I woke early, feeling vaguely melancholic and decidedly unsociable. And so I rose and dressed, and went alone to walk beside the river.

Monday mornings in France had a peaceful silence all their own. Most shops stayed closed out of tradition, and people clung a little longer to their pillows. In all my hour’s walk, I only met two people in the shuttered winding streets. From the river’s edge, I turned along the road and sauntered up around the château walls to where the white house of the Clos des Cloches slumbered in its field of green; then round and up again, past the château’s entrance tower with its silent bell, to the narrow breach in the cliff wall, where the steps from the fountain square wound their breathless way upwards.

Here I rested, tucking my hands into the pockets of my jeans and lifting my face to the warmth of the morning sun. Below me, in the patchwork jumble of turrets and church steeples, tightly walled gardens and blind shuttered windows, I heard a swallow singing. O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow … What was the rest of that poem? I couldn’t remember. Tennyson, again, at any rate – I’d read it at school. Something about a prince wanting the swallow to carry a message to his true love, to tell her he was coming.

A bird, perhaps the same one, broke, rustling, from a fruit tree in the garden just beneath me, and went winging out across the town, its dancing flight and joyful song dissolving my clinging mist of melancholy. ‘So my prince is coming, is he?’ I asked the swallow, just a speck now in the brilliant sky. Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

But when, a moment later, I heard footsteps coming up the steps below me, that’s exactly what I did – I held my breath for no good reason and leaned forward to peer over the wall. My chest relaxed. I exhaled, and it sounded like a sigh.

Not a prince, certainly. Only Garland Whitaker, labouring upwards, her fingernails flashing blood-red on the iron handrail. The auburn hair, I thought, looked artificial in the sunlight – too bright, too tightly curled. She puffed a little, and her face was flushed.

More footsteps echoed to my right, punctuated by a trill of childish laughter. I straightened away from the wall and turned in time to see a tall man coming round the corner further up by the château, with a lively child swinging on his hand. The man’s dark head was bent low, to catch the chatter of the little girl. He hadn’t seen me yet.

Thinking fast, I ducked my head and scurried off, away from the château, away from the steps, away from all of them. I was not, I thought firmly, going to hang about while Garland and Armand bumped into each other, with me in the middle. She was a hopeless gossip, he was a hopeless flirt, and I’d never hear the end of it.

My getaway would have done credit to a bank robber, I moved that quickly, though no doubt a bank robber would have had a better sense of direction. It should have been easy to find my way down into town, but the first sloping crossroad I came to was blocked, completely blocked, by an idling lorry, and instead of waiting for the driver to move on, I decided to walk along the cliff a little further. Surely there’d be other roads, or even stairs …

The narrow road curved upwards and became a lane. Still hopeful, I moved briskly between the silent houses and garden walls, past thick falls of fading ivy and red clay-tiled roofs, painted gates and painted shutters. The houses crowded closely on both sides, parting now and then to give a glimpse of the dizzying drop to the terraced gardens on the cliffside, and the quiet river snaking past the rooftops far below.

I appeared to be the only person about, which was just as well, since there wasn’t room for two on the narrow strip of pavement. For a short while I enjoyed the solitude, the scent of roses drifting from the gardens, the spectacular view. But when I reached the first cluster of troglodyte caves, I began to feel uneasy.

I blamed it, to begin with, on the caves themselves. They were not the neatly chiselled cliff dwellings pictured in my Loire Valley guide books, cosily supplied with curtains and carved fireplaces. These caves, cut from a thrusting rise of rock, were eerie and abandoned, black windows crumbling over hollow doors, broad chimneys giving way to the grasping growth of weeds and vines that spilled down from the burning cloudless sky. It was an easy thing, in this apocalyptic settlement, to fancy eyes that watched from every yawning door.

All right, I admitted, so maybe it wasn’t too clever of me to be walking up here, on my own. When I crossed the next path cutting down from the cliff, I’d descend to the safety of town.

The path that I was on grew more wild and lonely the further I walked. There were few houses now. On my right, a low rubblestone wall, spattered with lichen and moss, was the only barrier between me and a sheer vertical drop through cedar-scented scrub and tangled weeds. Even the roofs of Chinon, far below, seemed somehow less hospitable.

The paved path turned to yellow soil beneath my feet, and a second crumbling cliff of troglodyte dwellings rose from the weed-tangled hill beside me. A warning prickle chased between my shoulder blades. Oh, bloody hell, I thought. I turned. The breeze caught a withered leaf and sent it tumbling end over end across the dirt path, until it was trapped by the long waving grass. Nothing else moved. ‘Hello?’ I called, just to be sure. ‘Is anyone there?’

Silence. Slowly I turned around again, pushing on more cautiously. The solitary house that rose blackly from the path ahead did nothing to reassure me. It was an ugly house, unwelcoming, its sagging door wrapped round with barbed wire coils. As I passed by, the wind swept past, rattling the tightly-shuttered windows like a viper’s warning to the unwary. Again the shiver struck me and again I turned my head to look behind. The path was empty.