The Sauvignon Secret (8 page)

“Promise me you’ll say nothing to Juliette about this.”

“We don’t really know what ‘this’ is,” I said.

“Please be patient. You will soon enough.” He dropped his guard and I saw fear in his eyes. “You see, my life’s in danger and I need your help, Lucie. Please don’t turn me down.”

Charles clammed up after that remark, ending the cryptic conversation about needing my help and slipping into his jovial host persona as another couple joined our group. Pépé met my eyes, his message unmistakable: Let it go; we’ll find out later.

It wasn’t as though I had a choice. Whatever Charles was up to, it was clear that he’d gone to a lot of trouble to engineer this get-together. What was not clear, but becoming a looming possibility, was whether it might turn out to be an overblown melodrama that was much ado about nothing. Or, to give him a modicum of credit, about very little except an old man’s wish to see if he could still move players around on a chessboard.

Pépé had reminded me on the drive over to the Thiessmans’ that Charles had held high-ranking positions in administrations dating as far back as Dwight Eisenhower, dipping into consulting work when he wasn’t the political flavor of the moment. And of course, there was his ambassadorship to France during the Nixon administration. What Charles did fell into the need-to-know category, hush-hush stuff that utilized his background in science—chemistry, Pépé said—with an expertise that had been in demand by the Pentagon and elsewhere in the military establishment. I had asked if Charles was a spy or in intelligence, and Pépé had smiled enigmatically, saying he’d occasionally wondered about that himself.

Charles had retired a decade or so ago, but it must have been
tough to relinquish the glamour and trappings that came with the rank of ambassador, or even ex-ambassador, the fizzy excitement of the social and diplomatic world he and Juliette inhabited. The seductiveness of Washington’s power surely must have called to him like a Siren, tempting him to take what he wanted—everyone else did it—as his due after so many decades of service. Was he having trouble moving off center stage, becoming a spectator rather than a player? Did he need proof that he still had what it took, that he hadn’t been sidelined by younger, more virile men—and, God forbid, women—who replaced him? Charles, I guessed, was something of a chauvinist.

I said no, thank you to more champagne from an attentive waitress who wanted to top off my glass, since it was already making me light-headed. Or else it was the slowly blooming feeling that I had stepped onto the set of an old black-and-white movie where the last scene of a story that began long before I was born was about to be filmed. I have no idea what triggered it: Charles’s fifties-era attire, Juliette’s giddy coquettish airs befitting a much younger woman—and that portrait in the library—or the realization that all the other guests except me had probably come of age in the aftermath of World War II or earlier.

I caught a flash of white and gold across the pool, and then Juliette stood beside her husband, linking her arm through Charles’s and informing him in a low voice that the Hanovers were inside and dying to talk to him. I heard her quiet remark about an oxygen tank and not getting Mr. Hanover overly excited. He was in the library if Charles wouldn’t mind joining him there. Charles excused himself, and the other couple departed, leaving Juliette with Pépé and me. Something crackled in the air between her and my grandfather. For a split second, I felt like the child who accidentally stumbled into an intimate conversation between adults, overhearing a stray remark on a subject about which they felt vaguely ashamed.

“We’ve just had a greenhouse built behind the swimming pool.” Juliette seemed to be reaching for something innocuous to talk about. She waved a hand at a wrought-iron gate in the stucco wall and rambled on. “I’m so sorry Chantal isn’t here to see it. I miss her the most when I’m working in the gardens, especially among the roses. Would you like to have a tour?”

Of all the subjects she could have chosen, I wished she had brought up anything but my mother. I often thought Pépé grieved even more deeply than I did over her death, perhaps because he still hadn’t gotten over the devastation of losing his wife when he had to deal with the death of an adored daughter.

Juliette glanced at me as a courtesy, but I knew she’d been speaking to my grandfather.

“I’d love to see your greenhouse,” I said, “but if you’ll excuse me, I ought to find your powder room. You two go along. I’ll catch up later.”

Pépé shot me a martyred look as though he wouldn’t be responsible for his actions without a chaperone, but I gave him a bland see-no-evil look and smiled. He was a big boy; he could handle this.

The powder room off the foyer was occupied. As I waited, the noisy sounds of the kitchen staff preparing dinner floated down the hallway. My cousin would be there, cool and collected, calmly making sure everything was in order with her staff, the meal, her host and hostess.

I walked down the hall and pushed open the swinging door. Juliette’s enormous French country kitchen was warm and inviting, dominated by a collection of brass and copper pots suspended from a wrought-iron rack over a granite island and walls filled with colorful plates and oil paintings. Above all, the fragrant aroma of baking and the odors of garlic, onions, herbs, and spices mingled with meat and, I thought, fish, smelled wonderful.

Jasmine, the waitress who had filled my champagne glass and gotten Charles his martini, stood at the large Viking stove, whisking something in a copper saucepan.

“Can I help you?” she asked, mopping her forehead with the sleeve of a chef’s jacket she now wore. Her voice was low and pleasant, and in the brighter lighting of the kitchen, I noticed the tiny beauty mark by her upper lip, the quizzical tilt of her dark eyebrows, and intelligent eyes.

“Smells wonderful in here,” I said. “What’s for dinner?”

“Roast chicken with garlic and herbs, pan-seared trout with summer vegetables, new potato gratin … the menu’s
à la française
, of course, for Bastille Day. Crepes for dessert, fresh berry compote,
and
mousse au chocolat
. All the herbs, vegetables, and fruit are from Mrs. Thiessman’s garden or her greenhouse. Even the olives. She cured them herself. The chicken is from the organic butcher in Middleburg and the fish from someone I found who catches it fresh.”

Her French accent sounded native and she obviously worked at the Goose Creek Inn as more than a waitress. I knew almost everyone on the staff, but I hadn’t met her.

“We haven’t been introduced,” I said. “Dominique told me she hired a new chef last month, so I guess that would be you. I’m Lucie Montgomery.”

“I figured you might be.” She looked up from her sauce again, a game expression on her face, eyes avoiding my cane. “You own the vineyard. I’m Jasmine Nouri. Your cousin did hire me as an assistant chef, but it looks like I’m probably going to be helping out more with the catering business. Tonight, though, she thought I was too new to solo and she needed to supervise.”

I wondered when Jasmine Nouri would find out that if Dominique had been around when God made heaven and earth, she’d feel the need to supervise Him before he went solo on this brand-new creation thing He was trying out.

She must have read my mind because she said, “Don’t worry. Everyone from the bookkeeper to the guy who takes care of valet parking has made sure to tell me she likes to keep her finger in every pot. Literally.”

“That’s because so far no one in the family has found her Off switch,” I said. “And now we’re all pretty sure she doesn’t have one.”

Jasmine smiled.

“Where did you work before you came here?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Everywhere. Most recently a restaurant in Portland, Oregon.”

“Virginia’s a long way from Oregon.”

“Umm.” She turned off the gas and set the saucepan on another burner. “I’d better get busy. Dominique will have my head if this evening isn’t perfect.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to distract you. I’ll just say hi, then disappear,” I said and slipped out the side door.

My cousin glanced up from grinding her cigarette butt under the heel of a black sandal. She looked like she did the time I caught her in the kitchen adding a can of broth to her made-from-scratch chicken stock.

“
Merde
, you scared me,” she said. “I thought it was Juliette. She believes cigarettes are the devil’s creation. They’re totally banned from the house.”

“Serves you right if it had been Juliette. When are you going to quit? You’ll get cancer.”

“Pépé smokes like a chimney. He’s eighty-four and he doesn’t have cancer. We’ve got good genes,” she said. “Where is he, by the way?”

“Visiting the greenhouse. Juliette is giving him a tour.”

“Just the two of them?”

I nodded and Dominique shot me an unreadable look that I didn’t like.

“Where’s Charles?” she asked. “She sent him to the library to talk to a guest who’s on oxygen. You know, I think I’m the only person here tonight except for your staff who is under sixty. Maybe even under seventy.”

My cousin didn’t smile.
“Merde,”
she said again. “I knew it.”

“What?” I asked.

“She’s still in love with him. After all these years.”

“What are you talking about? Pépé and Juliette?”

Dominique automatically slipped her pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her slim-cut black trousers and I glared at her.

“Oh, all right,” she said and shoved them back. “But it calms my nerves when I smoke.”

“Forget the cigarettes and tell me about Pépé and Juliette.”

“I forgot that you wouldn’t have known. It started after Grand-mama died. My mother told me the story one night when we stayed up really late and drank too much champagne. He was so lost on his own. Juliette … well, she lived in the same building on Boulevard Saint-Denis, so they all knew each other.” She bent and picked up her cigarette butt, holding it between her thumb and forefinger like it was some rare specimen that needed to be preserved. “She got in the habit of coming by to bring him dinner. She’d say she
just cooked a little more than they needed and that he would waste away to nothing if he didn’t eat. Sometimes my mother and I would drop by his apartment and there’d be a pretty bouquet of flowers, or pastries from the
boulangerie
across the street. My mother said she always knew they were from her. Juliette was married at the time to a troll who beat her. She finally left him.”

“And?”

“Well, I think she was hoping … you know. ”

“That Pépé would ask her to marry him?”

She nodded.

“Were they, I mean did they … I mean …”

“Did they have sex? Is that what you mean?” Dominique rolled her eyes. “And who do you think was going to ask him that? You know Pépé.
Mon Dieu
, he’s so private. They could have done. The troll traveled a lot so it wouldn’t have been difficult to arrange, living in the same building. To be honest, I don’t think they did. He’s too much of a gentleman and she was married.”

“But after the divorce?”

“He was sent to Brussels for a year since he was still doing some consulting for the foreign ministry. It was a blessing, kept him really busy, but of course he was living in Belgium. Then my mother heard Juliette was moving to Washington to take a job as a secretary at the embassy. She thought Pépé pulled strings to get her the position. Juliette left France and apparently decided to turn over a whole new broom.” Dominique spoke English fluently but despite years of living in America, idioms continued to baffle her.

“You mean forget about Pépé?”

“My mother always thought that’s why she left,” she said. “Juliette met Charles in Washington right around the time he was named ambassador to France. She married him and moved home, into the residence on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré with her new husband, and all of a sudden she’s living down the street from the Élysée Palace. Parties, balls, receptions, lots of fancy entertaining, and a huge staff to help. My mother said she was absolutely
aux anges
. She was such a beauty, too—her picture showing up all the time in
Paris-Match
and
Vogue
.”

I nodded and thought about the portrait in the library. Maybe
that teasing smile had been for my grandfather and he’d been there when she posed for the artist. It would explain why he’d been so abrupt when I asked him if he knew where it had been painted.

“Charles and Pépé never got to be close friends, did they?”

“You know Pépé,” she said. “He’s such a gentleman and always polite, but I don’t think he ever warmed up to Charles. And Charles didn’t strike me as so dumb he didn’t realize his wife still carried a torch for another man. It wouldn’t surprise me if Juliette married Charles just to get back at Pépé—then she had to live with her decision. The irony of it is that Charles has a reputation as a womanizer, though he’s discreet and they pretend to be a happy couple.”

“My God, how complicated.”

Was this what Charles wanted to talk to us about after dinner? Something personal? His marriage? The kitchen door opened and Jasmine’s head popped into view.