The Vintners Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

  Xas didn’t answer her, so she changed tack. ‘When I had recovered from my surgery, when I could be touched –’ she touched her chest, not now padded by her prosthetic corset, for she had come out in her nightdress and an old greatcoat of Paul’s – ‘the Baron wanted to resume relations. He was at pains to reassure me that I was still beautiful to him. But I didn’t want him to find me beautiful – it was like an insult to my loss.’

  ‘You think I imagine I’m ugly?’

  Aurora opened her mouth to say that wasn’t what she’d said – but then thought that she didn’t need to be understood, she just wanted him to talk to her. His imperfect comprehension made her feel protective – for inside his smooth cocoon of grief this ancient, intelligent being wasn’t thinking right.

  Xas said, ‘I don’t want him to touch me. The touching was a mistake. I should have stayed chaste. I shouldn’t have gone to Heaven unchaste.’

  Aurora nodded. ‘Perhaps. God didn’t save you – true – except that you’re alive. But it was Lucifer who cut off your wings and I don’t think that had anything to do with rules about chastity. I told you what he said to Sobran: “You can keep him. He’ll always have to wear a shirt, but you can keep him.”’

  Xas’s hands crept up from under the edge of the blanket and covered his own ears. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Yes. I see.’

  ‘Who wounded you?’

  ‘Michael. He warned me before about trespassing.’

  ‘I think Lucifer spoke to God about you – when he was standing here, where we are sitting. God answered him by all the leaves falling from these trees. Or, at least, I think that’s what happened. That’s what Sobran told me. Lucifer shut those doors and came back angry and cut off your wings. Do you think he acted on instructions, or to spite God?’

  Xas shook his head.

  ‘Don’t you have any idea?’

  ‘I was sure they both loved me.’

  Aurora, fishing for information, ventured an opinion. Since the God who made the world had a plan, Xas’s punishment must be part of that plan.

  Xas said, ‘God didn’t make the world.’

  ‘I’ve tried to make my peace with my idea of God – but I’m always using my imagination,’ Aurora said. ‘Besides, I prefer facts to faith, I always have. When I was an atheist I didn’t have faith in God’s non-existence – I knew it, it was a fact to me. But then I suppose I was trying to imagine my creator, not some almighty plagiarist, someone who puts His name on another’s work, or nature’s work. Lucifer scared me half to death with his six wings and terrible gaze, but there were several times when he looked into my eyes as though I was real and we were somehow equal – equally miserably there – and he knew I was making some sense of his actions.’

  Aurora listened to Sobran use Lucifer’s words. ‘I didn’t let him know I wanted to keep him. He won’t come back.’

  The sun was up. The night of the 27th of June had passed, and the darkness of the morning of the 28th. Aurora saw Baptiste and Martin Jodeau come out of the house with their guns. The young men were dressed in the leather hunting coats they wore to keep gunpowder from their clothes. They began up the slope. A maid opened the curtains in one upstairs bedroom.

  ‘Did I tell you what I did to him?’

  ‘You told me you threw him out the window.’

  ‘Worse than that.’

  Sobran had come in one evening after a day balancing the books. He was tired of the winter, of his work, and his fingertips were dry from paperwork and shrunk against the bone. He was tired of his anger, more angry now than ever, and out of patience. There was Xas, bundled up by the open double doors. The room was cold, the one other window filmed with frost on the inside. Sobran strode over to the angel, took the blanket by one corner and pulled so that the angel sprawled and lay for a moment looking faintly surprised and very grubby, his clothes muddy, and hair matted. Sobran began to shout at him, then to kick, then fell on his knees to work with his fists. Xas presented no guard, his face pushed and turned by each blow but showing no sign of damage. Then the man picked the angel up by his armpits and pushed him out the window. He saw Xas fall, rolled up, as light as a spider, then uncoil in the snow and raise his face. Sobran slammed the doors, bolted them and leaned, saying perhaps, ‘Go away. Get out of my sight.’

  ‘I’ll never see him again.’ Sobran mourned. Aurora cradled his head against her shoulder. She looked up as Martin and Baptiste came into sight again out of the switchback of the slope. They stopped and stared. She heard Baptiste say to his younger brother, ‘Leave this to me. You go on.’

  Baptiste stood above them, then, leaning his gun against the boundary marker, he crouched beside them. ‘Baroness. Father. It’s that anniversary.’ He looked unconvinced. Aurora knew what he was thinking – how could his father confine guilt or grief so neatly to one night a year. ‘He told me about the Russian woman and Austrian infantryman,’ Baptiste said to Aurora. ‘But, Baroness, I must say I’m surprised to find you here.’

  ‘Why? Considering all the conjecture about me and your father over the last ten years.’

  Baptiste said, spiteful, ‘But you were on your pilgrimage to Compostela when I discovered a woman in Father’s room.’

  Sobran laughed at that, told Aurora, who had turned to him in indignation, that he’d told Baptiste, through a closed door, that he had a guest. Baptiste hadn’t ‘discovered’ anything.

  ‘Oh,’ Aurora said.

  ‘I’m sick of this,’ Baptiste said. ‘I worry about you, Father. You’re not always strong.’

  Sobran got up, shook himself, set his clothes in order then gave Aurora his hand and helped her to her feet. ‘It’s all over now,’ he told his son, and patted his shoulder in a reassuring way. When he offered Aurora his arm she waved him on down the hill and said, ‘Baptiste will escort me to my horse – I’ve not kept the coachman out this year.’

  Baptiste blushed. She held out her arm and he was obliged to take it. He left his gun and they started down the slope to the road.

  ‘Careful,’ Sobran called after them.

  ‘He means I should keep my mouth shut,’ she said.

  ‘Baroness –’

  ‘Shhh. You want to know everything but are appalled by what you already know. How Antoine Laudel and I hid here once to spy on your father. How I walked into the river. You know all that.’ She sighed. ‘I’m not going to tell you everything. Your father has his secrets.’

  ‘Was it a man in his room?’

  Aurora paused a beat, then said, ‘No.’

  ‘Who is she then? And what can it have to do with the dead sheep and goats?’

  ‘Nothing. The animals died as the result of an experiment.’

  Baptiste was outraged. ‘What kind of experiment?’

  ‘A scientific experiment.’

  ‘Splendid! You and Father conduct scientific experiments. He has a mistress who no one has ever seen. He does penance one night each year for a twenty-five-year-old murder – he says. Now you’ve joined him.’

  ‘It was my experiment, Baptiste. Your father was in Autun. When he returned he helped me clean up.’

  Poor Baptiste – he must think every woman a creature of sweet surfaces covering rank lunacy. He let go of her arm. ‘I won’t stay here and run his vineyard. I won’t watch this – Paul and Agnès will walk up to the altar on a path of flowers strewn over who-knows-what pits of sin and madness. You are all mad.’

  ‘Well then, you should certainly go somewhere else to find a wife,’ Aurora said, in a tone of great reasonableness – mischief on her part, but she couldn’t help herself, he was so like his father, haughty, excitable, distressed. ‘Come now, dear, bring me to my horse.’

  After a minute in which all he did was glare and grind his teeth Baptiste took her arm again. He opened the iron gate in the wall of the clos and they went through.

  ‘Your father has a broken heart, Baptiste.’

  He let out a l
oud nasal breath but refrained from comment.

  ‘And if he’s right that it’s all over, then there isn’t any need for you to know more. You have to consider that, although you’ve been ready to share his trouble for years now, he’s still in the habit of thinking of you as a child – who mustn’t be troubled.’

  ‘So it was never you – pardon, Baroness, but it made sense.’

  ‘It does make sense. I love your father. But I can’t compete.’

  They reached her horse, tethered to an apple tree that grew against the wall.

  ‘What about now? If “it’s all over”?’ Baptiste asked, and to avoid her eyes he stooped and made a stirrup with his hands.

  ‘I’m a married woman.’

  Baptiste boosted her into the saddle. ‘I forget that.’

  ‘So do I.’ She smiled at him. ‘Dear – I’ll look after your father. You should go and seek your fortune. Shall I send you to Paris on business? Shall I foist you on Paul? Would you like that?’

  Baptiste nodded, the colour gone from his face. It wasn’t any one thing she had said, he was just worn out by the conversation. He was forward – just like his father – but hadn’t Sobran’s nerve.

  ‘He won’t – hang himself, will he?’ Baptiste asked.

  ‘Oh, I can see that – Sobran charging wrathfully into Hell. No, he wouldn’t take his own life. I think despair has had its moment with both of us.’

  The horse was dancing and Baptiste moved back. ‘That animal isn’t sufficiently gentle for you, Baroness.’ He was gallantly disapproving – trying for some reason to get the upper hand.

  ‘Child – I am not an old woman. I’m the same age as the century and my father was a cavalryman.’ With that she rode off.

  1837 Casse (an unhealthy haze or deposit in wines)

  A year of blankness. Nature was an engine, the vines, unattended by the vintner, grew flowers, fruit, thicker shade. Sobran was tired all day, every day, and irritably wakeful all night. When Paul asked to press the grapes of the south slope, Sobran was lockjawed and unresponsive. Letters went unanswered – Baptiste’s from Paris, Aurora’s and Agnès’s from Dijon.

  On their anniversary Sobran took out what he had hidden, the wings, still fresh and supple. From them Sobran made, on his bed, a bier or boat in which he lay and – somehow – caught the tide of grief and sailed away from his blankness. Day by day, week by week, the pains and itches, taste and warmth of the world came back at his eyes, into his ears, and against his skin.

  1838 Buvable (drinkable)

  On the morning of the 27th of June Paul de Valday married Agnès Jodeau in the Chapel at Vully. The marriage was conducted with great, high ceremony. Afterwards the bride removed her veil – Brussels lace, fifteen feet in length and fifty years of age – and went out to the celebrations, the trestle tables on the terrace in front of the château. All the well-to-do peasant families of the pays were at the feast – the Laudels, Lizets, Wateaus, Pelets, Garveys, Tipoux. Among these were some who had done a little better, climbed a little higher, like Sabine and her vintner from Chalon-sur-Saône. Here were Paul’s aristocratic godparents, the old Comte’s surviving cousins, Paul’s Parisian friends, some of Agnès’s schoolmates from the convent at Autun. The bride was a bit too thin for her dress – nerves, of course. The groom seemed rather limp, but pleased. The bride’s mother was dazzling with happiness.

  The bride’s father kept close to the groom’s mother. All the locals were past remarking on this – everyone knew that the Baroness and Sobran Jodeau were the best of friends. And the Baron, Henri Lettelier, seemed to accept this figure on his wife’s far flank as though it was quite natural – a gracious man, all agreed. And, after all, at the high table the usual protocol sorted them all out, sat bride by groom, bride’s father by bride’s mother, groom’s mother by her husband.

  Baptiste leaned around Céleste’s back and whispered in his father’s ear that he, too, was married – he’d beaten Paul to it – and no, he thought parental consent an outdated imposition. Anne was sixteen, a Parisian milliner’s apprentice. Anne had her older sister’s consent. He would bring Anne home before winter came.

  Sobran inclined the other way, towards his daughter. Did Agnès know that Baptiste had wed?

  Her eyes went wide. ‘No!’

  Beyond her, ‘Yes,’ said Paul.

  ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ Aurora, beside Paul.

  ‘What? What?’ Paul mimicked, affectionately. ‘Before long she’ll be jabbing me with an ear-trumpet. Mother, there was no good time Baptiste could pick to tell his father he’s married.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me,’ Agnès said. She couldn’t believe it.

  Paul put his mouth to her ear. ‘I don’t approve. But I was waiting for him to introduce the girl to you so that you could form your own opinion.’

  Agnès nodded. They gazed at each other, very pleased with their understanding.

  ‘I look forward to making Anne’s acquaintance,’ Sobran said to Baptiste. Then, ‘Please inform your mother of your good news.’

  *

  After dark Baptiste found his father nursing a glass of brandy and looking from the terrace down the avenue that approached the house, towards the road and along it to the first four folded slopes, one of which was Jodeau.

  ‘Don’t go up there,’ Baptiste said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve come to tell you about Anne.’

  Sobran shrugged. ‘A fine girl, but you were careless. I suppose that’s what you have to say.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t like that. She laughs at me and I like her.’

  ‘That sounds good.’

  A large branch tumbled out of one of the bonfires and the wedding guests shrieked.

  ‘Have Paul and Agnès gone?’

  ‘Yes. But they’re all still toasting at the high table. I think Baron Lettelier and Uncle Antoine are in competition.’

  ‘Antoine always thinks he can hold his drink.’

  Baptiste smiled. He put out a hand when his father shifted his weight and stumbled, but didn’t touch Sobran – who, on the other hand, usually held his drink well, just slowed down.

  ‘One more toast,’ Sobran said, very deliberate, and raised his glass to that distant slope. ‘Here’s to thirty years.’

  After the harvest Jodeau South was pressed separately for the first year since Martin Jodeau died. The grapes were crushed by the great stone presses in the winery at Château Vully, fermented in the vats of the cuverie for six days, Sobran’s older two sons climbing in twice a day to break up the ‘hat’ of pips and skins that formed on the surface of the fermenting juice. After six days the ‘free-run wine’ was put up in the two new barrels named by the vintner and his employer Angel One and Two, names that, within one season, were contracted by other interested parties – Comte Paul, the Baron, the cellarmen – simply to ‘the angels’.

  1839 Delayer (to dilute)

  Paul and Agnès produced a girl, born in Paris and christened Iris. Baptiste’s wife Anne gave birth to a boy, christened Paul.

  Aurora and Sobran became lovers almost by accident, or, at least, she hadn’t foreseen anything that night, the night they sat up late – as they often did, regardless of whether Henri was in Paris or Vully. Aurora and Sobran were having an argument about the newly published Idées napoléoniennes. Aurora’s calves were aching, so she slipped off her shoes and, to interrupt a particularly pompous speech her friend was making, put her stockinged feet in his lap. He stopped talking and stared at her. She grinned. Then they were in each other’s arms. Following this were weeks of discovery, warmth, laughter, natural intimacy, confidences like trapdoors giving way, turn by turn, on hitherto hidden places in their lives, conversations where they lay face to face in his bed in the soldiers’ gallery, her hand under his cheek.

  1840 Pique (a pickled, vinegary wine)

  The days were gone when people would hint, or accuse, or ask them privately to please be careful, or good to each other. They were fr
iends; he had the freedom of her house – though he was never to be seen upstairs in the château. He never came to her. When she came to him, Aurora walked in her night attire through the library doors, down from the terrace and around through the shrubbery, the walled orchard, the kitchen garden, to the courtyard by the coach house. There were sixty servants in her household and she was seen, but her servants thought Aurora and Sobran both deserved better than the spouses they’d chosen – they deserved each other, and were both grandparents, so why trouble to tell. Sure, they both had their demonic side, she with all her books, even the banned Corinne, he with his night walks, strange turns, and their experimenting, the mass grave of sheep and goats in the deep sand by the coach house. And the elaborate secretive orders the cooper had received for the construction of ‘the angels’ – in which, it was rumoured, something had been sealed. Yet the Baroness and M. Jodeau were fine people, in whose service one could prosper. Let them be.

  Besides, inevitably, one widow whispered to another at Easter as Céleste Jodeau went by with her younger children and their nurse – it was on one of those rare occasions when the Jodeau and Laudel women at least deigned to come to church – ‘How like her father’s dead brother that child is,’ pointing a crooked finger at little Véronique. Then the old women looked at each other, eyes wide, having innocently surprised a scandal and an explanation for Léon Jodeau’s suicide. Soon the whole village of Aluze had something new to say behind Sobran’s back. Oh, and be careful of the mad woman herself, don’t let her hear you, or Sophie Laudel, or the Comte and his dear little wife, or that fiery eldest Jodeau son …

  Jules Lizet heard it, though, in the asylum at Autun, and wept in his cell, because Léon Jodeau had loved Aline, and only Aline, whose innocent head he had not broken, he had not, he, Jules, had not …

  1841 Grume (a single grape berry)