Chapter 7 - The House at the End of the Vine
The cottage at the edge of the vineyard smelled of lavender, old oak beams, and beeswax.
It sat on a small stone terrace three hundred meters above the main house, surrounded by six rows of Sangiovese vines whose leaves had turned a deep, fiery red with the arrival of October. From the front porch, Mara could look down over the entire estate: the red-tiled roofs of the stables, the gray stone courtyard where she had spent five weeks pushing her mop trolley, and the high iron gates that marked the boundary between the Vicari kingdom and the rest of the world.
She moved in on a Thursday afternoon.
She didn't carry her brown canvas suitcase; Bernardo carried it for her, setting it on the chest at the foot of the brass bed with the awkward, formal care of a soldier handling a brass shell casing.
"The stove is set," Bernardo said, tapping the black iron range in the small kitchen. "The wood is in the shed behind the pump. Don Cristiano says if you need more lard or salt, you tell the kitchen girl when she brings the milk at seven."
Mara stood in the middle of the room, her hands resting on her stomach.
She was wearing a new dress—a soft, dark green wool that had been delivered from a shop in Modena that morning, cut wide at the waist with small horn buttons down the front. It felt impossibly soft against her skin after five weeks of scratchy agency cotton.
"Why is he doing this?" she asked Bernardo as he reached for the door latch.
Bernardo stopped. He looked out through the small square window at the vineyard, his grey mustache twitching once.
"Thirty years ago," Bernardo said, "Don Cristiano’s father had a brother named Leone. Leone was twenty-one, very handsome, very wild. He thought he could run the family business better than his father."
Mara waited.
"Leone made a mistake with a family from Palermo," Bernardo continued, his voice dropping into a low, flat whisper. "They caught him in a barn outside Parma. They didn't shoot him. They left him tied to a beam for four days in the sun without water."
He turned his grey eyes to her.
"When Don Cristiano’s father found him, Leone was still alive, but he had lost his mind. He couldn't speak. He could only make a sound like a dry pump." Bernardo spat quietly onto the doorstep. "Don Cristiano was eight years old when he sat by his uncle's bed for three weeks while the boy died."
"The horse," Mara whispered.
"The horse was four days without water," Bernardo said simply. "Don Cristiano doesn't like to see anything die of thirst while he owns the well."
He opened the door and walked out, his heavy boots crunching down the gravel path toward the main house.
Mara stood alone in her kitchen.
She walked to the small deal table near the window, where a basket of fresh figs and a loaf of grey bread sat under a clean linen napkin.
Beside the basket lay a small leather-bound book—not the black ledger Marco had stolen, but a small, green-covered volume of Sonoran horse-breeding records printed in Mexico City in 1994.
Inside the front cover, written in a long, elegant copperplate script that belonged to a man who had been educated by Jesuits in Lausanne, were four words:
For the maid's child.
May you like
Mara sat down in the wooden armchair by the window, pressed the book against her chest, and looked out over the valley as the sun began to sink behind the black shale of the mountains.
For the first time in nine months, she didn't check the latch on the door.
