The Vintners Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

‘We could have the vat for the price of the stone, I suppose,’ Léon said, conceding. ‘But,’ he added, ‘you only go so far trying to outwit chance. If it had rained in August instead of June…’

  Nicolette ran indoors and held out her little red fists for her mother to warm.

  Sobran said to his brother that the only things he knew would happen were what he’d make happen. They had to think of the future. Some day the château would change hands, would go to someone who hadn’t been raised at Vully. Hadn’t Comte Armand named his niece heir? The Parisian, the convent girl. Weren’t she and her invalid husband expected at Vully in the spring? Clos Jodeau must make a gift to the girl – a dozen bottles of this vintage. Yes, that was something they should do. Sobran sounded very sure of himself.

  ‘All right, brother, we will work hard, waste nothing and woo our betters,’ Léon said, as if to imply that while all these things were worth doing they weren’t all worthy ideas.

  Sobran felt a kind of clenching, like tearful anger. Disregarding Léon was a habit Sobran had learned when Léon was full of advice about his conduct and examples that seemed less good behaviour than petty forms of self-torture. Sobran wanted to talk to his angel, to ask was Léon wrong, and was he right? He thought of a prayer as an invocation, but trapped the words of it behind his lips, where they lay, and fermented, and slowly warmed his mouth.

  1817 Vin de cru (wine from the grapes of a single vineyard)

  The following year was very hard. Léon Jodeau took to gambling on his share of the vineyard and Sobran found he had more to pay than money to pay with. Léon swore to sign his labour over for life, a gesture that only annoyed his older brother. ‘You won’t turn me into your master and find a reason to resent me for ever. No, just take yourself off and earn a living – and don’t speak to me again till you’ve given up cards, cockfights, and prize fights,’ Sobran told him.

  There was one black, silent, early spring night, when Sobran and his wife were in different parts of the house making an inventory of their most precious possessions – each one planning to make the whole necessary sacrifice. Céleste counted her new oak dresser, her as yet unused stores of wedding linen, her best china, the pewter tankards and platters, and the small dowry of jewellery she’d had from Aunt Agnès. There was enough.

  In another orbit Sobran took stock of his guns, his mother’s inlaid writing desk, his books, his grandfather’s lute. There wasn’t enough.

  He sat at the table by the bedroom window with his head in his hands and looked through the open shutters at the hill that hid the other half of his vineyard, land he hadn’t earned or inherited but which had fallen to him by default and which he somehow loved more than the family clos – land he wouldn’t part with. He looked at Aimée, who raised her head from her paws and stared, alert and eager, but so aged now that her lower eyelids drooped to show their red lining. Sobran got up, climbed on to the chest at the bed end and felt around the top of the rafters for what he had tied there. He slipped a feather out from under the black thread and carried it back to his desk. When he held the feather to the candle its flame reached, hopeful, and wrapped readily. But there was no smoke, no scorching, the feather’s colour remained as pure as the flame. Sobran watched this phenomenon and thought: here is a fortune.

  Four days later came news of another murder.

  Aurora de Valday saw the men from her window, a crowd on the flagged courtyard before the old château and under her window in the new wing. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sight, but in this throng there were no milling dogs, or guns cradled in the men’s arms – it was spring, so this was no shooting party. Some of the men belonged to the château, were servants of the Comte, and some were from Aluze, the village, farms, small clos this side of the river.

  Aurora peered at the men over the head of her maid as the girl fastened each bow at the front of her morning gown, so that layers of ruffled silk disguised the smooth watermelon swelling of Aurora’s womb. Her maid, Lucette, was not of the house, and had no idea what was up. Aurora saw her husband walk down into the crowd, following her uncle the Comte. Paul’s coat looked too big for him, his head was angled back and his mouth open – the better to breathe. For a moment Aurora watched only Paul, and forgot to guess what was going on. The only evidence she had eyes for was her evident future: Paul’s decline, herself alone.

  She asked Lucette if she would take her tea in the kitchen this morning and bring back any news. The maid curtsied and went out.

  The crowd was sorting itself into groups in consultation with the Comte. Aurora watched the men attend to her uncle, then turn to listen to one man at the back, who was wearing the smock, breeches and wooden shoes of the men of the pays. He was a tall man, with dark hair and a full beard cut close to his face. Aurora saw Paul bridle and begin to say something. The Comte touched Paul’s lapel and he subsided. The men bowed and turned towards the gatehouse and put on their headgear as they walked beneath its arch and out of the Comte’s presence.

  Aurora went to wait for Paul in the morning room. Eventually he came to ask after her health. He sat beside her to catch his breath. Told her that a girl was missing. There were fears she might have been murdered. ‘It isn’t something you should concern yourself with.’

  ‘I hope they find that she’s run off with her lover. I’ve often wondered: If a girl from a cottage runs off with her lover, is she disgraced? Or rather, how great is the disgrace?’

  ‘I don’t know that they do run off. Generally. More likely get with child and are married off, or not. They don’t leave their children with the holy sisters, and marry rich old men, as the ruined quality can.’

  Aurora thought of the fortunes of Madame de Staël’s heroine Corinne. Both Paul and Aurora were stroking her abdomen now, and both laughed as the serene geometry of her belly was interrupted by a series of heaving movements.

  ‘Where are they looking?’ Aurora asked.

  ‘Along the river and the fields near the road. Ditches, hedgerows, copses.’

  Aurora shuddered, thinking of the cold, abject secrecy of such places once a corpse was in them. She said, ‘They don’t hope to find her alive?’

  ‘They remember another girl who disappeared, then appeared later, dead. Seven years ago, your uncle says.’ Paul answered her original question on the matter she needn’t have concerned herself with. It was always like this between them, she would have to melt his propriety in every conversation.

  Paul said he thought he’d rest – later, perhaps, her uncle would need his assistance. ‘With priests, bailiffs, magistrates, and what-have-you.’

  He left her.

  Aurora’s maid, Lucette, had this report: the missing girl was fifteen years of age. Marie Pelet. Apparently her younger sister said Marie claimed to have a beau. His identity was Marie’s secret, the little girl said. Perhaps Marie had eloped, not met the fate of the other – Geneviève Lizet – who had been found on the riverbank seven years ago, her skirts up over her head.

  Lucette crossed herself.

  When Marie Pelet was found the searchers would be recalled by the gun on the château’s roof. ‘Monsieur Paul is to light the charge,’ the maid added.

  The gun was fired in the late afternoon. A group of women who had gathered at the gate came into the courtyard, some already weeping.

  The first of the searchers back weren’t those carrying the corpse. The man who ran with the news stood in the courtyard giving his report. A Pelet, an old man, the girl’s grandfather perhaps, stood among his kin, and roared with grief, till his face was as dark as a drunkard’s and drool hung in clear strings from his stretched mouth. He put his head down and bulled among the other men while they closed in to hold him.

  Then there was a quarrel. The women: why was Marie being brought back to the château when they wanted to take her now, wash her and lay her out by the hearth in her own mother’s house? And the men: the Comte, bailiffs, the magistrate, must look on her to see how she died in order to discover who killed her. But t
he hour of her death was gone, said the women, and the stone long settled over Geneviève Lizet, and still no one knew who had taken her life.

  Aurora stayed hidden, in the shadow of the heavy door to the main hall – kept still and listened till she saw Paul signal to a groom with a saddled horse. He had on his greatcoat and boots. She went out, lumbering, in her frilled draperies and satin slippers. No one seemed to see her at first, not even Paul, his back to her and foot in the stirrup.

  ‘Paul!’ she called.

  The young man with the close-cut beard had seen her, had stared across the whole breadth of the courtyard then come forward at a run to stop her. ‘Mind the horse, Madame,’ he said, then called out to the Comte – not ‘your honour’ or ‘your grace’ but ‘Vully’ then ‘Sir!’ as an afterthought.

  Paul was willing but weak, and still not in the saddle. The Comte saw and summoned him: ‘Paul, come here, I need you.’ And Paul, who’d meant to fetch the magistrate, desisted from his efforts to mount and went obediently to Aurora’s uncle who gave him the task of settling the women.

  ‘Madame, forgive me, I thought you were in danger,’ the young man said, and let go his grip on her upper arms.

  ‘If there was a little less confusion here,’ Aurora said, ‘and more mastery of emotion, the horse wouldn’t be turning in nervous circles.’

  The Comte came up to them. ‘Aurora, normally you would be able to offer us some assistance. But in your condition, and with Paul so determined to do a well man’s share –’

  ‘I only came out to stop Paul getting on the horse.’

  Aurora’s uncle took her hands in his, held her there a moment exposed, underdressed, in the surgepool of hysteria the space between the château and gatehouse had become. He looked at the young man. ‘Jodeau, have you ridden a horse with a saddle?’

  ‘No. You should send your groom.’

  ‘I want to send a man with some brains.’

  ‘I’m sure the magistrate is sufficiently intelligent not to fish for knowledge in a pool of hay and horse liniment.’

  ‘Do as I say,’ the Comte ordered, but he didn’t seem offended by Jodeau’s manner.

  Jodeau moved to do as he was told, but his clogs wouldn’t fit into the stirrups, so he borrowed another man’s leather shoes, then mounted as he’d seen cavalry men do, and rode gingerly through the gate.

  The Comte told Aurora to go indoors.

  The following morning Aurora found her uncle in the library, with his clerk and a copy of the magistrate’s questions and answers. The clerk was blotting the pages with sand. Aurora found a candle snuff and put out the spluttering stubs.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll go to my grave not knowing who this killer is,’ the Comte said. He began to gather the pages together, turned their edges against the desk to neaten the stack. ‘I’ll have to add it to my list of questions to ask God.’ He looked up at Aurora. ‘Is Paul asleep?’

  ‘His cough is bad. I left him tossing and turning. I asked someone to make you breakfast – with meat.’

  Aurora’s uncle hooked an arm at her and she came to him. They stood hip to hip and she put her head on his shoulder, felt him kiss her hair. ‘I’ll go to her funeral,’ she said.

  ‘We all must.’

  ‘Who was that man, Uncle, the one who held me back?’

  ‘Sobran Jodeau. He owns two clos – a vineyard that straddles the road, near Aluze. He was a gunner with the Grand Army; marched through the winter from Moscow. His wife is a beauty – great pale eyes and gold hair like a mermaid.’

  ‘Is he an important man in Aluze?’

  Her uncle looked at her. ‘Did you take a dislike to him, Aurora? How like your mother you are. She disliked anyone she met when she was with child – then turned some baffled souls she had glared at in suspicion into “very good friends” as soon as her milk was dry.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t feel the need to go so far as forming a dislike.’

  ‘How haughty you sound. Jodeau can read and reckon up. In his Sunday best he’s what passes for a man of substance around here. Which is, of course, why I must import company for myself, like Paul, you, my hunting set.’

  ‘You like him,’ Aurora accused.

  ‘He’s a sharp-tongued, high-handed bully. He fills me with fellow-feeling,’ her uncle said.

  1818 Vin du clerc (wine offered by a plaintiff to the clerk-of-the-court if the tribunal finds in the plaintiff’s favour)

  Sobran had glasses and a bottle of the Jodeau wine they had drunk that first night, ten years before. ‘It isn’t old yet, but let’s see how it fares.’

  They tasted. Both were quiet, looking out over the house. The night was warm and the house walls starred with white, open flowers.

  ‘I see that the cellar isn’t finished yet,’ Xas said.

  ‘It’s been a bad year. An evil year.’ Sobran put his glass down on the flat-topped boundary stone he had put in – he told his family – to mark the old limit of the family vines. (Céleste thought of it as a headstone for Baptiste Kalmann – and had quietly planted marigolds about it.) Sobran took from his shirt a posy, the three feathers, and gave them to Xas. ‘You must have been moulting.’

  Xas tucked the feathers into the bundle he had arrived carrying – a bottle of yapincak, a Turkish sémillon, and a rose bush packed in chalk and wrapped about with oilcloth.

  ‘That first night, when the whirlwind took you, you dropped them.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Xas.

  1819 Vin de veille (vigil wine)

  Xas’s offerings stood unopened, upright between the woody knees of two bared roots of a cherry tree. It was dawn and chilly, the distances were gathering distance under clouds in curtain-raiser colours.

  Xas had held Sobran all night, lying against the slope, on the raft of his wings.

  Sobran’s daughter had died. The eight-year-old, Nicolette. Four months earlier.

  Sobran had very little to say – of the fever and rash all the children had had, how they’d been afraid for the boy, Baptiste, who had been very ill. How Sobran had feared for Céleste – with child and worn out by nursing.

  Sobran’s sister Sophie came to help – her own children had had the disease. Nicolette seemed better, the girls had eaten a little and were sitting up in their bed, talking – then Sabine called out (Sobran remembered that, at her shout, the blood rushed to his heart and he sped up the stairs, but was sinking already, as though he knew before he saw Nicolette’s blue face). She just died – Sabine said – dragged in a breath, held it, stared and fell back on the bed. ‘Please God!’ Céleste had shouted, but it was too late for intervention.

  Before Sobran had spoken at all, he had fallen into the angel’s arms, and his embrace had carried them both to the ground.

  At the funeral Sobran’s friends had touched him, and for weeks afterwards, laid hands on his shoulders, his arms, whenever they met. Those who had lost children did know how wounded he was. And he held Céleste – at night, when she eased her nipple into the new baby’s mouth, and wept while it suckled, or when she stood in the yard, arms opening and closing at her sides in noiseless, agitated grief, watching Sabine, her bowl emptied of chicken feed and the fowl around her feet too close because she was stuck fast, her chin down on her apron bib and the knobs of her neckbones showing, a stilled child and playmate to a silence. When Sobran saw them both immobilised, his wife and daughter, he would draw Céleste back indoors so that Sabine couldn’t see her mother’s convulsive struggle with grief. The boy, Baptiste, grizzled and sulked and asked after his other sister and was suspicious that they had hidden her, like they would hide those fragile enchanting things he wasn’t permitted to play with. The whole house was sad. Sobran’s friends brought him brandy or laid their arms along his shoulders – but no one wrapped their body about his and bore him away.

  The angel was strong and tender and as fresh as a young river. The angel wasn’t tentative or impatient. For hours through tears and the painful intimacy of mourning the angel held him.r />
  Sobran’s grief lost its edge against Xas’s body. He had lain quiet for a long while, they both had, till they turned their heads to watch a cart go by on the road below them. Its driver looked up, saw the man and angel and pulled up his horse. He stared, stood on the box for a better look – grew sure of what he’d first thought he could see and began to quake, then took up the traces and whipped his horse into a canter, as though he’d just heard the last wolf in Burgundy howling.

  ‘One of your neighbours?’ Xas asked.

  ‘Yes. Jules Lizet. I hope he’ll decide he was dreaming.’

  ‘Your household will wake soon. We both must go,’ Xas said, but didn’t unlock his arms.

  As he watched his neighbour’s cart go down the road, Sobran said, ‘Whenever I went away overnight, on business, I’d always bring everyone some little gift. The girls would jump up and down shouting “Papa! Papa!” Nicolette was smaller, but always seemed heavier than Sabine, getting one jump in for every three of her sister’s. She would squat right down then shoot up and her feet would leave the floor about this much,’ the breadth of his hand. ‘I tried to teach her not to let Sabine always speak for her.’ Sobran was silent for a long time. The sun broke out over the farthest eastern hill, and every tiny stone sprang a black leak away from its light.

  Xas passed his palm down Sobran’s face once more, his thumb a hoe weeding tears.

  ‘I always made sure that she had her share,’ Sobran said. Then, broken-hearted, ‘I loved her best.’ He remembered their pacts against her powerful sister. He’d ride Nicolette around on his shoulders and they’d hunt Sabine – both girls shrieking and happy. He remembered the hours he’d spent playing with her, obliged to woo her when he appeared, a stranger in her life, after his time in the army. ‘I want you to find Nicolette, Xas. Find her in Heaven.’

  The patient bed of Xas’s body moved under Sobran at last. He was turned by hands, legs and wings, so that he lay prone on the cushion of one wing. Xas held Sobran’s head in both hands and looked into his eyes. ‘Do you know what you’re asking me to do?’ If only the angel had seemed tired he’d have looked ordinary, because there was white dust on his hair, which draped the soil, as silky as melted butter on flour.