Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

feel ready to try a short canter?”
    “In a moment, perhaps,” he said. “You’ve had me riding so much that the inside of my thighs are sore and I feel as if I’ve scoured all the hairs off my legs.”
    “Your legs are still gripping too tightly. As you get more confident, you’ll relax, and it’ll be fine.” Pamela paused, and in a different tone of voice said, “I suppose you know what was in the paper, about Jacqueline?”
    He nodded. She had been returned to Quebec under a treaty that allowed French and Canadian nationals to serve prison terms in their home country.
    “Nine months wasn’t much of a sentence,” Pamela said.
    “Obstruction of justice, providing false evidence and statements, failure to report a death, killing an animal; no, not much of a sentence. The commercial espionage count was dropped, since Bondino decided not to press charges. And there was no proof that she’d been paid by the Australians,” Bruno said.
    “Australians?” Pamela asked. “There was nothing about them in the newspapers. How were they involved?”
    “She did some research for her professor in California on that paper he wrote for Bondino on commercial prospects in the Dordogne,” Bruno explained. “So she had a copy of the paper and got in touch with the big Australian wine group she’d interned with when she was studying there and sent them a copy. They were interested to find out what the competition was doing and Jacqueline wanted a job, so the relationshipgrew. From her e-mails, it’s clear she sent them everything she got from Bondino’s computer, including the contract on drought-resistant vines with the research station.”
    “Did she put Max up to setting the fire?”
    “She denies it, and we couldn’t prove anything,” Bruno said. “And she was very good at the trial, beautiful and vulnerable and young. She milked the tragic ordeal in the vat and convinced the judge she had panicked. She probably didn’t even need the good lawyer her parents got her.”
    “So next summer, she’ll be out and free again,” said Pamela. “It doesn’t feel right.”
    “Her real punishment will start then,” said Bruno. “She’ll never work in the wine trade again. She’ll be notorious, after all the publicity. And Bondino escaped her plot. The feud’s over. He won.”
    “You have a very idiosyncratic sense of justice, Bruno,” she said.
    “Wait,” he whispered, pointing. “See over there, at the edge of the field?” At the horse’s feet, Gigi was pointing, one paw half raised and his head up to catch the faintest scent, his tail out horizontally behind him. Pamela peered across the field but saw nothing, and then suddenly there was a fluttering in the far hedge and a small black shape emerged to dash across the gray November sky, darting up and down as it flew.
    “Bécasses,”
said Bruno. “Soon it will be hunting season.”
    “Good hunting. I’m looking forward to another of your dinners with
bécasses
. And what wine do you plan to feature this time?”
    “It’s an embarrassment of riches,” Bruno said. He still could barely believe what an extraordinary case of wine he had been given, even though he had been to Hubert’s cellar to see the twelve bottles of Château Pétrus. There were three each from 1982, 1985 and 1990, and a single bottle from each of thegreat years: 1947, 1961 and 1975. It was Bondino’s gift, and it had taken Hubert a month to assemble it from various cellars. It had come with a simple card saying “Thank you, Bruno. Fernando.”
    Bruno realized it had cost a ridiculous amount of money. Hubert told him the case was worth more than Bruno’s investment in the new company Vignerons de Saint-Denissur-Vézère. “Maybe I’ll sell it and buy more shares in the company,” he’d told Hubert, knowing he wouldn’t. There were some things more valuable than money.
    Another dinner, another wine, another love. He looked gratefully at Pamela, a woman who seemed content to give him all the time in the world.
    “Let’s try a canter,” he said, pressing his heels into Victoria’s rounded sides as they rode past the ruined shed and headed for the break in the woods that led down to the valley and Pamela’s home.

Acknowledgments
    This is a work of fiction, in which all events and characters are invented. But like the first in the Bruno series, this book once again owes everything to the kindness and generosity of the people of Périgord and the splendid way of