The Widows of Champagne

by Renee Ryan

  “I’ll find a way back to you,” he vowed.

  “However long it takes, I will be here, waiting.” The words were as true as her feelings. So strong. So quickly changed. No, not changed, revealed. Illuminated.

  Uncovered.

  They stood silent, staring hard, breathing harder. Gabrielle could not find tears for this parting. Her sorrow wedged too deep for weeping. She hardly knew this man, and yet, in her heart, she accepted that he was her greatest ally in the war. They would live separate lives, for the good of others, connected only through memory and the silent promises neither dared to speak aloud, even in this private, intimate moment.

  “Stay alive,” she said.

  And then, they were in each other’s arms and his head was lowering to hers and what had seemed complicated seconds before was suddenly very, very simple. Separate, but together. The kiss lasted no longer than three beats of her heart. He set her away from him but kept his hands on her waist, and his gaze locked with hers. “I will pray for you.”

  “We will pray for each other. I want to lift you up by name.” She cupped the sculpted lines of his cheek. “Will you trust me enough to leave that small piece of yourself in my care?”

  He took her hand, pressed a kiss to her palm. “My name is Richard. Richard Doyle.”

  So very British, she thought, so perfectly suited to the man standing before her with such tenderness in his eyes.

  Again, sorrow and hope shared equal space in her heart. She touched his lips and then pressed a kiss to where her fingertips had been. “I will pray for you,” she said. “Richard.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Gabrielle

  The war waged on. The people of Champagne slowly starved under their Nazi oppressors. Gabrielle became responsible for finding provisions, both for her family and, when possible, for the resistance.

  Not long after Richard left for Berlin, she received word via a series of coded messages that her mother had arrived in America and was living with her father in New York. Paulette stayed in Paris, while Gabrielle took full control of Château Fouché-LeBlanc.

  The weinführer’s quotas continued putting a strain on resources. Working on Sundays became a way of life. The sacrifice of the Sabbath did not mean she didn’t seek solace from God. Gabrielle spent many evenings in the LeBlanc chapel, alone and in prayer, her thoughts often straying to the man who’d saved her father-in-law and mother. Sometimes, she even opened her heart to possibilities of a future after the war. Hope, it would seem, was not dead in her heart.

  Josephine spent most days in Marta’s company. Gabrielle understood, but it still hurt to know her once-close relationship with her grandmother was forever changed. At least Grandmère was alive, and Gabrielle counted that as one of her most precious blessings.

  On a bright morning in August, with the 1944 harvest looming, she took the familiar trek through the château, outside onto the terrace, down the stone steps. At the edge of the vineyard, she stopped and paused.

  The vines strained against the wires that held their trunks steady and their grapes from skimming along the ground. Their bushy canopies were nearly black in the predawn light, a series of round, shadowy figures poised in the lapse between night and day.

  A pair of birds whistled to one another. Their trills and gurgles combined to make a happy, harmonious melody. Gabrielle took the sound as a good omen. As she headed into the vineyard, the church bells began marking the top of the hour, seven strikes of clapper to bowl joined in perfect sync with the seven pings of her heart.

  She didn’t hear her name at first. “Gabrielle.” Marta all but ran toward her, tears streaming down her face. “You must come back to the château. There is news from Paris.”

  “Has something happened to Paulette?”

  “Non, non. Your sister is well, as far as I know. It’s happening. The liberation of Paris. A full assault. The resistance has joined the battle and is working directly with the American and British forces.” Marta reached for Gabrielle’s hands. “This is it. The end of our suffering. The Germans will finally be thrown out of France.”

  The news only got better. Josephine, Gabrielle and Marta congregated in the parlor to listen to General de Gaulle’s triumphant speech. “...Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!”

  “It’s over,” Gabrielle whispered.

  As de Gaulle continued his speech, she thought briefly of Richard Doyle, then set the memory of him aside and moved to sit beside Josephine. She took the frail, weathered hand. “Paris is free, Grandmère.”

  The eyes that turned to her were clouded with tears. “Reims will be next.”

  It took another fifteen days for her grandmother’s words to come true. Reims wasn’t liberated until the eighth day of September.

  A week later, Paulette arrived home. Gabrielle greeted her at the door. Their reunion was no happier than their farewell.

  The years had not been kind to her sister. Though the girl, now a woman, still held a strong resemblance to their mother, Paulette looked harder in the eyes, rail thin in the body, and her gaunt face was still filled with that heartbreaking mixture of guilt and grief.

  Gabrielle suffered her own combination of guilt and grief. She’d done this to her sister, turned her into a shell of her former self. She would tell Paulette the truth now. All of it. As she’d told Josephine the day after Paris was liberated.

  Over a meager serving of watery soup and moldy bread, Paulette spoke of their mother with immense sorrow. Not wishing to upset Josephine, Gabrielle waited until after the meal to make her confession. She found Paulette on the terrace, absently looking out over the vineyard, smoking a cigarette that smelled the same as their mother’s brand. A tribute, perhaps, to the woman she thought lost to her forever. The scent gave Gabrielle a vague queasy feeling.

  “You’ve taken up smoking,” she said to ease them both into the difficult conversation.

  “I took it up not long after I arrived in Paris.” She studied the glowing tip. “I don’t particularly enjoy it.”

  “Yet you smoke anyway.”

  Paulette shrugged, the gesture reminiscent of their mother at her most carefree. “War will do that to a person. It will make you turn to small vices to get through another day.”

  The bitterness was new, as was the rough, indifferent air that could not be faked. Gone was the passion for life that had once defined her sister. There was nothing of the selfish, flirtatious girl left. And it is partly my fault.

  No, Gabrielle realized, this conversation would not be easy. “I have something to tell you about Maman.”

  Before she lost her nerve, she told her story. She held nothing back, no detail, no vital piece of information. She started with von Schmidt’s disappearance. Their mother’s arrest, Lieutenant Weber coming upon her in the wine cellar, his attempt to strangle her, the champagne bottle she’d cracked over his head to halt his assault. Then, Detective Mueller’s arrival on the scene, his revelations and his vow to escort Hélène safely across the border.

  Paulette took a step back, the sound of her gasp as loud as a slap.

  “Why are you telling me these lies?” she demanded, a catch in her voice. All of a sudden, she looked every bit the young ingénue she’d once been, a mosaic of hope and fear in her eyes.

  “They aren’t lies, Paulette. Maman is alive and living in New York.”

  “Alive. In New York. All this time.” As if needing a moment to process what she’d just heard, Paulette glanced out over the moonlit vineyard. She attempted to take a pull from her cigarette. But her hands shook violently, and she couldn’t fit the end between her lips. After three failed attempts, she gave up. “You knew, all along, you knew the truth. You knew Maman wa
s safe. And you kept it from me?”

  “Oui.”

  “When I came home from the police station, devastated and blaming myself, you knew. On the train platform the day I went to Paris, you knew.”

  “I knew.”

  Paulette hurled herself across the space between them, her hands flaying, scratching at her face, connecting only once before Gabrielle caught her wrists and yanked away from the curled fingernails digging at the empty air. “Calm yourself.”

  The words only made her sister battle harder. She was no match for Gabrielle. She had the benefit of two inches and five extra pounds on the girl.

  “You let me go to Paris thinking Maman was dead. You knew I blamed myself. And you said nothing.”

  Gabrielle’s reply was harsh, forced out between her clenched teeth. “You’d already made too many mistakes for me to trust you with the truth.”

  “You blame this on me? You made the choice to lie, yet somehow it is my fault.” Paulette wrenched her hands free. “I have never hated you more than I do at this moment. I will never forgive you, Gabrielle. Never.”

  She didn’t blame her sister for her hate, or her lack of forgiveness. She could only hope in time, Paulette would find it in her heart to understand why she’d withheld the truth from her. “When Maman comes home—”

  “Home?” Paulette’s laugh was full of wretched anger. “She can never come home. She was a collaborator. Do you know what that means? Do you know what they are doing to women like her in Paris?”

  Gabrielle blinked, too stunned by her sister’s rage to give a response.

  “They shave their heads and take them through the streets to be pelted with garbage and hurled with insults. Then they arrest them for treason and then they... Non,” she snarled, her face draining of color. “Maman can never return to France.”

  “What is all this shouting?” Josephine came to stand between the sisters. She glanced from Paulette’s furious expression to Gabrielle. “This is no way to welcome your sister home.”

  “She is not my sister.” Paulette glared at the older woman. “This is not my home.”

  “You are a LeBlanc,” Josephine said firmly, in the voice of the family matriarch. “You are the last of us. The champagne house, the vineyard, this château—they will all be yours someday.”

  “This is not my home,” Paulette said again, and her expression went brutally hard.

  Gabrielle reached for her. “Paulette—”

  “Do not touch me.” She took a step back, then turned her wrath onto Josephine. “You can keep your champagne house and your precious vineyard. You can keep your legacy. I don’t want it. May it die with you and may that day come soon.”

  Gabrielle gasped at the venom in her sister’s tone. “You don’t mean that, Paulette.”

  “I am not the liar here. That honor is all yours.”

  She had no defense. “I’m sorry, Paulette.”

  “I’m not. I will go back to Paris. Non, I will go to New York. To Maman.” She headed to the château, then whirled around to face Gabrielle. “I choose exile over this vineyard. This house. Over you. And even you.” She stabbed a finger at Josephine. “You have always loved Gabrielle best.”

  Head high, eyes dry, Paulette left the terrace. Gabrielle and Josephine stood frozen in the aftermath of her storm.

  “She is angry and in shock,” Josephine said softly. “She will forgive us in time.”

  “I don’t think she will, Grandmère.” A clock chimed the top of the hour. “I fear we have lost her forever.”

  “Do not give up hope. Time is a great healer.”

  By silent agreement, they turned to look out over the vineyard and the legacy they’d built that Paulette had so callously dismissed. The moon cast its silvery light over the windblown vines. The champagne house loomed large in the distance.

  Gabrielle could not find her joy. The LeBlanc women had survived the war, but at great cost. “We are alive,” she said, desperate to take comfort in that truth. “We prevailed.”

  “Was there any doubt?” Josephine patted her arm. “A thousand German soldiers are not equal to one LeBlanc woman.”

  Struggling for control, Gabrielle let out a breath. “We are the last of our family. We will rise from the ashes of this war and create fine champagne, the best the world has ever tasted.”

  Josephine’s eyes closed, as if working through a moment of pain, then she nodded. “Oui, Gabrielle. With the sovereign Lord as our guide, we will do all that, and more.”

  All that, and more. So much more. They would rebuild, with the champagne Gabrielle had hidden on a dark, rainy night on the eve of war.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Gabrielle

  7 May 1945

  Gabrielle entered the château, her spirits still high after rejoicing in the streets of Reims with her fellow Champenois. The war was officially over. After five long years of Nazi occupation, the end had taken less than ten minutes. With a sweep of pens to paper, top-ranking officials from the Allied and German forces signed the surrender documents in the Reims school building where the American General Dwight Eisenhower had set up his temporary “war room.”

  How fitting that the enemy was forced to surrender in a city where they’d caused such pain and death, not only during the current war but also the one before. Gabrielle was still thinking about poetic justice when Marta peered around the corner. “You look happy, chère.”

  “It’s been a good day.”

  Marta’s smile came fast and true. “A very good day.” She turned to go, then paused.

  “Was there something else?” Gabrielle asked.

  “A letter, from New York. It arrived while you were gone. Your grandmother is reading it now. You will want to hear the news, I think.”

  There were countless questions on her tongue, but the housekeeper was no longer standing in the doorway. A clock chimed from somewhere in the house, startling Gabrielle into motion. She stepped into the kitchen. And froze.

  Her grandmother sat at the scarred table in the center of the room, head bent over a single sheet of paper. She’d seen her in this same posture nearly six years ago. The war had ravaged her, body and mind and soul, and she looked every bit a woman in her eighties. Gabrielle cleared her throat. “Marta tells me we received a letter from New York. Is it from Maman?”

  Faded blue eyes rolled up to meet hers. “Ah, ma chère, come. Sit. And I will read what your mother has to say.”

  The letter itself was short, not more than a page and a half. It started with a salutation, and a brief summary of Hélène’s life in New York. “We had a lovely spring,” Josephine read. “There was much celebration when news arrived of Germany’s imminent surrender.” She paused, her forehead creased by a frown as if trying to make sense of the scene. “Paulette is more herself these days. She sleeps better now and is only plagued with the occasional nightmare.”

  Josephine sighed, the sound heavy and full of sadness. Marta sat beside her and patted her arm. “It is to be expected. The girl had a rough time during the war.”

  “I weep for her.”

  “We all do.”

  Feeling her own tears welling, Gabrielle carefully took the letter from her grandmother and, after scanning the page, finished reading the rest. “The skills Paulette learned in Paris have put me in mind of an idea. We plan to open our own little boutique in Manhattan next autumn. With my sense of style and her creativity, we just might make a go of it.”

  I pray you succeed, Maman.

  She’d nearly made it to the end of the letter when the sound of pounding on the front door cut her off. All three women jumped at the noise. Marta started to rise. Gabrielle said, “Let me.”

  It was an odd hour for visitors, even considering the joyful events of the day. Allied forces were everywhere and...

  Something like hope moved through her
. Her hands shook as she freed the lock then reached for the handle. The door creaked on its hinges and seemed to want to stick as she tugged. Two men stood on her doorstep, a British soldier. And...

  “Papa!” Gabrielle yanked her father-in-law into her arms. He was older, and thinner, and much smaller in the shoulders, but he was alive. “Oh, Papa, you made it home.” The words hitched in her throat. “Are you well? Let me have a look at you.”

  She stepped back and smiled into the dear, dear face. Max sighed, a slow lifting and lowering of his shoulders, then opened his arms as if to let her have a nice, long look at him.

  So many emotions poured through her—shock, happiness, relief. “I feared we would never see each other again. But here you are.”

  “It’s good to see you, ma fille.”

  “I have so much I want to ask. How have you been? Where have you been?” Once the words started tumbling out of her mouth, she couldn’t stop them. “How did you get home?”

  “There will be plenty of time for answers. But first, there is someone I wish for you to meet. The man who saved my life.” He motioned to his companion. “Gabrielle, meet my friend from the British army.”

  The soldier stepped forward. “Bon soir, Gabrielle.”

  It required several seconds to place the man in the uniform of the British army. Then, he took off his hat and the wind tousled his hair and she knew him in an instant. Her lungs stopped working. Her heart quit beating. “Richard,” she said, deaf but for the roar in her ears.

  His vitality hadn’t dimmed. He looked solid and real and alive. He’d survived the war and she couldn’t stop staring. He seemed plagued with the same affliction.

  Max cleared his throat. “I wonder, Gabrielle, if perhaps your grandmother is at home?”

  Eyes still on Richard, she nodded. “You’ll find her in the kitchen with Marta.”