The French House Helen Fripp (the two towers ebook txt) 📖

happened before. Look at me.’ She pressed her palm to his cheek. It was slick with sweat. ‘The black well again? Despair? You can’t see the bottom?’

‘I feel terrible.’ He tried to muster a smile for her. ‘But I don’t want you to worry. Not tonight.’

‘Go to bed, chéri, you’ll feel better in the morning.’

‘No! We’re going to Moët’s ball or he’ll think it’s sour grapes if we don’t. I’ve promised to play the violin and, anyway, I love showing the world you’re mine.’

Her heart leapt, still, after seven years of marriage. Louis’ letter didn’t mean ruin, just a bad year, like the others.

Nicole went to her study. She’d prove to François how a bad year was quickly followed by a good one, maybe two, then back the other way again. She unlocked the drawer and pulled out the ledger. He couldn’t argue with the black and red ink. Here, neatly in the thick pages of profit and loss was the cycle of hope and ruin they had faced since the day they had married. She preferred to contemplate it like this. Dispassionate, neatly added up and taken away. No pain, no dashed hopes, just ink on paper.

She looked back to five years ago. Bottles ruined in the heat: twenty thousand. Losses: thirty thousand francs. Bottles shipped: thirty-five thousand two hundred. Labourers paid: two thousand francs.

The figures didn’t show the months spent tending the vines, digging the earth, tying the shoots to poles, the blending, nothing of the workers looking for portents in the stars, praying to the harvest saint.

She turned a couple of pages: 1802. The Treaty of Amiens. Peace with Britain and an opening up of the trade routes again. She, Louis and François had leapt to the violin, loaded their best samples of 1800 vintage champagne into a trunk for Louis and sent him off to London. It was another disaster. Moët had a stranglehold on the market, strutting around all the grand houses, hiding his support for the overthrow of the French aristocracy, playing cards, dancing their mannered dances, shooting a hundred-weight of unsuspecting pheasants out of the sky, handing out phials of his wines.

‘It’s a closed world,’ Louis had complained. ‘They’re terrified of the revolution and they look at me like I’m a criminal.’

That summer, like this one, the sun would not leave them alone. While her sister idled in the sultry heat, boating on the Vesle River with her friends, she and François watched the grapes shrivel on the vines. She had cursed the sun and closed the shutters in the house, dreaming of foggy mornings and dewy grapes.

She ran her finger down the ledger. Last April was the beginning of their current disaster: seventy-five thousand bottles had set off, bound for Russia. More than their entire sales for 1804. She left the next entry clear to see how things turned out. It could easily come right yet.

François peered round the door. ‘Mugging up in your study again, Babouchette?’ He kissed her head and she leant back into his arms, hastily putting her hand over the numbers in the red deficit column.

‘Come and get ready,’ said François. ‘We can’t change anything, however hard you stare at the figures. I have something for you. And don’t worry about Mentine, she’s already tucked up in bed. She fell asleep while I told her a story about a young girl with strawberry curls who defied a man with a gun, right here in the cathedral square during the revolution.’ He kissed her. ‘Mentine always look so sublimely peaceful asleep.’

His about-turn of mood filled her with optimism. Why not start right now?

‘Give me ten minutes, I’ll be up!’ she breathed through his kisses.

She hurried outside and across to the press, filled a box with sand and picked four bottles of champagne that were in second fermentation.

‘Don’t touch those ones, they’re nearly ready and you’ll dislodge the sediment!’ scolded Antoine.

‘We can spare them, and I’ll bet two of them will be cloudy however careful you’ve been,’ she countered, feeling giddy as a schoolgirl.

Antoine tutted and returned to his work, shaking the bottles one by one and replacing them in the sand.

Nicole spirited her bottles away to a dark corner in the basement of the house and carefully placed them upside down in the sandbox, stood back and brushed the sand off her hands. This would be her secret – she had no idea how, but she would do it. No matter that a resolution had eluded champagne producers down the ages; she planned to observe, learn, experiment and start again, for François. If she could solve the sediment problem, shorten the time it took to slowly turn and shake the bottles to coax the sediment to the neck of the bottle – riddling, Antoine called it – and make sure every bottle was reliably clear in a shorter time, François would never need to worry again. She imagined his delight at her clever idea, locked the door behind her and ran upstairs to join him.

François was waiting for her, smiling. ‘Your cheeks are flushed, you’ve been running. Is this one of your schemes? Sit down for a minute and close your eyes, Babouchette.’

She sat on the bed, closed her eyes tight and felt a heavy package and the rustle of wrapping drop onto her hands.

‘Now open them.’

François was himself again, ready for the ball, unruly hair tamed for the occasion, a striking, long-limbed figure in his embroidered coat and slim trousers. More handsome than ever, she thought proudly.

Thick paper printed in gold and blue hid the contents of the parcel from her. She tore it open to reveal a red velvet dress, and a box. She picked up the dress first and held it up against her.

‘As beautiful as the day I met you. I bought it for you to wear in Russia, but you might as well wear it tonight. Put it on, then open the box.’

She slipped it on. The red velvet was the same colour as