The Champagne Girls (The Champagne Dynasty Family Saga Book 2) by Tessa Barclay

Author:Tessa Barclay [Barclay, Tessa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: family secrets, family saga, page turner, French historical romance, must read, twists and turns, enjoyable romantic read
Publisher: Wyndham Books (Family Saga)
Published: 2016-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Nine days later Laura Fournier-Tramont died of pneumonia. Minutes after she breathed her last the newsboys were out on the streets of Paris and the big cities shouting, ‘Dreyfus Pardoned! The President Acts!’

‘If only she could have known,’ Gaby said later, looking back on that day with its strange mixture of sadness and triumph. ‘It would have meant so much to her.’ But at least, she thought, Aunt Alys had got her wish. It was over at last.

It was by no means over. The reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair were to echo over the heads of the French for seven more years until at last, in a complete reversal of former opinions, Alfred Dreyfus was decorated with the Legion of Honour. But the Tramonts didn’t feel compelled to take part in the campaign to clear his name totally ‒they had done what they wanted to do, they had helped to give the prisoner his freedom so that he could undertake that fight himself.

In any case, the Tramonts had problems of their own.

Arnold Simeon and his wife had come to be with their daughter in her last illness but arrived too late to see her alive. Gaby and David could scarcely remember them. Last time they’d seen them, they’d been small children and Grandpapa Simeon had seemed tall, dark, severe. Now he looked an old, tired man, and Grandmama Simeon had hair that was almost pure white under the black veil for the funeral.

Before he left to take ship for New York, Arnold had a conference with the men of the House of Tramont. ‘How’s business?’ he asked, with a wry glance.

‘Not good. That damned phylloxera is still chewing at our vines. We here at Calmady have planted where we can with grafted plants, but it’s an expensive process. Monsieur Simeon.’

The old man didn’t want a lecture on viticulture. He knew nothing about that. What he wanted was something different. The death of his only daughter had stricken him. He wanted to draw his relatives closer.

‘Our vines in America are immune to this bug ‒ am I right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Whyn’t you sell up and move to America, then?’

‘To do what?’ Frederic asked, astounded.

‘To make wine, of course. Plenty of wine made in California and round the Great Lakes.’

Robert thought fleetingly of his father, Jean-Baptiste Labaud, at Bracante Norte. For him the idea had attractions. And yet … Jean was in his seventies now ‒ what was the point of removing to California to be with him when he might not live many years longer?

Gavin was already shaking his head.

‘You can’t make champagne in North America,’ he said.

‘Why not? It’s just a sparkling wine ‒’

‘No, no. No other sparkling wine is champagne. Only the wine made here ‒ Gavin threw out a hand to indicate the mist-wreathed landscape outside the mansion’s window ‒ ‘only our wine is champagne.’

‘You mean to say that you’re going to go through all this expense, grafting French twigs on American roots, just so you can grow the damned things in this rotten climate?’

The three wine-makers looked at each other.

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