The Wine of Dreams (2 page)

The stranger looked like the kind of customer who knew exactly what he was
looking for, although he obviously could not locate it in the racks, but
Reinmar’s mood was so bad that he let the man carry on looking for a full five
minutes before his patience finally gave out.

“May I help you, sir?” Reinmar said, four minutes later than politeness and
good tradesmanship demanded.

“You might,” the stranger said, coming to the counter as soon as the offer was
made, “if you can fetch Luther Wieland.”

Reinmar blinked in astonishment. Luther was his grandfather, and had been
forced by his ill health to surrender the running of the business to Gottfried
before Reinmar was born. The old man had been bed-ridden for the last six years.

“That I cannot do,” Reinmar said. “My father—Luther Wieland’s son—is in
charge of the shop nowadays, and even he is not at home at present. I fear that
there is no one to help you but me, but if you care to tell me what it is you
want, I am sure that I can find it. I know my way around the cellars.”

The stranger stared at him, not in a hostile way but rather discomfitingly.
“Gottfried’s boy,” he murmured, pensively. “Gottfried’s boy, and almost grown.
What’s your name, lad?”

“Reinmar.”

“Reinmar, eh? Very well, Reinmar—are you telling me that Luther Wieland is
dead and buried?”

“No sir. But he has been in poor health for a long time. He takes no active
part in the business.”

“What about Albrecht?”

Reinmar blinked again. Albrecht was Luther’s brother, but Reinmar could
hardly remember the last time he had come to the shop, and Gottfried rarely
visited his house, which stood some way apart from the town. There had been some
trouble between them, although Reinmar had no idea what had caused it. His
father did not seem to like or approve of Albrecht, but Reinmar had no idea why,
because Gottfried never mentioned the subject.

“Albrecht never had any part in running the business,” Reinmar told the
stranger, uneasily.

“But he has a stake in it, does he not?” the stranger was quick to say.
“Albrecht is part-owner of the shop.”

“I believe he was at one time, many years ago,” Reinmar admitted. “But to the
best of my knowledge, my grandfather bought out his brother’s interest long before I was born. My understanding is
that when my grandfather dies, my father will inherit everything—everything in
this house, that is. Albrecht has his own house. I believe he lives alone,
except for an old gypsy woman who serves as his housekeeper. I’m sure that I
would have heard had he died, so I assume that you can find him at home if you
want to see him, but he is even older than my grandfather and might be just as
poorly. I haven’t seen him since I was nine or ten years old. I doubt that I’d
recognise him if I ran into him in the market.”

“A close family,” the stranger observed. “What a marvel of stiffness these
little provincial towns are, where quarrels can last a lifetime and old friends
can pass one another in the street every day, refusing to speak because of some
long-forgotten insult that city folk would think utterly trivial.”

The contempt in his voice was not calculated to improve Reinmar’s mood. “What
is it you want, sir?” Reinmar asked, pronouncing the final word as if it were an
insult rather than an honorific.

The stranger took another step closer, and leaned across the counter in a
confidential manner.

“What I need, Reinmar Wieland,” he said, in a voice hardly louder than a
whisper, “is a flagon of dark wine.”

“I am prepared to pay the market price, since it seems to be required,” the
stranger added. The tone of his voice suggested that he did not think it should
be required.

“I don’t know what you mean by dark wine,” Reinmar told him, flatly.

“You said that you knew your way around the cellars,” the stranger said,
resentfully.

“So I do,” Reinmar replied, with equal asperity. In actual fact, he did not
know his way around the cellars half as well as his father thought he should,
but he was certain that Gottfried had never mentioned “dark wine”. The wines of
Bretonnia, it was said, were red instead of white, but no one in Eilhart would
ever have deigned to drink Bretonnian wine while good Reikish hock was
available. The most colourful wines in the shop were sweet dessert wines made
from grapes that had stayed on the vine till their skins had shrivelled to
raisin-brown, but they were straw-coloured and Reinmar had never thought of them
as “dark” or heard them described in such a fashion.

The stranger had withdrawn slightly in the face of his uncertainty. “Boy or
not,” he said, in a low voice, “you’re the heir apparent. You should know your
stock.”

“I do,” Reinmar insisted, again.

“There’s nothing to fear,” the stranger said, leaning closer again. His dark
eyes stared with a brightness that was surely unnatural, given that their lids
were so heavy. “I’m your cousin, if you hadn’t guessed—or your father’s
cousin, at any rate.”

“My father has no cousins,” Reinmar retorted, annoyance giving him a
steadiness that he might otherwise have lacked. “My grandfather had but one
brother, and my grandmother was an only child. Albrecht never married.”

“No,” the stranger said, his lips forming a humourless smile. “Not the
marrying kind, my father—but he acknowledged me nevertheless. If I am not
known here, even in rumour, it must be Luther that kept the secret, for I am
certain that my father wrote to him from Marienburg to tell him the news. I’m
your cousin, in truth—but I have already told you that I’m willing and able to
pay the full market price for the goods. If you cannot bring Luther to me, then
you must take me to him. He will set your mind at rest.”

“He will not,” said a new voice, speaking from the door that connected the
shop to the living-quarters of the house.

Reinmar and the stranger turned their heads simultaneously. Reinmar was
surprised to see his father, having expected him to be out on business for at
least two hours more.

“Cousin Gottfried,” said the stranger, easily. “I’m glad to meet you, at long
last.”

“I have no cousin,” Gottfried replied coldly. “What is it you want?”

“He asked for dark wine,” Reinmar put in, anxious to avoid any accusation
that might materialise regarding his apparent failure to do his job properly. “I
told him that I did not know what he meant.”

“Which was true,” Gottfried said, still speaking in a cold tone that he
usually reserved for his servants when they had earned his most extreme
displeasure—and occasionally for his son, when Reinmar had done something he
reckoned very wrong. “We have no such thing in our cellars.”

“Come now, cousin,” the stranger said, meekly. “I assure you that you can
trust me—and if you doubt me, there are things I could say to Uncle Luther
that would set his mind at rest. Will you insist that I return in company with
my father, when I had hoped to arrive at his house bearing an appropriate gift?
I bring news—bad news, alas, but news that you ought to hear.”

“We do not keep the wine you want,” Gottfried said, firmly. “We have not kept
it for twenty years and more. No one in Eilhart keeps it now. There is none to
be had for ten leagues in any direction.”

“You will forgive me if I take leave to doubt that,” the stranger said,
smiling. “Perhaps I should take my news to someone who will be grateful for the
warning.”

Reinmar pricked up his ears at the mention of the word “warning” but
Gottfried was not to be tempted or intimidated. “I will not give you leave,” he
said, with all his typical sternness. “No one in Eilhart doubts my word, and I
expect a similar courtesy from strangers. I would be greatly obliged, sir, if
you would leave my shop and never return. There is nothing for you here.
Nothing. We are respectable tradesmen.”

The stranger murmured something that even Reinmar could not quite catch,
although it might have included the phrase “a contradiction in terms”—but the
dark man was quick enough to draw back, and then to turn towards the door that
led out to the street. “Very well, Cousin Gottfried,” he said, as he opened the
door and made ready to step out. “I shall have to go to my father empty-handed—but if you never see me again, it will be the result of his instruction, not my
desire. Will you tell me how to get to his house?”

“If it will be rid of you, I’ll be glad to,” Gottfried said, ungraciously.
“Go up the hill until you pass the bounds of the town, then take the pathway
that goes away to the right. Go through the gap between the two farms and on for
a further five hundred paces. You’ll see the slate roof of Albrecht’s house on
the upper slope, nested in the firs. If you miss the path you’ll find your way
easily enough—the ground’s not treacherous.”

“Thank you, cousin,” the dark man said. “I’m sorry that you did not want to
hear my news. Good day to you, Reinmar.”

Reinmar might have replied had he not caught his father’s eye, but the
rejoinder died on his lips. The stranger stepped out into the street and closed
the door quietly behind him. Reinmar found, somewhat to his own amazement, that
his bad mood had evaporated, to be replaced by a fervent curiosity. It was the
most exciting sensation that had possessed him for as long as he could remember.

The silence that fell when the stranger’s footsteps had died away was
profound. Reinmar resisted the temptation to demand an immediate explanation from his father, contenting himself with
watching the elder Wieland carefully as he moved uneasily around the shop,
making a show of peering into the racks as if taking stock. For several minutes
Reinmar was prepared to assume that his father would eventually relent, but the
older man’s body became gradually less tense and still he kept silent.

Reinmar’s mother had died when he was a small child, and Reinmar had always
wanted to believe that Gottfried’s lack of emotion was a defensive mask forced
upon him by the loss of a beloved wife, but now he wondered whether the chill
might have set in long before that. In the end, Reinmar could contain himself no
longer. “Did Great-Uncle Albrecht have a son while he lived in Marienburg?” he
asked. “Could that man be your cousin?”

“No one in Eilhart knows or cares what Albrecht got up to in Marienburg,”
Gottfried replied, brusquely. “We are respectable folk.”

Reinmar had only the vaguest notion of when Albrecht had gone to Marienburg
or when he had returned, both events having taken place before he was born. No
one had ever told him in so many words why Albrecht and Luther had quarrelled,
but he suspected that it must have had to do with the business. Presumably
Albrecht had felt that there was more to life than shopkeeping and had gone off
to “seek his fortune”, leaving Luther to learn the ins and outs of the trade
much as Reinmar was now doing. If that had indeed been the way it was, Reinmar
could easily sympathise with Albrecht, but he had no brother of his own, and his
father would be only too glad to remind him that Albrecht had not, in the end,
found or made “his fortune”. At some later date the prodigal had returned to
Eilhart to live, by which time he no longer had any financial stake in the
business and no friends in the town, where he had settled again as a virtual
stranger. Nowadays, he was a recluse; even if Reinmar had been able to recognise
him, the probability of “running into him” in the market square was negligible.

“What is this dark wine that he wanted to buy?” Reinmar wanted to know. “Do
we have any in the cellar?”

“No we do not,” Gottfried replied, his coldness turning to passionate heat
with alarming suddenness. “It were best you had never heard of it, but since you
have, you must believe me when I tell you that there has been none in this house for twenty years. We
do not keep it and never shall.”

“Why? Because it is Bretonnian?”

“Bretonnian! It is worse than that, Reinmar. We do not keep such liquor.”

“But you did once,” Reinmar pointed out, inferring the obvious. “Or
grandfather did, in the days when you were his apprentice.”

“What my father did when I was your age does not concern you,” Gottfried said
firmly. “There has never been anything within these walls to taint your life or
harm your soul, and so it will remain while there is breath in my body. I cannot
deny that your great-uncle exists, since he lives little more than an hour’s
walk away, but his connection with this house was severed many years ago and can
never be repaired. He has no legitimate kin, so we have no cousins in law—and
this is a house in which the law obtains its due respect.”

“Are you saying that Great-Uncle Albrecht’s house is one in which the law is
not respected?” Reinmar asked curiously.

“I am saying that the dead past need not concern you,” Gottfried repeated.
“We do not keep the produce for which that man was enquiring. If he calls again
while I am not here, send him away immediately. He is not to be allowed to
linger here, and he is not to be allowed to see my father. Do you understand?”

“Not really,” Reinmar said.

“Then you must obey without understanding,” was the absolutely typical reply.
“I have said what there is to say” To make that abundantly clear, Gottfried
stamped back to the door which gave access to the stairway leading up to the
bedrooms, and slammed it behind him.

Reinmar absentmindedly raised his hand to tug at his collar. His throat was
dry and the warm air was so heavy that it seemed to require twice the usual
effort to draw an adequate measure into his lungs. He was not in the least
surprised by his father’s unwillingness to tell him more, because there were a
great many issues on which Gottfried Wieland was apt to offer opinions as if
they were beyond all possible dispute. Yet most of the others were matters of
propriety and etiquette. This was the first time Reinmar had been squarely
confronted with the awareness that his family had secrets, although now he was forced to consider the fact, he realised that there were other clues he might
have noticed, had he been more observant.