‘But that’s wonderful!’ Andrea forgot other worries momentarily in her pleasure for her uncle who had given so much of his time for children’s charities in recent years. ‘And of course, I won’t mention it to a soul. Is it definite?’
‘Almost, I would say,’ her aunt conceded smilingly. ‘As long as nothing happens to spoil it for him.’ She sighed. ‘That’s one of the reasons I’m so delighted about Clare. Your uncle’s very old-fashioned in some ways, you know, and he has very strong views on the honours system and all it stands for. He wouldn’t countenance anything that might bring it into disrepute. And I’ve always known that if Clare had ever done anything really—foolish, something that might cause a public scandal—these gossip columnists can be quite unscrupulous, dear—then he wouldn’t accept the knighthood.’
‘You can’t be serious.’ Andrea stared at her aunt, her brows wrinkled frowningly. ‘Uncle Max can’t still regard himself as responsible for Clare’s dottiness. She’s a grown woman.’
Aunt Marian gave a slight smile. ‘If she were a grandmother, I don’t think it would alter his attitude in the slightest degree. He doesn’t approve of this decline in morals they talk about. He feels people in public life should set an example—he always has done.’ She sighed. ‘Of course, I’ve never breathed a word of this to Clare herself. I didn’t want to burden her with that kind of responsibility, but I don’t know whether I was right. Anyway, she’s found Peter, so I no longer have any worries on that score.’
Andrea looked at her aunt for a long moment, registering the air of serenity that hung almost tangibly about her. Could she really sit back and see that destroyed? she thought despairingly. Clare was a fool, but marriage to Peter might be the salvation of her, after all.
She got up, forcing a smile.
‘Excuse me, will you? I’ve just remembered—there’s something I have to tell Clare.’
Andrea pulled the car into the side of the road, applied the brakes and sat for a moment with her eyes closed. Then she twisted round in her seat and stared back grimly, assimilating almost with disbelief the road she had just ascended.
The late October sun hung low over the valley, and she could see the road like a thin white ribbon winding along the valley side, disappearing at intervals into sheltering clumps of bare trees. On one side of her there had been a towering wall of forbidding black rock, on the other an unfenced drop down to the gleam of the river far below her. She was thankful that the long drive from Paris had given her a chance to at least familiarise herself with the car before she was faced with these conditions, and she had clung to the wheel with grim determination as she mounted through a succession of hairpin bends, praying she would not meet anything coming in the opposite direction.
She looked at the heavy clouds massing in the west and grimaced. All during the drive, the weather had been perfect—golden and autumnal. She had put to the back of her mind all the things she had heard about Auvergne—a place of storms, she’d read somewhere, where the weather was eternally in conflict with itself. Judging by those clouds, war would soon be declared once again!
She reached for her road map and sat studying it, her brows furrowed slightly. Blaise Levallier was making few concessions to his future wife, she thought, asking her to make her own way to this inaccessible place. In itself, this seemed to contain an element of warning, silently conveying the amount of courage and self-sufficiency it would require to survive in this bleak mountain region with its dead volcanoes, and buildings that seemed to have been hewn from solid lava. Yet, in spite of her nervousness, Andrea had to acknowledge its strange compelling beauty. And of course, she told herself, she was not going to be asked to survive here. She gave a slight mischievous grin as she imagined what Clare, a nervous driver at the best of times, would have said when confronted with the valley road she had just traversed. That might have been one way of solving the problem, she thought, stifling her mirth. How would the unknown Blaise Levallier have coped with a bride who applied her handbrake and stubbornly refused to budge? Anyone as determined as he seemed to be would probably have hired a tractor from one of the hill farms and had her dragged to St Jean des Roches.
She sobered slightly as she put her map away. She had only a few kilometres to go to her destination, and the thought was singularly unappealing. A warning voice inside her seemed to be saying it still wasn’t too late to turn the car around and drive back to the comparative sanity of Clermont-Ferrand. She could leave the car there and get a train back to Paris. If Clare had been her sole consideration in all this, she might just have done it, she thought as she re-started the car.
She had made that brutally clear to Clare as well, not just that first night when she had reluctantly agreed to go to St Jean des Roches in her cousin’s place, but during the subsequent discussions that had taken place. Clare seemed convinced that the incriminating papers would be quite easy to find, but Andrea was not so sure.
‘Ask to see them,’ Clare had suggested. ‘Say you’re not too sure about the wording—oh, you’ll think of something.’
‘I’ll have to,’ Andrea conceded rather drily.
She had read Blaise Levallier’s letters, especially the last one, a dozen times, until she felt every word was imprinted on her memory, and as she read, a slow anger was kindled. Who was this man who thought he could threaten the people she loved and damage their happiness and well-being with impunity? He was simply not going to get away with it. Clare might have been an utter fool, but at least she had seen the error of her ways in time, and he should have had the decency to release her from the ludicrous promise she had made him when she asked him to. Was he so unfeeling that the thought of life with a girl he had literally forced into marriage and for whom he could have no emotional attachment could actually seem tolerable?
If so, his reasons for wanting this hasty marriage must be extremely cogent ones. She had questioned Clare closely about them, but Clare had destroyed the earlier correspondence with him long ago, and was aggravatingly vague about their contents. She maintained, however, that he had not been at all specific, except about the urgency of his need for a wife at least on paper. That he had said it was ‘a legal necessity’ was almost all Clare could recall. Andrea had brooded about those words, but they still conveyed very little to her. She had also tried to probe further into the reasons for Martine’s family’s strong disapproval of their distant cousin, but she’d met with no more success here. The most Martine’s parents had let drop were veiled hints, Clare said. But if he regularly made a habit of blackmailing people to get his own way, he was far from being a desirable connection for the eminently respectable Montcours, Andrea thought.
The more she considered what lay ahead of her, the more her apprehension grew. She must be as crazy as Clare to imagine she could get away with this. Just what kind of a man was she going to find waiting for her at St Jean des Roches? she asked herself. Apart from being simply undesirable, had he been guilty of some crime, that he was so reluctant to show his face in more civilised places, and had to find himself a wife by correspondence? And if he was such a villain, what chance did she have to outface him? Andrea sighed. It had never seemed more certain that she was heading for big trouble, but she seemed to be committed now. If she did not arrive at the chateau, Blaise Levallier would undoubtedly set enquiries in train as to her whereabouts, and this would lead to all the problems she had come here precisely to obviate. No, she had to go on. Get in, get the papers, and get out, she told herself. In theory it sounded simple.
She groaned slightly as the first raindrops spattered against the windscreen, and set the wipers in motion. That was all she needed—a strange road, and a rainstorm.
She wondered what Blaise Levallier had thought when he received Clare’s meek letter, accepting his terms and telling him the date of her arrival. They had expected some kind of response, probably gloating, but there