Then, quite suddenly, it lay before her. A turn of the road, the rounding of a great clump of poplar trees and there it was, a small untidy building, its walls, once white, now cracked and weather-beaten, a gate swinging back from its broken hinge and a yard deserted save for a tortoiseshell cat sleeping on a wooden bench.
Fleur put down her luggage and stood gazing at the house. Only the cat reassured her that someone was at home. She was half-afraid from the general air of desolation and quiet that the place might be uninhabited.
Resolutely she picked up her luggage again and was rehearsing to herself the words she would say.
She crossed the yard and abruptly, deep within the house, she heard a dog bark, a sharp insistent bark as if of fear.
She was conscious then that she was being watched and next someone looked through a window swiftly and furtively and was gone again. There was the sound of a voice, too far off to be intelligible, nevertheless a voice calling and once again silence, Fleur reached the porch, she waited a moment and then half-fearfully rapped on the door.
She could hardly hear the sound she made herself and she rapped again, this time louder.
After what seemed to be a long time she heard footsteps. They came nearer the door and paused. Someone whispered, she was certain it was a woman and there was the sound of a lock being turned and a bar being lifted.
The door was opened and a man stood there. Fleur looked at him and knew at once that this was Jacques, Marie’s brother. They were very alike. He had the same shaped face, the same eyes of Norman blue and the same square sturdy figure.
He was not a young man, his face was deeply scarred with lines and he had too the quiet sad expression which is often characteristic of those who live near to the soil and learn to accept the vagaries of nature with a fatalistic melancholy.
“What do you want?” Jacques Bouvais spoke slowly, his voice deep and gruff, and to Fleur there was something unfriendly in his attitude.
“I have come to you from your sister, Marie.”
She looked at him as she said the words, expecting an instantaneous response and change of expression. But, if he was surprised, there was no sign of it on his countenance, only the same look of patient resignation and the same impression of unyielding antagonism.
“Well?”
It was a question.
Fleur felt frustrated.
“May I come in?” she asked. “There is so much to explain.”
She felt suddenly afraid. Supposing Marie had been wrong, supposing her brother was also one of the collaborators with the German conquerors? In that case she was giving herself completely over to the enemy.
And yet what could she do? She had come so far.
“I think you had better explain your business here first,” Jacques Bouvais replied and suddenly Fleur felt that she could bear no more.
She was so tired, too tired to argue and to explain. She was also afraid, the glare of the sun had made her eyes ache and she felt now as if she could not trust them to read correctly whether it was friendship or enmity that she saw in the face of the man opposite her.
She had put down her wicker basket when she had first come to the door. In her other hand she still held the carpet bag and now it felt as if it was weighing her down, dragging her lower and lower, and she could not resist it. She let it fall and felt the whole earth rocking beneath her, a darkness before her eyes –
“I \m all right,” she heard herself say, “if I could only sit down.”
Even as she said the words, she clutched at her receding senses.
“I have spoken in French,” she thought “I must remember to keep speaking French.”
She felt someone’s arm go around her shoulders, hands were supporting her and then the glare was gone and she was sitting on a chair in the cool dimness of the house.
“Drink this,” a woman’s voice then came.
There was a glass between her lips and drops of cool, almost icy cold water going slowly down her throat. Her vision cleared, the dizziness went and with it much of her weakness.
“I am sorry,” she murmured, “it must have been the heat.”
“You have come from Marie?” a soft voice asked and she looked up to see the gentle face of an elderly woman.
There was no mistaking the kindness of the expression, the tenderness of work-worn hands that still held her arm firmly as if she might be expected to fall from the chair.
“I am sorry,” Fleur repeated, “but I am all right now. Yes, I have come from Marie. She sent me to you. She said you would help me.”
She saw a glance pass between the man standing silent on the other side of the room and the woman beside her. She could not interpret it and could not understand what it meant.
‘Shall I tell them the truth?’ Fleur asked herself. ‘Dare I?’
And because there seemed no alternative, she looked from one to the other desperately and then said in a voice that held a note of despair –
“Marie said I could trust you. She told me that I would be safe here.”
“How do we know that you speak the truth?” the man said suddenly, his voice surly.
Fleur stared at him.
“She did not give me a letter,” she replied, “because she told me that you, if you are her brother, Jacques, could not read. She told me she had heard that your son had been killed, the Priest had written and told her. She described to me how to come here and – ”
Fleur paused for a moment and then went on bravely,
“ – she had my papers made out in your name. I was to come to you as your niece, ‘Jeanne Bouvais’. Here they are.”
She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out the papers which had been handled so often in the last two days. She bent forward and put them onto the table. They looked very crumpled and rather dirty, the edges curling round the blue stamp that had made her whole journey possible.
“I have money,” Fleur went on. “Marie gave it to me. I can pay for staying here if you will keep me.”
It was the woman who spoke quickly,
“She’s all right, she has come from Marie. Of course she has. How else would she have known about François and that the Padre had written for us. Marie sent you.”
She turned and peered into Fleur’s face. “You swear that ? You wouldn’t deceive us?”
“But, of course not,” Fleur replied quickly. “I so need your help. Listen, I will conceal nothing, I will tell you the truth. I am English.”
The woman beside her gave a start and then she looked across the room at her husband.
“English!” she exclaimed and then quickly, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Shut the door.”
The man moved slowly. He locked the door, put back the bolt which Fleur had heard removed. When it was done, he came back again and stood, as he had done before, immobile and uncompromising.
“But why are you here? Why have you come to us?” the woman asked.
Fleur told them how she had come out to France a few days before the outbreak of war to marry Lucien de Sardou and how he had been killed and how she had stayed on, happy at first to be with his mother and then trapped and unable to leave after the German occupation.
She spoke of Marie’s great kindness to her all through the months when they had lived together, three women isolated in the Château, knowing very little of what was happening in the world outside. Then the Comtesse’s death, Monsieur Pierre’s arrival