It must have shown, or maybe he simply couldn’t contain an inarticulate cave-man grunt of admiration, for she curtsied; he offered an arm and she tucked hers through it as they walked down the curving staircase and out the tall doors to the gardens.
“And the same to you, sir,” she said. “Ready to eat? And dance?”
“Eating sounds good,” he replied. “Dancing sounds great in the conditional future tense.”
The rear of the great house was bright, the windows a blaze of lights and Chinese lanterns hanging high in the limbs of the trees, stretching away into dimmer reaches to the west. A set of trestle tables had been set on the velvety lawn, surrounding a white fountain of tapering stone basins; the band was setting up farther away, on a low stone platform nearer the paved area around the pool. A crowd of people awaited them, bowing or curtsying as Tom and Adrienne came out the main doors onto the patio that spanned the rear of the building beyond the enclosed courts. Tom felt hideously self-conscious at that; Adrienne waved with every appearance of calm, and the people went back to milling around and chattering, obviously excited and happy at the special occasion.
They were all in their best, and of all ages from just past toddlerhood to the elderly. The children were surprisingly well behaved….
Or maybe not so surprisingly, he thought.
One started to kick up a ruckus; the five-year-old’s mother grabbed him by an ear and administered half a dozen solid whacks to his behind with the other hand, reducing the noise to a teary pout that soon vanished in the general excitement and high spirits.
Guess a swift smack to the fundament hasn’t been redefined as assault here, he thought, amused.
Tully stood under a string of Chinese lanterns, talking to Sandra Margolin; she was giggling, and then burst out into wholehearted laughter, which with her figure was enough to make you blink; she was wearing a low-cut blouse and peasant-style skirt.
“Not wasting any time, either,” Adrienne said, amusement in her tone.
“He usually doesn’t,” Tom said—he’d always been a bit baffled by Tully’s success with the opposite sex. “He never has any problem finding company. Keeping the woman interested is another matter,” Tom said. Then: “Hi, Roy. Where in hell did you get that oufit?”
Tully’s jacket was acid green, his shirt purple, trousers fawn, belt-buckle silver and turquoise, and his shoes brown, white and black; the cut of the clothes also had a much bigger hint of the zoot suit than Tom’s.
“Picked it up in Rolfeston. I was assured that it’s the height of local fashion,” the smaller man replied loftily. “Hello to you too, Kemosabe.”
“It’s not that people in men’s-wear stores keep lying to you, Roy,” Tom said. “It’s the way that you keep believing them that gets me.”
“I think he looks fine,” Sandra Margolin said, and Tom threw up his hands.
Besides, I’m feeling at one with the world, and everyone’s friend, he thought, grinning.
A bell began to ring, summoning them to the harvest supper; people streamed off toward the tables set up on the lawn. Those were in the shape of a large T with a double stem and a small crossbar. From what Adrienne had said, Tom gathered that this was a twice-yearly occasion, after the wheat harvest and then in the fall after the grapes were brought in; the manor’s cook—a middle-aged woman of Franco-American-Italian descent and formidable heft—her staff, the housewives of the rest of the estate’s households, and the odd man who fancied his hand on a grill had all been working overtime, and with a certain ferocious competitiveness. The food reflected the mix of people who’d gone into founding this strange country: the Southern take on traditional Anglo-Saxon cooking, but with a heavy Latin influence via Italy and southern France, and a dash of German and East European.
He suspected that the mix of plebian and haute cuisine dishes was unique to occasions like this, though. Corn on the cob for starters, with an alternate choice of ranch-cured duck prosciutto and pears, or spicy tuna tartare, tomato fondant and chilled coriander broth… No, there was a twenty-first-century Californian influence there, too.
The crowd took their places, waiting expectantly. Adrienne had seated Tom at her right, with Tully and his new friend beyond that; the rest of the top table held the mayordomo and his family, and the other senior staff and theirs; Simmons’s tracker and the nahua sat at a separate section at the base. There was also a large ceremonial salt shaker, evidently a social marker separating the upper table from the hoi polloi even on a community occasion like this.
Adrienne rose, and took her glass of white wine in hand. Silence fell, after a few shouts of “Speech! Speech!” and “Go for it, Miz Rolfe!”
“Friends,” she said, “this is the twelfth harvest supper I’ve hosted as landholder of Seven Oaks. I’d like to thank everyone for the hard work—”
The speech was mercifully brief, and good-humored. The reactions on all the faces he could see were too. He ate—the corn first; he didn’t really like raw fish of any sort—and helped himself to Lucillian salads with scallops and lobster tails, and greens he’d seen being picked that morning, a steak of Angus beef lightly brushed with garlic-steeped olive oil from the grove to the north of the house and grilled over oak coals, cauliflower with mustard and fennel seed, beaten biscuits….
Tully made a production of drinking a glass of wine—an open bottle stood between each two diners, with a simple label reading Seven Oaks, which included a silhouetted oak tree beneath. Tom drank some of his and decided it was extremely good. When it came to wine he just knew what he liked without pretending to know anything about it. Roy went in for the full wine-country vocabulary.
“Black cherry fruit… soft tannins… just a bit of vanilla from the oak… very nice,” he said to Adrienne, after swirling and tilting a glass, looking through the edge at a candle flame, sniffing and sipping. “Basically a cabernet sauvignon, right? But blended. Is it yours?”
“Well, I’m scarcely going to serve someone else’s wine at my estate’s harvest supper, Roy,” Adrienne said, leaning forward to speak to him across Tom. “Yes, it’s a blend, eighty-twenty cabernet and merlot; the ’ninety-two vintage. That was a wonderful year at Seven Oaks, and it just keeps getting better in the bottle.”
“But there’s something… I can’t quite place it. Not bad, just a little different.”
“Probably the fermenting vats,” she said. “We’ve got temperature control, but we use open-topped redwood tanks, not the closed stainless-steel ones they have FirstSide.” A quick urchin grin. “Our motto—‘Malolactic fermentation is for sissies!’”
Tully nodded. “I noticed driving up that you don’t have the piped water system in the vineyards that they use in the Napa on FirstSide either. What do you do when you get a late frost after budbreak?”
“Ahhh… hope next year is better?” she said, blinking at him, and then they both laughed.
Tom suppressed a slightly miffed feeling and waited until Adrienne was talking to someone who’d come up to the head table; she stood and walked aside with the questioner for a moment. Things weren’t crowded, and he could be quasi-private when he leaned close to Tully and asked, “Look, do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
“Well, it ain’t the U.S. of A., Kemosabe, and I’m not real comfortable with this patron-client setup they’ve got either. But on the whole, it’s not too bad—Uncle Sugar had us defending Allah allies who were a hell of a lot more skanky. The anti-Rolfe league definitely looks a hell of a lot worse.”