Ellen Crosby - The Sauvignon Secret

“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.”