‘You must earth up the vines,’ he said feverishly. ‘Light the smudge pots. It’s urgent. I’m roasting like a rabbit in here, but the vines will freeze if you don’t get out there and work.’ He tried to sit up. His voice was as rattling and wet as a creek that is flowing through gravel. Cap sat at his side and held his hand and felt for his pulse. Bird in a snare, she thought of his heart; worn out from grief and from beating against his rage at his own fatigue. From time to time he would clutch at his chest and she could almost see the pain. She wanted to run to the chateau or to Marie-Claire’s and call the doctor again, but she had done it too often. She would have liked to barricade the physician in the cottage and force him to keep watch but he would only say, as he said each time: ‘There is nothing to be done. It is not uncommon for a stroke to follow a heart attack. Keep him hydrated and keep him warm. Keep feeding him broth. I am the only doctor in St Gilles and there are many urgent calls on my time.’
‘The buttage around the roots has been done, Papa. The smudge pots are lit every night. Many boys from the village have come to my aid. Father Boniface sent all the altar boys to help. The whole village is praying for you. And for the vines.’
‘Did you send for Lilith and Ti-Christophe?’
Cap closed her eyes and pressed the back of one hand against her mouth before she could sufficiently steady her voice to answer. ‘Yes, Papa. I sent for them.’
Her father grew agitated, his breathing ragged. ‘Tell them to come quickly. There isn’t much time.’
‘I told them it was urgent, Papa. I think they are here.’
‘Yes,’ her father murmured, sliding back into sleep. He smiled. ‘Yes, you are right. They are here.’
Pierre of the velvet pantaloons and the goats came to the cottage door. ‘The countess wants to see you,’ he said. ‘You are to come to the chateau now.’
‘Please tell Madame la Comtesse,’ Cap said, ‘that I send my regrets but I will not leave my father’s side.’ She closed the door in Pierre’s face.
For Cap’s father, the knock on the door brought on an extreme gust of the shivers. He pulled his quilt close around him and huddled inside, rocking slightly and moaning, until a sudden inner burst of energy shot him upright. ‘Coldest winter ever,’ he said. ‘Worse than ’44. It’s a signal.’
‘It’s your fever, Papa.’
‘It’s a signal. I heard something.’
‘It was Pierre at the door with a message.’
‘No. I heard a shot.’
‘It’s just a hunter, Papa. Or a poacher. He’s after rabbits or quail.’
‘No. On the radio. He shot the president. The American president has been shot. I heard that. Is that my fever?’
‘It’s not your fever, Papa. I heard it too. It’s real. It’s a terrible thing.’
‘Like the Occupation.’
‘Yes.’
‘Ti-Christophe’s maman, your maman, Ti-Christophe. The American president.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘We think we’ve survived but it never stops. We’re never safe. All the omens are bad.’
‘We make our own omens, Papa. You taught me that. I’m here and I’m not going to leave. We’re safe.’
‘I used to believe,’ her father said, his voice raspy and weak, ‘that we did what we had to do, and the fact that we were doing what we had to do was enough. It should be enough. It should be. But I don’t know anymore.’
‘Even if it isn’t enough, Papa, we would still do what we have to do.’
Pierre knocked on the cottage door with a letter from la comtesse.
Ma chère Melusine,
Your loyalty to your father is exemplary. That is precisely why it is so essential that you complete le bac in Tours and go on to the Sorbonne. I know your father would wish it. I understand that you cannot countenance the idea of leaving him alone in this illness (whether it is of the spirit or the body or both, I will not attempt to say), but certainly the disappearance of his son and the death of his unborn grandchild have only added to the struggle of his heart. Your father’s health matters as much to me as to you. Therefore, so that you can be free to return to the convent, I will take Monsieur le Jardinier into the chateau as my personal guest. He will have a resident nurse and a resident physician. He will have first-class care.
There is also the matter that the survival of the chateau and its vineyard depends on a manager and full-time viticulteur. I have tentatively hired a new manager and he will need to move into the gardener’s cottage as soon as possible. Please visit me in the chateau so that we can discuss procedures for moving your father into my residence here.
Cordialement à toi, ma petite Melusine,
Isabelle, Comtesse de la Vallière Vanderbilt
Capucine spent all night at her father’s bedside drafting and redrafting a reply. She gave it to Pierre the next morning.
A Madame la Comtesse de la Vallière Vanderbilt.
Ma très chère Comtesse Isabelle,
My father and I owe you everything and can never adequately repay you. You saved his life when the SS were quartered in the chateau. You have given me one of the finest possible educations. Everything that I know and treasure about art and literature is due to you.
I hope, therefore, that you will forgive me when I say that the place where my father wishes to spend his final days is this cottage where he was born, the very tenancy of which we owe to your goodwill. I cannot and will not leave him alone here. Much as I love my convent school in Tours, much as my teacher nuns are dear to me, much as I will be forever grateful to you for providing my extraordinary education, I must decline.
I know that your financial concern about the vineyard is a real and serious one, but I can do that work. You do not need to hire anyone else. I can become manager of this estate and would love to do so. With respect, chère Madame la Comtesse, I will not leave my father and I beseech you not to require him to leave this cottage. Avec un respect et une tendresse qu’on ne peut plus, Melusine, fille du jardinier
There was a knock on the door in the early morning and Capucine expected a return note from Pierre. Instead, her cape covered with frost and a dusting of snow, la comtesse stood there in an overly large and clumsy pair of worn leather boots. ‘The chauffeur’s mechanic lent me his work shoes,’ she said. ‘It was kind of him. It is more difficult than I had realised to walk through snow and slush. I’ve never done it before.’ She surveyed her footwear. ‘Not very glamorous, are they?’
‘Madame la Comtesse, I think you have never looked more magnificent. But you shouldn’t have attempted this walk. It’s icy underneath the snow. You could have fallen and broken your hip.’
‘I once saw a girl,’ the countess said, ‘who fell out of an apple tree. She did not know I was watching. I always admired her. I thought that if I could have my life over, I would want to be like her. Not afraid of anything or anyone.’
Cap was so astonished and so moved by this declaration that she could not trust herself to speak.
‘I have never been inside the gardener’s cottage,’ the countess said. ‘Will you invite me in, Melusine?’
‘Madame la Comtesse, it is an honour.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Here. In front of the fire. Sleeping.’
‘I will sit beside him,’ the countess said. ‘I will come each day and hold his hand. I will attend to his needs. I will engage one of the village women to sit with him through the night. Melusine, may I speak frankly? I have lost a son. I do not want to lose someone who is as dear to me as a daughter. I understand that I have lost my son because I was so afraid of losing him that I sent him away and he has not forgiven me.
‘I know I risk making the same mistake with you, Melusine, but I want you to pass le bac at the convent in Tours. I will spend every day in this cottage at your father’s side to bring this to pass. I hope you will not deny me this. And if there is any change for the worse in your father’s condition, I will send a car for you. We will b
e with him together.’
‘Madame la Comtesse …’
‘On another small matter,’ the countess said. ‘It no longer seems to me at all appropriate for you to address me in such a formal way. You are not my daughter and I am not your mother, but I like to flatter myself that the bond between us is one of affection and is something more than formal. I would like you to think of me as your godmother, ta marraine, if that would be acceptable to you.’
‘Ma chère marraine,’ Cap said. She thought of asking: Would you permit me to hug you? but like the girl who fell out of the apple tree, she acted on impulse first and thought later. She threw her arms around the countess and buried her head against that elegant and formidable shoulder and the countess did not resist.
‘I’m not crying,’ Capucine said.
‘Nor am I,’ the countess replied.
2.
The Mother Superior at the convent in Tours woke Cap at dawn. ‘A phone call for you,’ she said.
It was the countess. ‘Melusine, I have just changed shifts with the night nurse from the village. I am sending the car for you. You should come quickly. I will stay with him.’
‘Thank you, ma chère marraine.’
Cap had one request for the Mother Superior before the car arrived. Could she place a phone call to New York?
‘Madame Goldberg,’ Cap said when the call went through. ‘Grand Loup is dying. We think the end is very close. The countess herself is with him and I’m leaving Tours for St Gilles as soon as her car arrives. I wish … I hope … I would want you and Monsieur Goldberg, if possible, to be here with me for the … at the … Well, before the end, that’s not possible now. But for the funeral?’
‘We will get the first flight we can,’ Myriam Goldberg promised.
‘And do you think you could get a message to Ti-Loup?’
‘I’ll try. But you know I have tried many times …’
‘Yes, I know. But still …’
Snow was falling. The cypresses were so weighted down with heavy wet white that the tips of their feathered branches touched the graves. In the churchyard of St Gilles, several inches of snow covered the ground. The boots of the pallbearers sent up icy flurries as they pushed their way through the heavy wet crystalline marshmallow-mush, leaving dangerous channel-tracks behind them. The procession of mourners knew better than to follow in these pressed-down ice-slicked routes. Instead, like barnyard hens, they pecked their own erratic and scattered routes, footstep by footstep, each bootfall shattering through a brittle untrodden pellucid wafer into gluey wedding-cake fondant.
‘You must hold my arm,’ Cap told the countess. ‘You must lean on me. I don’t want you to fall.’
The trench waiting to receive the body of Grand Loup gaped black and seemingly bottomless except that far down, if one peered in, a quilt of snow covered the mud floor. Suspended above the trench, on leather straps, the mahogany coffin was smothered with flowers.
La Comtesse Isabelle de la Vallière Vanderbilt wore black silk and was heavily veiled in black chiffon edged with lace. In the church porch, she had exchanged her elegant shoes for a spare pair of the gravedigger’s boots. She pressed one white hand to her heart. She swayed a little and it seemed she might fall or faint.
‘Melusine,’ she murmured. ‘We were children together, your father and I. He should not have gone first. I have no one left now.’
‘You have me,’ Cap said.
‘You will leave, as you should. As I wish for you to do. My son never responds to my letters. Only your father never thought ill of me.’
‘I never think ill of you.’
‘Only you and your father.’ The countess pulled the black chiffon veil from her head and let it float down to the coffin where it settled like the wings of a dragonfly, diaphanous, dark. ‘He would smile, Melusine,’ the countess murmured, ‘don’t you think, to see me in the gravedigger’s boots?’
There was a reception back at the chateau and the entire village came. Almost the entire village. Monsieur Monsard, the butcher, and his wife and son did not come. The countess stood at one of her windows and looked out towards the church and the graveyard beyond. Cap brought her a steaming mug of mulled wine.
‘There were informers,’ the countess said uncertainly. ‘We know that. I know many in the village condemned me for having the Germans in the chateau.’
‘The village knew you had no choice.’
‘Some in the village resisted, nevertheless. Your father resisted. I did not have that kind of courage. Who are those people? They look familiar but I don’t know who they are.’
‘The Goldbergs. They flew to Paris and took a car from the airport and arrived here just in time. You’ve met them before.’
‘Are they the art collectors from New York?’
‘Yes.’
‘They claimed they’d been here in the past but I had no memory of them. Was it true?’
‘It was true. But they were in hiding.’
‘When?’
‘During the Occupation. My father saved their lives. My mother gave hers. That’s why they came back. They wanted to find my parents and thank them.’
‘They recognised my Modigliani.’
‘They used to own it.’
‘Ah.’ The countess moved her fingers along her rosary as she always did when disturbed. She did this discreetly, under cover of her black silk sleeves. ‘So many terrible things we do in ignorance. So much harm. Perhaps I can do a small thing to make amends. I will give the painting back.’
3.
The Place Jeanne d’Arc in Chinon, like the narrow streets that lead to it, is still paved with cobbles laid down in the Middle Ages. Above and behind the intimate town square broods the great crumbling ruin of the Château de Chinon, the fortress where Henry II, first of the royal line of the Plantagenets, Count of Anjou and King of England, died in 1189. Below the castle the town slopes precipitously down to the Vienne and the visitor can see across the river to the vineyards beyond.
‘We stayed in this lovely little inn when we came back looking for Grand Loup and Lilith,’ Myriam Goldberg said. ‘Less than four years ago. Such a short time to thank him for all the years he gave us.’
‘That visit was the first time we had actually seen Chinon,’ Aaron said. ‘We were Parisians, you understand. We were completely Parisian. We had no knowledge of the provinces and no interest in them. Not even in the Loire Valley and the chateaux.’
‘Not even in this town?’ Cap reproached. ‘Where Rabelais was born and where Jeanne d’Arc first met the Dauphin?’
‘Not until it became the place where we first met your mother,’ Myriam said. ‘Which seems much more significant to us. Still.’
They had not actually seen Chinon in February 1944 because they came under cover of darkness, first by a night barge down the Loire from Tours and then upriver by rowboat on the Vienne. The Chinon safe house, they knew, had to be close by, but they had no idea where. In the castle ruins, perhaps?
‘I can’t think back to that time without massive anxiety,’ Myriam said. ‘Look at my hands.’ She laid them palms down on the bistro table, though this did nothing to still the tremor. ‘But your mother was so serene, Lilith. So confident. She had this gift … I don’t know how, but she could impart a sense of calm. It seemed supernatural to me then and still does. I don’t believe in angels or in anything paranormal, but if I did, I would say that your mother lived in a different dimension from the rest of us. Against all logic, she could make me believe we were safe.’
‘And here you are,’ Aaron said. ‘A carbon copy. A reincarnation of your mother.’
‘No, I’m not remotely like her,’ Cap protested. ‘I’m not calm and not brave. I’ve been too afraid to ask but I have to: did you get word to Ti-Loup?’
‘We tried,’ Myriam said. ‘I tried two routes. I called Shannay in the Bronx. She used to be housekeeper at the Vanderbilt penthouse. Ti-Loup’s father fired her because she joined Martin Luther King’s march.
We’ve stayed in touch with Shannay but she said it was no use. She’d left messages at Fifth Avenue and at the school, but Ti-Loup never returned her calls. I also sent a letter by Priority Post to the Dryden school. Ti-Loup would have had to sign for it. But I never heard back.’
‘I can’t understand it,’ Cap said. ‘I just can’t. He disappeared when Ti-Christophe disappeared. They both vanished. The last time I saw him, he was looking back through security at Paris airport. He went through the looking-glass. He got vaporised. He doesn’t exist.’
‘Grief is strange,’ Myriam said. ‘It’s a strange thing. And trauma is even stranger. You can’t predict, no one can, how you’ll handle it.’
‘Which brings us,’ Aaron said, ‘to something we’ve been planning for a very long time.’
4.
The Goldbergs had left it too late to leave Paris. They had watched German troops march down the Champs-Elysées in June 1940. They were aware of the flight of the French government to Bordeaux. They heard General Pétain make his nationwide announcement one week later: ‘It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must stop fighting.’ They heard Pétain accede to the abject capitulation of France. They were well aware of the contempt in Hitler’s terms for surrender, which he insisted take place on the very railroad car where the armistice of 1918 had been signed, in the forest of Compiègne, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. They were very familiar with the words carved into the granite monolith which marked that date and that site: Here … succumbed the criminal pride of the German empire … vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave.
They knew that Hitler had the 1918 marker blown up three days later.
The Goldbergs knew all this and yet they did not flee. They were French. Their fathers were decorated veterans of the First World War. The Goldbergs had been blindly naive. They were confident that the descendants of the French Revolution would never submit to a German dictator’s rants.
The Claimant Page 36
