"My goodness. I wonder how she had the gall to show up here."
"Who, Mrs. Smythe?" Samuel de Kock asked, turning to see the direction in which his companion was launching the piercing daggers of her eyes.
The woman took a step away from where she, and her husband, Major Sydney Smythe, and Samuel and his wife, Melissa, were standing. The small group was tasting the first pouring of the Lady M Cabernet Sauvignon offering of the Marymount Wines vineyard on the Kaep Hangtip peninsula east of Cape Town, South Africa.
Major Smythe put a restraining hand on her arm and muttered, "Not here, dear. Leave it."
The woman Georgia Smythe had been staring at, Susan Toliver, maiden sister of Pastor Henry Toliver, had just been getting out of a car in the car park next to the winery garden where the first pouring ceremony of the Lady M vintage was being held. The Toliver woman stopped one foot in and one foot out of the car, her eyes going to Mrs. Smythe, but more directly to an envelope protruding from Mrs. Smythe's handbag—a lavender-colored envelope. The color drained out of Ms. Toliver's face, she turned and snapped something to her brother, climbed back into the car, and, after the minister scurried around to the driver's seat, the car backed out of the car park and disappeared down the hill.
"My word, I wonder—" Melissa de Kock, a startling beautiful, blonde women, a slight smile on her face, started to say, but was interrupted by Mrs. Smythe again.
"The nerve of that woman."
"Come, Georgia, she's gone now," Major Smythe cajoled her. "And you know that no one here believes that gossip anyway."
"Ah, there is the deputy premier and his wife," Melissa said to her husband, Samuel, himself a golden boy, but a good five years Melissa's junior and much more casual and easygoing then Melissa's obvious marshalling of command. The winery was Samuel's in name, having inherited it from his parents, who had made it the premier wine estate, save one, in South Africa. But everyone in the region around Overberg knew who wielded the sword in managing and building the business.
Melissa used her sugary-sweet voice. "We must do the welcoming duties and get wineglasses in their hands and photographs with them." She smiled apologetically at the Smythes, while pulling another couple in to talk with them, the disengagement so smooth that whatever had set Georgia Smythe off was defused and she began chattering with the new couple. If she noticed that there was a lavender-colored envelope peeking out of the purse of the female half of the newly appearing couple, she said nothing.
The photo op with the province's deputy premier, the prints of which would go directly to the society pages of the Cape Town
Daily Sun
, taken care of, Melissa and Samuel peeled off in different directions. Melissa made the rounds of the black African servants, a mix of Khoikoi and Zulu young men, to direct them, rather pointedly, in more active service of glasses of the new vintage wine, and of sweets and savories on trays. Those who didn't want to try the new vintage, who wanted a previously proven white wine instead, were being served Master S, the winery's standard Chardonnay.
For his part, Samuel headed toward a small group of vintners from other wineries to sound them out on how jealous they were that the Lady M Cabernet Sauvignon had turned out so well. But before he could get to them, the overseer of the vineyards, the Dutchman, Jan Townenaar, a bit too coarse and scruffy for this gathering—and overpoweringly intimidating in his height and muscular bulk—came from out of the vineyard fields surrounding the garden and caught Samuel's eye. It was obvious that Townenaar was hard at work. He certainly wasn't dressed to be at the wine tasting. It was also clear that he had no part in the publicity or sales of the product—or gave much regard for those who did.
Showing a bit of irritation, Samuel pulled over to him and said, "Yes, Jan. What is it you want? As you can see, we are busy presenting the new Cab Sauv."
"I think there is something you need to see in the loft of the wine barrel shed, Mr. S," Townenaar said. "Unless, of course, you'd like to take care of it right here."
He towered over Samuel. He'd been overseer here since Samuel's parents had been running the operation and, although in his early fifties, he was still an imposing figure—gray haired, with rugged facile features, a perpetual deep tan from a life working in the fields, a barrel chest, and massive biceps. He was well over six feet tall, at least five inches taller than the well-formed, if diminutive, stature of Samuel. But he worked for Samuel, and, in front of the important guests present today, Samuel had every intention of showing that he did. Townenaar didn't fight him, but he obviously had a mind of his own—and something he needed to share with his employer.
"I don't think . . . ," Samuel started to say, but then he looked across the garden, past the gathered groups of guests, and saw Melissa entering the main house behind the servant Koson, a strapping Zulu young man of particularly striking good looks and cut body. "OK, yes, I'll meet you up there in ten or fifteen minutes," he said.
Without waiting for Townenaar's response, Samuel went looking for his vintner, Christian Devour, and his wife, Sheila, the winery's publicity manager, to tell them they'd have to hold down the fort at the garden party for a while. He had made sure that, in appearances, Jan Townenaar was subordinate to him, but both he and Jan knew that when Jan said he needed to go to him someplace, Samuel would go.
And he doubted that Melissa would be back for at least the next twenty minutes. She probably thought that he was totally blind, but his eyesight was good enough—nearly of X-ray quality—to be looking through the walls of the second floor of the main house, where the master bedroom was located—knowing that Melissa and Koson would be there now, on the four-poster master bed, with Melissa writhing under big-cocked Koson as he frenziedly fucked her missionary style, her dress pushed up to her waist and her panties dangling on one of her ankles.
Melissa's devotion to him—Samuel—although total and worshipful in the public eye, was, he knew, grounded on the winery and the prestige it gave her. She fought to get him all of the best of everything—showing much more ambition than he did—but it was because whatever he had represented what she had and controlled.
When he reached the loft of the wine barrel shed, he found that Townenaar didn't want to talk. Samuel hadn't thought for a moment that was what he wanted. Townenaar wanted to assert his mastery and control over Samuel, taking him away from the wine-pouring party on purpose just to show he could—to show who had control between the two of them. Samuel had known this before he'd come up here. The winery might be in Samuel's name and nominally under his control, but he was at least third in line on who really controlled.
The loft had a window overlooking the garden, where the party was going on. It also gave Samuel a vantage point over the windows into the master bedroom in the main house and told him he was right about Melissa and Koson. They were on the bed, Koson covering and mounted on Melissa, his plump, berry-brown buttocks undulating with his rhythmic thrusts inside her. Koson, like Jan, was asserting his control over Melissa, taking her away from the party because she had spoken sharply to him and the other native servants before all those white people.
For the same reason Jan Townenaar had taken Samuel away from the party. As Samuel leaned over a table set against the window in the loft overlooking the garden, his trousers and briefs puddled on the floor around his ankles, Townenaar crouched over his back, holding Samuel's hips between his hands, holding the younger man steady, as Townenaar fucked him in the ass from behind.
Tearing his eyes away from his wife and the black servant and not wanting to look down into the garden either where he should be, Samuel looked up the hill, up the line of the rows of grapevines neatly spread on wires held up by wooden posts. The vines stretched all the way to the summit of the hill. They weren't all his, though. They weren't all part of Marymount Wines. His winery was the best in reputation in South Africa, save one. At the summit of the hill, the smaller, but repeatedly better awarded winery, BeauView Winery, teased and beckoned to him.
Once BeauView was part of the De Kock family holdings—back when the Khoikoi and Zulus here were no better than slaves and back when this was just a farming area, before it was discovered that it was good for grapevines. When Apartheid collapsed and the natives working the farm no longer had to do so for slave wages, the dominant native family here, the Curries, were given what was then considered inferior farming land at the summit of the hill in exchange for continuing to work the De Kock farms.
