Escape to the French Chateau

Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Harry hadn’t been part of the group Madame Beaufoy was conversing with, but, from afar, he’d heard the shout go up for help. He’d watched Penny tug at her ponytail as she ran to join the group of staff heading back towards the chateau. Without so much as a backwards glance, she strode towards the building, shrouded ever more effectively by a blanket of smoke.

‘Where are they going?’ he asked the nearest person, a guest.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, her attention fleeting and quickly claimed by someone else.

The group of searchers were heading into Chateau les Champs d’Or, disappearing into black smoke which swirled around in an increasingly strong frenzy of a breeze. The smoke seemed to be coming from every direction, the wind making it impossible to get a grip on its origin.

Harry knew the time for inaction had passed. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter why those people were heading back into the hotel, or who they had gone to find – Harry presumed the only reason they would head back inside would be for a missing person. But the why wasn’t important. The only thing to factor in Harry’s mind was that Penny was about to put herself in mortal danger, and he knew, in that moment, that he would do anything – anything – to make sure she was safe.

The strength of that thought stole Harry’s breath. Glancing around, he reached for a discarded piece of linen, no doubt clutched in someone’s hand as they originally left the chateau but subsequently dumped. That would do. Slipping down the bank and then dipping into the trickle of water of the stream, he soaked that piece of material alongside the towel still looped in the strings of his apron and then ran for the chateau, ringing the worst of the water out as he moved.

With one of the cloths wrapped around his nose and mouth to cut down on smoke inhalation, he sprinted up the steps and into the building, taking a moment to adjust and take stock. Nobody remained in the foyer – the search must have moved deeper into the chateau and Penny had gone deeper, too.

Shouting her name, Harry realised he had a decision to make in the maze of hotel corridors. Which way should he turn? Left or right? And it wasn’t the only decision demanding his immediate attention, because he had to decide before it was too late. Decide what he wanted. Penny or Sophie? Cheffing or the army? Happiness or duty?

Johnny reached the prone figure, dropping to his knees beside it as he struggled to make sense of what he was seeing.

The back of his arm became a temporary towel as he used it to try to wipe away the worst of the tears, springing again and again from eyes stinging from the smoke. Wasn’t the air supposed to be clearer the lower you got? The random thought popped into a brain already working overtime, the fact that wind was swirling smoke in every direction presumably made the natural behaviour of the stuff null and void under these circumstances.

Johnny couldn’t bring himself to touch the body, but he needed to check. Needed to know if he was too late, if it was all too late.

Breathing through the sodden material he held across the bottom half of his face, he reached out, tentatively. Didn’t want to touch it, couldn’t bear to uncover the truth. Catching his top lip between his teeth and biting down hard enough to give his mind a new focus, Johnny pulled at the bundle, turning it to be able to see it properly.

Lifeless. He’d known as much by the way it had moved, slumping from one direction to the other like a rag doll as Johnny pulled.

It took him a few more seconds to fully understand what he was looking at. Through the smoke Johnny felt tears again, but this time they were tears of utter relief. He prodded at the shape as if to reassure his senses that he was right. What had looked ominously like a body was, in fact, a discarded sausage-shaped bag of linens, tied at the top with a drawstring and, on closer inspection, not at all Fran-shaped.

Johnny laughed, then coughed as the smoke punished his reaction. This wasn’t Fran, but he was still no nearer to actually finding her. And if she’d ventured out here in search of the cat, it would be an impossible task to find her in all this smoke.

With the nightmarish scenario of Fran being lost somewhere outside playing on a loop in his head, Johnny made for the chateau door. Needed to find Noel and get him to help.

‘Noel. Where are you?’ he shouted, the words catching on the smoky hooks in the back of his throat and forcing him to cough and retch. ‘Noel?’

‘Down here.’

His brother’s voice was faint, echoey, and Johnny couldn’t get a handle on where it was coming from.

‘Where are you? You need to come and help me,’ he shouted. ‘I think Fran’s outside.’

Noel’s dishevelled frame appeared around the bend in the corridor, his expression impossible to read, the shake of his head and tilt of his eyebrows worrying Johnny. And then Noel spoke.

‘No, she isn’t. Mate, I’ve found her.’

Less than five minutes previously, and by the time Fran had felt her way back around to the side door she’d given up trying to make her whistly mouse noise, the final vestiges of hope for finding Red faded away as she realised she was lucky not to have succumbed to the smoke.

Fran clung on to the wall, taking a final look at the smoke-filled vista. A last, desperate glance through half-closed eyes, eyelashes desperately inadequate against the constant sting of the smoke. Sending a prayer spiralling upwards, she hoped for a miracle, for the cat to have understood the approaching danger and have fled long before the smoke and the flames engulfed the area.

Once she was inside the chateau, she went to pull the door closed, then paused. If, by some miracle, Red was still out there, she should leave the door ajar so he could take refuge inside the building.

In the staff corridor, Fran bent double as a fit of coughing overtook her. The possibility of becoming lost out there, of turning the wrong way or losing her grip on the reassuring firmness of the chateau wall and totally losing her bearings in the smog was beginning to sink in. The thought of succumbing to smoke inhalation, of falling unconscious somewhere out there, in the path of the oncoming flames, was just horrific.

She’d been a complete idiot to go out there.

In the dim lighting of the corridor, she allowed herself a moment or two to get her breath back, to allow her lungs to fill with air, rather than trying to keep the smoke out. Blinking rapidly, involuntary tears filled her eyes, and she allowed them to form and fall – the quickest way to clear her vision.

When blinking became less painful, and the coughing had all but stopped, Fran straightened. Time to get out of here and head to the mustering point to await the emergency services.

Frowning at the thought that it was what she should have done right at the start, Fran headed for the dining room, and the quickest route out of the front of the chateau.

It was then that she heard a noise, a thump. Swivelling, she saw nothing. There wasn’t anything out of place in the corridor, a halo of smoke around the door she’d left ajar, but nothing else. And then it struck her. The cellar. If Red had been searching for somewhere safe, he could just as easily have headed for the cellar. Why hadn’t she thought of that earlier?

The cellar door was wide open, and Fran hit the light switch as she began her descent, taking the first few steps without waiting for the slow energy-saving bulbs to flicker into life.

‘Red, are you down here?’

She called out as she descended, the words morphing into a strangled cry as her foot caught against something hard, tipping her centre of gravity too far forward. Sticking out a hand to try to steady herself, Fran heard something smash, and she was falling, the light blinking and illuminating the scene as she sprawled.

With no way to halt her forward momentum, Fran did her best to tuck and roll, but a sharp pain in her wrist as her hand collided with the stone step was followed by knees thudding against rock, and reflex action took over as she squeezed her eyes tight and waited for the next blow.

Tumbling her way down the stone staircase, impact after impact knocked the wind out of her. With her eyes closed, time stood still, and the only things Fran remained aware of were momentum and pain. Until, that was, Fran’s head connected with one of the steps. An unexpectedly sharp blow, the only benefit being that all the other painful parts of her body seemed to float away until she was left with nothing but stars and strange-coloured shapes stretching and flexing inside her eyelids, or maybe inside her head.

Fran couldn’t tell whether the darkness was because her eyes were closed, or because everything was disappearing in the gathering gloom. The stars extinguished one by one by the darkness, the colours fading until there was nothing but black, until Fran felt herself float away, too, and then the blackness itself disappeared and there was nothing at all.