woman who had always derided and scorned her—to write the letter summoning her back to the Palacio de los Naranjos—the Palace of the Orange Trees—the home of the Silvadores family set among the orange groves from which the family’s fortune was derived and whose scent hung sharply and sweetly on the early morning air.
A shiver trembled through her, and mistaking it for coldness, the stewardess touched her arm, motioning her towards the airport building. Despite the huge number of people who passed through her life daily, something about Davina intrigued the other girl. She looked so frail, spiritual almost, her beauty tinged with a contemplative acceptance that touched the heart far more than any more overt signs of grief. What had happened to her to give her that look? She might have posed for some great painter of the Renaissance. Her expression told of great suffering and resignation, and yet surely she had all the things any woman could want? Youth, beauty, this adorable baby, and somewhere the man who had loved her enough to give her his son.
When they emerged from the Customs hail it was dark. Davina walked out into the soft silkiness of the Spanish night, Jamie in her arms. Spain! How the scents of the night brought back memories. Herself and Ruy wandering hand in hand through the orange groves during their honeymoon, and later, when the moon had risen fully and he had taken her so paganly in that shadowed garden, teaching her and thrilling her until her passion matched his. She had been happy then—deliriously happy, but she had paid for it later. She had thought Ruy loved her, had never realised that to him she was merely a substitute for the girl he had really loved; that he had married her to punish that girl.
In the shadowed garden of his home she had thought she had found Paradise. But every Eden must have a serpent and hers had held Ruy’s mother, the woman who hated her so much that she had deliberately opened her eyes to the truth.
And now Ruy wanted her back—no, not her; it was his son. The only one he was ever likely to have, or so the letter had told her. Jamie was his heir, and his place was with his father, learning all that he must learn if he was to take it successfully. And Davina could not deny it, although she could not understand why Ruy had not been able to get his freedom—Freedom to marry the girl he had loved all along, the girl he had really wanted to be the mother of the son who would succeed him, as Silvadores had succeeded Silvadores in an unbroken line from the sixteenth century onwards.
The letter had said that she would be collected from the airport. A porter brought her cases and she smiled as she tipped him. His eyes rested appreciatively on her face, and her hair, like spun silver, and so very different from the girls of his own race. Her features were patrician and perfect, her lips chiselled and firm, her complexion as fine as porcelain, her huge amethyst eyes fringed with luxuriously thick dark lashes.
She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, Ruy had once told her. But he hadn’t meant it.
‘Davina?’
She hadn’t heard the opulent Mercedes drive up nor seen its driver emerge to come and touch her lightly on the arm, and she spun round, startled, her eyes widening slightly as she found herself looking into a face she remembered as being a boy’s.
‘Sebastian?’
‘Let me take the boy. He looks heavy.’ Her brother-in-law lifted Jamie from her arms with a competence which would have amused her four years ago. Then he had been nineteen, and still at the university studying viticulture in preparation for taking over the family’s vineyards. Now, at twenty-three, he had matured considerably. Although superficially he resembled his brother, Sebastian lacked Ruy’s totally male grace. Where Ruy was lean and muscled Sebastian showed a tendency towards what would develop into plumpness in middle years. He was not as tall as Ruy, his features nowhere near as tautly chiselled, but for all that he was still a very handsome young man. Especially when he smiled—which he had been doing as he held his small nephew. However, the moment he turned towards Davina the smile was replaced by cool formality. She was handed back her child and ushered into the expensive car, her luggage stowed in the boot, and then Sebastian was sliding into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. It surprised Davina that if one of the brothers had to meet her, it had not been Ruy. Surely he must be anxious to see his son to permit his presence?
She voiced her opinion of her husband’s lack of manners as they drove out of the city. In the driving mirror Sebastian’s eyes met hers, before moving away evasively. She remembered that he had always hero-worshipped his elder brother. Twelve years separated them, and Ruy had already been a man while Sebastian was still a child in school.
‘He was unable to meet you,’ was all the explanation Sebastian would vouchsafe, and Davina was glad she had played down the meeting with his father to Jamie. The little boy would have been sadly disappointed had he been expecting him at the airport. In point of fact Davina was surprised that Sebastian had come for them. She had half expected to be collected by the family chauffeur, rather like a piece of unwanted luggage.
Before her marriage to the Conde de Silvadores Ruy’s mother had lived in South America, the only daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and had been brought up very strictly. She had never learned to drive and was always taken wherever she wished to go by a chauffeur. That had been yet another cause of dissent between them. Davina had found it very hard to adjust to being the wife of a rich nobleman without having to behave like some Victorian heroine, not permitted to put a foot out of doors without an escort. Used to running her own life and relatively untrammelled freedom, she had rebelled against the strictures Ruy’s mother had wanted to impose upon her.
Her small sigh brought Sebastian’s eyes to her face. She was very beautiful, this silver-haired girl who had married his adored brother—even more beautiful now than she had been when they married. Then she had been merely a girl; now she was a woman… His eyes rested on his brother’s child. Madre would be well pleased. The boy was all Silvadores.
Unaware of her brother-in-law’s covert inspection, Davina stared out into the dusk of a Spanish evening, forgotten memories surfacing like so many pieces of flotsam, things she had vowed never to remember filling her mind, like the vivid beauty of the sunset, the subtle smell of oranges on the evening air, peasants trudging contentedly homewards after a day in the fields, donkeys with panniers laden. She sighed.
The Palacio lay between Seville and Cordoba, and this journey was the very first she had taken with Ruy after their marriage. They had left Barcelona straight away after the ceremony and flown to Seville…
More to bring a halt to her errant thoughts than out of any real curiosity, she questioned Sebastian about his life since she had left.
Yes, he had now left the university, he answered politely, and was running the family’s vineyards. Davina had a hazy recollection of a young Spanish girl whom his mother had wished him to marry, and when she mentioned her Sebastian told her that they had been married for two years. ‘But, alas, without any little ones,’ he volunteered sadly. ‘The doctors say that Rosita will probably never have children. An operation to remove her appendix caused some complications…’ He shrugged philosophically, and Davina’s heart went out to his young wife. She knew all too well what importance was placed on the bearing of children—especially sons—in her husband’s family. Hadn’t she had it drummed into her time and time again by her mother-in-law that Silvadores had been linked with the history of Spain for hundreds of years and how important it was for the name to continue?
Now she could understand why the family were so anxious for Jamie to be brought up in the full knowledge of what his role would one day be, although previously she had always expected, when Ruy had their marriage set aside so that he could marry Carmelita, that Jamie would be disinherited in favour of the sons she would bear him. She was not au fait with the Spanish inheritance laws, nor had she made any attempt to be. She had left Ruy swearing that never would she ask him for a single penny towards his son’s upbringing, and
