Chapter 16: Tomas Remembers
Tomas Aguilar had not slept properly since the gala, and Elena could see it in the way he held his coffee cup that morning, with both hands, as if it might otherwise betray him.
He had come up from the cellar earlier than usual, before the household had quite settled into its day. Ada found him standing in the kitchen doorway, cap in hand, asking — in that slow, careful way of his — whether Mr. Stallone was awake, and whether Miss Elena might be there when he spoke to him. Ada, who had known Tomas for twenty years and had never once heard him ask for an audience, sent for Elena first.
"He looks like a man carrying a bottle that is too full," Ada said quietly. "One wrong step and it will spill."
Dominic received them in the small study off the terrace. The morning light fell across the vineyard beyond the windows, row after row in late-summer green. Tomas stood until Dominic waved him, with some impatience and more kindness, into a chair.
"Sit down, Tomas. At our age, standing for bad news is a waste of good knees."
"It may not be bad news, sir," Tomas said. "It may be late news. That is worse, I think."
Elena sat with her notebook closed on her lap. Dominic leaned forward, his hands folded, and for once he did not fill the silence with a joke. He waited.
Tomas began with the night before the gala.
He had stayed late in the cellar, he said, longer than the ledger showed, because a delivery of glasses had been stacked where no glasses ought to be. He was in the back aisle, among the oldest racks, when he heard the cellar door open above him. Not the service door, which rattled. The main door, which sighed on its hinge when it was opened properly, with the code.
"I did not call out," Tomas said, and shame crossed his face plainly. "We were told the cellar was finished for the night. I thought perhaps I had forgotten to sign myself out, and that Mr. Ben was checking. I stayed quiet because I did not want to be found still working, like a foolish old man who cannot leave the bottles alone."
Steps had crossed the floor above the racks, unhurried. A pause near the cabinet where the toast bottle rested. Then, after some minutes, the steps again, and the door sighing shut. Tomas had waited a long time before he moved. When at last he climbed the aisle and looked, the cabinet was closed and latched, just as it should have been. Only the bottle's place had troubled him. The first-vintage bottle had stood, for years, a fraction turned toward the light, the way Margherita had always left it. That night, in Tomas's memory, it stood square to the shelf.
"I told myself I was tired," he said. "I told myself an old man invents things when a house is full of strangers. So I said nothing. Then Miss Elena took that glass from your hand, sir, and I have not forgiven myself since."
Dominic's face had gone very still. "The code, Tomas. You heard the door opened with a code. Do you know whose?"
Tomas nodded once, miserably, and then with growing certainty, as if saying it aloud set the memory in its proper place at last.
"Each code makes the lock speak differently," he explained. "A little pattern of sounds. I have heard them for years without thinking. Mine is slow, because my fingers are slow. Mr. Ben's is quick and even. That night the pattern was the one I have heard a thousand times when he comes down to check the temperature logs with me. It was Mr. Julian's personal code, sir. Not the general staff code. His own."
The room was quiet except for the faint ticking of the clock Elena polished every Friday.
Dominic did not explode, as Elena had half feared he might. He sat back and looked out at the vines, and his anger, when it came, was cold and contained, which frightened her more.
"He walked into my cellar," Dominic said, "the night before my birthday, with his own code, and he counted on everyone being too polite, or too tired, or too loyal to say so afterwards." He turned to Tomas, and his voice softened in a way that made Tomas lift his head. "You have said it now. That is what matters here. Late news is still news, and I would rather have it from you than read it in a lawyer's letter."
Tomas's hands, around the empty cup, had stopped shaking.
Ben was called, and Ada brought the service ledger, and together they walked down to the cellar in a small, sober procession that felt nothing like the gala and everything like the truth. If the real bottle had been moved that night, Elena reasoned aloud as they descended, it had perhaps not been taken far. A man working alone, in a house still awake above him, would hide a thing close and quickly, and trust a label to do the rest.
They searched methodically, rack by rack, while Tomas grew more himself with every aisle, muttering names and years like a litany. At the very back, behind a stack of empty cases, stood a crate stencilled for a modest recent vintage, the sort no one would open for a celebration. Its lid sat slightly uneven. Tomas saw it before any of them, and his breath caught.
Ben lifted the lid. Inside, nested in straw that did not belong to that crate's year, lay a single bottle. Elena did not touch it. Tomas did, with the reverence of a priest and the sureness of a man who had known it for decades. He turned it gently toward the light.
The foil was the exact, muted shade Elena had recorded in her notebook on the morning of the gala. The wire cage was twisted clockwise. And there, near the edge of the foil, so small she might have wept to see it, was the tiny scratch her thumbnail had made when she polished it.
"That is her," Tomas said. "That is the bottle Mr. Dominic and Mrs. Margherita bottled together. The first one. She was here all the time, in the wrong crate, with the wrong name on the box."
Elena opened her notebook then, and wrote the time, the place, and the names of everyone present, her handwriting as neat as she could make it. Dominic stood in the dim cellar with the recovered bottle cradled in Tomas's arms, and for a moment the years seemed to fall away from him entirely.
"She kept it safe by accident," he said at last, with a rough attempt at his old humour. "Margherita always did have better security than I pay for."