The Winemaker's Wife(93)

Inès knew that Monsieur Godard would take the lie and spread it all over Champagne. And that meant that David—whose mother’s Jewish blood could otherwise put him in danger someday—might be able to safely disappear. Surely Edith and Edouard, with all their connections with the underground, could come up with a cover story to explain his arrival in Reims. “Yes. It is quite a tragedy.”

“Well, then, I will leave you to it,” Monsieur Godard said, bowing slightly, obsequiously, as he began to back away. “I trust I will see you tomorrow at the Brasserie Moulin, then.”

“Yes,” Inès said, though she had no intention of seeing the smarmy lawyer until she had figured out a way to redeem herself. “See you then.”

? ? ?

Inès brought two bags back to Edith’s apartment—one full of her own belongings, one full of the baby clothes Céline had been sewing from repurposed garments for months, in anticipation of her baby’s arrival.

She held David all afternoon, cooing to him, feeding him, trying to memorize his features. She could see Michel in him, as plain as day, and she could see Céline, too, in the fullness of his cheeks, the curve of his jaw. “I promise you,” she told him as she rocked him gently, “I will do everything I can to make sure your life is a good one.”

At the Brasserie Moulin, Edouard read over the lawyer’s paperwork and suggested a few small changes to the proposed fee structure, but Inès waved his concerns away. “I only care that he keeps the Maison Chauveau alive,” Inès said. “It will belong to David one day.”

Edouard frowned. “But how will you accomplish that with no proof that he is Michel’s son?”

“Because I own the Maison Chauveau now, and I can do with it what I wish,” Inès said.

By candlelight, long after the others had gone to sleep, Inès carefully printed out a note willing the Maison Chauveau to Edith should anything happen to her. She knew that if she didn’t return, Edith would find a way to make sure that David was legally her own, which would make him Edith’s heir. Inès signed the note, leaving it for Edith, along with another more hastily scrawled message begging Edith to care for David while Inès was gone.

He is better off with you You are good and kind, and I am not. I must make amends for what I have done, or I will never be the person I need to be. I understand now that fighting for France, fighting for goodness, is the only way I will find redemption. It is what Michel was trying to do, and I must carry on his work. If I do not return, and worse, if Céline does not survive, please do everything you can to ensure that David has a good life, and that he inherits the Maison Chauveau, which was never truly mine to give.

After signing that note, too, Inès left it on the desktop and returned to the parlor, where David slept peacefully, nestled in a pile of blankets on the floor. Inès watched his tiny eyelids flutter with the ghost of a dream, his little limbs twitching. Finally, after a very long time, she stood and slipped from the apartment, silent as a mouse, and disappeared into the dark night.





thirty-one


MAY 1945





CéLINE


Céline was one of the lucky ones, they said, though that word—lucky, chanceux—tasted false and ugly on her tongue, so much so that she could not bring herself to say it aloud, even when the nurses hovered over her, tended to her wounds, pinched her hollow cheeks, and called her survival a miracle.

But what if she was, in fact, one of the fortunate? What if she could return to the Maison Chauveau and find Michel there waiting for her, their David now a chubby-cheeked toddler running circles in the vineyards, his laughter floating like bubbles into the sky. It was that thought that sustained her through all the dark, terrible nights in Auschwitz, that place of ghosts and nightmares. In the nearly two years before the camp’s liberation, she’d withered to thirty-five kilos, less than eighty pounds, skin stretched over bone. But she had survived because she had to. She had to come back to the love of her life, if there was even a chance he’d be there. She had to come back for their son.

She knew in the depths of her heart that Michel was probably dead. She had seen the Germans haul him away, had understood the price he would pay for his involvement in Richter’s death. The fact that Richter was about to violate Céline, well, that would not mitigate Michel’s fate, even if the Gestapo believed him. For two years now, she had made peace with the idea that he was gone, though the grief hadn’t ebbed.

But David. There was a chance, wasn’t there? Surely Inès had understood the stakes when she took him from Céline’s aching arms. Had Inès understood that her penance for what she had done was to keep David safe? Céline had clung for two years to the belief that the answer had to be yes, that David was happy, healthy, alive.

But now, as she approached the Maison Chauveau on foot, after taking the train from Paris to Reims and hitching a ride with an American convoy into Ville-Dommange, doubt swept in, nearly paralyzing her. For up ahead, the sign that had once sat outside the property, announcing the Maison Chauveau to visitors, was gone, and beyond it, the caretaker’s cottage, where Céline had lived a lifetime ago, was boarded up. She dropped her satchel—which contained only a bar of soap and a secondhand dress given to her by a sympathetic Red Cross worker—and ran the rest of the way to the main house, though her spindly legs—her muscles long since atrophied—shook and threatened to give out.