next to Mathilde’s fancy silks and satins. This had seemed to her the last straw and she had screamed to the heavens, tears of pain and frustration coursing down her cheeks, and kicked at the ground until she felt her ankle would break. Cochon was the only one who witnessed this. Actually, it was the high point of his day.
There were more signs of someone else with no plans to move on: the leather jacket always hung on the rusty nail inside the back door; the same chipped green cup used day after day. The odd little something from Bernadette’s pâtisserie even turned up here and there. It was infuriating, of course it was, this invasion of her privacy. But less infuriating perhaps than the unwelcome military neatness Mathilde was imparting. A symmetrically intimidating stack of Italian
Vogue
magazines on a re-polished hall table was one thing, a jam jar of wildflowers on the kitchen table another.
In truth, Clementine had to admit that the littlest Peine did not exude anywhere near the same poison as the middle one but this did not mean she could or would speak to her. She wanted nothing to do with either of these two interlopers!
A sob escaped her and those hands, usually so steady, lost their rhythm. A bottle fell to the floor, hitting her foot painfully and rolling, unbroken, away from her. There was only one reason why her sisters were still there and, jam jars of wild flowers or not, she was a fool to keep ignoring it. They weren’t there for the champagne, of that she was sure. Mathilde claimed it gave her a headache and Sophie had probably never even tasted it.
Money. In the end, it was going to be about money.
Clementine might have been tending the vines these pastfew years but Olivier had not been nurturing the family finances. She didn’t need to decode the scribbled messages and random calculations in his wine-stained ledger to see just how close to ruin they were. Unopened bank statements littered the floor of his office, unpaid bills decorated the desk, countless correspondences suggested that many customers who had faithfully ordered Peine champagne for years had more recently stopped bothering. There were letters of complaint about gross delays and mix-ups over addresses, and clear evidence that order after order had simply not been delivered and thus not paid for.
In other words, there was no money.
Enough payments limped in from sales of the existing stock to keep Clementine from starvation but if her sisters wanted to be bought out, there was no way on earth she could manage it. Not without caving into Old Man Joliet. Selling off chunks of her carefully tilled Peine soil to that old
mec
would be the only way she would ever come up with the money required.
Images of her Peine ancestors crowded Clementine’s jumbled mind. They had battled the likes of Henri Joliet for centuries — and won — and would roll in their graves and most likely seep out from the Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne churchyard and haunt her into her own should she be reduced to selling off any of her precious plots. And anyway, how would she ever choose which grapes to sell and which to keep? It was an impossible task, like choosing which child to hand over to enemy soldiers.
Another bottle crashed to the ground through Clementine’s shaking fingers, this one shattering, its lively
mousse
— the teenage bubbles — confidently forging tiny pathways in the cave’s uneven floor.
Flawless Mathilde would probably ruin them just for thefun of it but Sophie looked like someone truly in need of money. She had a few euros to her name obviously, which were funding her trips to the pâtisserie, but her clothes looked about to disintegrate and there was barely enough meat on her bones to keep out the chill that clung to the walls of the house even though summer had arrived in the outside world. Clementine’s sobs gained momentum as she watched the spilt champagne travel further away from her. All at once she was desperate to escape the
There were more signs of someone else with no plans to move on: the leather jacket always hung on the rusty nail inside the back door; the same chipped green cup used day after day. The odd little something from Bernadette’s pâtisserie even turned up here and there. It was infuriating, of course it was, this invasion of her privacy. But less infuriating perhaps than the unwelcome military neatness Mathilde was imparting. A symmetrically intimidating stack of Italian
Vogue
magazines on a re-polished hall table was one thing, a jam jar of wildflowers on the kitchen table another.
In truth, Clementine had to admit that the littlest Peine did not exude anywhere near the same poison as the middle one but this did not mean she could or would speak to her. She wanted nothing to do with either of these two interlopers!
A sob escaped her and those hands, usually so steady, lost their rhythm. A bottle fell to the floor, hitting her foot painfully and rolling, unbroken, away from her. There was only one reason why her sisters were still there and, jam jars of wild flowers or not, she was a fool to keep ignoring it. They weren’t there for the champagne, of that she was sure. Mathilde claimed it gave her a headache and Sophie had probably never even tasted it.
Money. In the end, it was going to be about money.
Clementine might have been tending the vines these pastfew years but Olivier had not been nurturing the family finances. She didn’t need to decode the scribbled messages and random calculations in his wine-stained ledger to see just how close to ruin they were. Unopened bank statements littered the floor of his office, unpaid bills decorated the desk, countless correspondences suggested that many customers who had faithfully ordered Peine champagne for years had more recently stopped bothering. There were letters of complaint about gross delays and mix-ups over addresses, and clear evidence that order after order had simply not been delivered and thus not paid for.
In other words, there was no money.
Enough payments limped in from sales of the existing stock to keep Clementine from starvation but if her sisters wanted to be bought out, there was no way on earth she could manage it. Not without caving into Old Man Joliet. Selling off chunks of her carefully tilled Peine soil to that old
mec
would be the only way she would ever come up with the money required.
Images of her Peine ancestors crowded Clementine’s jumbled mind. They had battled the likes of Henri Joliet for centuries — and won — and would roll in their graves and most likely seep out from the Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne churchyard and haunt her into her own should she be reduced to selling off any of her precious plots. And anyway, how would she ever choose which grapes to sell and which to keep? It was an impossible task, like choosing which child to hand over to enemy soldiers.
Another bottle crashed to the ground through Clementine’s shaking fingers, this one shattering, its lively
mousse
— the teenage bubbles — confidently forging tiny pathways in the cave’s uneven floor.
Flawless Mathilde would probably ruin them just for thefun of it but Sophie looked like someone truly in need of money. She had a few euros to her name obviously, which were funding her trips to the pâtisserie, but her clothes looked about to disintegrate and there was barely enough meat on her bones to keep out the chill that clung to the walls of the house even though summer had arrived in the outside world. Clementine’s sobs gained momentum as she watched the spilt champagne travel further away from her. All at once she was desperate to escape the
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