The Vintners Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

  Aurora must know, and she needed an ally in her investigation so that it would seem less of an intrusion. It was the kind of scheme formed by a sleepless head on a damp pillow, childish, but Aurora was tired of politeness. She recalled how she had reassured the surgeon: ‘It was necessary!’ So compassionate, ladylike, a saint thanking her torturers for her martyrdom. It was true, it was necessary, but she had wanted to howl, to sink her teeth into his arm. There had never been time to be civilised, Aurora knew now, and civility was dalliance.

  Antoine said, ‘What can I do, Baroness, to help you?’

  ‘I want you to be there too. To conceal yourself near that hilltop, near enough to help me, if I need help. I want you to keep watch with me, secretly.’

  Antoine was nodding. ‘It’s time Sobran was found out – whatever he is at. But, Madame, how can it be about murder? I think you must be wrong, Baroness. I think it is a lover he meets, an old lover, some great and stately person – but not you.’

  Aurora called to mind everyone of her class, for thirty miles either side of the river. No one much younger than she. She remembered his glow in ’22, his madness in ’28. ‘I’d rather you were right,’ she told the stonemason.

  Their faces mirrored each other’s distress. Aurora said she would send a note if the arrangement was changed. Antoine took her arm when she stood. He walked her out into the sun and handed her up into her carriage.

  A month from midsummer, Aurora visited Sobran’s fine new house on the morning that the household was to disperse – Martin and the younger children to Sabine in Chalon-sur-Saône, Léon, Agnès and Céleste to the spa at St Florentin. Aurora brought the travellers gifts, two hampers stocked with sweet wine, dried fruit, cheeses, jellies and tins of breadcrusts baked in herbs and butter. And, of course, the society journals in which Agnès so delighted, and would spend hours studying, especially the engraved portraits of fine ladies of fashion.

  Sobran saw Aurora out to her carriage. In the carriageway she paused to close her parasol and said, ‘I won’t be able to keep our appointment.’ She hurried on: ‘An aunt of Henri’s is dying and I’m expected to attend.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sobran said. He watched as she fussed with the silk cord on the handle of the parasol. She settled it on her wrist and, without looking up, said, ‘All women are like Pandora – avid to open locked boxes.’ She was almost simpering.

  ‘I see,’ Sobran said, smoothing the path of her escape.

  She glanced at him. ‘I can’t say when I’ll return, it’s all dependent on how tenacious of life Henri’s aunt proves to be.’ She looked past Sobran’s shoulder at the ridge and the pepper tree, beneath which were the table and chairs that had become summer fixtures. Sobran and Baptiste particularly liked to sit there in the hot weather, overlooking the visible slopes of Jodeau-Kalmann, and their standing-army of vines. A triangular sail was fastened to the pepper tree and propped on two long poles, like the roofed entrance of a Bedouin tent. It provided more shade. Aurora thought she could hear the canvas from where she stood; she saw it move and heard a gulp, like the sound made by a well-trained but eager dog in a hunter’s covey – waiting. She stopped fussing with her parasol and gave Sobran her hand. He paced her to the carriage door and handed her up. She called to Paul, who was in the porch talking to Agnès. Paul kissed Agnès’s hand and hurried over. This made Aurora and Sobran meet each other’s eyes, as if to ask, ‘Did you notice that?’ But Paul seemed quite un-self-conscious and said to Sobran as he came up that he was pleased Baptiste was staying, he hoped they’d get in a few dawn fishing trips. He shook Sobran’s hand, smiled, got in after his mother who Sobran saw watching him still, past her son’s head, her eyes black and solemn.

  The letter concerning the Baron’s aunt was scribbled by candlelight at the aunt’s bedside. It said that the old woman had faded quickly, her flow shrinking like pumpwater when the pump handle is still. Her feet were already cold, the letter said, and its writer called Henri and Aurora to attend the funeral. Aurora was gone only a week and kept her appointment – the one she had made with Antoine when her fears got the better of her. Antoine had reservations about a lady of quality out at night in secret in the company of a commoner –

  ‘There’s little difference between this and my former arrangement with Sobran. Besides, the gossip is about him and me not you and me,’ Aurora reasoned.

  ‘I don’t like to deceive him.’

  ‘What difference is there between the deception we’d be practising if I stood beside him and you stayed hidden, or if we both hide and spy?’

  ‘You made a bargain with him.’

  ‘He made it with me. I only bargained for him to tell me his secret.’

  Antoine looked uncertain.

  ‘What we see will be what normally happens,’ Aurora reminded him. ‘And you’ll run no risk of having to rush to my rescue. Whatever we learn can remain our secret. If that’s what we want.’

  Antoine shivered.

  ‘Two witnesses,’ Aurora said, ‘as the law requires. And nothing Sobran’s rehearsed – but what really occurs.’

  1834 Boire (to drink)

  The house was quiet. The maid was in a deep exhausted sleep after her efforts soaping the carpets and washing the curtains, no doubt.

  The cook was on holiday, and the family – except Baptiste – away, building up their strength for the long haul of harvest.

  Sobran was cold from inactivity. He hadn’t moved from his chair under the canvas where he sat sunk in a milk of filtered moonlight. He turned the hourglass again. It was late. He got up to pace, took off his hat and felt the moonlight. Its touch, like midwinter sun through fogged glass, was very faintly warm. He was lonely, felt Aurora’s absence, and realised that he had wanted to share his secret. It would have been good to be alone with her, waiting into the small hours when all humans are raw and unguarded. What would they have said to each other?

  As Sobran saw it, for six years his family and friends had all had the satisfaction of being gentle to a man who was stronger than them. They had practised their kindness, their distance and omissions because he wasn’t in his right mind. Sabine married, but the rest of his children let themselves spoil because they thought both their parents were unstable.

  Sobran knew he would never tell now. Aurora wouldn’t ask again. She’d returned to her corner, cagey, self-sufficient, and proper. That embrace in her dressing room was as far as their friendship went.

  Sobran stopped pacing to look out over the north-east slope, the road, the wall and rising rows of Kalmann. All was still. Yet he felt that he stood above a monstrously swollen river, watching while a whole drowned, uprooted town swept by – a fine home, a tavern, a church. This was the high point of his life, the only hour with firm foundations. He could feel the moments ticking along his body, of the 27th of June for twenty-six years.

  There was a noise out on the road, an explosion that Sobran identified as the momentous impact of a full glass bottle. He saw a wide dark splash on the road below the ridge, a stain and melting stars of glass. He stepped out from under the obscuring tree, turned in circles with his head thrown back.

  The angel fell from the sky as though shot, plunged straight at the ground with his wings shut, then opened them at the last moment – crack – displaced air flattening Sobran’s shirt against his chest. Xas lay on his stomach with his wings stretched out along the earth. But his head was turned and he was looking at Sobran.

  Sobran dropped on to his knees. Despite the angel’s bright gaze Sobran feared he was hurt.

  ‘Lie down,’ Xas said.

  Sobran stretched out beside him.

  ‘There are two people concealed, close by, between the vines. They could see us if we stood. I’ve circled for hours, half-a-mile up. I didn’t want to go without seeing you. I dropped the bottle to draw their attention to the road, then came down as fast as I could.’ The prone wings stirred like oars, made a ripple in the dirt. Xas laid his cheek down on his extended arm.

/>   As if it was Xas who needed calming, Sobran placed a hand on his back, on the hard bands of muscle that supported his wings and made his back unlike that of any human, however powerful. Xas’s skin was hot and his muscles twitching.

  The angel asked, ‘Do you have any idea who they are?’

  ‘Two?’ Sobran checked.

  ‘I sensed two awake. I saw them when I came close, both are cloaked.’

  Sobran guessed Paul and Baptiste. Even if they had missed Xas – had looked away when the bottle exploded – before too long Baptiste would come up the hill to see what had happened to his father. Sobran realised that he must get up and return to his chair; must be seen. Perhaps he could move the chair a little nearer to Xas, talk to but not look at him.

  ‘I have to get up. If one of these spies is Baptiste he’ll be anxious now that he can’t see me. That’s what I must do first – now – to buy us a little time.’

  Xas made a harsh unhappy sound in the back of his throat. He reached out and took hold of Sobran’s coat, hauled the man under his wing, which was smothering, thick, as warm as an eiderdown – but smelled of salt. Sobran felt the stitches part along the back seam of his coat.

  Xas’s face was against Sobran’s throat. Sobran took hold of the angel’s head, touched bunched jaw muscles; the angel was silent because his teeth were clenched. With many years’ experience in lordly gestures of forgiveness, Sobran did to the angel what he would to Céleste whenever she came to make peace after one of her rages of suspicion or jealousy – he kissed Xas on the forehead. He said, ‘You must let me go.’ Xas loosened his grip and lifted his wing several inches. Sobran got up and walked away to lean against the tree. The graze on his ear stung, and one slow rivulet of blood tickled his neck. He looked at the slopes, the strips of shadow. He felt that his heart had stalled and was only blowing steadily in his ear.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘North-east.’ The angel’s voice was barely audible.

  Sobran glanced at him; his face was turned down against his arm. Sobran decided to improvise. Since he looked like a man keeping a vigil, he must be seen to be still watching for someone. He lit the lamp, went to the boundary stone, raised it and waved it slowly back and forth. Then he came back and set it on the table, resumed his seat.

  ‘One of them has made water, I can smell it. Pissing fear,’ Xas said, then deduced, ‘I was seen.’

  ‘Why do you have salt in your wings?’ Sobran asked.

  The angel was incompletely immobile, his feathers stirring though his wings were still, as if each quill was governed by its own muscle. Xas said that the way to Hell, the only way any body could go, was through narrow caves of saline rock in a salt dome in Turkey. Yes, he did go into the earth to get to both Heaven and Hell, but no one could dig and find them. He couldn’t draw a map, with Heaven and Hell in hollow pockets under the surface of the earth – it wasn’t like that. Sobran should imagine that any map he knew he read folded – always folded – whole territories were hidden in the folds, and the coasts, rivers and mountain ranges of the known world crossed the edges of these pleats, crossed them as if the space in which they lay was complete, a whole cloth with no hidden folds.

  Xas came and went through the salt, he said, a passage filled with loose salt. The tunnels changed shape over the years, often unexpectedly. There had been times when Xas had spent hours burrowing like a worm, unable to find his way in or out. Times when he’d emerged on earth breathless, burnt and temporarily blind, and simply roosted in the shade of a salt pillar till the blindness passed. The salt was caustic and suffocating – like the water in the lake of the Antarctic volcano that served as a gate to Heaven – so anything he carried had to be wrapped. He veiled himself, wore silk over his eyes nose and mouth, but ‘swam’ with his wings so that they were always as gritty as a sparrow’s after a dust-bath. The way to Hell emptied itself only once, after the earthquake at the time of the crucifixion – the Harrowing of Hell. The way was open for a dozen years. It was then Xas began to plant his garden, those twelve years of grace when it was easy to carry water.

  ‘There’s no sweet water near the passage,’ Xas said, ‘but I have a distillery in Hell.’ Then he said, ‘One of the spies is a woman. It was she made water. The fear was masking it. She has recently conceived.’

  Sobran began to figure. Céleste was in St Florentin with Agnès, both under Léon’s care; Aurora with her husband at the deathbed of an aunt of his. If it was Baptiste with a sweetheart why would sweethearts have posted watch near a father? It couldn’t be Sophie and Antoine. Sophie had done with childbearing years since, besides she wouldn’t spy on him.

  ‘I’ll face away from them,’ Sobran decided. ‘Give them a chance to creep off before dawn comes. There’s no real cover down there other than shadows.’ He looked up at the half-moon. ‘I think you might have to stay put till they’re gone.’

  ‘I was seen,’ Xas said. ‘Why am I hiding now?’

  ‘They’re busy disbelieving their eyes. Besides, just let anyone try raising the subject with me.’ Sobran was at his most autocratic.

  Xas was silent for some minutes after that, and when Sobran glanced at him he couldn’t make out an expression. Finally he got up and came closer, so that he stood over the angel. ‘I suppose you could choose to stand up and stretch and fly away in your own good time. Let them confirm what they saw. Leave me to deal with it.’

  ‘I want to stay secret.’

  Sobran saw the glaze on Xas’s cheeks. He asked, ‘Have you been crying?’

  ‘Do I do that? Do I ever?’

  Despite Sobran’s fear of summoning his best bet – Baptiste – he moved from view, crouched by the angel’s head. ‘Since the night knowledge drove me mad I haven’t been able to see colours. The only thing that brightens the greys is moisture. I love the look of rain.’ He touched the wet cheek.

  Xas stared at Sobran, his look at an upward angle and sidelong, because of how he lay. Despite signs of tears the look was calculating. Then Xas closed his wings against his body, rolled over, relaxed them again and lay supine. Sobran could see the angel’s ribs moving with each shallow breath. ‘All right,’ Xas said.

  Suddenly Sobran was on his knees, then leaning down so that his arms trembled as they took his weight. He was too old for this. Then youth ignited where the touch first scorched. His mouth, his head, then his whole body on fire. He came to his senses to feel and taste what was really there, a firm, soft-skinned caressing mouth, spit as clean as grass sap, an ageless, inhuman body pressed against his own. For the second time in his life he was close to coming at only one touch, and that touch had been localised, exact – Baptiste Kalmann first touching him there when he was fourteen years of age. The angel’s hands were against his face and neck and he was being kissed, and it wasn’t a kiss of trouble, of crossed swords, but the kiss of a coupled harness – the present suddenly hitched to the past. Sobran remembered Baptiste, remembered so that he smelled tobacco and brandy, and felt stubble – like stubble, the dry stalks of after-grass that showed through the scabbed ice of the first snow that fell and lay every year he had longed for his dead friend, his eyes for that face, his ears for that voice. The angel’s kiss was like a wave that washed him out of his consciousness, into his past, then came back and pulled him into itself – a mouth whose moisture was innocent of a meal, of wine, innocent even of the tang of hunger.

  They both turned their mouths away, lay cheek to cheek. Sobran put his arms around Xas and held the angel.

  ‘Don’t kiss me again,’ Xas said. ‘I don’t like what happened to you.’

  ‘You’re mine, I have you,’ Sobran whispered. He didn’t want to do more than hold Xas – and it wasn’t fear that stopped him, but tenderness that quickly turned to a kind of tiredness. He wouldn’t try to extract himself from the embrace. He felt the fatalistic torpor of an animal who has struggled for hours in quicksand.

  ‘Your nose is bleeding,’ Xas informed him.

  It was Sobran mo
ved his head to see blood on the angel’s face and a pale rind of the pre-dawn sky in each large dark eye.

  Sobran made hushing sounds.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ Xas said. ‘As soon as you couldn’t see them they went stealthily, then fast. I can’t sense them any more. But there’s one awake in the house. I used to say that when you hid from me, Sobran. I’d stand on the ridge and say to myself, “One awake in the house.”’

  The blood was drying in dull scabs; the angel looked as though he’d been rolling in leaf mould.

  Sobran realised that he had crossed a frontier. He was where he’d never expected to be – even twelve years back when he’d longed for Xas as a lover does. For the first time he understood that it was the angel, and not he, who was in danger. He had to be careful. The angel wasn’t strong; Sobran had mistaken resilience for strength. He said, ‘Don’t mind what happened to me. Don’t be angry. I’m a frail creature with certain crude reflexes.’

  The sun showed over the hills to the east, spines bristling. The vineyard turned gold and began to exhale steam.

  ‘The one awake in the house is either Baptiste or the maid. If Baptiste, then he’ll come out before breakfast to discharge a gun between the rows to frighten the early birds.’

  ‘Then I should fly.’

  ‘There were things I meant to tell you – about Aurora’s illness. And a murder. I never told you about the murders. And about what you just said, I mean, before. I wanted to ask you –’ Sobran stopped speaking, though his mind continued to clutch convulsively at lost time, six years of lost time. It would be another whole year till he saw the angel again. Aline’s murder didn’t matter. He’d kept the others from Xas, for some reason his mind shrank from it, a dread about where what he had seen and not recognised would lead him. He needed someone to command him to think, not shrink, think clearly. But all he was able to do then was pursue what interested and moved him most. He wanted to stand beside the angel in one of those few places in the angel’s past that was illuminated – the rest unimaginable, mysterious, obscure. He asked, ‘When Christ came to Hell to preach, why didn’t you go with him? Did you hide?’