The Winemaker's Wife

by Kristin Harmel

  But Inès wasn’t looking at the still form of Richter; she was staring in horror at Céline. “My God! You’re covered in blood. What did he do to you? Did he . . . ?”

  “You got here before he did what he came to do.”

  “So the baby . . . ?”

  Céline closed her eyes and placed her hand on her belly. She could feel the familiar wingbeat of motion in her womb as the baby shifted within her. “The baby is safe, thank God. But Inès, we have to move quickly. We have to make sure he can’t come after us.” Céline tugged her skirt back down and squatted at Richter’s side, her hands supporting her belly. She glanced at Inès, who still had the bottle hoisted high, a weapon if they needed it. With shaking, blood-slicked hands, Céline reached for Richter’s neck, moving her fingers around until she felt a faint pulse. “He’s still alive,” she said, backing up quickly, as if he might awaken at any time and finish what he’d started. She looked up at Inès. “You—you saved me. How did you know?”

  Inès finally turned her attention to Richter. “I saw him from the window, dragging you toward the cellars. I knew you were in trouble.”

  “Thank you.” The words were woefully inadequate. “But what now?”

  Inès was still focused on the crumpled German officer. “If he wakes up, we’ll all be executed.”

  “Yes,” Céline whispered.

  “So we cannot let him wake up. That is all there is to it.”

  “But what do we do?”

  “We wait,” Inès said. She bent beside Richter and carefully pulled his handgun from his holster, then she stood again, the gun trained directly on him. “We wait for Michel to come home. He will know what to do.”

  twenty-six

  JUNE 2019

  LIV

  Julien arrived at the Maison Chauveau just before the five o’clock tour began, leaving barely enough time for him to kiss both Liv and Grandma Edith on their cheeks before disappearing to purchase a ticket.

  “I had forgotten,” Grandma Edith said as she regarded Liv with amusement, “just how silly people act when they are in love.”

  Liv realized that she was still touching the spot on her face where Julien’s lips had been, and she hurried to put her hands behind her back. “I’m not in love, Grandma Edith,” she protested, aware that her face was probably flaming. “It’s just a crush.”

  “Crushes are for children,” her grandmother said, raising an eyebrow. “And you are most certainly not a child.”

  Julien rejoined them just as a college-aged man moved to the front of the waiting area and called out, “Everyone for the English-language tour, please assemble here! We’re about to get started.”

  Grandma Edith herded Liv toward the tour guide, and Julien followed. “English, can you believe it?” Grandma Edith said to Julien. “The sacrifices I make for my granddaughter.”

  “I heard that,” Liv said.

  The older woman rolled her eyes at Julien, who laughed.

  “Welcome, everyone, to La Maison Chauveau, the House of Chauveau, a world-famous champagne house here in Ville-Dommange, France,” the tour guide began as the group—two middle-aged couples in addition to Liv, Julien, and Grandma Edith—edged closer. “My name is René, and I grew up not far from here. In fact, when I was a boy, my father worked in the cellars here at Maison Chauveau, so you could say I grew up with the legends of this place. I will begin by telling you a bit about the history, and then we will visit the cellars.”

  Liv’s mind wandered as René began to talk about the Chauveau family founding the house just after the French Revolution, and growing it in the middle of the nineteenth century along with their pioneering neighbors to the south, the widow Clicquot and Jean-Remy Moët.

  Liv glanced at Grandma Edith, who had a stricken expression on her face. “What’s wrong with her?” Liv whispered to Julien, who frowned and shook his head. “Is this because she was friends with the woman who owned this place? The one who died?” Liv continued, earning her a glare from one of the tourists in their group, a middle-aged woman wearing too-tight leggings and running shoes.

  “Shhhhh,” the woman hissed, and Liv narrowed her eyes.

  “I think your grandmother is okay,” Julien said in a low voice, and Liv turned her attention back to the tour guide.

  “Along with the rest of the Marne, Ville-Dommange was nearly destroyed during the First World War, and the Chauveau family, along with many others in the region, lost almost everything,” René was saying. “The Marne suffered more damage than most other French departments. As for the grapes, forty percent of the vineyards of Champagne were ruined during the war, and it took many years for the region to recover. The Chauveaus were one of the families hardest hit, and it is said that this strain contributed to the early death of the house’s owner, Maurice Chauveau, in 1935. His wife, Jacqueline, died the same year, and the maison was taken over by their only son, Michel Chauveau, who was then just twenty-one years old.”

  Grandma Edith made a choking sound, and then she began to cough violently, doubling over as Liv rushed to her side. René stopped speaking, his forehead creased in concern, and while the legginged tourist continued to glare at them, Grandma Edith finally straightened and held a shaking hand up.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “I apologize.”

  “Grandma Edith, do you need to leave?” Liv whispered. “We can go outside, or—”

  “No!” Grandma Edith’s rebuke was sharp, and she glanced at Julien before softening. “No. I need to hear this.” She pointed to René. “Vous pouvez continuer, young man.”

  “Merci, d’accord,” René replied before turning back to the group. “So, Michel Chauveau took over the house after that. Now, I will continue my story in the cellars, if you will follow me.”

  René turned and began to walk away, and Liv moved again to Grandma Edith’s side to support her as they followed him. The older woman was shaking, and Liv exchanged concerned glances with Julien. “Are you sure you’re all right, Grandma Edith?” she asked.

  “Stop treating me like a child,” she snapped. “I’m perfectly fine.”

  René led the group to a door against the back wall of the main room. “Just before the Nazis came to Champagne during World War II, Michel Chauveau had the foresight to conceal this entrance with an enormous armoire. That way, Monsieur Chauveau was able to come and go unobserved if he needed to, simply by moving the furniture. Today we have widened the entrance to make it more accessible. The stairs are still a bit tricky, though, so if anyone needs assistance . . .” His gaze drifted to Grandma Edith.

  “I am perfectly comfortable on my own, thank you very much,” she said icily.

  René shrugged and led the group down a set of winding stone steps into what looked like a vast network of halls underneath the earth. As they descended, the air grew colder. “Because these cellars are dug into the chalk beneath the earth, the temperature down here is very constant. Here in these caves, regardless of the season, they are a steady ten degrees Celsius, which is about fifty degrees Fahrenheit for you Americans. They were installed over the course of three decades during the second half of the nineteenth century, because the owner at the time, Pierre Chauveau, was obsessed with the success of the larger champagne houses in the nearby city of Reims. Many of those houses stored their wines in underground crayères, which is a French term for chalk quarries. These quarries had been constructed by the Romans beginning around AD 300, but not for winemaking; they only wanted to take the chalk from the earth to use it for buildings, which left Reims with many, many cold tunnels beneath the earth. In Ville-Dommange, there were no such crayères, so Pierre Chauveau—fixated on competing with the larger houses—endeavored to make his own. Thankfully, he died before he could completely bankrupt the family, and his son, Charles Chauveau, who took over upon his father’s death in 1902, was able to salvage the champagne house and begin making it into something extraordinary.”

  All around, unlabeled bottles rested on their sides on gian
t wooden scaffolding, and in one of the caves, barrels sat in neat, silent stacks. “Unlike some of the larger houses, most of our work is still done by hand, including the riddling of our bottles,” René said as they walked. “Three or four months before the wine is to be released, there is a worker, a master riddler, who comes down here to turn the bottles, just an eighth of a turn each day, to dislodge the sediment that has collected as the wine ages. Here, on the bottles tilted downward, you can see the yeast cells and particles collecting in the neck. Soon these bottles will all be positioned fully neck down, and then comes disgorgement, when the bottles will be immersed in a very cold solution to freeze the sediment, opened by a machine, the sediment popped out, and the remainder filled with a mixture called dosage, a blend of sugar and reserve wine. This is the stage that determines how sweet the champagne will be. At Chauveau, we tend toward wines that are less sweet, so the flavor really shines through. Most of our portfolio is brut or extra brut, which means that it contains less than twelve grams per liter of residual sugar, or less than a half teaspoon per five-ounce glass.”

  René led them deeper into the ancient tunnels, which were illuminated by overhead lights and lamps at five-yard intervals, and Liv found herself thinking about the secrets these chalk walls must hold. The scent of the air reminded her of the basement of the house she’d lived in with her mother just outside Boston when she was twelve; it smelled like stone, dirt, and cold.

  Finally, at the end of a twisting hall, René took a sharp right into a small cave that was completely empty. He waited for the group to filter in. Grandma Edith was the last to round the corner, and as she did, she inhaled sharply.

  “What is it?” Liv whispered, and Grandma Edith shook her head, but Liv could see that the color had drained from her face.

  “This is a very interesting place,” René said, putting a hand on one of the stone walls. “It looks like just an ordinary cave, right? But during the war, this cave contained a small room that was hidden behind a brick wall, built by Michel Chauveau.”

  “What’d he use it for?” asked the tourist in the leggings as her husband pulled out his iPhone and began snapping pictures.

  René’s eyes twinkled. “Résistance.”

  “I thought this was supposed to be an English tour,” the woman grumbled. “What’s that mean?”

  René cleared his throat. “Resistance,” he said, making the word sound as American as possible, and the tourist nodded, apparently satisfied. “In other words, he was one of the résistants—ordinary people fighting against the Nazis—who operated here in the Champagne region. Now we don’t know anything definitively, but it is said that not only did Michel Chauveau hide munitions here, he hid refugees.”

  “Only two,” Grandma Edith said suddenly. “He planned to hide more people, but it was not safe.”

  Liv turned to stare at her grandmother, as did everyone else.

  “Er, yes,” René said, giving Grandma Edith a confused look. “It sounds as if you have taken this tour before.”

  “No,” Grandma Edith said. She glanced at Julien, who was staring straight ahead.

  “What is she talking about?” Liv whispered as René resumed speaking.

  Julien just shook his head and pressed his lips together.

  René gave Grandma Edith a few nervous glances as he told the group that Michel Chauveau was part of an organization that printed a Resistance tract, blew up train tracks, and even reportedly killed a German officer. “So you see,” René concluded triumphantly, “when you drink a glass of Chauveau, you are really tasting heroism in all those bubbles. The Maison Chauveau helped save France.”

  “So what happened to him anyways?” asked the tourist in the leggings. “Michel Chauveau?”

  “Well,” said René, leaning in conspiratorially. “He died in 1943, leaving his champagne house to his wife, Inès Chauveau, but then she vanished, too. Since then, the Maison Chauveau has been run by a trust set up just after the war by a law firm in Reims.”

  “How’d Michel Chauveau die?” asked the tourist in the leggings.

  The tour guide cleared his throat. “He was arrested by the Germans, and no one knows quite what happened after that.”

  “Well, that’s simply an incomplete answer, young man,” Grandma Edith said, and René turned to her, confusion etched across his face.

  “But that’s what’s in the tour guide notes, madame,” he said.

  “Grandma Edith,” Liv said, placing her hand on her grandmother’s arm, but the old woman shook her off.

  “Michel Chauveau was executed by the Germans in the center of Reims,” Grandma Edith said, her voice shaking. “On the rue Jeanne d’Arc, to be exact, at Gestapo headquarters. He was betrayed, you see, by someone he once thought he loved. Someone who never deserved that love in the first place, I think.”

  The cave was silent as everyone looked at Grandma Edith.

  “How do you know that, Grandma Edith?” Liv finally asked, her voice low. “You knew him?” She must have, Liv realized. If what the man from the restaurant had told her was true, Michel Chauveau was the husband of Grandma Edith’s best friend.

  Grandma Edith’s eyes were full of tears as she looked up at her granddaughter. “Yes, Olivia. Yes. I knew him well.” She turned and strode out of the cave before Liv could reply.

  “Madame! You’ll get lost!” René called, starting after her, but Julien put his hand up.

  “Let her go,” he said. “She knows these caves.”

  René opened and closed his mouth, but there must have been something in Julien’s tone that stopped him.

  “I have to make sure she’s okay,” Liv said to Julien, but he just shook his head.

  “Let her have a few minutes to herself,” he said. “This is the first time she has been back here in many years. I think she needs to be alone.”

  “But . . .” Liv’s mind raced.

  Julien glanced at René and then back at Liv. “Let’s take a walk, shall we?” He turned once more to René. “We’ll see ourselves out. I apologize for the interruption.” He steered Liv out of the cave, and as they walked back to the stone steps, she looked for Grandma Edith, but she had seemingly disappeared.

  Aboveground, Julien led Liv quickly through the gift shop and out the front door. Once they were standing outside the main house, she turned to face him. “What is happening here? Why did my grandmother freak out like that?”

  “Oh, Liv.” Julien sighed. “I wish I could tell you, but as I’ve said, it is her story, not mine.”

  “Then why won’t she tell it?” But the question was rhetorical, and they both knew it.

  “Come,” Julien said, taking her hand, “let’s look at the view, shall we?” He led her a few hundred yards from the main house, toward a smaller cottage that appeared well tended. They passed it and stopped at the edge of a hill overlooking the valley. “Grapes,” Julien said, “as far as the eye can see. One day, they will be part of great champagnes that find their way all over the world. It’s incredible when you think of it, isn’t it?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  He smiled. “I’m merely pointing out the beauty of this place. It’s a place your grandmother once loved.”

  “And yet she has never in her life mentioned it,” Liv muttered. “You’re sure you can’t tell me what’s going on?”

  “I wish I could.”

  Liv shook her head, frustrated. “Fine. So what about you?”

  “Me?”

  “If you can’t tell me my grandmother’s story, what about yours?”

  He looked down at her. “My story isn’t so interesting.”

  “Will you tell me about Delphine?”

  He sighed. “Someday, if you’d like, I will tell you all about her. She was the mother of my child, Liv. I was very much in love with her. There were no problems in her pregnancy, no reason to think she would not be completely fine. But there was a complication in the hospital, and . . .” He trailed off and shook his head.
“Well, you know, of course, that she died, and Mathilde lost her mother. I have tried to keep her memory alive for my daughter all these years, and of course she will always be a part of my life. I will always love her.

  “But,” he continued, “I’ve been realizing lately that perhaps living in the past means you don’t give yourself a chance to move into the future. When we talked that day at the brasserie about your life, it made me think of my own, too, and how I’ve been stopping myself from going forward. My possibilities are wide open, just like yours, and I think I needed to remember that. You, Liv, reminded me.”

  “I’m so sorry about your wife,” Liv said as Julien took a step closer. “It’s the kind of loss I can’t even imagine.”

  “Thank you. We all suffer losses. But it is how we choose to move ahead that matters, isn’t it? We must honor the past without turning our backs on the future.” He brushed a strand of her hair from her cheek, his hand lingering there against her face. “I hope that now that you know the truth, you do not think I was terribly out of line to kiss you.”

  “No.” And then, summoning her courage, she closed the final inches between them and pressed her lips gently to his. His hands tangled instantly in her hair, and he tugged her toward him.

  “Better later than never?” she asked, finally pulling away with a smile.

  “I agree.” He laughed and stroked her cheek with his thumb. “As long as we can do it again.” He leaned in and kissed her, with more passion this time, his lips parting hers.

  She kissed back, lost in the moment, until the sound of someone approaching snapped her out of it. She pulled back as she realized it was Grandma Edith standing there, blinking at them. Liv covered her mouth, embarrassed. “Grandma Edith, I—”

  “If you’re done making out like a couple of teenagers, I’d like to go now, please,” her grandmother said.