The Eden Inheritance (19 page)

Kathryn, for her part, was busy avoiding Paul as much as possible. The less she knew about what he was doing the better, she thought, and he must be of the same opinion. He went out a great deal but he never told her where he was going or why, never explained himself when he returned.

There had been a few unpleasant moments – the day when von Rheinhardt had come to lunch had been one of them. She had held her breath when Paul was introduced to him, horribly certain that von Rheinhardt's sharp eyes would see through the charade, but Paul had, as usual, been utterly convincing, every inch the rather dull tutor, and she had breathed again.

It was still Christian who worried her most. Sometimes she would look up unexpectedly and find his eyes on her, and the knowingness of his gaze sent a shiver of fear through her.

At other times the whole situation seemed vaguely unreal, a bad dream from which she would surely soon awake. Then one day when she went to collect Guy from his lessons Paul drew her to one side.

‘A word, Kathryn.'

‘About Guy?' she asked. But she knew it was not about Guy. Paul's serious tone had already told her that.

‘No. Something I want you to do for me.'

Apprehension flared in her.

‘What?'

‘Could you go to Périgueux – take a message for me?'

‘I don't know …'

‘Mummy! Mummy!' Guy had pushed back his little chair and was running across the room to them waving a sheet of paper on which he had been drawing with bright crayons. ‘ Look – see what I've done!'

She bent down, scooping him up, glad of the interruption.

‘Oh Guy, it's very good. What is it?'

‘It's General von Rheinhardt.' The name was too difficult for him to pronounce, it came out as ‘Wine-hat'. ‘And there's the sun – and that's a tree …'

‘I need to speak to you in private. I wouldn't ask, but it's important,' Paul said.

She looked up at him over Guy's small dark head. A pulse was beating in her throat.

‘All right. I'll come to your room as soon as I've taken Guy back to Bridget.'

Fifteen minutes later she tapped on the door of his room. He opened it immediately and stepped aside for her to go in.

Anxious as she was she could not help noticing how much he had made the room his own during the few short weeks he had been there. Few as his belongings were, they somehow impressed an unmistakable maleness on the previously anonymous guest room.

‘I couldn't finish what I had to say in front of Guy,' he said. ‘We don't want him repeating conversations.'

‘I hope he doesn't mention that I was coming to your room,' she said. Nervousness and something else – the sudden overwhelming awareness of him – made her tone sharp.

‘Is he likely to?'

‘You're his tutor. What do you think?'

‘I think you had better have an excuse ready, just in case. And I'll be as brief as I can. I need to get a message to someone in Périgueux who is working for me and it's urgent – too urgent to leave it in our usual letterbox.'

Kathryn knew he was referring to the series of hiding places in dry-stone walls and hollow tree stumps where agents of the Resistance hid messages if they needed to pass on information. She bit her lip, desperately trying to think of an excuse to make the journey to Périgueux.

‘What would I tell Charles?'

‘Do you have to tell him anything? You two don't talk much, do you?'

‘I'd need to take the car. He'd certainly wonder why.'

‘All right – Plan B. I'll provide the excuse if you can provide the car. You can say I need to pick up some more books to help me with Guy's education from a friend there. Drive me in and I'll deliver the message myself.'

‘You have got this well worked out, haven't you?' she said drily.

‘That's my job – the reason I'm here. Well, what about it?'

She thought for a moment.

‘All right, we'll try it. Who do you have to contact?'

‘I'll tell you that when we get there. But we'd better make an early start. I shall need to be in Périgueux by ten-thirty at the latest.'

‘That shouldn't be a problem. Charles is working long hours.'

‘I'll leave the arrangments to you then.'

‘I'll do my best.'

‘What the devil do you want to go to Périgueux for?' Charles exploded when she broached the subject.

‘I told you – Paul has some materials at a friend's house there that he wants for Guy. Why do you have to question everything I want to do?'

‘It sounds like a waste of petrol to me – joy-riding all that way.'

‘Don't be so mean-minded, Charles. Surely Guy's education is important enough to justify a little drop of petrol? Anyway, you can always get more from your friend General von Rheinhardt, I expect,' she added tartly.

‘Von Rheinhardt is not my friend. But I've no intention of going over all that again.'

‘Well, can I have the car or can't I?'

‘I suppose so.' Charles sighed wearily. He hated this constant bickering. ‘Just as long as you're sure that's the reason you're going.'

Her blood ran cold. ‘ What do you mean by that?'

‘Nothing. But you're too friendly with this Paul for my liking.'

His eyes were dark, not with suspicion so much as jealousy. Christian! Kathryn thought. What has he been saying? Aloud she said: ‘Don't be ridiculous. He's Guy's tutor and an old friend, that's all.'

‘I hope so,' Charles said tiredly. ‘ I certainly hope so.'

They started out early, Kathryn driving Charles' Hispano. Spring had begun to turn the valley green, the first faint shoots spiking the trees and hedgerows, but the previous night there had been a frost which made everything sparkle in the first rose-pink rays of the morning sun.

Kathryn, who had always enjoyed being allowed to drive the Hispano, made the most of the opportunity which was, these days, all too rare, and the miles disappeared swiftly beneath its wheels.

Like so many old French towns Périgueux was dominated by its cathedral, a huge white Byzantine building crowning the hill. In happier times Kathryn had enjoyed visiting it, parking in the tree-lined boulevard and walking through the old town where the brownish-red roofs were dwarfed by the majesty of the cathedral with its dozen elegant minarets, five shimmering domes and a four-storey bell tower topped by a conical stone spire on a lantern of slender pillars. Today however she scarcely noticed it. Her mind was elsewhere.

‘Where do you want to go?' she asked Paul.

‘Puy St-Front. You know it?' He was sitting, remarkably relaxed, in the passenger seat, enjoying the comfort of the soft leather.

‘Yes. But you'll have to direct me when we get there.'

‘I will, don't worry.'

In spite of the war the streets were busy. Kathryn was forced to concentrate on negotiating the traffic and pedestrians.

‘Turn left. Here. Stop where you like. I have to pay a visit to the doctor's.'

He opened the passenger door and got out, walking along the narrow street, his rather worn brown suit with a shirt buttoned to the neck French-style blending perfectly with the surroundings.

As she waited Kathryn found herself wondering about him again. He had come into her life and turned it upside down, made her question all her fine principles, insinuated himself under her roof – and yet she knew so little about him. Perhaps it was safest that way but she couldn't help being curious – and suspecting that under any circumstances he would still be a very private person. The air of mystery was not only attractive but also strangely disconcerting.

After a while Kathryn began to be concerned. Paul had been gone a very long time. A Vichy police car turned into the narrow street and her heart leaped into her mouth. Supposing they stopped and asked what she was doing here – what would she say? To her relief it did not stop but cruised by.

Just when she thought he never would, Paul reappeared, coming out of the peeling brown-painted door with its tarnished brass plate.

‘Where have you been?' she hissed at him as he slid into the passenger seat beside her. ‘ I wondered what ever had happened to you!'

‘I told you – I had to visit the doctor. One has to wait one's turn.' His unruffled manner, when she had been so worried, annoyed her.

‘That's all very well, but I thought I was going to be questioned by Vichy police.'

‘You weren't, were you?'

‘No.'

‘That's all right then, isn't it?'

She pursed her lips angrily. It was impossible to argue with him and not very prudent either here in the middle of a busy street. She started the engine.

‘Hang on,' he said in English. ‘Where are you going?'

‘Home, of course.'

‘Don't you think perhaps we should visit a bookshop first and buy some books? It will look a little strange if we arrive back without any, since that was our excuse for coming.'

‘I imagined you had some. You seem to think of everything,' she snapped, annoyed at her own lack of thought.

He ignored the jibe and his continued determination not to be ruffled annoyed her still further. She knocked the car out of gear.

‘What do you want to do about it then?'

‘Drive on,' he said, ‘but slowly. Stop at the first bookshop you see.'

‘Which way?'

‘I thought you said you knew the place. All right, turn left here, then right … slow down, can't you! Here … stop!'

She did as he said, seething inwardly and trying not to show it. His sharp eyes had noted a second-hand bookshop; he got out and disappeared inside. A few minutes later he was back with an armful of battered volumes.

‘That should do the trick.' He deposited them on the rear seat. ‘All right, we'll go home now.'

‘I wish you'd stop treating me like a chauffeur,' she snapped.

She drove in silence until they were outside the town and heading back towards Savigny. Her knuckles gripping the steering wheel were white, her neck and shoulders a hard line of anger and tension. Out in the country, miles from anywhere, he touched her arm lightly.

‘Stop a minute, Kathryn.'

‘Why?'

‘Just do as I say for once without asking questions.'

Still fuming she pulled into the side of the road. The sun had melted the frost from the hedgerows now and the green shoots were clearly visible.

‘Well?'

‘Kathryn, would you rather I left the château?'

‘Sometimes I wish to God you'd never come.'

‘That's neither here nor there though, is it?' He pulled out his cigarettes and lit one without offering the packet to her. ‘I thought you'd be able to cope with me being there but now I'm not so sure. You seem very … strung up. That's a dangerous thing to be.'

Hot colour suffused her face and neck. Little as she wanted him there she wanted even less to be judged and found wanting.

‘I just wish I knew a little more of what was going on,' she said.

‘I've been keeping you in the dark for your own safety.'

‘That's not what you said in the beginning. Then you were full of all kinds of things you wanted me to do.'

‘That was before I decided to go ahead with asking you if I could use the château as a base. You've provided me with a good cover, which is probably just about the most important thing you
could
do. But for all our sakes the less you know about what I'm doing the better. It's dangerous to have too many agents under one roof. As things are, if I was captured you could plead ignorance. My cover story will hold up, I assured you of that. If you stuck to it no one would have any reason to disbelieve you.'

‘Unless you were to betray me.'

‘I wouldn't that.'

‘Brave words. But I've heard how the Gestapo persuade people to talk, putting out their eyes with a naked flame, cutting off their genitals. How would you hold out against that sort of torture?'

‘They wouldn't take me alive. I have a cyanide capsule in my cuff link.'

And still he said it with that infuriating calm, talking about killing himself with deadly poison in the same casually conversational manner he might use to discuss a trip on a cross-channel ferry. She looked at him sharply.

‘Who are you?'

‘You know better than to ask me that.'

‘Oh, I don't mean your real name. I know you won't tell me that. No, what I actually mean is – why are you doing this? Why you putting your life on the line in this way?'

‘I have my reasons.'

‘Which are?'

He opened the car window and flicked out the cigarette end.

‘Let's just say that I do understand your concern for your family – espedally for your son. If the Nazis did something terrible to him how would
you
feel – besides being devastated, of course? Wouldn't you want revenge? You wouldn't care about yourself then, would you? All that would matter would be doing all you could to help drive the bastards back into the sewers where they belong and screw the manhole covers down so tight they could never get out to wreak that kind of terror and destruction ever again.'

His hands were balled now in his lap, his voice, though quiet, held such undercurrents of anguish that the last remnants of her anger died, replaced by dawning horror.

‘You mean …?'

‘I don't want to talk about it,' he said roughly. ‘ But I understand those feelings only too well.'

For a moment she could not speak. She only knew that suddenly she was seeing him in a totally different light.

‘I'm so sorry,' she said. ‘ Please tell me … what happened.'

‘I said I don't want to talk about it. Suffice it to say that when this damned war started I had a wife and daughter. Now … well, I haven't.'

‘I'm so sorry,' she said again, knowing it was totally inadequate. She reached out and covered his hand with her own, the only way she could begin to express the emotions that were flooding through her – regret at having misjudged him, shame for her self-centred reactions and an empathy so profound it was as if she herself had already lost those dearest to her. For a few moments they sat without moving, locked together by a common bond, nothing physical now, in spice of the contact of their hands, more a meeting of two souls offering and receiving comfort.