Come The Vintage. Anne Mather
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that had her father still been alive, this day would not have occurred. She wondered how much the priest had known of her father’s affairs, of the terms of his will, and decided he had probably been a witness to it. He obviously shared her father’s and Alain’s belief that marriage should first and foremost be treated as a business arrangement, but the cold-bloodedness of it, the calculating method of its inception, filled Ryan with despair.
Custom satisfied, they turned to the meal. Alain served the priest first, then Ryan, and finally himself. If he was surprised that Ryan would accept nothing more than a small steak and half a tomato, he made no comment, and for this she was thankful. But when she cut into the meat she found to her horror that although the outer casing was brown and smelt appetizing, inside the core was still hard and frozen.
She looked up aghast to find Alain and the priest eating silently, apparently unperturbed at the rawness of the meat, but her stomach revolted. What must they be thinking of her? she thought desperately. Were neither of them going to say anything? They must know she had not thawed it before cooking. They would think her an absolute idiot!
She pushed her plate aside, and waited for one of them to speak. But they said nothing, and she suddenly felt furiously angry. She didn’t want their pity, she didn’t want them to pretend to enjoy something so as not to hurt her feelings. It was too galling to contemplate!
Taking a deep breath, she burst out: ‘Don’t eat it! It’s horrible! It’s raw! The cat ate the meat I thawed, and I didn’t have time to thaw any more.’
Abbé Maurice lifted his head in an embarrassed way, and Alain regarded her steadily. ‘Don’t be silly, Ryan. I prefer my steak rare.’
‘There’s a difference between rare and raw!’ declared Ryan vehemently.
‘I tell you, it’s all right.’ Alain’s eyes had hardened slightly.
Ryan’s lips moved tremulously. ‘Well, I’m not going to eat it,’ she retorted, pushing back her chair and getting to her feet.
‘Where do you think you are going?’ demanded Alain, half rising also, but she didn’t reply, she merely shook her head and walked unsteadily to the door.
Somehow she made it to her room, closing the door and sinking down on the bed, tears probing hotly at her eyes. Her first meal and it was a disaster! She would never learned to cope as efficiently as Berthe.
The door opened on her misery and she looked up in amazement to see Alain de Beaunes blocking the doorway with his bulk. His eyes were dark and angry, and his mouth was a thin line in his tanned features. He came into the room and stood looking down at her coldly.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ he inquired tautly. ‘Is it your practice to abandon your guest half-way through the meal?’
‘He’s not my guest, he’s yours,’ she managed, biting her lips to stop them from trembling.
‘He is our guest,’ Alain corrected her shortly. ‘Stop behaving so childishly. So – the meat is not thoroughly cooked! No one expects you to produce a perfect meal at the first attempt.’
‘Oh, thank you. That’s very reassuring to know!’ she exclaimed with heavy sarcasm.
He thrust his hands into the hip pockets of his trousers, tautening the cloth across his thighs. ‘I make allowances for your immaturity, little cat. Be thankful that I do.’
Ryan turned her head away, her eyes smarting from tears suppressed. ‘I don’t remember inviting you into my room, monsieur. Aren’t you supposed to knock before entering a lady’s bedroom?’
The exclamation he made was half anger, half amusement. ‘You are determined to challenge me, are you not, little one?’ he commented quietly. Then he turned towards the door. ‘Very well. You have five minutes to tidy yourself, and then you will join the good Abbé and me for dessert. Do I make myself clear?’
Ryan turned to face him protestingly. ‘I don’t want anything else.’
‘Maybe not.’ His eyes assessed her in a way that caused the blood to quicken in her veins. ‘You had no breakfast, did you? In spite of what I said. Your colour is high at the moment, but underneath you are pale. It is food you require, little one. Perhaps not the steak, I admit, but maybe some soup would not come amiss, eh?’
Ryan’s stomach heaved restlessly. ‘There is no soup.’
‘There are tins. Even I am proficient with a tin opener.’ He paused in the doorway and looked back at her. ‘You are all right now?’
Ryan hesitated, and then she nodded. And she was. It was true. Although he had not sympathized with her, his quiet words had restored a little of her confidence. The knowledge surprised her.
RYAN and Alain de Beaunes were married three weeks later in the small church of St. Augustine in the village of Bellaise. The service was conducted by the Abbé himself, and as neither Ryan nor Alain had any close family present it was a very quiet affair.
During those weeks preceding the wedding, Ryan felt herself to be living in a vacuum. The whole structure of her life had changed drastically and become slightly unreal, so that she found it hard to absorb what was going on around her. Most particularly her relationship with her future husband.
It was the time of year after the excitement of the grape harvest when a certain amount of anti-climax crept into the production of the year’s vintage. The initial pressing of the grapes had been achieved, and the juice transferred to casks for fermentation. Only time would tell whether the matured wine would measure up to their expectations, and consequently Alain was often at home, working in his study, and Ryan could never completely relax when he was in the house.
He had taken her, as her father had done, down to the winery, and she had descended with him into the massive stone cellars where there were casks of wine which had been maturing for a number of years. He had seemed determined that she should learn the basic fundamentals of the business, and had spent some time explaining the various difficulties they could encounter. She had met the elderly Breton again who had worked for her father, and his father before him, and shivered in the vaultlike caverns between the rows of vats.
The Ferrier vineyards bottled their own wine, and Alain showed her the small plant. He explained how later in the process the wine would be put into bottles and corked, and then inverted in racks to collect impurities on the cork. Afterwards, he said, these corks would be removed and the bottles recorked. In making a good red wine a certain amount of the crushed flesh of the grape was left in the juice during the initial stages of fermentation, but the finished product was required to have a clarity free of all sediment.
During these almost educational tours of inspection, Ryan could almost forget the improbability of their relationship. It was only when one or other of their employees congratulated Alain on his good fortune that the truth possessed her in all its terrifying reality. During the long nights when sleep was often elusive, she lay imagining the frightening possibilities of what she was about to do. What did she really know of this man who was to be her husband? The fact that her father had cared for him and depended upon him meant little to her. The relationship between two men was vastly different from the relationship between a man and his wife. The power over her which this marriage would give Alain de Beaunes was not to be considered lightly, and she had no sure way of knowing that he would keep his word about anything.
Her only companions during those weeks before the wedding were the old priest, and Marie, the girl from the village whom Alain had employed to help her. Marie was a year older than Ryan, and her initial shyness gave way to a genuine affection for the younger girl. In her way, she understood Ryan’s doubts about the marriage, although her reasons for so doing differed from Ryan’s own.
To Marie, it was all so simple. Alain de Beaunes was very much a man, all the women in the village thought so, whereas Ryan was little more than a child. Naturally