family were employed to work on the estate, which was the largest in the region.
Finlay dismounted from his horse and shaded his eyes to gaze down into the valley. Hermoso Romero was a beautiful place, the pale yellow stone walls and the terracotta roofs mellowed by the late-autumn sunshine. The grapes had been harvested from the regimented lines of vines that fanned out on three sides from the house, while cypress trees formed a long windbreak on the fourth. The main house was a large building three storeys high, the middle section of which was graced with arched windows. What must be the working part of the estate was located to one side, built around a central courtyard, while at the back of the main block he could see what looked like a chapel, and some elegant private gardens contained by a low wall constructed of the same yellow stone.
Jack’s mysterious contacts at the Foreign Office in London had done an impressively thorough job in providing Finlay with a cover story. The owner of the winery, Señor Xavier Romero, was by all accounts an extremely ambitious man, with a very high opinion of his Rioja wine. So when Señor Romero had been informed through a ‘reliable’ diplomatic source that an influential English wine merchant wished to pay him a visit to discuss a potential export deal, an invitation was immediately extended.
‘He’s likely to push the boat out a bit,’ the man at the Foreign Office had warned Finlay. ‘Be prepared to be courted. It would be advisable to crib up a little on the wine-production process if you can find the time.’
But time had been in very short supply. ‘It is to be hoped that Señor Romero is more interested in allowing me to taste the wine than grilling me on my knowledge of grape varieties and vintages,’ Finlay muttered, patting his pockets to reassure himself that his forged papers and letters of introduction were still in place. Though maintaining his alias was really the least of his problems. The scale of his task, the lack of information, the lack of any certainty at all, meant the odds of success were heavily stacked against him.
‘So we are going down there,’ he said, addressing his completely indifferent horse, ‘filled with hope rather than expectation. Let’s face it, laddie, there’s a hundred reasons why this could be a wild goose chase. Would you like to hear some of them?’
The horse pawed at the ground, and Finlay chose to take this for assent. ‘Let’s see. First, there’s the fact that though I think my partisan lass came from Hermoso Romero, I could be misremembering the name completely. Two years and a lot of water under the bridge since, it’s likely is it not?’
He received no answer, and so continued, ‘Then there’s the lass herself. A woman who, if she did not actually fight with the guerrillas, most certainly was one of them. What are the chances of her having survived? And if she has, what are the chances of her remaining here, if indeed here is where she lived? And if she is alive, and she is here, how am I to know I can trust her? It’s a dangerous thing, to espouse the liberal cause in Spain these days. My lass may well side with the royalists now—or at the very least, she’ll simply keep her mouth shut and her nose clean and herself well clear of associating with the likes of El Fantasma, won’t she?’
Receiving no answer once more, Finlay nodded to himself. ‘And if by a miracle she is still alive and still a liberal, why in the name of Hades would she trust me enough to lead me to the great man? For all she knows, I could be out to snare him myself. And in a way, she’d be in the right of it, too. The Ghost. I have to find him, for I most certainly don’t intend to let him haunt me for the rest of my life. So there you have it, what do you think of my chances now, lad?’
To this question, his horse did reply with a toss of his head. Finlay laughed. ‘As low as that, eh? You’re in the right of it, most likely, but devil take it if I don’t try to prove you wrong all the same. I’ve never been a death-or-glory man, but I’ve always been a man who gives his all.’
Mounting his trusty steed and turning towards the wide, new-built road that wound down towards the winery, Finlay felt as he did surveying the field before a battle: excited, nervous, with every sense on high alert, dreading the start and at the same time wishing it could come more quickly. It was one of the worst feelings in the world, and one of the best. He felt, for the first time since Waterloo, truly alive with a sense of purpose. He had missed it greatly, he realised.
* * *
‘Mr Urkerty. It is an immense pleasure to meet you. Welcome to Hermoso Romero.’
‘Urquhart. Urk-hart.’
‘Ah, yes, forgive me.’ Xavier Romero, a good-looking man of about Finlay’s own age, decided against a second attempt at the unfamiliar pronunciation, and instead shook his hand firmly. ‘If you are not too tired after your long journey, I would very much like to take you on a short tour of my winery. I am anxious that you see the quality of what we produce here.’
‘And I am just as anxious to sample it, señor.’ Finlay had no sooner nodded his consent than he was escorted by his host back out of the front door, along the sweeping gravel walk and through another door that led into the courtyard he had spied from the top of the hill.
‘Of course, the harvest is over for the year. It is a pity you could not have been here just a few weeks earlier. The soil here, as you will see when we go out into the vineyards tomorrow, is very heavy, mostly clay with some chalk. This gives the wine...’
Xavier Romero’s English was extremely good. He seemed to require nothing from Finlay but nods and smiles, which was just as well, for he was clearly a man with a passion for the wine he made and all the technicalities of the process. From the briefing he had received, Finlay knew that Romero had served as a lieutenant in the Spanish army, fighting alongside several British regiments in the last two years of what the Spanish called the War of Independence, while their British allies referred to it as the Peninsular Campaign. Señor Romero’s fellow British officers, two of whom Finlay had tracked down, had little to say of him other than that he seemed like a sound fellow, which Finlay took to mean that he was innocuous enough, and unlike the Jock Upstart, had the prerequisite amount of blue blood in his veins to fit in to the officers’ cadre.
‘We use oak barrels as they do in Bordeaux, but our grape varieties are very different. The main one is Tempranillo, as you will know, but...’
Señor Romero said nothing about his estate workers, a subject that interested Finlay much more than grape varieties, given the real nature of his business here. There was a small hamlet about a mile away, a cluster of cottages and farmland, planted with what looked like olive groves. Was it possible that the woman he had so fleetingly encountered lived in one of those cottages? He seemed to remember she said her family had some land.
Señor Romero was still pontificating. ‘Of course, the estate is quiet at the moment while we wait for the first fermentation, but you should have seen it in September and October,’ he said proudly, ‘a veritable hive of activity. Grape picking is seasonal work. Once the harvest is in we have a big fiesta, which goes on for days. If only you had timed your visit better—but there, it cannot be helped.’ His host pulled out a gold timepiece from his pocket and consulted it, a frown clouding his haughty visage. ‘I apologise, Mr Urker, I got quite carried away. We must leave the rest of our tour until tomorrow, when I will do my best to answer the many questions I am sure you must have. I hope you do not mind, but tonight I have taken the liberty of arranging a small gathering in your honour. A few friends, only the best families in the area, you understand. Some of them produce Rioja, too. They will try to tell you it is superior to mine.’ Señor Romero laughed gently. ‘They are misguided.’
‘I am sure that I will prefer your Rioja to anyone else’s,’ Finlay said.
He would make certain he did, even though he suspected he’d taste
