Unbridled Vengeance

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1“A toast! To our new neighbors, Caleb Martinez Stewart, his mother, the superb Doña Valentina, and all their family — Josefa, the twins, Lucas and Mateo, and all who roam the range at Rancho Del Oro!”

Sir John Russell clinked glasses with his roundly pregnant wife Pania, who’d remained seated beside him when the rest of the party stood to toast in the new year. “To our new partnership in wine.”

The long oak table groaned with festive food: turkey pot pie, venison stew, candied sweet potatoes and half a dozen other dishes. The Russells might have an English cook, Caleb thought, but her food tasted as delicious as pretty much anything Rosario cooked at home.

Garrulous chatter ballooned around them again, and Sir John’s Australian brother Nathan, who sat on Pania’s right, c*****d on his glass with a teaspoon to quieten the noise.

“Let me add my congratulations to you on this excellent vintage, dear brother. May the future wines that come from this valley” — he swiveled and dipped his glass in deference to the man standing next to him — “be as good as our New South Wales drop, thanks to this fine fellow.” He raised his glass. “To Aristide Laurent, vintner extraordinaire.”

Aristide laughed and shook his head. “Cheeky Australian.”

Nathan grinned. “And to the Stewart family, whose willing provision of Rancho Del Oro terroir makes this new venture possible.”

The flames on the two silver candlesticks flickered from the expelled breath and movement as everyone sat down again and resumed eating and chattering.

In his straight-backed chair on the corner of the table next to Sir John, Caleb was overcome with a sudden shyness. He was a Johnny Hayseed alongside the international magnate, one of California’s richest men, with interests in import and export, mining, railways and now real estate, agriculture and wine.

Granted, the Stewart family still owned five thousand acres of productive grazing land within easy reach of Sacramento’s heart in J Street, rolling north to the banks of the smooth-flowing American River. He was one of the few Californios who’d inherited a Spanish land grant from his father and held onto it. Not just kept it but kept it profitable — just. The golden years of free-roaming rancho beef were gone, and they needed new initiatives if the family was to continue to prosper. Which was why he’d sold part of the estate to Sir John.

He caught his mother’s hawk-like gaze as he rose to respond. “Thank you for the very warm welcome, Sir John. We’re overwhelmed.” He took in Doña Valentina’s ram-rod posture, the strongly arched eyebrows over intense dark brown eyes, and his attention moved past her to the rangy forms of his boisterous younger twin brothers, colts still growing into their legs and champing at the bit to get into the race. Across the table from them sat his black-haired, dark-eyed sister Josefa, so like his mother in her aristocratic beauty, but so unlike her in temperament.

“To Vino d’Oro. We all appreciate that the California my father and mother knew when they married is fast disappearing, and if the fifteen years since my father died have taught me anything, it is never to count on past successes. So a toast to the best partners we could wish for. To Sir John and Aristide . . . and Vino d’Oro.”

The twins were fidgeting, Josefa’s face had that dreamy, faraway light she so often took on these days, but his mother was right there with him. She gave him a barely perceptible nod of approval.

“Thank you for preserving the history of Del Oro by preserving the name.”

He sank back into his chair and watched as the easy comfort of loving family life folded around him like a warm blanket. The decibels of gay laughter rose; wives and children, visitors and workers like Laurent and his sister Madeleine, all enveloped in a pleasant glow.

Opposite him an elfin-faced little girl with a mass of dark brown curls wriggled in her chair, set between Nathan and his stunning, singing-star wife Graysie Castellanos. The child gazed from one to the other as she chattered on in a joyful monologue, barely stopping for breath or pausing for answers. She looked to be about six years old.

“Wine is only for grown ups, isn’t it, Uncle Nat? Children don’t drink wine. And especially not babies, that’s right isn’t it, Sissy?” She turned her enchanting, freckled face towards Graysie. “My baby brother George definitely can’t have wine, can he?” She giggled and helped herself to another ganache chocolate tart.

“What have you been up to, little imp?” Sir John’s wife Pania leaned across and tickled her under her chin. “Did you help Mademoiselle Madeleine in the kitchen this afternoon?”

“I did. She let me help fill the tarts with chocolate. And I got to lick the spoon!”

She gave a deep sigh of pure pleasure and gazed adoringly at Madeleine, Aristide’s school-teacher sister, a recent arrival from France. Madeleine flashed an answering smile. Pania followed the child’s gaze with an amused raised eyebrow, and Madeleine laughed. “Minette did very well, Lady Russell. She spooned the chocolate filling into the pastry shells with hardly a spill. She shows definite promise as a chef.”

Russell’s striking New Zealand wife laughed. “Pania, please, Mademoiselle. We don’t stand on ceremony here.”

Caleb felt the stirrings of a deep-down envy, so unlike anything he’d experienced before. He held his breath, waiting for it to pass. It didn’t. He shifted uneasily. Had anyone noticed how tense he was? He released his breath slowly and settled more deeply into his chair.

He’d been so consumed with ensuring the ranch’s survival, he’d missed out on making a life for himself. His father’s sudden death when he was fifteen, the onslaught of droughts and floods and bitter legal battles . . . A wife had been the last thing on his mind. Children? They were something for the future, when the ranch was secure, when his siblings were settled.

It came to him with the crashing of cymbals as he watched the loving, reciprocal interchange around him — Nathan Russell must be about the same age as him. And Aristide? He didn’t appear to have a wife, but he radiated a confident intelligence, a man happy in his realm, plainly delighted to have his sister with him.

And the sister? She’d been introduced earlier, taken on as domestic manager for Aristide and the winery when the family weren’t here, and as a part-time nanny when they were. She observed the proceedings with sparkling aquamarine eyes that he guessed recorded everything, answering inquiries with carefully crafted but flawless English, her sentences lit unexpectedly now and then by a brilliant smile.

He thought of the fractious Del Oro household: the twenty-year-old twins in rebellion against him for trying to replace the father they’d never really known, Josefa resenting his attempts to protect her from her own headstrong willfulness because someone had to. He suddenly felt tired, and much older than his thirty years.

He glanced up. Madeleine Laurent was quietly observing him, feathery lines visible around sad eyes, as if the clouds had rolled in and covered the sun. They locked eyes for a long moment, and she gave a slight nod of acknowledgment before turning to answer a query from Josefa, who sat next to her.

“I love being here, Josefa. Just love it. Aristide is my only family left, you see. Mother died last year and my sister several years before that. I can’t tell you how glad I was to find him.”

She, too, was clearly fatigued. She looked older than she’d appeared moments before. Caleb had the queerest sensation — what did they say? — as if someone had walked over his grave. Like him, she felt that life had passed her by, he would swear it. Either that or he’d had too much wine. He shook his head to clear the crazy thoughts. The legs of his chair shrieked as he pushed back from the table with a decisiveness he hadn’t been aware he felt a moment before, and thrust out his hand to start making his round of farewells. The family could stay till midnight and see in the new year. He had a business to attend to.

The waning crescent moon wasn’t due to rise until after midnight, so Caleb’s ride home was slower than usual. He was maintaining a steady gait on Nero to avoid breaking the black stallion’s leg in a gopher hole, but he was a good half mile away from home when two things happened in eerie coincidence.

The moon’s silver crescent nudged over the clear black line of the horizon, and two ghostly forms he couldn’t fail to recognize came bounding out of the darkness. He didn’t need a full moon to know the fluid strides of Jupiter and Venus, the deerhounds he’d left at home in Miguel’s safe keeping.

They were benign creatures, but it was a bad breach of animal husbandry to allow them to wander at night. Only something catastrophic would have prevented Miguel from shutting them up in their quarters near the cooking pits before he went to bed.

His heart beat a warning tom-tom as he rode the avenue of evergreen oaks leading to the house. Nero had barely stopped before he slid from his saddle, roughly tethered him by the trough and thundered inside, the dogs hot on his heels.

He drew to a hasty stop on the doorstep, pulling out his revolver, cursing the lack of light. He opened the door a few inches and peered in, weapon raised. The big family room where they did most of their daily living was empty, but it smelled all wrong. The familiar aroma of rising bread and Doña Valentina’s spicy perfume were overlaid with a heavy masculine presence: cigar smoke and sweat. And underneath it all, the unmistakable coppery tang of blood.

He pushed the door fully open and the dogs surged ahead of him, leading the way to the office nook where they spent much of the day sleeping. But when they got to the entryway, they pulled up sharply, their muzzles shuddering. Venus was whimpering; Jupiter stared back at him uncertainly. Both were reluctant to enter the room.

Gun raised, Caleb flattened himself along the wall and peered around the door jamb. Miguel lay spread-eagled on the rug, his kind, wrinkled face frozen in a heart-searing howl, the dark stain pooling around him the evidence that he’d bled out in the place which had been his refuge for most of his long life.

Caleb felt exactly like he had as a young teen when he’d been thrown from a horse and badly winded. Gut-punched. He lurched over, clutching his waist, struggling for breath at the same time as he was dry-heaving. His hands were icy, his neck clammy, and for a second or two he thought he might pass out in an intense wave of dizziness.

He clutched at the hard edge of the doorjamb, reminding himself the world was still upright, it was just him that was tilted off center. Slowly, as the big mantel clock ticked laboriously into the first hour of a new decade, he raised himself to his full height and spoke to the dogs.

“You were here, weren’t you guys? You saw who did this.” He shook his head and wiped away the first tears with the back of his hand. “If only you could talk.”

He turned his back on Miguel’s supine form and walked out on light feet, as if not to disturb his sleep, though he knew he was being a little batty. “Come on, now. We’ll get you bedded down. You’ve had a nasty fright.”

He worked his way to the back of the house where the estate kitchens were situated. The kennels were out back here too, the dogs familiar with the routine: fed, then bed. The fact that they were still loose in the house when Miguel’s attackers came told Caleb the killer or killers must have come early in the evening.

His mind was working overtime as he crossed the yard. Who would have any cause to kill Miguel — and why? The mestizo had been a faithful house manager for more than twenty years, since a bull charge crushed his hip and ended his days as a vaquero. His quiet wisdom and wiry strength had carried them through many a crisis over the years, never more so than after Caleb’s father died. He’d lost so much more than a capable man — he’d lost a spiritual connection. Miguel could read nature. He was a man of prophetic voice and stunning premonitions. And yet somehow he’d failed to detect the danger closest to him.