25. Iris
IRIS
Three days before it ends, I watch the case nearly come apart at the Thursday market.
I'm at the cheese stall when I spot Monique across the square, backed up against the fountain with Monsieur Fabre—the seed merchant, seventy if he's a day, a man who once told me Marguerite taught his wife to graft roses. He's turning his hat in his hands like it owes him money.
I don't mean to listen. I listen anyway.
"—can't do it, Monique. Not in a courtroom."
"You signed your name."
"That was before Bertrand's boy rang." He looks at his shoes.
"Jean-Pierre holds the note on my barn. You know that.
And his lawyer says if it goes to trial, there will be questions.
About her. About how she—" He can't finish it.
"I won't stand in front of a judge and be made to talk about how Marguerite lived. It isn't decent."
"It was decent enough when you drank her wine every harvest for forty years."
He flinches. So do I.
I'm halfway across the square with my mouth already open—I can fix this, I fix things, there are angles here, leverage, a spreadsheet assembling itself in my head—when Monique catches my eye and stops me with a look I will remember for the rest of my life. A look that says: not yours. Mine.
So I stand at the cheese stall and watch a woman in her seventies fight for us in a language older than any court. I can't hear most of it. I hear forty years. I hear her girls. I hear something low that makes him close his eyes.
In the end he puts his hat back on and walks away, and I can't tell from his shoulders which way it went.
Monique comes to me at the stall and buys a chèvre she plainly doesn't want.
"Thirty-three names," she says. "It was thirty-six on Monday. He is peeling them off one loan at a time, that man."
"What can I do?"
"Nothing. You can do nothing, and you can be seen doing nothing." She pats my cheek, hard, twice. "You are the granddaughters. You stand in your grandmother's fields and you be worth it. The rest is mine."
Then she walks off across her square like weather, and I go home, and I don't tell Cat how frightened I am, and for three days every ringing phone drops my stomach through the floor.
The phone goes at ten past eight, and I nearly don't answer it.
I'm in the kitchen in one of Cat's shirts, making coffee badly. Cat is still asleep in a way that suggests she may not be vertical before noon. The last thing I want is the outside world.
Then I see the name on the screen.
"Ma?tre Rousseau."
"Mademoiselle Beaumont-Clark." She has never wasted a syllable in her life. "Beaumont has withdrawn."
I put down the coffee pot. "Say that again."
"Jean-Pierre Beaumont has formally withdrawn his contest of the will. His counsel filed yesterday evening. It is finished."
The kitchen goes very quiet. Down the hall, a floorboard creaks.
"It's over," I say. "That's it? It's just—over?"
"It is over. The estate is yours and Mademoiselle Aldridge's. No contest, no conditions." A pause. "I will tell you one thing more, however, because I would rather you heard it from me than from the village."
Something in her tone puts a hand on the back of my neck. "Go on."
"It was closer than I allowed you to believe."
"How close?"
"His own counsel ran the numbers before they advised him to walk away." Rousseau's voice stays perfectly level, which somehow makes it worse. "With two fewer witnesses to Marguerite's competence, he would have had a case worth arguing. Possibly worth winning."
Two.
I stand in that kitchen with the coffee going cold and I do the arithmetic. Two people. Two names on a list. Two villagers who might have been travelling, or unwell, or simply unwilling to put their signature to a document defending an old woman who had loved another old woman.
Two. And I lose my grandmother's house, and Cat loses her home, and the entire shape of the rest of my life goes somewhere else.
"Mademoiselle?"
"I'm here."
"You had thirty-one," Rousseau says. And then, in a voice that is almost warm: "Madame Monique appears to have been extremely persuasive on the telephone."
Monique.
"Congratulations, mademoiselle. Go and be very happy. Send me nothing further."
She hangs up.
I stand there for a second. Then I go straight to our room, get into bed with all my clothes on, and wake Cat with my mouth against her shoulder and the words it's over, it's over, we won.
The harvest supper has been on Mathilde's calendar for a month.
Which is the only reason there's a party at all — nobody in this village could have organised one in six hours, whatever they'd like you to believe.
The tables were already going up in the courtyard at Les Oliviers.
The lamb was already in the ovens. All that happens is that news travels the way news travels here, which is to say faster than we drive, so that by the time Cat and I come through the gate at seven, the thing has quietly stopped being a harvest supper and started being something else entirely.
I know it the moment we walk in. The noise changes — just a half-beat, where the courtyard notices us and decides, collectively, to be delighted.
Cat's hand tightens around mine.
We haven't discussed this. We've been careful in the village. Not hiding, exactly. Not announcing, either. And now here we are, coming through the gate with our fingers laced, in front of every single person we know.
"They're staring," I murmur.
"Let them." Cat doesn't let go. "They've been gossiping about us for weeks. Might as well give them something accurate."
Monique comes out of the crowd like weather.
"There they are!" She has us both by the shoulders before I can speak, wine sloshing dangerously. "The women of the hour."
"Monique." I catch her wrist. "Thirty-one witnesses."
She waves this away. "I made a few telephone calls."
"Rousseau says two fewer and he'd have had a case."
That stops her. Just for a second the twinkle goes out of her, and something older and harder looks back at me — a woman who has lived in this village for sixty years and knows precisely what her neighbours are and are not capable of.
"Then it is fortunate," she says, "that I do not take no for an answer."
And that's all she'll give me. She's already turning away, already shouting for champagne, already pretending she has not spent three weeks on the telephone defending a dead woman's name.
Cat gets there before I do. She wraps Monique up from behind, presses her face into the old woman's shoulder, and says something in French too low and too fast for me to catch — and Monique goes very still, and pats her hand twice, and says gruffly, "Yes, yes. Enough."
She doesn't let go for quite a while.
The toast happens in the middle of the courtyard, with Monique standing on a chair over Jacques's loud objections about her knees.
"To Marguerite Beaumont," she says, "who loved this land, and loved Hélène Voclain, and never once apologised for either."
The courtyard goes quiet.
It's the first time I've heard it said out loud. In public. In front of everyone. Plainly, like a fact — like it was never a thing to be whispered about at all.
"And to Catherine and Iris," Monique says, raising her glass, "who are going to do it all again. Better. And in front of us."
"To the Domaine!" someone bellows, and the whole courtyard roars it back.
I don't decide to do it. That's the part I'll think about afterward — that I don't weigh it, don't plan it, don't run a single calculation.
I just turn to Cat, in the middle of the courtyard, with the entire village watching, and I kiss her.
She makes a small startled sound against my mouth. Then her hand slides into my hair and she kisses me back, and somebody whistles, and somebody starts clapping, and Sophie shouts something in French that I intend to pretend, for the rest of my life, I did not understand.
When we break apart, Cat is scarlet and laughing.
"Warn a girl," she says.
"No."
Later, at the edge of the courtyard with the lights strung overhead and the music going, she hands me a glass and asks me what I want.
"Legal thing's done. Harvest is in." She bumps my shoulder. "You can do anything now. So what do you want?"
In Chicago my whole self was welded to my work — the events, the clients, the endless performance of competence. Here that woman has quietly dissolved, and I have been waiting six weeks to panic about it, and the panic has never come.
"I want to run the farm," I say. "Properly. Learn the business, get the distillery paying for itself." I hesitate. "And then I want to build something."
"Build what?"
"There's a gap in the market. High-end lavender — cosmetics, home goods, the artisanal end of it. Right branding, right distribution." I hear myself picking up speed and I don't stop. "It could be real, Cat. It could be a proper business."
Cat is looking at me with an expression I can't read.
"What?"
"Nothing." She is fighting a smile and losing badly. "It's only that it's extremely attractive when you do that."
"When I do what?"
"Say the word distribution."
"You are a deeply strange woman."
"Yes." She takes my hand. "Build it. Build it with me."
"That's what I was asking."
"Then that's what I'm answering."
We walk home through the fields near midnight, the moon bright enough that we don't need a torch. The party is still going behind us and will probably go until dawn.
Cat is drunk in the specific way that makes her sentimental and slightly vicious, and she is telling me at length about Monsieur Lefèvre's opinions on modern irrigation, and I am not listening to a word of it.
I'm just watching her talk, and thinking that I came to this country with a suitcase full of the wrong shoes and a plan to be gone in ninety days.
We come up the track and the farmhouse rises out of the dark, and the sight of it does what it always does now, which is undo something in my chest.
Our house.
My phone buzzes as I reach the door.
I nearly don't look. It's past midnight, and nothing good has ever arrived after midnight.
I look.
Iris—
I've made arrangements to come to France. We need to talk. I'll be there in three days.
—Colette
I stand in the doorway of my own home and feel the entire evening drain out of me.
"What is it?" Cat says.
I turn the phone around.
She reads it. Her face doesn't move at all, which is how I know exactly how bad it is.
"Three days," she says.
"Three days."
She takes the phone gently out of my hand, slides it into her own pocket, and takes my hand instead.
"Come inside," she says. "We'll deal with her together."
I let her lead me in. But my heart is going like something trapped, and behind us the lavender is moving in the dark — and somewhere across an ocean, my mother is packing a bag to come and look at the life she spent thirty-two years making certain I would never have.