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

and if you do, I’ll find out – I’ll tell your wife, you’ll lose your job with me and you will never work in Champagne again.’

‘You can’t threaten me,’ he hissed.

‘I just have and you don’t frighten me. Let’s speak as equals. Give it time, Xavier, it will pass. The harvest is in. The vines are black and lifeless, but next year they’ll spring to life again. Everything will seem different. Your wife and son need you. Make up for betraying your wife and putting my entire livelihood – and yours – at risk. I have a way you can make amends.’

‘Spit it out, then.’

‘Stay with me, Xavier. I understand, you are only human, and she is from another world. I will keep my promise to you about a share in the profits and I’ll keep scandal away from you and your wife, but you have to promise me to forget her.’

She explained her plan. He agreed to carry it out to the letter. It was risky, but she was a vintner and everything she did carried risk.

He strode off into the darkness and she walked back to her carriage, exhausted. Even Xavier was prepared to betray her, after all they’d been through together. Moët was right about that much, this business was not for the faint-hearted. The more successful she became, the more enemies she seemed to make. And with so much at stake, she was forced to strategise like a general and double-cross people she’d counted as friends and allies until now. It was a lonely feeling, but she was actually quite good at it when it came to it and it gave her a satisfying sense of powerfulness.

The clock struck the quarter hour. Almost half past nine and she hoped that in another fifteen minutes her fortunes would change.

As she rode back past Thérésa’s house, she told the coach driver to stop. She checked Thérésa’s bedroom window and recognised the shape of Xavier’s cap. He and his friends had always been adept at lock-picking. As a child, she herself had joined them plenty of times in locked barns to eat stolen apples and make dens in the hay.

It was true what they said, the old country ways were always the best – a simple bit of theft in the night.

Chapter 23

The Spoils of War

October 1813

The cathedral clock struck half past and Xavier emerged out of the gloom.

‘Get in, quick!’

He jumped up, Nicole rapped on the window and the carriage lurched forward. He reached inside his jacket and dumped the sack on her lap. It was surprisingly heavy.

She peeped inside. The box was as breath-taking as she remembered and the glut of jewels glowed in the moonlight – more gems than most would see in a lifetime.

‘Worth a bit, that,’ said Xavier.

‘Thank you. And I’m sorry.’

‘Let me out here, sauvage. You’re a braver woman than me, I’ll give you that. I’d rather walk the rest of the way, if you don’t mind. I’m a bloody idiot and I need to walk it off.’

Xavier hunched his jacket around him and disappeared into the shadows and she followed him with her eyes until he was out of sight. Poor Xavier. They had Thérésa’s betrayal in common now, and a little less trust in the people they loved.

She held tight on the sack until she was safely in the bedroom at her house in Bouzy. The jewels shattered the candle flame as she opened the box. Nestled in the blood-red lining, there it was: the cameo given to Thérésa by Tsar Alexander, worth more than all her vineyards put together and enough to hold a powerful woman to ransom.

She admired it, ran her finger over the facets of the diamond, re-read the inscription: in perpetuum. There was a time when she had thought Thérésa’s friendship would last forever, but no more, and a piece of her heart turned to ice. She put the necklace back in the box, hid it under her pillow and got the first full night’s sleep she’d had since the day she gave Jean-Rémy the sack of Pinot vines.

The stagecoach to Paris was on time and she couldn’t wait to be off and escape for a while. You could be anonymous in Paris, especially a widow like her from the countryside. She smiled to herself as the coach passed Moët’s vineyard, the one that abutted her own Verzenay yard. The soil was freshly turned, the previous ancient and fertile Moët vines moved elsewhere and the new Pinot vines she’d given him proudly planted, carefully spaced, each with a pale compost circle of fumure. She held tighter onto the leather bag containing Thérésa’s necklace and looked forward.

As soon as she arrived in Paris, she left her luggage with the bellboy at the hotel and rushed the short walk to the Musée Napoléon.

‘The Greek and Russian icon room?’ she asked the man at reception.

He gave her brief instructions and pointed. She knew from his face that Thérésa was already there. A man had a certain stricken look after she had dealt with them.

‘Darling!’

Thérésa enveloped her in musky perfume and her lips brushed hers so briefly she wasn’t sure it had happened.

‘I’m so glad you could come!’ said Nicole, ashamed at how overwhelmed she was by Thérésa’s presence.

‘How formal, don’t be so silly. Why are you holding that bag like it’s a new-born baby?’

‘This? Oh, nothing. The stagecoach was late and I dashed straight from the hotel. I didn’t have time to put everything in the room.’

‘Why did you want to meet in this funny little place? It’s completely deserted – we could die in here and they wouldn’t find us for days, and to think that this used to be the Palais de Louvre. Now Napoléon’s filled it with loot from his travels and lets the great unwashed finger the walls in pursuit of his revolutionary ideals to educate the masses through art.’ Thérésa scrutinised her critically. ‘You look haunted. What on earth has been happening in