The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(7)
“Jean-Paul has inquired about it several times,” Grand-Mère said, “but I told him I lost the key years ago. Anyway, he thinks it’s just another storage closet with a few old plungers and some busted barrel rims.” She nodded at Elena. “Go ahead. Give it a try.”
A tingle ran up and down her skin as she stood before the door. Elena could almost feel the synergy waiting to converge. She put her hand over the lock and whispered her secret word. “Vinaria.”
Nothing.
The curse was still siphoning off the lifeblood of her magic.
“Try it again.”
She nodded and took a deep breath of cellar air, concentrating her energy on her palm against the lock. “Vinaria,” she commanded.
To her relief, the lock gave a click and the door swung open.
Inside, the room looked the same as she’d left it, with bottles, jars, and dried herbs lining the built-in shelves on one wall. The worktable, which took up half the space, still held her scale for measuring pinches and dollops and the small burner with the glass beaker she used for reducing her concoctions to their purest form. On the shelf, a granite grinding mortar had been propped up as a bookend to hold her half-dozen spell books with the gold-embossed spines. The pestle was draped by a sheer spiderweb speckled with dust. The rescued belongings blurred in a watery mosaic in her teary vision.
“I was certain it would be gone.”
Grand-Mère lifted the lamp to better show off the upper shelves. “I’ve dipped into a few jars for a spoonful of this or that over the years, but otherwise everything’s just as you left it.”
Elena twisted the lid off a jar of rosemary and sniffed at the contents. A bit off its potency but still viable. The dragonfly wings still shimmered in their bottle, as did the beetle shells and flakes of mica. The beeswax had grown brittle and hard, but it softened in her hands almost immediately. In truth, most things seemed workable again as she looked around. The sale of the vineyard was an abomination, but if this Jean-Paul fellow could be convinced of her value, perhaps her plans could still be salvaged too.
“It’s possible to get the vineyard healthy again,” she said, believing so with all her heart after seeing her belongings. “With luck we may even see results by harvesttime.”
“Since when has luck got anything to do with it?” Grand-Mère smiled and set the lamp on the worktable. “I’ll leave you to get reacquainted with your things. Come up to the house when you’re ready. I’ll have a guest room made up for you.”
But she did not return to the house. She spent hours inventorying the bottles, balms, and ground-up herbs she’d left behind seven years earlier. She flipped through books, wiped down the worktable, and sorted out a trunk containing her old clothes. Then, when sleep beckoned, she took out a thick wool blanket and lay down on the flagstones within sight of the wine barrels. Using a trick remembered from childhood experiments with her shadow vision, she placed her ear against the floor and closed her eyes, and soon she was listening to the footsteps of the monks who first worked the cellar. Their voices hummed inside the stones as they chanted their ancient songs in their old, forgotten language.
She breathed in the fragrance of wine and oak and let her body relax for the first time in days. Staying on at Chateau Renard under these new conditions would be a risk. She knew it the moment that man wiped his feet on the kitchen rug. Yet this was where she belonged. Without the vineyard she’d never gain her full strength back. Nor would she be able to see her revenge through to the end, and only a life for a life would satisfy the constant yearning in her heart. She did not know why the All Knowing was testing her so, but she would have payment for the years stolen from her, and if that meant a few uncomfortable compromises along the way, so might it be.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jean-Paul reached the southern slope of the vineyard as the first rays of light spilled onto the hillside. He enjoyed working in the crisp morning air with the sun shining on his back and his lungs breathing in the autumn scents of woodsmoke, the leaf decay in the undergrowth, and a whiff of musky fox from a nearby den. So different from how he’d spent the last ten years of his life stowed away in a corner office in the city, buried up to his nose in books and legal papers.
The law had its merits but had never been his choice. From the time he was a boy he’d been told he must attend university to fulfill some perceived duty owed to his family lineage. The Martels, after all, practiced the law. They mingled with powerful and beautiful people in top hats at the Palais Opéra. They ate foie gras and caviar at Maurice’s, drank fine wine at the Moulin a Farine, and spent their summers vacationing along the sunny coast in bourgeois comfort, with the Chanceaux Valley at their backs.
They also succumbed to early deaths. The heart had a tendency to harden off after being forced to survive inside a life two sizes too small, deprived of the oxygen of dreams. At least that’s where Jean-Paul’s reasoning had led him. The death of his father convinced him he had to make a change before his heart shrank any further. And so he’d escaped to the country, where a man could walk among the dormant vines in solitude and give his dreams a chance to breathe in the open air.
But damn the grapes. And goddamn the wine.
When he first read the news that Chateau Renard was for sale, he could hardly believe his luck—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of the valley’s history and be part of a renowned winemaking legacy. Certainly he’d heard the rumors that the old woman wasn’t functioning at her peak anymore, but making wine was a secret aspiration he’d harbored since his first taste of the vineyard’s pinot noir a decade earlier. Such musky, sensuous flavors of plum, cherry, and the perfect underlay of oak and flint. He would re-create that bouquet or die trying.