The French House by Helen Fripp (english readers TXT) 📗

‘I saw everything. I hope that fucker the Comte burns in hell. Follow me before you get yourself into more trouble – the whole town has gone mad, including you. You could’ve been killed,’ he said proudly. ‘I know a place to hide you away.’

They ran down a back alley and slipped through a hole in the fence into a yard full of wine barrels. Xavier heaved aside a stack of hay bales and lifted a cellar door.

‘Vas-y.’ Xavier gestured to dark steps. ‘Get in, and stay there. I’ll find your papa and tell him where you are.’ He thrust a lantern into her hands. ‘Don’t light this ’til you’ve bolted the door behind you. And don’t look like such a sissy, I thought you told me you weren’t afraid of anything. Go right down inside, we’ll come back and find you when it’s safe.’

Xavier winked, but he looked afraid, too.

She hesitated. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m not a little rich girl, I’m one of them, which works in my favour for once. Go on then, close the fucking door so I can get the hell out of here,’ he said.

Nicole plunged into the darkness and bolted the trapdoor behind her. Her hands were slick with sweat and her stomach pitched as she fumbled to light the lamp. The flame jumped and lit the steep cellar steps, but she couldn’t see to the bottom and it was dark and silent as a tomb. She held her breath. Xavier had never let her down. There was the time she got stuck in the apple tree trying to prove she could climb higher than any boy and he helped her down. And the incident with the farmer where she had to hide for hours when she got caught driving his horse cart round the orchard. Xavier had returned, as promised, to tell her when the coast was clear.

She held the lantern higher and struck out down the stone steps. At the bottom was a long corridor. She waited, alert for footsteps. Nothing but muffled silence. She pressed on down another corridor, and turned again, further into the labyrinth, feeling safer with each turn. It was surprisingly warm and the walls were chalk white. She touched them. Damp, like sponge. Lamps lined the walls and she tore her dress to make a spill to light two of them.

The space filled with light and she saw that she was in a wine cellar. It was beautiful here, with rows and rows of neatly stacked bottles, straight passageways and lofty vaulted ceilings. Light funnelled underground through tall chimneys and the wine bottles gleamed, green as the River Vesle. This was a fairy grotto after the horror of the streets, a place of safety, order and alchemy.

Nicole sat on a barrel and closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. It was only now she thought of the terror and injustice she had witnessed. Daniel was dead, murdered like an animal. She belonged to the workers in the square now, and shared their rage, grief and desperation. She spat on her palm, like she’d seen Xavier do to seal a bet, and made a pact with herself, there and then, for Daniel. She would work to build her own wealth, her own power, and she would use it for good, for her own revolution.

Chapter 2

The Crimson Grape

Eight years later, September 1797

Republican date: Fructidor, year V

Everything changed, and nothing had changed. Europe was at war and all the talk was of a brilliant young general, Napoléon Bonaparte, who was advancing his battalions against Italy with great success. It was hard to imagine marauding armies in the Reims countryside, and apart from Monsieur Moët boasting about his schooldays with the great general, and heated exchanges of news in the bakery, it all seemed far away to Nicole. The Comte d’Etoges, who had shot Daniel dead almost in the spot she was standing, was dead himself, slaughtered at the guillotine. Nicole crossed herself at the thought. Xavier had been right about that gruesome invention. Many lives had been lost and turned upside down since the day, eight years ago, that the revolution had begun, and she had taken refuge in the cellars.

The days and years had different and incomprehensible names now. The republican state had restarted the calendar to the beginning of the republic, and renamed everything so no royalist or religious references were made. There was no more October or November, but instead Latin or made-up names that reflected the weather of that particular month – Brumaire, ‘mist’, or Frimaire, ‘frost’. Everyone was in a muddle with it, never mind the illiterate workers who’d always learnt everything from previous generations. The old cathedral with its gargoyles and filigree stone was now the people’s Temple of Reason, but people still worshipped their old Christian God in secret.

Nicole crossed the square, past the boys who were crowded around the new statue of the Goddess of Reason to smoke and make owl calls. The Goddess of Reason was really Saint Joan of Arc on her horse, but no one dared say it out loud. The boys stubbed out their cigarettes on the horse’s hooves and sauntered off to the waiting carts to join the rest of the town for the grape harvest and, in that, life in Reims continued as it always had.

Not for her, though. Until recently, everyone had just accepted her as an anomaly, a rebellious child who loved being outdoors and doing everything at a million miles an hour, whether she was galloping a horse at breakneck speed, or pitting her wits with the boys in their games in the square. She wished she could join them now and ride out on the cart to the vineyards, but Nicole’s presence was required at home. Life at nineteen was a tedious parade of potential husbands, expectations of womanly submission and hand-wringing parents. Worse, her straight, slippery hair was pinned against its will into curls every day which took hours, and Maman insisted