After an age he was rewarded by her complete loss of control. Louise threw away every last inhibition as her orgasm built,
shouting at the top of her voice, her body arching desperately below him, lifting his knees from the ground. Only then did
he allow himself any release, joining her in absolute bliss.
Post-coital languor was a sweet time, one of tiny kisses, stroking individual strands of sticky hair from her face, single
compassionate words. And he had been quite right all along, forbidden fruit tasted the best.
“I love you, Joshua,” she whispered into his ear.
“And I love you.”
“Don’t leave.”
“That’s unfair. You know I’m coming back.”
“I’m sorry.” She tightened her grip around him.
He moved his hand up to her left breast and squeezed, hearing a soft hiss of indrawn breath. “Are you sore?”
“A bit. Not much.”
“I’m glad.” “Me too.”
“Do you want to have that swim now? Water can be a lot of fun.”
She grinned cautiously. “Again?” “If you want.” “I do.”
Marjorie Kavanagh came to his bedroom again that Duchess-night. The prospect of Louise sneaking through the red-shaded manor
to be with him and discovering him with her mother added a spice to his lovemaking that left her exhausted and delighted.
The next day Louise, eyes possessively agleam, announced at breakfast that she would show Joshua round the county roseyard,
so he could see the casks being prepared for the new Tears. Grant declared this a stupendous idea, chuckling to himself that
his little cherub was having her first schoolgirl crush.
Joshua smiled neutrally, and thanked her for being so considerate. There were another three days to go until midsummer.
At Cricklade, and all across Norfolk, they marked the onset of Midsummer’s Day with a simple ceremony. The Ka-vanaghs, Colsterworth’s
vicar, Cricklade Manor’s staff, the senior estate workers, and representatives from each of the cupper teams gathered at the
nearest grove to the manor towards the end of Duke-day. Joshua and Dahybi were invited, and stood at the front of the group
that assembled just inside the shabby stone wall.
The rows of weeping roses stretched out ahead of them; blooms and cups alike upturned to a fading azure sky, perfectly still
in the breathless evening air. Time seemed to be suspended.
Duke was falling below the western horizon, a sliver of pyrexic tangerine, pulling the world’s illumination down with it.
The vicar, wearing a simple cassock, held his arms up for silence. He turned to face the east. On cue, a watery pink light
expanded across the horizon.
A sigh went up from the group.
Even Joshua was impressed. There had been about two minutes of darkness the previous evening. Now there would be no night
for a sidereal day, Duchess-night flowing seamlessly into Duke-day. It wouldn’t be until the end of the following Duchess-night
that the stars would come out again for a brief minute. After that it would be the evenings when the two suns overlapped,
and the morning darkness would grow longer and longer, extending back into Duchess-night until Norfolk reached inferior conjunction
and only Duke was visible: midwinter.
The vicar led his flock in a brief Harvest Thanksgiving service. Everybody knew the words to the prayers and psalms, and quiet,
murmuring voices banded together to be heard right across the grove. Joshua felt quite left out. They finished by singing
“All Creatures Great and Small”. At least his neural nanonics had that in a memory file; he joined in heartily, surprised
by just how good he felt.
After the service, Grant Kavanagh led his family and friends on a rambling walk along the aisles between the rows. He touched
various roses, feeling their weight, rubbing petals between his thumb and forefinger, testing the texture.
“Smell that,” he told Joshua as he handed over a petal he had just picked. “It’s going to be a good crop. Not as good as five
seasons ago. But well above average.”
Joshua sniffed. The scent was very weak, but recognizable, similar to the smell which clung to a cork after a bottle of Tears
had been opened. “You can tell from this?” he asked.
Grant put his arm around Louise as they sauntered along the aisle. “I can. Mr Butterworth can. Half of the estate workers
can. It just takes experience. You need to be here for a lot of summers.” He grinned broadly. “Perhaps you will be, Joshua.
I’m sure Louise will ask you back if no one else does.”
Genevieve shrieked with laughter.
Louise blushed furiously. “Daddy!” She slapped his arm.
Joshua raised a weak smile and turned to examine one of the rose plants. He found himself facing Marjorie Kavanagh. She gave
him a languid wink. His neural nanonics sent out a volley of overrides to try and stop the rush of blood to his own cheeks.
After the inspection walk the manor staff served up an outdoor buffet. Grant Kavanagh stood behind one of the trestle tables,
carving from a huge joint of rare beef, playing the part of jovial host, with a word and a laugh for all his people.
As Duchess-night progressed the rose flowers began to droop. It happened so slowly that the eye could detect no motion, but
hour by hour the thick stems lost their stiffness, and the weight of the large petals and their central carpel pod made gravity’s
triumph inevitable.
By Duke-morning most of the flowers had reached the horizontal. The petals were drying out and shrivelling.
Joshua and Louise rode out to one of the groves close to Wardley Wood, and wandered along the sagging plants. There were only
a few cuppers left tending the long rows, straightening the occasional collection cup. They nodded nervously to Louise and
scurried on about their business.
“Most people have gone home to sleep,” Louise said. “The real work will begin again tomorrow.”
They stood aside as a man pulled a wooden trolley past them. A big glass ewer, webbed with rope, was resting on it. Joshua
watched as he stopped the trolley at the end of a row and lifted the ewer off. About a third of the rows had a similar ewer
waiting at the end.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“They empty the collection cups into those,” Louise said. “Then the ewers are taken to the county roseyard where the Tears
are casked.”
“And they stay in the cask for a year.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“So that they spend a winter on Norfolk. They’re not proper Tears until they’ve felt our frost. It sharpens the taste, so
they say.”
And adds to the cost, he thought.
The flowers were wilting rapidly now, the stems curving down into a U-shape. Their sunlight-fired coronal cloak had faded
away as the petals darkened, and with it had gone a lot of the mystique. They were just ordinary dying flowers now.
“How do the cuppers know where to wire the cups?” he asked. “Look at them. Every flower is bending over above a cup.” He glanced
up and down the aisle. “Every one of them.”
Louise gave him a superior smile. “If you are born on Norfolk, you know how to place a cup.”
It wasn’t just the weeping roses which were reaching fruition. As they trotted the horses over to Wardley Wood Joshua saw
flowers on the trees and bushes closing up, some varieties leaning over in the same fashion as the roses.
In their peaceful glade the wild rose bushes along the rock pools seemed flaccid, as if their shape was deflating. Flowers
lolled against each other, petals agglutinating into a quilt of pulp.
Louise let Joshua undress her as he always did. Then they spread a blanket down on the rocks below the weeping roses and embraced.
Joshua had got to the point where Louise was shuddering in delighted anticipation as his hands roved across her lower belly
and down the inside of her thighs when he felt a splash on his back. He ignored the first one and kissed Louise’s navel. Another
splash broke his concentration. It couldn’t be raining, there wasn’t a cloud in the barren blue sky. He twisted over. “What—?”
Norfolk’s roses had begun to weep. Out of the centre of the carpel pod a clear fluid was exuded in a steady monotonous drip.
It was destined to last for ten to fifteen hours, well into the next Duchess-night. Only when the pod was drained would it
split open and release the seeds it contained. Nature had intended the fluid to soften the soil made arid by weeks without
rain, allowing the seeds to fall into mud so they would have a greater chance of germination. But then in 2209 a woman called
Carys Thomas, who was a junior botanist in the ecological assessment mission, acting against all regulations (and common sense),
put her finger under a weeping pod, then touched the single pearl of glistening fluid to her tongue. Norfolk’s natural order
came to an immediate end.
Joshua wiped up the dewy bead from his skin and licked his finger. It tasted coarser than the Norfolk Tears he’d so relished
back in Tranquillity, but the ancestry was beyond doubt. A roguish light filled his eyes. “Hey, not bad.”
A snickering Louise was moved round until she was directly underneath the lax hanging flowers. They made love under a shower
of sparkling droplets prized higher than a king’s ransom.
The cuppers returned to the groves as the next Duchess-night ended. They cut away the collection cups, now heavy with Tears,
and poured their precious contents into the ewers. It was a task that would take another five days of intensive round-the-clock
labour to complete.
Grant Kavanagh himself drove Joshua and Dahybi down to the county roseyard in a four-wheel-drive farm ranger, a powerful boxy
vehicle with tyres deep enough to plough through a shallow marsh. The yard was on the outskirts of Colsterworth, a large collection
of ivy-clad stone buildings with few windows. Beneath the ground was an extensive warren of brick-lined cellars where the
casks were stored throughout their year of maturation.
When he drove through the wide entrance gates the yard workers were already rolling out the casks of last year’s Tears.
“A year to the day,” he said proudly as the heavy iron-bound oak cylinders rattled and skipped over the cobbles. “This is
your cargo, young Joshua. We’ll have it ready for you in two days.” He braked the farm ranger to a halt outside the bottling
plant where the casks were being rolled inside. The plant supervisor rushed out to meet them, sweating. “Don’t you worry about
us,” Grant told him blithely. “I’m just showing our major customer around. We won’t get in the way.” And with that he marched
imperiously through the broad doorway.
The bottling plant was the most sophisticated mechanical set-up Joshua had seen on the planet, even though it lacked any real
cybernetic systems (the conveyor belts actually used rubber pulleys!). It was a long hall with a single-span roof, full of
gleaming belts, pipes, and vats. Thousands of the ubiquitous pear-shaped bottles trundled along the narrow belts, looping
overhead, winding round filling nozzles, the racket of their combined clinking making conversation difficult.
Grant walked them along the hall. The casks were all blended together in big stainless-steel vats, he explained. Stoke County’s
bouquet was a homogenized product. No groves had individual labels, not even his.
Joshua watched the bottles filling up below the big vats, then moving on to be corked and labelled. Each stage added to the
cost. And the weight of the glass bottles reduced the amount of actual Tears each starship could carry.
Jesus, what a sweet operation. I couldn’t do it better myself. And the beauty of it is we’re the ones most eager to cooperate,
to inflate the cost.
At the end of the line, the yard manager was waiting with the first bottle to come off the conveyor. He looked expectantly
at Grant, who told him to proceed. The bottle was uncorked, and its contents poured into four cut-crystal glasses.
Grant sniffed, then took a small sip. He cocked his head to one side and looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he said. “This will do.
Stoke can put its name to this.”
Joshua tried his own glass. It chilled every nerve in his throat, and burst into flames in his stomach.
“Good enough for you, Joshua?” Grant clapped him on the back.
Dahybi was holding his glass up to the light, staring at it with greedy enchantment.
“Yes,” Joshua declared staunchly. “Good enough.”
Joshua and Dahybi took it in turns to oversee the cases the roseyard put together for them. For space travel the bottles were
hermetically sealed in composite cube containers one metre square, with a thick lining of nultherm foam to protect them (more
weight); the roseyard had its own loading and sealing machinery (more cost). There was a railway line leading directly from
the yard to the town’s station, which meant they were able to dispatch several batches to Boston every day.
All this activity severely reduced the amount of time Joshua spent at Cricklade Manor, much to Louise’s chagrin. Nor was there
any believable reason why she should take him riding over the estate again.
He arranged the shifts with Dahybi so that he worked most of Duchess-night at the roseyard, which meant his tussles with Marjorie
were curtailed.
The morning of the day he was leaving, however, Louise did manage to trap him in the stables. So he had to spend two hours
in a dark, dusty hay loft satisfying an increasingly bold and adventurous teenager who seemed to have developed a bottomless
reserve of physical stamina. She clung to him for a long time after her third climax, while he whispered assurances of how
quickly he would come back.
“Just for business with Daddy?” she asked, almost as an accusation.
“No. For you. Business is an excuse, it would be difficult otherwise on this planet. Everything’s so bloody formal here.”
“I don’t care any more. I don’t care who knows.”
He shifted round, brushing straw from his ribs. “Well, I
do
care; because I don’t want you to be treated like a pariah. So show a little discretion, Louise.”
She ran her fingertips over his cheeks, marvelling. “You really care about me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”