Belle's Secret

by Victoria Purman

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Amy demanded.

  “Forget it,” Tess sighed.

  “I won’t forget it. You two can run around and come up with all the fun ideas, but guess who has to work things so we can pay for them? Me. You know who I have to think about? All our growers. Their pickers. The people who work in the bottling plants. The distributors and the people who buy the wine so waitstaff can pour it into glasses in restaurants all over the world. That’s who I have to think about.”

  Harry stood and swept up his board papers. “You’re right, Amy. We weren’t thinking.” Her criticism stung, but he knew he was off his game. He hadn’t been able to put together a coherent thought the whole damn year. Since February. Since Vegas. Since he’d found – and lost – Belle.

  Tess followed him out of the boardroom and they walked the long corridor from the boardroom to his office. The walls were lined with framed wine labels from almost every vintage Harrison’s had ever produced. It was known as the Hall of Fame.

  Harry called it the Museum.

  When he turned sharp left into his office, she’d followed and closed the door behind them. He crossed the room and sat in the big brown leather chair. Tess sat opposite and propped her workboot-clad feet on the desk.

  “Well, that went well,” she noted dryly.

  “You think?”

  “It was like a … like a …” Tess tapped her fingertips together. “Boom.” She fluttered her fingers out until her arms were outstretched.

  “I was there, remember?”

  “The suits,” she said, blowing out a breath. “Sometimes I think they forget that we actually make wine. They’d be just as happy if we were pumping out widgets as long as the dollars added up.”

  Harry chuckled, despite his anger. “We shouldn’t have raised it today. It’s too soon after the fires.”

  They shared a moment of silence in contemplation of all that had been lost and what they’d been able to save.

  “Amy’s under a lot of pressure. She’s been waiting her whole life to run this place. And that’s going to be lonely. We’re all about the wine and Everett trusts us enough to know he can sell whatever we produce. But Amy … she’s the one who’s going to have to one day run this place without Dad.”

  “Or Mom,” Harry said after a beat of silence.

  The two siblings shared a long look. It had been five years since their mother had died from breast cancer. Their father hadn’t been the same since. None of them had been.

  Harry had a problem too. He wasn’t enjoying making wine anymore. He’d lost his passion for it. Subtly, Tess had stepped up during the last vintage without a word being spoken between them. He hadn’t been able to fight the deep-down feeling that he should have something more in his life than wine and this place. Something was missing in his life. Shit, who was he kidding? Someone was missing in his life.

  Where the hell was Belle?

  “You alright?” Tess asked quietly.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not. I’ve been worried about you … since, well, the whole year actually. Since Vegas, last February. You’re not still pissed at me that you had to go instead of me, are you?”

  “What? Hell no.”

  “I mean, I was studying for my finals at the time.”

  “Which is exactly what you should have been doing.”

  Tess regarded her big brother. “C’mon Harry, spill. Did something happen in Vegas?”

  He hadn’t told anyone. “I’ve just been a bit restless.”

  Harry glanced at the agenda on top of the pile of board papers. Tess’s scribbled words. Matthews Wines, Wirralong.

  “You passed me this note just before. What’s Matthews Wines got to do with anything?”

  “It sounds really cool. It’s in the state of Victoria, Wirralong’s the closest town. I’ve read that some people there are doing organics. And they’re good, from what I’ve heard. I’ve been trying to get my hands on a bottle, but they don’t export.”

  “That’s funny. Simon’s getting married to an Australian girl next January. I wonder if it’s somewhere near there. Maybe I could go and have a look.”

  Tess smiled broadly and slapped a hand on her denimed thigh. “Well, isn’t that serendipity. Why don’t you have a break? Fly all the way down under and taste some wine. Two birds with one stone, my friend. Wine and a wedding.”

  Wine and a wedding. In Australia.

  And Belle was Australian.

  His wife. Fuck, that still stung. Harry ran a hand over his face. “Yeah. I think I will. It’ll almost be vintage down there. Maybe I can get my hands dirty.”

  Tess’s phone beeped and she looked at the screen. “Oops. Gotta go.”

  “Yeah, get outta here.”

  She threw him a grin, stopped at the door and looked back. “Find a nice woman while you’re down there, huh? You’ve been looking a little lonely lately.”

  *

  Harry listened carefully to the GPS in his rental car as it issued instructions in a broad Australian accent. He followed the directions to Matthews Wines. The woman who owned the wedding venue, that friend of Belle’s, Maggie, had told him it was only twenty miles out of Wirralong, so he couldn’t be far away.

  It was a hot, dry day, with a blazing sun overhead, and he had the aircon cranked up high in the rental. On either side of the narrow, bitumen road leading north out of Wirralong, straggly looking gums lined the roadway like ragged hems, and beyond them were paddocks full of what looked like wheat. The crops were a faded yellow, and the breeze created waves in the heads that moved and swished like waves on the ocean.

  He played with the voice-activated controls on the car’s audio system until he found some old-school rock, more American music than he expected to hear on an Australian country road in the middle of the outback, and cranked it up loud. He pressed another button to wind down the window, hoping the wind would whip right through his head and erase every thought he’d had the past day about Belle.

  Excuse me. Isabella.

  Nope, that name didn’t sit with the woman he knew. With the woman he’d married.

  He hadn’t seen Belle today, since they’d agreed to their pact that the divorce would buy his silence about their past. And now, driving along the undulating Australian country road leading towards Matthews Wines with the windows down and loud music from the radio filling his head, he allowed himself to think about the elephant in the room.

  What the fuck was he going to do now?

  He was married to a woman who didn’t want to be married to him. He was in a job with roles and expectations he was battling against, one in which he was continually butting heads with his family and growing less concerned about what they thought of all the head-butting and the attitude. So, yeah, things were going great.

  Maybe it was his secret that had made him so reckless with his role in the family’s business. He hadn’t told anybody in his family about Belle and Vegas and the whole marriage mess he’d gotten himself into. That’s how much of a fucking fool he’d felt about it. Some mornings, when he’d woken sleepily, with a thick head from too much wine the day before, and had stumbled into the kitchen for his first coffee of the day, he’d forgotten that he was married to a stranger. And then he’d remember and the anger would fester and sit in his gut all day like a stone, ramping up his crankiness, dialling up his disappointment in who he was and what he’d done.

  At least he’d taken steps to do something about that mistake.

  As soon as he got word from his lawyers back home about setting in motion the divorce, he would be able to start the process of cutting all ties with Belle.

  “In one hundred metres, turn left, mate.” The instructions from the car’s GPS shook him out of his one-man self-pity party.

  “Thanks, mate,” he replied out loud, trying to copy the Crocodile Hunter accent. He shook his head. “Harry, your Aussie accent is shit.”

  He turned left and a minute later he’
d reached his destination. He pulled onto a grassed verge and got out of the car. The breeze hit him first, a soft tickle in his hair, and he breathed it in deep, this Australian scent of earth and heat and dryness and eucalypts. Matthews Wines seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, but he could hear the low rumble of voices and conversation. It was an oasis in the bush, he decided, this place. On one side, there were acres and acres of grapevines in full leaf, up hills and down valleys, glistening apple green and swaying in the warm breeze. Now and then there were more gum trees in straggly clumps near sagging fence lines. On the other side, cars were parked at angles in front of a low stone wall, shades of slate, grey and deep blue in it. There were four stone buildings beyond it in a cluster and then, beyond them, laughter and conversation and the sounds of singing and a strumming guitar. He turned his gaze to the sky, blue as the ocean. Not a cloud in it.

  What a damn fine day.

  He followed his nose through an open wrought iron gate fixed between two of the stone buildings, which opened into a courtyard surrounded by more stone buildings on the far side and then, behind them, towering modern corrugated iron sheds, which he knew housed the huge vats that stored the wine as it matured.

  Yeast. He knew that smell in the air. It was in his bones, that fruity, ripe tang. To his right, three giant wooden vats stood behind a low wooden fence, and one of the winery workers, in a blue singlet top and a broad-brimmed hat, was atop a ladder, aerating the grape juice—for it wasn’t wine yet—pumping it back on itself in a spray of the deepest plum and dark cherry. Harry knew the crushed skins sank to the bottom of the vat and that this process was vital to the maturation of the wine before it was bottled.

  To his left, a peppercorn tree reached into the blue sky with boughs like five fingers from an upturned hand, its leaves fluttering in the breeze, its dappled shade providing some relief from the heat of the day. The courtyard was full of people, tasting or listening to the singer or walking to their cars with their wine purchases in their arms. This was what he knew. This was what he did best. This was the kind of winery he wanted to build and grow. Not a multi-million bottle a year corporation. This.

  He walked to the cellar door and inside one of the stone buildings, picked up the tasting wine list and started at the top.

  *

  Half an hour later, Harry was sitting out in the courtyard listening to the singer, enjoying a particularly fine, dry Riesling. The people around him were weekend-relaxed. They were a sea of straw hats and chinos and flowing summer dresses and bracelets that jangled as the women wearing them applauded. A couple of barefoot kids ran around the peppercorn tree playing hide and go seek.

  This was Harry’s kind of winery. The cellar door at Harrison’s was traditional. A big, new tasting room with a long polished wooden bar. A row of wine fridges chilled to just the right temperature behind it. Gleaming wineglasses for tasting and brass spittoons for those who didn’t swallow when they tasted. He knew Harrison’s wines were top notch—and they had the gold medals to prove it—but there was no comparison with this place. Harrison’s was a big corporate behemoth. This place was the kind of operation where they bought grapes from neighbours and like-minded growers around the district and made the kinds of wine they liked to drink. And he could smell it in the scent of yeast and fermenting grapes in the courtyard. The wine was made right here. Grape juice became wine in the most mysterious alchemy in the world.

  Maybe not the most mysterious alchemy in the world. That was reserved for the inexplicable way two people could take one look at each other and just know. He was sure that if he’d met Isabella at Simon’s wedding for the first time, instead of in that Vegas bar, he still would have been struck by that same lightning.

  That same lightning that lit him up from the inside, that had made him, for a brief twelve hours, the happiest man on the whole freaking planet. And then every day since then, the most miserable bastard on earth.

  Inside the pocket of his jeans, his phone vibrated against his thigh. He fished it out, looked at the display.

  “Tess.”

  “Love you too, Bro. How’re things down under, mate?”

  “Take it from me, Brat, that is the worst Aussie accent I have ever heard.”

  “C’mon, I’m making an effort here! I think I sound like Nicole Kidman! So, are you having a good time? How was the wedding? Oh, that koala looked gorgeous. Have you petted a kangaroo yet?”

  “I did.”

  “Wait up. You patted a kangaroo? That is so cool. What was it like?”

  Harry smiled. “Soft. What’s going on back there?”

  “Amy’s busting my butt. Everett’s chasing a new woman. Same same. Tell me all about the wedding. Did you cry, you big softie? What’s Wirralong like?”

  “It’s a really cool place. Historic buildings. Cool new businesses. I’m at that organic winery you told me about.”

  “So jealous. Did you buy some wine?”

  He scoffed. “What do you think I am? An amateur? It’ll be shipped home next week.”

  “I can’t wait to try it. Hey, Harry.”

  “Yeah, Brat?”

  “You sound … happy. You meet a girl or something?”

  Was it sisters in general, or Tess in particular? She always seemed to know his emotional state no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

  “Maybe.” And then when he expected an interrogation, he got something else entirely.

  “Hey. That’s great. Have some fun. You’re overdue for some fun. Go find some beaut Aussie sheila and fall in love or something.”

  “Since when did I ever take advice from you?”

  “See? That’s your problem. You totally should. Anyway, glad you’re having fun.”

  “Thanks. See you next week.”

  “Cheers, mate.”

  “Confirmed. Worst Australian accent I’ve ever heard.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was Monday. A Monday like every other Monday Isabella had had since she’d arrived at Wirra Station. The day before, she’d married two teens who were about to join the Army and wanted to be wed before their first posting. Then, she’d spent the rest of the day moping and watching Notting Hill, and this morning she’d woken at six, spent half an hour convincing herself that the twisting and turning she was attempting on the rug in her living room was actually yoga, inhaled a coffee and a bowl of fruit, yoghurt and muesli while listening to the morning news, showered, changed and driven into her office in Wirralong’s main street. There was a wedding at Wirra Station today, but an old colleague of Isabella’s, Callen, was officiating. Two chefs were getting hitched and needed the ceremony to be on a Monday, when their Melbourne restaurant was closed for the day. Callen often helped out so Isabella could take a day in the office, and Wirra Station could keep doing what it did best.

  With another mug of coffee in her hand, she walked across the office to the vintage wooden desk at the back and sat herself down in her ergonomic chair. In front of her sat a wicker basket with gumnuts in it, a small pile of paperwork that needed processing, three pens, a wooden coaster for her hot cup, a keyboard and a mouse. She tapped a letter on the keyboard and her screen came to life. She sipped, waited for her email program to download any weekend correspondence and looked across the polished wooden floorboards to the front window overlooking the main street. ‘Wedding Belles’ had been sign-written in a lovely, romantic, cursive script. The words were backwards from where she sat.

  She put her cup down and sighed. Everything was backwards from where she sat.

  The thing to do was to get stuck into her paperwork. Yes. That way she could distract herself from thinking about her husband. And she really, really needed not to be thinking about her husband right now.

  Isabella slipped on her glasses, straightened her back and checked her mail—nothing that couldn’t wait—before opening a spreadsheet to update her accounts for the payment from her weekend weddings. Monday was a quiet day for her. She rarely did weekday weddings so she used the
time to keep her books meticulously up to date, check her emails for new bookings, and sometimes Skyped with potential clients who were interested in using Wedding Belles for their ceremonies at Wirra Station. She’d been a marriage celebrant in Melbourne for two years, but she’d never been busier since moving to the town almost a year ago. Word had spread like wildfire on a couple of bridal Facebook groups—and her own Instagram account—and business had really kicked up a notch. She’d taken a risk in moving to Wirralong to work alongside Maggie, but it had paid off in spades.

  The front door opened and Isabella looked up.

  “Hey, Iz.” It was Elsa O’Donoghue, the owner of Hair Affair and someone she’d become fast friends with when she’d arrived in Wirralong.

  “Good morning, Elsa. Want a coffee? I’ve just brewed a pot.”

  “No, can’t. I’m just about to open, but I saw your door open and thought I’d pop across the road instead of texting you.”

  “Ah, an old-fashioned pop in. It feels like the turn of the century.”

  Elsa laughed. “Ah, yes, 2001. I think that may have been the last time Serenity’s hair was her real colour.”

  Isabella’s shoulders shook with laughter. “So, what’s up?”

  Elsa tapped her watch. “Tonight. Smart Ladies’ Supper Club is at Maggie’s this fortnight. She has some wine she wants us to taste. You still in?”

  “You had me at wine.” Elsa had created a tradition for herself, Maggie, Isabella and Serenity – a fortnightly catch-up involving manicures, new hairdos and all-out pampering. Isabella always enjoyed their evenings and decided she needed it tonight more than ever. She held up her hand for Elsa’s inspection for proof. There was a tiny fleck of nail polish worked away on her index finger. “I desperately need fresh polish. I have a chip.” She needed her nails to be perfect. It calmed her. She’d been a nail-biter as a child and now she treasured the willpower and control she’d developed to keep her nails perfect ovals. It was the kind of control she’d exercised over every part of her life. Except one.

  “Great,” Elsa replied. “I’m sure Serenity can work her magic. And while your nails are being refreshed, we’re absolutely, positively not going to talk about that gorgeous American you were dancing with on Saturday night.”