what difference could one claim, ten, twenty, make to you now?’ Dread his reply or his evasion as she must, it was a question which had to be asked. She waited, almost holding her breath, saw Raoul’s crooked smile. ‘And that’s the story I came to tell,’ he said. ‘To begin with, do you know what is meant by “squatters’ rights”, I wonder?’

  Maryan stared. ‘I—think so. You mean—?’

  He nodded. ‘Just that. In other words—possession nine points of the law. Dogged keepers of deathbed promises, you and I, my love. You gave your father your word that you would claim Feu-Follet; I promised mine I would get it at all costs. Rash of me. Success had evaded him for years, and it evaded me, until I put it to my man of affairs that while he continued to look for its owners, I intended to walk in on the Plantage and take it over.’

  ‘Without owning it? What did your lawyer say?’

  ‘Affected to be shocked; washed his hands of all responsibility, but turned a blind eye.’

  ‘And—?’

  ‘Within weeks I had the place fenced, bulldozed, fertilised for the first of many times. The thing went on from there.’

  ‘But didn’t anyone question your sudden acquisition of it? Wasn’t there talk in the district?’

  Raoul shrugged. ‘Enough, I’ve no doubt. But we French are realists; more work for Jean-Paul and Pierre and Claude, and no one is going to look a pay-packet in the mouth. Officially though, it was accepted that I had the deeds all signed and sealed, and it took Ninon to decide to turn the screw when she found out that I hadn’t. The “business affairs” which brought her back to the district were, in fact, her secret on-the-spot investigations into my affairs, though I didn’t learn that for certain until yesterday.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘She told me herself, when I told her—Well, never mind for the moment what I told her. Enough that rage dragged it from her, a neat bomb-package which unfortunately exploded like a damp squib.’

  ‘She told you she knew you had usurped Feu-Follet without any legal rights to it?’

  Raoul nodded. ‘And threatened me with exposure. And appended a list of names of allegedly more rightful claimants—among them Vaile and another, Furneaux, which I happened to know, particularly as the Furneaux family’s claim was discovered by my lawyers, established as valid, and was redeemed by me nearly two years ago. In consequence, Ninon’s spies were just a shade out of date and touch.’

  Maryan’s eyes widened. ‘Redeemed? Then you bought in Feu-Follet? You really own it now?’

  ‘As it gave me some satisfaction to mention to Ninon. It wasn’t cheap. In fact, the price threatened to bankrupt the estate. But no one was grumbling. The Furneaux people—they had emigrated to America years ago—had a valuable property to sell, instead of a derelict swamp, and I gained a plantation under cultivation for six good years. All the same, I had to take certain steps to find the cash. I didn’t tell Lois so at the time, but as well as my idea of giving her a fresh start, temporarily at least, I couldn’t afford the staffing and upkeep of La Domaine. And when Ninon turned up offering a premium and a rental figure which I could hardly credit, naturally I didn’t turn her down. Her money was too good.’

  Maryan mused aloud, ‘And she was spying on you all the time. I don’t understand—She was your friend. You admired her. Lois hadn’t any doubt you meant to marry her.’

  Raoul tilted his head, as if in thought. ‘And do you know, I have a notion that was Ninon’s idea too? Such a pity she relied on her threat of exposure as the spur!’

  ‘But you might have done, if—?’

  ‘Never. Only a man as rich as Hercule Barbe was could afford Ninon, and only a fool would take her on her conception of marriage—as a glossy stage set in which she always plays the lead. No, thank you—this Leduc wouldn’t relish at all being “Madame X’s husband” to any woman. All of which I think Ninon may have begun to grasp even before I—’ He broke off. ‘Back to Square One. Don’t

  you want to know what it was I told her which sparked off her wrath?’

  ‘I—I’ve no right to ask.’

  ‘But you are dying to know, and I mean to tell you. I said, “I’m in love with Maryan Vaile. Entendu, she is only a Miss Workaday—your word for her, not mine; on your showing, she is a liar and a spy, but I still love her, and I’m prepared to sort out the rest. And you’re wrong—she is not just another of my passing fancies. I’ve loved her—without even knowing her—since she was a schoolgirl. And I love her because she is fresh and appears honest, even if she is not; because she loves France as a Frenchman’s daughter should; because Lois loves her and I respect Lois’s taste in people; because she giggles on cheap roundabouts, and when love happens to her, if it hasn’t already, it will put stars in her lovely eyes— Raoul paused. ‘A good speech, wouldn’t you say? Too good to waste on an exquisite like Ninon, to whom it wouldn’t mean a thing. But would you listen if I made it instead to you, mignonne?’

  As he knelt by her chair and reached for her hands, she glanced at him in shy wonder. ‘You could always try,’ she said.

  ‘Which bits would you like best to hear?’

  ‘If it’s true, about your having loved me ever since that first night on the Place—’

  ‘And you shall, I promise you, more than once. But even that, darling, wasn’t—this. Then I fell for a pretty girl, only half seen in darkness. My dreams and imagination had to fill her in. But you—known deeply now and loved, even sometimes against my will and my reason—you are all my future, all my hope. As I want to be yours—if you’ll take me for what I am. Will you?’

  Maryan took his face between her hands, withdrawn gently from his. ‘Does a Leduc have to ask?’ she teased.

  ‘Of a girl who hasn’t said she loves him—yes.’

  ‘And does this girl have to say it—in so many words?’

  For answer he snatched down her hands, bent his head and covered them with kisses. ‘Ah no,’ he said, ‘there’ll be time enough for words—for all the love words in the world that lovers use. But for now there are better ways—Come ...’

  He drew her to him; his arms went round her and for a long time the language of their searching, hungry lips and their little love-murmurs of delight in each other were eloquent enough. For Maryan even thought was drowned in sweet sensation; needing no more promise from Raoul than his kisses spoke of; knowing he understood that he had hers—for always.

  Even their quiet talk later, of mundane things, had a warm quality of contrast. Passion and desire would carry them to the heights again, they knew. But it would always be good to tread the lower levels too—the shared jokes and argument and ways-and-means of everyday.

  Raoul gently prodded the compact ball which was Mackerel, asleep on the hearth. ‘Between them, he and Feu-Follet fooled you completely?’ he asked.

  Maryan nodded and laughed. ‘Though they didn’t begin it. Blame the seabird first.’

  Raoul shook his head. ‘Not disposed to blame any poor dumb creature or even a bit of marsh-gas tonight,’ he said. And then, ‘When are you expecting Lois back?’

  ‘On an evening flight tomorrow.’

  ‘Th
en we’ll go to meet her, hand-in-hand. Would you like that?’

  She bent to brush his palm with her lips. ‘You know I would.’

  ‘Then we’ll do that, and on the way we’ll go shopping for a ring for you. When would you like to get married?’

  ‘Married? Oh—!’

  ‘Don’t look so shocked. It’s what logically comes next, isn’t it?’

  Maryan blushed. ‘But I shall have to work out my contract with Arnold first.’

  ‘He is getting Lois, isn’t he? Fair exchange. What makes you think Lois will come back with the whole thing settled?’ Raoul asked.

  She told him of Lois’s confidences on the night before she left and about her cryptic postcard from Rudesheim. Maryan concluded, ‘It’s the one thing I could have hoped and wished for either of them. And you?’

  ‘For Lois, certainly, if that’s what she wants. Early days yet to expect me to forgive the worthy Professor the bad times he’s given me over you. And so—when? Or must I bribe you by offering you a bathroom to yourself which I shan’t ask you to share with a hulking great Alsatian?’

  As they both laughed at that, the date for their marriage remained unfixed—a detail to be discussed and planned later on. Then Raoul glanced at his watch, stood and drew her to her feet. ‘Two things yet for me to do tonight,’ he said. ‘One for you.’ Maryan leaned against him, relaxed and happy. ‘What for me?’

  ‘To get ready for bed—where you should have been long since—while I go about my two. The first —to bring one of Ninon’s maids to spend the night here with you.’

  Maryan started back from him. ‘One of—? Raoul, you can’t! I won’t be beholden to—’

  ‘Calme-toi, Cherie! Ninon isn’t there any more.’

  ‘Not there—at the Domaine?’

  ‘No. After our scene, she left in a vixenish rage and on a broomstick, leaving bits of our contracts with each other to be picked up and tidied away by our respective lawyers. The staff she had is still there, clearing the house before they go too.’