The Vineyards of Champagne

by Juliet Blackwell

  “I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

  “One more try, Rosie, but if this doesn’t work . . .”

  “If it doesn’t, I’ll be there till the bitter end.”

  “It won’t be bitter, Rosie. It’s just the next step.”

  Chapter Fifty-three

  When she didn’t find Jérôme out in his fields, Rosalyn drove up to the old stone farmhouse. She sat in the car a moment, hesitating. She probably shouldn’t disturb him—what if he was napping after waking up at three in the morning to tend his vines?

  Get a backbone, Rosie, she told herself. Awkward never killed anybody.

  She knocked. When she got no response, she knocked again. Finally, she heard some muffled sounds, and Jérôme opened the door, looking rumpled and gorgeous. He didn’t say a word.

  “I know your English skills are impressive.” Rosalyn jumped right in. “But I’m not sure you completely understood when I told you I was a hot mess.”

  Jérôme gazed at her for a long moment, his head tilting slightly, those tiny lines forming between his eyebrows. Not long ago Rosalyn would have assumed he was angry with her, or annoyed with the ever-problematic American. Now she knew different: He was confused. Hurt. Perhaps even . . . feeling betrayed? Before long he would give a little shrug and turn away.

  How had she come to know him so well in such a short time?

  “Could I come in for a moment?” she asked.

  He stepped back so she could walk through the doorway. Once again she was impressed with the feeling of being at home and comfortable, despite the wildly awkward situation she found herself in.

  “Coffee?” he offered. “I was just making some.”

  “Thanks. I’d love a cup.” She leaned back against the kitchen counter. “I’m sorry, Jérôme. Again . . . this is a lot for me. I’m doing the best I can, but I think things moved a little fast between us. I wasn’t sure I was ready to start something new with someone. And I got caught up with the stories of Émile and Lucie, and the First World War, and thoughts of Dash, and—”

  “I understand. It was fast for me as well.” He set a mug of coffee in front of her. The cup was chipped, as though it had been in the family a long time. She ran her finger along the groove and decided she loved it even more for its imperfection. None of us makes it out of this life unharmed.

  “Emma’s sick,” Rosalyn said. “She has to go back to San Francisco, to try a new therapy.”

  He nodded. “I heard something about that, at Dominique’s store.”

  “Since when did you start listening to gossip?”

  “Since I started caring about who—or is it ‘whom’?—the gossip was about.”

  Rosalyn smiled. “Our flight leaves for San Francisco tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? You are escorting Emma back to the hospital there?”

  “Yes, but it’s more than that. I have to go back to California for a little while,” Rosalyn continued. “I have things to do in Napa.”

  “You have to get back to selling wine?”

  “Actually, I quit my job. I don’t want to sell wine anymore. But I have to finish up with my boss and help train my replacement. And, most important, I have to clean out my medicine cabinet.”

  The lines between his eyes deepened. They reminded her of the vineyards, carefully laid out in their parallel rows. The worries of war and harvest, the preoccupations of Champagne and the Champenois, now and forever.

  “The medicine cabinet?” he asked. “Is that a metaphor?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I’ll explain it to you one of these days, I promise.” Rosalyn’s mind went to the aqua bath mat, the vials lined up on the shelves. They no longer felt like a temptation, just a sad reminder of what Dash—and she—had gone through toward the end. “I left a life behind in Napa, Jérôme. Not one that I want anymore. I realize that now. But I have to go put things right.”

  Their gaze held for a long moment.

  “I was going to call you,” Jérôme said. “I have something to show you in the library.”

  As they carried their mugs of coffee down the hall, Rosalyn studied the stone of the floor, the chartreuse molding, the surprising modern art hung on the ancient walls, splashes of color everywhere.

  They stepped into that fantasy library.

  Jérôme took a book off a stack on the desk and handed it to her. “Look inside.”

  She opened the crumbly leather cover and saw the signature she had read so many times: Émile Paul Legrand.

  Rosalyn let out a little gasp. “Where did you find this?”

  “Right here, in the library. After what we found in the Pommery caves, I started looking through the books in earnest. There are many inscribed with the name Émile Paul Legrand—the man who built this library.”

  “So we were right? Émile—my Émile—was your great-grandfather,” Rosalyn said, a note of wonder in her voice. “Among other things, that means that you and Emma are cousins.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Emma discovered she’s the granddaughter of Émile and Lucie’s daughter. Everyone thought Émile had been killed in the war, so when Lucie died their daughter, Narcissa, was adopted by—”

  “The Australian woman who corresponded with Émile during the war?”

  “The very one.”

  “I don’t understand. . . . Why didn’t Émile search for their baby?”

  “He didn’t even know Lucie was expecting a child,” said Rosalyn. “She hadn’t told him yet when he went missing and was presumed dead. I suppose by the time he was well enough to return to Reims, everyone had dispersed, and he couldn’t find anyone who knew her, or who knew what had happened to her.”

  “I also found this, tucked into a book of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry.” Jérôme handed Rosalyn a very old newspaper clipping, in which one Émile Paul Legrand, of Reims, was searching for anyone with knowledge about one Lucie Camille Maréchal Legrand, whose last known address was in the Dakar niche of the Pommery caves.

  “So he did search for Lucie.”

  Jérôme nodded. “I wonder how long he looked before giving up, assuming he ever did give up.”

  “Why didn’t he write to Doris to let her know what happened, after he’d recovered?” Rosalyn asked herself as much as she asked Jérôme.

  “I doubt he even still had her address; he had no personal items with him. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to remember anything that would remind him of the war.”

  “And yet he remarried, and started another family, kept his bees, planted a vineyard, and built this library. That’s quite a spirit of resilience. I wish I could have known him.”

  “I have a feeling you know him better than a lot of people, because of his letters.”

  Once again their eyes met, and held. Jérôme reached out and took Rosalyn’s hand, traced the faint blue veins, toyed with her fingers. Her skin felt hot under his touch.

  “I’m sorry you’re leaving tomorrow,” he said in a low voice. “I wish we had met earlier.”

  “You met me my first morning here. Out in the fields, at dawn.”

  “Yes, but I thought perhaps you were a crazy woman.”

  She smiled. “Perhaps I am.”

  He gave a quiet chuckle. “Let me be more precise: I wish you weren’t leaving.”

  “I have to go, for Emma’s sake. But I was hoping—” Rosalyn took a shaky breath. “That is, I wanted to ask you . . . Could I come back in the fall, to help you work les vendanges?”

  “You want to work the harvest?”

  “I do.”

  “It is hard work. Most grapes here are still picked by hand, since the grapes must be whole and undamaged when they go into the pressoir.”

  “I know that. And the grapes come ripe all at once, so there are only a few weeks in which to work, as determined by the comité.
You see? I’ve been learning all about the méthode champenoise while I’ve been here.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “The point is, if you tell me when you need me, I’ll come. If you want me, I’ll help bring in the harvest.”

  “Is the harvest the only reason you will come back?”

  “Well, I’m in charge of bringing the galette des Rois for Epiphany next year. And besides”—she smiled—“I do believe I’ve developed a taste for champagne.”

  Chapter Fifty-four

  In the offices of the Small Fortune winery in Napa, Hugh held up his flute of champagne, tears in his eyes. His voice rough with emotion, he said, “Here’s to Emma Kinsley. A grande dame, if ever there was one.”

  Blondine and Rosalyn held up their glasses and chimed in solemnly: “To Emma.”

  “Oh, please,” said Emma as she returned from the restroom to join them. “Hugh, for the love of God, you sound like you’re toasting me at my funeral.”

  They all laughed and took deep quaffs of the golden bubbly, noting their impressions of the sample sent by a winery Rosalyn had connected with while in Champagne. Several thick green glass bottles, topped with their bulbous foil-wrapped corks, were chilled and just waiting to be tasted. But this morning, Hugh had insisted on raising a champagne toast to Emma’s latest prognosis of “guarded, but positive.”

  “Hugh, when this child first came to France, she wasn’t accustomed to drinking champagne in the morning,” said Emma, gesturing to Rosalyn. “I want to know: What in the world have you been teaching her all these years?”

  Hugh grinned at Emma, and their gazes lingered. As Rosalyn had predicted, the two got along famously—so well, in fact, that lately Hugh had insisted on chauffeuring Emma to and from San Francisco for her treatments. After a few weeks of inpatient care, Emma had been discharged from the hospital and now needed to visit the medical center only once a week, so she had rented a beautiful home in the Napa Valley so she could be closer to Blondine and Rosalyn—and Hugh.

  Hugh had helped Blondine to get a work visa, and she was staying with Emma and attending English classes at night school. Blondine loved Napa, and was thrilled to soak in the California sunshine. Back in Cochet, Gaspard was not at all pleased to lose his best salesperson, but after a long phone call from Emma, he had acquiesced with as much grace as he could muster. One of Blondine’s brothers had stepped in to help fill the considerable void Blondine had left at Blé Champagne.

  “I should have made a bet with Rosalyn that she’d love Champagne,” said Hugh with a chuckle as Blondine topped off their glasses of champagne. “Could have made a little cash.”

  “I don’t have any money, remember?” teased Rosalyn. “I’m still in debt, and Emma pays me a scandalously low wage.”

  “This is true,” said Emma. “How do you think I stay so rich?”

  In fact, Emma had offered an embarrassingly large salary, which Rosalyn could not in good conscience accept. The two finally settled on a comfortable but not exorbitant retainer, and they agreed to share in any proceeds from the future book, should it sell. Rosalyn was able to cover her debt-repayment schedule, and was well on her way to reestablishing her credit.

  Best of all, when she wasn’t training Blondine as her replacement, Rosalyn had been able to devote her energies to deciphering Émile’s letters, finally in chronological order, and was now working on interpreting the scans of Doris’s side of the correspondence as well. The papers from Lucie’s niche had been donated to the archive in Reims, which had made them available to the public through a computer database. Even though the paper had deteriorated in the dank cave, they were mostly legible; the archivists noted that Mrs. Doris Whittaker must have used very high-quality paper and ink, indeed.

  Though Rosalyn would have preferred to hold Doris’s actual letters in her hands, at least the Australian widow’s handwriting was easier to read than Émile’s—or Lucie’s, for that matter. The knitted items they had found in the Dakar “attic” had been donated to the local Reims museum, and Jérôme had recently informed them that the gargoyle had been remounted in its original place on Notre-Dame de Reims. He sent a photograph of the squat little fellow, high on the north side of the cathedral, looming over the city. Rosalyn planned on painting a picture of it.

  “Ah, but you’re a published author now, Rosie,” said Hugh with a wink. “Don’t authors make a load of cash?”

  Rosalyn laughed. She had been thrilled to publish her very first article, entitled “The Widows of Champagne,” about her experiences in France. It had paid very little, but the article had been well received, and she hoped her book telling the story of Émile and his correspondence with his marraine de guerre, and Lucie and the caves, and baby Narcissa’s fate, would find its audience. She might even include a little bit of her own odyssey on the page, if she felt brave enough.

  And at long last, Rosalyn had cleaned out the medicine cabinet and, in a dramatic but cleansing gesture, burned the aqua bath mat.

  Emma had hired an experienced winery manager to assist André in operating Emma’s wineries in France—and the two had fallen in love. They were planning on getting married next spring in a village not far from Cochet. Emma was determined to make it to their wedding.

  And, as promised, Jérôme had called Rosalyn when it was time to bring in the harvest.

  Rosalyn hesitated to leave Emma, but Emma insisted that she was far too well taken care of by Blondine and Hugh. She gave Rosalyn a clumsily wrapped package, with the strict instructions that she wasn’t to open it until after her flight to Paris had taken off.

  “Okay, a less somber toast!” declared Hugh, lifting his glass high. “To Blondine’s new job—she is so much better at this than you ever were, Rosie girl, sorry to say—”

  “Hey!” Rosalyn interrupted, and they all laughed.

  “And to Rosalyn bringing in the harvest,” added Blondine.

  “To Hugh,” said Rosalyn, “who forced me to go to France in the first place.”

  “And to Dash,” Emma said, “without whom none of this would have happened.”

  * * *

  “Thank you, Hugh,” said Rosalyn the following day, as her former boss drove her to the San Francisco airport.

  “No problem. I had a lunch planned in the city anyway.”

  “I’m not talking about the ride as much as . . . everything. Your support when Dash got sick, and all your financial help . . . I can never repay you. And you wanted nothing at all from me.”

  “I made you sell wine.”

  She laughed. “Just barely.”

  He chuckled. “Anyway, it’s not true that I wanted nothing. I wanted you to be happy.”

  “That’s what Dash used to say.”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s still saying it, wherever he is.”

  “Well, I’m not one hundred percent happy, but I’m working on it. Still, Hugh, not many people would have been so generous, or so understanding.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t bet on that.” He shrugged. “I went through some tough times as a kid, and some folks helped me out. If I didn’t pay it forward every once in a while, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. Do me one more favor?”

  “Name it.”

  “Give this Jérôme character a chance. According to Emma, he’s the real deal.”

  Jérôme and Rosalyn had been carrying on a correspondence since she’d returned to Napa. Theirs were long handwritten letters full of news and thoughts, longing and poetry. Being able to take time to explain her thoughts and emotions on the page allowed Rosalyn to open up more than she might have been able to face-to-face, and Jérôme seemed to feel the same. An epistolary relationship has a lot going for it, Rosalyn thought every time she thrilled at finding the telltale international envelope in her mailbox.

  Émile’s letters had given her insight into the past, while Jérôme’s offered her a p
romise of the future.

  * * *

  When the airplane bound for Paris reached altitude and the seat belt light pinged off, Rosalyn eagerly unwrapped Emma’s gift to find a ridiculous floppy, striped hat.

  A note in Emma’s distinctive scrawl read:

  My dear Rosalyn:

  Here’s to bringing in the harvest, and drinking the wine. Because nobody’s story is written until the day they die.

  Epilogue

  Champagne in early September was a different world from the frozen landscape Rosalyn had known when she was last here, in January. She was struck by the region’s muggy heat, the sudden rainstorms, the plethora of bugs, and the verdant beauty of the region’s lush rolling hills.

  The teams of grape pickers, called hordons, were made up of workers primarily from Turkey and North Africa, as well as several locals and a few unpaid volunteers like Rosalyn, who stayed in a separate section of Jérôme’s house referred to as “the dormitory.”

  If Rosalyn had anticipated a sun-drenched bacchanal, or an I Love Lucy–style escapade stomping grapes with her bare feet, she had seriously miscalculated. Instead, clad in rubber boots and rain slickers and wide-brimmed hats, gripping their sécateurs, the workers left at dawn in vans that transported them to their daily section of the vines.

  Foliage rustled, birds chirped, frogs croaked, and sécateurs snapped as Rosalyn pawed through dew-wet vine leaves in search of the correct stem to cut, which was tougher than it looked. The plants were laden with fruit, the warm air redolent with the honeyed scent of ripe grapes. She reached up to touch the silver locket she still wore around her neck; it had become her talisman.

  Dash would have loved this.

  Rosalyn carried her late husband with her still, a constant companion. His presence was no longer a burden, but a memory she embraced, a balance of contradictory emotions, both happy and sad at the same time.