Bella drove Charlie into Mondain-sur-Cher after they finished breakfast. Mondain was a sleepy collection of farms and houses strung out untidily along the River Cher, with a large tree-shaded square at its centre. A church stood on one side, facing an impressive Second Empire town hall, and Charlie noted a bank next to the town hall, a couple of cafes with iron tables and chairs spread in front of them, and a cluster of other shops in streets leading away from the square. Bella parked neatly and led the way to the nearest café, and several men standing in a gossipping group raised crumpled hats, and stared at both her and Charlie with undisguised interest.
Bella held herself very straight. She was dressed in a light blue and green cotton summer dress that set her copper hair off well and flattered her figure whilst still finishing respectably below her knees, and knew that she was on parade. Alan, a big city, bright lights man, had never really hit it off very well with Mondain-sur-Cher: he had always been a man of action, wholly push and drive, had never bothered to learn more than a very basic French, and had been almost totally oblivious to the niceties of French provincial social life. He had found Mondain dull, even boring, and Mondain had viewed him as a boor. Some coarser Mondainois had termed him ‘le couillon malin’ – ‘the crafty testicle’ – in a play on his name.
But he had been exciting. Bella had married him for his dynamism and aggression, and lived a roller-coaster life for the best part of twenty years. Then Alan had moved on. Now she was returning to her roots. She would look up Louis, a de Chevigney cousin working as a top lawyer in Paris, and Francois-Xavier Lamothe, last heard of being important at the European Commission in Brussels, because she was sure that both would take well to Charlie. She would introduce Charlie to friends from her childhood, and friends of the family, and rebuild her life.
The café owner came out from behind his bar to serve her personally, and she knew that she was off to a good start.
‘You are on holiday, madame?’ he asked as he collected two panaches, French lemonade and beer shandies, from his wife, flashing a polite smile in Charlie’s direction.
Bella smiled sweetly. ‘I have returned home.’
‘Ah.’ The café owner eyed Charlie quickly again. Jean-Claude, Madame Worthington’s gardener, had already dropped by for his glass of morning red, and spoken well of a French-speaking Englishman staying at the big house. But one could never tell with the English: the café owner was the son of a sailor, and memories of Mers-el-Kebir died hard. He would keep an eye on this new arrival. But he also noted that Madame Worthington and the Englishman appeared to speak French together, and that was a good sign..
Various men gathered at the café bar to take a good look at Bella and Charlie, and Charlie felt like nothing so much as a prize goldfish in a bowl.
Then they finished their shandies and strolled around the square and along Mondain’s main street, and Bella made a point of holding Charlie’s hand as they strolled. Charlie decided that he liked Mondain. The town was a comfortable sort of place where he could make himself at home, and practise being charming, and set about building ties: a place where goodwill might reap generous dividends. Both he and Bella had cut their ties with Britain. But he knew that he would be blissfully content.
French village life sometimes resembles nothing so much as a broad river, moving at a slow stately pace that may occasionally swirl with passing excitement or fury, before settling placidly again in a channel dredged out over the centuries. Charlie’s arrival took Mondain by the ears for all of a couple of days. But Bella quickly presented him formally to the mayor, then the cure, the doctor, the notary, and a number of other local notabilities and friends, and within a few days he was almost an integral part of village life – though as a foreigner he knew he would forever be viewed with just a touch of residual doubt.
The mayor, Monsieur Savalan, was a small round farmer with wheatfields and vines and a herd of prize-winning Charollais out along the road to Tours. He drove a top of the range Mercedes, and was reputed to be very rich, but kept the full extent of his wealth a close secret, though his bank manager, and notary, and wife might possibly have measured it pretty well.
Bella called at his office in the village square as a matter of courtesy, and Monsieur Savalan was graciousness itself. Charlie was presented as a friend, and the mayor hoped he would be happy in France, Charlie turned a nice compliment on the pleasantness of the town, and the three of them wreathed themselves in affable smiles. It was obvious that the mayor itched to probe Charlie’s status and Bella’s intentions, but was much too polite to ask outright, and a polite phrase hoping that Charlie would put his excellent French to the fullest possible use was the closest that Monsieur Savalan came to asking how long he was thinking of staying.
However the cure was a rather different kettle of fish. L’Abbe Bossuet shared rather more than his name with the zealot divine of pre-revolutionary France. He was a dark, saturnine man, of the kind that needed to shave at least twice a day, and his sharp, pointed nose scented moral decay in every woman’s smile. He called on Bella a couple of days after her arrival: he had heard that she had brought with her a French-speaking Englishman, and needed to ascertain whether this newcomer merely ranked as a passing fancy, and thereby purely as an occasion of mortal sin, or whether there might be hope of restoring one of Mondain’s leading citizens to the bosom of Mother Church – for Bossuet knew that she had married in England in a civil ceremony, and therefore still ranked as a spinster in religious terms. A lover might well rank more pleasing in the sight of heaven than a heathen husband, if prepared eventually to pledge his troth before a catholic altar.
He arrived at eleven sharp, enveloped in a flowing soutane, with a well-thumbed breviary in one hand and his broad-brimmed hat in the other, and Monsieur Bonnefoie ushered him into the drawingroom. Charlie emerged from the library to greet him, because Bella was somewhere in the garden with Sophie Bonnefoie, and the priest eyed him suspiciously.
‘You are guest?’ He spoke bluntly, and his English was fractured.
Charlie replied monosyllabically in French – he was too old to play games. ‘Counsellor.’
Bossuet frowned. Charlie had opened with a subtle manoeuvre, and the word ‘conseiller’ might have many connotations. ‘You occupy yourself with morality?’
Charlie looked modest. ‘I have a certain knowledge of financial affairs.’
‘You are a banker?’
‘I give advice.’
This was fencing. The priest scowled. ‘Such as?’
Charlie smiled silkily. He had tempted the man into a nice little trap. ‘I try to sow good seed.’
Bossuet bridled. ‘You are at least a Christian?’
Charlie was seraphic. Religious prejudice dies hard in rural France, particularly amongst the rural clergy. ‘I like to see myself as a good shepherd.’
This was too much for the man in the soutane. ‘Madame la Baronne is not accompanied by her husband.’
Charlie beamed at him. ‘I am here to think of the future, not of things of the past.’
Fortunately Bella entered the drawingroom as the two men glowered at each other. She understood the confrontation at a glance. Men in older days might have fought a duel, were priests allowed to fight. It was really most flattering.
She waved both Charlie and the abbe into chairs, and Monsieur Bonnefoie served coffee and small biscuity cakes. Then she smiled politely as the priest sipped at his cup, but also deftly parried his probing. She had invited Charlie to help rearrange her financial affairs, she explained, and these things took time. He was also a dear friend – and here she flashed Charlie a look of the purest devotion – and helping her cope with the strain of Alan’s desertion. Monsieur l’Abbe might not have heard, but her husband was in South Africa with a much younger woman.
Bossuet looked both shocked and sympathetic. He understood that these things could happen, but he reminded Bella that it was her duty to face misfortune with fortitude, and put her faith in the Lord. He hazarded that Monsieur Worthington might even repent of his errant ways and return.
Bella’s mouth tightens, though she refrained from replying. Alan could do what he liked, but she would never have him back – and she was not accustomed to sermons. Charlie twitched, and got up to walk to a window. He had burned all his bridges, and any thought of Alan returning must be wholly anathema.
Conversation languished, and the priest had an uncomfortable feeling that he had mistaken his tack. He switched his probing from the past to the future. He was not brave, nor foolhardy enough, to ask whether Bella planned to attend his Sunday masses. But his Bishop had asked him to mobilise support for a fete in honour of Saint Severine, the village’s patron, and Bella might well be coaxed into setting a lead. Sophie Bonnefoie’s cakes and fruit flans were renowned for at least twenty kilometres around, in a countryside where good pastrycooks proliferated, and it would honour the parish were Madame Bonnefoie to contribute.
Bella was mollified. She glanced at Charles Bonnefoie, standing like a statue by the drawingroom door, and the butler pursed his mouth cautiously. It was a sign that he wouldhave a word with his wife. The priest noted the exchange and decided that it was time to made a diplomatic withdrawal. But he was really quite a devout man, in his way, and he believed firmly in the power of hope. He held on to Bella’s fingers as they shook hands in farewell.
‘It would be as much a pleasure as an honour to see you at our little fete.’ He smiled a thin, zealot, smile that momentarily included Charlie.
Bella beamed sweetly. ‘It would be a return to my childhood.’
This might be interpreted as an encouragement. Bossuet caught his breath. ‘The days of yesterday?’
‘The days of previous times.’
The French language distinguished subtly between Bossuet’s ‘les jours d’antan’, and Bella’s ‘les jours d’auparavant’. The priest hoped against hope that the past might come back to life. But Bella had in mind a seamless continuity, broken temporarily by misfortune, and the man in black understood immediately.
His smile widened, and now it took Charlie in fully. ‘Blessed be the innocents, and those who remain like children at heart.’ He was tempted to raise his hand in blessing, because he had a feeling that a benediction might well prove the first step on a path to a more formal union. But he was also conscious that gestures could sometimes be overstated, so he set his hat squarely on his head and left.
Charlie accompanied Bella to the front door as she bid the priest farewell. She squeezed his hand.
‘He has hopes for us.’
Charlie returned her pressure, but was too full for words to speak. They turned back into the house, leaving Monsieur Bonnefoie to close the door. Charlie smiled amicably at the butler, and could have sworn that one of Monsieur Bonnefoie’s eyelids trembled momentarily in response.
Bella and Charlie were also invited to call on Maurice Delacroix, the man whose horse had dumped Alan Worthington in a heap of manure. Delacroix was an influential local landowner with a chateau some ten kilometres from the village, the owner of several thousand hectares of wheat and grazing and vines. His wines were white, and light, and had won themselves several gold medals, and he had two passions in life: viniculture and horses. He had been a close friend of Bella’s father. But Bella had rarely seen him since her wedding, for Delacroix had formed a low opinion of Alan Worthington’s reluctance to learn French, and Alan had refused to speak to him after landing in his midden. The invitation was a mark that Mondain had begun to form a far better opinion of the new Englishman in Bella’s life.
Bella prepared her call carefully. She dressed in a green silk shirt and a pair of smart khaki-green jeans held in by a wide leather belt, teaming it with short brown ankle boots. Charlie could see that she expected to ride, but dressed conservatively in a blazer and a pale blue linen shirt found left by Alan, the man’s best grey slacks and well polished shoes. He had nothing suitable for riding, and hoped his lack might prove his salvation.
The Delacroix chateau was imposing: a large stone building with several small steeples. Bella parked the Explorer, and Delacroix opened the front door to them in person. He was a tall, aquiline man with heavy eyebrows and piercingly sharp eyes reflecting cloudless sky, perhaps in his late sixties, dressed like an English squire in tweed hacking jacket and riding breeches and boots. Charlie’s heart sank, for it was plain now that his fate was sealed.
Delacroix led them across a large stone-floored hall into a formal drawingroom hung at one end with a huge tapestry of a hunting scene, and an aristocratic white-haired woman rose from a chair, supporting herself on a stick. Charlie bent to kiss her outstretched hand, and realised that it was the first time he had kissed hands since learning the manners and customs of the French aristocracy as a boy staying with a family of impoverished French aristos some forty years in the past, and it was another symbol of transformation.
Bella smiled at him approvingly. She was learning new things about this man with every passing day, and they were all nice. A butler, another Charles Bonnefoie, brought a bottle and a tray of glasses and they tasted the latest Delacroix vintage, and gossipped politely. But Charlie also felt a little taut: he knew that he was about to be tested, and that he could not shirk it. They came to the end of the wine-tasting, and he knew that he had reached his moment of truth.
Bella smiled at him sweetly. ‘Monsieur Delacroix has a passion for equestrianism.’
Delacroix nodded benevolently. Horses bring out the best, and the worst, in men.
Charlie gulped. But he was no coward and he would accept the challenge. However there were formalities to observe. ‘It has been a long time, and I regret that I am not properly dressed.’
Delacroix’s eyes narrowed a little. Hewas not quite sure whether this reticence was a politeness, or a sign of cowardice. He had not been over fond of Bella’s husband, and this Englishman might prove no better. ‘I think my people will easily find you a pair of boots.’
Charlie got to his feet. He must do what he must do, and would soon find whether he could still sit a horse. No doubt the lesson would be good for him.
Two grooms were already holding three horses in a courtyard at the back of the chateau, and a pair of highly-polished riding boots waited. Charlie noted a small manureheap to one side. The men were courtesy itself, and he was quickly booted. He got to his feet a little uncertainly, and noted that Delacroix waited politely for him to mount. He murmured a quick prayer under his breath, put his now booted foot in a stirrup, and swung himself boldly up into the air, right leg held high. Astonishly he found himself in the saddle, and lost memories came flooding back.
One of the grooms handed him a ridinghat and a short whip and he gathered his mount’s reins in his right hand. Bella was also mounted, holding herself very proud and straight. They smiled at each other, and Delacroix beamed benevolently again.
All three horses were fine bays, with coats gleaming in the sunlight, and they danced their way in a line out of the courtyard and onto a road following the broad sweep of the Cher. Charlie realised delightedly that he could remember how to steer, and half stood in his stirrups as Delacroix spurred his mount into a trot. It was not a comfortable way to travel, and he was sure his back would soon ache unforgivingly, but he would hold his own.
Delacroix slowed back to a walk, waiting for Charlie to draw up alongside him. He smiled encouragingly. ‘How do you feel?’
Charlie grinned. ‘I was only a boy.’
‘But you have not forgotten.’ It was as much statement as question.
‘I suppose horses are pretty much like bicycles…’
Delacroix frowned, plainly disapproving of this reply. ‘Horses are for heroes.’ He eyed Bella, who had drawn up alongside them. ‘And heroines.’
They rode on, and all the world around was content. Monsieur Delacroix pointed out his vineyards, running along the river, and his grain, just coming into the fullness of burnished gold, and a group of small children paddling at the edge of the river waved at them.
He smiled back at them, but then slowed his horse, to look down at them. ‘Be prudent, my children. The Cher has some dangerous places.’
Then they rode on, and the road turned towards a bridge over the river. A group of teenagers were fooling about on the bridge, and two teenage boys were holding a girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen by her wrists and ankles, swinging her as though to toss her into the water below. Monsieur Delacroix quickened his horse. ‘Oh, the idiots.’
Bella was frowning as well. ‘They are mad. The water flows fastest under the bridges, because it narrows, and deepens as well. I hope she knows how to swim.’
Now Monsieur Delacroix was shouting angrily at the boys. But they appeared not to hear him, tossing the girl into the water. She floated for a moment with her skirt spread around her, and then began to thrash around, plainly in difficulty.
Charlie was off his horse in the blink of an eye. He stripped off his blazer, dropping it on the bank, and dived into the Cher as the girl began to float away under the bridge. A sharp pain scored acrossed his right shoulder, but he ignored it, grabbing the girl as she started to sink, hooking his left arm under her chin and flailing his way towards the river bank. He touched bottom, and realises that the two teenagers were also in the water, helping to hold the girl up.
Monsieur Delacroix and Bella had also dismounted, and willing hands pulled Charlie and the girl to safety. But they were all staring at him, and he realised that his shirt was patched with red on his upper right arm and shoulder, and that the red was spreading. His shoulder was also aching, and suddenly he felt a little faint.
Bella took his good arm, helping him to sit on the river bank. Her eyes were wide with alarm. ‘Charlie! Oh, Charlie, what have you done to yourself?’
Charlie managed a wry grin. ‘I aimed badly.’
Monsieur Delacroix had stripped off his tweed jacket and pulled his shirt up over his head. He held the shirt out. ‘Cover his shoulder with this.’
Bella fashioned a rough bandage, using the arms of the shirt to secure it. Monsieur Delacroix had pulled a mobile telephone from a jacket pocket and begun speaking into it urgently. Charlie closed his eyes. Now his shoulder was growing painful. He gritted his teeth. Pain was something that he must handle on his own. Bella was holding his good hand and stroking it gently.
They seem to wait interminably, but it was probably a matter of only a few minutes before a large four wheel drive arrived, skidding to a halt on the road level with them. Two men leaped out, and then a second car stopped, and all of a sudden a small anxious crowd had gathered. Another vehicle screeched to a halt and the crowd partd, and a man hurried towards Charlie carrying a large case. He was Doctor Lemaitre, the town doctor. He knelt at Charlie’s side, gently disentangling Bella’s improvised bandage, cut Charlie’s shirt away deftly, and looked up at the circle of worried faces.
‘It’s not serious.’ He busied himself in his case, taking out a swab and a small flask of surgical alcohol to clean the wound and then applied a large dressing, taping it into place. Charlie winced, gritting his teeth again. The alcohol was a stinging lance of fire.
‘You’ll be stiff for a couple of days, that’s all.’ Doctor Lemaitre knelt back to inspect his handiwork. ‘It’s only a flesh wound. Nothing broken.’ He took a syringe from his case to fill it from a phial. ‘Now a little prick for anti-tetanus.’
Charlie was past wincing any more. He wanted a drink, preferably very large and very strong.
Doctor Lemaitre might almost have read his mind. ‘Pity that I don’t have a little restorative.’
Delacroix was already handing a flask to Bella as he spoke. She uncorked it, and passed it to Charlie, and he put it to his lips. It was brandy, and a very good brandy at that. He swallowed a large mouthful, and held the flask out to the chateau owner, but Delacroix shook his head and beamed. ‘It’s all for you.’
Now a police van had arrived. Delacroix and the doctor accompanied two policemen to the bridge, and the two teenagers were with them, looking very frightened and ill-at-ease. The girl tossed into the water had vanished.
The policemen returned, to stand looking down at Charlie with the detached interest of two professionals called in to handle an interesting case. One wore the silver stripes of a brigadier. He looked stern.
‘Monsieur, do you wish to made a complaint against these two young men?’ He did not look at the two teenagers, now looking very anxious indeed.
Charlie looks at them and shook his head. Every man is young once, and every man makes a fool of himself at some time or another. ‘It was not their fault that I injured myself.’
‘They committed a real folly.’
Charlie shrugged. ‘They helped me out of the water.’
The brigadier assented judiciously. He would take the two back to the station and give them a lecture that they would not soon forget, and would also have a word with their parents. The Englishman was a true gentleman – these things were always best resolved informally.
The police drove off, and the small crowd broke up into small knots discussing the Englishman’s courage. One of Monsieur Delacroix’s men reported that they have found a sodden branch wedged against the bridge, and that they already broken it up and hauled it out of the water to prevent it injuring anyone else. Charlie swigged another large mouthful of brandy, and the bystanders all smiled at him.
He was already fast on his way to becoming a local legend as the foreigner who had fearlessly leapt from his horse to save a girl from drowning, pulling her from the water despite being in great pain and bleeding profusely, and he was most deserving. Within a few days he would possibly almost qualify for sanctity.
Bella helped him to his feet and he walked a little unsteadily on her arm towards the four wheel drive. Delacroix watched him anxiously, and Charlie looked apologetic.
‘I regret, but I don’t think I can go back on horse.’
Delacroix shook his head. ‘My friend, you have no need. You have proved yourself today.’