Read Chapter 2: First Sight of Dust

The taxi stopped at the bottom of a long gravel drive that had given up any pretense of being a road. Élise paid the driver, watched him turn around in a cloud of dust, and stood alone with her suitcase among tall, ragged cypress trees that leaned like mourners.

Her heels sank into the gravel as she walked. The drive climbed gently, and at its crest, the house appeared—not the fairy-tale château her mother had once described in bitter, jealous asides, but a long stone bastide with shuttered windows, a sagging roofline, and ivy crawling up the west facade like a slow green fire. To the right, rows of vines ran down a slope toward a distant line of poplars, but the rows were shaggy, unpruned, full of weeds that had grown thigh-high in places.

She stopped halfway up the drive and took off her hat, letting the October sun hit her face. It was warmer here than Paris, but there was a bite in the air, the smell of dry earth and rotting grapes. Above her, a buzzard circled low, patient.

The front door was locked. She tried twice, then walked around the side of the house, past a broken fountain where a stone lion had lost its head, past a rusted iron pump, until she found a courtyard in back. A man was bent over a barrel, scraping at its staves with a curved knife. He looked up when she appeared, and his hands stopped their work.

Julien Vasseur was younger than she had expected—mid-thirties, with dark hair that curled at the collar of a stained linen shirt. His arms were bare, tanned to a deep walnut color by a sun that clearly did not care what month it was. He did not greet her.

"Madame Delacroix," he said flatly. Not a question.

"You know who I am."

"The notary wired ahead. And you can't be anyone else." He set the knife down and dried his hands on his trousers, leaving pale streaks of sweat across the canvas. "You're early. We weren't expecting you until the end of the week."

"I have nowhere else to be." She set her suitcase down and extended her hand. He looked at it, then at her face, and did not take it.

"The house is locked," she said, letting her hand fall.

"I know."

"Can you open it for me?"

"I could." He crossed his arms. "But I'd rather you turned around and got back in that taxi. There's another one that comes through from the village around four if you missed this one."

"I didn't miss anything. I'm here to stay."

"No." He shook his head slowly, like someone correcting a child. "You're here to sign papers, inherit what your aunt left you, sell the land, and go home to Paris. That's what they all do. I've seen three of your family come through here since 1946, and every single one sold. Your aunt knew it too. That's why this place looks like it looks."

Élise took a breath. The air was thick with the smell of crushed grapes, sweet and sour at once. She had read the will twice on the train, and once more in the café at the station before she'd found the taxi.

"My aunt's will requires me to live here for three years," she said, keeping her voice level. "To run the vineyard. If I don't, the property passes to a cousin I've never met, and I get nothing."

"And that's why you came." He said it like it explained everything about her, and in a way it did. "Did you read what you're inheriting? Not a château. A ruin. The vines are dying of neglect. The cellar hasn't been properly cleaned in a decade. There's no money for harvest labor, and the harvest should have started last week."

"Then we'll start it now."

"We?" He laughed once, a dry, humorless sound. "Madame, do you know the difference between a grape grown for table and a grape grown for wine?"

"One goes in your mouth and one goes in a bottle."

"Both go in your mouth." He shook his head. "That's what I thought. You don't know anything about wine, or vines, or this soil, or this region, or anything that matters here. You're a woman from Paris who dresses like she's going to a funeral and shows up to tell me how to do my job."

"I showed up to do my own job." She picked up her suitcase again. It was heavy; she had packed for three years, not for a long weekend. "Now, are you going to open the door, or should I break a window?"

Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or a grudging reappraisal. He did not smile, but he uncrossed his arms, walked past her, and pulled a heavy iron key from his pocket. He unlocked the back door with a groaning of old hinges and a clatter of wood scraping against stone.

He held out the key.

"The house is yours. You'll find out why it was locked when you see the inside." He paused. "You'll want to check the roof over the east wing before it rains. And don't touch the boiler. The man who fixed it last time wasn't properly paid, so he did it wrong. It will explode if you try to light it."

"Thank you for the advice."

"I wasn't giving advice. I was telling you what to expect." He turned and walked back to his barrel, picking up his knife as if she had already gone.

The kitchen was dark and smelled of mouse droppings and old grease. A heavy oak table filled most of the room, covered in a layer of dust so thick that Élise could write her name in it. She didn't. She set her suitcase on the table and walked through the rooms one by one, her heels clicking on worn stone floors.

The salon was a museum of neglect. Brocade chairs with their stuffing showing, a piano whose keys were yellowed like old teeth, a portrait over the mantel of a severe-looking woman in black—her aunt, she guessed, though she had not seen Joséphine since she was eight. The woman in the painting had the same narrow jaw that Élise saw in her own mirror.

She left the painting and climbed the stairs. The upper hallway was dim, the light filtering through grime-caked windows. She opened doors: bedrooms with collapsed beds, a bathroom with a tub so stained it looked like it had grown a skin. At the end of the hall, one door was shut and bolted with a wooden bar.

She pushed the bar up, opened the door, and stepped into her aunt's bedroom.

It was neat. That was the first thing she noticed—how neat it was compared to everything else. The bed was made, tucked with military precision. A brush and comb sat on the dresser, and beside them a small photograph in a silver frame: two young women, arms around each other, laughing at something off-camera. One was her mother. The other, she guessed, was Joséphine, though she'd never seen her mother smile like that.

She picked up the photograph and turned it over. Nothing written on the back. She set it back down exactly where it had been, as if the room had eyes.

The dust on the windowsill was undisturbed. No one had been in here since Joséphine died. The whole house was like that—frozen, abandoned, waiting for someone who had never come. But this room had been waiting in a different way, like a place that had been left for a particular visitor.

Élise sat on the edge of the bed, and for a moment, she let herself feel the weight of where she was. The house was huge and crumbling, and she was a woman alone with a dead aunt's bedroom and a hostile winemaker outside and no money to pay the men who were needed to pick what was left of a dying harvest.

Her creditors in Paris did not know where she was. Her friends did not know she had gone. Philippe's debts would come due in the spring, one way or another.

She stood up and smoothed her skirt. There was time for despair later. There was time for many things later.

She found Julien still in the courtyard, scraping away at the barrel. He looked up when she appeared, and the hostility was still there, but she thought she saw something else underneath it—curiosity, maybe, or the suspicion that she was not going to be as easy to be rid of as he had hoped.

"I need a list," she said.

"A list of what?"

"What needs to be picked first. What needs to be pruned. What needs to be repaired before it rains." She held up the notebook she had pulled from her suitcase. "You know this vineyard. I don't. So you will tell me what to do, and I will decide what gets done first."

"That's not how it works," he said. "You don't give yourself to the vines. You learn them. You learn the weather, the soil, the way the mistral sits on the hill. Three years isn't enough time to learn a place like this."

"Then we'll start now." She opened the notebook. "The harvest should have started last week. You said there's no money for labor. I'm standing here. I can carry a basket as well as anyone."

He stared at her for a long moment, his knife motionless in his hand.

"You'll ruin your dress."

"I'll change."

"And your hands. You'll bleed."

"Then I'll bleed." She wrote something in her notebook, though she wasn't sure what. "What's the first thing I need to know?"