Her Own Rules/Dangerous to Know (12 page)

Meredith said, “You're staring at me, Luc. Do I have a smudge on my nose or something?”

“No, you don't.” His dark brown eyes suddenly twinkled. “I was just admiring you, if you want the truth. You're a beautiful woman, Meredith.”

She felt the color rising up from her neck to flood her face and was mortified at herself. Men had paid her compliments before; why was she blushing because Luc had? “Th-thank you,” she managed to stammer, and was relieved when the telephone began to shrill.

Luc rose, went to answer it. “Clos-Talcy.
Bonjour.”
After listening for a second, he said: “Hold on for a moment, please,” and looked across at her. “It's your daughter, Catherine.”

Meredith's face lit up and she jumped to her feet, stepped over to the desk, took the receiver from him, thanking him as she did.

Luc merely nodded, walked over to the window, stood gazing out, his head full of this woman. He felt he knew her intuitively, and yet she baffled him. There was an air of mystery about her. He found her irresistible.

“Hello, Catherine, how are you, darling?” Meredith asked, then listened attentively as her daughter's voice floated to her across the transatlantic wire from New York. Her smile widened. “Yes, I'm happy for you, darling, I'm thrilled, actually.” She clutched the phone tightly, continued to listen, then said into the mouthpiece, “Yes, I'll be back in Paris on Monday, and no, I won't be home for at least another week.” There was a pause at Meredith's end before she answered, “Yes, all right, I'll call you on Wednesday Give Keith my love. Don't forget to tell Jon. Have a great weekend. I love you, Cat. Bye now.”

She replaced the receiver and smiled at Luc when he turned around to face her, an expectant look in his eyes.

“My daughter just got engaged. Last night. She's floating on cloud nine.” Meredith blinked and looked away, pushing back sudden tears. She was so happy for Catherine, her emotions got the better of her for a moment.

“What wonderful news! It calls for a toast and another glass of bubbly, as Grandma Rosie used to call it.”

After filling their crystal flutes, Luc raised his and clinked it against hers. “Here's to love . . . and happy endings,” he murmured, staring at her closely, his dark eyes riveted on hers.

Meredith stared back, felt the warmth rising to fill her face again. “Love and happy endings, Luc,” she repeated, and took a sip of champagne. Then she went over to the sofa, where she sat down. She was very conscious of Luc de Montboucher all of a sudden.

Luc followed her but remained standing, his back against the fire. “How old is your daughter?” he asked.

“Twenty-five. And I have a son, Jonathan, who's twenty-one. He's studying law at Yale.”

A smile flashed across his face, and he exclaimed, “I studied architecture there. Graduate school after the Sorbonne. What a coincidence! Does he like it?”

“Yes, he does.”

“I'm glad. I did, too. Best years of my life.” He chuckled.

“Were they really?”

“Up to a point. I had some other good years. Before. After.” He took a swallow of his drink, a reflective look washing over his face.

“Luc?”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever been married?”

“Oh yes. Didn't Agnes tell you about me?” He raised a brow questioningly.

“No.” She frowned. “What makes you think she would?”

“Oh no special reason,” he answered and shrugged. “I thought she might have, that's all. And yes, I was married. My wife died six years ago. Annick was in good health one day, dying of cancer the next. It was virulent, she went very quickly. Just six months after being diagnosed. She was only thirty-seven.” He paused, cleared his throat. “We were married eight years.”

“Luc, I'm so sorry. How tragic. What a terrible loss for you.” Meredith looked up at him worriedly, hoping she had not upset him. How stupid she had been, thoughtless, to bring up his wife.

“We didn't have children,” Luc volunteered.

Meredith said nothing, gazed across the room, lost in thought.

Luc put down his drink on the coffee table between the two sofas; he threw a couple of logs onto the fire, straightened up. Lifting his drink, he took a sip.

The room had gone very quiet. The only sounds were the crackling logs, the ticking clock.

At last Meredith said, “Nobody's life is ever easy, whatever we might think. There's always pain and heartache, trouble, problems, ill health. Loss . . . of one kind or another.”

“That is so . . . yes, it's very true what you say. My Irish grandmother was not only beautiful but also very wise. She was forever telling us, when we were growing up, that life had always been hard, was meant to be hard, and that it would never be anything else but hard. That is the earthly lot of us poor mortals, she would say, and therefore we should grab what bit of happiness we could whenever we could. And if we found the right person we must hang on to them for dear life. Forever. That's what she said, and I strongly suspect that Grandma Rosie spoke the truth.”

“I've never met the right person,” Meredith said, surprising herself, instantly regretting these words.

“I did. But she died.” Luc stared off into the distance for a moment, as if he could see something visible only to himself. Then he said, “I've never met anyone else. But I haven't given up hope. . . .” He looked at her pointedly, but Meredith did not appear to notice his meaningful glance.

“Catherine's father died,” she suddenly answered, “but he was a married man anyway . . . I would never have been able to marry him. I divorced Jon's father . . . that was all wrong . . . we weren't right for each other at all. . . .” She let her sentence float in midair, unfinished.

“Was that a long time ago? Your divorce?”

“Sixteen years.” Confessions, she thought. And more confessions. What's suddenly got into me? Why am I telling him all these private things about myself? This man is a stranger.

Luc said, “You will meet the right person, Meredith. I know you will.” He wanted to add that perhaps she already had, but he refrained.

Mathilde appeared in the doorway at the far end of the library. She cleared her throat.

Luc glanced at her. “Ah, Mathilde. Is lunch ready?”

“Oui, Monsieur. “

“Merci.”
Turning to Meredith, he said, “I don't know about you, but I'm ravenous.”

“Yes, I am too.”

As he led her across the library in the direction of the dining room, Luc explained, “I asked Mathilde to make a fairly simple lunch. Vegetable soup, plain omelette, green salad, cheese, and fruit. I hope that's to your taste.”

“It sounds perfect,” Meredith answered, looking at him.

Luc smiled at her warmly, took hold of her arm, and led her into the dining room, where Mathilde was waiting to serve lunch.

Suddenly Meredith did not care what she had told him about herself. She knew he would not judge her; she trusted him.

And she felt safe with Luc de Montboucher.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

A
fter lunch Luc took Meredith on a tour of the park in which Clos-Talcy stood. As they walked they talked about a variety of things, but eventually the conversation came back to his grandmother. Luc told her several amusing stories about Rose de Montboucher, keeping her thoroughly entertained.

At one moment she said, “The way in which you speak about
Grand-mère
Rose really brings her to life for me. I wish I'd known her.”

“You would have enjoyed her,” Luc answered, glancing at Meredith. “She was a true original. Strong of character, spirited and courageous, and she truly ran our family. Ruled it with an iron hand. In a velvet glove, of course.” He chuckled, continued. “My father loved to tease her, and when her birthday came around he always used to lift his glass and say, ‘Here's to that great man whose name is Rosie,' borrowing the line from Voltaire.”

“Who said those very words to Catherine the Great, when he met her in Russia for the first time,” Meredith remarked. “She's one of my favorite characters in history, and I've read a number of biographies about her.
She
was strong and courageous too. And she made her own rules.”

“That's true, she did, but then most strong women do do that, don't you think?”

“Yes, they do . . . sometimes they have to, because they have no other choice.”

Luc took hold of her arm and led her down a side path, heading for the orchard ahead of them. “In 1871, when my great-great-grandfather acquired Talcy from the Delorme family, he built the fishpond over there. It's actually fed by the stream that flows through the wood, and it was a marvelous bit of engineering on his part.”

They came to a stop by the edge of the pond, and Meredith peered down into its murky depths. “There really are fish in it,” she said, sounding surprised.

“
Of course.
When I was a little boy I used to fish here. My sisters and I all had rods and lines, and sometimes Grandma Rosie joined us. She was rather good at fishing.”

“I can just imagine.” There was a silence between them as they walked around the pond, turned, and headed toward the woods. After a moment, Meredith murmured, “Your grandmother was a great influence on you, wasn't she?”

“Oh yes. She brought us up, you see. My mother died in childbirth, giving birth to our little brother Albert, who was premature. He also died that same week. It will be thirty-three years ago this summer, to be exact.”

“How sad for you and your sisters . . . for your whole family.”

“Everyone took it very hard, especially my father. He never remarried, and I believe he mourned my mother until the day he died.”

“When was that, Luc?”

“Almost two years ago. He wasn't very old, only seventy-one, which is no age at all these days. He dropped dead suddenly of a stroke. He was in the stables, didn't know what hit him, thankfully. It would have been terrible if he had been an invalid, he was a very active man, a great sportsman.”

“And your grandmother? When did she die?”

“In 1990 at the age of ninety. She was wonderful right to the end, not a bit senile or decrepit, and she was very active, had all of her faculties. Oh yes,
she
was still the boss around here. One night she went to bed and never awakened, just died in her sleep, very peacefully. I was glad of that, glad she didn't suffer. Neither did my father, for that matter.”

“I think that's the best way to go, with your boots on, so to speak,” Meredith said, thinking out loud. “Or when you're asleep, as your grandmother was. Dying of old age is the most natural thing.” Meredith turned to Luc, smiled at him. “That painting of her in my sitting room is very lovely, isn't it? I was trying to figure out how old she was when it was painted.”

Luc's brow furrowed as he said, “I'm not exactly sure. However, she'd just married Arnaud de Montboucher, my grandfather, and come to live at Talcy when she sat for the portrait. So she must have been in her early twenties.”

“That's what I thought. She reminds me of somebody, I'm not sure who.”

“My sister Natalie favors her, but you've never met Natalie. Or have you?”

Meredith laughed, shook her head, “No, I haven't.”

“Natalie resembles Grandmother physically, she's really rather beautiful, but she's not like her in character. Neither is Isabelle. I'm the one who inherited Rose's basic character,” Luc confided.

“She really put her imprint on you, didn't she?”

“Absolutely.
I have come to realize that I think like her, and I have a tendency to do things the way she did. When someone really influences you in childhood, you carry her imprint. Always, I think. It's like an indelible stamp. And who was it who put their imprint on you, Meredith?”

“No one did,” she answered almost fiercely, and bit her lip, suddenly aware that she had sounded angry. Speaking in a softer tone, she went on. “I just muddled through on my own, doing the best I could, teaching myself. Nobody influenced me. There was no one in my life to do that, no one at all, I was completely alone.”

They had stopped walking a few seconds before, had paused near one of the fountains, now stood face-to-face as they spoke. The sadness invading her touched Luc; he wanted to reach out, pull her into his arms. But he did not dare. He was about to say something comforting to her, when she suddenly smiled. The bereftness vanished instantly.

Meredith said, “But there was someone later, when I was a bit older . . . eighteen. Amelia Silver. She showed me how to do certain things, taught me about antiques and art. She had wonderful taste and was very artistic, actually and her husband, jack, influenced me in certain ways, too.”

“Are the Silvers still living in Connecticut?”

“Oh no, they're both dead. They died years ago, over twenty years ago. Sadly, neither of them was very old.”

“I'm sorry. They were like family, weren't they?”

She nodded, half turned away from him. “I was twenty-two when Jack died, twenty-three when Amelia followed him to the grave. I had them in my life for only a few years.”

Aware that the sadness had surfaced again, Luc took hold of her hand. “Come on, let's walk down to the ornamental lake, it's so picturesque, one of the prettiest parts of the park.”

By the time they reached the lake situated at the far side of the house, Meredith was beginning to feel unwell. A wave of nausea passed through her and a peculiar kind of exhaustion seemed to settle in her bones. Unexpectedly, she thought she was going to collapse, and she grabbed hold of Luc's arm, said in a faint voice, “I don't know what's wrong with me, but I feel awful. Nauseated, and suddenly very tired.”

Luc looked at her in concern. “I do hope you're not getting the flu, that Agnes hasn't passed on any germs.”

“I doubt it, and Agnes wasn't ill.”

“No, but her family was. Do you think it was the wine at lunch? Could that have upset you?”

She shook her head. “I didn't drink very much. Anyway, I remember now that I felt a bit queasy when I arrived in Paris on Tuesday night. I'd spent the morning wandering around an old ruined abbey in Yorkshire, and it was bitterly cold. That night I thought that I'd probably caught a chill. But I was all right the next morning, so perhaps I'm just tired in general, run down.”

“Perhaps. Let us return to the house. You must rest for the remainder of the afternoon.” So saying, he put his arm around her and together they walked back to the château.

 

Luc accompanied Meredith upstairs to her rooms and fussed around her. He made her take off her boots and forced her to lie down on the sofa. After adding more logs to the fire, he brought her a thick cashmere throw and laid it over her.

“Don't go away,” he said, smiling down at her. “I'll be back in a few minutes with a pot of hot lemon tea laced with honey. It'll do you the world of good . . . one of Grandma Rosie's cures.” He left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

Meredith leaned her head back against the pile of soft velvet cushions and closed her eyes; she was so sleepy, she could barely keep her eyes open.

She must have dozed off, for she awakened with a start when Luc bent over her and moved a strand of hair away from her face. This intimate gesture on his part startled her for a moment, and then she realized that she did not mind that he did this. It suddenly seemed perfectly natural to her.

“I put the tea here on the ottoman,” he said, his voice low, concerned still. “Drink some of it while it's hot. Now I shall go and let you rest.” He squeezed her shoulder.

“Thank you, Luc, you're so kind. I'm sorry I cut short our walk, but I—”

“Think nothing of it,” he said swiftly “It's not important.”

“Would you turn off the lamp, please?”

“Of course. Now rest.” He left the room.

Meredith turned on her side, lay curled in a ball under the cashmere throw, staring into the fire's bright flames. The logs hissed and crackled and sparks flew up the chimney. She raised her eyes at one moment and gazed for a long time at the portrait of Rose de Montboucher.

The afternoon light was fading rapidly, the room filling with shadows, but the roaring fire and its dancing flames introduced a rosy glow. In the soft incandescent light it seemed to Meredith that the painting of Rose came alive. Her face was full of life, her delphinium-blue eyes brilliant, sparkling with joy, and the red-gold curls framed the sublime face like a halo of burnished copper. How beautiful she was . . . so radiant.

Meredith's eyelids drooped. She drifted on a wave of warmth. Her mind was filled with that face . . . memories jostled for prominence . . . fragmented into infinitesimal pieces. She fell into a deep sleep. And she dreamed.

 

The landscape was vast and it stretched away endlessly, as far as the eye could see, miles and miles of desolation. There was something oddly sinister about this place where there were no trees and nothing bloomed on the parched, cracked earth.

She had been walking and walking for as long as she could remember. It seemed like forever. She felt tired. But some inner determination pushed her forward. She knew they were here somewhere. The children. She had followed them here. But where could they be? Her eyes darted around. The land was empty; there was nowhere for them to hide.

Help me to find them, please. Oh God, help me to find them, she pleaded. And immediately she understood that her prayers fell on arid ground. There was no God here. Not in this empty void. It was godless, this netherworld.

And then unexpectedly she saw something moving near the pale rim of the far horizon. She began to run. The cracked dry earth suddenly gave way to mud flats and her shoes squelched and sank into the mud and sometimes stuck and her progress was slowed. She persisted. Soon the land was dry again. She ran and ran.

The specks on the horizon grew closer and closer, loomed up in front of her as if they had jumped backward. She saw a young boy holding a girl's hand. Just as they had drawn closer to her, now they withdrew, moved forward again, and rapidly so. She ran, almost caught up to them once more. They walked on slowly, the two of them, still hand in hand, perfectly in step. She called out to them, called for them to wait for her. But they did not. They went on walking as if they had not heard her. The sky changed, turned a strange grayish-green, and a high wind began to blow, buffeting her forward. Suddenly the boy flew into the air, as if blown upward by a gust of wind. He disappeared into the sky.

The little girl was alone now. She suddenly turned around and began to walk toward her. Meredith hurried forward to greet the girl, so wan, so pathetic, with her pale, pinched face and big sad eyes. She wore black stockings and shoes, and a heavy winter coat. There was a small black beret on her head and a long striped scarf was wrapped around her neck. The label pinned to the lapel of her coat was huge. The girl pointed to it. Meredith peered at it, trying to decipher the girl's name written there, but she could not.

Suddenly, taking her by surprise, the girl began to run away. Meredith tried to run after her but her feet were stuck, encased in the mud. She cried to the girl to come back, but she did not stop, just went on running and running and running until she was gone out of the landscape.

There was a cracking sound and then a terrible noise like shell fire and everything exploded around her . . .

 

Meredith sat up with a jolt. Her face and neck were bathed in sweat. She was disoriented, and it took her a moment to get her bearings. Then she realized she was in Grandma Rosie's sitting room at Talcy.

Outside, a storm was raging, lightning streaking through the darkening sky, thunderbolts rattling the windows. She shivered and huddled under the cashmere throw Luc had wrapped around her earlier, stared at the fire, grown low in the grate. And the fear was there inside, ravaging her.

Closing her eyes, she tried to push the fear away, not understanding why she was so frightened. She was here at the château, perfectly safe from the violent storm raging outside.

And then it came to her. She knew why she was so fearful. It was the dream. The dream that had recurred so many times in her life. She had not dreamed it for years now. Suddenly, the old, familiar dream had come back to haunt her, to frighten her again, as it always had in the past.