I listened for her loud, slapping footsteps, for her cheerful bawling voice. They didn’t come. Instead, to my horror, I heard a slow, measured, double clack-clack: the sound of two elderly ladies in high heels. If I’d had any sense I’d have run like a hare – but I hated to leave the warm red kitchen; besides, up to the last minute, I couldn’t believe they were really coming here. They hardly ever set foot in the kitchen. But they did come in, one behind the other, stepping stately and scrawny, like a couple of old moulting guinea fowls with their long necks. Dona Isadora and Dona Mercedes. They were in their usual black bombazine dresses, black mantillas, grey lace shawls wrapped round their shoulders, and black mittens on their hands. Each carried a fan, and Dona Isadora gave me a rap on the ear with hers as I scrambled to my feet.
‘What are you doing in here, Felix?’ she demanded in her high angry voice, that was like a saw biting through stone. ‘You are supposed to be confined to your chamber. Why do we find you here?’
I could see dislike in every line of her long, thin, sour face, with the V-shaped upper lip overhanging the one below. She was my grandfather’s sister and she hated me worse than poison. And I hated her back.
‘Shall I summon Father Tomas to beat him, sister?’ she suggested to my grandmother.
‘Later, Isadora. We had better go on now, to Bernardina’s bedside.’
‘You’re too late,’ I gulped. ‘She has just died.’
I couldn’t help thinking how very unwelcome they would have been at that strange death-bed on the stairs. Bernie despised both of them.
‘You have not answered my question,’ said Dona Isadora coldly.
‘Bernie wanted to see me before she died.’
The two old ladies looked at one another.
‘A wholly unsuitable friendship,’ complained my grandmother. ‘Between the cook – the household cook – and my grandson. But what can you expect? God only knows who or what his father was. Yet born to my daughter – a Cabezada, who could trace her ancestry back twenty generations to the Conquistadores!’
‘Is it to be wondered at that he prefers low company?’ muttered Dona Isadora.
‘Bernie wasn’t low!’ said I angrily. ‘She was kind. She wanted to give me some things of my father’s
‘What things, boy?’ said Dona Isadora sharply.
She was ten years younger than my grandmother, and much more forceful. Dona Mercedes often drifted off into vague memories of her lost sons.
‘I don’t know what things. I haven’t looked yet. This bundle …’
‘You had best open it directly.’
I hated to open it under Isadora’s supercilious stare, but there was no way of refusing. Slowly I undid the stiffened knots of aged linen, which, I now saw, was stained with streaks of brown – bloodstains, very likely – and spotted with grease too. It smelt as if Bernie had kept it alongside her chilblain ointment.
Inside I found another cloth, not a great deal cleaner, but softer and easier to undo. And inside that, a wad of folded paper, covered with faded writing. And inside that, a small brittle black plume and a few gilt buttons.
‘What have you there?’ inquired my grandmother in her vague way.
‘I think it must be a plume from an officer’s shako – ’
‘Not that, idiot!’ snapped great-aunt Isadora. ‘The letter.’
I unfolded the paper. There were several pages of it. Dona Isadora twitched it out of my fingers and held it close to a candle – for a moment I feared she was going to burn it. But she peered at it with her short-sighted eyes. I noticed that her hands were shaking. In a moment, though, she said disgustedly – but as if this were no more than she had expected –
‘It’s nothing but gibberish! It must have been written by a maniac! The blessed saints themselves couldn’t make head or tail of it. And furthermore,’ she added spitefully, ‘it is all covered with grease. The drunken old woman probably carried it about in her pocket for the last four years.’
‘Let me see the paper, please, Isadora,’ said my grandmother.
But she could not decipher it either, and at last it was passed to me. I resolved to make it out, if it took me the rest of my life. But not in front of those two hateful, cribbage-faced old hags.
‘Go to your room, Felix,’ my grandmother said. ‘You shall be dealt with in the morning. Come, Isadora; we had better go to the chapel.’
And the two of them went slowly clacking away.
After waiting till they were out of sight I picked up one of the candles – which I was not supposed to take – and took a different route back to my room. I crossed the main hall, where all the weapons had once hung – but they had been taken away during the French wars, and never brought back. None of the decorations had been left, except a huge spotty mirror, brought back from Venice many years ago by my great-great-uncle Carlos. The candle’s reflection in it caught my eye, but I looked away because I did not want to see myself there. I knew only too well what I looked like: short, rather plump, and yellow-headed as a duckling, with a round face, a pointed chin, and blue, angry eyes; wholly unlike the portraits of black-haired, lanky-faced Cabezadas, with their hooknoses and hollow cheeks, that hung in the dining-room and all the way up the stairs.
‘How can that boy be one of us?’ Isadora had said a hundred times, peering at me in her beady-eyed, short-sighted way. ‘It’s hard enough to believe that he was Luisa’s child – even though I myself was present at his birth – ’
I hated my own looks. Bernie used to call me Tigrito, her little tiger, because of my yellow hair, and because I fought such a lot, but that was no consolation. I longed to be dark, six foot tall, with a scar on one cheek, like my great-grandfather, El Conde Don Felipe Acarillo de Santibana y Escurial de la Sierra y Cabezada, whose portrait hung in the dining-room. What a hope! I would never be like him, if I lived to the age of ninety-three.
Returning to my room, I locked the door. Then, putting the candle on the chair, I unfolded the papers that my grandmother had reluctantly given back to me, and tried to make out the scribbled words on them.
Not one word could I understand.
It might have been written by a demented spider which had fallen into pale brown ink and then staggered drunkenly to and fro across the greasy sheets of thin grey paper. I stared at every line in turn – every word, every stroke of the pen – until tears came into my smarting eyes, tears of grief and rage as well as eye-strain.
What was the use of the stupid paper? I would never be able to read it. I might as well throw it away.
I almost did. But then I changed my mind. It was a relic of my father, after all; this soiled paper, scrawled with unreadable words, and the pitiful little plume, and the tarnished buttons, were all I had of him, things he had once touched. I wrapped them all carefully in the linen once more, and then clambered back into my cold bed.
Hours went by before I fell asleep. I thought of Bernardina’s last words: ‘Go saddle the sea.’ She had stopped in the middle but I knew the rest of the proverb: ‘Saddle the sea, put a bridle on the wind, before you choose your place.’
Put a bridle on the wind … I could hear the wind wailing outside, hurling itself against the massive stone walls, rattling the casement. And mixed with it, the crying of the sheep, like sad, lost souls. Where was Bernardina now? Was her soul in Purgatory, or had she gone to provide the angels with her baked butter cakes, chicory salad, beans with smoked pork, and semolina balls in syrup?
Trying to say a prayer for her, I fell at last into uneasy, dream-threaded slumbers.
When I woke next it was high daylight. The room was full of sorrow, which seemed to have stolen in like a mist. There was a real mist outside, too; when, as was my habit, I clambered up on to the stone window-seat and looked out towards the Sierra, all I could see was a short stretch of pale stony plain, huddled with sheep in their damp coats. The distant snowy ranges were out of sight. I could feel their icy breath, however, in the wind that came through the fog, and I pu
lled on a thick sleeveless vest over my shirt and under my black jacket.
Bernardina has died. What am I going to do?
It was late, I knew and didn’t care. Presently Father Tomas came to reprimand me for not attending early Mass.
‘But grandmother said go to my room and stay there – ’
‘Don’t answer back, boy!’ he snapped. ‘Come along now, you are wanted in the saloon.’
Dismally, I followed him down the stairs. I was only ever summoned to the saloon, now, when I had done something wrong.
The saloon was a large, handsome room, freezing cold, like all the rooms in that house except for the kitchen. My grandparents and great-aunts were all so old that I suppose they had ceased to feel the cold; they wrapped themselves in a few more shawls, that was all. Occasionally in the depths of winter my grandmother Mercedes would have a charcoal brazier placed beside her chair.
The walls were hung with linen wall-hangings in dove-grey and gold, and the furniture was all upholstered in grey satin. Marble side-tables were protected by fringed damask cloths. Enormous walnut cabinets against the walls were filled with treasures of china and silver, which my grandmother and great-aunts polished themselves because the servants could never be trusted not to break things. The pictures, in thick gold frames, were of dead hares, great slices of water-melon, cut salmon, and bunches of grapes painted so realistically that you expected the fish to drip. They were supposed to be very valuable, and so were the ornaments of Toledo steel over the fireplace. So were the gilded leather-bound books in the library, and the heavy chairs of studded leather, and the grey curtains interwoven with gold thread. Everything was a treasure in that house, and for years my grandparents lived in terror of the French, who might arrive and burn it all – or the English, who were just as bad. It was a piece of luck that Villaverde was such a high-up, tiny, unimportant place that all the armies had missed it completely in their various comings and goings. For years the silver had been hidden under clay and sacking in the stables, the pictures perched on rafters in the barns. But now the various valuables were all back in their places. All that the house lacked was sons – my grandfather’s four sons, Manuel, Carlos, Juan, and Esteban, who had died in the wars, one after another, at Talavera, and Albuera, and two at the battle of the Bidassoa. And his daughter, Luisa, who had died giving birth to me.
The old people were sitting in the saloon, silent as the painted fish in the pictures, munching their breakfasts: fried eggs, cups of chocolate, and toast, which they dipped in the chocolate. I preferred Bernardina’s crispy churros to the dry bits of toast, but nobody was offering me any breakfast.
‘Boy! Come here!’ said my grandfather.
I went, trying not to look humble, trying not to look cocky, and stood in front of his invalid chair, which was made of oak, steel and damask. The Conde was very lame, and had to be wheeled everywhere in this contraption, which was equipped with a side-table, a writing-desk, a lamp, and a mirror.
He was a handsome old man, my grandfather; his legs might be useless, but his back was straight as a musket. Smooth grey locks, eyes like chips of coal, a beak of a nose, a grey satin jacket, striped satin waistcoat, and a snowy cravat. His face, much lined, was the same colour as his jacket – like pewter. He looked at me as if I were a weevil that he had found in his toast.
‘You were to be confined to your room for three days. Yet you left it without permission.’
‘She asked for me – she was dying – ‘ I began hotly. I had meant to keep my temper, but injustice always put me in a passion.
The Count raised his hand.
‘That is not all. Father Tomas tells me that he found in your school-room a disgracefully impertinent poem that you had written about him, and a drawing so outrageous that I ordered him to tear up the paper before your grandmother or any of your great-aunts should chance to set eyes on it.’
I couldn’t help half a grin at the thought of their expressions if they had seen that drawing, but the Count added coldly, ‘Father Tomas has done so.’
Miserable old pig, I thought. Trust him to go rooting about among my schoolbooks and papers whilst I was shut up.
I hope the poem stung his thick hide.
‘Also,’ continued my grandfather, ‘when Father Agustin returned from his visit to the monastery at Lugo and retired for the night, he found among the coverings of his couch a dead fish. I have no doubt that it was you who put it there – such disgusting pranks have been all too common.’
‘I did not – ‘ I began indignantly. Father Agustin was rather stupid, and I had not been able to resist the trick with his dangling waist-cord, when it occurred to me, but I had no real grudge against him; at least the subjects he taught were a little more interesting than the prosing of Father Tomas; and he had once showed me how to make a kite.
‘As if I’d put a fish in his bed! What a stupid notion! Besides, how could I? I was in my room.’
‘You have played such tricks before. And what reason have we to believe you?’ said my grandfather coldly.
All the old great-aunts – six of them had flocked to this house, from every part of Spain, during the French wars, and had stayed ever since – nodded their mantilla’d heads up and down and hissed to one another: ‘Disgraceful, disgraceful! The boy’s little better than a savage. But can you wonder? Poor Francisco – how I pity him, having such a troublesome charge.’
Moan, moan, mutter, mutter, mutter. Isadora directed a particularly mean stare at me; I daresay she was the one who persuaded my grandfather that I must have put the fish in Father Agustin’s bed; she was always carrying spiteful tales against me.
‘I don’t tell lies!’
‘Hold your tongue, boy!’ said my grandfather wearily. ‘It is the height of impertinence to speak to your elders until you are requested to do so.’
‘It isn’t fair!’ I burst out in a real rage. ‘I am the only person in this house who is not allowed to speak when I have something to say. Every soul about the place despises me. And yet I am your grandson!’
‘Oh, how outrageous to address his grandfather in such a way,’ muttered the old ladies behind their fans.
My grandfather, turning his face away as if he could not bear the sight of me, said to Father Tomas who was standing by him looking like a hungry raven.
‘Take the boy away and beat him. Three strokes for leaving his room without permission, three for the poem and the drawing, three for the fish in Father Agustin’s bed, and three for his impertinence to me. Twelve in all.’
‘Doesn’t Your Excellency think he ought to have a few more strokes for the poem and the drawing?’ said Father Tomas, obviously disappointed. ‘After all, he was not only ridiculing me – as if I should care for a boy’s insults – but was making fun of Holy Church in my person!’
‘Twelve will be sufficient,’ said my grandfather. ‘You may do it in the dining-room. Then take him back to his chamber.’
‘You’re a lot of old fossils!’ I yelled, as Father Tomas dragged me away by my ear. ‘You and your silver plates and your china jugs and your dead-as-dust treasures. That’s what I think of you all!’
Father Tomas was hauling me past a leather-and-gilt table on which there was a little alabaster statue of a boy. I snatched the statue as we wrestled past, and flung it on to the stone floor, where it broke into three pieces.
A hiss went up from all the old ladies.
‘Oh! Look what he has done now! The monster! Why, he must have the devil in him!’
But my grandfather only said,
‘Three more strokes, Father Tomas, for the statue.’
The dining-room had a huge polished table, and more chairs of studded oxhide. Father Tomas tied my hands to one of the chairs with a cord from his pocket, and beat me with vigour. There was plenty of room for him to wield his cane – you could have fitted a couple of farm wagons into that room as well as the table and side-board. I pressed my lips together so as not to make a sound; I could picture all the
old things in the next room pricking up their ears as they sipped their chocolate, hoping to hear me blubber. When Father Tomas had done, he pushed me back to my bedroom and this time bolted me in, shouting through the keyhole,
‘There you stay, until your grandfather decides you can come out!’
‘I prefer to stay in! I don’t want to see any of you, ever again!’ I shouted back, and then I went and lay on the bed, on my stomach. I wondered if the whole world was as hateful and wretched as this house. I could not call to mind one single thing that seemed pleasant or cheering – so, in the end, I went to sleep for a couple of hours. When I woke, feeling very hungry and stiff, I went back to poring over the papers Bob had left me, for something to pass the time. By daylight it was easier to see the shaky scratches, but no easier to guess at their meaning. I worked all the way through, line by line, wondering if the words were English at all – maybe they were French – or some strange script. Arabic or Moorish? But then, on the last page, after a lot of thought, I decided that I recognised some English words. One was the, another was and. Hurray! I thought. With two words, I am on my way. The sentence in which they occurred was printed out more carefully than the rest, in large wavering spidery lines. Probably, I thought, the person who wrote these pages – my father? – wanted to make sure that whoever read them would understand this at least.
I stared and stared, and at last, after perhaps another sixty minutes of utter concentration, decided that those particular words were ‘The Rose and Ring-Dove’. But, given that was so, the words made no sense to me, nor did they help me in deciphering the rest of the message, which remained wholly cryptic.
The Rose and Ring-Dove. What could that mean? Was it the name of a ship? A book, a play, a poem?
I had gone as far as this when there came a tap on the door, and the outer bolt was cautiously pulled back.