Love & Death in Burgundy

by Susan C. Shea

  “We make what we can of it, don’t we?” she said. “And right now, I must prove my worthiness to this sophisticated crossroads in the middle of nowhere by shining at my job for the fête.” It made her nervous to realize the weekend was only a month away. The townspeople would have absorbed the news of Albert’s death by then, milked it for all its gossip value, and moved on, as people do. “The first battle is down the hill in Mme Pomfort’s garden.” She frowned at the cat. “You must wish me luck.”

  * * *

  Katherine had looked everywhere for her shoe, half of her favorite red pair, and now she was late. She pulled on her black boots, humming tunelessly in irritation under her breath. If one of Jean’s offspring had taken it … but why would they? Who wants one shoe? None of Jean’s brood was one-legged, at least that she had noticed. Don’t be unkind, she scolded herself. You sound like Emile. Their mother is dead, their father’s no help. What you should do is invite the children over for American-style ice-cream sundaes. She added it to her mental list of small gestures that might help civilize the feral creatures, even though reason suggested hot fudge was a dubious antidote to total parental neglect.

  Snatching up her straw basket, she eased past Fideaux, napping in his usual spot in front of the door, and down the slate steps. It was only a few minutes’ walk downhill to Mme Pomfort’s, but the woman was a stickler about promptness, and Katherine didn’t want to give her something else to complain about. Mme Pomfort wasn’t crazy about Americans. Mme Pomfort wasn’t crazy about anyone who wasn’t French. She was even suspicious of Parisians. But she must be courted and placated because she had the highest hereditary standing in the village. If Mme Pomfort decided you were not comme il faut, you might not get your firewood delivered until after the first cold rain, or a good seat at the pétanque dinner, or her help with decorations for the fête, which was why Katherine was rushing, not even pausing to admire the clusters of tiny purple flowers that had sprung up to decorate the edge of the road.

  “Here I am, Madame,” Katherine called out as she reached the iron gate that guarded a neat rectangle of stuccoed house with its ground-floor shutters closed against the daylight. The door opened and the solid shape of Mme Pomfort stood framed in it, almost filling the low doorway. Madame was a widow, with nieces who came bearing covered dishes once a year. She had no pets, because, she had told Katherine sternly one day when Katherine was being dragged down the road by her two shaggy beasts, “Animals are unhealthy.”

  “Bonjour, Mme Goff, you are only a few minutes late,” the old lady said with a pinched smile.

  “Ah, I’m sorry, but I brought you a little something from my garden.” Katherine pulled a plastic container from the basket and held it out. “Strawberries, the first of the season.”

  “Merci, Madame. How lovely,” Mme Pomfort said, pulling up a corner to peer at them. “But they do not look quite ripe.”

  Katherine smiled energetically, all the while thinking that’s because they are the first and probably the only strawberries the little patch will produce, and we had cold days last week, and it breaks my heart to give them to someone who doesn’t even want them. “It’s been a cold summer.”

  “Indeed.” The hostess parked the container on a table outside the door but didn’t invite Katherine in, instead leading the way across the narrow road to a wood-fenced patch of land next to the ancient, crumbling church that sat at the center of Reigny. The building, made of undistinguished local stone, was pockmarked from centuries of exposure and neglect. The local commune opened the locked doors a few times a year for subdued christenings, weddings, funerals, and special Masses, presided over since Katherine had arrived in Reigny by a distracted African priest who had the air of someone running badly behind schedule. Mme Pomfort made a great show of producing a key to unlock the low gate into the side yard and closing it with a clatter behind them. “We’ll take the sun in my garden.”

  Yves had explained that the Pomforts laid claim to this spot, about sixty by sixty feet, through Mme Pomfort’s extended family. “Trouble is, the Robiliers insist they have a stronger claim. Mme Robilier, the woman who works in my shop, says this piece of land was granted to a great-great-great-someone-or-other when it was taken from the Church during the Revolution.” Apparently, Mme Pomfort’s parents erected the fence and the gate one week forty years ago during an upheaval in the Robiliers’s lives, and Mme Pomfort now tended the space for at least a few minutes almost every day of the year to protect her family’s position.

  Yves said that this feud had been going on for generations, with the occupancy seesawing back and forth. The current resident Robiliers, whose grown children had fled for livelier places, had not been able to figure out how to strike back. There had been a spectacular move made right before World War II by M. Robilier’s father, something involving a large number of pigs and chickens, that had temporarily, at least, turned the land over to them. The war, the damage done by the hated Nazi occupiers—who had taken all the livestock—and the senior Robiliers’s deaths of old age had given the current Pomforts an opening; hence the fence, the gate, and the lock.

  On one side, a tidy herb garden laid out in medieval fashion, its sections separated by small stones, sent out a spicy fragrance. Scraggly tomato plants leaned against the church wall behind them. On the other side of the raked path, two rows of roses, the ground under them almost scrubbed clean. Circling the perimeter on three sides, tall hollyhocks, red geraniums, and espaliered jasmine. Not a leaf out of place, Katherine thought, wondering what Madame would make of her own wild space.

  “You’ll have lots of flowers by the time of the fête, I expect,” Katherine said, to steer the conversation toward the point as quickly as possible. “Your gladiolas are budding and your roses are blooming so much more than my own.”

  “One never knows. The weather, the soil. I wouldn’t want to say prematurely.”

  “Yes, well, you see, I’m hoping that I can count on you to contribute some of your bounty to decorate the front of the stage for our little show. Your flowers are the most beautiful in the village. I could ask Mme Robilier, I guess.…” Katherine thought the silence might stretch to ten seconds, but Madame couldn’t resist that long.

  “Oh, I am sure I shall have enough to do the decor. One wishes to do one’s part. Indeed, Mme Goff, I am not entirely sure I understand how you came to have such a role as you do this year. The mayor appointed you, I believe?”

  Katherine was on touchy ground here. The mayor had indeed appointed her, but only after Katherine spent several months during the winter flattering him to excess, painting a portrait of his ten-year-old daughter for free, and promising Michael and Betty Lou as entertainment. Mme Pomfort would never approve of an American taking such an important role as entertainment producer, so Katherine had had to lobby for it away from the widow’s hawklike attention.

  “Oui, Madame, I am so honored, but I think it was most likely because of my husband’s talent and the famous singer with whom he is recording a new album, you know.” She dared to lock eyes with the old woman for a moment.

  “A commune festival with a foreign entertainment. The next thing we know it will be Gypsies. What is to become of poor little Reigny, once the home of great families?” Madame cocked her head to one side and sighed like a true tragedienne.

  “Not at all, Madame, je vous assure. After all, Michael and I live in Reigny, don’t we?” Katherine bit her tongue to stop from mentioning Penny, who might be called a resident but who was surely on Madame’s list of alien invaders. On the spot, Katherine decided the inclusion of another foreigner would have to wait. Pippa would not be asked to sell wine.

  “Yes, well,” was all Mme Pomfort said before moving as swiftly as politeness allowed to the real reason she deigned to speak to Katherine this morning. “I have already delivered some potted jasmine to poor Adele. You have seen her? She was resting when I called on her.”

  “She’s terribly upset,” Katherine said. “She’s not s
eeing anyone. Sophie is with her.”

  “Ah, Sophie, yes,” Madame said, making it sound like a problem, which, Katherine supposed, it probably was, Sophie being so dramatic and so delicate.

  “Poor Albert, it was a horrible way to die.” Katherine waited for the village’s unofficial social leader to press discreetly for details so she could emphasize the accidental nature of the tragedy.

  There was a silence while Madame examined her hands. Her left hand, Katherine noticed, held the thinnest of gold bands. Then she said in a murmur, “One does not like to speak ill, one wishes to be polite. He was, however, a German.”

  Katherine squeezed her jaws together, willing herself not to leap into this and further threaten her relationship with Reigny’s arbiter of social life. She had to remember the plaques she saw everywhere, nailed over doorways and on posts at the intersections of the smallest roads, memorials to French patriots. Maquisards, they were called, locals organized into de Gaulle’s French National Resistance, who had been summarily shot on this or that spot by the Nazis during the occupation. The people here, living on the edge of the Morvan’s forested hillsides, had paid dearly for their support of the Resistance fighters and were, Katherine understood, still sensitive, especially the ones whose fathers, aunts and uncles, or grandparents had not survived. Who was she to criticize them?

  “Albert would have been awfully young to have been a soldier even if he had still been in Germany,” she said in hopes of softening any implied guilt without ruffling Madame’s feathers. “His family was living in Switzerland, Mme Bellegarde told me.”

  A sniff, and then, “The Nazis sent very young officers into the occupied zone near the end. There is no proof of where Monsieur was living. Read your history, Mme Goff, read your history. But of course a naturalized citizen is not the same thing as a French person in any case.” Madame said this dismissively and with another audible sniff. “I would not be surprised if his death was traced back to his business. You have heard about it?”

  “The police haven’t told Adele anything different from what she believes, that he fell on those uneven stone steps in the back quarter of the château, perhaps even had a heart attack which caused him to collapse.”

  “He was a merchant,” Madame continued as if Katherine had not spoken, “of German-made guns and ammunition. Young Yves told me last year that he is known as a man whose riches came directly from supporting police states. A man like that must have many enemies.” Mme Pomfort spoke with triumph, as if she had parsed a secret reason for Albert’s death while sitting among her rosemary and roses.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Katherine managed. “He lives—lived—here so quietly.”

  “Monsieur Robilier, that is, the Robilier who died before you arrived, not the current one, was a German sympathizer. I believe his mother was German.”

  Katherine waited for some explanation of why this was relevant, but Madame merely looked at her with an expression that seemed to say this explained everything, or at least something. Katherine fiddled with the fraying brim of her straw hat, wondering how to get back to a neutral topic before she offended Madame. Michael would be furious if the firewood was late again this year, so soon after Katherine had figured out what to do to ensure delivery by early October, when the nights got chilly.

  There was nothing to do but plunge in. “Well, thank you so much for offering to do the stage flowers. I am sure everyone who comes will notice how elegant they are.”

  “Will the gendarmes be interviewing anyone in town, do you think?” Madame said, not ready to let go of her conviction that an enemy of a war profiteer, or perhaps another German—her theory was a bit fuzzy—had snuck into Albert’s castle in the middle of the night and dispatched him.

  “I really don’t know. There is an officer from the gendarmerie assigned to investigate, so perhaps he will ask Henri to check with everyone about their whereabouts.” Maybe that was it. Mme Pomfort wanted an excuse to grill the sheriff, and the suggestion of foul play might be her strategy to get Henri’s attention.

  “My whereabouts are hardly the issue.” Madame’s veined hand flew to the scarf neatly tied at her throat.

  Katherine’s shoulders slumped. Really, she could not seem to avoid insulting her neighbor. It was bad enough being American, having a French accent that sounded more like Paris than Burgundy when it didn’t sound like California. But to also have a husband whose guitar playing, gentle as it was, managed to trickle in Madame’s open windows on warm summer nights was too much. Mme Pomfort had instructed Henri the sheriff to demand that Michael be silent by dinnertime, Madame’s five-o’clock dinnertime. Henri had been unwilling to go that far, but he had hesitantly asked the celebrity musician living among them if he could choose only “les ballades tranquilles” in the evenings. She wondered if Pippa, hidden away in her cottage at the opposite end of town, annoyed Madame as much as she, Katherine, seemed to, or if the young woman cared half as much as Katherine did.

  “Of course not. I only meant that they will ask all of us whatever they think will help explain what happened. Adele is miserable, and Sophie is struggling with what needs to be done.”

  “C’est tragique,” Madame said, more in judgment than pity, rising to walk Katherine to the gate, which she opened with a flourish. “It may well prove to be a criminal associate come to get revenge for a double cross. Or something like that,” she finished, less certain of the specific motive than of the truth that a stranger had invaded Reigny-sur-Canne’s peaceful existence. “In any case, he will have fled long ago.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Katherine promised herself every day that she would not have a glass of wine until five o’clock, and then only one. There were times, many of them, when circumstances beyond her control almost required that she break her rule. Mme Pomfort’s company might have tempted her by itself, but when the kitchen door slapped shut behind her, she heard voices and realized they had company. J. B. Holliday’s voice would make a decibel measure tremble anywhere, but it was particularly difficult to deal with in a small, enclosed space like their living room, never mind what he was saying. And what he was saying made Katherine reach without conscious thought for a tumbler and fill it to the brim. She took a big gulp and ruined her entrance into the conversation by having some of it go down her throat the wrong way so that she coughed and sputtered for a full minute.

  “Hey, Kathy,” J.B. said over her distress. “I’d get up but I’m too damned comfortable. Tell this husband of yours I can make him a rich man, indeed I can.” The record producer had settled into the only large, upholstered seat in the room, the chaise usually shared by Katherine and one of the dogs, and she doubted very much if J.B. could get up at all, much less bobbing up to be polite.

  She glanced at Michael. Being married to someone a long time was helpful at moments like this. He hated talking about money because, she had long realized, it underscored his embarrassment at having none. It was his style to carry a roll of bills and to peel them off easily when she asked him to pay for the beef roast or the incredibly cheap silver tongs she found at a flea market table, but that was small stuff. He couldn’t afford, say, a new car if the Citroën had engine problems. Right now, with J.B. talking like a big shot who had plenty of money and large investment ideas, Michael needed rescuing.

  “J.B., I’ve been meaning to ask you about that handsome son of yours. He’s a sweet boy, but I wonder if he should be a little more careful when he’s on that board thing and flying down the hill? What if a van is coming around the corner, or an unwary tourist who’s already lost and confused, since any tourist who winds up here surely is lost?”

  Michael’s shoulders relaxed a bit. J.B. chuckled from some deep place, a little like a motor turning over. “Brett? That boy’ll be the death of me yet, but I sincerely doubt he’ll die in the process. I live for the day he’s old enough to set loose on the world, I tell you. These days, if he’s not raising hell somewhere else, he’s hanging around that gir
l who lives in the house with the junk-filled yard. She’s something else, that one. All tease and no mistake.” He laughed, slapped one hand on his thigh, and winked at Katherine.

  Was Brett making some kind of play for Jeannette? The thought made Katherine uneasy. Brett was seventeen and American, raised on hip-hop, sexy movies, and God knows what else, which made him seem older. His parents may have tried to counter the popular trends, but his mother confessed to Katherine that he’d been caught with some pot back in the States when he was only sixteen. Meanwhile, Jeannette was motherless and naive. It was too much to expect her father would care. He’d probably see Brett’s attentions as an opportunity, although Katherine refused to define to herself what she meant by that. Katherine moved a talk with Jeannette to the top of her growing list of projects for the next couple of weeks.

  “She’s young,” was all she said. “I think it would be a good idea to mention the possibility of oncoming traffic to the boy, though. Michael, we’re due at Adele’s in fifteen minutes, sorry as I am to break up your visit.”

  Michael opened his mouth, no doubt to protest having to go into that gloomy house again so soon, but Katherine caught his eye and he shut his mouth abruptly and stood.

  “Don’t want to keep you from the widow’s side, for sure.” J.B. started the process of rising from the chaise, windmilling one arm while the other clamped onto the seat. Michael went to the door to whistle the dogs in as J.B. patted a file folder on the chaise. “I’ll leave this with you, Mike, and we can talk about it when you come over for rehearsal. I’m telling you, this will be a gold mine. You’ll leave those Crazy Leopards in the dust.”

  Michael mumbled something Katherine couldn’t hear as the two men walked out to the SUV with her trailing behind them.