Page 59 of A French Country Escape
Sasha sipped her coffee. ‘If anybody can be accused of meddling in someone else’s business, it’s probably me, not throwing Eliza’s box away as she told me to.’
‘Mais non. It was a good thing to not do. You make several people happy. If you are finish, we walk and I show you some of the land, yes?’ Jean-Paul stood up and held out his hand. ‘There is a little river at the bottom of my valley; you like to see? The dogs they can play in the water.’
‘Sounds fun,’ and Sasha sprang up from her chair.
Walking down the side of a flower meadow full of poppies and wildflowers, with her hand enclosed in Jean-Paul’s work-roughened one, she felt a surge of happiness flood through her body. Being with this man felt so right.
The stream, when they reached it, was an idyllic spot. Fresh clear water trickled over pebbles and small rocks and gurgled its way around larger boulders, creating several pools in the process. ‘What a beautiful place,’ Sasha said watching the dogs splashing around in the shallows. A willow-tree dipped its branches in the water and they both saw a flash of blue flying out of its protection.
‘Was that a kingfisher? I’ve never seen one before,’ Sasha said.
Jean-Paul nodded. ‘Yes. We are lucky to see it.’
Sasha gave a contented sigh and looked at Jean-Paul. ‘I understand why you’ve never wanted to leave the farm, you have everything you need here.’
‘I am proud to be the fifth generation of my family to work this land, to live in the farmhouse. I accept my destiny happily.’Jean-Paul smiled at her. ‘My papa, he teach me well in the ways of country life. You like the French countryside?’
‘I love it. The countryside is my happy place.’
‘That is good for me to hear,’ Jean-Paul said quietly. ‘The farming life is not for everyone.’ He paused for several seconds, leaving Sasha anxiously wondering what he was going to say.
‘I meet you and my heart begin to sing. Life, it take on a different vibration. Something special happen. I start to wonder.’ He hesitated, staring down at the water gurgling over the rocks before looking up at her. ‘But it is difficult when the language is not the same to know if the other person feel the same.’ Jean-Paul gazed at Sasha, his expression full of hope, his body tense as he waited for her reply to the question he was about to ask. He caught hold of both her hands. ‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’ Sasha asked quietly.
‘Do you have the feeling for me I have for you?’
There was a split second of silence as Sasha looked at him with a big smile on her face as she nodded. ‘Of course I do.’
With a deep sigh, Jean-Paul pulled her close and enveloped her in a tight hug before giving her a kiss that left neither of them in any doubt about how the other one felt about them.
45
The day before Bastille Day, Eliza accepted an invitation from Peter to go up to the château for lunch with him, his parents and Ingrid. ‘Alice and Lucas have both got a rendez-vous in Quimper, but Lucas has said he’ll drop you off here first and Alice will collect you later. So it will be just us oldies to talk things through and show you the family bible, and for you to go through the contents of the box.’
Penny cooked and served lunch for them but declined to join them, laughingly saying, ‘You’re all guests today.’ She’d been relieved when she’d learnt that Lucas wasn’t staying for lunch. She’d managed to avoid him ever since the afternoon when opening the box had changed things for them both.
When she saw the family bible with Bernadette Chevalier’s name scratched out, Eliza’s eyes filled with tears. ‘That poor woman. One cannot begin to comprehend what she went through. Such a different world in those days. No wonder she was unable to bond with her daughter.’
Edward Chevalier nodded. ‘We need to reinstate her name, add in her marriage to Alphonse Gilet and continue the family tree with her descendants. Set the family history straight.’
‘Thank you,’ Eliza said. ‘Until I read those two letters, I had no idea of what had happened in my family in the past. It seems Bernadette was a very unhappy woman for most of her adult life. The only grandparents I ever knew were my father’s parents and they died when I was quite young. Growing up, although my mother and I were close, I accepted without question that she never talked about her own mother. I remember when I was about ten, I think, I asked did she think her mother ever thought about her? She gave a shrug and said, “I doubt it. She wasn’t a maternal sort of woman”.’ Eliza gave a sniff. ‘Bernadette’s letter shows the real reasons.’
After lunch, Peter placed the contents of the box on the table. The mixture of old photos, letters, and birth and marriage certificates had been tidily sorted into date order as far as possible. Eliza picked out a letter to read, from Charles to ‘Bernadette, my dearest sister,’ when he had first enlisted, and she was still clearly living at home. Thanking her for the last letter that had finally reached him, he told her how much he missed home and her, and how he detested being a soldier. He couldn’t wait to be back and go walking the dogs with her in the countryside. Replacing it in the pile, Eliza saw a framed sketch of a large country house and picked it up.
‘Our family home near Rouen,’ Edward said.
‘It looks a substantialmaison de maîtrefor a successful family. Does a Chevalier still own it?’ Eliza asked.
‘Sadly no,’ Edward answered. ‘My father had to sell it in the forties after the war when we moved to England. He hated doing it but basically, a problem with inheritance tax and no money in the bank after the war gave him no choice. I’ve driven past it on a couple of occasions when we’ve been in France and dream of buying it back. Not likely to happen.’
Eliza picked up the ring box and, opening it, stared at its contents sitting on the velvet cushion. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Try it on,’ Ingrid said.
Eliza shook her head. ‘No. It won’t fit over my arthritic knuckles.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Ingrid said. ‘Put it somewhere safe when you get home then.’
