Louis counted Emily's eyelashes in the moonlight under the grape leaves.
The cast of her right leg lay between them like a stubborn boundary. In the sound of cicadas chirping, he felt the acorn in his pocket - the one he had brought back from the North African battlefield, the surface of which had been ground into pulp.
"The doctor says it'll be ready in two weeks.
" Emily said suddenly, her fingertips running across the plaster of the grapevine he had carved yesterday. "But you know what I saw in the wine?"
She lifted her flask, and the pinot noir rippling in the moonlight.
What Louis saw in the reflection of the wine noodles was not his present self, but the young man in the ill-fitting military uniform of 1940, burying acorns in the scorched earth beside the trenches.
"You're always running away."
The visions of wine, "Like seven years ago at the train station..."
Louis put his thumb on her wrist pulse. The scent of lavender suddenly became strong, and he realized it was a reaction to her nervousness.
The distant roar of a tractor roused the night-dwelling blackbirds.
The wooden box of Joseph's belongings was gathering dust in the corner of the attic. Emily turned the brass combination lock - she tried Louie's birthday, the date of her enlistment, even the phase of the moon on the day she first met, and finally the clicking noise came from her own birthday.
Madeleine's wedding ring lies beneath the yellowed Notes of Lupercalia.
Inscribed on the inside of the plain silver ring is the Provence proverb "root and vine", and the gem is a perfect sphere of amber, which contains the carbonized skin of the 1902 lightning strike on the vine.
Suddenly the notebook slipped, and out of the pages floated the 1940 train timetable.
Next to the red Saint Cyril station name, Emily finds an arrow painted with wine stains, pointing to a secret phrase she has not cracked for seven years: graft wounds are the second breath of life
When Louis bumped into Emily at midnight in the vineyard, she was digging through the roots of old vines with the tip of her cane.
The plaster glowing cold blue in the moonlight reminded him of searchlights in North African prisoner-of-war camps.
"Here's your answer."
She held up the muddy astrolabe, where the polished brass showed the Roman numeral Ⅶ, "In the root nob of the seventh old vine, there is Madeleine's..."
The sudden collapse interrupted the speech. The moment Louis pounced, the ringing in his ears from the 1943 air raid returned. By the time the dust cleared, Emily's plaster leg was stuck in the sinkhole, oozing not blood, but thick 1940 liquor.
"This is my prophetic dream."
She chuckled in the darkness, the aroma of wine on the tip of his nose with her breath, "only it's not separation in the mist, it's..."
Louis's lips pressed the last half of the sentence. Soft and untouched for seven years, it ferments to a flavor more intoxicating than any wine. Beneath the collapsed soil, Madeleine's sealed wedding ring was burning, and carbonized tissue in the amber was sprouting.
In the morning light, the rescue team found the two men asleep at the bottom of the pit. Emily's plaster leg broke into four pieces, revealing her pristine skin. The acorns in Louie's pockets had taken root, and the buds wrapped around their clasped hands.
Between the roots of the old vine, the wine-soaked "Notes of Luperz" was turning pages.
On the soiled pages, Madeleine's 1940 handwriting, added to it, gradually emerged: "When love and earth are at the same time, scars become the nourishment of the vine."
Emily picks up the astrolabe and discovers that the patina on the back has peeled off, revealing a miniature vineyard carved by Louis in the trenches of North Africa.
The roots of each clay vine are embedded with gravel from Saint Cyril.
"You stole my soil."
She pressed the astrolabe to his heart and heard the two heartbeats synchronizing into the drumbeat of the brewing season.
Joseph's moon phase clock struck seven at noon. The winery workers witnessed a miracle: the land that had collapsed last night was now covered with new emerald vines. The vines form a natural arch, with snail shells from 1927 and shell casings from 1943 hanging from the top.
Louis opens Madeleine's wedding ring box under the archway. When the ring rings on Emily's finger, the ancient vine in the amber suddenly bloom, petals fall into the 1953 wine label design.
"This is..."
Emily's exclamation was picked up by the wind among the grape leaves.
Louis pointed to the north slope, where wild vines covered the stone walls of the ruins of the mill where they had first met twenty years earlier. On the top of the broken wall, seven acorns are swaying to the cicadas, ready to start the next cycle.
Emily's fingertips ran over the petals in the amber, and the blueprints glimmered as they touched them. She suddenly recognized the shape of one of the acorns -- exactly the size of the one Louis was now carrying in his pocket, but with a silver notch on the surface.
"This is our growth ring."
Louis took her ring hand and rubbed the proverb on the inside of the ring between his fingers. As the wind blows off the drawing, the 1953 wine label design is revealed in the sunlight: a comet track wrapped around the outline of a plaster leg against a backdrop of seven glowing acorns.
The grapevine arch behind them suddenly rustled. The new vine that had been planted in the morning was already bearing fruit, and on the surface of each fruit were floating fine words - all the words of love in the Lupercalia, seeping into the skin with photosynthesis.
At noon in the Chateau de Chaffan wine cellar, Emily opens the barrel of the "Farewell wine" sealed in 1940. The moment the wine poured into the chart, the copper surface emerged from the scene of the train platform: Louis in military uniform, instead of fleeing, tore up the tickets on the tracks, letting the night wind blow the paper scraps into acorn-shaped stars.
"You changed the future I saw."
As she turned around, she knocked the bottle over, and the 1943 air-raid siren oozed through the spilled wine stain. With his wine-stained fingers, Louie painted on her plaster fragments, which automatically joined together to recreate the hugging silhouettes at the bottom of last night's collapse.
The ruins of the mill in the twilight, seven acorns cracking synchronously in the moonlight. Shoots climb around the wild vines, weaving a flowing curtain of light across the broken walls. As the first firefly passes through the light screen, the 1953 wedding scene appears on film:
Emily, leaning on a grapevine cane, pins her comet-like hairpin into her white hair; In the wedding ring box that Louie carved out of bullet casings, lies the amber ring on her finger at this moment.
"Madeleine's reincarnation is not a curse."
Emily put the astrolabe into the hole in the ruins wall, "is a second flowering for every wounded soul."
Louie's palm was covered by shrapnel on her right knee.
Wild vines burst into glow-in-the-dark blossoms, carving their scars into a vine totem. When the cicadas chirped for the seventh time, they heard themselves exclaiming in the cellar of the mill twenty years ago, and the laughter of forty years later floating from under the vine of the future.
When the moon clock struck the silver for the last time, all the casks of Saint Cyril's wine ripple at the same time. The winemakers were amazed to see the same image on the inside of each barrel:
the ruins of the mill under the stars, the wild vines coiled into an eternal ring, the seven acorns waiting for the monsoon at the heart of the ring.
Emily's prophetic dream is complete at last - there is no war or separation in the misty wilderness, only two sets of footprints winding deep into the vineyard.
Each step gave birth to a new vine, each new leaf engraved with the secret words of the years.
She removed the copper nails from the astrolabe and hammered them into the wall of the mill. When Louis's carving knife finished the final lines, the ruins exploded into emerald monuments.
The inscription is the final sentence of Madeleine's note and the beginning of what they are writing:
"Love is the only graft that transcends time and space."