Amanda McCabe - NOTORIOUS in the Tudor Court - A Sinful Alliance / A Notorious Woman

Marguerite closed her eyes, picturing it all in her mind. The house, glistening white stucco crowned with a rust-red tiled roof, shimmering under that bright light. White curtains fluttering at the open windows; tables spread with bread, cheese, olives, and the vineyard’s own wines on the warm terrace, shaded by cypress trees. The twisting, beautiful vines, spread out as far as the eye could see, plump grapes ripening happily, full of sugar, until they could be gathered and turned carefully, painstakingly, into that magical elixir—wine.

“My father, he had one passion in life besides the memory of my mother, and that was wine,” she said dreamily, looping one satin strand of his hair around her finger.

His finger traced a lazy pattern on her shoulder. “Do you mean to say you had parents, Marguerite?” he teased. “Human beings? That you were not left on their doorstep as a changeling?”

She laughed. “Of course I had real, human parents! I do not remember my mother, but my father used to carry me through his vineyard when I was a child, talking about his hopes for the grapes, his plans to improve the harvests. New methods for producing the wine, which he read about in agricultural treatises from Spain or Italy.”

“Your father’s vineyards did well under his care?”

She shook her head. “Not at all, yet he never ceased to try. We lived in Champagne, you see, in the north of France where the winters are cold and come early. But the soil was good for grapes, or should have been—chalky, so it drains well and doesn’t dry out quickly. Loose, so the vines could penetrate deep and retain the precious heat of the day. My father, he was working on pressing the red grapes without much skin contact, producing a white wine with only a faint colour, a vin gris, much desired at Court.”

“Was he successful?”

“Nay, there was a blight on the fields. It nearly ruined harvest after harvest when I was a child. But he never ceased to study, to try to find which vines would best flourish, how to best handle and mature the grapes.”

Nicolai’s fingertips moved lightly up and down her spine, until she laughed at the soft, tickling feeling. “It sounds like he passed his knowledge on to his daughter.”

“A bit. I don’t have time now to study as I would like, to experiment. But one day…”

“One day what?”

She shook her head. She could not say it aloud, could not give voice to longings she only half-understood herself, and dared not hope for. She shouldn’t have spoken about her father and the vineyards at all, but Nicolai’s plans had brought them out. The white villa, the fields under a sky as blue and endless as his eyes…

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