Читать книгу A Forbidden Love: An atmospheric historical romance you don't want to miss! - Kerry Postle - Страница 14

It may have been true that Don Felipe and Dona Sofίa had planned to return ‘sometime next week’ but times and dates, like everything else in life, were theirs to change.

‘Sunday? Sunday? I thought they weren’t coming back until next week. The house isn’t ready. And I always go to church on a Sunday.’ But it really didn’t matter what Cecilia always did. Cecilia had been blindsided.

That was how she found herself allowing her daughters to go off for a picnic with a foreigner and why she was here in the kitchen on her hands and knees scrubbing away at the flagstone floor while perspiration dripped off the tip of her nose. She wondered if Luis, the landowners’ son away at an English boarding school, would be joining them. She hoped so. He would be eighteen years old now. Same age as her Manuel. A broad smile broke out across her face at the thought of the boys.

*

Fifteen minutes away in a speeding car bumping over stones and re-acquainting themselves with their estate were her employers. Their son was not with them. Dona Sofίa was holding on to the door handle for grim death, concerned that her wrist might dislocate at any moment, while Don Felipe was driving as fast as the car would allow. He congratulated himself on the fact that he was master of all he surveyed: land, animals, and people. Dona Sofίa held a handkerchief to her forehead with her free hand, taking care to close her eyes for fear that she might inadvertently poke one of them out as the wheels of the car jolted over small stones.

‘See that Sofίa? Our workers!’ Her husband shouted at her in order to be heard over the sound of the engine. ‘We’ll whip this place back into shape.’ He swerved past two girls causing the wheels of the car to momentarily spin out of control. ‘Unbelievable!’ His wife’s eyelids sprang open, her eyeballs very nearly popping with surprise as she saw the feral creatures wobbling around on their bicycles. Her husband slammed his palm down on the dashboard. Who were these girls getting in his way? And why weren’t they at church? Girls out on bikes on a Sunday morning. The thought of it made his blood boil. He stamped his foot down hard on the accelerator as he saw another one, dressed in white, standing by her bike at a turning. A furious cloud of dust and grit filled the air. The car roared and so did its driver. And he continued to do so as the first thing he saw when the dust cloud settled was Richard Johnson careering off the road and into one of his fields.

‘What was that?’ A fish out of water cooking under the strong sun, the sight of the English boy stunned Don Felipe, and Dona Sofίa no less so.

‘Must be a Bolshevik … or a Jew.’ Inconvenienced by the jerkiness of her husband’s driving, she sat forward and blinked repeatedly, perplexed by the ghostly apparition. She remembered the article she’d been reading only the day before calling for the need of ‘a new Reconquista’ to purge Spain of ‘contamination’. It acknowledged there were few Jews left ‘thanks to their expulsion the first time in 1492 by Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella’, but now their friends, ‘communists, socialists, freemasons, liberals and the like’, were growing ‘like noxious plants’, destroying the very fabric of Spanish culture and tradition ‘from within’. She’d felt it a little extreme at the time. But, seeing this boy, so alien, so near to her estate, it did make her wonder.

‘Thank heavens we’ve come back,’ she said, a loud tut of disapproval punctuating her words. Don Felipe growled.

He pulled up outside the farmhouse ten minutes later. He tooted on the horn six times. Cecilia looked up from the floor she was scrubbing in time to witness Guido the estate manager open the car doors for Don Felipe and his wife. Opening car doors – one of the many jobs her employers couldn’t do for themselves, she caught herself thinking as she pulled herself up to standing. She smoothed out the folds of her apron and rushed into the hall. It was a surprise to her that Don Felipe hadn’t used his chauffeur to drive them here.

As landowner and manager walked around to the back of the house, Dona Sofίa wafted delicately into the house, a forced smile on her face as she greeted Cecilia and the three house staff all lined up at the bottom of the stairs to welcome her.

‘Would you like refreshments Dona Sofίa?’

‘Cecilia! Girls! How lovely to see you all again. Pilar, isn’t it? No? Julietta? Are you sure? Ah well. Never mind. Nothing for me, nothing at all. Just bring an orange juice up to my room, would you? But I can’t answer for Don Felipe.’ With a flick of her wrist, she gestured that her husband was somewhere outside and that Cecilia, or Pilar, or Julietta, or whatever her name was, should go and find him. ‘And now I need to lie down,’ she said abruptly. ‘We’ve had an encounter of the most unpleasant kind. With some hideous cyclists. You wouldn’t happen to know who they were?’ And without waiting for a reply she floated up the staircase leaving Cecilia feeling as though someone had trampled over her grave.

The housekeeper made her way towards Don Felipe.

‘… My workers have been doing what?’ he said to his estate manager, his voice at once angry and incredulous. Aware of his housekeeper shuffling towards him like something brought back from the dead he broke off long enough to snap, ‘Orange juice – verandah,’ while shooing her back inside the house with his own inimitable wrist action.

‘Reading, you tell me!’ Don Felipe’s words rang in her head as Cecilia scuttled away. ‘But why, Guido? Why?’ he bleated with all the emotion of a man betrayed.

In the kitchen Cecilia squeezed, pummelled and beat the oranges, extracting every drop of juice from them that she could. She placed two glasses on one tray, a single glass on another, filled them to the top, then, as she went out onto the verandah, she told one of the house girls to go up to Dona Sofίa’s bedroom. By the time Cecilia had placed the tray down outside her unsettled thoughts had travelled down to her wrists, palms, tips of her fingers, causing her usually steady hands to buckle and shake. The orange juice cascaded over the rim of the glasses, spilt out over the tray, spread across the table, until finally trickling, drop by hard-pressed drop down onto the ground beneath. She watched the scene unfurl before her, and though she willed it to stop, she was powerless to stem the flow now that it had started.

‘Careful! Clumsy woman!’ The clumsy woman dashed off to fetch a cloth.

‘Names! Give me names!’ She felt Guido’s eyes burning into the back of her head as she retreated. They burned no less when she returned.

‘Perhaps Cecilia can help you,’ the sly fox said. ‘Speak, woman!’ Her employer’s words, pushing her to give an answer, shocked her like the point of a sharp knife. She looked at Guido, searching for help. She found none. What was she to do? She had to name someone. Seňor Suarez? No. That English boy? No. Then, before she knew what she’d done she blurted out ‘Maria!’ ‘Maria?’ Don Felipe echoed back at her. ‘Yes,’ Cecilia confirmed. ‘Maria. Maria Alvaro. The doctor’s daughter.’ She felt no guilt. Rules, after all, did not apply to Maria Alvaro.