The French House by Helen Fripp (ebook reader with highlight function TXT) 📕

time you’ve been saying no, but the only way to beat him is to say yes. Louis’ name is on the contract with shares for this place, I think?’

She nodded.

‘Get your lawyer to dredge up some legal bollocks saying Louis must be given a year to return. That gives you another harvest. If he doesn’t come back, you go into partnership with Moët as agreed. That way, you’ve said yes, you’ve signed one of his bloody pieces of paper and he’s off your case for over a year. Then you wait for a miracle.’ He flicked his chin at the window. ‘You’ve seen them happen year after year out there.’

At home, Nicole poured herself a glass of champagne to steady her nerves. These grapes had grown on the eastern slopes and she could taste the sharp frosts that had come late the year she bottled it, the year that François died. The harvest had been terrible and this batch was all they could salvage. No miracles that year, but she was decided. Xavier’s advice was good. Delay the deal until harvest the following year, 1811. Plant the seeds, nurture the vines, do everything in your power to make things grow, and pray.

Chapter 16

Needs Must

March 1810

Did the smell of shit vary from town to town, like terroir? Nicole pressed a handkerchief to her nose to block plagues, but nothing could disguise the sickly-sweet stench of the open sewer.

Moët had agreed to her terms. If Louis didn’t return by the 1811 harvest in over a year’s time, they would become partners, an eighty–twenty split in his favour. The death certificate was safe until next year, and Xavier was right: Moët just needed a yes from her to keep him quiet for now. That didn’t solve her immediate problems, though. In two weeks’ time she would need to pay the wages, and the supplier invoices were piling up at an alarming rate.

She’d accepted Monsieur Moët’s offer to pay her bottle supplier. He’d insisted, so that when their deal matured and he took over the business next year, he could be sure the bottles were good quality – another yes to reassure him, and one she couldn’t really refuse in her straitened circumstances. It was one bill paid at least.

Nicole fingered her most precious possession in the velvet pouch in her pocket. The last thing of value she had, her gift from François, and the only thing she’d sworn not to sell for the sake of the business. But she had no intention of waiting for Xavier’s miracle. She’d make her own while she still had time.

She focused on the three grubby balls of the pawnbroker sign down the street and pressed on, past the red-cheeked laundry women shaking out their washing and cackling at a private joke, past the men catcalling and playing cards together outside the café. Everyone except her belonged to someone.

The pawnbroker shrugged as she untied the velvet pouch and held up the yellow diamond that was the firefly’s body. Even in the dim light, the sun sliced it into prisms. The last thing François had given her, and the most valuable.

The man picked it up and peered through his loupe, holding it up to the window. Dust swirled in the yellow light of the window. Worn jewellery, silverware and treasures were piled haphazardly in display cases.

He placed the diamond on his scales, counterbalancing it with weights.

Nicole narrowed her eyes. ‘It’s two carats. Those weights are wrong.’

‘Nine hundred francs. Not a sou more, Madame.’

Nicole snatched it off the scale and wrapped it back in the velvet pouch. ‘I do business on honest terms. Weigh it honestly and pay fairly.’

The man shrugged again. ‘I have mouths to feed as, I suspect, do you. It’s up to you.’

He was right, she had mouths to feed – he’d never imagine how many. Hundreds of employees and suppliers queued up in her head, hands outstretched. She unwrapped the necklace and admired it in the palm of her hand, the gold warming to her touch for one last time.

‘Promise I won’t be followed with the cash in my pocket and I’ll take your price. I’d rather be robbed in here than on the streets.’

He didn’t take his eyes off the velvet package. ‘You have my protection, Madame. I guarantee it.’

Nicole counted the cash twice, folded the money into a leather wallet and pushed it deep into her pocket. Enough to buy another year, until Moët’s deadline.

‘Give me six months,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy it back for more than anyone else can pay.’

‘I’d be rich if I had a franc for everyone who says that. I don’t expect we’ll meet again.’

Chapter 17

Luck from the Skies

March 1811

Everyone knew that the first March full moon gave rise to a tide of bubbles and it sent all the vintners rushing to their cellars, including Nicole. Napoléon and his Austrian wife Marie-Louise had at last given birth to a boy, but that didn’t stop his designs on the domination of Europe. His new son was to be crowned King of Rome and rumours of alliances to the advantage or detriment of the nation flew like forest fires around France. The war blighted all of their lives. In Reims, the wine sales that depended on European and Russian trade was still dead.

It was five months since her harvest was successfully brought in, laid down in Moët’s paid-for bottles last October, the 1810 vintage. She had high hopes for that at least. The harvest had been perfect, and after four years, Madame Olivier and Mademoiselle Var had proved invaluable, her own women’s tasting committee. When the men’s tasting committee made sure year after year that the Clicquot blends would be last on their list, giving everyone in the region a competitive advantage over her, she just smiled and wished them well.

One of Nicole’s favourite pastimes was to tell her fellow vintners of her women’s tasting committee and see the barely supressed snorts of derision and hopeless shrugs on