‘Max said today he was thankful that Clare was our only daughter. He didn’t think he could bear to live through all this uproar a second time.’ She smiled across at Andrea affectionately. ‘But he’ll make an exception for you, dear. When can we start planning your wedding?’
Andrea smiled back constrainedly. ‘Oh, there’s no one at the moment—no one serious anyway,’ she said. ‘I think Uncle Max has a few more years of peace ahead of him still once Clare is off his hands.’
‘Hmm.’ Aunt Marian’s eyes studied her for a moment, taking in the slim yet rounded figure, the creamy skin and the soft, vulnerable girl’s mouth. ‘I don’t understand today’s young men at all. When I was a girl, you’d have been snapped up in your first season.’
Andrea sighed. ‘Maybe I don’t want to be snapped up,’ she pointed out. ‘I do have a career.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Aunt Marian’s tone made it clear what she thought about careers. ‘I’m just thankful that Clare seems settled at last. I can speak frankly to you, dear, and I think you know how worried your uncle and I have been over the past two years. We’ve never wanted to interfere—to stop her living her own life, but there have been times when I’ve been so frightened for her—frightened that she’d take some disastrous step that she wouldn’t be able to recall. Some of the men she’s been involved with …’ Aunt Marian shuddered slightly. Her eyes looked shrewdly at Andrea. ‘I know you don’t think Peter is very exciting, dear, but he’ll be so good for Clare, believe me he will.’
Andrea forced a smile. ‘Yes, I do believe it. I just wish that he was a little more …’ she paused, searching for the right word.
‘Demonstrative,’ her aunt supplied. ‘I thought so too at first, but now I’m not so sure these outward displays of affection mean a great deal. Clare seems perfectly happy with the situation. She says Peter is shy, and she may be right. It would certainly explain his rather stiff manner sometimes.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Andrea, setting her cup down on the small table in front of her. ‘How is Uncle Max?’
‘Behaving very well—avoiding stress and doing what he’s told,’ his wife said affectionately. ‘And Clare’s happiness has helped his peace of mind as well. He’s even talking of giving up the board altogether and retiring early. He would like to have more time to devote to his charity work, and I’m all for it.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I don’t suppose I should be telling you this, but there’s talk of a knighthood in the next Honours list—something he’s always dreamed of.’
‘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
