Read Online The House with Blue Shutters by Lisa Hilton - Free Book Online Page A

way.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ Madame Nadl told her, ‘he’s willing enough and it’s company for Papie. They can keep each other out of mischief.’
    In the village, she said that it was a shame the way Sophie Aucordier had treated that poor child, he wasn’t really dumb at all, just strange, and his sister kept him very nice, you had to say that for her. William trotted happily about with Papie, watching Laurent at work in the barn, driving the cows into the meadow each morning. They were beautiful cows, the Murblanc animals, seven big Blondes d’Aquitaine with cream-coloured hides and soft pink noses. His favourite was called Alice, and Madame Nadl taught him to milk her, pressing his face against her warm patient flank and smelling the sweet grassy smell of her cud. William waited in the barn, stroking Alice’s ears and singing to her, when the Nadls went in for their lunch, until he saw Oriane coming down the track from the chateau.
    They went to Mass every Sunday now. Amélie Lesprats boasted that she was going all the way to Landi to take the School Certificate, and Oriane thought it would have been nice to go to Landi too, but Amélie came to work at the chateau all the same afterwards, and it was still possible to speak good French with Mademoiselle Lafage. She didn’t much mind leaving school, she had never gone there regularly, and Amélie didn’t seem any cleverer for it. Laurent said he didn’t see much point in girls going to school, it only made them ugly like Mademoiselle Lafage, and his own mother had managed quite well without it. Laurent’s sister Cathérine said he was an old stick, and when she had enough money saved
    she was going to get a husband in Monguèriac, a man with a shop maybe, and sit behind the counter all day on a stool and never get up to milk an old cow again. Madame Nadl laughed and said how was Cathérine going to persuade this marvellous shopkeeper to marry her if her jam came out stringy and she burned the meat? ‘He will love me for my great beauty,’ replied Cathérine saucily, pushing her bosom out and patting her meagre bun, and they all laughed because Cathérine was as plain as a saucepan, but it wasn’t cruel, because she said so herself.
    Cathérine was always laughing, but Laurent was quite stern. Every week after Mass he set off on his motorbike, and no one knew where he went. La Moto, people called him. The machine was blue and black with polished silver pipes and Laurent could mount it quickly, despite his leg, twisting the handlebars into a triangle with his body and then supporting his whole weight on his arms as he started the engine. It looked as though it must have taken a lot of practice.
    Oriane asked Cathérine why he hadn’t got married, there’d be plenty of girls who would have him, and Cathérine said he was very serious, he wanted a serious girl, because he’d been in the war. Yves Contier had come home from the war though, and he had got married to Magalie, who wasn’t that old, and they had four children. Bernard Vionne, too, had his boy Marcel. Oriane thought that maybe Laurent was ashamed because of only having one leg and felt very sorry for him. She knew about that, because of their father and William. Laurent was gentle though, and he always came up to Aucordier’s when his own work was over if she asked him for help.
    Most homes in Castroux did a big wash twice a year, in April and October. Two or three washerwomen came with a wagon from Landi, and for a week or so the wash-house opposite the nuns’ garden was filled with steam and the scent of wet ash. Poplar wood was best for ashing, as oak and chestnut stained the clothes with tannin. If the wind was not high, the women draped the linens over the big rosemary bushes inside the sheltered walls so they would absorb the scent, and it looked as though it had snowed, with all the shrubs white and bulbous. When Sophie Aucordier was still there, Oriane had gone down to wash with her mother as