The Beekeeper's Promise (Page 49)
He drew back to look at her face again, the face that he had missed for so long. And his voice was cracked and hoarse, but it was his own voice, returned at last.
‘I love you, Eliane,’ he replied.
Abi: 2017
Eliane’s house is located a couple of valleys across from Château Bellevue, halfway up a hillside whose sun-baked, south-facing slopes, clad with still more vines, stretch up behind her little stone cottage to the high-lying woodlands beyond. Just as Eliane foresaw, it seems that Mathieu eventually managed to find a position as winemaker at a local château so that they could marry and have a home of their own.
I feel nervous as Sara parks the car on the verge outside the cottage door. We’ve been invited to morning coffee with Eliane and Mireille. I’ve already developed such a clear picture of the Martin sisters in my head, through hearing the story of their lives during the war years, and I wonder whether I’ll be disappointed if they turn out to be completely different. Of course, I’m not expecting to see the young women they were back then, Mireille with her head of dancing, dark curls and Eliane with her straight, honey-blonde hair – in fact I probably won’t recognise them at all on the basis of the images of them that I’ve imagined, now that they’re both not so far off their hundredth birthdays.
Sara leads me past the front door, where pale-pink roses scramble in an exuberant profusion, and make our way round to the back, following a driveway that leads on up the hill to a much larger house – presumably the vineyard’s château – that is just visible among the trees above us.
The back door of the cottage stands ajar, and as Sara knocks on it I turn to look around at Eliane’s garden.
Held within the embrace of the hillside, three neat vegetable beds have been cut into the rich brown earth: I can identify the scarlet flowers of runner beans, which climb up a row of wigwam-shaped poles, and at the end of the row, bright-yellow sunflowers, taller than my head, turn their faces to follow the sun as it makes its daily procession across the sky. In the nearest bed, juicy-looking tomatoes hang in tempting clusters and courgettes nestle beneath them among the thick leaves of their own sprawling vines. Terracotta pots are planted with an array of herbs that exude their potent, medicinal-smelling perfume into the air around us. A little further up the hill, where the garden meets the vines, several trees form a line of shelter. And beneath the trees there are three white beehives. The sight of them makes me smile.
Higher still, up towards the top of the slope, where the vines meet the woodland, there is a whitewashed wall enclosing a square of the land. Sara notices me looking at it. ‘That’s the graveyard of the family who own this château,’ she says. ‘Mathieu is buried there.’
The back door opens wide and a woman steps out who is too young to be either Eliane or Mireille. She envelops Sara in a warm embrace, kissing her on both cheeks before turning to me.
‘Hello, Abi,’ she says. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Beaming broadly, Sara puts an arm around the woman’s shoulders. ‘This is your additional surprise!’
I look at the woman, with a bemused but still (I hope) polite smile fixed to my face. She has rosy cheeks and sparkling brown eyes and she wears her pepper-and-salt-flecked hair tied back in a somewhat unruly bun.
‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ she says. ‘I’m Blanche. Blanche Dabrowski-Martin.’
I can’t speak. And when I can get any words out at all, I blurt, ‘Blanche! You’re still here!’
She laughs. ‘I am. Or, more accurately, I’ve come back. When we lost Mathieu last year, I decided to move from Paris and keep Eliane company. And it’s so lovely to be home again.’
‘Paris?’ I echo. ‘But how . . . ? When . . . ?’ The questions crowd into my head so fast that I can’t formulate them clearly.
Blanche takes my hand and leads me to a little white wrought-iron table and chairs set beside the back door under a shaded pergola. Trumpet-shaped flowers, the colour of bright flames, hang in clusters around us, their thick canopy of leaves forming a roof above our heads. Bees bury their heads in the scarlet blooms, busily mining the nectar from them to carry it back to the hives.
‘I know, there’s so much to ask, so much to tell. Sara has said how interested you have been in hearing Eliane’s story.’ Blanche smiles. ‘After the war, my father, who had been fighting with the Allied Forces, came back to Paris to try to find my mother and me. There’d been no way of telling him that Esther had died, and that the Martins had taken me in. But he tracked down Mireille, through the atelier where Esther had worked. She brought him here, to the mill. You can imagine how he wept when he saw me and when Lisette produced my birth certificate from between the pages of her book of herbal remedies, where it had been hidden for so long. And so we were reunited. He and I made our home in Paris, but I’ve always been a frequent visitor to my other family down here in the Sud-Ouest.
‘Now,’ she continues, ‘you two sit there while I make the coffee. Eliane will be out in a moment. Mireille isn’t here yet, but I think one of her grandsons will be bringing her shortly.’
As Blanche bustles back indoors, we hear the sound of a car engine and a battered blue pickup truck pulls up the drive, stopping alongside the cottage. A cheerful-looking young man jumps down from the driver’s cab, waves to us and goes around to help someone else out of the passenger seat.
Leaning on his arm, a tiny, hunched old woman makes her way slowly towards us and we scramble to our feet. Her curls are as white as winter frost, but when she reaches me she gives me an appraising look with eyes that are as bright and sharp-sighted as those of a bird. ‘Bonjour, Abi. I am Mireille Thibaud.’ She shakes my hand and I realise her fingers are gnarled and lumpy with arthritis. ‘And this is one of my grandsons, Luc. He’s just passed his driving test and so his father has let him borrow his old truck. Quite an adventure, the two of us allowed out on our own for once, eh Luc?’
He grins. ‘Oui, Mamie.’ Turning to us, he, too, shakes our hands and then says, ‘And the price I have to pay for the privilege is going to do the shopping too. I’ll be back in about an hour.’
‘Don’t forget to drive safely like they told you to!’ Mireille calls after him, her tone fondly teasing. Despite her great age, I recognise her lively expression and her sense of humour from Sara’s descriptions of her.
Blanche reappears carrying a tray, which she sets down on the little table. Pretty china cups and saucers, decorated with butterflies, sit alongside a plate of little buttery biscuits.
And then she’s there: Eliane. I would recognise her anywhere. She’s taller and stands more erect than her elder sister; her straight, white hair is tied up in a chignon and her face is a perfect oval shape, the bone structure still visible beneath her age-softened skin. But it is her eyes that strike me the most. She fixes me with her gaze and it is the clear, calm grey of a summer’s dawn.
I’m expecting a formal handshake, but am taken aback when she steps forward and envelops me in a warm embrace before kissing my cheeks. ‘So you are Abi,’ she says. She holds me at arm’s length to get a better look, and then nods as if she recognises me too. And then she says, ‘I’m pleased to meet you at last,’ as if she’s been expecting me. As if she knew that we would meet one day.
‘And I’m pleased to see you still have bees,’ I say and then blush, realising that this is hardly an appropriate conversation-opener with these two old ladies whom I have never met before.
She smiles. And then, as if she, too, is continuing a conversation that we’d already begun, she says, ‘And you know, Abi, they are the descendants of the bees I kept at Château Bellevue.’
‘But how? I thought they were destroyed by the Germans?’
Her eyes cloud slightly, like a mist on the river, as she remembers. ‘You’re right, the hives were burned. But when Mathieu and I went back to the walled garden to start clearing away the devastation that the soldiers had left behind them, we noticed something. In the silence, up there, a bee began to buzz among the camomile and the peppermint. And then another, and another. And, as we watched, they flew back to a hole in the wall. You see, some of the bees had escaped the fire, enough to begin a new colony. And the next year, when they swarmed, I was able to fill a new hive. And so they have continued, down the years.’ She looks up the hill towards the hives beneath the lace-leaved trees. ‘Acacia,’ she nods. ‘The champagne of honey.’
We sit and talk for almost two hours. And, as we do, it seems to me that the Martin sisters grow younger, becoming once again the girls they were all those years ago.
Eliane shows me a photograph of a smiling family – a woman standing between her husband and three pretty, dark-haired daughters. ‘Can you guess who this is?’ she asks, pointing.
It takes me only a moment to realise. ‘Is it Francine?’ I ask, with wonderment.
She nods. ‘I always knew I’d see her again one day. She lives in Montreal. Her daughters are named Eliane, Lisette and Mireille.’
By the time Luc pulls up in the blue truck again, to take Mireille home, I can see that both the sisters are beginning to tire.