Meeting in Madrid (5 page)

‘I’m glad Miss Royce enjoyed herself,’ the Marquesa observed drily, ‘even although I’m afraid that Isabella de Vega is a little dull,’ and suddenly Catherine knew that she was not deceived. That penetrating gaze, so reminiscent of Don Jaime, had seen straight through Teresa’s wiles, but she had evidently decided not to pursue the subject at that time of night.

In the morning, perhaps? Catherine’s heart was beating fast as she followed the younger girl from the room.

‘Teresa, you should have told the truth and accepted the consequences,’ she pointed out. ‘Even now, I am not at all sure that your uncle has forgiven us.’

‘We will know quite soon,’ said Teresa. ‘Perhaps tomorrow.’

In the morning the preparations for their departure were all too evident. Don Jaime had gone off to the Rastro early to make some important purchases from one of the
galerias
before they closed at two o’clock, and Conchita had been instructed to begin Teresa’s packing.

‘We are going so soon!’ Teresa wailed. ‘It is all because we are no longer to be trusted. I told you about Jaime, did I not? He has a will of iron once he has made up his mind.’

The Marquesa said very little. Soon she would be on her own way to Andalusia to avoid the summer heat, but there was still no question of Catherine being dismissed. When Teresa finally challenged her, however, she admitted that their departure for Soria was only a matter of hours away.

‘If Jaime can reserve seats you will fly out in two days’ time,’ she explained.

‘Two days!’ Teresa gasped. ‘But that is impossible. I have all my clothes to collect, my shoes and the new dresses from Antonio.’

‘They will be sent on to you,’ the Marquesa assured her. ‘I will see to it myself, do not fear.’ She looked across the room at Catherine. ‘It will not take you very long to repack your suitcases. Miss Royce. I think you will be good for Soria,’ she added with an enigmatic smile. ‘Anyway, we shall see! You must not let Lucia dominate you, although you will obey her, of course. That is understood. Until Jaime decides to marry she will be mistress at Soria and she will not allow you to forget the fact, I think.’

‘Lucia is my
madrastra
,’ Teresa informed her as they left the room together. ‘You will hate her, as I do. My father married her after my mother died, but they were not happy together. All she wanted was the position as his wife so that she could do as she pleased. I do not believe my father really loved her, because she is not beautiful, as my mother was, but she has a will of iron. When she marries Don Jaime she will send me away, but I do not care. I will return to Madrid and stay here with the Marquesa.’

It was the following day before Catherine came face to face with Don Jaime again and by that time she had done most of her re-packing.

‘I’m sorry I have not been able to trace your books,’ he apologised, ‘but I will make the necessary arrangements to have them sent on to Soria. You will not be without them for long.’

‘I seem to be giving you a great deal of unnecessary trouble,’ she found herself saying. ‘If I tender my resignation will it help?’

He looked down at her from his considerable height, frankly surprised by the suggestion, although he had done nothing to encourage her in her job.

‘You cannot do that now,’ he informed her. ‘It would be utterly irresponsible. I have made a promise to my sister-in-law to bring Teresa back with a tutor’—he refrained from using the word ‘suitable’—‘and there is no time to change our arrangements now. You will be ready to leave tomorrow, if you please. The flight goes out at midday, so you have little time to squander.’

On dubious adventures? Her anger stained her cheeks, but she was determined not to let him see how easily he could upset her.

‘Where do we fly to?’ she asked, wondering why they could not make the journey by road since he had a powerful limousine at his disposal.

‘To Tenerife,’ he said. ‘Surely Teresa has told you that is where we live?’

‘Tenerife?’ Catherine repeated incredulously. ‘No, I had no idea we would be going so far. You have all referred to Soria as “the
hacienda
”, but I imagined it might be somewhere in Andalusia since your grandmother is preparing to go there for the summer. I never guessed that we would be leaving Spain.’

‘You are going to an island that is still part of my country,’ he pointed out. ‘I do not expect you to fall in love with Tenerife straight away—Teresa will colour your opinion too darkly for that—but it is a beautiful island, one of the loveliest in the world, in fact.’

‘The “Lost Atlantis”!’ Catherine murmured. ‘Or is that too fanciful a thought,
senor?
I’ve read about your island, but I’ve never been there. This will be something new for me, although it was unexpected.’

‘I hope that Soria will not disappoint you,’ he said to her further surprise. ‘My sister-in-law has lived there since my brother’s death and, of course, it is also Teresa’s home. I see no reason to alter these arrangements at the moment. We are a family of which I am now the head. When my brother was alive I also lived on the
hacienda,
but in a smaller house by myself, but that is changed. Teresa will tell you that Soria is a prison, but I try to make life as pleasant as possible for her. She has everything she needs, within reason, but unfortunately she has a chip on her shoulder—a stepmother chip!’

He smiled, and she was amazed at the difference it made to his dark countenance, erasing the lines which she had believed to be permanently etched between his brows.

‘We might be able to help her over that particular hurdle,’ she suggested. ‘Teresa is very young for her age in some respects.’

‘I thought you young for your age when we first met.’ The disconcerting confession was so unlike him as to seem completely out of character. ‘But perhaps I am a bad judge of women.’

‘I’ve done nothing to convince you otherwise since I came,’ Catherine admitted, ‘but I really didn’t see anything wrong about going to Botin’s without permission the other night. It wasn’t exactly polite to leave the Vegas’ so early. I realise that now and I’m very sorry.’

‘You have already apologised,’ he told her in the autocratic tone which she found so disconcerting. ‘We will say no more about it. You must see that I have to keep Teresa on a fairly tight rein because she is so impetuous and often foolish, but I really do understand how she feels.’

It was an admission which she had not expected him to make and it melted the ice a little. In some ways he was quite human.

‘Perhaps we can work something out once we get to Soria,’ she suggested.

He looked doubtful.

‘Perhaps we can try,’ he said.

The following morning they took their leave of the Marquesa, although she did not wish them goodbye. ‘
Hasta la vista
!’ she said. ‘We will meet again.’

They drove to the airport in plenty of time for their flight, their luggage piled in the capacious boot of the car while Catherine sat beside a pouting Teresa in the back seat.

‘We could have stayed for one week more,’ she complained. ‘This has been Lucia’s doing. She cannot bear Jaime to be away from Soria for too long.’

Catherine thought that it had much more to do with their own disobedience, but refrained from saying so because Teresa was in no mood for a reasonable argument. If Lucia had indeed sent for Jaime the fact that he had come running seemed also out of character, although it was difficult to judge if love had a hand in it.

She had become increasingly curious about Lucia, the woman who had married one Berceo Madroza for the power it would give her and who now wanted to marry his brother for a reason best known to herself. Love? Of course, it could be love. Lucia might be madly in love with Don Jaime and she already had one claim on his allegiance. She was his brother’s widow and in the Spanish household she was, therefore, his responsibility. When he had spoken about her he had accepted the fact.

The flight was shorter than she expected. They went out over the sea, low enough to watch the Iberian coastline fading away behind them, and by the time a meal had been served they were well above the Atlantic. Seated beside Teresa, Catherine felt a new excitement stirring in her veins, the lure of far-away places which her father had known for so long. She wondered if she was a wanderer at heart or did she really believe that there must be a place somewhere for her to put down roots?

She read a little, glancing at Don Jaime in the seat on the far side of the aisle from time to time, but he was busy with a thick sheaf of correspondence which he had taken out of his briefcase at the beginning of the flight, suggesting that he had no need for conversation to while away the time. Teresa gazed moodily out of her porthole between bouts of thumbing through the magazines she had bought at Barajas, but presently she sat bolt upright in her seat to stare out towards the horizon.

‘You’ll get your first view of the island in a moment or two,’ she announced. ‘I suppose it’s something you shouldn’t miss, although Jaime thinks it’s more dramatic to see from a ship. I’ll tell you when to look.’ She remained poised on the edge of her seat, peering through the porthole at the cloudless blue sky beyond the wing-tip and the blue sea beneath. ‘El Teide is our resident mountain and you can see him a long way off, like a lost pyramid sitting on the horizon. Look, there he is now, taking shape! Today he has his little cap on his head, but most of the time he is quite clear!’

Catherine could just make out a vague, conical shape, the ghost of a mountain peak riding the waves like a distant ship. It was so far away as to be scarcely discernible at first, but she watched in silence as it came nearer, slowly emerging from the mists of distance with a white cloud-cap on its head. Teresa had sounded excited when she had spoken about El Teide, yet only a few hours ago she had called Soria a prison. Was it only the
hacienda
she disliked so much?

‘He governs all our lives, that great mountain,’ Teresa was saying. ‘He is always there, so close sometimes that you believe he has come stealthily in the night to hear what you say. But he can also be a distant giant, wrapped in his mantle of cloud till he is almost hidden away. The labourers at Soria are afraid of El Teide; they are superstitious of his power.’

Catherine’s gaze still lingered on the distant peak, but suddenly she looked up to find Don Jaime standing beside her.

‘What do you think of our resident giant?’ he asked. ‘The first time you see him will remain for a long time in your memory. When you live in his shadow you will come to know him better.’

His dark eyes were fixed on the approaching mountain and she knew instinctively that this was his land, the place where he had put down roots which went deep beneath the surface, the place where he wanted to be. If he had only come to Soria because of his brother’s untimely death that did not matter. He
was
Soria now and that was enough. She could not believe that the mark of Cain was on his brow, as Teresa had hinted, although she had quickly denied the gossip to affirm her belief in him.

‘The Fortunate Isles!’ she mused, looking down on the smudge of sun-kissed islands lying just ahead of them. ‘I’ve always thought it a lovely description.’

‘It is a name you have to discover for yourself,’ he said. ‘Tourists come here and go away, but they rarely know the islands as they really are. Of course they are fortunate when the sun shines most of the time and the temperature rarely falls below sixty degrees along the coast, but they have a hidden face which you have to come to terms with, sooner or later. Once you have done that you can find happiness.’

‘Have you always lived here?’ she asked.

He nodded.

‘We are a fourth generation at Soria. The estate was granted to one of my ancestors for services to Spain when your Admiral Nelson was defeated at Santa Cruz. That was a long time ago,’ he smiled, ‘but you will see that my roots go very deep.’

Catherine gazed down at the islands lying beneath them now in a sea of incredible blue. There were seven of them in all, a little world on their own washed by the vast Atlantic swell but so near to the coast of North Africa as almost to be lying in its mysterious shadow. For a moment, as she looked, a little chill wind seemed to blow across her heart, yet they were compounded of sunshine and light, each with a character of its own.

‘Gran Canaria is the loveliest of them all,’ Teresa declared as they fastened their seatbelts, ‘but we seldom go there. Jaime’s world is on Tenerife, at Soria, and that will be your world, too, while you remain with us.’

They began to lose height on their approach to Tenerife, with the giant, El Teide, watching from the mountain fastness of Las Canadas, which was his home, but as they circled the white port lying at the edge of the sea Catherine realised that they would touch down farther inland on a high plateau on the northern end of the island.

‘La Laguna was a natural landing strip,’ Jaime told her. ‘It serves both sides of the island equally well.’

What she could see of their landfall was curiously disappointing at first. Tenerife, even when it was bathed in dazzling sunshine, looked dark and forbidding, with deep black valleys piercing the landscape and harsh gullies biting deep into the mountainsides. Then, as they drew nearer, she could see the lush green of trees and crops ripening in the sun and clusters of little white houses clinging to the mountainsides, and the face of the island was suddenly fair.

Set high on a small amphitheatre among the mountains, La Laguna was a gem. Catherine had never seen so many flowers blooming so lavishly all at once and she could well believe that their perfume could be wafted across the water to passing ships in the more leisurely days of sail to gain the Canaries the romantic title of the Fortunate Isles. She thought about the ancient Guanche who had inhabited these lands for a thousand years, living as though their little islands were the whole world and nothing beyond the sea mattered to them.

‘Well, we’re here!’ Teresa said in a flat tone.