The Vintners Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

  Your friend,

  Sobran Jodeau

  He saw her sooner, heard her arrive on the night of a thick snowfall. From his room in the château’s west wing, over the cuverie, he heard an outrider, shouting voices, footsteps indoors and out, hissing pitch torches and iron carriage wheels on gravel.

  They met late the next day in the château’s smallest drawing room. Aurora was on a divan piled with shawls. She had her feet up and a book in her lap. Her hair was fastened in a lace bag at the back of her neck. She looked tired, pained, pale – but not thin or yellow or at death’s door.

  Sobran asked if she had received his last letter and she said it must have passed her on the road. But she didn’t look at him when she said it; her brows were lifted but her eyes turned down. She asked if he’d got the package of books.

  ‘Yes, thank you. But I’ve read only the Hugo.’

  She looked up, ready to talk about Victor Hugo. Sobran said, ‘Paul wrote to me. This operation isn’t a hope that will keep, Aurora. You can’t bottle hope and hope for an improvement. It’s your duty to do what you can.’

  He watched her eyes cool as quick as wax sets at the top of a snuffed candle. She drew her legs up, the florals on her brocaded skirt catching the light, as gorgeous as healthy plumage. She drew the cashmere shawl closer. ‘It’s no business of yours.’

  Sobran straightened his back, sat forward on the seat, ready to leave if dismissed. He didn’t realise he’d assumed this pose and that deference was deeper in his bones that his sense of entitlement. He said, ‘We are friends.’

  She said, ‘I’ve never been in your confidence.’

  He said that he had always respected her privacy. The two statements stood in balance a moment. Yet, although he was her servant, Sobran had the courage of a mended man. ‘Write to this surgeon and ask him to travel here. Offer him a fortune.’

  ‘He’s younger than me, and almost as fearful as I am. I watched sweat bead his lip while we talked about the operation.’

  ‘Be brave for him, Aurora. Make a better man of him.’

  Aurora laughed once, dry, then tilted her head back against the curled arm of the divan. She looked a little like that painting by Jacques-Louis David of Madame Récamier – but in the thick, fussy clothes of their own age. ‘You are going to take me into your confidence, Sobran – now. Because any secrets you tell me I won’t know for very long.’

  He saw that she was angry at him, and not just because he would survive her. He saw she loved him, and not only as a friend. Hers was the gaze of an earthed fox. Any minute now she would tell him everything she felt for him – or suspected him of.

  ‘I’ll make a bargain with you, Aurora. If you write to this surgeon and fetch him here, if you have the operation and survive – then I’ll tell you my secrets. I promise.’

  ‘The things you tell no one?’

  ‘The things I haven’t told you.’

  She said again, ‘The things you tell no one.’

  ‘Yes. The one thing I tell no one.’

  *

  There were no women in the room. The women she’d asked to be there stood for a time at the door as she undressed. Paul’s nurse was there one moment and the next dropped the water basin she held and fled. The rug steamed – a good knotted Turkey, twice Aurora’s age.

  The surgeon was accompanied by another surgeon and two men. They weren’t enough to hold her – one of her footmen was summoned. He lay across her legs throughout the operation, and wept.

  The preparations. So much linen. Aurora climbed up on the dining-room table, which was draped with an old eiderdown. All the candles were lit in the chandelier above her, and the curtains not just open but wound in their cords so that they stood like tree trunks on either side of the windows.

  Aurora felt she had come to her own execution. She looked around for an avenue of escape. The surgeon stood over her. He had no colour in his face. She didn’t want to watch as he laid out the knives. Someone draped a cloth over her face. She was dead already.

  Brandy backed up in her throat. She felt the air on her chest as they uncovered her. Heard them talking and felt them touch her. Then they held her arms and shoulders and began to cut.

  Whenever they stopped to parley she would faint, then was roused by the pain again as they sawed and sliced. She screamed around the leather bit in her mouth. The breast was not soft, no mound of butter – the surgeon used force. She could feel where they cut, the direction and progress of the knife sawing through her flesh, a cross cut, then two circles. She felt her breast lifted piece by piece, like servings of pie, base burnt to the pan. Then she felt the knife scrape along bone.

  A chasm.

  Later she felt the cloth, wet, adherent, peeled from her head. The surgeon had blood on his face. And tears. Aurora found herself reassuring him. She whispered, ‘It was necessary.’

  They dressed the wound and carried her to her bed. To a room of blacknesses, like a blotted page. A terrible pain had torn its way into her and made its nest.

  Aurora’s son came into her room as her maid was spooning soup into her. A broth made of lambs’ kidneys, grainy and greyish, but tasty.

  Aurora put up her hand – the hand at the end of the good arm, the arm she could raise – and stopped the next spoonful. A little soup splashed her bed jacket. Hélène apologised and began to mop at her with a napkin.

  ‘Who is it?’ Aurora asked her son. The window was open a crack on the spring air and she’d heard a horse, not a carriage, so knew it wasn’t the Baron, whom they expected at any hour.

  ‘Monsieur Jodeau. Mother, he was here before, several times, but you were so very ill and then – lassitudinous.’

  ‘Lassitudinous?’ Aurora laughed.

  ‘Floppy and dreary, Mama,’ Paul said. ‘Of course I spoke to him, gave him reports, sometimes daily, about your progress. And we both sat with you once, when you were very ill – I hope you don’t mind.’ Paul blurted, ‘But Monsieur Jodeau is my friend!’

  ‘I’m happy he’s your friend, dear. And that you sat with me together.’ She began to struggle up. ‘Send him to my dressing room in half an hour. Hélène –’ to her maid, ‘– I want a clean nightdress and robe.’

  Paul went out.

  Through the door between Aurora’s dressing room and bedchamber Sobran watched two maids remake her bed. They did it with so much ceremony it was as if she had died; as if the room were in a convent hospital and they nuns remaking the deathbed for the next invalid. But here Aurora was, a little less thin and waxy than she’d been when he had sat all day by her bed, keeping Paul company. It had been thaw, then, and snow sliding off the château’s warmed leads had splashed on the stone sills of the bedchamber’s tall narrow windows. The snow splashed, Aurora breathed, and Sobran read to Paul, some of David’s psalms, he recalled.

  Aurora wore a lace cap over her hair, which had been cropped during her fever. She lay on an ottoman – moved her feet to make room for him and invited him to sit.

  He sat, flipped the tails of his frockcoat over her feet then put his hand down on the stiff froth of lace around the hem of her gown, clasped her ankle beneath it all. Then – he wasn’t sure how it happened, but in a movement like that of a freak wave that jumps a seawall where anglers stand, safe they think, and scoops them into the sea – he stooped and she sat up and they put their arms around one another, held fast, she with only one arm, so that he could feel her halved womanhood, the bony absence on one side of her chest. He pulled back and kissed her on either cheek, then cupped her face in one hand, feeling the loose suede of the thin flesh, and her fine skull beneath.

  Her servants were watching them.

  Sobran sat back and Aurora lay down. For a long time they just looked into each other’s eyes – from this distance – quiet, sunny looks.

  Aurora ended it. Her difficulties would be his difficulties. ‘Henri’s first wife died of this very disease,’ she said, in her husband’s defence. ‘It is for that reason he stayed away.’


  Sobran nodded.

  ‘But I didn’t want him.’ She played with the lace along her front, ran its scallops between her forefinger and thumb. ‘We expect him any day now.’

  Sobran nodded once more.

  ‘I lived,’ she said – met his eyes again.

  ‘Thank God.’

  She waved dismissively then asked, ‘What is the one thing you tell no one?’

  ‘Are you sure our friendship can survive my secrets?’ Sobran asked. She saw that he was pale and that his back had stiffened as though his spine had fused. She reminded him that they made a bargain. And that the only secret she had bargained for was the one about the poisoned friendship.

  ‘I hope you know it’s no small thing. I hope you don’t mistake my piety for preciousness.’

  ‘Sobran, I survived this – most terrible pain.’ She turned her eyes up a moment, an old trick to stop tears from falling. The memory of the operation still made her shake. She looked down again, picked at the ribbons on the front of her gown. ‘I’m tired of never saying what I believe I know. I’m tired of my fear of offending you. All that delicacy and deference, because I employ you, am your better, and a woman, and ten years your junior – all these awkward inequalities – your sadness or madness, my illness.’ She made a fist and pounded the striped silk cushion she lay against, three blows as firm and rhythmic as a judge’s hammer.

  ‘Insanity,’ Sobran said. He laid the word between them with a look alone, no commentary, as though he played a card and they were old whist partners.

  ‘I did say “your madness”.’ Aurora was weary, weak, reborn beyond decorum. But she wouldn’t hurt him, so didn’t say that she knew that people said Céleste Jodeau was mad, but that was a secret everyone knew.

  ‘My secret is a bottomless pit,’ Sobran warned.

  ‘I always thought it was about love. Then you insisted “he” not “she” – and I still thought it was about love.’

  Aurora watched the faint, involuntary rearing back of Sobran’s head, and she pushed him further: ‘Did you hope I’d die and you wouldn’t have to tell me?’

  ‘I wanted, I prayed, for you to live. So – you are alive and you’re asking me to harm you.’

  Aurora thought of something then. Something she hadn’t considered, like a woman who opens her husband’s mail, looking for the letters of his mistress, and discovers a crime. ‘Why am I so frightened?’ she thought – and searched her memory, her history, for a clue to the source of this terror. The terror meant to save her, she knew, for it was almost benign, like the sun shining on the back of her head, inviting her to turn around, like a warm hand holding her, fatherly.

  Then Aurora remembered the Comte, her uncle, holding her, his hand on the back of her head, her head bent on his shoulder. She remembered a library full of quenched candles, one morning, a desk covered in papers and ink-stained blotting sand. And, in the moment Aurora remembered that morning – the morning that followed the night when the body of a murdered girl, Marie Pelet, was carried into the château for inspection by a physician and magistrate – Aurora heard her old friend say, ‘My secret isn’t something I can tell; I’ll have to show you.’

  When Aurora returned from the trip her husband insisted she take, to a spa at St Florentin, she was well enough, to the Baron’s mind, to be allowed out on her own errands. So she went: to church, to choose cloth for new gowns at the silk merchants in Autun, to church – wearily – to church, till she threw the Baron off her scent and was able to take only Paul with her the day she got in her carriage and ordered her coachman to carry them to the workshop of the local stonemason.

  Aurora told Paul that she wanted to order her tombstone. Then she leaned forward to close his jaw and teasingly pull the floppy bow of his neckcloth out of his waistcoat.

  Further along the road she took pity on him. ‘I’m better now, but the matter was on my mind when I was ill. I’ll leave the epitaph to you, of course, but I want a say in the decorations.’ She lifted the curtain to look out at the dusty road and vine rows and, before long, a low stone wall and obelisk inscribed vertically: KALMANN. The carriage turned in.

  The mason had a new house, out of sight of the workshop that now occupied the whole of the old house. The second-storey bedrooms in which his family had grown up were now offices. Antoine and his youngest boy were at work. The other two sons were miles off, repairing the stonework of a château south of Chalon-sur-Saône.

  Aurora’s footman folded the steps down and held the door. Paul got out and helped his mother. Antoine appeared, slapping the dust from his leather apron. ‘Baroness,’ he said. ‘Come into the shade.’

  They went indoors. She and Paul accepted seats, and a glass of water each.

  Aurora told her son that she would like to speak to Antoine in private.

  ‘Mother! Surely you don’t need me gone in order to give Monsieur the Mason instructions about a relief of Athena and two owls.’

  She looked at him, a long, level stare. After a moment he jumped up, put on his hat and said he’d walk over to visit Baptiste Jodeau, and she could pick him up there when she was finished. He stalked out.

  ‘What is it, Baroness?’ Antoine asked.

  ‘You’ll think I’m mad. But never mind. I have an arrangement to meet your brother-in-law on the hill above his house on the night 27th of June.’

  Antoine blushed to the top of his tanned bald head.

  Aurora hurried on, explained the bargain made when she was ill. Added, ‘Sobran and I are dear old friends, and I’m a prying woman. I know this sort of rendezvous is improper, but …’

  Antoine interrupted her: ‘I thought it was you – forgive me, Madame – that it was you with Sobran that other night, six years ago. The 27th of June in ’28.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Aurora was thrown.

  ‘The table was set, with linen and crystal glasses, cheese and fruit, wine and brandy. That morning we found him very ill.’

  ‘Mad,’ Aurora said.

  ‘Yes, Baroness, mad. His face was covered with bruises he had made with his own fists. Sobran was always a deep one. Great for wandering about half the night. They all did that, all the Jodeaus, even my Sophie when she was younger. I’d wake up and –’ Antoine patted the air beside him ‘ – I’d find her outside, in her nightclothes, sitting on the swing I’d made for our sons. After that night Sobran was afraid, never went out after dark, for years, then two years back, when he was staying with me to keep an eye on the new house he was building, off he went wandering –’ Antoine got a strange look on his face, his mouth relaxed utterly and seemed to slip down his chin. For a moment he stared off into space then blinked and refocused on Aurora. ‘It was late June, the 27th, I’m sure of it.’ Then he said, ‘I looked for a corpse.’

  Aurora flinched. She asked him to please explain himself.

  ‘Pardon me. After that night, the night he went mad, I looked for a corpse. I thought he had killed someone. The woman he had met.’

  ‘He says it’s not a woman,’ Aurora said. ‘I mean – he didn’t say that it wasn’t a woman he meets. He hasn’t talked about any meetings. He says his friend, the friend of a “poisoned friendship”, isn’t a woman.’

  ‘What poisoned friendship? Sophie and I thought it was you.’

  They blushed at each other. Then she said, dry, ‘I’m pleased to have an opportunity to clear up your confusion. Sobran and I are friends, and that is all. Besides, Monsieur Laudel, I’m not certain that women are Sobran’s preference.’

  Antoine shook his head, all set to defend his friend against this charge. ‘No, no. When Sobran was young Baptiste Kalmann was a bad influence. Sophie has said that she knows they – and that’s one reason Sobran followed Baptiste into the army. But that was just boyish immaturity – and his marriage wasn’t all he’d hoped…’

  They were silent a moment, trying to calm themselves. Aurora folded her shaking hands in her lap and Antoine, who had bent forward eagerly on his stool, with his elbows
on his knees, straightened up and disengaged.

  Aurora asked, ‘When you thought of corpses did you remember Geneviève Lizet and Marie Pelet?’

  The stonemason lost his colour. He shook his head.

  ‘Sobran set the date for our rendezvous this spring. I thought about Marie Pelet even as he spoke to me. I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it was the first time I’d thought of his secret as a buried thing. And then, a fortnight back, this other murder occurred. In Chalon-sur-Saône, I know, so not in this province, but the Baron was asked to concern himself with the case because of the other two.’

  ‘And because it was Geneviève Lizet’s youngest sister who was killed,’ Antoine said. ‘Aline Lizet, Sabine Jodeau’s friend.’

  ‘A spinster, Henri told me.’

  ‘Aline was twenty-six. In a fair way to spinsterhood, I suppose. But Sophie said Léon had spoken to her about his plan of proposing marriage to Aline. Aline stood godmother to Sabine’s girls. She was close to us.’

  ‘Henri said suspicion has fallen on her cousin, Jules, who was always a little strange.’

  ‘He’s a simpleton who sees things. Jules was in love with Geneviève – everyone knew that.’ Antoine’s eyes began to tear; he was clearly very upset. ‘How could you suspect Sobran of murder?’

  ‘Because, to the best of my knowledge, those murders were the only terrible, unexplained events in this province within living memory. Because Sobran says his secret is a bottomless pit. Because he once spoke to me about finding the first body, Geneviève’s, and seemed, speaking of it, to be more affronted than horrified – but sometimes when he’s upset Sobran is only able to show disgust. Monsieur Laudel, I don’t suspect Sobran of murder, I suspect him of knowing who the murderer is. I think guilty knowledge is the poison of his poisoned friendship.’