“We are in your debt, monsieur. You must let us repay you for your trouble.”
She spoke as if she were addressing a tradesman who had performed a special favour, but her gaze held on the Saint’s face and she seemed a little disconcerted by what she saw there.
Simon smiled and bowed with an air that was more mocking than obsequious and did more than any words could have done to take him out of the pigeonhole she had allotted to him.
“My mother told me never to accept money from strange women,” he said solemnly. He spread out his hands so that the handkerchief wrapping was visible. “But I’d be grateful for a chance to clean up and put something on this.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the gentleman was hurt, Pascal?” she said sternly.
Before the youth could answer the Saint intervened, his face serious but his voice bantering.
“I’ve always fancied myself as the strong silent type but it is just a little painful.”
In fact it was not hurting too much, but he felt that the circumstances permitted a slight exaggeration. He had no intention of being patted on the head and sent on his way, when he had such a ready-made pretext for developing the acquaintance. And he had an idea that for all her attitude of stoical authority Mimette might prove a very sympathetic nurse.
Gaston told her almost too helpfully: “If you want to take him to the château, mademoiselle, I and the others will take care of everything here. Although there is really almost nothing to be done.”
The fire was too solidly established by then for amateur extinguishing. It would have to burn itself out until it exhausted the contents of the barn and failed to make an impression on the stone walls. Mimette saw the sense of the old man’s words and sighed.
“Yes, I suppose you are right, Gaston,” she said, and there was more than a hint of tiredness in her voice. “As you always are. Pascal and-?” She looked questioningly at the other student.
“Jules.”
“And Jules will help, too. Afterwards you will find them quarters with the other pickers.”
Gaston nodded. “Of course.”
“Oui, mademoiselle.”
Simon showed Mimette the Hirondel.
“That is my car. Perhaps you would like to drive, since you know where we are going.”
“Thank you.”
She took the keys he held out as they walked over to the car.
“She’s rather fierce on the throttle. Be careful how you put your foot down, or you might find you’re where you were going before you realise you’ve started.”
His warning was answered with a withering look, and the Saint held up his hands in a pantomime of surrender.
“I’m sorry! I was forgetting that you know how to handle a car. But then if I hadn’t braked so quickly I’d have had a new mascot for the bonnet.”
Her frown slowly dissolved into a smile.
“Of course! I was trying to remember where I had seen it before.” She examined the sleek lines of the Hirondel with evident approval. “You were the man who nearly hit me.”
The Saint laughed as he held the door open for her.
“Actually I was under the impression that it was the other way round, but we won’t labour the point.”
He climbed in and turned in his seat so that he could watch her. She started the engine and let in the clutch. After an initial kangeroo hop she handled the car competently enough.
They took the driveway down which the jeep had come, towards the backdrop of buildings that he had not yet had time to sort out. The Saint admired her coolness, but it puzzled him. She could not have been much over twenty-one, but she had accepted the destruction of the barn and the threat it posed to the harvest without the dramatics he would have expected from someone of that age.
As they climbed the slope he was surprised to see that what had looked from below like the crest of an escarpment was in fact only the first of a series of hills set close together, each one topping the one before it. Only the dependencies which he had seen from the barn were actually on the first ridge: The château which overlooked them stood in fact on the next hill, with a narrow valley between. Only an illusion of perspective had made its turrets and battlements seem to grow directly out of the nearer buildings.
Mimette seemed prepared to complete the trip in silence, but the Saint had no intention of wasting such an opportunity for conversation.
“I suppose you’re getting hardened to disasters like this by now,” he remarked, as if he was just making an idle comment to pass the time.
“What do you know about the things that have been happening here?” said Mimette sharply.
“Only what Pascal told me on the drive here. That you’ve been having a lot of problems lately. Something about a curse.”
Mimette laughed scornfully.
“That is superstitious nonsense.”
“Of course,” Simon assented readily. “There was certainly nothing ghostly about the two men who set fire to the barn. I know. I tackled one of them. I was amazed when my arm didn’t go right through him.”
Mimette laughed again, and this time it was with genuine amusement.
“I’m quite sure they were real, just as all the other things that have happened have been done by real people and not the spooks the workers prefer to believe in.”
They had reached the foot of the valley and were climbing the second hill. In a few minutes they would reach the château and then it might be too late to gather all the information he wanted. There was no time for subtlety.
“What other things?”
“They are no concern of yours.”
“Perhaps not,” he agreed, but there was a new and harsher edge to his voice that she could not ignore. “But I risked my skin to try to save your property. I think that entitles me to be curious.”
“Excuse me,” Mimette said penitently. “I was very rude.”
“So what is the story?”
“It all started last year, shortly after the stone was dug up...”
“The stone?”
“Yes. A sort of tombstone. Very old and covered in ancient writing. One of the workmen discovered it when they were planting some new vines. Apparently it is some relic of the Templiers. They used to own the château.”
“Pascal told me about them.”
“Well, from then on things started happening. The vines we planted were sprayed with weed-killer. A few weeks later there was a fire in the pressing house, and a month after that my father was taken seriously ill with food poisoning. It’s just gone on and on, one thing after another. Now nobody is surprised at anything that happens. The staff believe it is all to do with the stone. They say that it has awoken the Templars’ curse. Some have even become so scared that they have left us.”
“And what do you believe, Mimette?” he asked gently.
He had been watching her as she talked and for the first time felt he had penetrated behind the mask of aloof efficiency.
The girl sighed.
“Quite honestly I don’t know what to believe any more. Perhaps someone hates us enough to want the family bankrupted. Perhaps there really is a curse on the Florians. I really don’t know.”
As they approached the château Simon surveyed it in more detail. It was exactly as Pascal had described it, half mansion, half castle. The Saint had seen bigger and more grandiose châteaux in the Loire but never one more appropriate to its setting. There was at least four hundred years between the building of each element, yet they blended as harmoniously as if they had been designed by the same architect.