The Vintners Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

  Sobran carried water, bucket by bucket, from the pump, up the stairs. He filled his bath and lifted the angel into it, sat behind Xas with the angel’s head on his shoulder and washed his hair – washed till it was glossy, damp and tangled. He washed Xas’s face and body, once touched the dark meat of the wound. Lastly, Sobran cleaned the angel’s wings with a soapy cloth, wiped them till their fawn tips were only faintly pink.

  Sobran used his last clean sheets to dry the angel, then pushed the bath to the double doors and tilted it to pour the red water slowly into the sand far below the window. He hung the sheets so they screened the window, then carried the angel into the breeze and white filtered sunlight by the double doors. He sat, Xas’s head in his lap, and spread the glistening black hair in the sunlight, where it began to dry, hot across the palms of his hands.

  After eighteen hours the angel’s body was still warm, pliable and perfect. His skin was scarcely less radiant, lacking only that fume of lights and shade that had seemed to animate his body even when he was immobile.

  Near midday Sobran took down the dry sheets and made the bed. He put the angel into it and got himself dressed. For it was Sunday and he was due at Sunday lunch in his own house. The clock chimed quarter past the hour. Xas seemed to be asleep. He looked comical, like a young man sharing his bed with two large dogs, the humps his wings made under the covers. Sobran freed one wing and laid it along the bed, stroked its inanimate softness. Then he ran a finger around the angel’s mouth – as warm and resilient as ever – in a gesture that, when his grandmother performed it on her own mouth, had always meant, for she’d say it, ‘Secrets stay in here.’

  Sobran sat at the head of the table and gazed at his incomplete family. Sophie and Antoine were there, with two of their four sons, and the wife and child of one. Baptiste, the only person to look back at Sobran with any special attention, was at the other end of the table. The table lacked Sabine and her family, who were usually there at feast days; and Céleste, in Chalon-sur-Saône with her eldest daughter and her new baby, Véronique, whom Sobran had not yet troubled himself to meet. Agnès was still absent, on her way back from Spain and Aurora’s pilgrimage. The other children, Martin, young Antoine, Aline, Bernard and Catherine, attended to their food. Sobran met Baptiste’s eyes, but was beyond discomfort – he felt like a decorous guest at his own funeral. For, as he gazed, passed a dish when asked, salted his food, he knew he had to choose. He could feel himself choosing. It was like the sensation of overbalancing, the moment when a person knows they must stop trying to balance and somehow deal with the fall. For a fall would follow this choice.

  He would turn his face to the wall. If he could choose not to use his life then he needn’t use his imagination and imagine how his family would find him, what they would think, how they would feel.

  He tasted his food, then put his fork down and announced, ‘I have to go away on some business.’

  ‘Where, Father?’

  ‘Only to Autun. I think for a fortnight.’

  Baptiste asked would he visit Céleste on the way – which seemed so uncharacteristic that for a moment Sobran was at a loss for an answer till he remembered that Baptiste was under the impression that Sobran had taken a lover.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, pacifying.

  The soup, full of saffron, was the colour of marigolds, and the tomatoes, great globes, were very red. The colour was fine, even Antoine’s dim and Sophie’s ashy skins. Martin’s hair was gold like his mother’s, Baptiste’s the red-brown Sobran’s own had been. The colour made Sobran’s family seem marvellous and unfamiliar, the table a paradise to which he didn’t properly belong.

  The family watched Sobran get up and go out of the room. He came back with a bottle, dusted it on his coat sleeve and began to trim the lead from the cork.

  ‘What is it?’ Antoine asked – then drained off his glass in anticipation.

  ‘It’s the 1806, Jodeau South.’ Sobran poured some out for Sophie, Antoine, their sons and daughter-in-law, then for himself, Baptiste, and Martin – the other children were too young to appreciate it, he said, to which they made obligatory mutterings then went on with their lunch.

  Sobran sipped. The wine’s backward glance was powerful now, and came across the years.

  ‘This was pressed the summer I was sixteen,’ Sobran said to his sister.

  ‘The third to last time South was pressed separately,’ she answered. ‘Father’s best vintage.’

  ‘Which I broached early. It had been in the bottle only a year. I took two bottles of the friand and got drunk one night because your mother –’ he addressed his children, ‘– wasn’t very impressed by my suit.’

  ‘It wasn’t a suit, that’s why she wasn’t impressed,’ Sophie said. ‘But you found your resolve.’

  ‘It was only a flirt,’ Sobran said, ‘the wine. That little backward glance. Back then, it was only a flirt.’

  ‘Now it’s true love,’ said Antoine. ‘So no one tell me off when I run my tongue around the glass.’

  ‘What are we drinking to?’ Baptiste asked.

  ‘To our father.’ Sobran nodded at his sister, who made the toast. ‘To Martin Jodeau, God rest his soul.’

  ‘Oh – I have a little difficulty with that,’ said the young Martin, but complied when his uncle Antoine threatened to relieve him of his glass.

  Aurora returned to the neighbourhood five days later. She stopped first at Clos Jodeau to restore Agnès to her family, and was told that Sobran was away. She had begun to miss him. Her wrath and grief had run their course. But Sobran was in Autun, not handy to her softened attitude.

  The day after her return Aurora decided that, in his absence, she might go and see what Sobran had done with the soldiers’ gallery.

  Mid-morning she made her way from the château’s new (hundred-year-old) west wing, where she lived, past the ancient keep and old ‘new’ wing (it had been called ‘new’ for two hundred years, till the newer new was built) to the sprawl of outbuildings devoted to livestock (the cuverie and cellars were all in the west). These comprised a dovecot, kennel, dairy, stable, saddlery, tack room, grooms’ quarters, coach house and the rooms above these last that had housed Vully’s cavalrymen until the old Comte gave the remainder of them, and funds for their commissions, to the Emperor Napoléon.

  As she walked, looking about her to see if she was watched, Aurora could hear the mother superior of her convent education holding forth on the curiosity and cupidity of ‘the daughters of Eve’. Aurora replied to the remembered voice that it was better she took an interest in her friend’s affairs than forgot him entirely and failed to forgive him.

  In the heat the gravel of the walk seemed to swarm, as if each stone was hatching.

  At the perimeter of the kitchen garden nearest the stables Aurora found that the vegetables had all wilted, almost melted, as though someone had watered them with boiling water. She would look into the matter later. She opened the gate, crossed the yard, then noticed a cat stretched out in the shadow of a horse-trough. She went closer, believing it dead. It lifted its head and looked at her then, exhausted, lay flat again. The cat had one kitten, Aurora saw, perhaps two weeks old, eyes already open, its tail a fluffy wedge. The kitten was asleep with its mouth to a nipple. Aurora recognised the cat as Léon’s, knew Sobran had kept it at Vully since his brother’s death. She squatted to pet the cat, then went on towards the coach house – and walked into a drift of leaves, neither yellow nor brown, but a parched green. Aurora looked up at the trees, their thinning crowns. The withered foliage and vegetables together were too oddly alike. Aurora looked about her, at weeds and moss in the shady crooks of the stone walls – all were limp and dull.

  She hurried into the gloomy interior of the coach house, found the stone staircase up to the soldiers’ gallery, then stopped with her foot on the first stair. Three kittens, two tortoiseshell like their mother and one black, lay huddled and still at the bottom of the stairs. The small peaks of fur on the backs of the necks
of each showed where their mother had held them in her mouth to carry them downstairs and out of danger. All three were dead.

  Aurora ran up the stairs. The door was barred. She was thinking of poison. She hammered on the door and called out, ‘Sobran!’ Then, remembering the wilted garden and trees, she stopped her hammering. For what kind of poison killed both plants and animals?

  She put her ear to the door. Heard nothing but, after a moment, felt the door quiver as the bolt was drawn. When she pushed, the door gave.

  Sobran stood several feet away, clothed but barefoot, his jaw dark with stubble.

  Aurora stepped into the room, seized her friend’s hands and took stock of him. Sobran’s skin was yellowish, his eyes circled, and his breath rank – the wild onion smell of self-starvation. She looked around him and noticed first that the light shining through the open double doors, and whitely on the old oak floor, showed up a litter of – at first she thought – leaves. She saw that it was the bodies of insects – cicadas and bees, flies and moths. In the breeze that blew through the room and swept a clear, swerving path from the window to the hearth, the insect bodies tumbled and hissed.

  It was the angel, on the bed, the cause of all the death and depletion. Aurora understood immediately.

  She went closer to the bed to get a better look.

  He was as beautiful as daylight. His beauty was somehow legitimate; it made the many human lovelinesses Aurora had seen seem like tricks of the light. The angel was as strong as daylight too – inexorable – the sun that drains silks of their lustre.

  She asked, ‘How long has he been like this?’

  Sobran took his time answering and spoke like one who hadn’t expected ever to use his voice again. ‘He bled to death.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘A week.’

  Aurora looked at her friend. ‘I don’t know that he’s dead, Sobran.’

  ‘I saw him die. But he won’t decay.’ Sobran sounded exultant and horrified at once.

  Aurora took a step nearer the bed. ‘Everything is dying. I think because he isn’t dead.’ She mustered her courage, put out a finger and touched the angel’s smooth shoulder. ‘He’s still warm.’

  ‘I’ve been holding him.’

  Aurora didn’t try to disguise her fear, or any other feeling. ‘You must not any more, my dear, I think it will kill you to stay here.’

  She darted at Sobran, caught him by the shoulders – for he had moved towards the bed – and held him back. ‘Please, Sobran, tell me. Or don’t tell me – everything or nothing – I don’t care. Just come out of here with me. He isn’t dead – he’s deadly – Léon’s cat carried her litter out, too late, and there are three dead kittens at the foot of the stairs. He is killing everything near him. He is killing you!’ She put her hands on his cheeks, rough slack skin, and turned his face down to her – but his gaze stayed on the angel.

  For a moment she thought of hanging on his neck, considered tears, but she saw how he looked mad, or resolved, or both, and simply let him go.

  Sobran returned to the bed, lay down and embraced the angel.

  Aurora stood over them for perhaps half an hour and emptied out her store of intimacies. She talked about her illness, how fear of it made her flirt with death. She spoke about the morning she walked into the river, sought death without ever experiencing despair. She knew despair when she saw it – but Sobran should remember his loving family, and what Léon’s suicide had done to them when Léon was nowhere near as loved and necessary as he.

  She put her trembling fingertips into his hair, ran its glassy white strands through her hand. She touched his forearm, stroked its pelt of sun-bleached brassy hair. Although she didn’t respect his desire to be on his deathbed, Aurora couldn’t bring herself to rouse Sobran by repeating what Céleste had told her at the spa. It would only sound like malice. Yet Sobran seemed beyond provocation, didn’t look at her or seem to hear her. After a time Aurora stopped speaking and simply regarded them, her friend and that being – who, to preserve its toxic beauty, was using the vitality of others.

  Then Aurora thought of a course of action.

  The Baroness went to find her shepherd. She went out in her barouche to the sheepfold and came back with two ewes trussed by her feet. She had her footmen fit each with a collar and leash – asked very blithely for a few nannies and kids – oh, and could they please be washed? Let them think she was playing at shepherdess, as Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court had.

  Her servants were baffled, but obedient. As a young man Comte Armand had been fond of experiments, the old steward reminded them when they sat at talk over supper in the kitchens. ‘Model farms and what-have-you. And this is better than the time the Baroness’s father and the Comte took to playing with gunpowder. I hope we won’t see any of that again.’

  ‘Maybe the Baroness is keeping a panther,’ one of the footmen said, and was quelled thoroughly by a look.

  Aurora hauled the sheep one at a time up the staircase from the coach house. Their small cloven feet skated awkwardly on the waxed floor. She tethered both animals to the legs of Sobran’s bed.

  When she arrived an hour later with the goats, Sobran sat up.

  ‘The firstlings of my flock and the fat thereof,’ Aurora said in a droll, explanatory way – quoting Genesis on Abel’s offering to God. She was out of breath.

  Sobran stared at her, dull-eyed, then lay down again.

  Aurora struggled upstairs with feed for the sheep and goats, then water, put all within their reach. The sheep were already on their knees, panting, a look of fever in their eyes.

  Aurora went away to rest.

  In the morning, after talking to her maid at breakfast, Aurora went to see for herself the strange, grey-eyed knife-grinder who had turned up before dawn with his donkey, wares and whetstone, and offered to sharpen every blade in the house. The cook and seamstress gave him work, for his feet were blood-blistered inside his shoes and his donkey’s hair was pasted to its hide with sweat. Aurora asked him – as her servants had – how far he had come. He replied that he’d ridden and walked for three days just to get here, hadn’t worked as he travelled, knew he’d make good money at Vully as he had after the harvest every year. And when Aurora told him it was too soon to sharpen, oil, and store the vine knives he just looked at her in incomprehension with eyes that seemed to stare through all the miles he’d come to get there.

  Aurora paid him well, offered to put him up till the harvest was over. Then she went to the coach house.

  All the animals were on their knees, muzzles touching the floor, not starved, but shrunken somehow.

  Sobran was awake and looked at her. He seemed no worse than he had been. So Aurora went to fetch some more sheep. The shepherd wanted to know what she had done with the other two, and said that he’d heard about the goats.

  ‘Do you like your place?’ Aurora asked him.

  He blushed. The Baroness had never before taken his enquiries as insolence. He did as he was told, sent a boy to drive the sheep to the courtyard by the coach house where she wanted them. She sent the boy away. Then she stood a moment and looked about her at each window in every wall that wasn’t blind, the courtyard silent and hot, herself alone, for almost everyone was across the river, harvesting. One by one Aurora herded or hauled the sheep indoors and upstairs.

  At dusk Aurora sat on the stairs outside Sobran’s room, now and then taking a sip from a bottle of port wine. The stairs were foul with sheep droppings. Aurora had cleared a place with her boots, but the stairwell stank.

  The room above was silent: flies arrived periodically, then fell. Aurora heard them come, then freeze in action, heard their stumbling buzzing against the floor, then further silence. The freshest sheep were still breathing. The first lay deflated, dead, tongues like ramps put down from their mouths to let something disembark. They had died comatose, without a struggle. The animals didn’t seem afraid, and Aurora could smell snow – over the sheep shit, and wild onion sten
ch of the animals’ ketotic breath – more powerful than a range of mountains, a scent thick and narcotic, like a whole world of ice.

  Sobran was conscious, unchanged, and Aurora had begun to think that the angel – that pulseless, warm corpse – was somehow making an exception of his friend while his body plundered the life of every other living thing near him.

  As the light turned from bronze to blue Aurora heard dogs begin to bark. From their kennels Vully’s hounds gave cry, several house dogs joining in, and the sheepdogs, all together. They ceased at once also, a moment later, as if clubbed down into whining quiet. Aurora heard the wind. A tide of insect bodies rippled across the floor, then the shit and snow smells crested like a flood breaking a levee, and came out of the door and down the stairs at her, pushed by a powerful aromatic – carnations, or cinnamon apples, something domestic, but with the force of a glacier behind its sweetness. A sensation came with the scent, as though someone were blowing lightly in both Aurora’s ears. She dropped the bottle, which rolled intact to the foot of the stairs. She got up, dizzy, and slowly climbed, the ringing in her ears louder now, like a great steel hoop rolling on its edge.

  Aurora saw the wings when she looked into the room. She thought, for a fraction of a second, that the angel was up, and in the air. The wings were furled, black shot with red, bronze shot with blue, iridescent white, six wings with one body between them, massive, half-armoured, and the armour gleaming with uncut stones in green and iron-black. Aurora saw white flawless skin, several thick ropes of black plaited hair. Her eyes stung, she fell to her knees and put her face against the floor.

  Sobran felt himself separated from Xas. Hands sorted his fingers from his angel’s, prised them apart, rolled him, then lifted him up into the air. He was dropped, then steadied and pushed away by sandalwood-scented wings. He looked up into a face, met a gaze, equitable, grave, terrible. It was like finding himself in the path of a meteor. He staggered, fell, scrambled back and huddled with Aurora.