The Champagne Queen (The Century Trilogy Book 2) (18 page)

He staggered a little. It was so far to the nurses’ station. Leaning against the wall, he waited for the dizziness to pass. Damn it, if only the shooting pain in his head would pass, too!

Why didn’t anyone come to ask how he was? The nurses were probably off in some corner, drinking coffee or wine. The brunette with the facial hair always smelled of alcohol. And the young, blond night nurse, she had her eye on the senior doctor, guaranteed!

Two more doors, and he would have made it. A nurse had to be there. One step after another. Hadn’t he said the same thing to Isabelle that afternoon?

The next moment, he collapsed to the floor, dead.

Chapter Nineteen

Early August 1898

“I brought you soup. Eat, before the skin falls off your bones!” Ghislaine held the soup bowl so close to Isabelle’s mouth that she had to obey. Isabelle was silent as she slowly spooned up the soup, and Ghislaine stood and watched her, just as silent as Isabelle. But it was not the amicable silence of good friends; it was the silence—at least from Ghislaine’s side—of helplessness.

“He’s been dead for nearly three months. How much longer are you going to refuse to live?” Ghislaine asked after Isabelle finished the bowl of soup. “If anyone can understand the emptiness you feel after such a loss, it’s me. But sooner or later, you are going to have to start filling yourself up again. It doesn’t matter with what—work, with the joy of summer, with new life . . .” As she spoke, Ghislaine rested a hand on her own belly. Unless the signs were false, she was carrying a new life inside her again. “A
bébé
—is there any greater way to honor life?”

Despite all Ghislaine’s words, despite her insistence, Isabelle’s gaze remained as empty as ever.

Ghislaine stood up, shaking her head. “I can see you want to be alone, but I have to tell you one thing before I go: you’re not only making your own life unnecessarily hard, my dear, but our lives, too.” At the door of Isabelle’s bedroom, she turned back. “I can still remember very well how furious I was at you and your husband when old Jacques left you this place. Inheriting something so valuable, just like that! Something that once belonged to my family. I envied you, and I looked at you as intruders. More than anything else, I wanted to see you ruined or gone or dead. And when you arrived and Leon played the greatest sportsman and you went traipsing through the village like a princess, I saw all my prejudices confirmed. You with your pretty dresses, Leon in his cycling clothes—spoiled city folk, that’s what you were!”

Suddenly, Isabelle blinked, and her eyes seemed to focus; for the first time since she had entered Isabelle’s room, Ghislaine had her attention. Was it the doggedness in her voice? Or was it that she was revealing what she normally kept hidden so deeply inside, something she so rarely did?

Driven by some strange inner urge, Ghislaine went on. “But
you
changed my mind. All your husband ever had in his head was his bicycle, but you . . . you rolled up your sleeves and went to work. Whenever I left my house to go to the tavern, I saw you out working in the vineyards or talking with one of Jacques’s men. The vintners told me that you were driving them around the bend with all your questions. You surprised not only me, but also Claude Bertrand, Micheline, Marie, and all the other neighbors. Your devotion to this place, your eagerness to work—even Daniel saw it. Slowly, slowly, we began to get used to the idea that the estate was in good hands, in
your
good hands. And now?” Ghislaine looked at Isabelle accusingly. “Now you’re letting yourself down as well as everyone who trusted you!”

“Isabelle, please, you have to get up!” Micheline Guenin hurried from the bed to the window and pulled back the curtains. “The sun is shining! It’s a glorious day! You could sit out on the terrace before it gets too hot and look out at the vineyards. The roses are all in bloom. You were so looking forward to them blooming, and now you’re not even seeing it.” When Isabelle didn’t answer, Micheline continued. “We . . . could go to the cemetery together. Whenever I visit my brother Albert, I go over to your husband’s grave, too, and put some flowers in his vase. But wouldn’t it be nice to visit him yourself?”

Isabelle glanced at Micheline with impassive eyes.

“Well . . . maybe visiting the grave is still too painful for you,” said Micheline with a sigh. “But let’s take a stroll through the vineyards, at least! It would amaze you how the grapes have come on. Those pinheads have turned into little marbles, now, and they’ll be ripening before you know it.” When Isabelle still didn’t react, Micheline babbled on. “I actually tried one of the grapes yesterday, though you’d think I’d know better by now, wouldn’t you? Even when it’s getting close to harvest time, they still taste terribly sour.” She forced a bit of laughter.

Isabelle stared at her own hands. She noticed her fingernails were getting very long. And they were grooved and had white spots on them. Like the fingernails of a corpse.

“I’ve made some breakfast. Sweet nut bread. And I’ve brought lavender honey from Provence. Try a bite or two. You’re as thin as a leaf these days. Oh, child, what am I supposed to do with you?”

The bedspread. When had it started to smell different? The perfume of the apple flowers from the old tree in the garden was gone. And the sharp smell of their nights of lovemaking. Now the linen smelled of old sweat. Of loneliness. Of nothing ever again being what it once was.

“Claude needs to speak with you urgently. The man is at the end of his tether, Isabelle! It’s quite a lot for him—looking after the animals and the vineyards, too, now that Gustave Grosse has gone to his family in the south. It would be good if you could help, at least a little bit.”

For the first time since Micheline had come into her room, Isabelle looked at her.

“Grosse will be coming back,” Isabelle said with a flat tone. “Until he does, Claude should just do what he thinks best. He’s the overseer, after all.”

“But you’re the boss! There are things that only you can arrange. Claude and I, we’re happy to help, but . . .”

Isabelle closed her eyes and drifted off across her ocean of loneliness.

“A blood vessel ruptured in Monsieur Feininger’s head. No one could have predicted it. And even if we could have, we wouldn’t have been able to stop it from happening. An unforeseeable tragedy. A stroke of fate. Divine providence, madame.”

The doctor’s voice had revealed his shock at Leon’s sudden death, but there was a trace of fatalism there as well. The man knew the limits of human existence, and experience had taught him that fighting those limits made no sense.

That’s when it started. Isabelle had heard the doctor’s words; she had looked into his sympathetic eyes, but she had felt nothing. From one moment to the next, her ability to feel any emotion died off like a plant fed poison instead of water. She felt no sadness, no anger, no hatred for God above. She didn’t cry or scream. She didn’t ask the doctor any questions, didn’t want to hear any details about what happened. Why should she? The doctor was mistaken in thinking this had something to do with her.

Her husband. Dead? The man who had so many plans? The man who had been so happy to hear that he was going to be a father? Impossible. A mistake. Fate could not err so gravely. She closed her heart the way one closes one’s eyes when confronted with an unbearable sight.

She had packed up Leon’s things and was driven home. She sent a telegram to Leon’s parents; by the time she left the post office, she had already forgotten the contents. When the pastor talked with her about the funeral, she had arranged everything as best she could. Leon was to wear his cycling clothes. And the cap he had found in Jacques’s wardrobe and had loved to wear. Flowers? No, she would prefer a few tendrils of grapevine laid atop the casket. But it really made no difference. An error had been made. A nightmare, that’s all it was, and she would soon awaken from it.

Almost everyone in the village had attended the burial service. The members of a cycling club came from Charleville to pay their respects. Leon’s mother had come, too, and she stood silent and trembling beside Isabelle. No one could say which of them was the more pitiable, the dead man’s mother or his widow.

An air of melancholy settled over all those gathered. It no longer mattered that the residents of Hautvillers had viewed the redheaded
l’Allemande
and her husband with mistrust. That many of them had ridiculed Leon’s passion for cycling. That some had been angry to see Jacques Feininger’s inheritance end up in the “wrong” hands. In times of need, the people of Champagne stood as one. And as a widow, Isabelle Feininger was in need.

Isabelle had stood at the grave with her face as white as the chalk of the region. She listened to words of consolation, or at least pretended to listen. Many of those at the funeral, among them Raymond Dupont, handed her an envelope. Micheline explained that they contained small donations to help offset the expense of the funeral.

The chairman of the cycling club from Charleville also pressed an envelope into Isabelle’s hand and said, “Leon Feininger was greatly admired by all of us. The cycling world will be much poorer without him. If you ever need our help, just let us know.”

Isabelle, who had not even known that Leon was attached to a cycling club, thanked him kindly.

Now and then, she spoke a few words with some of the visitors, sometimes even smiling, but she had let their compassion roll off her. Accepting it would have meant letting her emotions show, and that would have hurt too much. Only once did she wake briefly from her lethargy. When she saw Ghislaine standing off to the side of the crowd, she went over to her and said, “Now we have both lost what we loved the most.”

Ghislaine had nodded, and Isabelle took some solace from that silent gesture.

Micheline was at the door, receiving a courier’s delivery, when Henriette Trubert’s coach drove up.

Henriette pointed to the bouquet of colorful gladiolas in Micheline’s arms, as if to inquire about them.

“From Raymond Dupont. Flowers, pralines, cookies—he’s trying everything to cheer the widow up,” Micheline said.

“I had no idea they knew each other so well,” Henriette said. “Well, I’d also like to cheer her up a little!” she added, and lifted the cloth that covered the basket she carried. “Almond cake, the best around.”

Micheline knew that the cake was no more than a feint, and that Henriette had far more in mind than the well-being of the young widow. But she had no choice, so she showed the vintner inside.

Even as a young woman, Henriette had never been innocent. As the attractive daughter of a successful businessman, she had been idolized by every young man for miles, whereas no one had much interest in quiet, shy Micheline. They had always been worlds apart, and that had not changed as they got older. It was not that Micheline abhorred the other woman’s business acumen. On the contrary, Henriette followed a long tradition of female
Champenois
. But what angered Micheline beyond all else was the brazenness with which Henriette sought to expand her holdings. An illness here, a death there, and along came Henriette with her checkbook in her hand, ready to snap up a cellarage, a vineyard, a press. But most important of all was land, land, land . . .

Since Leon Feininger’s death, the vintner had come by almost every week. Every time, she murmured a few sympathetic words in Isabelle’s ear, then renewed her offer to buy the Feininger estate. The first few times, Micheline had sat beside Isabelle like a mother hen, protecting her. It was unthinkable that Isabelle, blind and confused in her grief, might simply sign Henriette’s contract! But once it became clear to her that Isabelle reacted to Henriette’s purrings exactly as she did to Micheline’s own words, she decided it was no longer necessary to watch over her.

“So how is she? Still no sign of improvement?” Henriette asked with a nod toward the top floor.

Micheline shook her head, but said nothing.

Henriette did the same, but for other reasons. From her, the gesture signaled disgust, incomprehension, and more. “If you really cared for her, you’d get her to sell! Madame Feininger would be a wealthy woman, beholden to no one. She could go to the Côte d’Azur or wherever she wanted and wallow in her grief to the end of her days. And who knows”—Henriette let out a shrill laugh—“maybe she’ll get married again, maybe to a rich widower?
L’Allemande
won’t find any more happiness here in Champagne. We both know that that sorry little pile lying up there doesn’t have the spine to get out of bed and lead this estate again! It looks to me as if the wood the Germans are carved from isn’t as hard as they say, after all.”

“Can you believe Henriette came again today?” Micheline said to Claude a short time later, while the overseer curried one of the horses out in the stable. “I told her to keep her conniving nose out of other people’s business, the cow! It’s outrageous how persistent she is.”

Claude nodded. “She came nosing around here, too, saying I should try to talk Madame Feininger into selling. She says there’ll always be a good job waiting for me with her.”

Micheline looked at the overseer skeptically. “And what did you tell her?”

Claude shrugged. “Nothing. I haven’t seen madame for weeks now.” He lowered the currycomb and looked past Micheline, out of the stable window. “Sometimes I wonder if Madame Feininger wouldn’t truly be better off if she sold. Madame is letting her grief eat her away, and the place is slowly falling apart.”

Micheline could see that Claude felt at least as helpless as she did. With a sigh, she said, “You’re right. Isabelle is disappearing. Whenever I take her something to eat, she turns away. Apart from the bowl of soup that Ghislaine brings her every evening, she eats almost nothing. And she should be eating for two!” Micheline sat down on one of the bales of straw stacked along the stable wall. “Does my food taste worse than Ghislaine’s?” she asked, sounding rather put out.