22. Wine Tasting

WINE TASTING

MADDY

"I've never seen so many people in one place," I say. Kate and I are standing on a second floor balcony overlooking the Quinn Orchard and Vineyard showroom. Booths line the outer walls, displaying choice produce. But the pièce de résistance is the slightly elevated platform where the wine tasting will take place.

On one side of the platform was a set of chairs with orchestral instruments placed on them or near them. On the other side was a set of chairs with music stands and stacks of paper that was probably sheet music.

Behind the table where the tasters would sit, hung a banner depicting a field of grape vines, with fruit trees in the background. It was captioned "Organic is best".

"Of course you have," Kate replied. "You've been to medical and business conventions. You've just never looked out over all the attendees in one place at the same time."

"Sure these are not all family?" I cringe at the thought.

"About half, I'd say," Kate noted. "The Lanes have turned out in force, the Ildogis branch has brought cousins, as well as the refugees from the Mountain Hold debacle six years ago."

"Andrew told me a little about that," I say. "But it still all seems quite confusing."

Kate laughs. "I don't try to track all the ins and outs of it. I put my energy into remembering names and faces, so I don't make a mistake when introducing people. And speaking of introducing people . . ."

A tall, athletic man approaches us. A petite red-haired woman, also athletic in appearance, has her left hand tucked into his right elbow. Her right hand was clasped with that of the most adorable little girl I've ever seen. The man held the hand of another girl, identical to the first.

"Princess Catriona, Prince Consort Leland," Kate says, "Please allow me to introduce Madeline Northernfield, administrator of the local Spindizzy Clinic."

"And she is also Andrew's long lost lady, if I am not mistaken," Leland says. "He had a picture when we first met. He lost it not long after that, and mourned as if he had lost a sweetheart. It was not a very good photograph, but I can still see the resemblance."

I must have looked bewildered because the princess hastened to explain, "Andrew and Leland were friends before they learned they were brothers. They are both a bit older than I am, but years are not a barrier." She gazed up adoringly at her tall husband.

She was right. The years didn't make sense. She appeared to be not only younger than Leland, but a few years my junior, as well.

"You are adding up the years, and coming up with a mystery," Catriona says, her lovely eyes crinkling at the corners, her cheeks rounding as she smiles. "I will solve it for you. I was betrothed in the cradle."

She waited a minute for the shock I am sure must have been on my face to wear off. "I was thirteen years old when my mother told me that I was promised. I was so angry! I had my eye on one of my cousins, a big red-haired fisherman, named Jemmy. He had bodybuilder muscles, and calves that looked fine in his hose and spats, yet his hips were so lean you could swear that his kilt might slide off at any minute."

"That's quite a description," Kandis says, clearly amused. "But you married Leland, who certainly does not have red hair. Where does Andrew come into this? I must admit, I'm curious now."

"Well," Catriona pauses a moment, as if in deep thought, "Mother explained to me ever so gently that Jemmy was a second cousin, which is not a kissing cousin, if you take my meaning." She looked at us expectantly, waiting for our reaction.

"Kissing cousin?" I ask, not completely sure I wanted to know.

"Someone related to you, but sufficiently distant to marry," Kate explains. "Jason Wintergreen is a fourth or fifth cousin, twice removed, to the Lane family, which made him distant enough to marry Rylie."

"Rylie?" It is now Catriona's turn to be confused.

"My baby sister," Andrew explains. "Jase is a nasty piece of work. Rylie ran away from the marriage, and was rescued by Austin."

"A fine-looking man," Catriona said, glancing up at Prince Consort Leland in a way that let us all know that she was teasing him, "He could almost rival Jemmy for the breadth of his shoulders."

Leland smiles down at Catriona, and bumps her lightly with his hip since both his hands are occupied. "Such an example you set for our daughters," he says. "I would be jealous did I not know that he is staunchly in love with his Rylie. But since you have begun this story, perhaps you should finish it?"

Catriona grinned. "I pitched an absolutely royal temper tantrum. I'd been sure I could persuade my parents. So Mother put me in charge of the feeder mice for the zoological gardens. Mice are cute little things when bred in captivity, but their generations are short enough for her to make her point about not marrying close kin."

"Ok," I say, "that explains why not Jemmy. But how did you get from Andrew to Leland?"

"Well, we all thought it would be Andrew. And I was pretty much resigned to it. He was blond, not red-haired, but he looked handsome enough in a long, lean, English sort of way." She cast a sultry glance at Andrew. This time, the glance elicited a grumpy throat clearing from Leland.

Beside me, Andrew sighed. "I wasn't exactly set up for marrying at the time, and I didn't want to desert my team. We had quite a lot on our hands, you see. Besides, I had this memory. The pictures of Catri were cute enough, but she was just a kid. So I put off going to the island."

"So then what happened?" I ask, caught up in this behind-the-scenes tale of the rich and not-quite-so-famous.

"We weren't to be married until my eighteenth birthday anyway," Catriona went on. "Mother insisted that I should be at least that old. She would have liked for me to be more like twenty-one or even twenty-five. But we'd had a couple of bad harvests and we knew that the Lanes are absolutely loaded. It takes a lot of money to run an island, so Father is always on the lookout for new sources of revenue."

I must have looked completely astonished. I had realized that an arranged marriage was essentially a business deal, but I had not heard it put quite so baldly.

"The handfasting papers say, ‘Oldest son of Albert Aloyisius Lane', no specific name," Andrew put in. "My father paid me a visit to remind me of this obligation. But while he and my mother were there, she let slip that she was his second wife. She just casually wondered aloud what had happened to the first one. Before I could ask more, they boarded their yacht, and just a day or two later, they drowned."

"That must have been horrible," I say, trying to imagine the sudden loss.

"It was a bit of a shock," Andrew said. "But Mother's comment was enough to set me to wondering just what had happened to the first wife. So I wired Richard, and he started digging. That was when I found out that the man I had befriended is actually my biological brother."

I would have asked more questions, but there is a clatter of several footsteps on the stair behind us, and Rylie says, "There they are! I told you they couldn't be very far ahead of us."

Then Austin, in his southern California beach boy accent said, "You did say that, my mermaid. You also said that the kids would be fine with Mrs. Hubbard, especially with Charlie and Julia to help."

Rylie blinks her huge, blue eyes with their amazingly long eyelashes at Austin just as they reach the landing. "Mrs. Hubbard is intelligent, competent and experienced. She will make good use of younger, faster feet to keep up with everyone."

Richard, who is on the stair just above them, says, "Rylie, you have the most tangled up way of putting things. But Austin vouches for her, so I'll say you are probably right."

"Of course I am right," Rylie says. "I was right about that bimbo that left you at the altar, too. You just didn't want to take advice from your baby sister. Kandy is worth two hundred of her! Didn't I hear recently that she is on her third or fourth husband?"

Richard nods. "And she has taken every one of them for a very expensive ride. I truly lucked out that she took off before we were married. And got even luckier that Kandis agreed to marry me."

The whole arranged marriage idea gave me an extremely queasy feeling, like those ugly YouTube videos with lurid titles like, "I was a child-bride." Maybe I could get Catriona to finish explaining later on. After all, she certainly didn't seem unhappy, and her explanation about the cousin and the mice made a sort of sense.

But at the moment, it all faded into the background. Leland gently turned both his daughters over to his wife, came over and shook hands with Andrew and then slapped him gently on the back. He then turned to Richard, and gave him the same treatment.

Then it struck me. Except for their clothing and their skin color, Leland and Andrew were like carbon copies of each other. Both lean, both with a narrow face and high-bridged nose, both with a distinct cleft in their chins. Richard was like a smudged, chunkier version of his brothers.

And then Catriona finishes her explanation. "Leland is two years older than Andrew. Mr. Aims and his wife coerced Albert Lane into divorcing Amari, Leland's mother, so he could marry Deborah Aims. Something about obligations to the "family." It is almost as if the Aims family and the Lanes were some sort of New York royalty. Regardless, have you ever seen anything finer than the three of them together?"

No, I truly had not. I looked up at the three of them, two light, one dark, and saw the same air of confidence and compassion that characterized Andrew. And, as all three Lane men smiled, they exuded the same wickedly devastating charm that got them into scrapes and back out again. Charles Emory was quite upstaged by them, or so I thought.

But Kate breathed softly, "And then there is Charles Emory." And her tone said that he was her world.

Then the tableau was over, the moment broken and we were all headed downstairs. Mimi and Pops Quinn, Great-aunt and uncle to Kandis, entered from a door behind the orchestra seats, meeting us as we all trouped to the seats in front of the low stage where the wine was already set up, and where the tasters would pass judgment on wine from the various local vineyards.

Andrew falls into step beside me. "How are you doing?" He asks softly.

"A little overwhelmed," I say. "There are a lot of people here."

"There are," he says. "It is a far cry from a clinical setting or even from the operating room."

"Or from the jungle?" I ask.

"Or from the savannahs," he says. "It has been a long time, and I tended to duck out on these things as often as possible even before I left. The social scene was more Richard's bag. Speaking of social scenes . . ."

Ahead of us, twelve older people rise from their seats, and converge on Leland, gripping hands, exchanging hugs. Most have dark or tawny complexions, but one stands out. She is tall, skinny, white-haired. From her complexion, she was probably once blond. She lets out a blood-curdling cackle of a laugh, then hugs Leland.

"The village elders from Mountain Hold," Andrew explains. "They have been touring the United States for the last six months. To them, Leland is their prince, and will always be, unless he passes his title to another family member."

"Who . . .?" I look up at him

"Amari remarried, remember?" Andrew says. "He has a younger brother and several sisters. Leland plans to back his brother as next manager for Mountain Hold. That is not going to sit well with Grandfather Aims, because it will take it out of the Family's governance."

"The who?" I ask. Because the way he has said "Family" gave it a much different meaning than just this gathering of brothers, sisters, and cousins.

But I did not get a reply, because the skinny woman was hugging Andrew.