A Bordeaux Dynasty: A Novel

by Françoise Bourdin

  “It’s so nice of you to come by,” she said.

  “Your father is my godfather,” Jules politely replied. “Don’t forget that.”

  He accepted a glass of champagne, and as he was about to take a sip, someone hit his arm, hard.

  “I am so sorry!” Valérie Samson said joyfully.

  Jules forced himself to smile.

  “Let me get you another glass,” she said. Then, turning to Camille, she said, “I think that your father needs you. …”

  Camille’s father was waving at his daughter from across the room. She walked away, annoyed to have to leave Jules with Valérie.

  “The Cazes are adorable,” she said. “And so nouveau riche. …”

  “You’re wrong. Their fortune isn’t that recent.”

  “What’s certain is that they like flaunting it.”

  Jules took a glance around the room and said, “You don’t like the decoration? That’s odd, since this place looks like your office.”

  His smile was mocking but still pleasant, and she was amused by it.

  “My profession requires that kind of décor,” she said. “My house is very different, but you don’t want to see it.”

  “You’ve never invited me, as far as I know.”

  “Yes, I did. For dinner, the other day. But you turned me down. Remember?”

  He then did something he usually never indulged in: He gave her a long head-to-toe.

  Immobile, she waited until their eyes met and said, “Did I pass the test? Do you now regret not having spent that evening with me?”

  Jules looked for his cigarettes, but then remembered she hated Gitanes.

  “Would you give me one of your fine cigarettes?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said, opening her purse. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

  She started to laugh, pushing back her superb red hair.

  “I must be a little different from the women you usually meet,” she said. “I’m sure that none of them has ever hit on you like I do. But, of course, I’m only kidding. I’m too old for you, young man.”

  He made a vague hand gesture and once again looked around him. Without a doubt, Valérie Samson was one of the most attractive women here. He wondered if she behaved differently in private, whether she dropped that provocative act of hers. As though she’d read his mind, she suddenly put on an adorable, almost timid expression.

  “I can tell that little Camille is trying to join us,” she said quickly. “I have about fifteen seconds to convince you to join me for dinner, just once. Please … ?”

  At that same moment, Jules felt Camille’s hand on his shoulder. Valérie Samson spun on her heels and began chatting with two of her colleagues. Absentmindedly, Jules followed Camille around the room, sharing a few pleasantries with fellow wine producers, munching on a canapé. After thirty minutes or so, as he’d planned, he went over to the Cazes and excused himself. He spent a few minutes in the yard searching for what he was looking for. Valérie’s car had a parking sticker with her name and “District Court Attorney.” It was, no surprise, a black Porsche. Jules took out one of his business cards and wrote “One of these days, I promise” on the back, without signing it. He then slipped the card under the Porsche’s windshield wiper.

  As he drove home, he wondered what had possessed him to do that. He had no intentions of cheating on Laurène, didn’t feel at all like having an affair, even though that woman really was different from the others, and she was attractive in an odd way. Still, he’d played along with her. Exactly like his father on that point, Jules had never turned his back on the chance of sleeping with a beautiful woman. But he was married now. He had responsibilities toward Laurène and, even more so, the obligation not to cause her pain. She’d made herself sick over Frédérique’s child, worried about her sister’s distress, and was making extraordinary efforts to live up to the high expectations at Fonteyne. Above everything else, she was wildly in love with Jules, and everyone could see it. Going out with another woman, no matter how beautiful, even for just a drink, would be shameful.

  He thought so much about Valérie Samson that he felt discouraged and guilty by the time he arrived home. He regretted the impulse that had made him slip a promise, vague though it was, under the attorney’s windshield wiper. But he almost managed to convince himself that he’d done it out of spite for Alex, humiliating him even more by hitting on the one who’d represented him in court. He smiled at the notion while going up the stairs. Laurène wasn’t sleeping. She was reading in bed, Botty snug against her.

  The dog raised his head, slipped out of bed, and went over to his master. Jules scratched his head, before pointing at Botty’s own bed by the fireplace. Then he kissed his wife with such passion it made her laugh.

  “So,” she said, “how was your evening? Was Maurice as loud as usual? And that daughter of his, was she all over you?”

  “I hate those parties,” Jules said, lying next to her in bed.

  He was still dressed and smelled of cigarette smoke and cologne. She wrapped her thin arms around him and began to kiss him. He put a hand on his wife’s stomach. He was moved each time he thought of their baby. He very much felt like making love to Laurène but was hesitant.

  “Do you feel like it?” he whispered. “If you don’t, I’ll completely understand, you know. …”

  Laurène snuggled against him, a bit clumsy as always, but up for it.

  Jules took a look at the alarm clock once again. It was four in the morning and he was completely awake. In the last days before the harvest, he never slept much. He decided to just get up. He explained to Laurène that—no—he wasn’t trying to get away from her when he tiptoed out of their bedroom, but that he preferred walking around in the fields or working on some file instead of simply lying awake in the dark.

  He took a shower and got dressed. He felt like walking before making himself a pot of coffee. He came out of the castle through the main door and took a deep breath, the air saturated with wonderful odors. Fall was here and the grapes were waiting to be picked. Jules decided to start his tour on the west side of the estate, his favorite.

  The air was cool and he began to walk faster to warm up. Even when Aurélien was alive, his morning walks had been a solitary affair. That was when he meditated, letting his mind go free, coming up with ideas for the future development of Fonteyne. Sometimes he went beyond the estate’s limits, admiring a neighbor’s plot he dreamed of one day owning.

  He turned toward the woods and Fonteyne disappeared behind the trees. It was still pitch-black, but Jules knew all the paths by heart. When he came out of the woods, he stopped in his tracks. At the top of the hill ahead of him, about one hundred yards away, he made out the glow of a flashlight. He looked harder and managed to distinguish two silhouettes moving in an odd way. He waited a moment, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. If he tried to approach them, he was going to make himself seen. Torn, he knew that this was potentially a very dangerous situation. He went back into the woods and started running. He had to get around the hill and, doing that, he’d go by Lucas’s house. He stopped there, out of breath, and knocked at the door. Fernande, a light sleeper, opened almost immediately. Jules ran up to the bedroom and shook Lucas awake.

  “Come with me! Hurry!”

  Lucas jumped out of bed and was dressed in a minute. Downstairs, in the kitchen, Fernande was coughing.

  “What’s going on?” she asked as soon as she got her breath back.

  Jules gestured for her to keep quiet, and both he and Lucas got out of the house, Lucas carrying his rifle.

  “There are two guys in the vineyards, with a flashlight,” Jules said. “They were on top of lot twenty-seven. Meet me there as fast as you can.”

  Jules darted past and soon outran Lucas. He knew that something dramatic was going on. An uncontrollable fear prevented him from breathing normally, and he had to slow down a bit. He forced himself to walk, trying to make as little noise as possible. The two
silhouettes were hunched over a metallic can. Jules stopped for a second to try to identify the unusual odor around him. He heard muffled laughter, and then recognized the unpleasant smell of a concentrated chemical product.

  He was now only thirty feet away from the men, and he rushed one of them. The attack was violent, and Jules rolled on the ground with the man he’d tackled. Jules hit him so hard he went limp, knocked out. He immediately got up and ran after the other man fleeing with the flashlight. He dove and snatched the man’s ankle, making him crash to the ground.

  Panicked, unable to think, Alex desperately tried to free himself.

  “No!” he screamed. “Let me go!”

  When he felt Jules’s hands around his neck, he was overtaken by sheer terror. He tried to push his brother away, but Jules kicked him in the leg as hard as he could, breaking it. Alex began to scream like a madman, but Jules pressed his knee against his chest, knocking the wind out of Alex.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Jules growled between his teeth.

  This was no threat. Alex again tried to free himself, but Jules grabbed him by the hair, and forced him to lie face down. Then he began to slam Alex’s face into the ground, over and over again. Alex was overwhelmed with the fear of dying. He heard a loud crack and immediately his mouth filled with blood. He tried to spit out some of the blood and the dirt, gasping for breath.

  “Let him go!” a familiar voice pleaded in the background.

  Alex was about to pass out, waves of pain overcoming him. The sun was slowly rising on the horizon, but Alex couldn’t see anything and was suffocating under his brother’s weight.

  With his rifle, Lucas was keeping Marc, now conscious, in check.

  “Jules!” he shouted. “Let him go!”

  Mad with worry, Lucas took a step toward the two brothers. Firmly holding his rifle with his right hand, he grabbed Jules’s shoulder with the left.

  “Dammit, Jules! Stop it!”

  Alexandre managed to produce a moan as Jules kept pounding his face against the rocky soil, though he was exhausted and out of breath.

  Lucas then did the only thing he could do. He turned his rifle around and hit Marc with the butt to get rid of him. Then, he dropped the rifle to the ground and tried to pull Jules off Alex. But Jules was like a rock. Lucas pulled some more but then toppled forward, on top of Jules and Alex, who was no longer moving.

  Gripping Jules’s body, Lucas said, “Let go of him! That’s enough!”

  He took ahold of Jules’s hands but still couldn’t make him stop slamming Alex’s face into the dirt.

  Realizing he’d never be able to overpower Jules, Lucas began screaming in his ear, “He’s your brother! Stop it! Think of Aurélien! Aurélien! Aurélien!”

  The name echoed in the night, traveling from one field to the other. Jules let go and Lucas was finally able to push him off Alexandre. Sick with worry, he hunched over the inert body. When he heard Alex’s faint breathing, Lucas almost sobbed with relief.

  Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then Jules staggered to his feet. Lucas picked up his rifle, the flashlight, and looked at Alexandre, without touching him. Then he turned to Marc, who was still on the ground, his eyes now open wide with terror.

  “The sons of bitches,” Jules muttered almost inaudibly.

  Lucas pointed the flashlight at Jules for a second and then turned it off. There was another moment of silence.

  “We need to call an ambulance,” Lucas said.

  “You go ahead. I’m staying here. I won’t touch him.”

  “You swear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Want me to call the cops, too?”

  “No.”

  Lucas hesitated, then headed for his house.

  At Fernande’s suggestion, Lucas called Dr. Auber, who came with the ambulance. Alexandre was still unconscious when placed on the stretcher. Jules, livid, told the doctor that Marc and Alexandre had a fistfight. A fight between drunks. Marc wasn’t injured. He remained silent and didn’t contradict Jules’s story. When the ambulance left, Jules told Marc to scram, and the young man bolted.

  “What did you say to make him go along with your story?” Lucas asked.

  “That his fingerprints are all over the cans, and that he had cost me an awful lot of money. Two and a half acres of Margaux. …”

  Jules turned his head, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  “Oh, Lucas,” he said, “at least two and a half acres!”

  Lucas put a hand on Jules’s arm and gave it a good squeeze. He’d never seen him cry. He himself felt like he was on the brink of exhaustion and despair at the sight of this vineyard both of them had tended to with such care for so long. He suddenly felt dizzy, and Jules caught his arm.

  “Come,” the young man whispered. “Let’s go. …”

  They walked to Fonteyne, stopping only once they’d reached the castle’s steps. Both men were calmer now.

  “Call in two employees immediately,” Jules told Lucas. “And Bernard. We have to set up our watering equipment. We won’t save the grapes, but we have to clean up the vineyard as soon as possible. We’re going to have to flood the field if we want to dilute that junk.”

  “You’re going to contaminate the soil,” Lucas protested.

  “I have no choice. We’re going to build a dam at the bottom, right next to the road.”

  Jules then ran up the steps, into the castle, and up the staircase. He woke Louis-Marie up, quickly explained what had happened, and told him to immediately call their agronomist. He left him no time to reply, told him nothing about Alex’s condition, didn’t say a word to Pauline. Five minutes later, he was already outside directing operations.

  The grueling work went on for hours. Tirelessly, the field was cleaned up. Water fell in a light rain on the grapes all morning long. Jules had no hope of saving the crop, but he at least had to ensure the field’s future. The workers dug ditches so that the polluted water would be properly drained.

  Looking grim, never stopping for even a moment, Jules oversaw the operation, marching up and down the rows. Lucas watched him go, feeling sad. He had a hard time getting over what had happened. Fear had given way to disgust and then anguish. Jules had really wanted to kill Alex, and Lucas thought it was a miracle he’d managed to prevent him from doing so.

  At lunchtime, Lucas went over to the castle to grab a sandwich and see Louis-Marie, who gave him reassuring news about Alexandre. The atmosphere in the quiet castle was heavy. Even Fernande, in her kitchen, looked stricken.

  At nine that evening, Jules declared that the repair work was done. The rest of the family had waited for him before eating. He crossed the dining room and stopped behind Dominique’s chair.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice coarse.

  Pauline was looking away. Laurène lowered her head. Louis-Marie glanced at his brother.

  “So am I,” Dominique replied.

  She suddenly got up and threw herself into Jules’s arms.

  “I’m not mad at you, Jules,” she said. “I’m mad at him.”

  He made her sit back down, managed to give her a smile, and took his seat.

  “How is he?” he asked Louis-Marie.

  His voice was as impersonal as if he were talking about a vague acquaintance.

  “Auber called this afternoon. His condition is not … alarming.”

  Jules made no comment and Laurène discreetly rang Fernande, who brought a superb dish of cold hake with mayonnaise, accompanied by a shrimp salad.

  Jules waited for her to come by him to whisper, “Put all this on the table and go to bed, please.”

  She looked so tired and sad it made him feel awful. In spite of their faults, all four of Aurélien’s sons were like her own, and so she felt terrible for both Jules and Alexandre.

  “Go. …” said Jules.

  She nodded and left the dining room.

  Jules turned to Laurène and said, “Next time you see Auber, please tell him to examine Fernande, whet
her or not she wants it or not. I’m very worried about her.”

  “We can hear her coughing all day long,” Pauline said.

  Out of habit, Dominique got up to serve everyone’s food. The silence in the room was so heavy that Jules felt like he had to say something.

  “I did what I could to limit the damage. The crop from that field is going to be destroyed tomorrow. I refuse to take any risks. But I think that the toxic product that was spread was diluted enough so that the vines are going to be okay in the future. We’re still going to water that field for the next few days.”

  No one was eating as they listened to Jules intently.

  “I didn’t call the cops on Alex,” he continued, “because … because I just couldn’t.”

  Jules suddenly looked distressed, almost vulnerable.

  Louis-Marie got up and said, “I’ll go see him tomorrow.”

  He and his brother eyed each other for a moment.

  “That’s fine,” Jules finally muttered.

  His anger was still there, dense and heavy.

  “It’s his land, too,” he said, slowly. “I don’t know how he could’ve … I didn’t think that …”

  He threw his utensils on his plate, chipping it.

  “No matter what happened between us, I never would’ve thought that he’d attack Fonteyne. It’s where he grew up. It’s our land, our property. His, too. I would’ve preferred he’d set the castle on fire.”

  Jules sincerely believed that, and the others didn’t doubt it.

  “He must’ve had too much to drink. …” Laurène said.

  “Just like the day he beat up Dominique, right? So? It’s an excuse?”

  “It’s an explanation,” Louis-Marie said, calmly.

  Jules almost exploded but contained himself.

  “I can’t accept what he did,” he said.

  “So take him to court just like he did,” Louis-Marie said. “You could do it. You have plenty of proof.”

  Jules let go of a sigh of exasperation.

  “I’d never bring this up in public, you know that. People around here have had enough chuckles at our expense as it is. Don’t you think?”