The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

her and realized that the real entrance drive had come that way, from the river and what must once have been the road along the river’s bank. The glint of the Vézère lay perhaps a quarter mile down a handsome avenue of trees, which were flanked on one side by vines and on the other by an orchard of neatly pruned apple and pear trees. Before the trees began, an outbuilding in bright new stone overwhelmed the old stables. They had already passed one guard post as they had left the road. This was clearly another, with three big, black Citroëns parked alongside it, and three tough-looking young men leaning too casually against them. In the doorway of the new building, a big bald man with a thick stripe of mustache cupped his hand to his ear, listened attentively, and then nodded at them. As Lydia looked again at the front of the château, realizing that this had once been a small medieval fortress before the Renaissance window had been knocked into its facade, and before some seventeenth-century Malrand had rebuilt the rear, the front door seemed to open by itself. The effect was almost eerie, until a maid appeared, tucking her hair into a white starched bonnet, to guide them in.
    Malrand awaited them in a large and rather cold room that ran the entire width of the house. He stood smoking a yellow cigarette before his Renaissance window, dressed as if going for a stroll, in sturdy brogues, corduroy slacks, and a tweed jacket, his checked shirt open at the neck. His clothes were somehow familiar. Lydia suddenly recalled a rather grand shop on one of the Paris boulevards just by the Madeleine called Old England, and her curiosity was satisfied. He looked just like one of the window displays. His hair was thick and white, his face strikingly pale apart from the sharp redness of his cheeks; his thin nose and lips gave him a hawkish look. He appeared far more intense and less tranquil than his photographs in the newspapers, as if still full of a youthful nervous energy.
    “Welcome to my home, Major Manners. It is over fifty years since your father first stood where you are now,” he said genially in excellent English, his voice like gravel after a lifetime of smoking, as he advanced upon them with hand outstretched. “I knew that you were accompanied, but had not known that we were to be honored by the presence of such a lovely woman.” He took Lydia’s hand, bowed slightly, and raised it to within an inch of his lips. “Mademoiselle, a perfect English rose.”
    “American, Monsieur le Président, and honored to meet you.”
    “American? Then this is almost like old times. A Malrand, a Manners, and an American, here in the old château, just as we were when we first landed back in 1944. It would be too much of a coincidence, mademoiselle, for your name to be McPhee?”
    “Too much indeed, Monsieur le Président. My name is Dean,” she said, a little irritated. His security men would not only know her name and nationality but he had probably checked out her ancestry, her education, and her tastes in everything from food to music.
    “Mademoiselle Dean,” he said. “An Anglo-Saxon rose. Have a glass of champagne, and come and admire my new vineyard. We now have some decent wine again, for the first time in over a hundred years. You know about the phylloxera, the disease that wiped out so many of our vineyards in the time of Napoleon the Third? In Bordeaux and Burgundy, they were wise enough to replant with good American vines from California, which resisted the disease. In these parts, they decided there was more money in tobacco. A great mistake. So the only wine we grew here was our own pinard, the rough stuff that used to be given to the soldiers when they got two liters a day as part of the rations. We drank it ourselves, too. More fool us.”
    He was putting himself out to be charming, with considerable success. Lydia, who had been fretting about the suitability of her ivory silk dress with a red scarf and shoes, felt herself relaxing quickly. Not too quickly, Lydia, she warned herself.
    “Mademoiselle Dean, or if I may call you Lydia, you are far too beautiful to keep calling me Monsieur le Président. It makes me feel even older than I am. If you must call me anything, call me François, since we are all off duty and at our ease and you are my most welcome guests. I have to suffer far too many formal occasions, so indulge me in a happily private one.” There was a distinctly jolly twinkle in his eye,