Chapter 11: The Buyers

I went down the back stairs in Rhys's flannel shirt and out through the mudroom into the vines.

I did not run.

I walked along the wet rows until I reached the gravel track that leads to the barrel room.

I went in through the cellar door like a woman who had every right to be there.

As far as the valley knew, I did.

I was the fiancee.

In the stone passage the cellar crew was already at work, eight of them in rubber aprons, rolling barrels onto racks.

They looked up.

One of the women, a stout, gray-haired woman who had been on the crew for thirty years, took in the shirt and the braid and my face.

She said nothing.

She picked up a rag and handed it to me.

"Wipe your boots," she said.

"The old lady doesn't like mud on the cellar floor."

That was the first thing that happened that morning that I did not expect.

The second happened at seven that evening.

Helene Wheelwright had come up the drive to invite me to dinner.

She had done it standing in her son's front hall in a camel coat, with Rhys beside her and me on the stairs in a borrowed shirt.

She had not so much as raised an eyebrow.

"Signe, what a pleasant surprise," she had said.

"I'd hoped to catch you both.

"Seven o'clock tonight, here.

"I have two guests I would like you to meet."

She had looked at the shirt.

"And do wear something of your own," she said.

I went home and put on my mother's green wool dress.

It was not the one I wore to the banquet.

It is an older, plainer dress with a high neck and three-quarter sleeves, and I had worn it exactly once, to a neighbor's funeral.

I put on my glasses and left my hair down.

At seven I walked up the steps of the old vineyard house.

A young man in a white jacket I had never seen before opened the door.

There were candles lit in the front hall.

A long table had been laid in the dining room with a white cloth, six places, and a row of glasses at each setting.

Rhys stood at the sideboard with his back to the room, pouring wine.