Meeting in Madrid Page 6

  ‘Teresa will go for one,’ Alex suggested. ‘Ask at the office, Teresa, there’s a dear, sweet girl!’

  While they waited Alex allowed the water to trickle slowly over her wrist.

  ‘How are you going to cope?’ she asked.

  ‘With Teresa?’ Catherine hesitated. ‘I think we’ll see eye to eye sooner or later. Teresa isn’t very pliable just now, as you may have guessed, and she wants to be a dancer more than anything else, but she has plenty of time to change her mind, although I don’t think it’s exactly my task to help her to the right decision. I’m here mainly to teach her to speak English.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of Teresa,’ Alex said carefully. ‘I was considering the whole set-up at Soria. You haven’t met Lucia yet, I gather, so I feel that I should warn you to be on your guard. Lucia will be your enemy, and I don’t envy you. She can’t possibly be expecting anyone like you, anyone so young. I don’t mean to sound too alarming,’ she added quickly, noting the rising colour in Catherine’s cheeks, ‘and of course, this is only a job as far as you’re concerned.’

  ‘I would wish my work to be satisfactory to Don Jaime and Dona Lucia equally,’ Catherine said a little stiffly.

  Alex laughed, although not unkindly.

  ‘You must be quite starry-eyed,’ she declared, ‘but you have yet to meet Lucia.’

  Teresa returned with the necessary bandage, leaving Catherine to tie it while she looked on.

  ‘Splendid!’ Alex commented, surveying her wrist with satisfaction. ‘I won’t bleed to death, after all! ’Bye, once again. I’m sure Jaime will be wondering what’s happened to you.’

  Don Jaime was standing beside the parked car, glancing at his watch. He seemed impatient, and Catherine was surprised to find how far the sun had travelled down the sky.

  ‘Jaime will want to reach Soria before nightfall,’ Teresa explained. ‘He will know that my stepmother expects us before dark.’

  Catherine offered their apologies.

  ‘Miss Bonnington had a slight accident,’ she explained. ‘She cut her wrist and I bandaged it up for her.’

  ‘Something’s always happening to Alex,’ Ramon observed. ‘Is she badly hurt?’

  ‘No, not at all. It wasn’t a very deep cut, but it bled a lot.’

  They got into the car, the men in front this time, with Ramon driving. Don Jaime had not offered to occupy the back seat.

  Retracing their way along the same road, they branched right to travel high above the sea, and in the rapidly-fading light Catherine could just make out the black volcanic line of the shore with white waves, like lace, breaking along it and the calm stretch of dark water beyond which seemed to stretch to infinity. Above them, dominating the whole island, stood the Pico de Teide, withdrawn now into his mountain fastness to sleep away the coming night.

  The road they followed stretched for miles, always high above the sea, with a small township here and there clinging to the hillside. It all seemed so far removed from the busy world of Orotava and its guardian port and the brash new hotels which had sprung up to cope with an increasing tourist trade. This was the real Tenerife in all its desolate splendour, scarred by black rivers of calcined lava which had flowed from Teide’s last eruption and dark with mystery.

  Abruptly Ramon turned the car inland, climbing a little way before they began to drop down into a hidden valley where all the lush vegetation of the north was renewed. The sea was behind them now and densely wooded hills closed them in, but the land on either side of the road was intensely cultivated. Fields of bananas stood motionless in the still air, while figs and vines clothed the foothills in terrace after terrace, irrigated by a semi-circular dam at the top. This wide cultivated strip stretched as far as the eye could see until they came to a high wall running beside the road, and here Ramon slackened speed and Catherine’s heart began to pound because she knew that they had reached Soria, at last.

  At a wide, arched doorway in the wall they pulled up, and almost immediately the door was opened by a small, swarthy youth who saluted them as they passed through. Ramon turned the car along a brick-paved road bordered by a hundred flamboyant plants and flowers whose scent rose headily into the evening air, assailing their nostrils as they drove along. One perfume seemed to dominate, and Catherine turned to Teresa to ask what it was.

  ‘Stephanotis,’ Teresa replied indifferently. ‘It is everywhere.’

  The house itself lay in a little hollow sheltered by a group of palms, its adobe walls gleaming pinkly in the pale evening light, an old house built many years ago in the Moorish style and added to periodically as the family grew. Planned originally round an inner courtyard, it had expanded on either side, with broad arches leading from one section to the next and a central fountain which leapt high into the air to splash back into its ancient stone basin filled with waterlilies.

  The main door of the house stood wide open, but nobody waited to greet them.

  Don Jaime got out of the car and crossed the patio, while Teresa and Ramon took a little longer to follow him. There was no joy in this homecoming for Teresa, apparently, and Ramon put their luggage down on the flags and drove away. Don Jaime turned back at the door.

  ‘Leave them to Alfredo,’ he commanded as Teresa lingered beside the suitcases. ‘He will attend to them.’

  Inside the house a great commotion had begun, with several female voices rising in unison somewhere at the rear of the hall, an excited chatter of servants as they realised that the master of the house had returned. Two of them appeared at an inner door, the older one smiling broadly, the younger painfully shy in the presence of a stranger.

  ‘Eugenie! Sisal’ he greeted them. ‘This is Miss Royce from England. You will attend to her, Sisa, while she remains here.’

  The younger girl seemed pleased, although she did not step forward immediately, sheltering behind the older servant’s maturity. She was small and plump, with a mane of sleek, straight hair flowing around her shoulders and a broad face out of which glowed a pair of large, dark eyes.

  ‘Si, si!’ she agreed eagerly, rushing off to help with the luggage.

  Catherine glanced about her at the great hall with its beautifully tiled floor gleaming in the light of a magnificent wrought-iron lantern which hung from a central beam, and then, suddenly, she was aware of being watched.

  A long gallery ran round three sides of the hall, reached by a magnificent branched staircase, and at the head of the stairs a woman stood waiting. In the shadows above them she looked extraordinarily tall in her long-skirted black dress which was wholly devoid of ornamentation, and the fact that her wealth of black hair was worn high and braided to form a coronet about her shapely head did nothing to detract from the illusion as she came slowly down the stairs towards them.

  Lucia, Catherine thought. This was the present and, perhaps, the future mistress of Soria. It was then that she noticed the ruby. A large, unmounted stone, it hung by a slender chain round Lucia’s neck, burning against her bare flesh like fire as the light from the lantern leaped in its many facets, bringing them to glowing life. It was utterly magnificent, yet peculiarly evil in some curious, inexplicable way which she could not understand, a thing of beauty which could also destroy.

  ‘Lucia,’ said Jaime, ‘this is Teresa’s new tutoress, Miss Royce.’

  Catherine met the dark eyes above the glowing ruby, conscious of the scarcely controlled fury in their depths.

  ‘How is this so?’ Lucia demanded, addressing her brother-in-law in Spanish. ‘It is not as we wished. You know that, Jaime! It is some mischief of that old woman, your grandmother. She is a viper! She is determined to have a finger in every pie!’

  The smile faded from Don Jaime’s face.

  ‘Miss Royce may be younger than we expected, Lucia,’ he said quietly, ‘but she is also competent to teach Teresa, and this we must accept. A mistake has been made, but that is impossible to change now. Please see that she is welcomed to Soria in a reasonable manner and comfortably housed.
’ He drew himself up to his full, commanding height. ‘Our hospitality must not be impaired by the fact that she is not what we expected.’

  Lucia turned on the bottom stair.

  ‘Come this way,’ she said in halting English, as if she was almost reluctant to use the language which Don Jaime wished her stepdaughter to master. ‘I will show you to your room.’

  Catherine followed her up the staircase, not quite knowing what to say. The slim, ramrod-straight back was as hostile-looking as Dona Lucia’s eyes had been only a moment before, and she led the way along the gallery without another word. Here and there large items of Spanish furniture placed against the whitewashed walls cast even darker shadows on their way, and the heavy oak doors leading to the upstairs rooms were all carefully closed against intrusion, giving what should have been a happy family residence the air of a prison. She remembered what Teresa had said about Soria in Madrid, thinking that it was all understandable now that she had come here.

  Lucia paused at an archway leading to a suite of rooms beyond the gallery.

  ‘You will be here, with Teresa,’ she announced. ‘Out of harm’s way.’

  It was an odd remark to make, but Catherine was not in a position to question it at the moment. Lucia flung open one of the doors beyond the arch, standing aside so that she might go in, and Catherine had the impression of a sparsely-furnished room which yet was adequate for her requirements, with bright chintz curtains at the windows and the inevitable four-poster bed against one wall.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Dona Lucia. I shall be very comfortable. I’m sure.’

  She looked up into the unresponsive face, but all she could see was the ruby lying like a spot of blood at Lucia’s throat and the eyes above it burning with hatred as Teresa came slowly towards them along the gallery.

  ‘Buenas noches, madrastra!’ said Teresa. ‘I hope you are now well.’

  ‘Well enough, in the way you mean.’ Lucia had frowned at the word ‘stepmother’ but let it pass. ‘Of course, I am still mourning your father’s death, as no one else here seems to do.’

  A deep red colour stained Teresa’s cheeks.

  ‘We all grieve for him, madrastra, but we do not all wear our hearts on our sleeves,’ she said. ‘I will never forget him, although it is three years now since he was killed.’

  Three years is nothing!’ Dona Lucia turned to leave them. ‘You had a pleasant stay in Madrid?’ she asked with pointed courtesy.

  ‘Very pleasant. You know I always like to go there,’ Teresa said.

  Her stepmother laughed unpleasantly.

  ‘I know that you like to put as many miles as possible between us,’ she conceded, ‘but you cannot do as you like until you are eighteen and your own mistress.’

  The flush deepened in Teresa’s cheeks.

  ‘You remind me of the fact so often, madrastra, that I am hardly likely to forget,’ she countered, ‘yet you will be glad to be rid of me when the time comes.’

  A guarded look came into Lucia’s eyes.

  ‘You know that Jaime wishes you to remain here,’ she said in an altered voice. ‘He is responsible for you until you come of age. He made a promise to your father before he died.’

  Without waiting for her stepdaughter’s answer she swept away along the gallery to her own room, closing the door firmly behind her.

  There was a small, awkward pause as Teresa and Catherine looked at each other.

  ‘She does not like you,’ Teresa said, at last, ‘because you are young and beautiful and because you may one day attract Jaime.’ A spark of glee dawned in her dark eyes. ‘That would be something worth waiting for,’ she declared. ‘Dona Lucia in second place! Why are you blushing, Cathy?’ she demanded. ‘Surely you know that you are beautiful with your fiery hair and skin like a ripe peach and a figure almost as slim as Lucia’s? She is not in the least beautiful except, perhaps, for her hair which she attends to so lovingly. Do you not think that her face is too long and her eyes too near together? Besides, she has the Velazquez nose, which is too high and too sharp to be attractive in a woman.’

  Teresa’s description of her stepmother had been apt but decidedly cruel, and Catherine would not encourage her.

  ‘I thought her distinguished,’ she answered carefully. ‘Does she always wear that magnificent ruby at her throat?’ It was the wrong question to ask. Teresa’s eyes filled with angry tears.

  ‘It belonged to my mother,’ she gulped, ‘but my father gave it to Lucia on their wedding day. It is the Pablo ruby and it should have been mine. It has been handed down in my mother’s family for many years.’

  Wondering if this might be the main cause of dissension between Teresa and her stepmother, Catherine began to unpack her suitcases, hanging up her dresses once more in a capacious wardrobe and folding her underwear neatly in the dressing-chest drawer. For how long this time? Dona Lucia’s dislike of her seemed to hang above her head like the Sword of Damocles, yet it would be Don Jaime who would finally ask her to go.

  She crossed to the windows to look out, opening one of them to step out on to the creeper-covered balcony which overhung part of the patio, and suddenly the scent of stephanotis was all around her. It hung in the still air like incense, cloying, overwhelming, dangerously sweet, holding her there in the darkness until she was aware of a movement on the terrace beyond the thin silver thread of the fountain. A man and a woman were standing out there, half in shadow, half revealed, and the woman was too tall to be anyone but Lucia.

  Catherine stepped back involuntarily. Lucia and Don Jaime? She could not see the man plainly enough, but the two were undoubtedly deep in conversation until Lucia finally made a gesture of dismissal and the second figure dissolved into the shadows cast by the motionless palms. Lucia came towards the house along the colonnaded stretch of the patio, glimpsed here and there before she finally disappeared inside, but once she had gone from the terrace her companion of a few minutes ago returned. It was not Don Jaime. The man was shorter and more sturdily built and he wore a poncho over his clothes, as if he had just come in after a long journey. The horse he had been riding followed him out of the shadows, led on a long rein.

  Catherine drew a sharp breath of relief, although why she should have thought that it was Don Jaime down there on the terrace when he could have spoken with Lucia openly in the house she could not imagine.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The meal they shared at ten o’clock that evening was traditionally Spanish. It was served in the long, whitewashed dining-room whose windows opened on to the colonnaded end of the patio overlooking the fountain, and the superb black oak refectory table and high-backed chairs with their intricate carving were a joy to Catherine as she took her place beside Ramon, who seemed to be in excellent spirits now that his young niece was safely home. Teresa sat facing them with her back to the windows, and Don Jaime settled Lucia in the armchair at the foot of the table. He himself sat down at the head, very much the master in his own house, saying grace with an authority which stopped Teresa in her tracks as she began to speak.

  ‘I had forgotten,’ she apologised when he had finished. ‘In Madrid people do not always say grace.’

  ‘ “There is only one place better than Madrid and that is Heaven?” ’ Ramon quoted teasingly, but she chose to ignore him.

  The servants entered with their first course, led by Eugenie carrying a huge tureen of soup while Alfredo followed with a tray of ice-cooled melon and the delicious jamon serrano which Catherine had already sampled in Madrid. The dark red mountain ham, cured in the sun, would be at its best here, she thought, as Eugenie put the tureen down on the table in front of Lucia and handed her the silver serving ladle.

  ‘What has happened to Manuel?’ Ramon asked as they ate. ‘I did not see him come in.’

  Lucia stiffened.

  ‘Surely it is not of great importance what becomes of Manuel,’ she suggested icily. ‘He comes and goes as he wishes, attending to the horses, as he is meant to do
.’

  Ramon opened his mouth to reply, but decided against the impulse.

  ‘I hope he has been looking after Seda for me while I’ve been away,’ Teresa remarked.

  ‘Every day,’ Lucia observed drily, ‘but do we have to talk about Manuel all the time? He does his job at Soria and that is all we have to be concerned about.’

  ‘So long as he does it well,’ Don Jaime agreed, serving Catherine with a portion of the delicious mountain ham sliced so thinly as to be almost transparent. ‘I will see him in the morning about the horses.’

  ‘Cathy ought to have a horse to ride,’ Teresa suggested. ‘It is the only way to get around the estate when all the cars are in use.’

  ‘Can you ride?’ Don Jaime looked round at Catherine with a hint of doubt in his eyes.

  ‘Not very well,’ she was forced to confess. ‘I didn’t live that sort of life in England. My home was in London.’

  ‘Everyone rides here,’ Ramon interjected. ‘I will teach you, Cathy.’

  Don Jaime frowned.

  ‘I think we will rely on Manuel,’ he said drily. ‘You have other work to do.’

  A quick flash of resentment sparked in his brother’s eyes. ‘You must know that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,’ he said, ‘but I will concede that Manuel does the teaching while I supply Cathy with the experience—in my free time.’

  Their gaze met over the silver candelabrum which adorned the table, the small flames of the candles reflected in their eyes as they confronted one another on yet another issue, before Ramon laughed.