The Chalk Beneath

18th-century France. The beginning of the French Revolution. And a young woman about to inherit a secret that could destroy her.

Nicole Ardenne is the daughter of vines and chalk — raised in the shadow of Champagne's great estates, she knows soil and seasons better than society ever expected her to. When she is swept into the world of the landed merchant class through a marriage to François Delaunay, she finds herself navigating a gilded cage she was never meant to enter.

But her husband harbors secrets — debts, hidden ledgers, and an alliance with a predatory aristocrat who will stop at nothing to claim what he wants. When François is destroyed by scandal and left to die, Nicole is left widowed, indebted, and alone in a house that wants her gone.

The Revolution thunders closer to the valley every day. Creditors circle. Revolutionaries threaten anything with a crest. And the nobleman who covets her — Remi de Hautvillers — moves with the patience of a man who has always taken what is not his.

Nicole must outwit them all: the creditors who would strip her bare, the revolutionaries who would burn it down, and the predator who would claim the house and everything in it. Or lose the one thing she has left — the vineyard, the legacy, the life she fought to keep.

The basis for the historical drama series CHAMPAGNE.