Three-Cornered Halo

by Christianna Brand

  Well, but they didn’t, said the Patriarch, surprised. Just took the whole tooth out. “There was a great run on tweezers on those days and a regular scramble for the gallows, one reads; some of the victims not even dead yet and they used to put up quite a fight.” He laughed heartily at these pleasing reminiscences.

  “One does long to know if the ‘Caza de Dientes’ has found its way yet to the Forest Lawns Cemetery,” said Mr Cecil.

  Winsome and Major Bull sat together, a little neglected, their cheesecakes, for one reason or another, untouched; the Major sinking a good many reviving brandies and shying like a startled horse every time Lorenna approached with her inviting smile. “My dear Major Dick,” said Winsome at last, for such was her whimsical name for him, “is something the matter?”

  “Matter? Good God, no. Just going to ask you the same thing, s’matter of fact.”

  But there was nothing the matter with Winsome, either. “A little tired, that’s all. That horrible crowd …”

  Shocking business, shocking business. The Major shook his white head and chattered like a budgerigar into his chins. “Helpless woman, sh’never have been out alone. Anything might have happened. Well, I mean—well, anything …!” He dug her in the ribs with an elbow like a navy-blue pork chop. “Damn it all, good-looking girl, y’know, Winnie, couldn’t blame the fellers.…”

  “Whatever do you mean, Major Dick?” said Winsome faintly.

  Major Bull chattered and chumphed. Old buffer—past prime—still got eyes in his head all the same, eh, what? “Looking very charming tonight, old girl, by Jove,” said the Major with an air of admission not wholly flattering, but gazing most tenderly into her startled eyes.

  “My dear Major!” Winsome, who had in her time played many a rubber of Heronsford bridge in the Major’s company and watched the tide going out in hospitable bottles, glanced meaningfully at the brandy decanter. “Hush, please! People will hear you.”

  Feelings-honest-gentleman-not-ashamed …

  “Well, never mind that now, Major, please don’t embarrass me,” said poor Winsome, fiercely whispering. “You will feel differently in the morning.” Over his protests and the opening of a recital apparently relating to a hen pheasant, which she could not begin to understand, she raised her voice and cried out with shrill determination that it was true, was it not, that the ‘Colossus’ of Goya had been in fact a portrait of old Juan himself.…?

  “Quite true, quite true,” said the Patriarch, a little surprised since he and Mr Cecil were by now adventuring along other paths of converse. “We have at the Palatio a sketch made thirty, forty years before the picture was painted—the same figure, but clothed in the costume that in the last days of his life, when Goya knew him, El Pirata would be wearing. And the monster devouring his children!—that too is recognisably …”

  There was an interruption. Two new figures made their appearance, a wrinkled crone wrapped in black shawls and carried in a sort of litter by two attendants, one scrawny hand clinging to the hand of a stout youth of prep. school age, who walked at her side: La Contessa di Perli, ‘La Madre,’ surviving parent of El Margherita, a venerable figure now nearing her ninetieth year, and Don Juan Isidro, a nephew of the Grand Duke, known officially as El Bienquisto, the Well-Belovéd. The chair was set down. At a signal from the attendants, Lorenna handed round her tray. The Grand Duke, introductions over, said sharply, “No sweets for you, Isidro.”

  The Well-Belovéd emptied half a dish of candied chestnuts into his mouth and, losing a good deal of them when he opened it again to speak, was understood to ask why not.

  “Because if you continue as you are now doing, and as your great grandmother encourages you to do, you will be named when you get to your English school, not El Bienquisto, but El Porco.”

  “If anyone in England calls me names,” said Isidro, transferring a wedge of mashed chestnut to his left cheek, “I will have him beaten.”

  “In England you don’t have people beaten. You have to fight for yourself.”

  “Then I shall fight.”

  “If you took on so much as a blancmange,” said the Grand Duke, without love, “you would be vanquished.” The old woman began to jabber and he gestured towards her with his ringed hand. “Ask her what she wants.”

  It was almost gruesome to see the devotion between these two: the old woman, thin, gnarled, brown and brittle as a bundle of dry sticks, the child as white and fleshy and fattily glistening as a lardy-cake. He stilled her chattering with a tenderly imperious hand across her mottled mouth, spoke to her soundlessly, forming his soft, thick lips into slow words. She answered, gibbering back, glib and shrill as a monkey. “La Madre says she does not wish me to ride. She says I shall fall off and be injured.”

  “As to that,” said the Grand Duke, “I am glad it has arisen. I have asked these ladies and gentlemen here this evening to advise me on this very matter: as well as for the pleasure of their company.” He bowed to them slightly from his chair and asked suddenly, sharply: “Miss Cockrill—you, for example: have you got a bicycle?”

  “A bicycle?” said Cousin Hat. “Yes, certainly.” A good, strong, lady-like, old-fashioned bike with a criss-crossed coloured string protection over the rear wheel to protect the sensible skirts—how else did the man suppose a lady of moderate means got about Heronsford to do her shopping? Winsome had her little car, to be sure, and tootled around most gamely, always in the dead centre of the road and never losing more than half a minute or so, after the traffic lights turned green; fancifully apostrophising other cars and their drivers as (most unreasonably hooting) they approached or overtook her: ‘Here comes the Vicar in old Slow-and-Bideawhile … That was Mrs Brown’s Bentley; The Smoothing Iron, I shall christen it, goodness knows she’s always Dashing Away with it …!’ Her own car was called The Matchbox. Cousin Hat’s preference for referring to it as that wretched little hearse of yours, she had countered by having it repainted, with another of her quaint fancies, in matchbox colours, dark-bodied with yellow roof and wings. “All it looks like now is something crawling out of a hive,” said Cousin Hat, cheated; but from then on Winsome called it Busy Bee instead, and she wished she had kept her mouth shut; the truth was that with Winsome you couldn’t win. But anyway, yes, she rode a bicycle: and if that were the question, yes, again—she thought a boy should be able to.

  “You see, Isidro. In England, everyone has one. Miss Foley—yes? And Major Bull?”

  Miss Foley had had a bicycle when she was a girl and it had been called Magicar, short for Magic Carpet, and had carried her away, away, into a fairyland all of her own among the woodland dells, the primrose copses of her country home. And as for the Major, yes, by Jove, fairyland, fairyland, ting-a-ling-a-ling on the bell, look-no-hands, what, what? “You understand,” said the Grand Duke, skating over these contributions a mite hastily, “that in the ordinary way we have no such things on San Juan. No wheels mechanically propelled, are permitted—we are too hilly and far too small. But——” He appealed to them. “The boy is fatherless, it is all left to me. Can I let him go to a prep. school in England, never having so much as seen a bicycle?”

  It seemed to Miss Cockrill that so lacking was Don Isidro in attributes desirable in the English prep. school boy, that the mere absence of bicycling experience would hardly be observable: and anyway would be offset by items of knowledge beyond the dreams of most of his fellow pupils. She refrained from comment, therefore, and merely asked whether the Grand Duke had actually obtained a bicycle for him?

  “Smuggled up to the palace, yes. A group of my wife’s friends arrived from Paris yesterday, this was sent over with their advance luggage, in a wooden case. There are people still on the island, you see, who’d regard it as a contraption of the devil.”

  Mr Cecil heartily agreed with them. He had got through life with perfect satisfaction to himself without ever having so much as set bottom to saddle, and was about to unburden himself to this effect, when the old woman interrupted with a stream of
rapid jabber. “She says,” reported Isidro, “that I shall fall off.”

  “There will be half a dozen palace guards there to hold you on.”

  “She says I shall evade the guards and try by myself.”

  “Nothing is less likely; but tell her you shall be watched to see you do not.”

  “She says I shall do it nevertheless. She says I shall creep out at dead of night and go spinning at a great rate down the steep paths of the gardens. She says,” said Isidro shaking his head at the hopelessness of trying to deal with his own insensate daring, “that I am so brave.”

  “I have already removed the lamp from the bicycle, so that you can’t.” There was a moment of silence, and the Grand Duke asked in some triumph: “What does she say to that?”

  “She says you are taking a suspiciously kindly interest in my welfare,” said El Bienquisto: and stuffed another handful of chestnuts into his mouth.

  It was twelve o’clock. In the silver moonlight, the silver fountain tinkled in its silver bowl, the marble babies wore masks of shadow that transformed them from innocent childhood to a sort of arrested old age, sporting with the marble dolphins in some horrid ring of vice. Lorenna moved silently, on her rounds of solicitation, pressing forward the tray of sweetmeats, the bottles of green and red and yellow liqueurs. From below in the rock arena came music: singing and laughter and the shuffle and scrape of a thousand dancing feet; here in the patio, only the splash of the fountain made any sound. Even the old crone was silent, staring malevolently out from her nest of black shawls; the boy stood beside her, his fat hand lovingly holding her skinny fingers, his jaws moving mechanically in his bulging face. The Grand Duke leaned back against his marble seat, his arms, black cloaked, spread like a raven’s wings along the full length of it, his splendid head bent, staring down at the shimmering rugs beneath his feet. He said at last, and his voice was huge, and deep and soft as velvet, with a sudden note in it like velvet torn across: “That will do. Tell La Madre that my kindly interest in her welfare prompts me to suggest that she should retire at once. My barge will take her back to Barrequitas now, and return for us later. You will go with her. Say good night to my guests.”

  The boy made a round of hand-kissings obediently, his chubby buttocks quivering with the shock of each smart bringing-together of his chubby heels. To La Bellissima he murmured a few words and she held his hand for a moment and smiled at him kindly and answered him, in French. The old woman poked out two fingers from her shawls and comprehended them all in a gesture of dignified, if not very gracious, farewell. The boy caught up a last handful of sweets and stuffed them into his mouth, the attendants lifted the palanquin, the cortège departed. “My dear, stap one’s vitals,” said Mr Cecil, “what a gruesome pair!”

  “Few of my relatives are precious to me,” agreed the Grand Duke. “But La Madre and El Bienquisto, I confess, jostle for position at the bottom of my list.”

  “How would one cook him?” said Mr Cecil, fascinated. “One can’t think of anything else. He’d look so splendid on a menu—Blanquette de Bienquisto …”

  “Stuffato d’Isidro,” suggested the Grand Duke.

  “Grand Ragout de Garçon Juanese …”

  “Bambino bollito …”

  “Or, Boiled Boy in White Sauce.…”

  “And now, Winsome,” said Cousin Hat, “you have seen the mother of your idol. How did you like her?”

  The narrow hands fiddled with a folk-weave pleat, the gooseberry eyes filled with tears. It had been—disillusioning: a terrible old woman and after this long and bewildering day, almost more than one could bear. “She’s old,” she said at last, bleakly. “And after all—Juanita may have taken after her father.…?”

  “Well, no,” said the Grand Duke. “I must admit that she favoured her mother’s side—if favour is the word for it; for, with all deference to her sainted character, my dear aunt Juanita was by no means a charmer.”

  “La Madre would be—your great aunt?”

  “My great aunt, yes. And great, great grandmother to the boy. She married a brother of the then Grand Duke, my grandfather, a monstrous old party known to his very face as Pedro the Vile. The Grand Duke, I mean: her husband had no time to be vile, he was polished off much too soon.”

  “Polished off?”

  The Grand Duke shrugged. “One can only suppose so. My family have splendid health—why should he die young? He’d offended by marrying La Madre, as she’s called now, a woman of no breeding from the Toscanita plain. The family has died out—assisted also by Duke Pedro, I take it; he would have no love for his brother’s vulgar in-laws and they certainly came by a chapter of most curious accidents.” He shrugged again. “I confess that I long to apply the same routine to their one survivor. But the people would object—she has a veneration value for El Margherita’s sake: La Madre, The Mother of Juanita. We produce her at these fiestas. They would miss her.”

  For Winsome too, despite all, she had a veneration value. “La Madre! To think one has actually talked with the mother of a saint!”

  “Except that you didn’t exchange a word between you,” said Cousin Hat.

  “It’s true that one couldn’t quite understand …”

  “No one understands her nowadays,” said the Grand Duke. “Except the boy. For my part it’s years since I even made the attempt. I try never to speak to her.”

  “Yet she lives in your palace?”

  “She has apartments there: she’s had them for over seventy years. Old Pedro took a fancy to the infant Juanita: otherwise, no doubt, mother and daughter would have followed Papa. However, the palace is large, thank God, and I never need see her: just on high days and holidays. For the rest, she keeps to her quarters and sits spinning mischief and spoiling what’s left to spoil in her great-great-grandson.”

  “Her mental faculties …?”

  “Are unimpaired as you see,” said the Grand Duke, dryly. He laughed. “It by no means escapes La Madre, in fact, that for two pins I would seat the Well-Belovéd on his bicycle and send it spinning down the hill to Barrequitas; not pausing at the quay. But alas!—like La Madre herself, El Bienquisto would be missed.” He added, not looking at anyone: “He is my heir.”

  There was a rather chill silence. El Patriarca, not very well understanding what was going forward, nevertheless recognised a note in his master’s voice, and launched once more into social chit-chat regarding the delights of the Domenica di Boia. The discomforture of El Pato, no doubt, they had found extraordinarily buffant?

  “El Pato?”

  “The Arcivescovo, you know. We call him El Pato, or sometimes El Anitra—the duck.”

  Well, actually, said Mr Cecil, they had not found that frightfully buffant; no. “Would you say just a trifle decrepit for practical jokes? And ill?”

  “Ah, ill, yes.” El Patriarca touched his own forehead. “He will die very soon.” For some reason this appeared to add richly to the entertainment.

  “You do not understand my country,” said the Grand Duke heavily, from his seat. The cat had sprung on to his knee and he sat caressing it idly, the jewels winking as he ran his ringed fingers through its short white fur. “These people are very childlike. Many of them do not read or write: you may teach them but they will forget, you may speak but they will not listen: they do not want to know. We must reach them, therefore, by signs; and even the signs must be strong and clear and in their own language, such as children understand.”

  “But need they be cruel?” said Miss Cockrill.

  “Cruelty is a language that everyone understands.”

  “And so, to teach them, an old man must be tortured?” She leaned forward, boldly, looking him in the face. “To teach them what? Why was it necessary?”

  His hand tightened on the loose fur behind the cat’s head, pulling it back till the blue eyes were Siamese slits, the thin lips a grin over the pointed teeth. He let the skin go and the cat purred contentedly on. “You heard what the Archbishop said in his sermon today?”<
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  “Everyone heard that.” She answered a little at random, her eye was seeking Mr Cecil’s eye: she was, it appeared, for some undisclosed reason, anxious to be left alone with this terrible man. And welcome, thought Mr Cecil, unable however at the moment to do anything about it. “Do you suggest that I should remain silent,” the Grand Duke was suggesting smoothly, “while the Grand Duchess of San Juan el Pirata is rebuked before her people?”

  “I see.” Miss Cockrill looked ‘Jane Seymour’ up and down, just once, and returned her eyes to his. “So all your anger was on account of your wife?”

  “I, also, was rebuked—in the matter of Juanita.”

  “Everyone wants her canonised. Why not agree?”

  Slit eyes and the grin again. He said coolly, however: “I have agreed. If on the Fiesta di San Juan she gives us a sign …”

  “That’s just an excuse. You know she won’t give any sign.”

  Really, thought Mr Cecil, the sooner one obeyed Miss Cockrill’s injunctions and left that intrepid woman alone with her prey, the more confident one would feel of surviving till morning. He developed an imperative longing to see over the Pavilion. If La Bellissima would be so prodigiously kind …? And the Patriarch, no doubt, could explain many details to them both.…? But the Grand Duchess shrank into the shadows of her veil, the Patriarch hissed and frowned. It was not permissible to withdraw without express command. That he too would have been thankful to absent himself from this explosive atmosphere was apparent from the anxious eye he bent upon his lord, and the burst of chatter which ostensibly covered his horrified interest in what, in only vaguely understood English, appeared to be going on. Mr Cecil sighed, and resigned himself to calamity. The Grand Duke said coldly to Cousin Hat: “Very well, then. Juanita is unable to give a sign. In that case she is not a fit subject for canonisation.”

  “Why should she give a sign just because you ask her?”

  “The whole island asks her. For one reason or another, the whole island desires her canonisation.”