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

by Natalie Meg Evans

  Her answer was to smack his hands away from the mouth of the hatch. ‘Even if I could drag Cyprien half a mile along a shaft,’ she yelled, ‘I’d be no good once I left it. They need a guide who knows the ways through the woods. I’d probably stumble into whoever was flashing that message. I’ll remain here.’

  To end up in Albert’s clutches? Part of her hoped so, so that viper could finally know how ruthless she could be. ‘Damn you, go!’ She dropped the trapdoor, forcing Henri to whip his fingers back and duck into the darkness. ‘I’ll find you!’ she yelled through the boards. ‘I love you.’

  Yvonne and Raymond started with the lightest of the barrels, but Raymond was spent and her hands were too slender to get a proper grip. She tore her fingernails as the wine sloshed inside the cask, threatening to upturn it. Any moment, they’d surely hear the hideous splintering as the Germans broke through the gatehouse. Any moment...

  Except they didn’t hear it. After a while, they crept out into the courtyard. ‘The geese have gone quiet,’ Raymond said.

  It was true. Still reluctant to believe they’d been victims of a false alarm, Yvonne whispered, ‘They might be creeping up on foot. I need to get to the woods, but can you lead me by the safest route?’

  Raymond took her through the stables into the vineyard, tracking through the rows with the confidence of a fox crossing its territory. It was such a clear night, anybody watching from a vantage point might have seen their flitting forms. But nobody challenged them, and there were no sounds of break-in or pursuit from the château either. Yvonne wondered if Raymond hadn’t perhaps mistaken a routine Milice night-patrol for a German advance.

  They learned more when they reached the highest ridge and looked over the château roofs towards the forest. Powerful lights that could only belong to military trucks stole the beauty of a near-full moon and exposed whole sections of forest.

  Yvonne cried out, ‘The convoy was going to the woods, not coming here. Oh, Raymond!’ Had the boy lingered another minute, he’d have seen the column pass by, and Henri would not have entered the tunnel. ‘We could have been safe out here, together. Oh, my poor Henri! What’s waiting for him?’

  He would come out of the tunnel, hampered by his injured fellows, and would be pinned down by lights. Only if he abandoned Jean-Claude and Cyprien and ran through the undergrowth like a wild boar had he a chance. Those woods were his back garden…

  Rattling gun fire from the woods cut hope dead. On and on it went, like muffled like firecrackers. ‘Someone brought the enemy to us.’

  ‘We know who,’ Raymond whispered. ‘Monsieur knew too, but what could he do? Kill his own kin?’

  Under the pure moon, they stood hand in hand, helpless witnesses to a brother’s treachery.

  Shauna spoke in weary continuation of Yvonne’s grief. ‘Albert signalled to the Germans, then made himself scarce. Five men paid and he’s spent the last sixty years blaming a woman.’

  Laurent’s doubts had vanished too. ‘Yvonne melted away into the dark. With her gone, Albert could pervert the story any way he wished.’ They were sitting with their backs to the commemoration stone, slumped like two rucksacks left at a bus stop.

  ‘Why didn’t Raymond speak out?’ Shauna asked. She felt Laurent shrug.

  ‘In a tiny community, silence is sometimes necessary for survival. Raymond would want to protect his family, and Audrey’s, and the children of course. I don’t really know how he got through the war, but I know he eventually went to work for the Valles, married Audrey and took over his father-in-law’s farm. Only when his eldest son took over in his turn did Raymond ever come back here, to work for my father. Have you noticed, Raymond never comes near the château? He works only in the chai.’

  ‘Your father, Pierre-Gaston, was the baby Audrey carried away to safety?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Who had the tower window blocked up?’

  ‘Isabelle. She inherited a share of the château from her father, and chose the part where the geese had been kept. Well, you know she has a quirky eye for design. She saw possibilities nobody else did. While she was having her apartment converted, she got the mason to block up the west-facing tower window. She said she never wanted to look out on the woods where her father had died.’

  Shauna mused out loud, ‘No wonder Albert was agitated when Monty Watson came asking questions.’ She reached above her head, stroking the stone which was slick with dew. ‘“Casse-toi!”’ Get lost!

  Laurent got stiffly to his feet, reaching to pull Shauna up. ‘There are five names on this stone.’

  ‘I’ll have Yvonne’s name added even if I have to carve it myself. Let’s get home and under a hot shower.’ Her lungs felt shrunken, her heart loaded with pity.

  But Laurent lingered. ‘Something doesn’t add up. Why are Michel Paulin and Luc Roland’s names there at all? They weren’t at Chemignac on the night of the escape, nor in the tunnel with Henri. They couldn’t all have died in the same massacre.’

  Shauna tried to answer, but her mind had run out of battery. As they plodded across the meadow and saw the château tower through the dawn, she muttered, ‘If Yvonne hadn’t put that dress on, Isabelle wouldn’t have flipped and pulled the picture down—’

  ‘And Yvonne wouldn’t have glimpsed the lamp in the woods that was returning Albert’s signal. They’d have been sleeping when the Germans came for them. Dragged from their beds and hurled into the backs of trucks, taken to interrogation centres, even the children. Raymond and Audrey would have been tortured along with the adults. In Audrey and Yvonne’s case, likely raped too. Don’t you see, Shauna? That night at least, the Gown of Thorns saved lives. It saved Chemignac.’

  After standing under a steaming shower until the tank ran out of hot water, Shauna and Laurent drank coffee and ate their way through a mound of toast. They then parted.

  He was anxious to get to the chai to test the temperatures of yesterday’s pressing. Shauna made her way up the tower. In the top room, she took out the Gown of Thorns. Holding it in front of her, she addressed it directly.

  ‘“Never forgive, never forget”, right? I don’t know if you are a force for evil or for good, or somewhere in between, but we need a resolution. Albert may be frail and old, but surely he should answer for what he did? Oh, and I want to marry Laurent, but I don’t intend to be another of Chemignac’s victims. Got that?’

  She laid the dress on the bed. Nodded at it and went out, deliberately leaving the door open behind her.

  The Cabernet Sauvignon vines were picked clean in just under three days. All that was left now was a half-hectare of white Muscadelle and Semillon, hanging in the hope of a vendange tardive, a late ‘noble rot’ harvest. Chemignac’s 2003 vendange was declared officially over.

  The trestles were out in a long line in the meadow. It all looked to Shauna like a scene from a Thomas Hardy novel. Having first phoned Isabelle in Paris to ask permission, she’d raided the cupboards for table linen, choosing the embroidered napkins that Isabelle had been ironing the day she fell and knocked herself out. Each place setting had a spray of wild flowers, two glasses and a violet napkin folded like a yacht sail. The children had blown up pink and purple balloons – not very Hardyesque, admittedly – which bobbed on silver ribbons along the length of the tables. Seating was straw bales and a fire bowl had just been lit a safe distance off. Later, there would be dancing. Monty Watson had organised a local folk band to come and play.

  Audrey and her neighbours had spent the day cooking and the buffet tables creaked under traditional fare. The brazier that had been Shauna’s idea spat and sizzled with hamburgers and chicken drumsticks. In a moment, the fly covers would be whipped off the food and thirty or so workers, neighbours and friends would dig in. All they were waiting for was their host and the gerbeboade, the wreath whose appearance marked a successful harvest-home. Laurent had woven it from the last vine of the last row, making a figure-of-eight of leaves and purple grape clusters. Every woman present had kiss
ed him, and the men had slapped him on the back. Set on a pole, this pagan garland would preside over the feast.

  Rachel was bringing it in the pony cart and the two oldest harvesters were riding with her – Madame Guilhem and Albert de Chemignac.

  Rachel’s veiled threat of staging a competing feast had come to nothing. She’d mentioned it again on the last-but-one day of harvest, in Laurent’s hearing. In a teasing drawl that nevertheless carried a clear embargo, he’d said, ‘As you like, Rachel, but it’ll be like putting on a puppet show with the full Broadway cast of Chicago making a guest appearance in the next field. Of course, you may like eating sausages on your own…’

  Rachel had laughed and said, ‘I was only kidding. Do I look like a woman who needs to impress people with her cooking?’

  Shauna was watching for Laurent, wanting him at her side. She was regretting her one-sided conversation with the Gown of Thorns. Of course she didn’t believe in curses, or the raising of evil spirits, but she had no doubts now that human existence was more than the linear progression from A to B. It was more like a complex concerto, with many lines of music playing at the same time, all in slightly different time signatures. She and Laurent had discovered how to jump from line to line. They had melded minds with Henri and Yvonne. And if that could happen, then anything could happen.

  She was anxious too because, with the harvest over, the clock was ticking. Nico and Olive were itching now to get back to Paris and, unless she had a meaningful invitation from Laurent to stay, she’d also have to go. No – who was she kidding about ‘meaningful invitations’? She wanted red roses and Laurent down on one knee. Either she took his name, the name of this place, and lived out the happiness stolen from Yvonne and Henri, or she quit. And if she quit, the next generation of lovers would have to mend Chemignac’s wounds. Last night, she’d dreamed again of Yvonne. Not the fiery beauty who had stolen Henri’s heart. A frail, wrinkled Yvonne whose face had swum up to hers and whose lips left these words in her ear:

  ‘Brave, aren’t you? A life for a life, that seems to be how it works. Henri gave his for me. What would you do?’

  A cheer went up nearby. Someone shouted, ‘They’re coming,’

  Shauna stood on tiptoe and saw Nico and Olive hurtling towards the chai. The cart would come that way and Raymond, who would not trespass on the meadows, not even for a feast, would hand over a pitcher of fresh-pressed juice. Just as Shauna thought she saw Laurent’s muscular outline, a glint of metal between the branches of the walnut avenue stole her attention. A silver saloon car was gliding up the drive. It looked like a Mercedes. Monty’s band, coming in style? Actually, it looked like the station taxi, the one she’d tried to get into the day she arrived.

  It progressed slowly up the avenue before disappearing between the walls of the gatehouse. She forgot about it then because here was the cart, pulled by the faithful white pony. Someone had entwined flowers and vine leaves in the creature’s mane. Rachel sat on the driver’s seat, with Laurent walking alongside carrying the gerbeboade on its lance.

  Rachel’s toffee-coloured arms were elegantly extended, the reins relaxed in her hands. Queen of the harvest, she was wearing the Gown of Thorns. Laurent was staring up her like a man smitten.

  Shauna’s world tipped upside down. Adão came to stand beside her, and in broken English he said, ‘We are the left-behind ones. Each season, Laurent takes a new love and Rachel too. I am told that, whoever they use in the beginning, they always end up together.’

  ‘Who told you so?’ she rasped, but Adão’s insistent gaze was back on Rachel. The Delphos gown made the perfect foil for her shape, every proud inch of her exaggerated by its pleats. Is it true? Shauna wondered. Every year Laurent unceremoniously dumps his ‘harvest girl’ and returns to Rachel? Maybe this crowd had seen it a dozen times before.

  People were gathering around the cart, helping down its elderly passengers. A throne had been made out of straw bales, decorated with garlands of greenery and purple balloons. The seat of honour was intended for Madame Guilhem, but Albert took it, folding his arms in defiance.

  Madame Guilhem protested, ‘I’m the eldest. That is my place.’

  Audrey added her voice. ‘That’s right. Monsieur de Chemignac, that seat is reserved for the oldest of the harvesters. That’s not you.’

  ‘Not for a few more years,’ Madame Guilhem agreed. ‘You can have it when I’m gone.’

  But Albert stayed put. Shauna glanced at Laurent, who was surely the proper person to mediate. But he was helping Rachel down from the cart seat, and she was sliding into his arms like a knife returning to its sheath. Shauna would have run then, had she not been stayed by somebody who had approached unseen.

  ‘Gotcha!’

  She was clasped from behind by arms clad in a bright cotton print. Instantly, she smelled a scent as familiar as childhood. Soapflakes and wool, talcum powder and cooking spices. Hair soft as angora tickled the nape of her neck and she shouted, ‘Mum! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to find out if my runaway child is still alive.’ The arms relaxed and Shauna turned round with a cry. Bundled in unmatched layers, white curls piled up any-old-how, Elisabeth Vincent could have been air-dropped from her Sheffield kitchen. Unusually for her, she exuded an energy that seemed to electrify her to the tips of her crystal chip earrings. ‘So you’re now a vendangeuse, tried and true. And a little bird has been telling me you’ve fallen in love. Do I get to meet the poor sap?’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ Shauna dissolved, hiding her sobs in Elisabeth’s hand-crocheted waistcoat. It made an effective tissue, but Elisabeth wasn’t inclined to indulge her daughter.

  She pulled a silk square from a pocket and wiped away Shauna’s tears. ‘Whatever’s gone wrong, you had no business hiding away all this time. You’ve been like a ship, sending out an S.O.S. before vanishing into a fog bank. And your beloved has a question or two to answer. Fancy telling people you’ve gone away to loiter in Place Pigalle!’

  ‘Mum? You’re making no sense.’ Was this the Gown of Thorns’ doing – the loss of Laurent’s love, and now her mother apparently raving?

  ‘I’m not the only one who wants a frank talk with you and Comte Laurent de Chemignac.’ Elisabeth Vincent pointed. Shauna looked. Progressing across the meadow were two people she could never have imagined together outside a bizarre dream. Isabelle Duval, heavily reliant on her stick, and supporting her stronger side, Professor Mike Ladriss.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Elisabeth couldn’t tell Shauna what her university professor was doing here, other than that she’d overheard him at Garzenac station, asking directions to Chemignac. They’d shared the station taxi. However, Elisabeth did quickly explain how she came to be here.

  A few days ago, she said, she’d taken a desperate phone call from Isabelle in Neuilly-sur-Seine, from the landing outside her daughter and son-in-law’s flat. Isabelle had just arrived home by taxi from the hospital where she’d spent hours sitting by Louette’s bed. Exhausted, she’d discovered her son-in-law had double-locked the door and she couldn’t get in. It was the third time that week it had happened.

  With his wife ‘as well as could be expected’ but showing no signs of recovery, Hubert’s visits to the hospital had become fewer. He would drive Isabelle there in the morning, promising to pick her up at lunchtime, only to disappear all day, his phone switched off. ‘In the end,’ Elisabeth said, ‘Isabelle got it out of him that he’d gone back to work, but was too guilty about it to tell her. And he expected her to keep house for him too, cook and do the washing. Poor thing was at the end of her rope. She could hardly manage the steps from the apartment lobby to the street.’

  Elisabeth had booked a flight to Paris straight away. ‘I didn’t ask Hubert’s permission to move in. I told him so, and I said, “I’m not sure which of you needs the carer the most, you or Isabelle.” He didn’t put up a fight. Then yesterday, Isabelle announced, ‘I want to sit down at Chemignac’s feast. I want to see my gra
ndchildren, Laurent and Shauna too.’ So, we booked our travel and here we are!’

  Isabelle and Mike had joined them by now. People swarmed forward to hug Isabelle and express their astonishment at her appearance. There was a presumption it must mean that Louette was recovered, and Shauna heard Isabelle dashing hopes, insisting that, sadly, her daughter was still in a coma. ‘She is stable. That’s all they say. Stable. Ah, mes petits sauvages!’ She opened her arms for her grandchildren. Mike, meanwhile, had spotted Shauna.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded. Shauna saw what her mother had meant about a ‘frank conversation.’ Mike Ladriss exuded frankness as he beetled at her through his thick-framed glasses. ‘I gave up messaging you, Shauna, so I thought I’d try and find you in person. That job with Cademus came free.’

  ‘Oh. I know.’ She closed her eyes as a wave of guilt broke over her.

  ‘You know?’

  ‘I only got your message a few days ago. Somebody found it on the fax machine, and instead of giving it to me, they . . . sort of lost it.’

  ‘What stopped you calling me when you did finally get the message?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Pathetic answer! She was meant to be a career scientist on a trajectory to success. She should have phoned Mike the moment Rachel confessed what she’d done. The truth? Shauna didn’t want to go back to England and work in a sprawling corporation. She wanted to be here, only here. Shame burnt her cheeks. ‘I would have called you, once harvest was done.’

  Mike looked mightily unconvinced. Elisabeth, who had re-joined them, appeared equally sceptical, saying, ‘You used to check your phone every three minutes at home. I’d hide the blessed thing in a drawer sometimes, just for some peace. Professor Ladriss showed me a message implying that you’d gone to Paris. To ‘hang out’. It wasn’t a pleasant thing for a mother to read, Shauna, but I told him it was a prank.’