Vintage by Rosemary Friedman Read Free Book Online

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    Raised on a stud farm, by the time the twenty- two-year -old Viola, the eldest of the four Fitzpatrick daughters, left her native Galway to spend the summer in Bordeaux, she had had no sex education at school and none whatsoever from her parents. Although she was intimately acquainted with the covering of a mare by a stallion, she was still virgo intacta and she did not equate such equine couplings with herself.
    Although it was her father who mainly concerned himself with the breeding, Viola could not remember a time when she had been thought too young to witness the apparently violent and mechanical process to which the mares were submitted, usually more than once, during their summer heat.
    Standing at the door of the breeding shed, she would watch as the mare in her covering boots, twitching andirritable, her plaited tail held high in anticipation, was held by one stable lad while her private parts were washed down by another. At a nod from her father, the aroused stallion was brought in and the copulation, violent and thrusting, and sometimes not without what Viola mistook for tenderness (a bite on the neck which her father said was merely to keep the stallion in position), took place. There were always four or five stallions, and in the season – Sundays included – there were seven or eight matings daily, each one hopefully representing several thousands of pounds in the Fitzpatrick coffers.
    Despite the fact that at home in Ireland she had been surrounded by so much rampaging fertility, Viola’s own deflowering by Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand, Baron de Cluzac, the consequence of which was to keep her in France for the next nine years, had turned out to be not what she had expected.
    The young Viola, dark and feisty, was not the first of her kinsmen to settle in Bordeaux. When the English had put paid to the wool trade in the early eighteenth century, the Irish had come up with the ingenious idea of supplying Bordeaux with home-produced salt beef, in return for which the Bordelais had satisfied the Irish thirst for claret.
    The fortunes made by the Irish in Bordeaux were typified by ‘French Tom’ Barton, originally from Tipperary, who bought valuable estates in the Médoc (where his descendants are still to be found), and became the biggest single purchaser of claret in the second half of the century.
    Of all this Viola Fitzpatrick had only the haziest idea when she was sent by her father, George Michael Fitzpatrick – who thought it would do her good to get away from Ireland – to spend the long summer at châteauKilmartin with her second cousins once removed. The Kilmartin estate occupied a prime position overlooking the wide estuary of the Gironde, and was one of the few châteaux in the Médoc to produce white wine.
    It was when her ‘uncle’ had asked her to take a temperamental gelding and deliver it to the head groom at Cluzac, that Viola had made the acquaintance of Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand de Cluzac, who happened to be crossing the courtyard of his father’s medieval château, as she trotted confidently in over the cobbles and enquired the way to the stables.
    Flattered by the admiration in the young man’s eyes – he had silently appraised her wild Irish looks while ostensibly admiring the gelding and her mastery over it – Viola had not been displeased when she ran into Charles-Louis again the following morning in the course of her morning ride.
    When he asked if he might join her, Viola readily agreed. The early-morning trysts, during which they often dismounted and walked along the river bank, became a regular habit to which Viola looked forward with anticipation.
    Flattered by his attentions, she was not surprised when, on one blistering morning when the sun had already burned away the early mists, he pulled her down on to the grass and started to remove her clothes.
    That her objections were only perfunctory was due to the fact that not only did she find Charles-Louis