‘Go away, there are grapes to be harvested, even if we can’t damn well press them…’
Fen didn’t need yelling at twice and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Fine,’ she mumbled to herself and then a very quiet ‘how rude!’ for good measure.
She headed out of the winery and towards the fields. It only took her a few minutes to be back in sight of the château as she followed the rough track that edged the vineyards.
The grapes had all been picked from these near fields and all but one of the other south-facing slopes further away and the pickers were active in the middle vineyards, a good fifteen-minute walk from where she was now.
‘Time to stretch the old legs.’ Fen hummed a tune to herself and started the walk. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Estelle running from the winery towards the château, holding her skirts up to her knees so she could get a fair pace going.
‘Now what are you up to?’ Fen said to herself as she watched the figure take the steps up to the terrace two at a time and dash round to what Fen assumed would be the kitchen door. With Estelle now out of sight, Fen continued walking towards the vines, following the sounds of the pickers’ voices and the odd whinnying of the cart horse.
‘Where is Hubert?’ one of the other workers asked her when she got there and picked up a spare hod.
‘He’s in the winery, and acting like a bear with a sore head.’
‘Typical! Why though?’ the local worker asked.
‘Why indeed. Well, I don’t know. Something about one of the presses being stuck.’
‘Ooh la la,’ the worker shook his head and looked worried and went on to tell Fen in great detail about the need to get that press fixed as quickly as possible as it was well known that the Bernards were running a shoddy enough winery with their old and cranky presses, far too few of them too, and to have one out of service when these next hods of grapes came in… ‘The Englishman is very good at fixing machines,’ he continued. ‘He should be around here somewhere, send him to help.’
‘Good plan,’ Fen nodded and looked about her, hoping to see James among the pickers. She knew he wanted her to act all nonchalant about knowing each other, but she still felt a certain comfort in having him near – a link to Arthur now that she knew she’d never see him again. Some women kept their lover’s tokens close at hand, but Fen liked the idea that James could tell her so much about Arthur, and she could really talk to him about her fiancé – much better than a lock of hair or an embroidered handkerchief.
But James was nowhere to be seen and Fen clasped the hod to her and joined one of the working parties, looking up every now and then to check the landscape for the familiar blond hair and almost permanent, but not wholly unwarranted, scowl.
Estelle brought the lunch rations round, but her thunderous face made Fen think twice about asking her why she’d been dashing away from the winery earlier. And she was just finishing off the chewy end of a piece of cheese, more rind than goodness – Estelle really couldn’t be her biggest fan she thought – when she saw the black-clothed figure of Sophie slowly hobbling along the farm track.
‘Madame! Sophie!’ Fen called to her and trotted over to her, with the intention of helping her home.
‘Ah, Fenella, you angel.’
‘Can I help you, Sophie?’
‘Yes, that would be kind, thank you.’
Fen reached over to the basket, but Sophie held it close to her and instead motioned for Fen to help her by holding her arm. ‘It’s easier for me to lean on you.’
Fen did as Sophie requested and let her lean against her as they limped back towards the château, through the gatehouse and into the courtyard. Once Fen had seen Sophie into the kitchen and helped her to a seat, she bade her employer a goodbye and turned to leave.
‘Oh, madame.’ Fen suddenly turned to face Sophie. Something had been bothering her and she’d finally noticed what it was. ‘You’ve lost your scarf.’ She pointed to her own red and white spotted one on her head.
Sophie’s arm flew up to touch her bare head. ‘Ah, zut. I must have left it at Sybille’s. No matter. Goodbye, Fen.’
Fen felt very much dismissed and walked back to the vineyard with one thought going round in her mind. Cousin Sybille… could this be a new contender for the S of the German love letter?
A few hours later, the sun started to fall behind the treeline to the west of the vineyards and Fen heard the church clock strike the hour in the town. It was the signal to the workers to down tools and, along with the rest of them, Fen picked a couple more bunches of grapes to fill her wicker hod before heading back towards the gently whinnying horse and his cart. Her fellow grape pickers dusted themselves down and some took a long thirst-slaking drink from the tap at the end of one of the rows, while others mounted their bicycles, which had been left there since the afternoon shift had started.
‘Zut alors!’ She heard one of the workers exclaim, as he clambered off his bicycle saddle and looked carefully at his front tyre. He prodded it a bit and gave the old rubber wheel a squeeze. Tutting to himself, she saw him scrub around in the dirt next to his tyre and throw a couple of shards of pottery into the vines, away from the path. ‘Such mess!’ He tutted as he decided to push his damaged bicycle away from the vineyard.
Fen was intrigued as to what could have caused the gash to his tyre and walked over to where she’d seen him toss the offending shards. It didn’t take her too long to spot a few pieces of creamy white porcelain. She bent down and picked them up, running the smooth ceramic over in her hand, but being careful of the sharp, knife-like edge where it was obviously cleaved from another similar shard. In all, she found three pieces and neatly fitted them back together into a sort of incomplete bowl shape.
‘How odd,’ Fen wondered to herself, but rather than drop them back into the path, she pocketed them in her dungarees. Something told her, like a marker in a crossword clue, that there was more to this than met the eye. Why would a small bowl be broken and discarded in the vineyard? It struck her as odd, like the shreds of fabric she’d found in the winery, and she patted her pocket to make sure they were safely inside.
‘Ah, Fenella,’ Sophie greeted Fen when she entered the kitchen, having taken her work boots off in the hallway. ‘Just the person. So’ – she indicated the ingredients she’d picked up on her trip out – ‘where do I start? Is it like clafoutis? Or frangipane?’
Fen couldn’t help but chuckle and was relieved when Sophie smiled back at her. It was so hard in a house that had seen so many recent deaths – and one wrongful arrest – to know if you’d walk into somewhere with the atmosphere of a morgue, or to somewhere a bit more ‘make do and mend’. Luckily, this evening, it seemed to be the latter.
‘Well, madame, I don’t think we need to get as technical as that.’
‘You know what they are?’ Sophie looked up at Fen from her seat at the table, half in admiration but also, Fen wondered, a tiny bit annoyed that this Englishwoman had such a cosmopolitan palate.
‘Of course. I grew up in Paris, you know?’
‘Ah, of course, I thought I could detect some of the city in you.’
As Fen set Sophie off peeling the apples and sorting through the blackberries, she rubbed the smallest amount of fat – she couldn’t tell if it was butter or lard or something in between the two – into the flour and rationed sugar.
‘Ideally, this should have about quadruple the amount of good brown sugar,’ Fen mused as she set about the mixture, using the very tips of her fingers to rub the flour and fat into a breadcrumb-like consistency.
‘Oh, sugar! How I miss it!’
‘Those croissants from Fracan were exceptional,’ Fen said, though instantly regretted bringing up a subject so close to that of the murdered priest. Luckily, Sophie didn’t seem to connect it, or mind, and carried on with her reminiscing about her own time in Paris.
‘Did you ever go to the patisserie in Rue Champollion? It’s a few streets away from the Sorbonne.’
‘No, I
don’t recall—’
‘The strawberry tarts were…’ Sophie kissed her fingers like a happy chef. Then she sighed. ‘Those were the days, you know.’ She paused as she peeled some more of the apples and then passed them to Fen, who, having made her crumble topping, was now able to cut them into slices and place them in a pie dish.
‘Did you meet Pierre in Paris?’ Fen hoped her question wouldn’t spoil Sophie’s seemingly contented mood, but it seemed an innocent enough question.
‘No, not Pierre. Believe it or not, I had a German boyfriend then.’ Sophie had almost whispered it.
‘Gosh. I don’t suppose you know what happened to him?’
Sophie thought for a moment, her eyes glazing over slightly, and Fen worried that tears might be about to come and inwardly scolded herself for possibly upsetting Sophie. ‘No, no, I don’t. But I don’t know what happened to that girl back then either, you know?’
The war had changed them all and Fen would be the first to agree that the happy-go-lucky kid she’d been in Paris in the 1930s was a stranger to her too, now she had weathered so many winters since then. Fen shivered and wanted to change the subject before it all got too maudlin.
‘Shall I go and find Estelle?’ She asked the question of Sophie, who seemed to be completely unfazed about the lack of her boys’ nursery maid, even though the little ones were starting to whine for their dinner and Benoit was climbing up her sore leg to get onto her lap, in order to be even closer to her ear to whine into. For once, Sophie wasn’t wincing in pain and Fen had a moment of grief pour over her as she imagined what her and Arthur’s children might have been like. It seemed a far cry to believe she might ever have that perfect motherly relationship, now there was no one who could ever be the father.
Fen turned towards the stove to hide her tears from Sophie, who was appeasing Benoit by popping juicy blackberries into his mouth. She wondered where James was, and if Hubert had found him and got help with that press. Dry-eyed and recovered enough now to turn around and speak, Fen was about to tell Sophie about the damaged wine press when the kitchen door was flung open.
Benoit gave an involuntary squeak and slipped off his mother’s lap, leaving a purple smear down her sleeve. Sophie tutted and turned to see who had made such a violent entrance, as did Fen, and both ladies were greeted with a face as white as the ash from the stove. It was Hubert, standing in the door, his work boots still on and dirty from the soil between the vines, one hand pressing against the door frame, keeping him from falling over. Sophie turned back to Benoit to give him a ticking off for getting blackberry juice everywhere, so it was Fen who stepped across the kitchen to ask the estate manager what was wrong.
‘Is it the press? I was just telling madame—’
Hubert shushed her with his free hand and then wiped it across his brow. ‘It’s not the press that’s the problem now. It’s the body.’
Twenty
‘The body?’ both Fen and Sophie exclaimed. Fen had a ghastly thought of a crumpled human body being the cause of the press not working, its screw coming up against bone and flesh rather than grapes and seeds. ‘Oh dear Lord…’
Putting her feelings of dislike towards the man aside, Fen urged Hubert into the room and bade him sit next to the sheet-white Sophie. A pair of bright and wide blue eyes looked up at her from under the table and Fen mustered all her self-control to calmly pick up the small boy and, with nodded consent from his mute mother, take him to the doorway and send him out to play with his brother. Fen watched him run towards the older boy and only when they both seemed content building mud patties in the last of the early-evening sunshine, did she let her forced smile drop and turn back to the adults sitting, ashen-faced, around the kitchen table.
‘Stabbed.’
‘Stabbed?’
‘Through the heart.’ Fen caught the end of Hubert’s explanation to Sophie.
‘And then dumped in the wine press?’ Fen couldn’t help but make that assumption.
Hubert turned to look at her as she sat down opposite him, on the other side of Sophie, who was now holding her head in her hands and mumbling, ‘So much death, so much death.’
‘No.’ The estate manager held Fen’s gaze. ‘Not dumped in the wine press. No Frenchman would pollute our national treasure this way.’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t a Frenchman?’ Sophie looked up from her hands and her eyes darted from Hubert to Fen, who remembered it was Sophie who had accused James a few days earlier of Father Marchand’s death.
As they sat in contemplative silence, another figure appeared at the kitchen door. Clément, wringing his oily hands inside a rag. He solemnly walked in and Fen sighed in relief that the elderly man wasn’t the body that had been found, be it in a wine press or not.
‘Have you heard, Clément?’
‘Heard what now? James and I…’ he looked around and seemed perplexed that the Englishman wasn’t with him, ‘have just fixed that bloody press. The grapes are wasted, and those from the best field too. You know what the problem was?’
‘Clément, not now,’ Sophie beckoned him over and Fen, being the closest to him, offered him her chair. Sophie reached across and held the old man’s hand as Hubert continued.
‘When you and James came and relieved me from that bloody press,’ Hubert said, ‘I went to go and manage the pickers in the far vineyards, the Pinot Noir.’
‘Yes, yes, I know my own vineyards,’ Clément chuntered and Fen could feel him getting agitated. Hubert, in a display of sensitivity that Fen had never seen before, placed his hand on the elderly man’s arm. ‘I’m so sorry, Clément, but we found a dead body there.’
There was a silence.
‘From the war? A shallow grave?’ Clément pulled his hands away from Sophie and shrugged off Hubert too.
‘No, not from the war. From today.’
Before Hubert could say anything else, Estelle bustled in, whistling to herself, holding what looked like Sophie’s basket.
‘Good evening,’ she called out to the people around the table, obviously not feeling the tense atmosphere in the room. ‘Madame, I found your basket in the courtyard and rescued it from being used as a helmet or some such.’ She looked around the faces of the stunned people around her. ‘I suppose it’s up to me to get the dinner on? Unless we only want English pudding, eh?’ She clocked the mess of apple peelings and mixing bowls on the table and chuckled to herself, placing the empty basket down at the far end of the table.
‘Estelle, sit down.’
‘Sit down? Like I have time to sit down with you all sitting down, yourself excluded, madame, of course.’
‘Estelle!’ Sophie’s command stung through the air and Estelle shrugged and came to sit down next to Hubert and opposite Fen. Fen tried to meet her gaze, but Estelle was huffing, and had folded her arms, not wanting to show how upset she was at her employer’s sharpness.
‘Fine I am sitting, now what?’
‘Hubert…’ Clément had found his voice. ‘Hubert has some terrible news for us. A man…?’
‘Yes, a man,’ Hubert confirmed Clément’s query.
‘Has been found dead, in the furthermost vineyard.’
Estelle gasped and crossed herself.
‘He was stabbed, through the heart, though there was no weapon nearby.’
‘Who was it?’ Fen dared ask the question that she knew must be on everyone else’s lips.
Hubert’s reply shocked them all.
‘Pascal Desmarais.’
Fen gasped and was about to reach across the table for Estelle’s hand, when the grief-stricken woman, who was repeating ‘no, no, no’ over and over, pushed her chair away and fled from the table and out of the kitchen door into the twilight.
‘Pascal Desmarais? The apothecary?’ Clément seemed struck by the randomness more than the terrible nature of the news.
‘The pharmacist, Clément, yes.’ Sophie was breathing slowly, staring straight down at the table.
‘Why would anyone kill that o
ld softie? Did he have a rival for Estelle’s affection?’
‘Don’t be so foolish, Clément,’ Hubert snapped at him.
‘He’s not so foolish, you know,’ Sophie raised her eyes up and looked at all of them for a moment. ‘Good men are few and far between and Estelle was doing well to secure the advances of such a professional man, with his own business and all.’
‘You don’t really think that, do you?’ Fen challenged Sophie. ‘Stabbed out of jealousy?’
‘Through the heart.’ Sophie pointed towards Hubert, reminding the table of what he’d said earlier. ‘If that is not a crime passionelle, then I don’t know what is. Now, Fen, please go and find Estelle, we can’t have her wandering around in distress in the dark and in front of the boys.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Fen wasn’t convinced of Sophie’s theory and, judging by the look on Hubert’s face, he wasn’t either. Nevertheless, she left the table and headed out to find Estelle, calling to the boys when she saw them, busy cutting slices out of their mud pies.
‘Jean-Jacques, Benoit – go inside and find your grandpa. You can all clean up together.’
A few whines later and they were scurrying towards the kitchen, hopefully, Fen thought, none the wiser about the most recent tragedy to befall this beautiful old place.
‘Estelle!’ Fen called out in the gloaming, hoping that Estelle’s white apron would show up in the half-light.
She saw a figure approaching and waved, before realising that it was James, not Estelle who was coming towards her.
‘What ho,’ Fen had her hands on her hips and let James come up to her. She scanned the horizon one more time before continuing. ‘Heard the news?’
‘About the candlesticks?’
‘No, what?’ Fen asked, confused.
‘The problem with the press. Not mechanical, but structural. Instead of just grapes in there, there were a pair of very nice silver candlesticks.’
A Dangerous Goodbye: An absolutely gripping historical mystery (A Fen Churche Mystery Book 1) Page 17