She could hardly blame Him, if so.
It was unusual for an Australian woman to be a marraine de guerre—as she had just penned to the young Monsieur Émile Legrand, most marraines were French. But Doris had not hesitated to use her money to make it happen; one way or another, she would do her part for the war effort.
And she had always wanted a child to pass her wisdom on to. Not that she had much wisdom, but she supposed some inevitably came with age, no matter how one tried to hide from it. What else was money for, after all? To find the name and essential military address of one Émile Legrand, a simple farm boy from the outskirts of Reims, in the region of Champagne, in the north of France, not far from the borders with Germany and Belgium. The site of the fiercest fighting.
What else should she tell her new “godson” about herself? Doris leaned over the desk once again and reached for her pen, the kind that had a reservoir of ink inside the barrel, the clever thing. Her husband had insisted on buying these extravagantly priced fountain pens, preferring them over the dip pens that stained so easily. She supposed that was yet another thing she should thank him for.
She started to write, then hesitated, her pen held aloft. Her girlhood friend Caroline Bickley had urged Doris not to reveal her wealth or marital status, for fear she might be taken advantage of. A soldier may be fighting for a noble cause, Caroline had said sternly over the rim of her teacup. But that does not mean that all soldiers are noble. And indeed, the flyer that described the ideal marraine underscored the importance of not becoming too personal—some of the public already considered correspondence between unmarried men and women without benefit of chaperones a touch unsavory.
People were ridiculous.
I am so sorry that you have been compelled to go to war at such a young age. I imagine you garbed in your uniform of sky blue trousers and jacket, as we have seen described in our newspapers. The traditional uniform of bright red trousers was very smart, though I understand it made you more visible to those dastardly Huns!
I am sure you are very brave, but I know you would rather be dressed in your simple muslins, guiding the plow and bringing in the harvest. Please tell me what you can about your life before the war, and even now; perhaps it would be a solace to you to share your experiences with a “mother” so very far away.
I assure you, I am not a delicate flower, and I read every account of the war that comes to us, no matter the wretchedness of the violence. I do not fear the darkness. If it is any succor to you to share with me, please describe to me your life in the trenches.
Doris caught a glimpse of herself, distorted in the reflection of the curved glass doors of an intricately inlaid curio cabinet imported from England.
Her father had always instructed Doris to make the most of her winsome good looks, and ever the obedient child, she had obeyed, catching the eye of the richest man in the county, Richard Whittaker. For all the good his fortune had done her. She was scarred now, not from a fist but from a life of bitterness. Her plump, youthful face had not aged well, and over the years, it had settled into the hard angles and sharp planes of disappointment and resentment. No children, no husband, sitting in her fire-damaged mansion with a staff who cared for her because she paid them to. Her once-lithe figure was now heavy and clumsy, due to her fondness for pastries and tea cakes. Food and wine were her last indulgences.
Her only other source of happiness was her collection of dollhouses.
There was a Cotswold cottage, a Venetian town house, a Tokyo home with small rice paper doors. And within, tiny mothers and fathers, even tinier children. Pets and grandparents. Families. Symbols of lives Doris would never live, but could fantasize about.
She peeked into the windows of her newest acquisition: a petite French farmhouse, complete with stone walls. She had asked the doll maker to build it when she read about the victory of the Marne, followed by the siege of Reims and the bombardment of the cathedral. Inside the farmhouse, three miniature baguettes sat on the big wooden kitchen table, alongside a mound of diminutive produce and petite baskets of apples. The mother worked in the kitchen; the father brought home a rabbit for dinner. Bundles of herbs—thyme and lavender—hung from the rafters. A fiddle sat in the corner; she imagined the father played in the evenings, when the family gathered around the stone hearth, a large iron pot of simmering stew hanging from a hook above the red-orange embers.
It was a simple house, a happy home.
Doris thought of the invading Germans—the “barbarian Huns,” as the English and Australian press had started to call them—marching across the fields of Belgium and France, tipping over the water troughs for the horses, slaughtering the cows and sheep to feed themselves, terrorizing the children. Turning the neat green fields red with blood . . .
Best not to think about that. The French—with the British and Australians and other allies—would fight valiantly against the invading hordes. And they would be victorious.
They had to be victorious.
After finishing her letter to Émile, Doris would take on the unpleasant task of writing to influential friends in the United States, telling them in no uncertain terms that their nation must not stay neutral but must rally to the support of their good friends France and England.
Doris thought of the day the messenger came to the door with the news of her husband’s death. He had shot himself, the drunken fool, when his pistol fired as he climbed over a fence chasing a black cockatoo he was convinced had insulted him. It was a stupid and entirely avoidable act of an idiot, and exactly the sort of thing she had come to expect of him. Doris referred to her husband’s untimely demise with the polite fiction “a hunting accident,” and those who knew the truth tactfully pretended they didn’t.
As Caroline Bickley had swathed Doris in the customary widow’s weeds, she counseled: “Chin up, my dear. There is something peculiarly compelling about a widow who has found her voice.”
Finally, Doris concluded her letter to Émile, the simple French farm boy, with a quotation:
The American writer Edgar Allan Poe wrote: “In the Heavens above, the angels, whispering to one another, can find, among their burning terms of love, none so devotional as that of ‘Mother.’” I am sure you have a true mother who is thinking of you, and I have no intention, still less the ability, to replace her, but I thank you for allowing me to be your marraine de guerre, just for now. Just until the nightmare is over.
Once the missive was composed, Doris set about the onerous task of translating it into her finishing school French—something else she should thank her husband for. She had come to him a “diamond in the rough,” as he’d liked to say, and he’d said it often. They met when she was fifteen, and he nearly forty. With her parents’ enthusiastic approval, Richard sent her to finishing school to be trained and molded into the proper society wife he believed he deserved. Doris had been willing enough at the time—she was barely more than a child, she reflected—and she had learned many things during those years.
Quite enough, her dear brother, Louis, liked to say, to ensure Doris would never become a proper wife.
She stared at the letter, once again hesitating. Finally, she signed it:
Yours truly,
Mrs. Doris Dickinson Whittaker
Chapter Nineteen
Rosalyn riffled through the first group of letters, the ones Emma had carried with her on the flight to Paris. They seemed to be the earliest correspondence, most dating from late 1914 or the winter months of 1915.
Of course, back in the day of snail mail—mail that had to pass through a war zone, no less—Émile might well have been answering questions Doris had written in several previous letters. If he was writing a few times a week, there wouldn’t be a straightforward tie between letters received and letters answered. It would take weeks or even months for a letter to go from France to Australia, and back again.
After s
earching through stacks of envelopes, Rosalyn discovered one from Émile stamped December 28 that seemed to be his response to Doris’s first missive:
My esteemed Mrs. Whittaker,
I was so very pleased to receive your kind and fascinating letter. It is an amazing thing in our modern world, to be able to correspond with someone so very far away. Someone from another country, across the vast ocean, in Australia! My imagination is set afire just thinking of the voyages by carriage, train, and sea, the exploits and adventures through which our letters must pass to arrive in our hands!
Please rest assured that your French is very good. Perhaps better than my own. Though I enjoy reading, I cannot claim to be a well-educated man.
We are so grateful to have Australian troops fighting by our sides; I have met many, and they are always very cheery. Though I cannot understand their English, I have been led to believe that they, along with the British troops, are disappointed in the beer of the xxx region. If only we were in Reims, I would serve them our famous champagne. How I miss it—the bubbles, the effervescence, the effusive joy.
But enough about that. You asked about my home. My family has some land in Reims, on the outskirts of town. We have vines and sell our grapes to the large champagne houses of Pommery and Taittinger. I am also an apiarist, and I keep several beehives. My mother kept a kitchen garden as well, though it has long been abandoned, along with my hives.
I think of my bees often, and hope they have escaped the poison gases; I think perhaps they fled to the deep forests. Bees are far more intelligent than most people assume. Sometimes I think they are a good deal smarter than the humans I know.
I wonder if you have heard about the bombardment of Reims. The Germans entered the city in September, and held it for only ten days. But after being expelled from our city, they remained on the surrounding hills, shelling the city from the heights. It is a thing of horror, to see the buildings tumbling into the streets in a great cloud of brick and plaster dust. They appear quite like living things as they moan and groan and fall to their knees, spilling their contents into the streets like viscera.
There are also snipers awaiting the citizenry. They make no distinction between soldier and civilian, between a legitimate target and an innocent child.
Everywhere the land is strewn with bodies, as neither side dare stop to bury their fallen soldiers. It is an atrocity, what is happening to my region. Trenches and barbed wire crisscross the once-green fields of xxx; there are mortar shells and gas, and corpses of human and animal alike poison the creeks.
But enough of that. I have not been back to Reims in many months; it is difficult from here. I prefer to think of my city as I left it. And of my loved ones safely tucked away in their homes.
I am so very pleased to know that you enjoy poetry. One of my favorite countrymen is Charles Baudelaire—in fact, he translated Edgar Allan Poe into my language. Do you know his Les Fleurs du Mal? In it he wrote, je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune. One of your countrymen has translated it into English for me: I am a cemetery shunned by the moon.
At night, trying to sleep in the trenches, I often feel like that, as though plagued by the gutted silence of a cursed cemetery whose ground is too cold for even the moon to plate with its silver light.
The savagery of this war is a thing of nightmares.
Thank you, my esteemed marraine, for writing to me. The postal system has been disrupted in Reims, encircled as it is by the enemy, and we rarely receive mail from our families and loved ones. Your letter was a true balm to my soul, sweeter than the salve my mother used to concoct in her kitchen. She applied it to me once, after an accident with the thresher. It smelled of olive oil and thyme, honey and myrrh, and the arnica and herbs gathered in the high mountains.
Sometimes at night I imagine the scent lingers on my skin; I conjure it when my nostrils are filled with the noxious odors of death.
But again, I apologize for my baroque language, my tendency toward hyperbole. This must be why I am so drawn to Mr. Baudelaire’s writing. My fellow poilus find me difficult to comprehend, at times.
I sincerely hope you will not share their opinion of me!
Je vous prie d’accepter, Madame Whittaker, l’expression de mes sentiments distingués.
Émile Paul Legrand
Chapter Twenty
Although her countryside hermitage had been invaded by Emma and Blondine—and Emma’s assistant, André, who generally kept to himself—Rosalyn did not feel suffocated.
On the contrary, she rather enjoyed stumbling into the kitchen in the morning to find Emma slouched over a mug of steaming coffee, perusing Le Monde and chuckling at the latest antics of French politicians. Or André materializing at just the right moment to open the door for her, nodding politely. Or Blondine dropping by Chambre Chardonnay, rapping smartly on the door, and sharing a croissant and coffee before starting work in the office.
Rosalyn was at last able to connect with some of the growers and winemakers who were returning to the region and invited her in for tastings. She sampled their effervescent offerings, explained Small Fortune’s marketing plans, signed one producer, and arranged for a few others to send samples to Hugh in Napa.
Throughout, she could hear Hugh’s voice in her head: In any kind of business interaction, ongoing human-to-human contact was key, and the small, family-focused wine growers of France, perhaps more than most, took relationships seriously.
It was certainly easier than trying to convince busy wine shop owners or restaurateurs in the Napa Valley to buy the wine she was selling, Rosalyn reminded herself as she drove from village to village, parking alongside muddy, freshly plowed fields. Here, in Champagne, she was the buyer, the U.S. representative whom the wineries wanted to impress so that they might export their wine to the American market.
Still, each time Rosalyn pulled up to a new winery, she would take a long moment to take ten deep, slow breaths, psyching herself up for the interaction. She tried to remember what it was like to feel happy and carefree, to be her old self, friendly and outgoing, the affable American representative.
Over and over, she donned the mask.
She spent one afternoon in Épernay, the second largest city in Champagne and home to the famous champagne houses of Moët & Chandon, Perrier-Jouët, and Pol Roger. But she preferred the small villages, most boasting at least one or two small producers of champagne. She stopped at informal tasting rooms, chatted with winemakers, and was taken out to lunch by aspiring vendors, and when she limped back to the Chambre Chardonnay at night, grateful to be done for the day, she reminded herself—for the thousandth time—how many people would have loved to have her job.
Hugh had offered Rosalyn the position out of friendship, and probably to the surprise of both of them, she wasn’t bad at it. But she wasn’t a great wine rep, either, and she never would be because she wasn’t by nature a salesperson. Emma was right. It leached something out of her soul.
But if I didn’t work for Hugh, she thought to herself, a slight panic fluttering deep in her belly, what would I do?
She couldn’t not work. More than two years after Dash died, she was still paying down their debts, slowly and painstakingly digging herself out of the pit of financial obligations and bad credit that Dash had left her in. Rosalyn had long since reconciled herself to the fact that she would have to work at any decent-paying job she could get, not to mention she would never have the lavish art show Dash used to talk about. She never painted anymore, anyway.
Her fairy tale had had a far too real ending.
The only thing she really wanted to do right now was to dive back into Émile’s letters. She sat at the table in her room at the gîte, heedless of the passing hours as she deciphered words and phrases, checking their meanings with translation sites online, as well as lists of French slang and idiomatic expressions, striving to capture not just the definit
ions of the words and phrases but their true meanings, and the nuances of expression.
The dates were out of order, but she didn’t care.
January 14, 1915
My dear marraine, Mrs. Whittaker,
We are now situated in xxx, not far from xxx. When last I wrote I promised next to tell you of how it all started. The beginning, as we Rémois experienced it.
The euphoria over the victory of the Marne ceded to the somber fear of the approach of the invaders. At first there was a great exodus from the city, as those with means—and many of those with very little—slept at the train station with hopes of finding a space to ferry them south, away from the threatened onslaught.
I remember marching off to war, the citizens thronging the bridge of Laon to toss flowers to the convoys of us poilus heading to the front, smiling and singing as we went.
We Rémois were confident we would defeat the Boches and return in time for Christmas. What made us think this, I still don’t know, except that it seemed so absurd that anyone should try to take our country from us. We were full of a brash confidence that now feels like arrogance, or ignorance, or a pathetic mixture of both.
Christmas has passed and we are in a New Year, but we poilus celebrate the holiday as we celebrate every day, hunkered down in our trenches of mud, leaning against sandbags and even our fallen comrades, as we have neither the time nor the ability to remove the poor broken remnants of men, sons, friends, fathers. I hesitate to tell you these things, my dear marraine, but you repeatedly assure me I should tell you all the truth, as I see it. It is a horror, and surely not appropriate for a lady.
I hope you will not think badly of me when I tell you that despite the dreadfulness that fills my daily existence, there are moments of strange and glorious beauty. I seize upon them eagerly: a startlingly clear night, the stars twinkling and beckoning with their immaculate shine, untouched by the terror of bullets and shells, safe even from the poison gases.
The Vineyards of Champagne Page 13