ceiling, and furnished with heavy and ornate dark wood furniture of a type that Fliss knew from her mother’s descriptions was typical in expensive antique Spanish furniture. Beautifully polished, and without a speck of dust, the wood glowed warmly in the light pouring in through the room’s tall French windows. Stepping up to them, Fliss saw that they opened out onto a small balcony, decorated with waist-high beautifully intricate metalwork, its design classically Arabic rather than European. Try as she might, Fliss could not spot the deliberate flaw that was always said to be made in such work, because only Allah himself could create perfection.
The balcony looked down on an equally classical Moorish courtyard garden, bisected by the straight lines of the rill of water that flowed through it from a fall spilling out of some concealed source at the far end of the courtyard. Either side of the narrow canal were covered walkways smothered in soft pink climbing roses, their scent rising up to the balcony. On the ground alongside them were white lilies. The pathways themselves were made from subtle blue and white tiles, whilst what looked like espaliered fruit trees lined the walls of the courtyard. In the four small square formal gardens on the opposite side of the rose walkways, white geraniums tumbled from Ali Baba–sized terracotta jars, whilst directly below the balcony, partly shaded from the sun by a sort of cloistered, semi-enclosed area, there was a patio complete with elegant garden furniture.
Fliss closed her eyes. She knew this garden so well. Her mother had described it to her, sketched it for her, shown her photographs of it. She had told her that it was a garden originally designed for the exclusive use of the women of the Moorish family for whom the house had been built. It was obviously an act of deliberate cruelty on the part of Vidal to have given her this room, overlooking the garden he knew her mother had loved so much. Had he given her the room her mother had slept in? Fliss suspected that he hadn’t. Her mother had told her that she and Vidal had occupied the top storey—the nursery quarters—when they had come to stay with Vidal’s grandmother, who in those days had owned the house, even though Vidal had been seven years old at the time.
Fliss turned back into the room. Heavily embossed with a raised self-coloured pattern, a rich deep blue brocade fabric hung at the windows and covered the straight-backed chairs placed at either side of the room’s marble fireplace. The cream bedspread was piped in the same blue, with tasselled blue brocade cushions ornamenting its immaculate cream width. The dark wooden floorboards shone, and the antique-looking blue-and-cream rug that covered most of the floor was so plush that Fliss felt she hardly dared walk on it.
It was all a far cry from her minimalist apartment back at home. But this decor just as much as the decor she had chosen for herself was a part of her genetic inheritance through her father. Had he not rejected her mother, had he not denied them both, she would have grown up familiar with this house and its history, taking it for granted. Just as Vidal himself did.
Vidal. How she loathed him. Her feelings towards him were far more bitter and filled with contempt than her feelings towards her father. Her father, after all, had had no voice. As her mother had explained to her, he had been forced to give them up and to turn his back on them. He had not opened her letter pleading to be given a chance to get to know him and then told her that she must never ever try to contact him again. Vidal had done that. He had never known her personally and looked at her with a gaze of cold contempt, then rejected her and walked away from her, as Vidal had done. He had never scorched her pride and burned a wound deep into her heart with his misjudgement of her. Vidal had.
It was here in this house that decisions had been made. They had impacted on her and on her parents in the most cruel way. It was from here that her mother had been dismissed. It was here that she had been told that the man she loved was promised in marriage to another—a girl chosen for him by his adoptive family, who was in her final year at an exclusive school that groomed highly born girls for their marriages. A girl, as her mother had told Fliss, Felipe had sworn to her he did not love and certainly did not want to marry.
It hadn’t mattered what Felipe wanted, though. All his promises to Fliss’s mother, all his protestations of love, had been as beads of light caused by the sun’s rays touching the drops of water as they fell from a fountain. So beautiful and entrancing that they stopped the heart, but ephemeral and insubstantial when it came to reality.
There had only been time for the two of them to snatch a final goodbye embrace and share the fevered illicit intimacy that had led to her own conception before they had been torn apart—her mother sent back to England and Felipe instructed to do his duty and propose to the girl who had been chosen for him.
‘He swore to me that he loved me, but he loved his adoptive family too and he could not disobey them,’ her mother had told her gently, when she had asked as a girl why he had not come after her.
Her poor mother. She had made the mistake of falling in love with a man who had not been strong enough to protect their love, and she had paid the price for that. Fliss would never let the same thing happen to her. She would never allow herself to fall in love and be vulnerable. After all, she had already had a taste of how that felt—even if her feelings for Vidal had merely been those of an inexperienced sixteen-year-old.
Shaking herself free of her painful thoughts, she looked at her small case. Her mother had told her about the traditional way of life of this aristocratic, autocratic Spanish family that Vidal now headed. Vidal had said that his mother had insisted she stay here. Did that mean she could expect to be formally received by her? Perhaps over dinner? She hadn’t brought any formal clothes with her—just a few changes of underwear, a pair of tailored shorts, some fresh tops, and one very simple slip of a dress: a handful of non-crushable matt black jersey that she had fallen in love with on a trip to London.
She was just about to lift the dress from her case and shake it out when the door opened and Rosa came in, carrying a tray containing a glass of wine and a serving of tapas.
After thanking her, Fliss asked, ‘What time is dinner served?’
‘There will be no dinner. Vidal does not wish it. He is too busy,’ Rosa answered haughtily in Spanish. ‘A meal will be brought for you if you wish.’
Fliss could feel her face beginning to burn. Rosa’s rudeness was unforgivable—but no doubt she was taking her cue from Vidal.
‘I have no more wish to eat with Vidal than he does with me,’ she told Rosa spiritedly. ‘But since Vidal told me specifically that it was his mother’s wish that I stay here, instead of in the hotel I had booked, I assumed I would be expected to have dinner with her.’
‘The Duchess is not here,’ Rosa informed her curtly, putting down the tray and turning grim-lipped to the door. She had disappeared through it before Fliss could ask her any more questions.
Vidal had lied to her about his mother’s presence here in the house and about her wish to see her. Why? Why would he want to have her here beneath his own roof?
Just for a moment she wished she was back at home—and more than that she wished that her mother was still alive. Filled with the sadness of her emotions, Fliss sat down on the edge of the bed.
Her mother had given her the best childhood ever. A wonderfully generous bequest of an elderly relative Fliss herself had never even known had enabled her mother to buy them a lovely home in a quiet country village—large enough for Fliss’s grandparents to move in with them—as well as providing an income which had meant her mother had been able to be at home with her. Her mother had talked openly to her about her father, referring to him with love in her voice and her eyes, and no resentment or bitterness. She had only clammed up when Fliss had begged her to bring her to Spain so that she could see the country for herself. She had refused to criticise Vidal when Fliss, with a seven-year-old’s sharpness of mind, had worked out that he must have been the one to betray her parents.
‘You
