Invitation to Provence(17)
Then, there always seemed to be laughter and food and wine and glamorous clothes, because Rafaella had been a clotheshorse right from the age of three, when her notorious aunt, Marguerite (her mother’s sister who was always said to be “no good”), brought her a winter outfit from Paris. It was a red velvet coat with a matching little hat trimmed in snow-white ermine, and for the first time she had seen herself reflected in those same hall mirrors as glamorous and gorgeous and feminine all at once. Of course her mother had said she looked like a cheap little Santa Claus, but her mother was like that. Maritée Marten could never have been called a free spirit the way her sister was, and besides, she never liked her daughter.
When Rafaella finally hit her stride in her teens, tall and too thin with a neck like a swan that looked so fragile it might bend under the weight of all that piled-up dark hair, she embarked on a lifelong love affair with clothes, buying from Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, and Valentino. She still had most of them stashed away in the cedar-lined attics set aside for just that purpose because she couldn’t bear to give her beloveds away.
The young men in her crowd were all in love with her. They met her eyes with a sexy question, which of course she’d laughed at, thrilled with their attention and a little afraid of it at the same time. They told her she was a beauty, which she knew not to be true, but she liked it anyway and became an expert flirt, enjoying herself, enjoying being young, enjoying life.
Then she’d married Henri de Roquebrune, who had taken her name because of the inheritance clause in the Marten family trust. The Marten line had gone on unhindered by change from the time the first known one, a wealthy seventeenth-century burgher from Bordeaux, had purchased the bishopric and much of the land here—a common occurrence at that time, when rich men could buy their way into the clergy and own entire villages and even towns. It was he who had built the beginnings of the chateau and founded the Domaine Marten winery.
Rafaella never knew if she was in love with Henri or whether she’d just been dazzled by his older-man glamour. He’d seemed so much more mature than the young men she knew.
Henri had wined her and dined her and romanced her. He’d also taken her, with friends to chaperone—not too successfully as it turned out—on a summer yacht trip to the Aegean islands, where he also took her virginity on a white beach with the sound of the sea lapping in her ears and sharp pebbles sticking into her naked behind, and with the shrill night sounds of crickets in her ears, which from then on she would always associate with making love.
Her son Felix had been the result of that night, though knowing what she knew now, Henri should certainly have been more careful. After all, she was only nineteen years old and an innocent for all her big talk. It meant she’d had to walk down the aisle of the Saint-Marten village church draped in shimmering white satin with a long, heavy train that slid plop, plop, plop down the stairs as she descended, with an extra large bouquet of lilies to cover her bump.
She smiled now, thinking about what a little idiot she’d been. Henri had turned out to be a cold man and boring, something she’d never realized, enthralled as she was by his older-man experienced attentions, by the waiters at the smart restaurants who bowed to him, the doormen who saluted him, the elegant men and women he knew, and the Paris society he moved in, while she was barely out of the schoolroom and like a filly at the gate raring to go.
Of course Henri hadn’t given her the Marten name back when she’d left him, but now he was gone, buried with her parents and the other Martens in the flowery little graveyard just outside the village.
When she’d realized that she did not love Henri and that he certainly had never loved her and had married her only for her money, she’d proceeded to live her own life, keeping the chateau filled with friends. She’d become something of a fixture in café society in Paris and on the C?te d’Azur, where the Martens owned a pieds dans l’eau villa, which meant it was right on the sea. You could step out from your bedroom onto the hot summer tiles of the terrace and run down the steps, through the gardens and directly into the cool blue sea that slid around your body like a thin silken nightdress.
She’d flirted, and there’d been a few liaisons of course, but nothing serious—until she met Lucas Bronson, that is. Then nothing she could have done would have stopped that tumultuous fall into love’s darkest entanglement.
Rafaella thought what fun life had been then, how glorious those years. Did she regret any of it? Not a bit. Not even Lucas. Except now maybe, she regretted how careless she had been with time, all those wasted hours and frittered days, the long lazy weeks that led to irretrievable years. She had been a foolish woman with time, and now it had caught up to her.
And, at the heart of it all, had always been the chateau.
11
THE CHTEAU WAS HOME, the place where Rafaella’s heart was, but it was the vineyards that were her true passion. By the time she was twenty-five, Rafaella’s knowledge of wine making equaled that of the most prestigious male vintners—and this was in an era when few women were in “the business” of producing and selling wine.
Taught by her father, she had worked at the winery dressed like the workers in men’s big bright blue overalls, though she’d had to roll them at the wrists and ankles and hitch them tight around her thin waist with a piece of string. Her dark hair was bound in a red kerchief, her pretty hands were stained purple with grape must, and her head swam drunkenly from the fumes as the grapes fermented in the great vats.