His voice softened when he mentioned her name.
“Okay, I will.”
“And you will be with me for the trip out west,” he continued. “I’ll change the reservation at the hotel in San Francisco and you can stay with my friend Robert Sanábria when you go up to Napa. I’ll join you after my talk. He lives in Calistoga so you’ll be right where you need to be.” Another pat on the hand and he said, sounding happy, “It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone some good, eh, ma belle?”
I showed up at Mick Dunne’s for tea on Saturday morning, Bastille Day, looking and feeling like something the cat dragged in. His housekeeper, a pretty, petite Hispanic girl with long, dark hair pulled into a loose bun, told me Mick was out by the pool and asked me to wait while she went to get him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “He’s expecting me and I know where to go. I’ll find him myself.”
She was new. He’d had another housekeeper when we were seeing each other and I slept here from time to time.
“Of course.” She bobbed her head, courteous and respectful, but something about the heavy-lidded flicker of her eyes told me she’d heard that line before, and each time it had been a woman who’d said it.
With a little twinge of jealousy, I wondered whom Mick was sleeping with now. Surely there was someone.
I had to walk through his gardens to get to the pool. When Mick bought his home a few years ago, he discovered that the previous owner, who had studied botany as an avocation, had worked with a horticulturist to identify and label the many exotic species of trees, shrubs, and flowers that bloomed on the parklike grounds of his estate. Mick tracked down the horticulturist and persuaded him to take the job of full-time groundskeeper, giving him carte blanche to purchase whatever new or unusual specimen he wanted. The current passion was succulents, or so I’d heard. Desert plants and cacti that looked like modern sculpture and could wound like weapons weren’t my thing; my favorite was the lush, luxurious sunken rose garden with its pretty two-tiered fountain. Mick told me that coming upon the rioting tumble of roses—espaliered climbers, bushes, shrubs, floribunda, tea roses, hybrids—the first time he saw the house had brought back a flood of memories of his childhood in London and the days when his route walking to and from school had been through Regent’s Park and Queen Mary’s Rose Gardens. He’d bought the house on the spot.
After that, each time I came here I couldn’t help but hear schoolboy voices and see shadows flicking in and out of the sunlight, imagining blazers heaped in a pile on the ground, dress shirts untucked, ties askew, the thud of a soccer ball being passed back and forth imitating the agile footwork of the current football idol who played for Arsenal or Man United.
Mick was on the phone by the side of the pool, still dressed in riding attire after being out with the horses for their morning exercise. He sat at a glass-topped table under an umbrella, legs splayed out in front of him, running a hand through his long, dark hair, intent on the conversation and the caller. I could tell by the way he sat, and his demeanor, that it was business.
He looked up and saw me, raising a finger to indicate that he would be only a moment as the housekeeper came outside carrying a silver tray with a Portmeirion teapot, matching dishes, a cloth-covered basket, and a pretty cut-glass bowl of summer berries.
Mick’s house, like mine, had been built on a hill where it commanded a spectacular view of the Blue Ridge. The former owner had taken advantage of the way the hill dropped off to a long vista of the Piedmont anchored by distant mountains and had put in an infinity pool—a swimming pool with no edge or rim on one side that gave the effect of water disappearing at the horizon, almost as if it were joining the sky. In reality it cascaded like a waterfall into a smaller pool below where it was pumped through filters back into the main pool. The effect always took my breath away.
Mick clicked off his phone and tossed it on the table, getting up and pulling me to him. He kissed me swiftly on the lips and held me so close I smelled horses and sweat, and a faint whiff of whatever his housekeeper used to wash his clothes. His arms tightened around me.
I placed my hands on his chest. He sensed the restraint and pulled back.
“What does it take for a girl to get fed around this place?” I asked. “You did promise tea.”
I hated that his easy sexuality could still knock me off balance—and that he knew it—the implied intimacy of lovers who had just gotten out of bed or the shower together. Mick was a man of angles and planes, nothing soft or yielding about him, both in his business dealings and his physical features. His face was fair and smooth shaven, but it had been burned brown by years in the Florida sun and wind whipped from riding fast horses while foxhunting and playing polo at dizzying breakneck speed. He looked lean and hard muscled, more like a rugged American cowboy than an English gentleman.
“I’ll feed you myself,” he said and grinned. “It’s good to see you, love. Thanks for coming by. Please …” He gestured to the table and two chairs.
We sat across from each other and, as if she had been waiting behind the boxwood hedge, the housekeeper appeared with another tray, this one with little bowls filled with jam and thick cream, a plate of lemon slices for the tea, a sugar bowl, and a small pitcher of milk.
“Do you fancy coffee?” he asked. “Or is tea okay?”
“Tea’s fine,” I said as he picked up the pot, nodding dismissal at the girl. “This looks lovely.”
“You look absolutely shattered,” he said as the gate to the pool closed and we were alone again. “Something wrong?”
“My grandfather and I had drinks with Charles Thiessman at his lodge last night. Or more like very early this morning.”
Mick smiled. “That gardener bloke drive you home, too?”
I nodded and our eyes met like a couple of guilty underage kids who’d conspired to get drunk as lords behind their parents’ backs. “I told him you and I had spoken about this California wine he talked you into buying. He seemed surprised we’d discussed it.”
What Charles hadn’t said was how much he had told Mick about Teddy Fargo, or Theo Graf, and about his obsession with learning whether black roses grew somewhere on the property. My guess was that Mick knew only what Charles believed he needed to know and nothing more.
“Truth be told, I was surprised he came to me with the information in the first place. Apparently he’s got loads of contacts in the wine world out in California.” Mick indicated the rose garden. “I think it was the connection with roses. This place in Calistoga is supposed to have quite the fabulous rose garden attached to it.” He gave me a lopsided grin. “Which probably explains why they call it Rose Hill.”
“He did mention the roses.” I stabbed a slice of lemon with a tiny fork. “Did he say anything specific about them to you?”
Mick didn’t answer right away. “About the roses? What do you mean?”
I stirred my tea. Mick was shrewd. I shouldn’t have brought up the subject if I didn’t want him to connect the dots.
“Nothing. I just thought he went to a lot of trouble getting my grandfather invited to this Bohemian Grove meeting and then indirectly arranged through you for me to accompany Pépé to California.”
Mick burst out laughing. “You’ve got this the wrong way around. Being invited to give one of the lakeside talks at the Bohemian Grove is huge, Lucie. The most important men on the planet belong to that club. Crikey, it’s easier to marry a royal and get yourself a title than it is to join that lot. I have friends whose fathers were still on the waiting list when they died—and I’m talking decades.”
“So you know about this Bohemian Club, too?”
He nodded. “Who doesn’t? I think it was Herbert Hoover who called their July campout ‘the greatest men’s party on earth.’ I’d cut off a limb to be a member, even with some of the boys’ own silliness that goes with it.”