“It was part of my trousseau.”
“And you never married? What happened?”
“It’s a long story,” Marie said quickly. “We have no time for it now. Come, mam’selle, you must dress.”
There was a hint of tragedy somehow, Fleur felt, in all of this and yet she realised that Marie was right. This was not the time for gossip if she was to get away from the Château before Monsieur Pierre was awake.
‘I must go on the earliest train, the market train,’ she thought to herself. ‘The one which leaves at about five-thirty in the morning.’
She felt strange when she looked at herself in the mirror. Marie had helped her button the bodice down the front and caught the lengthy skirt round her waist over several petticoats.
Then she had dragged her hair off her forehead and her ears and covered it with a plain black straw hat. She looked surprisingly young and at the same time unobtrusive, as a young peasant girl who might be setting off to take up her first situation as a femme de chambre.
“Your nails, mam’selle,” Marie pointed out insistently.
Fleur looked down at them and understood. They were certainly not in keeping with the character that she was portraying
All the time she was dressing, Marie was putting her clothes tidily and neatly into the wicker basket and the carpet bag.
At last she was ready.
“How will you explain my departure to Monsieur Pierre?”
Marie shrugged her shoulders with a kind of fatalism.
“He will blame you,” Fleur said. “I cannot have that, Marie.”
“Could you leave him a letter?”
“Yes, that is a good idea. I will say that I received a telegram that one of my family is ill. I will not say which one. No, that would get Monsieur le Maire into trouble. A telephone call is better. He can say that he thought it came from Paris.”
Fleur went to the writing table and sitting down wrote a short note.
“Monsieur,” she began simply determined not to stoop even to politeness where such a man was concerned. “I have received the sad news that my cousin is indisposed. I must go to her at once and do not wish to disturb you. I am desolated that I shall not be present at the interment, but my thoughts and prayers will be with Madame.”
She did not sign it, she felt that she would not stoop to that last lie, having told so many. She would not assume, not even for the last time, Lucien’s name to which she had never been entitled.
She slipped the note into an envelope and addressed it.
“I will not give it to him,” Marie said, “until late in the day.”
“Be careful, Marie. You must not annoy him more than is necessary.”
“I am not afraid. I am old, what does it matter what happens to me? But you are young.”
They heard the clock in the hall chime the hour.
“You must go,” Marie said. “Fabian will be waiting for you in the back drive. He will give you your papers and now, mam’selle, there is one thing more.”
She drew a leather bag from her pocket. As she put it into Fleur’s hand it clinked and Fleur, feeling the heaviness of it, knew that it was coin.
“What is it?”
“It was Madame’s,” Marie replied. “Always she insisted that we keep a little nest egg in the house. She could remember so well the invasion of 1870 and she knew what happened to the franc in the last war. ‘We will have gold, Marie,’ she had said to me over and over again. ‘There is always value in gold.’ And so we have hidden it, she and I, but now is the moment to use our treasure to prove its value.”
“But, Marie, I cannot take ‒ this.”
“It is yours because you loved Monsieur Lucien and he loved you,” Marie said simply and all the protestations that Fleur would have made died on her lips.
She knew that Marie wanted her to have this money, that she believed it was her right and somehow the mere fact of its value was unimportant. It was Marie’s wish. No need to suggest that she should have it herself. How easy it would have been for her to take it.
Impulsively Fleur bent forward and kissed the wrinkled cheek.
“Thank you, Marie. I shall think of it as something coming from Lucien. Perhaps it will help and protect me even as I feel he will help and protect me while I take this journey.”
“We are all in the hands of God,” Marie answered.
Then for a moment she held Fleur close.
Fleur knew then that she was saying ‘goodbye’ to Lucien.
*
Trudging down the drive holding her wicker basket in one hand and the carpet bag in the other, conscious of her skirts and sensible flat-heeled shoes, Fleur felt as if everything that she had known since war began had been a dream.
She saw Fabian standing under the trees. He came towards her and as he lifted the wicker basket from her hands, she turned and looked back at the Château.
‘A picture from the past,’ Fleur thought, ‘and already it has passed and gone as far as I am concerned.’
She did not know why she was not deeply saddened at the thought and she felt that there should be tears in her eyes and that she should feel acutely the drama of the moment.
Instead as she walked along beside Fabian, she found herself responding to his boyish air of excitement. He thought that it was all a fine joke, he envied her, he said, setting off to see a bit of the country.
“It will not be exactly enjoyable,” Fleur said, half-reproachful that he should not realise the danger of what she was doing.
“It is always enjoyable to deceive the Bosche,” he laughed. “I have your permits here, mam’selle. Before we get to the Station I will give them to you. My father had an idea. The first paper I shall give you is just a permit to visit Bugalé for the market. That is all you will be asked for this morning. Then, when you change your train, you produce your new papers. There will then be no one to be suspicious. Here at the Station they might think it strange that you should want to go so far.”
“I understand,” Fleur said, “and will you please thank your father? Will you tell him how grateful I am? I am only afraid that he might get into trouble with the Germans.”
“Father will see that he doesn’t. You are lucky that he had these permits, mam’selle. He got them from a German who had too much to drink one night. Just as he was going to bed, Father asked him for the usual permits to visit the market the following day.
“‘Find them and I will sign them’,” the German Officer said, he was in a good humour.’
“Father took him at his word. He found not only the market permits but others too. They have come in very useful one way or another. But naturally Father doesn’t use them except in an emergency.”
“He is wise.”
“The wisdom of a serpent!” the boy boasted.
They were now approaching the Station. Fabian stopped in the shade of a haystack and produced the papers. Fleur put them into the old worn leather purse that Marie had given her and thrust it deep into the slit pocket in her skirt.
It felt strange not to be carrying a bag, but Marie would not let her take one.
“A purse is more usual,” she had insisted. “You mustn’t make yourself conspicuous.”
Fleur had understood. She