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I’d have…”
    He broke off guiltily, as if he had almost said something forbidden.
    Reinmar did not want to press him too hard, while there was a tale he was
prepared to tell. It was difficult to be patient, but he knew that he had to get the old man talking again, and hope that the flow
of his conversation would regain its impetus. So he put the cup to the old man’s
mouth again, and lied.
    “It’s all right, grandfather,” he said. “There’s all the time in the world.”

 
 
Chapter Four
     
     
    “At any rate,” Luther continued, when he could, “attempts were made downriver
to stamp out the trade in dark wine, and we found it politic to get out of it.
There was still demand in Marienburg, and we might have taken a good profit from
the service of that demand, always provided that we exercised discretion, but
your father never had any sense of adventure. If I , hadn’t fallen ill, I’d have
taken the chance, but your father saw things differently. He’d married, and he
intended to start a family. He knew that I took a little of the wine myself
occasionally, but that only made him more determined. Now, I suppose, he’ll be
more convinced than before that he was right.”
    “He told the witch hunter that there was nowhere within ten leagues where the
wine could be obtained,” Reinmar observed. “Was he right?”
    “How should I know, stuck fast to my bed as I am? There was none for me, at
any rate, and I doubt that Albrecht’s fared much better for all the sharpness of
his thirst. I never knew where the vintage was trampled and stored—and it was
usually bottled before it was delivered into my hands—but the fact that its
producers used our family as agents suggests that Eilhart lay on the most
convenient route to the Reik. If the dark wine and its kin no longer use the Schilder as a conduit, they must use another route, but how
close it lies I cannot say. If certain rumours were true which said that the
wines came from Bretonnia by means of a secret pass through the mountains, its
makers may have had to go twenty or thirty leagues east or west in search of
another such pass, but I never trusted that kind of talk. I always suspected
that the source lay closer to home—in which case the present distribution
route probably passes within a day’s walk of the town.”
    “As close as Great-Uncle Albrecht’s house, perhaps?” Reinmar suggested.
    That obtained a reaction from the old man, whose right hand twitched before
forming a fist.
    “Not as close as that, I think,” Luther said, in a low voice. “Albrecht was
never cut out for the wine trade, and when I saw him last he certainly didn’t
have the look of a regular drinker.”
    “Why wasn’t he cut out for the trade?” Reinmar wanted to know. He had grave
misgivings about his own suitability for a life in any sort of trade. “And what
look does a regular drinker of the dark wine have?”
    Luther chose to answer the first question and ignore the second. “Albrecht had
no talent for moderation,” he said dourly. “The wine business may not require
the iron discipline your father brings to it, but it does demand moderation.”
    “Is that why you quarrelled—because his drinking was eating into the
profits?”
    “Is that what your father told you?” the old man parried. The conversation
had obviously strayed too far into matters of which Luther was supposedly
forbidden—presumably by Gottfried—to speak.
    “Father never tells me anything that is not strictly related to the conduct
of the business,” Reinmar answered, with more than a trace of bitterness. “It
was a guess.”
    “Not such a bad guess,” Luther admitted. “It was far more complicated, of
course, but that was part of it. Albrecht always had a keen thirst, for wisdom
as well as wine. He had ambitions to be a scholar, and more. Eilhart was never
enough for him. He wanted to be a city gentleman, but his passion for prosperity
far outstripped the patience