Sweeter Than Wine (17 page)

He woke up crying out, and rolled off the bed, scrabbling frantically for his rifle.
But only the nubbled texture of the rug met his fingers. Where was it? He had to
find it, because--because--

There are no snipers here
. He pulled himself upright and forced himself
to go the open window, to expose himself as a target. He leaned out on the
windowsill, surveying the sleeping vineyard, seeking calm in the steady moonlight
pouring over the hills. His labored breathing slowed.

The night was warm. The fog must have gotten lost on its way in from the
sea.

The sound of his bedroom door opening seemed louder than a rifle shot.

Siegfried jumped, turned, and saw Alice, standing in the doorway in a thin
white gown.

"Are you all right?" she asked, anxiously. The moonlight silvered her face and
hands, and her hair was a long dark rope falling along the side of her neck past
her breast.

"I dreamt about the War."

She stepped back hastily. "Oh."

"It's nothing to concern you," he said, harshly. "We lost."

"I'm sorry," she whispered, automatically. "If you need anything--from the
kitchen, if you're hungry, or--" She bit her lip as he gaped at her.

Her nightgown moved with her breathing, outlining her body. He ached to
follow the twining trail of her braid up to her ear, then her cheek, then her mouth,
taking possession...He moved into the shadow of the wall, aware of his nakedness
all at once, like Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Alice crossed her arms across her chest. She yanked on the end of her braid
as if it were a bell-rope, and her head a bell, to be cleared by one loud ring. "Good
night." She backed out of the room and closed the door.

He returned to the light flooding through the window, laid his cheek against the
cool glass, and let himself imagine what it would be like to follow her into her bed
and sate his hunger.

Perhaps her kisses might save him, banish the dreadful emptiness and chill
that had been gathering in his soul since the day he returned home to Alsace.

The thought hit him all at once, sending a shaft of warmth into his belly, like a
glass of wine on an empty stomach.
She came here. She heard me cry out,
and she came.

He smiled.
She does not hate me
. Maybe, if he tried hard
enough...intoxicated with hope, he planned his new campaign in the
moonlight.

* * *

Alone in the wide bed that she had once shared with Bill, Alice cursed herself,
staring up at the high, pale ceiling. She should never have entered Siegfried's
room! She should never have looked at his body, shadows softening the stark
bones showing too plainly on his large frame. His muscles stood out as if sculpted
of wire and clay. The strength that had carried him through the horrors of the War
was as evident as the shocking scar puckering his thigh from knee to groin. What
a hideous wound that must have been, so near his...

She threw the back of her forearm across her face as if to shut out unwanted
thoughts. She shouldn't think such things, not about an enemy soldier, not about
any man not her husband.

Her husband was an enemy soldier.

When she had heard him cry out, her first instinct had been to comfort
him.

And what did that make her?

Traitor
! her mind whispered. She hadn't made any protest at seeing him
naked, hadn't had the decency to turn her head, hide her eyes. Should she have
squeaked in alarm? She didn't know what else she might have done. Should have
done. If only she had had a normal childhood, a decent upbringing--a decent
mother! A truly respectable woman, the kind Alice pretended to be, would have
retreated far sooner.

Especially when she had recognized the look in his eyes. Even through the
darkness it had seared her. She knew what he felt. She had always known how
Siegfried felt about her, though she had tried to deny it.

Desire.

No. He only wants Montclair. I'm not a complete fool.

The smooth cotton sheets grew warm against her skin. The back of her hand
pressed against her lips as if to hold in the sound she would have made, had she
been alone in the house. She must hate him. She must hate him. He was a Hun!
Bill had made the supreme sacrifice only last year.

Married to the enemy.

She had no room in her heart for a German soldier, even one who lightened
the burden of their enormous task with his contests and good humor. She needed
his talents as a vintner, that's all. In daylight, he treated her with respect,
bandaged her hands, called them pretty....they both had secrets to hide. If
Siegfried's past could be so easily revealed by Hugh's malice, so could hers. And
she had far more to lose.

She shook her head, unwilling to feel empathy with Siegfried. Their
circumstances were nothing alike! He had volunteered. She had to avoid any more
personal contact with him until after crush. He was too dangerous. It would be too
easy to forget why she must hate him.

She waited a long time, listening for another sound from Siegfried's room, for
the hiss of bare feet across hardwood floor, or the creak of a bed frame accepting
an occupant.

Little by little her heartbeat calmed and the hot tingling faded from her skin.
Tiredness weighted her down, pressed her into the warm, soft pillow, and she
slept, to dream of a merry smile, a solid male body wrapped close against her
back, a large hand tenderly possessive on her hip.

When she woke in the cool dawn, she ached for a real husband, not just a
phantom figure with Bill's face.

But she put away her mourning, and prepared for the day. They had too much
to do before crush.

Montclair

Monday, May 26

Delicious scents of perking coffee and frying bacon lured Alice to the kitchen
despite her apprehension at the thought of facing Siegfried in daylight.

Maria's back was to the room as she busily ladled pancake batter onto a
griddle over the gas burner. Alice paused in the doorway leading from the hall,
because Siegfried was already sitting at the table, fully absorbed in studying the
weekly newspaper. As she watched him warily, he picked up a pencil sitting next
to his plate and carefully circled a small ad.

She was on the verge of moving when she noticed the jam-jar sitting next to
her coffee mug. It was crowded with pink rosebuds tied with a neat tendril of
grapevine. Siegfried had obviously gathered them during his early morning walk
through the vineyards--without her.

Her intake of breath must have been audible. Siegfried's face went as pink as
the flowers, and he busied himself with shaking out the newspaper, folding it over,
and smoothing it completely flat. When he finally did look up, his expression gave
away nothing. "Good morning," he said, as if commonplaces were all that lay
between them.

Alice moved forward through air thicker than Maria's syrup and as perilously
sweet. How could Siegfried possibly think he could court her when she knew about
his past? She began to sit down across from him, very gingerly, as if the flowers
might leap out of their humble vase and attack her.

It got worse. Siegfried rose and helped to adjust her chair. She sat so upright
and tense she was sure her shoulders would crack. He sat down as she spoke in
what she hoped was a businesslike fashion. "So. How are my Grenache vines this
morning?"

Siegfried gave a conspiratorial smile which made her grit her teeth. Then he
donned seriousness like a uniform. "They are bearing moderately. We shall not
need to thin them very much." He touched one of the pink buds tenderly. Alice
noted his stroking finger with an odd shiver in her chest. "You know your roses
well."

She placed her napkin on her lap and said pointedly, "Bill and I planted those
bushes, just before he enlisted."

"Ah." Siegfried hastily withdrew his hand, bent his head, and began studying
the newspaper again.

Maria turned around with a pot of coffee and a tall stack of golden-brown
pancakes. "Mrs. R!" she greeted, glancing slyly at Siegfried. "I'll have your toast
ready in a minute." She poured coffee briskly for both of them, conspicuously eyed
the roses, waggling her eyebrows, and gave Alice a broad wink before turning
back to the stove.

The awkward silence was broken when Peter's heavy tread sounded on the
porch. Peter entered the kitchen and flung himself down with a laconic, "Morning."
He pulled his chair forward with a loud scrape, and said brusquely: "Give me some
of those flapjacks, too, Maria. And a couple of eggs." Peter glanced over at Alice.
"Don't know how you get by, eating like a bird." His glance rested on the jam jar.
"Nice flowers. Looks like you're training Sig right." He laughed loudly, and Alice
winced.

Siegfried put aside the newspaper, his face shiny red now. He cleared his
throat as he poured syrup over his pancakes. "Peter, what progress has your crew
made in spraying the Pinot Noir section?"

"We're nearly done, but we'll need another sack or two of Bordeaux mixture to
finish the Cabernet."

As Peter continued to detail his ongoing struggle against powdery mildew in
the vineyard, Alice studied the roses in front of her. They were her favorite flowers,
but it was far safer to acknowledge irritation at Siegfried's blatant attempt to butter
her up than pleasure.

"Alice," Siegfried said, interrupting her contradictory thoughts. "I think you
should not clean the inside of the tanks any more. It is too dirty a job, not fit for a
lady." He polished his plate with the last shreds of pancake.

Peter added, "A kid could fit inside, and we'd only have to pay him half a man's
wage. Herculio has a nephew who'd be more than happy to earn some extra."

"How kind of you," Alice replied, fuming in earnest. The winery was her
responsibility.
Hers
. And, no matter how tempting the offer, she wasn't
about to concede that responsibility to Siegfried. "But we really can't afford to hire
anyone else. Besides," she produced a bright smile, "I'm already dressed for the
job."

* * *

Later, inside the reeking, dimly lit isolation of the enormous vat, Alice wielded a
long-handled scrub brush and reflected on the thorns that came with roses.

I shouldn't have accepted the flowers
, she thought, pulling out her
scraper and furiously attacking a dark ridge of deposit on the curved redwood
walls of the tank. But if she had publicly rejected them, she would have seemed
unreasonable to Maria and Peter.

How do respectable women discourage this sort of thing? If I make a fuss
I'll seem petty, but if I accept them, he'll just get bolder.

A traitorous flutter in her midsection liked the idea of Siegfried becoming a little
bolder, and of being courted, really courted. She pushed the feeling down, hard,
trying to stomp it out of existence. He was a Hun. He had fought against
Americans, killed them. And she had loved Bill, who was so charming, so
gallant.

She concentrated on the memory of her first arrival at Montclair, when he
helped her out of Da's touring car just as if she had been a grand lady. But that
memory skipped like a bad phonograph record to the day she had to sell the
Buick, just before Christmas, all alone and terrified she would not get a good price
for it.

Bill was gone, and his legacy to her had nearly been beyond her ability to
keep.

Alice turned her head to her upper arm, and wiped her eyes against a fold of
Bill's shirt, then picked up the pace of her scrubbing, trying to dispel her memories
along with the fossilized remnants of past vintages.

The labor brought her mind no peace. Siegfried's actions raised the specter of
her own secrets. Despite his past--
soiled, like yours
, her conscience
insisted--he was a good, decent, honorable man. Had he been an American, she
would not have felt worthy of him, just as she had never felt quite worthy of Bill
after their marriage had been so hastily arranged by her Da.

But Siegfried was not American. She couldn't ignore his past, what he had
been, what he might have done. Things would have been easier if only Hugh
hadn't told me the truth!

By the time the dinner bell rang, she hadn't decided what to do; and by that
time it was too late.

Siegfried's noon offering was a bouquet of white wildflowers: yarrow and
Queen Anne's Lace wrapped by convolvolus. White, for innocence of heart and
purity of motive.

What made her most disappointed with herself, in a shivery, breathless kind of
way, was that she wished she could believe it.

* * *

When Alice came downstairs, Maria was waiting for her in the flower-bedecked
kitchen. There wasn't an empty jam jar in the house.

"What a pretty dress!" Alice exclaimed, doubly glad Maria had gotten a new
white summer frock. At least there was something to talk about besides the
flowers! And Siegfried's crushingly polite, silent persistence.

"Peter bought it for me," Maria said, brushing off some invisible lint. "We had--
some words, and he thought he could make it up to me. Are you in the same
boat?" Before Alice could answer, Maria's face relaxed in a dreamy expression as
she fondled some rose petals. "I remember when Peter used to bring me flowers,
when I was sixteen. He would turn up at my parents' house just after supper, with
a big bouquet of whatever he had stolen from his mama's garden here. His papa
thrashed him once for cutting down her prize delphiniums, but he said he didn't
care, as long as I...kissed him." Maria glanced, embarrassed, at Alice, as if unsure
how her employer would take this rather risqué confidence.

Alice didn't know how to deal with it, so she pretended she hadn't heard it. She
certainly couldn't condemn Maria--or anyone. Of all people, she had no right to go
casting stones. "Didn't I smell some coffee?" She saw Maria accept the change of
topic as a rebuke, and tried to soften it with a smile, but the other woman had
already turned to produce a steaming cup from the counter.