At the age of twenty, Jacques- Louis completes his apprenticeship in the apothecary under the judicious Doctor Douglas. But when it might have been assumed that he would don the apron and continue his work in the shop, the doctor reminds Jacques-Louis that an apothecary well versed in human nature makes a wiser practitioner . Perhaps it is time to go abroad, to expand his mind, to make peace with the past. From Edinburgh, Jacques-Louis goes to Paris to visit the Picpus Cemetery . There he sits beneath a young tree and reminisc es with his parents. He does not even know under which expanse of grass their faces and limbs moulder . He resolves to make enquiries and have a plaque placed. He leaves the shaded pathways emptied by the encounter . In Reims their vineyards had been broken up and allocated to others in the devisal of modern France. The chateau that had been his childhood home had been destroyed in a fire. There is no way to reclaim the estate under the laws of the r epublic. But in the village, he is delighted to find Philippe and Mathilde, who had risked their lives to ensure he and Henriette es caped. They are so moved to see him that Mathilde falls at his feet. Mathilde and Philippe’ s sons have been conscripted into the navy of Napoleon, whose reign has become a series of battles and blockades waged at sea and on land against the English, the Austrians, the Germans, the Russians, the Prussians, the Spanish and Napoleon’ s fellow Italians. It is a dangerous time for one such as Jacques-Louis, a member of the Ancien Régime. Mathilde worries that Napoleon’ s declaration of an amnesty for returning émigrés is not enough to protect Jacques-Louis and that he might suffer a similar fate to the Duc d’Enghien—the last descendant of the house of Condé—who had been suspected of a plot to overthrow the new emperor . Kidnapped in Baden, he was brought across the border to be shot, despite Napoleon being assured of his innocence.
What if Jacques-Louis is discovered and called upon to fight. To fight for France? It seems as ridiculous to Jacques-Louis as asking him to fight for England. He knows not where his loyalties lie, other than with some notion of a past he does not know how to re capture. But Napoleon has a particular love of champagne and farm labour is in short supply. He ke eps his armies and his allies well supplied . The fields that made the Colbert wines now supply the house of Jean-Rémy Moët, maker of Napoleon’ s favourite champagne. Philippe has found work in the Moët cellars. He obtains a position for Jacques-Louis as a labourer in the caves, pretendin g he is a n ephew , and Jacques-Louis quietly resumes the education that had been cut short. A government minister and chemist, Chaptal, has written a book which Jacques-Louis acquires and reads aloud to Philippe, who has long been certain that the flavours of a particular wine, the very texture of it, derive from the place where it is grown. Certain vineyards produce grapes whose wine evokes truffles or raspberr ies, while others nearby produce flavours of honeysuckle and citrus. The addition of sugar is nothing new, but sugar is in short supply, wars and blockades having halted shipment s from the Caribbean Sea. Fields of sugar beets have been planted at Napoleon’ s instruction to avoid a champa gne crisis, spreading a new green mantle across the soil. There is much to learn from Chaptal, and from Philippe and his colleagues when they inspect the vineyards before harvest. Vine spacing, pruning, the care of the soil. The pitfalls of interplanting or harvesting varieties together , which results in a wine of no particular character . In the cellars Jacques-Louis, with the eyes of a chemist, observes experiments of fermentation. He notes the effects of lessening or increasing the time the grapes and skins are in contact, the time the grapes remain in the first ferment ation, then the moment of union when the blending begins, and the perilous balance of sweetening. The smallest variables are consequential. There is an optimal time to pick the grapes, when they are neither too ripe nor too green. Rotten grapes must be discarded. No stems are to be crushed with the grapes, nor too many grapes crushed together . He is reminded that the wine must not be stirred too often, and that vats must be washed with lime and water, barrels regularly r eplaced, the vins clairs covered. Philippe encourages him to learn the nuances of flavour within the
wines, and what might be blended, what must wait, and what would blossom yet. Every year brings its challenge s. A wet summer , a particular ly bitter spring. Results are unpredictable and the flavours in the wines from riverfront or hillside, north- or south-facing, vary. Jacques-Louis discusses all this with Philippe, and he shares it in his correspondence with young Hannah at home in Edinbur gh. She cheers him with her reflections on her teachers, the neighbours, the books she is reading, the seasons passing through Edinbur gh and her interactions with fellow students. Jacques-Louis has been in France for four years when Philippe and Mathilde receive word that both their sons have been lost in a sea battle. Philippe ages overnight. Within a matter of weeks, he is laid in his grave, as if the lives of his children had been the animation of his soul. Mathilde, blighted by grief, counsels Jacques-Louis to leave. ‘Do not linger here from some sense of duty or obligation. Do not risk the madness of Napoleon. Of all I have cherished, you alone survive.’ He goes south and east to the Italian states, considering he might expand his knowledge there, but he finds wine of an inferior nature. The vines are allowed too much vigour, and grain and vegetables are planted in their midst making pruning and harvest particularly arduous. In the cellars the grapes are not sorted, and new grapes are added to the old from the day’s harvest. He writes to Hannah: The vines give of their bounty in a dance between man and fruit, season and patience, but only in Sicily and Tuscany have I found anything of merit. Elsewher e it is in abundance, but it is wine fit only for poets and their friends, as I heard it described. There is little consistency and much petty squabbling between various sovereignties, so industry is sorely limited. Napoleon is celebrated as founder, restorer and conquer or, having declared a new Kingdom of Italy and himself Emper or. He proposes to a merry, curvaceous girl and has his heart wounded when she decides to marry someone of greater means and lesser wit. He thinks to work passage from Sicily to Greece and on to Constantinople where he might find a ship to America and see the vineyards he has heard of
in California. But when he reaches Athens a letter arrives from Hannah, much delayed, telling him that her mother has died of a haemorrhage during a late and unexpected pregnancy . The baby had died, too. Jacques-Louis feels the loss keenly, the woman who had taken Henriette and him into her family. He knows he must return to Edinbur gh. When Hannah descends the stairs to greet him, he sees that the years he has been away have transformed the girl of his memories, with her chestnut braids and plaid dresses, into a beautiful woman. ‘You are not as I remembered you,’ he says. ‘You are exactly as I remember you, Jacques-Louis Colbert,’ she r eplies. Had Doctor Douglas foreseen that the daughter he treasured and the boy once destined to be a duc might share a destiny? ‘It seemed prudent to see what a little time might do,’ the doctor says with a twinkle in his eye. When Jacques-L ouis expresses his delight at finding himself in love with her, and his desire to marry her, Hannah laughs and says, ‘Did you not always know that you adored me?’ Returned to the apothecary on High Street, with its familiar contents, and with Hannah nearby to welcome him home, a sense of tranquillity descends upon Jacques-Louis. ‘Perhaps in time,’ Doctor Douglas suggests, ‘with wisdom, you will be sufficiently successful to grow the vineyard you imagine. Napoleon will not live forever , and France may yet find its way to more peaceful times.’ Jacques-Louis and Hannah are married, and when they return from their honeymoon in London, Jacques-Louis discovers that Doctor Douglas has altered the words on the glass door of the apothecary . It now reads: Apothecary & Chemist J. M. Douglas and J. L. Colbert A year later, Hannah gives birth to Caroline, and two years later Augusta is born. Esther, the maid who has known Hannah since she was born and who had cared for the orphans arrived from Re volutionary France, is now their inestimable houseke eper .
Doctor Douglas dies of a stroke on a beautiful summer day. Jacques- Louis reads a verse of Robbie Burns at the funeral service, which is well attended by the physicians, surgeons and patients of Edinbur gh who have relied upon him. The chanting linnet, or the mellow thrush, Hailing the setting sun, sweet, in the gr een thorn bush; The soaring lark, the per ching r ed-breast shrill, Or de ep-toned plovers, gr ey, wild whistling o’er the hill ... Henriette returns from London to attend the service. She urges Jacques- Louis and Hannah to bring their young family to London. His skills are needed. They are not bound to Edinburgh and the apothecary would sell for a good price. London offers so many opportunities for his practice, and for their daughters. There is a future there waiting for them all.
In Edinburgh, patients had visited him on the High Street with their aches, rashes and agues, but in London he finds himself administering salves and ointments to the displaced, the destitute, the dissolute and the abandoned. Before dawn each day, the factory bells sound and, soon after, Jacques- Louis hears the footst eps of children, women and men passing by in the darkness, returning only as night closes in, and later. He hears of a white moth, well known in the midlands, which had become easy prey to owls and other birds for its newfound conspicuousness on the coal-blacked walls of the factories and houses. Over a few decades, it has begun emerging from its chrysalis with black wings and body, thus demonstrating, he supposes, the thinking of the time. Adapt; comply; survive, if you can. The new century had been filled with promise, as new centuries tended to be. But he had not perceived the importance of James Watt inventing a s eparate condenser for the steam engine, empowering the machinery of mining and manufacturing. It was a scale of production never imagined. He had never seen the spinning jenny that multiplied the power of the weaver eight-fold. He had not reckoned on African slavery ever ceasing, but the British seem set on outlawing it. The new slaves are in the factories of London. He sees the chronic throat infections, eye infections, the incessant coughing and lung disease of the workers and those who lived close to the factories. The girl with the missing arm caught in a machine, who tells him that she rarely left the factory for it was warmer there and, if she was late for her shift, the foreman beat her with a whip. Without an arm, her future is the poorhouse or the brothel. He sees the split fingers and crushed feet. He tends to people with broken spines and ruptured organs. He closes the eyes of those who come too late. The woman who had sought to rid herself of the baby she was carrying, for she could not afford another child, and bleeds out in the back room of the shop. Nothing to be done, by that late stage, but to hold her in his arms and watch her light fade.
It isn’t only London. It is evident in Derbyshire and Leicestershire, the guilds and their apprenticeships lost, the skills of artisans, men and women, livelihoods extinguished by machines impervious to the cycles of daylight, weather , seasons and commun ity, a legacy of craftspeople gone in a generation. Ned Lud saw it in Nottinghamshire. Workers in the woollen mills sought a regulation of wages and hours. Public letters were written and affixed to every door and published in the papers, all signed with Lud’s name, or sometimes signed King Lud, which made a lot of people laugh, though not the real King, of course. The adamant refusal of factory owners caused riots. The government busied itself stamping out Ned Lud and his Luddites. How dare a common man, easily r eplaceable, rail against the ingenuity , the sheer brilliance of invention and efficiency , this juggernaut born of steel, steam and coal? A worker might as well rail against an ocean he hoped to calm with a ballad. How dare he protest against men who had staked their capital on distant lands, and whose wealth built factories and machines? Such men were the landlords of the world. Justice had no time for dissent, insurgence or radicalism. Of the one million people living in London, one hundred thousand of them were criminals. The captured ships from England’ s wars were rotting in fog-filled estuaries and swamps, until one British lord conceived of them as places to house the flow of thieves, forgers, embezzlers, fornicators, schemers and opportunists, the detritus of the new industrial age. Someone calculated that it cost a great deal less to transport such vermin than to maintain them in England. There they could also provide a useful workforce. And was it not prudent for a parliament of aristocrats to rid themselves of the poor and disenchanted before they rose up against their masters, as they had done in France? Hereditary power, the privilege of position, must remain as fixed and enduring as the sun in the sky . England had sent more than fifty thousand convicts to Maryland, Georgia and Virginia over the past two hundred years. When America won her ind ependence, she ceased to acc ept such cargo. Over the coming century , the English governmen t would send more than one hundred and sixty thousand convicts, to a place of waterfowl and wildlife, of estuaries, forests and mountains that would become Sydney . It was as far from England as it was almost possible to sail, a land the maps referred to as Terra Australis. South of Terra Australis, there was a group of islands, one
quite large. The Dutch had named this archipelago Van Diemen’ s Land. The French explored it, but the English claimed it.