The Wine Widow
The Champagne Dynasty Family Saga 1
Tessa Barclay
Copyright © Tessa Barclay 1984, 2016
This edition published 2018 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1984
www.wyndhambooks.com/tessa-barclay
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
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Chapter 1
The light from the shaded candle was only just enough to let Nicole see that the gathers of her petticoat were evenly spaced before she tied the waist tape. From the back of a chair she gently lifted her blouse of fine lawn, lightly starched. She let it slip over her head so that it floated round her young breasts encased in a bodice of thick decent cotton. Next came the black over-bodice cleverly trimmed with brown braid to accentuate her trim waist.
She tied the front lacing tight, so that from the shoulders the puffed sleeves of her blouse escaped like a fine white foam ‒ like the foam from the champagne for which her district was famous.
Now she put on her best stockings, of fine brown thread, much darned and mended but so expertly done that the mends didn’t show. Her mother was adept at the craft, had done special mending for the villagers until the crooking illness began to warp her fingers.
At the thought, Nicole gave a guilty glance towards the sleeping figure in the bed. She moved the candle a little further away so that its light should not disturb her mother. It was very early on a fine May morning, scarcely half-past four as yet, and if possible Madame Berthois should be allowed to sleep on until full daylight.
But already Nicole had been out to tend the goats that munched drowsily at the coarse new grass of their hillside field. She had milked them and moved their tethers so that they had fresh pasture enough for the time she would be away.
For Nicole was going to Rheims, for market day.
Market day! How she had longed for it. To get away from Calmady, if only for a few hours.
Nicole Berthois didn’t dislike her village. Like many another in the Department of the Marne, it was neat, its main street well swept and its little square graced by a brisk and clear fountain over which a stone angel stood guard.
But the ragstone houses were faced with rough plaster left grey in the cool and often wet climate. The roofs too were grey, of durable slate. Villagers spent little money on the painting of woodwork ‒ doors were generally plain oak or black-painted pine, and though some of the windows were graced with windowboxes there was little colour elsewhere.
In the great city, though, everything was different. There were shops through whose window panes one could see fine silks, feathered bonnets, thin-soled shoes with pearl buttons. The cafés had awnings, sometimes red, sometimes emerald green, and under them on fine days sat ladies and gentlemen in fashionable clothes. There were beds of flowers, organ-grinders, street-singers.
Of course Nicole wasn’t going to Rheims just to stare at the sights. No indeed, that would not have befitted her role as head of the Berthois family. There was business to be done today. She had cream cheeses to sell, and after that she must go to see Paulette at Madame Treignac’s. From Paulette she would receive the wages earned by her elder sister for the spring quarter. The money would be safely tied in the chamois leather pouch which Nicole now tied about her waist before preparing to put on her skirt.
‘Nicole!’ came a cry of reproach from the bed. Madame Berthois, awake, was struggling to sit up. Nicole hurried to help her, pushing the pillows into her back to ease the strains on the ailing joints. ‘I didn’t mean you to wake up yet, Mama.’
‘Evidently. Otherwise you wouldn’t be putting on your coloured skirt.’
‘Mama, I’m going to market ‒’
‘If you were going to paradise itself, it would still be wrong to wear coloured clothes when you’re still in mourning. Think shame on yourself, Nicci! Your father and your brother aren’t dead a year yet.’
Nicole coloured at the reproof but her chin was stubborn as she turned back to the garment she’d been about to put on when her mother called out. ‘Ten months’ mourning is long enough,’ she muttered.
‘You know it must be at least a year! Father Raimond even said that for such a bereavement we ought to wear black a full eighteen months ‒’
‘But you can’t call a brown skirt so very bright ‒’
‘It’s cinnamon-colour! It’s not even dark brown. I won’t have it, Nicci ‒’
Nicci was fastening the buttons at the back. She smoothed the wide folds over her petticoat. ‘I’m not going to take it off, Mama. I’m going to Rheims and it’s a beautiful May morning. I refuse to go to market looking like a crow ‒’
‘Good God, child, what does it matter what you look like? Who’s going to care, except Paulette?’
‘I might see Madame Treignac. I don’t want her thinking we’re a family of dull nobodies!’ Nicole headed for the door of the bedroom knowing full well she could be out and away before ever her mother could struggle out of bed.
‘Nicole!’ cried Madame Berthois. ‘You’re not going to run off without even saying goodbye?’
At once her daughter turned and came back. After all, she was going to Rheims, a full eight miles away, a long journey by the market waggon which lumbered through the vineyard villages to collect peasants with produce and letters for the post office in the great cathedral city. Who could tell what might happen on the road? Over two hours’ travel there and the same back – and one heard of such terrible a
ccidents, coaches overturned on the terrible roads, footpads taking money and jewellery from passengers …
But then that was the coach passengers. No footpad was going to waste his time on the carter’s waggon, for peasants had only farm produce or the money they had earned at market. All the same, one ought not to part without a kiss and a farewell, because life outside the village was always full of hazard, everyone knew that.
‘Goodbye, Mama, I’ve left bread and milk on the kitchen table for your breakfast and there’s soup by the side of the fire for dinner ‒’
‘But you’ll be home by then?’ Madame Berthois said anxiously. ‘I shan’t eat till six o’clock.’
‘Yes, yes,’ soothed Nicole. But privately she had decided not to catch the afternoon waggon. On market days the carter had two vehicles on the road, and the second didn’t leave Rheims to take the market-goers home until early evening once the long light evenings began.
They kissed and hugged. Madame Berthois had quite forgotten her disapproval of the cinnamon skirt. Her younger daughter, her mainstay, was off to the great city, too far for a sixteen-year-old to go unchaperoned but then, who was there to go with her? The Berthois family was reduced now to three womenfolk, and it was cause for gratitude to God that Nicole had so much good sense and courage. Without Nicole, Madame Berthois knew she would have been dead long ago ‒ of hunger, of exhaustion, of sheer lack of desire to live.
Accident of circumstance had made Nicole Berthois head of her family. Her father and her brother, both fine sturdy men, had been carried off by a typhoid epidemic which struck the village in the previous summer. There had been some talk of bringing Paulette home from her work at the dressmaker in Rheims, but where was the sense of that? Though older, Paulette was timid and shy; moreover they needed the wages she could bring in with her exceptional talent for needlework.
When Paul and Robert Berthois died, the neighbours had done what they could to help. But many families in the district had been stricken by the sickness too, so even if Marie would have consented to marry off one of her daughters so as to have a hard-working son-in-law for the farm, it would have been impossible.
There had been no decision to let Nicole take charge. Somehow it just happened. But that was a hard life for a young girl, thought Marie ‒ tending the goats and their few rows of vines, working for hire in the greater vineyards when the season called for labourers, looking after the house, tending a semi-invalid mother …
So now Marie sent her off to walk to the village crossroads to meet the market waggon, wishing her a happy day and praying inwardly that no trickster, no robber, would take advantage of her pretty little dove of a daughter.
The waggon was late. The waggon was always late. Nicole occupied herself in seeing that her precious cream cheeses in their little wicker containers were safe and moist in the wrapping of cabbage leaves, that her salt butter was neat and shapely in its precious paper package with the family name painstakingly lettered in indian ink. The produce from the Berthois farm was sought after in Rheims, but there could only be a limited supply and usually it had to be taken by a neighbour. That was a waste, because of course the neighbour had to be paid a commission.
But once a quarter, when Paulette’s wages were due from Madame Treignac, Nicole made the trip to Rheims herself, and sold her produce proudly in the market place. After that, she would visit Paulette at Madame’s dressmaking establishment, perhaps share the lunch that Madame provided for her employees, and go home the richer not only in money but in enjoyment.
The passengers on the waggon greeted her with pleasure. They made a space for her among the crates of ducks and the baskets of vegetables. In winter the waggon would be covered with a great canvas awning, but on such a fine day the great vehicle was open to the air. The passengers, when not forced to hang on like grim death as the wheels ground in and out of potholes, could look at the passing scene.
Nicole saw around her stretches of young vines, now in pale leaf. To her left were the vines bearing grapes which produced the vintage known as ‘the mountain wine’, after the Mountain of Rheims on whose slopes they grew. This ‘mountain’ would have made a Swiss farmer laugh ‒ nowhere was it more than six hundred feet above the plain. Yet it was imposing enough in the flat Marne landscape, with its thick cape of oak, beech and pine at the summit.
As the waggon toiled on, the fine new windmill at Verzenay became visible, built only thirty years ago in 1820 but already regarded as a famous landmark. The great sails were turning in the spring breeze. Beyond those spread fingers, the sky was azure and white, clouds sailing like galleons towards the west, towards distant places such as Lorraine and Germany, towards unknown worlds and adventure.
A cry from the other passengers called Nicole back from her daydreams. A sharp-eyed youngster had seen the first grey outline of a turret roof. The great cathedral at Rheims was coming into sight on the left. Everyone became busy wrapping shawls more tidily, tying lace caps more securely, exchanging wooden shoes for leather, unearthing baskets and containers buried under the belongings of others.
The route into the city lay past wool factories and the manufacturers of wine-growing equipment. At seven in the morning the workers were hurrying through the streets towards the factory gates. Café proprietors were sweeping the pavement in front of their shops. The early sun glistened on gilt shop signs, the high varnish of carriages, the tubs of iris bordering the entrances to the fine hotels.
Nicole was one of the first to jump down and hurry away, calling thanks to old Jouvet, the driver. She darted under the noses of the horses, who now stood tossing their manes and looking hopefully for a nosebag of fodder. Ahead of her at the end of the road lay the alley which led to the great square. She wanted to be early in choosing a place to set out her wares.
It was always strange to be in a square so vast. And the people around her spoke in a dialect different from her own. Not that Nicole Berthois was restricted to the patois of the Marne ‒ certainly not. The Berthois family had always been a cut above the rest when it came to speaking the French of Paris.
Their superiority hadn’t always endeared them to their fellow-villagers, and arose from a humanitarian act carried out by Nicole’s great-grandfather at the time of the Revolution. Old Robert had given shelter to one of the monks of the Abbey of Hautvilliers, Brother Joseph. Nicole’s grandfather grew up with this kindly and learned man, whose influence was strong throughout the Berthois family even two generations later. He had lived and died in their house, piously awaiting the restoration of his abbey.
The Berthois could read, which was by no means a universal talent in the Marne in 1850. They could write, not just their names but in current script and with good spelling. Taken together with the fact that the Berthois before the Revolution had been owners of quite a decent acreage and a house with four rooms, they were regarded as ‘different’ from the other villagers of Calmady. The fact that they were now desperately poor and hard-pressed didn’t diminish the respect they were shown.
So now when housekeepers from wealthy families approached to buy her cream cheese and butter, Nicole was able to respond without awkwardness to their educated speech. She did brisk business. An hour after setting up her little stall, she had sold out.
It was still too early to go to Madame Treignac’s if she were to share Paulette’s midday lunch, so she set off for a stroll around the market. There were sellers of leather and wool yarn, basket-makers, silversmiths, purveyors of game and fresh vegetables, mushroom gatherers, a fortune-teller, a tooth-puller, and a muscular giant who broke iron manacles with one surge of his bulging biceps.
Nicole resisted the temptation to have her fortune told. She knew only too well what it would be: hard work, the care of her ailing mother, an arranged marriage with some older man who could take over the running of the farm. Though she accepted this future, she didn’t like to dwell on it. Instead she wandered round the square, seeking free entertainment, occasionally grasping her lawn cap t
o keep it on her head in the fine spring wind.
The gentry were now beginning to arrive for the day’s shopping. They came in their carriages from outlying estates, some of them wealthy bourgeois who had bought land cheap when the aristocracy were dispossessed, some aristocrats who had regained their possessions when the monarchy was restored. Nicole paused to watch a carriage which drew in to the kerb, a handsome calèche drawn by four horses and roomy enough inside for an entire family. But out of it stepped only a well-dressed elderly lady and a young man in the light-coloured morning suit considered right for country life.
As the lady was helped down from the carriage, she dropped her gloves. The footman retrieved one, but the other was kicked away by a hurrying passer-by. It came to rest a yard away from Nicole’s feet.
She stooped to pick it up. At that moment a man’s hand took hold of it too. For a moment both held fast, wondering who might be trying to take possession.
Philippe de Tramont raised his eyes to find himself head to head with an extremely pretty country girl. Her dark hair was held back in two thick loops that framed her forehead and covered her ears. On top was a little cap of embroidered lawn, caught back into two bone hairpins for safety. Sparkling dark brown eyes regarded him, rosy lips curved up in a smile.
‘Thank you, mademoiselle,’ he said, as she let the glove go into his hand.
‘A pity to spoil it with market dirt,’ she said, nodding towards the squashed cabbage leaves and dead flowers that littered the ground.
‘Rheims is always so dirty on market day.’
‘That can’t be avoided, alas. We have to sell what we have as quickly as possible ‒ no time to be tidy.’
‘You’re a stall-holder?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t come often enough for that. I had only a few things to sell, and they’ve gone.’
‘Philippe!’ called Madame de Tramont, from the kerb by the carriage. ‘Why are you wasting your time with that turnip of a common peasant girl? I’m waiting!’
The words floated to them above the hubbub in the square. Nicole coloured in resentment, Philippe coloured in embarrassment. ‘My apologies, mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘My mother doesn’t really mean ‒’
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