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

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘I like the sound of lunch. Not sure about the rest,’ Shauna grumbled. So much for steering him away from his fixation.

  He held out his hand to her and, a moment later, was striding up the hill to the café, his long legs forcing her to run.

  Monty’s place was fuller than she’d ever seen it before. A group of young men had pulled tables together, creating a noisy island in the middle of the floor. They were barracking one of their number as he tapped away at a laptop. Shauna couldn’t quite work out what language they were speaking until one of them recognised Laurent and called out ‘Olá!’ Spanish, she presumed.

  Laurent stopped, and enthusiastic hand-shaking and shoulder-slapping followed.

  ‘They’re here for the harvest,’ he said, after they’d secured themselves a laptop and found a quiet table outside beneath the courtyard pergola. ‘The same families come year on year and you get to know them. We get a real international brigade. Australians, New Zealanders, Moroccans and some Spaniards.’

  ‘I thought they were Spanish.’

  ‘Portuguese. The man I was speaking to, Adão, has come to Chemignac every September since I took over. He wanted to know if Rachel was working for me still.’

  ‘Hm. I thought I heard her name being mentioned.’ Shauna disguised her distrust by picking up the menu, burying her face in it. ‘Shall I ask for the house special?’

  ‘Yes, you choose.’

  She went back inside to order two salads with warm Cabécou goat’s cheese and a savoury tart, bringing back bottled water and a half carafe of wine. She found Laurent clicking his knuckles impatiently while the laptop’s modem buzzed and whistled. It was a slow system, very different from the fast wireless connection Shauna was used to at university. She pulled up a chair next to Laurent.

  Once a connection was made, he typed the words ‘Yvonne, SOE, France, 1943’ into a search engine. He scrolled down a long list of articles until he found a piece about a British agent called Yvonne Rudellat. A closer reading revealed that this was not the ‘Yvonne’ they were looking for, but a much older agent, captured in northern France and who died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944. Typing in ‘Yvonne, Chemignac, Sturridge, Barnsley’ brought up an article by Monty Watson which attempted to shed light on the Chemignac forest execution. ‘Five men, their bodies strewn about a peaceful clearing,’ read the introduction. Other sites mentioned the same names, but as Laurent read them out, it became clear that they were simply parroting Monty’s research. Nowhere was there a mention of a female SOE agent in connection with Chemignac.

  ‘If Monty couldn’t find Yvonne, what makes you think we can?’ Shauna poured water and a glass of wine each. ‘Like I said before, chances are she got killed too, or was caught and deported. I mean, next to being a fighter pilot, being an SOE agent in occupied territory was about the shortest-lived wartime occupation going. Or perhaps there wasn’t an Yvonne at all.’

  ‘There was,’ Laurent said with absolute assurance. ‘My father spoke of her – from hearsay only, as he was a child of three in ’43, but Isabelle told him a little about her. “A flame-haired English girl whom Father hid from the Germans, in the tower.”’

  ‘Romantic. Very.’ Shauna recalled the sorrow haunting the tower room.

  ‘And another proof – Albert.’

  ‘You said he denied knowing anything about Yvonne.’

  ‘Exactly. My uncle proves her existence by refuting it. I mean, if somebody doesn’t exist, why insist upon it? He shouts, “There was no Yvonne” until he’s had a bottle of wine, then he rants, “That Englishwoman. That rouquine.”’

  ‘“Rouquine”?’ she prompted.

  Laurent ruffled her hair. ‘Like you.’

  ‘Ah. The curse of the red. Maybe the next time he’s halfway into a bottle, I’ll dress up in 1940s clothes and scare the truth out of him. Or perhaps we should just ask Isabelle. She knows far more than she’s told us.’ Shauna wasn’t sure what prompted her to say that. It just felt true.

  Monty arrived with their food. In his late forties, hair tied back in a scrappy ponytail, wearing a faded T-shirt advertising the tour dates of a 1970s heavy metal band, he projected the image of a retired rocker who had somehow ended up running an internet café. Which, by his own admission, summed him up. Pulling up a chair, he began chatting in English, asking Laurent about the prospects for this year’s harvest, and Shauna about her job-hunting.

  ‘Still sore about losing out to that posh totty?’

  It took a moment for her to get his meaning. ‘You mean Allegra Boncasson? Er, no, not really.’ It was beginning to feel like ancient history, her bitterness over being replaced at Cademus by a leggier science grad. Laurent looked up from the laptop.

  ‘What’s this? Who is Cademus?’

  ‘They’re a European pharma company, trailblazing new cancer treatments,’ she told him. ‘I was going to be on a project isolating antioxidants in berries – including grape skins, ironically.’

  ‘And Chemignac is keeping you from this?’ Laurent looked wounded.

  ‘I didn’t get the job, and actually’ – she gave her feelings a quick temperature check – ‘I’m resigned to it.’

  Monty changed the subject by asking Shauna about her home town. Though originally from the south of England, he’d knocked around Sheffield for a couple of years, he told her. ‘I went to drama school and only a northern college would do. I felt the north was more “real” somehow.’ Only, he’d dropped out before his third year.

  ‘To be an actor or not to be an actor, that was the question,’ he said in a plummy stage voice. He rolled a cigarette but didn’t light it, having established at their first meeting that Shauna detested smoking. ‘’Fraid the family acting dynasty ended with me. From somewhere I inherited stage fright.’ His eyes crinkled at some unpleasant memory. ‘Dropped out and became a roadie with a rock band. I spent the next twenty years becoming intimate with the A1, the M1 and all major roads in between.’

  Out of nowhere, Shauna said, ‘Monty’s not your real name.’

  ‘Right. It’s Maurice. Try having that in the early sixties. I’d tell the other kids at school it was “Morris” to rhyme with “Horace”, and they’d still call me “Maureece”.’

  ‘Because you’re part French.’

  ‘Well spotted. Half French, half English.’

  ‘You’re the agent Maurice Barnsley’s…?’

  ‘Nephew. He was my darling mum’s big brother. So, Miss Marple, tell me why I washed up in this place?’

  ‘Closure. You came to investigate Barnsley’s death.’

  Monty shrugged. ‘My mum needed to know what happened. She and her brother were French-born, but they moved to the port of Dover when their mother married an English sailor. When war started, my uncle Maurice was recruited by SOE because he’d stayed bilingual. Not because he was a trained soldier or a seasoned spy, but because he could pass for French in France. They dropped him out of a bloody plane into God knows what. Twenty-one years old, beaten with the butt-end of a gun and shot to—’ He stopped. Whether to spare Shauna or himself, she couldn’t tell. ‘I wanted to find out more. But, hey, I liked this place so much, I stayed.’

  Laurent, who had followed the exchange in silence, said, ‘You have put down roots here, but you still don’t really know why Maurice Barnsley died. Only how.’

  ‘True enough. I’m hanging on for the last piece of the jigsaw. Too late for Mum, she passed away last year.’ Monty reached for the empty wine carafe. ‘I still need to know how he and the others ended up in Chemignac forest, surrounded by Gestapo.’ He pushed back his chair as Laurent powered down the laptop and closed its lid.

  Laurent said, ‘They were betrayed, twice. On arrival, by an informant, possibly one within the Resistance circuit. They got away that time and were spirited into hiding by my grandfather. They laid low for a while before being sold out to the Gestapo. Same informant, or a different one? Answer that and you have the missing piece of your jigsaw.’ />
  Monty picked up the laptop, tucking it under his arm. ‘I’ll leave you to finish your lunch. Give me a shout if you need a refill.’ He stopped, a foot each side of the doorway. ‘When I interviewed Monsieur Albert de Chemignac, he told me to get lost. Casse-toi! But as I was leaving, he shouted after me that “It was a girl that did it.” A redheaded female who couldn’t keep her hands off—’

  ‘My grandfather?’ Laurent supplied.

  ‘Off the “Gown of Thorns”. Those were his words. A girl did it. Cherchez la femme.’ Monty gave Shauna a wink.

  She took Monty’s chair so she could face Laurent. For a moment, she struggled with the desire to up-end their table and send their lunch crashing onto the paving slabs. Laurent saw it coming and grabbed the table’s rim. His cough of warning brought her back to herself, though her voice throbbed as she cried, ‘It damn well wasn’t Yvonne. I’ll prove it!’

  ‘Good luck.’ Monty Watson had not moved from the doorway. ‘But you won’t find Yvonne online, or in any archive. I’ve been searching for five years, right? I found documents in London listing her as one of three agents dropped into Chemignac during the last week of June, 1943. But after that – alakazam!’ He flourished an imaginary wand. ‘Vanished.’

  And who could blame her, Shauna thought as Monty sloped off. I’d vanish if the world blamed me for sending five men to a horrible death. She dropped her forehead onto her hands.

  ‘Shauna?’

  ‘Monty can’t find Yvonne because he’s looking in the wrong place.’

  ‘And where is the right place?’

  Shauna raised her head and looked around to check that Monty really had gone. ‘Chemignac, of course.’

  ‘Go on.’ But Laurent’s mobile phone rang and he answered it, his voice changing from mildly impatient to anxious. ‘All right, Tante Isabelle. Yes, yes. She’ll come home right away. Yes – I mean it. She’s on her way.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You must drive home. I’ll get a lift back with the delivery van.’ Louette’s cleaning spree had reached the wardrobe in the tower room, he explained. ‘She’s brought all the dresses down, accusing her mother of storing them badly. The only way to preserve them, Louette says, is to donate them to a museum. She knows the curator of a costume gallery – well, she knows everybody! Albert is backing Louette because he wants the dresses gone. Isabelle is distraught. Please go and help.’

  ‘I’m not family! It’s not for me to decide.’

  He looked at her, hurt, then took her hands in a grip too tight for comfort. ‘“Not family”? Shauna, if you want to leave Chemignac and me, then say. I would never hold you back from your career – I hate men who do that! What you were saying to Monty about medical research, well, that’s more important than anything I can offer. Just know that you are everything to me. But if your future is not here, if you’re looking elsewhere…’ He gave a lost shrug. ‘Say so.’

  Emotion sped through her, but she chose not to deepen the conversation right now. Let them return to it later, in the moonlight, in private. Then she’d let him know exactly how she wanted her future to look. Reaching for her bag, she said briskly, ‘If Louette intends to have her own way, she’s unlikely to listen to me.’

  Laurent shook his head. ‘You don’t understand – I want Louette to take those dresses, the Gown of Thorns most of all. I’m on her side and – for once – Albert’s. You knew in the tower room that something about that dress horrifies me. It infects our family. It rips us apart. Isabelle won’t let it go, but she might if you add your voice.’

  Shauna spread her hands in a hopeless gesture. ‘It’s a purple dress. Gorgeous and no doubt valuable. But only a dress.’

  ‘Not “only”.’ Laurent briefly closed his eyes, then opened them again with all uncertainty erased. ‘You are either our salvation or our nemesis, Shauna Vincent. You are the only person in three generations to wear the Gown of Thorns and come to no harm from it. I am putting my money on salvation. Please – go to Chemignac.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  As Shauna drove out of Garzenac, stalling several times as she gained familiarity with the 2CV’s dashboard gear stick, Louette Barends regarded herself in her full-length bedroom mirror. She skimmed her figure in self-loathing. The spreading waistline and heavy breasts she disguised with well-cut jackets and tunics were mercilessly revealed by the Gown of Thorns. It hugged her contours without compassion.

  Really, it was an insult to wear it. Whatever mystical name they gave it within the family should not obscure the fact that it was a rare, genuine, Delphos gown by Fortuny. It deserved a beautiful form to show it off. Curvy little Shauna would look delightful in it, and that cold-eyed queen bee who tended the horses would be transformed by it. One day, it might even suit Olive…

  ‘No. Never! You won’t poison another generation.’

  Some ten days ago on the night of the August full moon, Louette had crept into the tower bedroom on naked feet. Like an alcoholic breaking a pledge of sobriety, she’d rifled the wardrobe, wrinkling her nose at the grassy-musty scent. Every time she came to Chemignac, she sprayed patchouli vapour over the dresses to keep the moths away, even though the smell made her gag.

  This morning, spurred by her imminent departure, she’d emptied the wardrobe of its contents and brought them here to her room. It had taken three trips up and down, and Audrey, who’d come into the kitchen, had caught her at it. Audrey had alerted Maman, who in turn had indulged in histrionics before phoning Laurent and summoning Shauna home to act as intermediary.

  Intermediary to what, though? The dresses draped across Louette’s bed were not Isabelle’s property. By Isabelle’s own admission, they were family treasures, and so just as much Louette’s as anybody’s. Could Maman even be trusted with them, considering her poor track record of conserving couture items?

  Just as she, Louette, had emptied the wardrobe in the tower, Maman used to empty her own wardrobes in the Paris house when Louette was a child. She’d do it in advance of a soirée or a diplomatic reception, a gown at a time. ‘This one? Or this one?’ She’d hurl them onto her huge, white bed, as if they bored or disgusted her. ‘Teal or gold? Sage or ivory? Which would you choose, Louette?’ That was when her mother still had her dresses made for her by the best Paris salons. Louette would try desperately to make a selection that would earn her a kiss. Gawky even as a child, she’d so envied her mother’s whip-thin figure. She’d so wanted to be like Maman. It wasn’t right, was it, for a little girl to judge herself against her own mother?

  After Papa died, and the parties stopped, Maman’s dresses had been sold. Louette had been allowed to try them on before they went to the dealer – until she tore a Balenciaga gown by stepping on the hem. She’d missed the special privilege of being allowed into her mother’s dressing room. ‘Which would you choose, Louette?’

  ‘Gold, Maman.’

  ‘Perfect. Gold it shall be.’

  Why had things changed? Deep within Louette’s psyche lurked the horrible certainty that it was her own fault that life had altered so radically. Papa dying, Maman having to go out to work, she to boarding school, their intimacy fracturing. Her fault.

  Aged ten, during a holiday at Chemignac, Louette had discovered the wardrobe in the tower. Without questioning why, she’d reached for the amethyst gown, dropping it over her head, pirouetting until the pleats belled around her legs. Somehow, she’d known she was doing something forbidden and that it would end badly and indeed, her mother had come up looking for her.

  ‘Take it off!’ The voice from the doorway had been more a cat’s hiss than a woman’s. ‘That is a family heirloom, and priceless. Get it off, now!’

  Louette had quaked in shame as her mother slammed the cupboard door on the dress. Louette had expected to be marched down the steps by the ear, but her mother had fallen silent for a disturbingly long time. At last, she’d turned to Louette. ‘The Gown of Thorns isn’t mine, you see. It was made for my grandmother, but my mother c
laimed it as her own. Her favourite dress.’

  ‘Why is it called the Gown of Thorns?’

  ‘Never mind that. You must not touch it, because it brings death.’

  Louette had burst into tears then, believing she was doomed to die. Well, she hadn’t died, but she had developed tonsillitis within days. No ordinary tonsillitis either, but an aggressive form that led to weeks in the local hospital. It had changed her voice, and she’d never caught up with her schoolwork. Held down a year, she’d then developed psoriasis, a painful skin condition which had taken years to overcome. One minute’s romantic self-indulgence and her life had ricocheted in a new direction. A bright, high achiever, she’d become a mediocre student, prone to depression. Look at her now – a jobbing translator when she could have been a diplomat or a politician. The Gown of Thorns brings death. So, why this mania to feel it against her flesh?

  Louette stared at herself in the glass, then over her shoulder at the steamer trunk she’d brought down and which lay open on her bed. In a moment, she’d snap the clasps shut. Once she was back home, she’d call her friend at the Musée de la Mode and discuss donating the entire haul. Together, those dresses represented a microcosm of French couture between the wars. It would be a crime not to ensure their preservation.

  She stroked the corrugated silk. This dress had outlived two of its owners. The first, Louette’s maternal great-grandmother, had died in the 1920s after giving birth to Albert, her last child. Its second owner, Louette’s grandmother Marie-Louise, had died following a trip to Paris with the Gown of Thorns in her luggage. Reason rebelled against the idea of a dress being cursed, and yet, and yet… Louette touched her throat, recalling the pain of those childhood quinsies. Or peritonsillar abscesses, to give them their correct medical term. She might easily have succumbed to sepsis had it not been for modern antibiotics.