by Janet Tanner
Chapter Three
PALE WINTER SUN filtered through the bare branches of the poplar trees surrounding the château. It lent a semblance of warmth to the pale stone walls and the dull red of the roof, it glinted on three storeys of unshuttered windows and threw poorly defined shadows in the shape of the twin towers which stood guard over the ancient building which was the ancestral home of the de Savignys and the centre of life for the village which bore their name.
In his study on the first floor Baron Guillaume de Savigny, sitting at his heavy old desk, looked up from the ledgers spread out before him and felt the pleasant diffusion of the sun warm his parchment-like skin through the glass of the window. A slight smile curved his once well-shaped but now thin lips and he turned his face towards the warmth. It was good to feel the sun; he hated being cold and in winter it seemed he was cold too often nowadays. For all the fires that were kept blazing in the grates and the central heating which he bad had installed, at enormous cost, in his private apartments a few years previously, the château could still be a draughty place. He had not used to notice it, of course; as a younger man he had poured scorn on those who complained when the warm summers of Charente gave way to the chill winds and sudden harsh frosts of winter. Now, in his eighty-fifth year, he viewed things differently. The cold which he had once shrugged off crept into his bones now and worsened the ache in his arthritic hip, legacy of a fall from a horse when he had been a young man. He dreaded to see the leaves begin to change colour on the poplars which half hid the château and on the walnut trees in the valley beyond, and in spite of the fact that he was in remarkably good health for his age he always found himself wondering, a little sadly, whether he would be there in the spring to see them grow fresh green again.
The thought was seldom more than a fleeting one; Guillaume de Savigny was not a morbid man. He enjoyed comfort too much, not just the physical comforts of warmth and feather beds, good food and a glass of his own cognac, but emotional comfort too. In his opinion time spent on worrying or being miserable was time wasted and he had a facility for ignoring circumstances or events likely to upset his contented equilibrium. When things went wrong he was always initially upset, offended almost, to think that fate could be so unsporting as to play such a backhanded trick on him, but before long he would adjust his thinking to accommodate the misfortune, whatever it might be, and life would continue much as before. This facility was, in Guillaume’s opinion, his greatest strength, though there were others who regarded it as a weakness. Whichever, there was no doubt it had helped him personally come to terms with what might have been crushing blows to a lesser man and probably contributed to the remarkable state of his health, both mental and physical.
He eased the rosewood chair, upholstered with ivy-green leather, away from the desk and rose slowly, crossing to the window, a spare man of medium height in a tweed suit which had seen better days. It wasn’t that Guillaume could not afford to spend money on his wardrobe – money was not, and never had been, a problem for the de Savignys. Rather he liked the comfort of the old and familiar and, like so many wealthy people, could see little point in unnecessary outlay. The suit was still good; Louise, his wife, who still retained the chic that epitomised the Parisienne, could badger him all she liked to exchange it for a new one, but Guillaume could be as stubborn as he was placid. He liked the suit, there was nothing wrong with it, he would wear it with whatever shirt he chose, the warmer and the more frayed the better, and if Louise didn’t like it, then – too bad.
The study was at the front of the château, overlooking the broad paved forecourt where in summer a fountain played. Now, in winter, it was still, the carved stone nymph that topped it gazing impassively down into the lichened bowl beneath. Beyond the forecourt stretched the lawns, an expanse of neatly trimmed green, and the drive, lined with tall graceful cypress, cut a grey swathe through them and the half-mile of parkland which separated the château from the main road into the village. It presented a scene of which Guillaume never tired, epitomising for him the timelessness of Savigny. For more than five centuries the château’s walls had provided a refuge for his family and a linchpin for the community which depended upon them; it had survived the Revolution and two world wars, and he hoped and believed it would survive another five centuries – and that there would still be de Savignys living there to watch over it and continue the production of the cognac, made only from the vines on their own estates and sold to a discerning market under the name ‘Château de Savigny’.
As usual, the very relishing of the name filled him with pride and warmed his tired body with much the same glow as did the liquor itself, and he turned back to his desk without the slightest tinge of regret. He was less involved now than he had once been with the day-to-day running of the vineyard and the processes that produced the light elegant cognac for which the château was renowned; much of that responsibility had passed now to Henri Bernard, his son-in-law. But he still liked to keep his finger on the pulse. Henri was a good businessman, shrewd and dependable, but Guillaume had never quite been able to reconcile himself to relinquishing the helm to a man who was not, by birth, a member of the de Savigny dynasty.
If his own sons had survived the war perhaps he would have stepped down and handed over to them with more grace, perhaps not – he had had little time for either of them. Charles he had considered weak and Christian feckless, and Guillaume himself was a proud and stubborn man. But neither of his sons had survived. He had seen them both taken, and the fact that in their lifetimes they had both irritated him had become an irrelevance. Both had been posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre, but the honour had done little to compensate for their loss. His greatest hope now was that Guy, his grandson, might step into the breach when he became Baron. At present he had a restless streak, for which Guillaume blamed his English mother, Kathryn – among other things, not least of which was Charles’ death. But Guy also had a strong sense of history and family loyalty and Guillaume believed that when the time came the inheritance would be safe in his hands. He had to believe it. Anything else would be a betrayal of family tradition.
It was more than a hundred years now since Guillaume’s grandfather, the then Baron, had begun producing his own cognac and selling it to the most exclusive retailers in England and on the continent. It was he who had designed the distinctive engraved bottles with the heavily embossed labels, he who had laid down the ground rules which had, from the very outset, determined the quality – only grapes from their own fifty-hectare estate were to be used, no ‘buying in’ even in lean years, the wine to be distilled on its lees and matured for twenty years in the dank cellars that lay beneath the château. Now the estate boasted seven stills and although their output was tiny compared with many of the big-name producers in the region, the quality was such that its reputation was assured.
Because of its excellence and because it was backed by de Savigny money the cognac production had survived every crisis turbulent history had thrown at it.
Just ten years after his grandfather’s first bold venture, a plague carried by a louse, Phylloxera Vastatrix, had begun to devastate the vineyards of Charente and soon the vines were withering and dying where they stood. The setback had literally broken his grandfather’s heart. He had gone out one day to inspect the damage and never returned – the estate workers had found him that night lying dead of a stroke in his beloved vineyard, and the talk in the village was that Château de Savigny cognac would now be sold out to one of the wealthy merchants who were moving in to take the devasted vineyards off the hands of those growers who could no longer make a living from their ailing vines. Not that the de Savignys needed the money, of course, they had sufficient reserves to ride out the storm, but young Louis was a banker, wasn’t he, who had never shown the slightest interest in his father’s pet project except to drink it!
‘Young Louis’, however, had other ideas. He knew how much the production of his own cognac had meant to his father and he had no intention
of letting it die with him. He arranged his business and banking duties to allow him more time at the château and picked up the mantle of responsibility for the vineyard which his father had let fall. For a while, like everyone else, he had searched for the right chemical to treat the precious French vines, but when this proved unsuccessful he joined an expedition to the New World to look for suitable plants to replace his own disease-ridden ones. A short time later he was back, triumphantly bearing rootstock which was to prove ideally suited to the chalky soil of Charente, men personally leading the replanting of the previously higgledy-piddledy vineyards in neat rows on the softly undulating hillsides.
Guillaume had been little more than a baby then, but he fancied he could remember the excitement as the new vines began to flourish and bear fruit.
The cognac distilled from that first pressing was still maturing in the damp cellars when the Great War ravaged France, but it scarcely touched Savigny. And later, when the depression took its toll and prohibition drove a hole through the American market, Château de Savigny once again survived, for it was sold mainly to only the most exclusive outlets in England and on the continent, to the kind of people wealthy enough to be almost unaffected by slump or boom.
Louis had followed his father to an early grave and Guillaume was the Baron de Savigny by the time war once again threatened the peaceful way of life in Charente. This time there was no escaping it; when France surrendered to the Nazi invaders the demarcation line which was drawn between occupied and Vichy territory bisected Savigny land. But once again the production of the cognac was barely disrupted. The German conquerors were too partial to the smooth golden-brown liquor to allow its demise; as long as the bottles were earmarked for their own consumption they were happy enough to allow the process to continue uninterrupted, though there were, of course, fewer young men available to do the work and the older ones and the women had to toil long and hard to ensure the vines were stripped before the frosts came to spoil the flavour of the grapes.
During those turbulent years many cognac producers had taken a great delight in cheating the Germans – inferior blends had been bottled and falsely labelled so as to be passed off as the genuine thing – but Guillaume had never been able to bring himself to indulge in such sharp practice. He was too proud of the superior quality of Château de Savigny. He couldn’t bear to think of anyone, even a German, tasting it and finding it wanting.
There was no danger of that now. In the boom of prosperity that had followed the defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of France, Château de Savigny cognac had gained in reputation and gone from strength to strength, and Guillaume, for all the limitations advanced age had brought, still liked to retain his grip on the reins. All he hoped was that when he was gone there would still be a de Savigny to carry on his work. Henri did his best, but it wasn’t the same; without the continuity of family heritage passed from father to son down the line how could it ever be?
His own sons were gone – no amount of wishful thinking could bring them back – and his daughter had only managed to produce daughters herself, and rather avant-garde ones at that. He shook his head slightly as he thought of Lise, twenty-five years old and still unmarried, seemingly more interested in left-wing writers and politicians than the family heritage, and Françoise, still studying at the Sorbonne, and looking increasingly likely to turn out the same way.
No, Guy was the one on whom his hopes were pinned – and Guy was coming to see him. With his thin, bloodless fingers Guillaume lifted the corner of his ledger and retrieved the letter which he had left on his desk top so as to be able to read and reread it at his pleasure.
It was unusual for Guy to visit at this time of the year and Guillaume allowed himself to wonder just what was behind it. That he had made up his mind at last to give up junketing about in these little twin-engined planes of his, perhaps, and move to Savigny permanently? That would be the perfect solution, the smoothest possible handover of Savigny power. It would be so good to know Guy was here, heir-in-waiting, when something happened to Guillaume, as it was bound to one day in the not-too-distant future.
I’ve already done a lot better than my father or my grandfather, Guillaume thought with a touch of self-congratulatory humour.
And supposed that it was Guy’s impending visit that allowed him to regard his own mortality with such unaccustomed levity.
‘I need to talk to you, Grandpapa. Alone,’ Guy said.
Dinner was over, the formal meal so beloved of the Baron Guillaume de Savigny, reminiscent of all the formal meals he had enjoyed throughout the years. Even when he and Louise were alone they still ate in the dining room at the long refectory table which could quite comfortably seat twelve, with the solid silver candelabra placed at either end throwing a soft dancing light on their lined faces and the portraits of his ancestors looking down at them from the walls. It was the way Gullaume liked it, yet another comforting familiarity to provide evidence of continuity.
Tonight however there were six; himself and Louise, elegant as always, if a little frail, in a Paris gown of the softest black wool, Henri and Celestine, his daughter and son-in-law, who had their own suite of rooms on the second storey of the château, Lise, home from Paris for the weekend, and of course Guy. Guillaume looked at his grandson and felt himself warmed by a glow of approval. At first glance he might have been looking at his own son, Charles, at the same age, but Guy had more about him than Charles had ever had – a strength of character his father had lacked and which Guillaume found gratifying for it eased, in part at least, the disappointment and frustration which had always marred his paternal pride in Charles. Perhaps he was wrong to harbour such resentment as he did against Kathryn, he thought, for he was fairly certain that Guy’s strength had been inherited from her and nurtured by the way she had brought him up. But for all that he could not forgive her for taking Guy away from Charente, and the old enmities between them went too deep for forgiveness or any hope of reconciliation now.
‘You want to talk to me,’ he said, swirling the last of the cognac in his glass. ‘Well, I suppose I should have known you had a reason, coming here so unexpectedly. We’ll go to my study.’
‘Oh Guy, don’t be such a bore!’ Lise said. She spoke fiercely, everything about Lise was fierce these days, from her small set face to her defiantly masculine clothes. What had happened, Guillaume sometimes wondered, to the little girl who had set the château ringing with her laughter, the little girl in petticoats and flounces with ribbons in her hair? That hair was long and straight now, a sleek but, in his opinion, unbecoming curtain with a deep fringe which almost hid her eyes, and she never seemed to laugh. Her tone was always pitched somewhere between aggression and earnestness, totally lacking, he thought, in feminine charm, but he was also wise enough to know that the extra note of sharpness in it now was because Lise was disappointed that she was to be denied Guy’s company, for a while at least. She hero-worshipped her cousin to the point of obsession – it had always been the same. As a small girl she had followed him everywhere like a pet puppy dog and little had changed in the intervening years. Guillaume was fairly certain she had come home this weekend especially because she had known Guy would be here; more often these days she remained in Paris with her intellectual and – in his opinion – extremely tiresome friends.
‘Sorry, Lise, but it’s quite important.’ Guy stood up and moved toward the door, tweaking a strand of that straight dark hair as he passed her chair. ‘I’ll see you later and you can tell me all your news.’
‘What makes you think I want to tell you anything?’ she retorted, but a little colour came into her sallow cheeks all the same.
Guy allowed his grandfather to precede, him along the corridor and up the curving stone staircase, matching his pace to Guillaume’s.
The study was in darkness, the heavy curtains drawn against the night, and Guy went around the room turning on the lamps whilst Guillaume settled himself in his favourite chair. Then he perched on the corne
r of his grandfather’s desk and turned to face him.
‘You remember telling me, when I was a little boy, about the. Nazi who was here during the war – the one who was responsible for my father’s death?’
‘And your Uncle Christian’s, and a great many others besides.’ Guillaume’s voice was bitter. ‘How could I ever forget?’
‘Well, I can’t be sure, of course, but I think I might have found him.’
For a moment Guillaume was utterly still, the unexpectedness of Guy’s statement robbing him of the ability to respond in any way. Then he shook his head.
‘After all this time? Impossible!’
‘Why impossible? So far, I know, he has managed to hide himself away to escape having to answer for what he did, but that doesn’t mean he can stay hidden for ever. The world is a smaller place these days than it was thirty years ago. Besides, they become careless, these war criminals. They get overconfident, thinking, just like you, that after so long they are safe. Hasn’t Klaus Barbie been found living under an assumed name in Peru? And there are plenty of others like him. So why shouldn’t von Rheinhardt float to the top of whatever cesspit he buried himself in?’
‘That’s true enough, I suppose. Somehow I imagined him to be dead, though I suppose there’s no reason why he should be. He’s a young man compared to me, and I’m still alive and kicking.’ Guillaume’s lips twisted into the ghost of a smile but the veins stood out taut and blue through the parchmenty skin as his hands gripped the arms of his chair. ‘ What made you look for him? all the stories I’ve told you, I suppose.’
‘I didn’t look for him,’ Guy said. ‘I have always thought I’d like to find him and make him answer for what he did but I’ve never actually done anything about it, apart from putting out a few feelers. I heard about this German, who I think could be von Rheinhardt by sheer chance – one of those flukes that beggars belief. In a funny sort of way that, more than anything, is what makes me inclined to believe it really is him.’
