The Winemaker's Wife(4)
“Pack my bags?”
Grandma Edith sighed dramatically as she stood and beckoned Liv toward the bedroom. “Well, come on, then! We are already behind schedule.”
“For what?”
“For our flight.”
Liv just stared at her.
“Enough wallowing, now, Olivia. Our plane leaves in four and a half hours, and you know how security is at JFK.”
“Grandma Edith, what on earth are you talking about?”
“Try to keep up, dear.” Grandma Edith rolled her eyes and drained the rest of her martini. “We are going to Paris, of course.”
three
MAY 1940
INèS
The cellars beneath the Chauveau property were dark, dank, humid. The arched brick walls, carved into soft chalk and limestone, held the wetness in, had done so since Michel’s great-grandfather had begun constructing them seven decades earlier, and because of that, they were the perfect place for champagne bottles to sleep on their way to becoming something great.
Inès knew this because Michel had told her the history of his family’s property when he’d first begun courting her a year and a half ago. His father’s family had been vignerons, winegrowers, since the sixteenth century, but it was only in the early 1800s that they’d begun to toy with the idea of producing their own wine. In nearby Reims and épernay, and even the commune of A?, massive champagne houses were making a fortune, while growers in the small villages still lived like peasants. When Michel’s great-great-grandfather married the daughter of a textile magnate in 1839, there had finally been some money to purchase equipment and supplies.
The business had evolved slowly, and nearly stalled when Michel’s eccentric great-grandfather became obsessed with building a network of caves underneath their property to rival the chalk-carved crayères of the great houses of Reims. The tunnels he had constructed, beginning in the 1870s, were so twisting and complex that during Inès’s first week living at the Maison Chauveau, she’d gotten lost belowground for hours, a terrifying ordeal. Michel hadn’t found her until well after nightfall.
“The tunnels go on for many kilometers and are quite confusing,” he’d told a sobbing Inès as he led her into the evening air. “Don’t worry, darling. You’ll learn.” Of course, Michel knew every centimeter of the maze by heart, had played hide-and-seek in the twisting caverns as a boy, had carved his name into the chalk portions of the walls alongside the names of his ancestors, had huddled there while bombs shredded the earth overhead during the Great War.
But even a year after that first frightening experience, Inès still wasn’t accustomed to the dark stillness, the way the aging bottles crowded the caves like silent little coffins. She hadn’t gotten used to the constant chill, as if the seasons aboveground ceased to exist, and she had never adjusted to the way the wind sometimes howled at the main entrance to the caves, a sound that made her think of the ghosts and wolves of fairy tales.
This was supposed to be a fairy tale, Inès thought with a pang of regret as she paused now to rub her throbbing shoulders. When she’d first met Michel, in November 1938, they’d seemed a perfect match; he had been entranced by her youth and her optimism, and she had been equally moved by his solidity, his wisdom, and his fascinating role in making a champagne that everyone in France knew of. It had all seemed so magical. Who would have thought that a mere seventeen months later, she would be wearing work boots and sliding twenty-kilo cases of wine toward the secret cave Michel’s parents had constructed during the Great War to hide their valuables?
It was an ingenious installation, and the first time Michel had shown it to Inès, just after France had declared war against Hitler’s Germany in September, her jaw had dropped; she never would have guessed there was an enormous storage cave lurking behind what looked like an impenetrable wall. A hidden door swung out from a hinge concealed between bricks, and when it was closed, it looked as if it was part of the decades-old stone and chalk tunnel. There was even a specially ordered Madonna, designed to appear permanent, in front of it, although the statue of the virgin was deceptively easy to move. Inès knew that because she’d had to do so herself earlier that morning in order to access the hiding space, where they’d been slowly concealing bottles for months.
Alone in the caves, her arms and back aching, she felt a chill of foreboding. In January, as they’d lain in bed together one stormy night with the wind lashing the vines outside, Michel had predicted a terrible year for Champagne—a bad harvest, a shadow cast over their whole region. Inès had thought he was just being a pessimist, but now that the Germans were over the border, she wondered if he was, as usual, right about everything. While she respected his intellect, sometimes his inability to err could be stifling. It left no room for Inès to have thoughts or opinions that differed from his.
“Inès? Are you here?” A voice wafted down the narrow stone stairway from the main entrance to the cellars, which was behind a wooden door tucked into a stone wall behind the chateau where Michel and Inès lived. Inès closed her eyes briefly. It was Céline, the wife of Michel’s chef de cave, Theo Laurent. “Michel said you might need some help.”
“Yes, I’m here!” she called back, trying to sound friendly. She scratched her left forearm, a childish habit her mother had tried to break her of, telling her it was unladylike, that the harsh red streaks her fingernails left were unbecoming and juvenile. Still, the nervous tic returned whenever she was on edge. “I’m just headed back to the cave where the last of the twenty-eights are stored.”