sudden noise made her stiffen. It came from the other side of her bedroom door, where there was the large sitting room of the luxurious suite she shared with Catalina. Somebody had entered by stealth, and was looking around.
Summoning her courage she slipped out of bed, found her bag, dropped a heavy ashtray into it, and crept to the door. Then, with one wild movement, she yanked the door open and swung the bag at the intruder.
The next moment her arm was seized in a grip of steel, and she was looking at the astonished face of Don Sebastian de Santiago.
‘Merciful mother of heaven!’ she moaned. ‘What have I done?’
‘Nearly brained me,’ her employer said wryly, feeling into the bag and removing the ashtray.
‘Forgive me, Señor. I thought you were a burglar.’
The habitual stern, haughty look on Don Sebastian’s face softened. ‘It is I who should ask your forgiveness for intruding on you without warning,’ he said courteously. ‘I ought to have knocked, but knowing it was your night for going to Julius Caesar I assumed the place would be empty, and persuaded Reception to give me a key.’ He regarded her face with concern. ‘Are you un-well?’
‘A little, Señor. It is nothing, but I preferred not to go out, and I knew I could entrust Catalina to Señora Cortez.’
‘Ah, yes, you mentioned her in your letters. A respectable English woman, who teaches languages.’
‘And the widow of a Spaniard,’ Isabella said eagerly. ‘A most cultivated and reliable person, with a mature outlook and the highest principles.’ Fearful that her chaperonage might be found wanting, she continued to expatiate on Maggie’s virtues until Don Sebastian interrupted her gently.
‘I don’t wish to keep you from your bed. Just tell me how to find them.’
Isabella produced her own unused ticket from the bag. ‘They will be sitting here.’
He shepherded her kindly to the door of her room, bid her farewell, and departed. In fifteen minutes he was at the theatre, arriving in the middle of the first interval. Rather than waste time searching the crowd, he went to the seat number on his ticket, and waited for Catalina and her companion to join him.
Your Place Or Mine? was only mildly shocking, but to a girl from a sheltered background it seemed deliciously risqué. Afterwards they walked to a nearby restaurant, Catalina blissfully remembering tunes and jokes from the show.
‘Sebastian would be so cross if he knew where I’d been tonight,’ she said cheerfully as they sat waiting for their food.
‘I can’t imagine why you agreed to marry him if you dislike him so much.’
‘I was sixteen. What did I know? Maggie, when you live in a convent boarding school with nuns saying, “Don’t do this,” and “Don’t do that,” you will agree to anything to get out.
‘And along comes this old man—OK, OK, middle-aged man—who was a friend of your Papa—also he is your distant cousin, third or fourth, I forget. But Sebastian is the head of the family, so when your Papa die this man is your guardian. And he say he has decided you will make him a suitable wife.’
‘He has decided?’
‘He is a decisive man. It is his way.’
‘What about what you want?’
‘He says I’m too young to know what I want.’
Maggie appealed to heaven. ‘Give me patience!’
‘Anyway, you say yes, because if you don’t get out of that school you will scream,’ Catalina explained, adding with a big sigh, ‘but he’s much worse than the nuns. A girl should go to her wedding joyfully, full of adoration for her groom. How can I adore Sebastian?’
‘Since I’ve never met him, I don’t know whether he’s adorable or not,’ Maggie pointed out.
‘He is not,’ Catalina said firmly. ‘He is a grandee, an aristocrat. He is proud, fierce, haughty, imperious. He demands everything and he forgives nothing. He believes that only honour matters, for himself, for his family. He is impressive. But adorable—no!’
‘Well, adoration is fine for the wedding day,’ Maggie observed. ‘But a marriage needs to be built on reality.’ She poured them both a glass of the light wine she had ordered.
‘What are you thinking?’ Catalina asked, looking curiously into her face.
‘I—nothing. Why do you ask?’
‘Suddenly your face has a strange expression, as though you could see something very far away that nobody else could see. Oh, no!’ Her hand flew to her mouth in a conscience-stricken gesture. ‘I have made you think about your own husband, and that makes you sad because he is dead. Forgive me.’
‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ Maggie said hastily. ‘It’s four years since he died. I don’t brood about it now.’
‘But you do. You never talk about him, so you must be brooding in secret,’ Catalina said with youthful romanticism. ‘Oh, Maggie, how lucky you are to have known a great love. I shall die without ever knowing a great love.’
That was the thing about Catalina. One moment she could discuss her predicament with a clear-sightedness that made Maggie respect her, and the next she would go off in a childish flight of melodramatic fancy.
‘I wish you would tell me about Señor Cortez,’ she begged.
‘Start eating,’ Maggie advised quietly.
The last thing she wanted to discuss was her husband, whose name had been Roderigo Alva. After his death she had reverted to her maiden name of Cortez, determined to cut all connection with the past. Normally she kept her secrets, but in an unguarded moment she’d let slip that she’d once had a Spanish husband, and Catalina had naturally assumed that Cortez was her married name. Rather than correct her, and prompt more unwanted questions, Maggie had let it pass.
To divert the girl’s attention, Maggie said, ‘I’m sure Don Sebastian will see that he can’t hold you to a promise given when you were sixteen. If you just explain—’
‘Explain? Hah! This isn’t a reasonable Englishman, Maggie. He only listens to what he wants to hear and insists on his own way—’
‘In short, he’s a Spaniard. And I’m beginning to think any woman who marries a Spaniard is crazy,’ Maggie said with more feeling than she’d meant to reveal.
‘Oh, yes,’ Catalina agreed. ‘Let me tell you what my Grandmama used to say about my Grandpapa—’
Maggie was a good listener, and Catalina poured her heart out in a way she could never do with the easily shocked Isabella. Maggie already knew much of the story of her childhood in the old Moorish city of Granada, motherless, because her mother had died at her birth, leaving her with a bewildered father who was already middle-aged. But Catalina told it again anyhow, talking about southern Spain, its vineyards and olive groves, orange and lemon orchards.
Just outside Granada stood the Santiago estate, or at least part of
