“I’m fine,” Elliott said, struggling to wipe the sweat that was pouring off his forehead as he was bent in half.
“Here, let me help you,” Bastien offered. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a kerchief. Elliott grabbed the bandanna from Bastien’s hand, sweeping it over his drenched face before attempting to hand it back to him.
Bastien’s eyebrow lifted, and his lip curled. “Non merci, you can have it.”
Elliott nodded and stuffed it into his back pocket. “Do we just go inside, or should we like knock first?”
“We can go inside,” Bastien answered, never taking his eyes from my face as he pushed open the massive wooden double doors. “As I just explained to Plum, churches are never locked.”
I broke away from his gaze and saw Elliott was already heading inside the chapel to find someone who could direct us around. After he spoke with a cloaked clergyman passing through the church’s nave from the pulpit, Elliott walked back up the aisle to rejoin us at the front door.
“Bad news, Father François was called away to visit a sick parishioner earlier this morning and hasn’t returned yet. We’ll have to film this on a different day, although I’m not sure when we’ll have time, the schedule is already pretty jam-packed,” he explained.
Bastien held up his hand. “Give me une moment, I’ll go and have a word with the clergyman.” Then he whisked himself away with an enviable sense of confidence.
“He’s wasting his time and ours,” Elliott said once Bastien was out of earshot. “Nobody’s allowed in the archives without Father François.”
A few minutes later, Bastien clapped his hands together, the sound echoing off every wall of the chapel. He turned and gave us a big thumbs-up.
I elbowed Elliott. “Nobody, huh?”
“Maybe something I said earlier got lost in translation,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.”
Bastien hurried up the aisle. “Father Timothée agreed to chaperone us into the archives. We can poke around all we want, we just cannot take any of the items with us.”
“Can we film?” Elliott asked.
Bastien pulled the release out of his pocket and waved it around proudly. “I got his Thomas Jefferson right here.”
“Thomas Jefferson? Do you mean his John Hancock?” Elliott said.
Bastien shrugged. “Who’s John Hancock?”
Elliott added the release to his clipboard. “You know what, it really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s signed.”
We followed Father Timothée past the altar, down a long hallway, to a set of stairs leading up to a newly constructed addition to the church. Its modernity was in stark contrast to the ancient walls that otherwise surrounded us.
“This space has been a passion project of Père François for a long time,” Father Timothée explained. “He wanted a place where the history of the region would be well preserved. It’s taken most of his lifetime to collect enough money to build l’annexe, but here we are,” he said, pushing open the heavy door.
We squeezed behind him into the archive room. A mahogany table sat in the middle of the room like an island surrounded by a sea of filing cabinets. Elliott turned on the camera’s overhead light, which practically lit up the whole space.
Father Timothée jumped up and down, waving his arms in the air. “Non, non! The light can harm the artifacts.”
Elliott turned it off and set down the camera. “I don’t have the right equipment with me to shoot without proper lighting.”
I interjected, “If you have a C100 you should be fine. Just switch out the 24-105 for the 18-135 lens.”
“I guess that could work,” he said, his voice tinged with disbelief at my knowledge of camera equipment.
But you didn’t grow up on film sets and not pick up a few things. More than a few things. I used to spend every spare second I could with the EVERLYday crew, far more interested in what was happening behind the cameras than what was taking place in front of them. “It’ll work. Trust me.”
“This whole outing’s been a bit of a bust. I’m hot and hungry and tired. What do you say we just wrap?”
“Wrap?” Bastien asked. “What do you mean wrap?”
“Call it a day. Go home,” Elliott answered impassively.
Bastien’s brows drew together. “Why would we do that? We can still learn about Château Mirabelle without the camera, n’est-ce pas?”
Elliott picked his bag up off the floor and turned to me. “I’m gonna start making my way down to the van. I have a bunch of calls to make back at the inn.”
“You know what, I think I’ll stay here with Bastien,” I said. “I have my phone and can shoot some footage if we come across anything interesting.”
Elliott scoffed. “It’s not really the same thing. I wouldn’t even bother.”
“Between all my social media accounts I’ve actually gotten pretty good at it.” I took out my phone and quickly showed Elliott a clip I took from when we first drove into Maubec captured with a dramatic time-lapse and overlaid with Édith Piaf singing “La Vie en Rose.” The combination of stunning visuals and the iconic song created a compelling story, and Elliott’s skepticism seemed to waver just a bit as he watched the enchanting scene unfold.
“Suit yourself, but I don’t expect we’ll be able to use much—if any of it,” he said before turning on his heel to leave.
After he was gone, Bastien and I dove into the research, pulling out every last artifact related to Château Mirabelle from the cabinets and spreading them out across the table. One photograph in particular caught my attention: a handsome young man in a dark suit and a striking woman in a lace wedding gown standing arm in arm in the middle of the château’s massive vineyard. I turned it over, and scribbled across the back were the words Luc and Imène Adélaïse, 1931.
I took out my phone and hit record. “Is this them? The last owners of Château Mirabelle? Luc and Imène Adélaïse?”
Bastien took the picture from my hand. “Oui, this must be their wedding day.”
“It’s strange, other than the clothes, and the fact it’s in black and white, this picture could have been taken yesterday.”
