Escape to the French Chateau

Chapter 30

Chapter 30

Johnny wanted to wrap Fran up in his arms, to hold her close and comfort her as she cried. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone lose it in quite such an uninhibited way, was struggling to know what to do. Natalie hadn’t ever shown this level of raw emotion, even in their most private moments – her displays of emotion tended towards anger. He’d learnt over the years that attack was his wife’s chosen defence mechanism.

He rested a hand on Fran’s shoulder, waiting for her to take the prompt and turn into him, but she didn’t. Instead, she kept both hands flat on the balustrade, face turned down and away from everybody as she wept.

‘Looks like they’re making headway with the fire,’ Noel said, a touch of desperation in his voice as he dithered at Johnny’s side.

Johnny allowed his gaze and his hand to slip away from Fran, was almost grateful to his brother for the distraction. For the first time, he took notice of the fire department’s arrival, and their immediate, decisive strategy. Their priority was to keep fire away from the main buildings and there was a long pipe stretching all the way to the river, sourcing water from there rather than their tanks as they doused the areas nearest the chateau. Johnny wondered what each vehicle’s capacity was for carrying water, tried to fill his mind with practical, unemotional thoughts. Would they attempt to contain the fire, rather than trying to put it out – allow it to burn out in a more controlled way? Maybe that strategy was already underway. Johnny wondered how many miles of vineyards would be lost, wondered if the fire had reached Monsieur Beaufoy’s grounds – or even Chateau des Rêves?

Now was not the time to worry about a derelict chateau he’d already decided he wasn’t going to buy. Logic told him as much. But the strong, almost visceral reaction to the thought of Chateau des Rêves burning took Johnny by surprise, stole his breath. It was as though someone had punched him in the stomach.

Another set of flashing lights, accompanied by another wailing siren took everyone’s attention – an ambulance picked its way up the drive and came to rest beside them all with a final flick of granite chips.

Madame Beaufoy ushered the paramedic across to where Fran stood, eyes puffy from her tears and expression forlorn enough to make Johnny blink hard to get himself under control. He reinstated his hand on Fran’s shoulder, intending to interpret, to explain to the medic what had happened. But she shook his hand off and headed towards the ambulance without a backward glance.

Fran knew Johnny was only trying to help, but she couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear anyone’s sympathy or attention. Couldn’t cope with his tender, reassuring touch on her shoulder. Once the tears had begun to fall, it was as though her body had been overtaken by a waterfall of emotion. And once she’d allowed the torrent to find an exit route, she didn’t seem able to stop it. Like a swollen flood-season river finally breaking its banks, there was no force strong enough to prevent the water from flowing wherever it chose.

It was about Red. The loss of that beautiful little creature and the time she would never be able to spend with him, the harsh possibility of a life cut short. It was about far more than Red. She was back in Lyme Regis, in her mind, when they came to find her to tell her about her mum’s accident. She was back on one of those desperately uncomfortable plastic moulded chairs in the hospital, holding on to the hand of the only person who had ever loved her unconditionally. Listening to the beeps and hiss of a machine keeping the body of her mother alive. A woman who had given up everything to give Fran a life. A woman who Fran knew was never going to wake up, however hard she wished for it.

It didn’t matter how much she wanted five more minutes with her mother, what she would have given for one last chance to tell her mum how much she loved her, Fran had this snatched away from her. The memory of the mundanity of their final words to one another earlier that fateful day haunted her with a fresh layer of helplessness. A fresh dousing of sadness, the grief from that time was back – worse, if that was possible – sharp like lemon juice in an open cut, mixing with her sadness at losing Red and shutting her away into a dark, cold place.

‘Where is Fran? I need to make sure she’s OK,’ Penny asked Madame Beaufoy, having made her way through the crowds until she came upon the manager.

‘She’s being seen by the paramedics before they take her to hospital.’

‘What happened? Is it serious?’ Penny couldn’t stop the panic rising as her mind crowded with worst-case scenarios.

‘They say she’ll be fine. She fell and took a blow to her head while she searched for that damned cat. She was unconscious for a while so they will keep her in the hospital overnight.’

The news brought more tears to the corners of Penny’s eyes, only made worse when Madame Beaufoy took hold of her arm, squeezing tight before letting her go.

‘We are all worried, but I think you will be taking this news harder than some. You care for Fran, don’t you?’

Penny did her best to style out the tear as it bulged and fell, twizzling a hand as if she was pushing a non-existent hair from her face, while she used the back of it to wipe at her eye.

‘I’m not proud of myself that day in the office; I was hurt and lashed out at Fran, and now I regret the things I said. The thought of her in danger and never getting the chance to explain myself, to apologise, is …’ She was desperately trying hard to hold back the tears.

Harry suddenly appeared at Penny’s shoulder, and one look at her face had him wrapping an arm around her. The action had Penny confused, because she still didn’t know where they stood – was this a friendly gesture of support, or something more? Ever since he showed up in the hotel, ready to save her, she was struggling to read through all the mixed messaging. Though one thing was for sure: Harry had a fiancée back home, an entire life he’d chosen to hide from her. There was no way Penny should be tucked against the secure contours of his body, but she didn’t have the energy to pull away, or the inclination. After spending so long wanting nothing more than to have this level of proximity to him, this moment mixed with the bittersweet truth of their situation wasn’t lost on her.

Harry, sensing Penny’s emotional turmoil, held on a bit tighter to her before saying, ‘There’s things we need to talk about too, Penny,’ he said.

A glance in his direction was enough to know his attention was fixed on her, but she made herself pull away from him, didn’t allow herself to be sucked in by his gaze, however much she wanted to be. There was a lot going through Penny’s mind and she needed to take things one step at time – and, right now, her priority was Fran.

‘I want to see her – when can I see Fran?’ she asked Madame Beaufoy, crossing her arms and focusing on her employer’s answer.

‘I do not know for sure, but I will arrange for you to visit her.’

‘I need to know, Madame Beaufoy.’

Madame Beaufoy told her to wait a minute before heading to the tall guy she recognised from table six, Fran’s cat search-party partner, asking him whether he would be willing to give Penny a lift to the hospital later that day.

‘I’d planned to fly home this afternoon,’ he was saying – which seemed to be news to his brother, if the latter’s expression was anything to go by. ‘But I don’t want to leave until I know Fran is all right.’

‘I believe you are booked with us for another night, anyway, Monsieur Taylor. And you will need time to recover from this drama. Monsieur, can I ask if it is all right to call you Johnny?’ Madame Beaufoy laid on her most charming smile. Penny edged closer.

‘Of course,’ he replied.

‘It looks as though Chateau les Champs d’Or will stand for a few more centuries, I think it has been very fortunate not to have suffered any significant damage. And it would be a great shame if you cut short your visit unnecessarily.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Forgive my presumption, but I think you have become a good friend of Fran’s, n’est ce pas?’

Wily old goat, Penny thought as Johnny’s expression morphed through a rainbow of emotions.

‘I thought I had,’ he replied.

‘Visit her in l’h?pital, Johnny. Recently, Fran has had much change in her life, and sometimes it is hard for us to see … what is the expression … the branches for the trees – is that right?’

Johnny grinned, and in that moment, Penny could see why Fran was having difficulty trying to pretend she felt nothing for the bloke. When he dropped his serious, professional man act, he was dead sexy.

‘The wood for the trees,’ Penny said, at the exact moment Johnny did, and Madame Beaufoy drew her into the conversation while they planned the hospital trip.

Harry supposed it was only fair that Penny was giving him the runaround. After all, he’d been giving her the runaround ever since the day they met, one way or another. But seeing her pelting headlong into the chateau in search of her friend had cemented something in his mind. The way she had thrown caution to the wind and had been searching alone, checking behind chairs in case Fran was lying prone behind them had tugged at him.

And when the smoke became thicker, and he’d had a momentary wobble about his own safety, it hadn’t been Sophie who had filled his thoughts – it had been Penny.

It wasn’t that Harry was falling in love with her because she was wayward, or difficult, or acted without thinking first – but all those aspects to Penny’s personality gave Harry a buzz. There was no point denying it. She made him smile, she made him laugh, she drove him nuts and he had no idea where she got all her energy from. She was exhausting, but in all the right ways. More important than any of that – she’d made him question himself more than ever before.

He’d believed he had broken free by taking the decision to travel, to learn as much about his passion for cooking as he could while he backpacked his way across the world. He’d defied his father, made his mother cry, seen the confusion in Sophie’s expression. But had he truly believed this new reality would stick? However much he’d dreamed of becoming a professional chef, had he truly believed he had the bottle to go through with it, or had he always had a return home, prodigal son-style, in the back of his mind? Why else hadn’t he had the guts to make a clean break from Sophie?

Whatever the situation was between himself and Penny, right now or going forward, Harry was decided on one thing; he wasn’t going home anytime soon. If ever. And this revelation spurred clarity on another aspect of his life.

He needed to speak to Sophie.

Fran was almost certain she didn’t have a concussion, even though she had to admit to the doctor that she’d been knocked unconscious for a few seconds. She’d been concussed years before, when she’d been messing around on the harbour wall in Lyme Regis as a kid, slipped on the wet stones and cracked the back of her head on the granite of the Cobb’s wall.

However hard she tried to explain that she knew what a concussion felt like and that she didn’t feel the same way this time, nobody was paying her any attention. Yes, she did have a headache, but she had none of the dizziness, or the intolerance to light or noise. When she was a kid, all she’d wanted to do was sleep, and her mother had resorted to pinching her to keep her awake – and when she was awake, she’d demanded to have the curtains drawn, to keep the worst of the light out.

Back then it had taken her weeks to be able to concentrate for long enough to read a book, or even watch the television. She should have loved the time she’d had off school but had felt too grotty to enjoy any of it.

By contrast, there was no way she could bear being stuck in this hospital room if she’d had a concussion, because there seemed no end to the noise and the light. Perhaps there was a medical reason to stay, to ensure she didn’t nod off and end up in a coma, but Fran was having a hard time finding answers.

She supposed she should be grateful the cut on her forehead hadn’t needed to be stitched. Instead it had been cleaned up, with butterfly strips applied in quick order to join the wayward portions of skin back together, with a dressing over the top for good measure.

‘You are lucky. No scar,’ the nurse had said to her, with an exaggerated hand movement back and forth across her own forehead, before she’d gathered up the detritus of her work into a kidney-shaped cardboard bowl, snapped off her single-use gloves and headed to her next task.

Fran puffed out her cheeks, resting her head against the pillow as she stared at the ceiling. It didn’t take her long to wish for the next busy pass by a nurse or a doctor, for someone to want to flash a bright pencil beam of light into her eyes, or for someone to report back with the X-rays they’d taken of her wrist and ankle in case anything was broken. Instead, she was left alone with her thoughts for the first time since she’d discovered that Red had disappeared.

Welling up again, Fran did her best to stop her lips from quivering, her whole jaw vibrating with the effort of not crying. It had become impossible to understand who the tears were for – the cat? Her mother? Herself?

It wasn’t that she hadn’t cried when her mum died, it was more that to a large degree she had no time to really process her emotions while dealing with the aftermath. There had been so much to sort out, so many people to tell, so little time between the funeral and the introduction of Bill Wilding into her life. There hadn’t been any spare moment for her to stop, to absorb, to reassess.

She’d felt so excited at the prospect of being a part of her father’s life, of his business. To potentially have the opportunity to pursue her dreams.

And only that very morning, her father had basically offered her everything she’d ever wanted on a silver platter. Maybe the house in Lyme Regis would give her the breathing space she needed to fully grieve her loss. After all, her money worries would basically be a thing of the past – her father had intimated as much.

So why had she drawn back rather than biting his arm off? Why did she need time to think it over?

‘Because you’re far stronger than you realise, far braver than you know, far better than that.’

Her mother’s words, repeated like a mantra when she’d crawled home after Victor had done his best to rip her into tiny pieces. But why were they springing into her mind now?