The Angel's Cut (19 page)

Cole went pale. ‘Oh,' he said.

Flora got up and ran out of his room. She moved as fast as she could, hampered by her scars. She had to get out. Out of that moment, that hour—but it had its hooks in her. Cole
came after her, caught up as she was fumbling with the catch of the garden gate. ‘Flora,' he said, ‘Flora.' Just her name, pleading.

Flora wrestled the bolt back. She jabbed her elbow into Cole's sternum, pulled the gate open and fled out onto Sunset.

Though Cole had confessed, if only sidelong, Flora had no proof. She was in a rage of grief, but powerless to act on what she knew. Who could she go to for help, or even sympathy? Who would care now, but her? Because, in the end, what was Xas? He was a thief, he was shiftless and unreliable and lived under aliases and had left nothing behind him.

After several sleepless nights and drained days all Flora could think to do was to leave a note on the pad on her porch. She wrote to her mysterious correspondent. She wrote that Xas was dead. And that Conrad Cole had killed him. She wrote that she had no proof, and that her heart was broken.

For over a week the note stayed where it was, slowly curling in the damp air. Then one morning it had gone, and in its place, Flora found this. This list:

Two days after she'd received this insane and taunting message, Flora had a call from the jeweller. Green told her that he'd had a response to the queries he'd made through Lloyds of London. The present Comte du Vully had written to him requesting a full description of the pearls, their number, size, and colour. Green complied, and three weeks later he received a wire saying that one Henri de Valday was coming to America to claim the pearls. De Valday would arrive in New York on the fifteenth of March, and would be in Los Angeles eight days later. Green said, ‘Would you like to be present when I speak to him, Miss McLeod?'

Flora said yes, she would.

‘And have you heard from your friend?'

‘No,' Flora said, and that she knew now that she wouldn't be hearing from him. ‘He got into trouble. People bore him ill will. I guess there was something provoking about him.'

‘I hope you're not in danger!' Green was concerned.

‘No. All I suffered was spite. Harmless, pointless spite.'

‘I'm very sorry to hear it. Are you all right now?'

Flora reassured the jeweller that, if she wasn't yet, she soon would be. She hoped she was telling him the truth. She felt so low. Whoever it was who'd coaxed the truth out of her—the truth about what Cole had done—had only mocked her trust and her grief.

‘I'll let you know when M. de Valday arrives.'

‘Thank you.'

F
lora had been sitting for some time by herself among the gleaming display cases when Green and M. de Valday arrived. They'd been out to lunch. Green had grease on his chin, and a look of happy triumph in his eyes. He introduced Flora, then told her that he'd been very daring and had taken de Valday to a little delicatessen nearby, whose specialty was avocado sliced on rye and dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Henri de Valday was in his early thirties, a slight, energetic man with a pockmarked face and warm hazel eyes. When Green finished describing their lunch de Valday kissed his fingertips—a gesture Flora had always thought a property of film, not life. He added, in perfect English, ‘And at last I forgot to shake my head over the absence of wine at the table.' He took Flora's hand. ‘So, you are the friend of this Jodeau?'

Green led them to his office, a room even more hushed and exclusive than the showroom. De Valday and Flora sat
side by side on a sofa. Green went to a wall safe, and came back with a blue velvet box, which he set on the coffee table before the Frenchman. The jeweller then perched on the edge of his desk.

De Valday opened the box. His face went soft and sombre. He lifted the pearls from the box and wrapped them around one hand. As they moved they made their distinctive heavy kissing noises.

‘You see,' said Green. ‘Priceless is not a word I use lightly or lazily.'

De Valday looked up at Flora through his eyelashes. ‘Jodeau is not a common name. Before I left home I spoke to our neighbours, the family Jodeau. They couldn't think who this person might be, although, of course, they are a large family, and spread far and wide. M. Green tells me you have no idea how your friend came by the pearls.'

‘None,' said Flora.

‘The Jodeaus of Aluze are still in partnership with my family. Vully's only Grande Cru is made of Jodeau grapes—and hence its name,
Château Vully l'Ange du Cru Jodeau
—‘the angel of the soil of Jodeau'.'

Green leaned forward, eager. ‘Would you please tell Miss McLeod about that? Tell her what you told me.'

De Valday smiled. He coiled the pearls in his lap and made a steeple of his fingers. ‘In the cellars of the Château are the two barrels in which our only Grande Cru matures. Two barrels, because the wine is pressed from grapes from one slope only, a stony south-facing slope above the villa of the family Jodeau. There are vines growing right to the
walls of the house—the soil is that good, that blessed. The barrels in which the wine matures are very old. I have seen myself the bill of lading for their delivery, which is pasted into the Château's account book for the year of 1838.

‘There is, in my family, a story told about these barrels. A legend. Though it is a legend with an addendum I regard as truth, since I myself heard my grandfather swear to it.'

Flora liked the man's ‘I myself', and the caressing gesture that went with the words—he'd stroked his own sternum with the tips of his fingers.

‘The legend is this: that the Château's vintner, Sobran Jodeau, my great-great-grandfather, ordered the barrels, which were very large, and were built by a cooper on site in Vully's old cellar. Before they were finally sealed, a bundle was deposited in each barrel. Large silk-wrapped bundles. There was a rumour in the district that the winemaker had used the barrels to conceal the evidence of some crime. And there was other talk—for these country people were at that time not Christian in any civil sense—that the bundles were some kind of talisman, an offering to St Lawrence, the patron of winemakers.' De Valday gave a simultaneous shrug of eyebrows and shoulders to show Flora what he thought of these theories. She didn't respond. She didn't like to intervene with questions. She didn't know what to ask. What to ask about ‘Sobran'—the name of Xas's dead lover and, apparently, this man's distant ancestor.

‘There is another story. The family story. And that is this: that what Sobran Jodeau concealed in the barrels were what gave the wine its name. What lay beneath the silk wrappings
of each bundle was the severed wing of an
angel
. M. Jodeau himself apparently never had anything to say on the subject, though his wife, my great-great-grandmother, would say quite readily that it was true, that the bundles were wings and that she'd had some part in cutting them off. However, another of my great-great-grandmothers, on the de Valday side, Aurora, the Baroness Lettelier, used to spit with fury whenever anyone repeated Madame Jodeau's remarks. Of course I should say that there was no love lost between the Baroness and Madame Jodeau, the Baroness having been for many years Sobran Jodeau's lover.'

De Valday made a graceful, dismissive gesture. ‘So much for that. It's a good story—a colourful story—a pretty legend my brother the Comte would like to print on our wine labels. But what I will tell you next is what I must regard as true.

‘The Angel of the Soil of Jodeau is a great wine, and one that has always had a heavenly consistency. There are variations, naturally. There are vintages. But for all its faintly altering points of interest, for all that comes to the wine from different seasons and changes in the soil, there is a
spirit
in the wine, a divine quality, and the family opens a bottle whenever anyone is ill.

‘Because the wine is so consistent, the methods of its making have never altered, and the barrels are never opened. They are filled and emptied. The Château's practice of reverence toward “The Angels”—as the barrels are called—is regarded by the neighbourhood as simply a sensible superstition.

‘However, when my grandfather was a boy the Château employed a winemaker from outside the district and, during his tenure, it happened that there appeared a discernible clouding in the wine drawn from Angel One.

‘On the winemaker's prompting the family decided to take a look in that barrel.

‘The job of scrubbing plaques of tannin from the timbers of a barrel usually falls to a boy—someone old enough to follow simple instructions, but small enough to fit through the aperture in the top of the barrel. It is a dark job, though someone will be posed at the opening with a lamp. It is a suffocating job, because the wood of an empty barrel is impregnated with wine and the barrel full of fumes.

‘My grandfather was eight years of age when he was lowered into Angel One. He had scrubbed other barrels, so was prepared for the darkness and the smothering perfume of the wood. The perfume was as strong as ever, he said, but different. The barrel was warm, he said, but there was something cold to the smell in there. My grandfather said that the family didn't tell him to get on with the usual job—chipping at the staves—instead they wanted to know what was in there. My grandfather said he could hear the winemaker too, but the way in which the winemaker asked what was in the barrel was quite different from the way his father and uncles and cousins were asking, for, after all, the winemaker was only looking for the cause of a pollution.

‘Grandfather shuffled about in the silt at the bottom of the barrel. He explored its damp curving walls with his
fingers. He moved out of the light. Then he touched something—wet, slimy fabric. He called out to tell his father and uncles. He said what he'd found. Then he heard the winemaker ordering him to “Get that mess out of there!” Then, at once, there was a chorus of other voices countermanding the winemaker, asking my grandfather to just “pull at the cloth”.

‘My grandfather got a grip on the cloth and pulled. He ignored the quarrel outside. He gathered two handfuls of material and shook the bundle till the cloth was free. Then he carried what he had in his hands to the hole and handed a wine-stained mess of disintegrating silk up to his uncle. He heard the winemaker say, “Is that all of it?” and answered that no, he'd only pulled the silk free from another mass. Then he shuffled back out of the light, through the encapsulated warmth of fermentation, and closer to that strange, powerful cold odour.

‘And what my grandfather said he touched then, and tried to lift, was a damp mass of feathers. He hauled the mass over to the light and that's when he, and his uncle above him, saw the wing.

‘The wing was white—grandfather said—and there was wine
on
the feathers but not staining them. Small beads of wine sat on the feathers like crystals of water on the back of a duck.'

De Valday paused and leaned back in his chair. ‘The family sent the winemaker away—dismissing him on the spot. Then they opened the other “Angel” and lowered my grandfather into it and had him remove the wine-ruined silk
from the other wing. The wings were unwrapped, and left in the barrels. Then the barrels were sealed and haven't been opened since.'

De Valday looked at Flora with the look of someone who knows he's told a good story and is more interested in its being appreciated than believed. Green caught Flora's eye and made a gesture, less a nod than a spasm of enthusiasm. ‘What do you think?' he said.

For a moment she wasn't able to think anything. Her mind only blazed, painlessly, as though she were freshly on fire. And then she remembered Xas's figure, glimpsed through her kitchen window, out on the paper road in the rain, white skin whiter still in patches like mist floating below high, even cloud. She thought of the brief, taunting correspondence she'd had, and the startling unworldliness of the person who'd written the notes. She thought of an awning torn from a shop front and used as notepaper, of the stealth it would take to have spread that canvas at her door, for the crackling tarred tin on her veranda had given nothing away. She remembered Xas saying that the pearls had belonged to a relative of his. And she thought that, of course, that relative had wings—
still
had wings—and had dropped down out of the sky above her house to ask after Xas.

Flora didn't answer Green, she only put out her hand for the pearls. Henri de Valday poured them into her palm. She stretched the rope out taut and gave it several sharp, strenuous tugs, so that the pearls vibrated, singing. The string held; it had no give.

‘Careful,' de Valday said. He retrieved the pearls from Flora, and shook an admonishing finger at her.

Flora apologised. Then she said to Green, ‘I wanted to see for myself.' But what she was thinking was: ‘
Angels are
indestructible
.'