“No.”
“No Wi-Fi? Really? Surprising.”
“No—you’re not goin’ to the estate.”
Ellie rocked back on her heels, sobered by the finality in his tone. While the reasoning was unclear, the look of determination in his face was not. She wasn’t getting an invitation, regardless of her purported reservation status—the same status she’d already paid for.
Ellie folded her arms over her chest and leveled her glare, challenging him with what she hoped was a look as stubborn as his.
“Sir, I’ve paid an advance deposit for two weeks—more, if necessary. My credit card has already been charged. Now, I may not need to stay the duration of the booking; it just depends on how long it takes to find what I’m looking for. But I’d prefer to speak to the owner before I make a decision.”
“What could you be lookin’ for out here?”
“Presently? The estate house where you work. I paid extra for a vineyard staff member to show me the Loire Valley, so I’ll leave the rest to my tour guide. If I could just get access to my e-mail, I could confirm it for you.”
“Sorry. Not able to help.” He rolled the truck forward, adding inches. “If you please, then.”
Maybe he was a looker not two minutes ago. But the Irishman had developed a bit of a surly smirk for no apparent reason. Ellie made the command decision that one moody local wasn’t going to put a damper on the trip, just because he’d decided to wake up on the wrong side of the vineyard that morning. It didn’t matter if it was two kilometers more or two hundred—she’d come this far, and she was going the rest of the way.
“Fine. Thank you for your time.” Ellie dipped her head in a polite nod. “I can always go knocking on doors up the hill. Maybe they can help me find this Titus Vivay.”
The truck engine cut off with an abrupt, coughing jolt.
If the poor auto had finally died on that last sputter, the man might be regretting the clipped edge to his conversational skills. Ellie may not know much about the metric system, but a couple kilometers’ walk was bound to be far enough to be a nuisance, especially when he wanted to be on his way. But no way was he in line to receive a ride after the cool reception he’d just dished out.
Ellie turned on the sound of the driver’s-side door creaking open.
He’d stepped out, then clicked the door closed behind him. Odd, but he wasn’t boorish as she might have expected. Instead, he took a few steps toward her but stopped still a healthy distance away, then looked down on her with an amiable attitude once again in place.
Something flashed in his eyes. Narrowed, but with a softer crinkle between the brows. Was it . . . concern? She wasn’t sure what to make of that.
“I’m sorry—what name did you say?”
“My reservation was made with the estate owner, a Mr. Titus Vivay. Why?”
“Judas!” He slapped a palm against his leg, then turned to stare out over the fields with his hands braced on his hips. He hung his head, shaking it back and forth. “That’s what I thought you said.”
“Is . . . that a problem?”
“It is when the man has been fightin’ any form of modern technology for the last sixty years and only now decides to use a computer just so he can defy me. And my own grandmother helped him. What makes him think he can just rent out rooms in our house?” He exhaled low, as if frustration had mounted to tipping. “I’ll kill him. No—first he’s goin’ to make this season’s wine, then I’ll kill him. Or at the very least, break his laptop so he’ll stop invitin’ strangers to set up housekeeping under our roof.”
“Your roof?” The barb struck her then. “Hey, what kind of stranger do you think I am, anyway?”
“You’re American.”
She shifted onto a cocked hip. “Meaning?”
“That’s quite enough chancer for this morning.”
Chancer? Ellie made a mental note to research the term as soon as she had Wi-Fi access. It didn’t sound favorable in the least, and she wanted to be on his level if she needed to dole out a zinging comeback later.
He turned back around, greeting her with irritation flashing in those eyes of his. “And yes. It’s my roof. Or ours. The family’s home. And he probably used my laptop too. The one he didn’t care to turn on to update the books in the last two years, as fate would have it. But that’s beside the point. We have a harvest to bring in. You can see the fields, yeah? That’s fog. That means it’s cold. Another week of this and there’ll be frost, and then we can kiss the melon harvest good-bye.”
“Melons?”
He sighed. “Not melons. Melon de Bourgogne—white grapes. But it would be an entire label lost for the year and I’m not going to let that happen, no matter what harebrained scheme my grandfather finds himself a part of. We don’t have guests durin’ the harvest. Period.”
That didn’t make sense. “But I read somewhere that vineyards do take in tourists and pay them to hand-cut the grapes. It stands to reason that you would need help instead of turning it away at harvesttime.”
“I’m not interested in what all the other wineries are doin’.”
The man’s temper hadn’t truly flared—just his frustration at the surprise of a reservation at an inopportune time. That was something Ellie could at least try to understand. But flying thousands of miles and trekking through tourist towns with only a rental car, a guidebook, and some inherited grit meant she wasn’t backing down either. Not when she had her grandmother’s photo in her pocket, an abandoned castle to find, and precious time ticking away with each passing hour.
“He’s your grandfather, this Titus?”
The man ran a hand through his hair on a half eye roll to the sky. “Yeah, heaven help me. He is.”
“And he lives at the estate house, does he?”
“Until he finds a way to displace the lot of us. But for the moment, yeah. He’s there.”
“Good.” Ellie marched over to her car and tossed the map on the passenger seat. Followed by her phone. She got in and poked her head back out, calling over her shoulder, “Since you speak English, I might need you to translate to work this out. So if you please, kindly show me to the estate. I’ve had a rough night in town and a long drive already this morning, and that’s all before I’ve had any coffee. What I’d like is just a bit of perspective and a lot of caffeine. And hospitality, if you can manage it. Then I’ll retire to my room and be out of both your and your grandfather’s way.”
“It’s Quinn Foley. Not Vivay—grandfather on my mother’s side. But you’re in luck, miss.” He motioned around a bend in the road, the one that trekked up over a rocky ridge. “He hasn’t gone into town yet this mornin’. So come on. Let’s go get your money back so we can send you packin’.”
SIX
APRIL 22, 1944
LES TROIS-MOUTIERS
LOIRE VALLEY, FRANCE
Gunfire rocketed through the trees.
“Stay down.”
The man wasted no time in issuing the order, just raised his rifle over a fallen tree and scanned the dense thicket as more shots echoed overhead. He’d only just led them out of the chapel and begun a steady trek through the woods when a rapid succession of gunshots had cut through the trees. Several steps later, despite the slight hitch of his limp, he halted and pulled Vi down to her knees in the underbrush beside him.
His demeanor read as straight confidence, enough that she obeyed. But she wasn’t a novice at running from a threat. With what she’d seen, Vi had been war tested long before now. He might have stopped to consider that if she’d been running from guns herself, she knew when to keep her head down and would do it on her own.
“It’s alright.” He shot a glance back at her, just once, then turned back to the direction of the gunfire.
“Why do you say that?” Vi stared ahead. Watching. Adjusting her knee away from a stone bent on cutting into her flesh as they held their positions.
“Because you’re shaking.”
Vi edged back. Blast! She’d
crept up so close behind that she’d fused her nails into the moss-covered log and had pressed up against his back. She relaxed her fingertips. Her hands were shaking on their own, and being so close, he certainly would have felt it.
There went her plan to declare an assertion of courage.
“Well, I consider it a victory that I am not screaming in terror, to tell you the truth,” she whispered back, still scanning the forest for the telltale uniforms of Nazi gray. “I’ll take silent trembling and a cool head over that any day.”
His profile eased into the hint of a smile. “As would I.”
Nature stilled in response to the gunfire. Its usual sounds were replaced by something far more eerie: a melody creeping through the trees.
Music? Surely not.
Vi strained her ears, listening, waiting as notes drifted closer. The ping-ping of high-pitched notes lilted through the trees like a lost music box.
“What is that?” she whispered, seeing no movement against the overgrowth of fern, felled trees, and rocks that covered the forest floor around them.
“A gramophone. The Nazis probably found a stash of wine and are taking their jollies out with target practice on the castle ruins.”
“And they do that often?”
“Not as a rule, no. But we’ve seen it before. Sometimes they look to pick a fight in town. Other times they amuse themselves with whatever they have at their disposal. It’s something to do while they wait.”
That was little explanation. “While they wait for what?”
“The Allies.”
“The Allies?” Vi swallowed hard. “You’re quite sure of that.”
He nodded, his eyes fixed in front of them. “They’re coming. We just don’t know where or when. But it’s a rumor that persists enough to keep the Nazis locked in their posts. So now? We all wait. And pray to God to sustain us.”
A rumor.
Vi nodded. How many in France believed the Allies were coming? And what would happen when the truth finally played out? The intelligence she’d been privy to was more than rumor. More than innuendo she’d heard of Hitler’s military leaders at Château de La Roche-Guyon.
She clutched the messenger bag at her side, instinct eager to keep her secrets close. His attention wasn’t broken by the action though. He appeared not to notice—just pointed a finger over a ridge ahead of them.
“There’s enough cover beyond the hill that we should be able to slip out unseen. It’s something of a good hike, but we’ll be able to get out if we go right now.” He looked down at her shoes and shook his head. Dirt-caked shoes with thick heels probably weren’t what he’d hoped to see. “I hadn’t remembered what you were wearing. With the accent I was half afraid to find a pair of heels on you. But lace-up oxfords are close enough to it. You won’t be able to keep up.”
“I would have given up these heeled stompers a long time ago, had I been given a choice. The old coat and dress too. But war is not a garden party, monsieur. You take what you can and hold on to what you have. I learned that about the same time I started my career in pear stealing.”
That comment garnered a genuine smile from him. “I suppose you do have to make quick getaways in that line of work.”
“If you say we’ll escape Nazis with itchy trigger fingers, then I’m more than ready to make any getaway you’d like. You just might find that in the end, you’re the one who has to keep up with my oxfords.”
Mustered courage in her words was something she used to overshadow the opposite tells of her physical presence. He must have known it because Vi could still feel the slight quiver of her hands. She hid them in busyness, adjusting the bag’s strap over her shoulder instead.
Hunger. Fear. A combination of both—whatever had caused the trembling, he either hadn’t noticed or simply let it go without comment. With one final check over the vantage point to the direction of the castle, he edged forward like he was about to spring.
She stopped short, pulling him back at the elbow. “Wait.”
“What?”
“Your name?” she whispered. “I can’t keep calling you monsieur, and I sure don’t want you calling me English again. I shouldn’t want to keep smacking the sod who’s rendering my aid.”
“For a Brit you sure don’t pull any punches.”
“Aren’t we in the business of survival? Your words. If we’re risking our lives with this run, I’d like to at least be on a first-name basis in case I have to curse you for getting me killed.”
“I’m not sure what good it does to exchange names when we’ll only have to part ways again. It’s safer if we don’t know anything about one another.”
“Safer how?”
He wasn’t ready to elaborate, apparently. Neither was she. So they were at a hefty stalemate in the middle of the woods.
“Julien.”
“Is that your name?”
Again, he didn’t linger in the details.
“You’re English, so . . . Lady. That’s your name while you’re here. Anyone asks, that’s what you reply.”
“That’s fine for the French, but you do realize what Dame is in English? You don’t have to be terribly clever to connect the dots on what that implies.”
She could think of a list of less flattering things to be called, starting with mud-caked pear-stealer. But he’d moved on, pulling his rifle down, preparing to run. Lady it would have to be for now, and she’d pick a fight over propriety later.
“We’ll head northwest. You’ll see a small riverbed after a kilometer or so. There’s only one way over—a stone bridge they like to keep up with random patrolling. We’ll have to cut over in the other direction, along the forest, where it’s shallow enough to wade through. Then across the vineyards to the opposite tree line.”
Vi sighed low. “Is that all?”
“For the moment, it’s enough.” A pair of errant pistol shots pierced the woods. Julien shifted his glance in the direction of the sound. It was followed by the faint echo of laughter somewhere far off, though it only lasted for a few seconds. “Ready, Lady?”
She nodded.
It was then or never—and she’d come too far to accept never.
“Allons-y!” He sent her off with the whispered shout of “Let’s go,” then jumped out on her heels and lapped her to lead the way.
The trek through the woods was faster than she’d imagined, especially since she was in foreign surroundings and Julien didn’t appear exactly surefooted. Still, they angled over rocks and around overgrown thickets, moving at a quick pace.
Twigs poked at her legs. Branches—the scraggly, sharp kind—punished with unyielding snaps as they swept by. Vi ducked and moved each time she felt them reach for her. Best to be nimble or she’d take a limb to the face. She could navigate the rough terrain, though bone weary and hungry as an ox. Running through the woods was her specialty now, as was hiding from hunger. Even death. As long as Julien could keep pace against those things, so could she.
The landscape muddled in a blur of greens and ruddy browns, trees and earth. The ground was soft from spring rains—disastrous if the sole of her oxford caught in the forest floor. She could turn an ankle or worse. Vi picked up her feet as best she could, keeping her gaze locked on Julien’s back, minding her footing even without a sense of direction as to where he was taking them.
The same landscape bled by like a moving picture show until she’d lost sense of anything but trees. Underbrush. The sound of water as they crossed rocks lining the streambed. More earth and sky and running.
Then—gold.
That’s what swept in around them. The overgrowth of the thicket broke open and the vineyards spread out before them, rolling in hills of lush vines, greens and warm golds awash in sunlight piercing rays through the clouds.
“This way.” Julien led them into the vineyard rows, his gait in a steady half run.
Vi had seen the Loire Valley’s grape arbors before, though most she’d passed by had been burned, picked clean, or withered as
casualties of war. They bordered roads, uneven. Bombed out and littered with the carcasses of horses and abandoned wagons and—Lord help her—the occasional crumpled body . . . The remnants of death were left to rot for days, weeks, even months now. It was stark, to have passed by darkness as if unaffected.
But then, in a snap: life again. Vines covered with scores of tiny grape buds, vibrant and green, and young leaves shining under a glaze of morning dew. The view became otherworldly—a mirage of normalcy in their war-ravaged world, with row after cultured row of life flourishing under the warmth of the sun.
Julien didn’t stop, so she didn’t either, not even when her side issued a sharp hitch from the pace. Vi ran with her shoulders drooped but her head up, keeping in step with him as they passed through arbor rows.
The forest landscape was finally revived, creating a thick tree line at the opposite extension of the vineyard. He led them over a rise, taking her hand to help her climb the rocky incline. He released her when the ridge leveled out. An expanse of a stone wall took shape, running behind a humble cottage tucked in the crest of the incline. It was hidden, with lofty trees overhead and a vantage point of the break in the canopy, a perfect view of the long road to the castle below.
Vi stood, taking in a fairy-tale view of castle spires climbing through the trees, grazing the clouds. “What is this place?”
“Old winemaker’s cottage on the estate.” He’d slowed to a walk but kept moving, intent upon getting them under cover. “This way.” Julien pulled a key from his pocket—one of the old, iron kind that rusted in the folds of intricate carvings along the shaft. He turned it in the tiny lock hole in a weathered wood door, then led her inside.
Two steps in, Vi bent over at the knees, still trying to catch her breath. Julien recovered more quickly, gripped his rifle tight in one hand, and clicked the door closed with the other.
Dark fabric blacked out the windows, but a thin veil of sunlight peeked under the door, just enough that Vi could begin to make sense of the cottage layout. It was a single ground-floor room. Stairs snaked up the far wall, looking dangerously aged. There were no other doors that she could plainly see and few furnishings, save for an oversized bookshelf, near empty, that dominated a corner tucked behind the stone fireplace.
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