a watch, but I assumed it was sometime around midnight. I pulled a few francs from my pocketbook. ‘Perhaps some money.’
‘Yes!’ the wife yelped. She stuck her arm out the window and motioned with her hand for the money.
He yelled at her and then turned to me. ‘Keep your money. And this.’ He shoved a crinkled note into my hand and got back into car, slamming his door. I tried the handle but he pushed the lock down.
‘Wait!’ I cried, with pounding fists as he rolled the window up. ‘Don’t leave me here!’
He jammed the car into gear without even turning his head and then bolted down the road. His wife’s hands flailed in the air, smacking him on the shoulder as their red tail lights faded under whirling dust.
Everything was quiet.
A RAF balloon drifted over my head, dipping and plunging in the air, spilling propaganda leaflets from the sky. And I walked; down narrow dirt roads that turned into wider ones until I saw black, twisted grape vines growing on the hills in the distance—Creuzier-le-Vieux, Papa’s vineyard and the chateau.
Some of the winemakers in Creuzier-le-Vieux made wine only for themselves, planting grapes in their gardens so they’d have wine at their supper tables. Others, like Papa, made a good living off their vintages, owning acres upon acres of ancient Vichy vines. The wrath of grapes rolling over the darkened hills, dotting plots of country land here and there, was a stark contrast to the abruptness of the city only a few kilometres away, and the dull glow of city life.
The sun crested the horizon and I’d finally made it back home. I was exhausted, choosing to sit down on the grassy slope behind the chateau before going inside, rubbing my blistered, bloodied feet, banged up from walking all night in the wrong shoes. I pulled the note the bald man had given me from my pocket, and read Marguerite’s coded message. Three days, it said.
The chateau looked the same as I remembered with its eighteenth-century stone façade and blue shutters. The clay pots where Mama grew her favourite herbs were still on the patio: mint, basil, and fennel by the bushels. Wrought-iron arbour arches in the garden overgrown with light pink roses buzzed with swarming bees.
I fell back into the grass without meaning to, feeling the blades in between my fingers. A budding French catchfly had broken through the volcanic soil and fluttered in a twist of morning light, its distinguishing, prickly stem too new to poke back. Then I thought about it, the day I realized I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—marry Gérard.
He stopped by the chateau one afternoon in early June, as he had been doing for the last few weeks to talk to Papa, often asking me to take rides in his sidecar or go wine tasting in the valley.
‘We need each other, Adèle.’ Gérard swept a lock of hair from his eyes, which looked yellowy-brown. ‘Your country needs you.’ He spread a blanket onto the tall grass and told me to sit on it, smiling back at the chateau to Papa who was watching from the window.
‘My country?’ I folded my arms. ‘Who are you to tell me what my country needs?’
‘I’m a gendarme in the Vichy police,’ he said, pushing me down. ‘Don’t you know what that means? What woman would turn down such an opportunity: a prominent place in this nation?’
‘I have a place.’
He laughed, uncorking the bottle of wine Papa had given him. ‘And where is that? Your sister told me you’ve done nothing since you quit setting hair at that salon.’
I held up my glass. ‘Just give me some wine. Papa is watching. I know how much you like to put on a show.’
He poured me a glass, and I drank it down before he had a chance to pour his own. Then I played with the grass, running my fingers through it, wondering how long I’d have to listen to him talk about my place in this country.
‘I asked your father for your hand. We are to be wed in a week.’
I sprung up. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘He arranged our meetings. Surely you know what’s happening when a man visits your home for two weeks straight.’
‘Papa said I needed to be nice to you. I thought it had something to do with his wine, a big purchase for your parents’ spa…’
‘Your family needs a marriage to a man like me, Adèle. You may not survive the war if you don’t make the right