House of Peine Read online

  No wonder I am starving, she thought happily, licking her lips. But before she could throw that strangely graceful leg over her saddle and head towards Bernadette’s financiers, Christophe Paillard’s bright red Renault careened around the corner, veering wildly into the loose gravel beside her as he threw on the brakes, a cloud of dust enveloping her and her little horse.

  “Mind what you are doing, you stupid oaf,” she growled as he cut the motor. She’d met him many times before; he had too much chest hair for her liking (it poked up above his shirt collar like an unmown lawn), but worse than that he was a lackey of Old Man Joliet, who sent him around periodically to sniff out the chance of a land sale. “And for the last time the answer is no.” She slapped furiously at the grime on her clothes, coughing and half blinded as she heard him open and close his car door. “No, no, a thousand times no. How many times do I have to say it before you get it through your thick skull?”

  Another door opened and shut, this time with a sharp slam. “Well, well, well,” purred a velvety feminine voice, “will you look what we have here? All these years, Clementine, and you still look like something the cat dragged in.”

  Clementine’s blood ran cold. She stopped brushing away the dirt, her hands falling uselessly to her sides. Surely, it couldn’t be …? No. It was impossible. She was dreaming. But that voice, that tone, the tension that tingled in the air between them. She peered through the falling dust, blinking stupidly at the vision of sophistication that had stepped away from the car and was standing still beside it, a tall, rail-thin blonde in caramel stilettos, a cream trench belted tightly around her tiny waist, arms crossed in front of her, red nails gleaming, red lips gathered in a perfect contemptuous smirk.

  There was no doubt about it. “Mathilde,” Clementine gasped. She had not seen Mathilde for 18 years, not since the evil wench had ruined her life in more ways than she would ever, could ever know. And while the skin may have grown over those wounds and hardened into scars, it felt to Clementine that she was simply splitting open in all the same old places, as though no time whatsoever had passed, let alone almost two decades. “Whatever you want,” she cried, “you’re not having it. Go away!”

  “Jesus, what the hell is that thing?” Mathilde, ignoring her, pointed an elegant finger at Cochon, who was pig-rooting in the dust beside his owner. “Monsieur Paillard, you didn’t mention she’d spawned.”

  Christophe started to object but was interrupted by Clementine. “La-a-a-a!” she cried in her sing-song falsetto. “La-a-a-a!”

  “Do you mind?” Mathilde grimaced. “Some of us are fond of our eardrums, you know.”

  “Leave,” cried Clementine. “Go away. Go on. Get out of my sight before I call the police and have you arrested for, for …”

  “Ladies, please,” implored Christophe. “Is this really necessary?”

  “Have me arrested for what, exactly?” Mathilde smiled languidly as she patiently inspected a large diamond ring on her slender wedding finger.

  “For being a filthy tramp and a thief and a trespasser, that’s what!” Clementine exclaimed. “You’re nothing but a —”

  “Now, now, Clementine,” Christophe said, more forcefully this time. He stepped towards her and waved a podgy hand in the air as if attempting to slow traffic but Mathilde, unconcerned, just laughed her old tinkly laugh.

  “Don’t worry, Monsieur,” she said soothingly. “If I remember rightly she just needs to let off steam every five or six minutes. You know, like a big, fat, old black kettle.”

  Eighteen years and like that she could bring tears to Clementine’s eyes. Tears that usually were tucked down neat inside her, buried beneath the tune of turning bottles, the click of pruning shears, the chatter of dancing bubbles.

  “Tramp,” she mumbled, turning around, refusing to give Mathilde the satisfaction of seeing what effect she had had. “Thief.” Like a vampire, if Mathilde knew what blood she had already drawn she would not stop until the last drop was sucked out. Abandoning her trip to the pâtisserie Clementine dragged her bike clumsily over to the gates and attempted to open them, Cochon bringing up the rear so closely she could feel his enthusiastic nose against the back of her knee. “I don’t want to see you,” she said, her hands shaking as she fumbled with the rusty gate. “I don’t know what you’re doing here but you’re not welcome in my home. You had your chance, Mathilde, and you didn’t want it. You threw it away. All those years ago, you threw it away and nothing has changed since then. Nothing will ever change. Just go away and leave me alone!”

  But the gates would not allow her a dignified escape. Instead, they remained stubbornly closed as she desperately rattled them, her bike sliding off her hip to the ground, Cochon rearing up and nudging her bottom just to add to her humiliation.

  Christophe slipped in beside her, using his squat hairy bulk to assist her with the recalcitrant ironwork.

  “It’s not quite that simple, I’m afraid, Clementine,” he said gently. “It’s not a matter of taking chances or throwing things away, as you must well know. Your sister and I —”

  “Half-sister!” Clementine corrected, twisting around and ending up with her face pressed very nearly in his sweating armpit. “Half-sister!”

  “Very well,” Christophe agreed patiently as the gate finally relented and allowed itself to be pushed open, “your half-sister and I need to come inside and talk to you. That is, I need to come inside and talk to you both. I’m sorry, Clementine, really I am. I thought perhaps Father Philippe might have prepared you for this. I spoke to him as soon as I made contact with Mathilde but —”

  “What do you mean?” Clementine demanded, her teeth starting to chatter, her fear out in the open, naked and undisguised. “Prepared me? Prepared me for what?”

  “I’m sorry,” Christophe repeated, “but I’ve been trying to reach you. I’ve called, I’ve sent letters.” He noticed, at that moment, the soggy pile of unopened envelopes lying on the grass inside the rusty gates. “Really, Clementine, this need not have come as such a shock.”

  Quatre quarts

  There were few situations in Clementine’s experience that left her without an appetite but being told she had to share the House of Peine with her long (and happily as far as she was concerned) lost half-sister Mathilde was definitely one of them.

  The creamy tarts and luscious pastries that had been dancing about in her head as she riddled now slithered to a slimy heap at the bottom of her mind with all the appeal of a freshly steaming cowpat.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said to Christophe as he sat in the kitchen, having just revealed what felt distinctly like a final slap on her stinging cheek from the hand of her dead and now decomposing father. “I just don’t believe it.”

  Mathilde, sitting awkwardly across the table as though her tightly toned buttocks were repelled by the mere thought of what scum lay on her chair, rolled her eyes.

  “Your father never talked to you about what would happen in the event of his, erm, demise?” Christophe prodded. “You never discussed the possibilities?”

  “He hardly talked to me at all,” Clementine replied, in a daze. “We never discussed a single thing.”

  “Yes, but you knew that Mathilde would always have the right to —” Christophe started, but mention of that name catapulted Clementine out of her stupor.

  “The right?” she repeated. “The right? How dare you talk to me of rights? What right has she to any part of the House of Peine? What? Tell me! What? It’s me who has been working here with Olivier all these years. Not Mathilde. Not anybody. Just him and me. And most of the time lately, just me. Who has it been out there in the vineyard training the vines and tasting the grapes? Who spends hours down in the winery riddling the bottles and calculating the dosage? Who wets the barrels and prunes the canes and battles the infernal bloody grapeworm, hm? It’s me, Christophe, me. I’m the one who’s lived with him all this time. I’m the one who’s put up with his moods and his silences and whatever demons had him how
ling in his room at night if he hadn’t passed out on the kitchen floor. I’m the one who’s put up with his meanness, who’s sacrificed my friends, any chance of a normal life, for our grapes and our champagne. I am! Yes, me!”

  There was no point trying to get a word in. Christophe just bit his tongue.

  “He never even spoke her name again,” Clementine continued, pointing at Mathilde. “Not once since she was here the last time. And you talk to me about her right? It’s inconceivable that she — no, worse than that. It’s criminal that she has any right. What has she ever done to deserve it? There must be a law against this, Christophe. There must! If there’s a God in heaven then the House of Peine should be mine, I know it, you know it, everyone knows it. You’re the expert, so what can I do? Tell me! What can I do? Don’t just sit there staring at me — tell me!”

  Christophe tried opening his mouth to speak but was nowhere near quick enough.

  “Oh, don’t get yourself so excited, Clementine,” Mathilde leapt in. “I’m hardly jumping with joy at the prospect of splitting my inheritance with you either but you don’t see me making a song and dance routine out of it.”

  Clementine stood up from the table so abruptly her chair clattered to the ground behind her. “Don’t speak to me,” she cried, one trembling hand flying up to her face to shield her eyes from the very sight of her sister. “Don’t you dare even speak to me!” Cochon, who had not been showing his usual enthusiasm for a skirmish, skittered out from beneath the table at that point, his rounded rear flanks quivering as he skidded on the smooth stone floor.

  “You let that overgrown whatever-it-is inside?” Mathilde demanded, a disgusted look on her face. “Why couldn’t you just collect cats like a normal madwoman?”

  But Clementine was too distressed to bite back, turning instead, with uncustomary desperation, to the lawyer. “There must be something you can do,” she begged him wretchedly. “Anything! Please, Christophe, anything. You must help me. It’s not fair.”

  “Come on, Clementine,” he reasoned, not without sympathy. “Is this really such a surprise?”

  “She should renounce it!” cried Clementine. “That’s what she should do. That’s what anyone else would do. What does she want with champagne, Christophe? With Saint-Vincentsur-Marne? With me? It’s just not fair!”

  For a moment Christophe felt real pity for her. She was right. Life had not been fair to Clementine. It had stuck her in this dilapidated hole with Olivier Peine, to whom reason was a foreigner and rationale an enemy, as far as Christophe could make out. The old man had been the same ever since he could remember. Frankly, the Peine sisters should be grateful the law protected their birthright because the old reprobate could otherwise have left the whole sorry business to Old Man Joliet just to spite them or, worse still, signed it over to the Oeuilly donkey refuge.

  “Well, don’t just sit there, you great fat lump!” Clementine’s desperation was short-lived, quickly stirring itself into the usual brew of Peine anger. This was a drop that Christophe had sampled on many a previous occasion and which somewhat overwhelmed the appetiser of compassion he’d only just tasted.

  “Well, it might be criminal but it is perfectly legal,” he said brusquely. “Your sister — sorry, half-sister — has made it abundantly clear that she does not wish to renounce her share in the estate and there’s not a thing you or I or anyone else for that matter can do about it. Plus, I’m afraid there’s —”

  “Why, that miserable piece of shit,” Clementine bawled, hands clenched, her foot now stomping furiously on the cold slate floor. “That drunken selfish pig. That poor excuse for a human being. That imbecile!”

  “And he spoke so fondly of you,” Mathilde drawled sarcastically, still sitting wrapped tightly in her trench, her disdainful eyes on the croissant flakes left over from her sister’s breakfast.

  “It is hardly your father’s fault,” Christophe insisted, noisily straightening his papers against the table top. “He is required by law to leave the bulk of his estate to his children, which brings us —”

  “He did not speak fondly of me.” Clementine forced her eyes to rest on Mathilde, her voice low and hoarse. “He did not speak fondly of anyone. Not me, not you, not his lawyer, not our neighbours, not our pets, not a thing, no one.”

  “Well, I don’t have any pets and he was probably right about the neighbours so I don’t care. I’m just here to get my share of his precious champagne house.”

  “Please, Mathilde,” Christophe attempted yet again, “you really should —”

  “His precious champagne house?” cried Clementine over the top of him. “I’ve poured my whole life into this place and now I’m expected to hand it over to a trumped-up city floozy who knows nothing about grapes, nothing about wine, nothing about —”

  “I knew enough to get in one month what you’d been desperate for your whole pathetic life,” said Mathilde, “and probably still are, you stupid fat cow.”

  “Ladies!” Christophe, who had two highly strung daughters aged four and seven, could spot a punch-up brewing from a mile away. He leapt to his feet just in time to stop Clementine clocking Mathilde over the head with the bread-board.

  “You evil witch,” Clementine bellowed, tears of rage squirting from her eyes. The breadboard fell to the floor, further alarming Cochon who was huddled over against the coal range, the whites of his eyes still rolling in the direction of Mathilde, about whom he had a very bad feeling. “Why did you have to come back? Didn’t you do enough damage last time? Why do you have to do this to me?”

  “I’m not doing anything to you, you ridiculous creature,” Mathilde answered calmly, not a hair on her perfectly coiffed head ruffled, as Christophe continued to restrain her enraged sister. “Why don’t you save yourself the bother of an aneurysm and get used to the idea that I’m simply here to rightfully claim what is mine. One half of this crumbling old house, one half of that dreary spread of grapes and one half of the contents of Olivier’s cellars.”

  “But madame,” Christophe grunted with some force, pushing Clementine back towards the chair he had righted for her and attempting once more to take control. “That’s what I have been trying to explain to you.”

  Mathilde uncrossed her long sheer denier-clad legs then crossed them again, which made it extremely hard for him to concentrate. She smiled to herself. Men, really. They were quite ridiculous. “Explain what, Monsieur Paillard?” she encouraged in her silkiest voice.

  “That it’s not half,” he replied, feeling a sweat develop on his upper lip that was nothing to do with the promise of what lay at the top of those never-ending legs. He should have got this part out of the way sooner. What had he been thinking? Women! Would he ever understand them?

  “Not half? Hah!” cried Clementine, a tremor of relief rumbling through her despair. The French succession laws were so complicated, she had never fully contemplated them but of course there would be loopholes for situations such as hers. Of course. “Thank God!” She collapsed back into the chair, her rage deflating. “He did care,” she said softly, picking at a pastry crumb on the table. “He did. I knew he did. He had to.”

  Mathilde’s poise wavered slightly and Christophe felt a surge of nausea as a steely glint flashed in her eye. For all Clementine’s faults, among them extreme rudeness and truly terrible taste in clothes, she lacked the scent of danger that lurked deep in the chic Mathilde. Certainly, those American legs of hers had bewitched him for a while. He had found himself comparing his wife’s short stocky ones quite unfavourably earlier in the car, wishing that she would dress more like a Parisian and less like a provincial mother of two. But his wife took in stray kittens. She cooked him truite ardennaise after a bad day at the office (hopefully, she’d make it for him tonight). His wife delivered home-made raspberry jelly to new neighbours, even foreign ones, and chose his ties and ironed his shirts. His wife loved him to pieces and spent nearly every moment they were together showing it. Mathilde would do none of these things, he s
uspected. There was something missing in her. It occurred to him that the whole Peine affair was not going to end prettily. The best he could hope for was that his part wouldn’t take too much longer and he would escape without the need for surgical attention. Thus recognising the urgent need to get a grip on himself and the business at hand, he swung into his well-practised professional mode.

  “I’m afraid that what I have to say will come as something of a surprise to you both,” he said boldly. “And I’m not sure how best to tell you so I’ll just come straight out with it.”

  Two sets of eyes bored fervently into him.

  “Your father had another daughter.”

  A gasp, in stereo.

  “Her name is Sophie Laroche. She was born in Paris in 1979 to Josephine Laroche, or Fifi as she was more commonly known. You might remember her, Clementine, she worked at Le Bois here in Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne for a year or so until, well, anyway, your father was in limited contact with her for a while after the birth of the child but Mademoiselle Laroche’s whereabouts are currently unknown. My colleagues in Paris, however, are following a strong lead regarding young Sophie. I am expecting to hear from her any time soon and you should be prepared for the same.”

  Clementine had been struck dumb, but not so Mathilde. “What the fuck are you telling us, you gibbering idiot?” she demanded, whipping her charm out from under the lawyer’s feet so adeptly he felt like a wobbling teacup on a magician’s table. Oh, how right he had been to sense danger.

  “I’m telling you that your father did not leave the House of Peine to you two,” Christophe answered her swiftly. “He left it to you three.” The last word reverberated around the room like a horseshoe ricocheting off the pale brick walls. For the first time in nearly two decades Clementine and Mathilde met each other’s eyes with something other than loathing. “Sophie, too, inherits an equal share,” Christophe added with as much good cheer as he could fake.