head jerked round to look at her, and he missed a gear change. ‘Les Hiboux?’ he repeated. ‘But that is an empty house.’
She said coolly, ‘Which I believe belonged to my mother, Isabelle Riquard.’
‘Why, yes, but—’
‘I intend to use it,’ she cut across him flatly. ‘Is it far from here?’
Jacques would normally, she guessed, have an open, cheerful face, on the borderline of good-looking, but now he looked distinctly glum.
‘No, not far. But M’sieur Rohan would not wish…’ He hesitated in turn. ‘It would be better, mademoiselle, for me to take you to the nearest syndicat d’initiative. Someone there will be able to arrange a room for you. It would be wiser, believe me.’
She could guess the identity of M’sieur Rohan only too well, and steel entered her voice. ‘And I prefer to stay at Les Hiboux. If you won’t take me, then stop the car here, and I’ll find my own way.’
His mouth tightened. ‘The patron, mademoiselle, instructed me to drive you wherever you wished to go. And that is what I shall do.’
Jacques called this Monsieur Rohan ‘the boss’, but surely that didn’t mean he was the Baron de Rochefort? The girl at the Maison du Vin had said the Baron was in poor health, and this—Rohan looked capable of strangling tigers with his bare hands.
The thought of him—the way he’d looked at her, and spoken—made her start to shake again, but this time with temper. She looked out of the car window, struggling to regain her composure.
In other circumstances, this would have been a pleasant drive. Freed from the necessity to concentrate on the road, she could have admired the sweep of the rolling scenery of broad fields dotted with cattle, and tree-crowned hills. There were a few houses here and there, some clearly centuries old, their stones weathered to a cream, and pale sand, dark shutters closed against the power of the south-western sun. Others were distinctly modern, looking sharp and raw against the soft colours of their rural backdrop, but all were built with the steeply sloping roofs and heavy timbering that she’d already come to recognise as typical of the region. She remembered reading that all kinds of property, as well as building land in the Dordogne area, was being snapped up by the British and the Dutch.
But the only real sign of activity she could see were the tractors, at work in some of the fields, cutting hay. Certainly, they’d passed no other vehicles.
It was totally tranquil, utterly serene, stamped with an ageless certainty and stability, and, for the first time, Sabine realised what poets had meant when they sang of ‘La Douce France’.
I belong here, she thought fiercely. They won’t send me away.
They had turned on to a side-road now. In the fields on both sides, the grass grew high, interspersed with the crimson splash of poppies. They passed a grey stone workshop selling agricultural machines, a small garage with two petrol pumps, and a war memorial surmounted by a statue of Christ on the cross.
They turned again on to an even narrower track, its tarmac pitted and holed, with grass growing down the centre of it. Far ahead of her, Sabine could see a cluster of buildings, obviously a farm, but on her left, set back from the road across an expanse of roughly cropped grass and stones, was a smaller property, whitewashed walls, and earth-red tiles, standing alone.
She did not need Jacques’s laconic, ‘We have arrived, mademoiselle,’ to tell her that this was Les Hiboux. Somehow, she already knew.
The house presented a defensive, almost secretive face to the world, she thought, as they approached. Fronting the road was a long wall bisected by a low archway, and terminated by a structure like a squat tower, surmounted by the usual pointed roof. As far as she could see, the rest of the house seemed to be single-storeyed. She reached for her bag, her hand closing on the bunch of keys, as Jacques brought the car to a halt.
They both got out, and he looked at her, his pleasant face serious, even concerned. ‘You wish me to come with you—to make sure all is well?’
‘Thank you, but no.’ She needed to be alone for this. ‘How—how are you going to get back to the château? Do you want to borrow the car and return it later?’
‘There is no problem,’ he assured her. ‘By the road, it seems a long way, but I need only to walk a kilometre across the fields beyond the farm. It is nothing.’
Following his indication, Sabine realised with a hollow feeling that all they’d done was skirt the hill where the château stood; that Les Hiboux in fact stood beneath La Tour Monchauzet, but on its other side—and still in its shadow.
I could have done without that, she thought, and the short-cut past the farm.
‘M’sieur Rohan will wish to know where I have brought you, mademoiselle,’ Jacques said uncomfortably. ‘He will not be pleased to know you are here, but I cannot lie to him.’
‘Then tell him the truth,’ Sabine said with bravado.
Jacques’s brow became increasingly furrowed. ‘He is a good man, mademoiselle—all the world would tell you so—but he has had to be strong—to bear everything on his shoulders. It has not been easy—and he does not like to be crossed.’
She thought, I knew that before I met him.
She shrugged, forcing a faint smile. ‘I’ll take my chance.’ And paused. ‘Before you go, can you tell me where I can get supplies? Without being disloyal to M’sieur Rohan, of course.’
There was a palpable hesitation, then he sighed. ‘There is an Intermarché in Villereal, mademoiselle. Now goodbye—and good luck.’
He sounded convinced she would need it, Sabine thought as he trudged off. She looked up at the hill, but the château was invisible from this angle behind its enshrouding of trees. But it was there, just the same, like prying eyes peering round the corner of a thick curtain.
And he was there too. She was starkly aware of it. A man it was not wise to cross, whose angry scorn had already bruised her. And a man to whom she had just thrown down a deliberate challenge.
She said again, ‘I’ll take my chance,’ and walked towards the archway.
SABINE didn’t know what to expect. This had been her mother’s house, after all, and Isabelle had left it over twenty-two years ago, and not been back since.
She was half anticipating having to fight her way through a jungle of undergrowth to reach the front door. But she was totally mistaken. A neat flagged area confronted her, flanked by the wall of some storage building on one side and the length of the house on the other. There were narrow flowerbeds in need of weeding on both sides, and in the sheltered corner between the store and the wall a tall rose lifted imperious petals like flames.
Beyond the store, the garden opened out into an untidy sloping lawn, with trees and shrubs, and the flags narrowed to a terrace. Sabine saw that the arched motif had been repeated in the french windows all the way along the front of the house and the stout wooden entrance. The rooms seemed bare, she thought, peering in through the dusty
