Read Online Vintage by Rosemary Friedman - Free Book Online

behaviour , but by his inability to communicate on anything but the most basic level with anyone but Desirée, the red setter bitch who accompanied him to the garages, the vineyards and the chais, and who never left his side. She occupied herself with her husband’s stables, the running of which she assumed; she took an interest in show-jumpers , which she gradually learned to train; and she kept a watchful eye, when she remembered, on Clare.
    It was when her seventeen-year-old sister, Rose, was visiting Cluzac one September to help with the vendange – between leaving her convent school and going to university in Dublin where she had won a music scholarship to Trinity College – that the crunch had finally come.
    Knowing Charles-Louis as she did, and recognising the fact that Rose, with her wild auburn hair and her eyes the colour of vintage marmalade, was as full and juicy as the ripe peaches suspended from the wall of the courtyard, Viola had cautioned him.
    ‘Keep away from my little sister, now,’ she had told him. ‘You so much as go near Rose, Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand de Cluzac, and you’ll wish you’d never been born.’
    All had gone well until the night of the party held in the great barn to celebrate the end of the vintage. Sitting among the exhausted army of grape-pickers who came yearly to Cluzac from Spain and Portugal, Baronne Viola de Cluzac had graciously accepted the gerbaude, the annual bouquet of flowers, from their spokesperson and recited her statutory few words of thanks, when itdawned on her that both her husband and Rose were missing from the table.
    Stopping by the stables to pick up her riding-crop, and following her intuition, she combed the shadowy grounds. She found them in the gazebo where Rose, who had partaken too generously of the carafes of château wine, was standing naked as a moonlit statue while Charles-Louis worshipped at her auburn shrine.
    Yelling to Rose to get her clothes on at once and return to her tower bedroom, Viola, screaming like a Dublin fishwife, had set about her husband with the riding-crop . In an angry torrent of cliché and somewhat mixed metaphor, she had told him that this time he had not only widely overstepped the mark but had finally cooked his goose.
    The following morning she had packed her bags. Accompanied by a bewildered Clare, and the hung-over and shamefaced Rose, who was unaccustomed to drinking, she had left Château de Cluzac, and returned to Ireland.
    She had no hatred for Charles-Louis. During their eight years together there had been times when she had found him both engaging and amusing. He was not an ungenerous man and had left her pretty much to her own devices in the stables, which was what she enjoyed most of all; but she could no longer tolerate his philandering, which she considered, to say the least of it, immature. They communicated whenever it was necessary, usually over matters to do with the child, but there was never any talk of divorce.
    Having had her fill of life in a castle and an unsatisfactory marriage, Viola Fitzpatrick (she felt more comfortable in the old shoes of her Irish name) bought a derelict property in County Kerry, which she had since made a premier centre for the training ofshow-jumpers. At the Fitzpatrick Equine Centre she took in the odd paying guest who wanted to learn to jump. To say that it was a hotel would have been painting the lily. Rooms were made available and let to riders by word of mouth. Apart from breakfast, which was provided, they were expected to fend for themselves. They were invited to leave the washing-up, if they could find a place for it, in the kitchen sink.
    As far as companionship was concerned, Viola had taken as a lover a lecturer in jurisprudence from the University of Cork, several years younger than herself.
    When Clare had written that she was engaged to be married, it had brought Viola’s age home to her. It seemed no time at all since she had left Château de Cluzac, a