They held a long, terse conversation in French. Mr. Beaucaire’s tone became sheepish. His face reddened. He cut his eyes at her in a shrewd, awkward manner. Amy began to realize the shocking truth, and her legs turned to rubber.
“My apologies, mademoiselle,” Mr. Beaucaire said finally. His voice was cold and clipped. “I did not fully understand the situation. Doctor de Savin has explained. You are, of course, in no trouble at all.”
Doctor de Savin? She lost all of her adrenaline-provoked bravado and stared at the ground. “Thanks.” Then she hurried away without looking back.
She went to her spot by the vines and worked doggedly, her face hot with embarrassment. Dr. de Savin. Of the de Savin winery. He was so young! But he owned this place. She had pestered him, squirted water down his windpipe, and then called him pitiful. She refused to look up or acknowledge the questions of the other workers. The remnants of her pride were all that kept her from leaving and never coming back.
Mr. Beaucaire marched past her. She glanced at him from the corner of her eyes. There was dignity and anger in the ramrod straightness of his back. She had gotten him in trouble, she realized with alarm. Then it began to sink in that Dr. de Savin had defended her—and no one had ever done so before.
A few minutes later Dr. de Savin came around to her side of the trellis. Without a word to her he reached down and took her bucket of grapes, then strode up the row in the direction of the trailer with its dumping crates.
Amy watched him open-mouthed. When he came back he set her empty bucket down and walked on, nodding to her as he passed. Dazed, Amy stared after him. He walked to the edge of the vineyard, retrieved his shirt from a trellis post, then turned and caught her watching him. With an utterly sincere expression on his face, he bowed to her.
He was leaving. Poignant adoration rose in her chest. She wondered if she’d see him again and fought the urge to cry. Something wonderful had happened to her, finally. She lifted one hand in a silent salute to the nobleman who had just made an unforgettable impression on the slave in his vineyard.
When Sebastien Duvauchelle Yves de Savin bowed to the girl, he was mocking his own gallantry. But she responded in complete sincerity, raising one hand in a slow, dramatic salute, her palm toward him. He was surprised when goosebumps rose on his flesh. Her gesture was not an affectation; it was as if she were pledging her loyalty to him forever.
The face that peeked out from a floppy straw hat and black sunglasses had a neat little chin and round cheeks. They framed a wide, solemn mouth that looked capable of reaching from one of her small ears to the other, if she ever smiled. At the moment she showed no hint of doing so.
Her legs, sticking out comically from big denim shorts, were well formed but a little too thin. It was easy to see, however, that a few good years and a few good meals would turn those legs into a marvelous asset. The same could be said for the long, slender body above them.
She was obviously no child, but no grown woman, either. He didn’t encourage her attention, but when he turned to leave he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He hesitated, picked up his clippers again, and worked for a minute longer. His head was fogged by lack of sleep; a mild giddiness obscured his reserve. He entertained himself by recalling how she had come to his rescue and given him orders in her comical, squeaking voice.
When he nearly cut his fingers with the sharp shears he knew it was time to stop such nonsense. Like most surgeons, he protected his hands at all costs, and was not above a certain vanity about them. He had a laborer’s hands, big and blunt like those of his mother’s people, hands meant to work a fish net or guide a plow, not perform delicate maneuvers inside a human heart. Only through sheer determination had he schooled his hands to move gracefully, to be as fluid as a dancer’s.
He left the vineyard with a distinct feeling of regret, sensing the girl’s gaze tracking him as he departed. He hadn’t expected to find himself receiving gentle bullying from a primly dressed young woman with an amusing voice. Nor had he expected Pio Beaucaire to chastise her so bitterly.
Sebastien knew that his father had instructed Pio to keep the local females as far from him as possible. And, while Pio realized he had no control over Sebastien’s life, still he tried faithfully to follow orders. Sebastien shook his head. How could his father even hope that eleven years of medical training would fly out the window and his wayward, arrogant son would come home to fulfill his family obligations?
Had he followed his father’s wishes, Sebastien wouldn’t have been in the vineyard to intercede on behalf of a timid young woman who touched him with her kindness on a day when he found the world to be particularly ugly. He would not have been working in an American vineyard that was no more than an insignificant experiment among his family’s vast business ventures. Perhaps even more important, the vineyard was his father’s excuse to keep Pio, a lifelong de Savin employee, in America to inform on Sebastien. Pio’s job was about to end; Sebastien was two weeks away from completing a fellowship in cardiac surgery at Gregory University in Atlanta.
His family heritage was, after all, one of nobility and prestige as old as France itself; of service to kings and emperors; of fortunes remade in the years following the revolution; of social pedigrees and political power and staunch elitism. If he had done what he had been raised to do, he would, at twenty-nine years of age, have been working in Paris for Philippe de Savin, his father, and preparing to take control of a conglomerate that owned or held interests in shipping, vineyards, textiles, and a dozen other businesses.
His younger sister, Annette, with her love for corporate intrigue and her skill with people, was the natural successor to their father’s corporate throne. Had she not had the misfortune to be born female, their father might have welcomed her into the business instead of trivializing her commitment to it. She was six years younger than Sebastien, newly graduated from a prestigious grande ecole, and anxious to earn their father’s respect. She had never understood why Sebastien cared so little for it.
Over the years the family situation had been made even more tense by the fact that Sebastien’s younger brother, Jacques, was a lovable but completely irresponsible young man who intended to do little that involved work. Jacques, at twenty, was failing as an art student at the Sorbonne and excelling as a playboy in the trendy Left Bank circles occupied by the offspring of the rich.
Sebastien had never—not even as a teenager—been so carefree as his brother was now. He took his baccalaureate to enter the grande ecole at the amazing age of fifteen, knowing he wanted to be a physician, to mend people, to take revenge on death. And, since his father was to blame for what had happened, Sebastien took revenge on him, as well.
He was a very serious and sophisticated man at twenty-nine, and though several years younger than other physicians at the same level of training, he was already gaining a reputation for being mature, brilliant, and demanding. All of which earned him equal shares of respect and dislike among his American colleagues. He was amused by the fact that some of them called him Young Doctor Frankenstein behind his back and that others, citing the scar on his chin, his love for double-breasted suits, and his town house decorated in art deco style, said that he was a gangster at heart.
He did not need anyone’s friendship as long as he had their respect, and because virtually all of his waking hours were devoted to his work at the hospital, he did not have time for more than a few social acquaintances. Occasionally he pursued more intimate invitations from the hospital’s nurses and female physicians, which he consummated with charm and great skill but with no hint of permanent attachment.
The women who accepted his single-minded dedication to his work settled for his generosity in bed and other ways, including the use of his several cars, his sailboat and cottage on St. Simon Island, and the free run of his town house in Buckhead, Atlanta’s most exclusive residential area. Women who wanted more from him were quickly yet graciously ushered out of his life.
On the morning when he dro
ve his white 1936 Cord to the de Savin winery north of Atlanta, he had been at the hospital for three days without sleep. A middle-aged grocer named Alphonso Jones had thrown a clot while undergoing angioplasty, and had to be rushed to the operating room for a bypass.
The bypass had gone perfectly, but two hours later, with the disregard for explanation that often accompanied such things, another clot broke free and went to Jones’s brain, causing a massive stroke. Jones, a robust father of five and grandfather of seven, clung to life with the aid of machines.
In the long hours of the second night, Sebastien met Jones’s wife, a stern little woman with a graying afro and a no-nonsense attitude. “None of these other goddamn whitecoats will tell me anything,” she protested. “And I want to know the truth—if my husband makes it, is he goin’ to be an invalid?”
Sebastien studied her for a moment, while he weighed the consequences of answering a question that should go to the patient’s cardiologist. But if Mrs. Jones wanted the unadorned truth, she had asked the right man. “Perhaps. We’ll have to wait a few days to see how he recovers. And it may take six weeks to determine his long-term problems.”
She began to cry. “He’ll have to take early retirement, sit in a chair in front of a TV all day, never be able to play baseball with the grandkids again? That sort of thing?”
“I can’t predict anything at this point. He could do much better than you think. First things first. Right now, we have to wean him off the ventilator.”
“The what?”
“The machine that’s helping him breathe.”
She gripped Sebastien’s arm and looked up at him with a desperate expression. “I want him to die. I want you to tell the others to turn off all those damned machines.”
“You know we can’t do that.”
“What’s better—living like a cripple, or dyin’ like a man?”
“I won’t debate that with you. It’s not the issue.”
“You coward! ’Course it’s the issue! But you’re too much of a liar to admit it.”
Sebastien looked at her grimly. How her husband lived was not his concern, only that he did live. “First things first,” he repeated. “Until he can breathe unassisted, he will remain on the ventilator.”
She was still crying, but she snorted in contempt. “He’s not even a man to you. To you he’s just something to fix, like an old truck. Even if it’s only got a few miserable miles left, you want to run it into the ground.”
She flung herself away and headed down the hall to a waiting room. Sebastien grimaced. He disliked dealing with patients’ families. Their mindless sentiment complicated the logic of medicine, the rational, impersonal study of disease and injury. He had more important concerns than their grief. Grief was a useless emotion.
But he was not unaffected by the grocer’s death. It tore at him like a personal insult. The man’s lungs simply refused to work on their own. Without dramatics, without a fight, he slipped away until the ventilator had more life than he.
Sebastien left the hospital without bothering to change his surgical garb. He kicked off the thick-soled jogging shoes he wore when he worked, seeking freedom in every way that he could, and drove to a garage where he stored his vintage Cord. Then he headed north out of the city, along the interstate. He drove at a speed that would have infuriated lovers of classic cars and would have cost him at least a speeding ticket, more likely a suspended license, if a highway patrolman had spotted him.
He had little control over only one part of his emotions. He had one weakness that he had kept hidden throughout his medical training. The death of a patient enraged him; the helplessness he felt went beyond a rational reaction and gripped him like a phobia. He wanted to keep his patients alive for his own sake more than theirs. He battled that selfishness privately, knowing it was the one weakness that could ruin him as a surgeon and therefore as a person.
He had been in that black, bleak mood when the girl came to him. It astonished him that her fumbling attempt to help him had made his anger vanish. He didn’t understand the phenomenon until he realized with disturbing clarity that she was the first person who had ever tried to rescue him from himself.
A few days later Sebastien came back to the winery to sign the paperwork authorizing purchase of more acreage on the estate’s southern border. He disliked dabbling in his father’s businesses and tried to minimize his involvement. On this trip he drove his black Ferrari, and chided himself when he realized that he had chosen it hoping to impress his rescuer. The vineyard workers were not in the fields when he arrived; he checked the heavy gold Rolex on his wrist and saw that he’d picked lunchtime by mistake. He smiled ruefully at his disappointment. He had never considered himself a preening peacock where women were concerned.
He parked beside the vinting building next to the chateau, grimacing as he passed the fake turrets and stonework. It was a monument to the tourist trade that would come here someday, and its resemblance to a real château was laughable.
Inside the winery offices Beaucaire’s secretary, a matron with an easy smile, looked up from her typing. “Hi. Mr. Beaucaire said to tell you he’d be a few minutes late. He’s talkin’ to the temps. Here are the papers.”
As he signed, Sebastien asked, “Do you know any of the temporary people?”
“Sure. I’ve lived around here all my life.”
“There is a very shy young woman among them who has an unusual voice. She is slender, fair-skinned, and she has a perpetually puzzled expression on her face, as if she were trying to understand some very confusing issue.”
“Oh. You’re talkin’ about Amy Miracle.”
“Miracle?”
“Weird, I know. Her stepmother’s a member of my church. She says the family comes from circus and carnival people from way back, four or five generations. The name was Merkle to start with. Somewhere along the line somebody changed it to Miracle.”
“What else do you know about her?”
“Hmmm, like I said, her folks are circus people. Used to be, anyway. They settled around here maybe ten years ago. Her daddy has a bad back, had to quit the circus. He was a clown. Odd bird. Real odd.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, he’s nice … he came over and made balloon animals for my granddaughter’s fifth birthday party, but—but”—her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper—“he’s a hippie.”
“Hmmm?”
“He’s got long hair. A man his age! And he smokes dope. Around here, he’s just a weird character, if you know what I mean. His wife’s got a chicken house. I think that’s all that keeps the family off welfare.”
“What do you know about the girl?”
Another shrug. “Shy as she can be. Just graduated from high school this spring. She dates a boy who’s going to trade school this fall.”
“Trade school?” Sebastien had an excellent grasp of English, but this term eluded him.
“He wants to work on trucks. You know. Big trucks. Be a diesel mechanic.”
“Ah.” Sebastien impatiently checked his watch. Why indulge his curiosity about the girl? He had to get back to Atlanta. He was working tonight at the hospital, and between now and then he had medical journals to read.
Pio arrived a minute later. Sebastien smiled at his stately manner. He was a very dignified spy who pretended to be insulted each time Sebastien questioned his reasons for following him to America.
Pio slapped him on the back. “Bonjour: Ca va?”
“Comme ci comme ca. I’ve taken care of the signings already.”
“I could have mailed the papers to you.”
Sebastien made a large, distinctly Latin shrug. “I felt like driving out again.”
“Hmmm. Come and sample the Merlot your father sent to me.”
They went into Pio’s darkly paneled office with its stiff, leather-covered furnishings and old photographs of the chateau de Savin in the Loire valley. The office was spartan but debonair. Pio took a bottle from a wine rack tha
t covered one wall. He opened it with decades of skill, poured small amounts into two tastevins, and presented one of the shallow cups to Sebastien. After a nonchalant examination of the color and clarity, Sebastien sipped the Merlot slowly. “Too sweet.”
“No! The best vintage since seventy-two! I will never forget that one!”
Sebastien smiled at the older man’s wistful tone. “You should go home, Pio. You miss it.”
Sighing, Pio carried the bottle of Merlot to a sideboard and filled two crystal glasses. He and Sebastien raised the glasses to each other. Pio sank onto a couch, wiping sweat from his deeply tanned forehead with a white handkerchief, and gave Sebastien a speculative look. “Did you come back today to admire some more young, pretty grapes?”
“Never fear, Pio, I only choose what is ripe.”
“You wouldn’t cause an old man trouble with the local fathers, would you?”
Sebastien smiled dryly. “You aren’t old. You haven’t aged a year since I was a child.”
“Oh, but you have changed, my boy.”
“I have only grown up. I’m not the naive child you put to work each time he came home from school.”
“Your papa was proud of that child, no matter how bitter that child became as he grew into manhood.”
“He should be proud, now, too. If he’s not, that’s his business. What do you tell him about me lately?”
“What can I say? I tell him that you are still a doctor. ‘Your son works all the time at the hospital. He lives in a fine home. He makes love to American women. He becomes an American. He forgets his family responsibilities.’ ”
Sebastien laughed without warmth. “I like your sense of drama. You do me justice.”
Beaucaire sighed. “So, tell me why you took such an interest in the girl. Such an odd one … she hardly ever talks, but when she does, c’est comique, what a voice! You won’t cause trouble with her, I hope.”
“Perhaps I simply have a gallant streak, eh? You think I’m the kind of hawk who swoops down on birds who have just learned to fly? Like father, like son? No, I’m not like that bastard.”
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