his hands and looked at them. “That’s for certain. I doubt you’ve ever done any heavy lifting your entire life.”
“I most certainly have,” he told her. “Every time I take a piss.”
She laughed for the first time with him, truly laughed, and her smile somehow broke his heart. Maybe it was the cut under her animated eyes, so full of life and yet filled with sorrow. She had an effect on him that no woman ever had before, including Helena, and it made him uncomfortable and curious all the same.
“Follow me, Sampson, and we’ll see how strong you are.”
• • •
Much to his disappointment, she took him far away from the winery, past rows and rows of vines to the middle of the vast fields.
“The Dovilins are in the business of celebrations,” she told him. “Communions. Weddings. Banquets. Baptisms. Everything and anything. Those celebrations begin with wine. Jesus turned water into wine. It was his first recorded miracle. It was at a wedding. We can’t turn water into wine. But we can turn grapes into wine. Good wine starts with good grapes. Good grapes start with good vines.”
“Yes,” Athanasius said. “Jesus said, ‘I am the vine. You are the branches. Without me you can do nothing.’”
Unlike Bishop Paul, she took no offense at his display of knowledge. But neither was she impressed. “Without the vine there is no wine, Samuel. My primary job as vineyard manager is to forecast the harvest. The Dovilins don’t like surprises. We must predict how much fruit we’re going to be getting come harvest.”
So that’s why she was the vineyard manager, Athanasius realized. Despite the contempt with which everybody seemed to regard her, her methodology for forecasting grape yields—and improving them—was simply too valuable for the Dovilins to ignore. It was a talent Vibius clearly lacked, as well as everybody else around here. Suddenly Athanasius wondered not how Gabrielle got her job but how the Dovilins’ business could ever thrive without her.
“So how do you do that?” Athanasius asked.
“You are going to count the clusters for me, Samuel.”
“Me?”
“Look,” she said, and lifted a branch on the nearest vine. “See these flowery little buds? These are the ovaries. They develop into grapes. Now count them.”
Athanasius got down on his knees in the dirt and with his hands lifted several branches on the vine and counted. “This one has 14 clusters.”
“You missed some, Samuel.” She lifted another branch. “This one has sixteen, see?”
He saw. He looked under the last branch she had lifted and accidentally broke it off. “Oops.”
“You might as well be dropping gold so far as the Dovilins are concerned,” she cautioned him. “You don’t want to cost them money in your counting.”
He sighed. Counting grape clusters was not what he had in mind in traveling all this way to Cappadocia. This morning he was further away from the wine cave than he was upon his arrival, doing mindless work for this maddening girl who was barely a woman and who in her Christian charity defended these Dovilins who beat her down along with everybody else in this forsaken valley.
Perhaps she was a dead end, a waste of time, and he would have to pursue a less direct yet faster route to the Angel’s Vault.
“So how long do I do this?” he asked her, already thinking that Dovilin’s daughter-in-law Cota might be his better bet inside the winery.
“Until you reach the end of the row,” she said, pointing down the long line of vines. “Then you go down all the other rows and count how many clusters there are and write them down.”
She handed him a leather strip with a lead puncher to mark numbers and walked away.
“There are going to be grapes on the vines by the time I finish counting,” he called out after her. “No, there won’t be any grapes, because they will have already been picked!”
He watched her disappear into the distance between the endless rows of