by Joan Aiken
She lifted herself up, looking past me.
I twisted my head round, thinking someone must have walked up silently behind my back. But nobody was there. Then I remembered that Manolo was the name of Bernie's baby, who had died long before I was born.
One of the kitchen girls, coming back with a hot brick in a cloth, screamed piercingly and dropped the brick on the flagstones.
I turned my head again in time to see Bernardina topple slowly and heavily off the step on which she was balanced; it was like seeing a great log, which had been floating down a millstream, suddenly upend itself and go over the milldam.
Isabella flung herself forward; I scrambled back down the stairs. But we both knew that what we were doing was no use. I think Bernie died before she fell. There she lay, on the granite flags, her great mouth open and her small eyes staring, still with that look of surprise. Dead as the stone on which she lay.
Father Tomás swished back, tut-tutting irritably, and pushed us aside.
"Go to your room, boy! And you, girl, fetch the others—fetch some strong women, and the porter, and one of the gardeners—tsk, what a way to die—"
I went away quietly. There was no point in staying.
Taking a different passage, I walked into the big kitchen, where Bernie had been mistress all my life long. It was a grand room. The walls and floor were covered with shiny red tiles, decorated by little blue-and-white diamonds and crosses. The fire burned on a wide platform, the step up to it marked out by more tiles, green-and-white ones, these; and a two-foot-wide shelf ran most of the way round the room. There was still plenty of fire in the hearth, and some candles burning, but nobody in the room; I daresay they had all run off to lay out Bernie and say prayers in the chapel. I pulled up a stool to the fireside and sat there shivering. I couldn't believe yet that Bernie was dead. Every minute I expected her to come roaring in through the door, calling out, "Hey, boy!Hola, my little tiger! You want a merienda? Glass of beer? Bit of bread and chocolate? Just a minute, then—"
It looked as if she had been making herself a merienda just before she had been taken ill. A pestle and mortar stood on the big scrubbed table with some chocolate in it she'd been pounding, and a platter held a pastry cake sprinkled with salt, my favorite food. Maybe she was going to sneak it up to me in my room. Now I couldn't have touched a crumb of it. I kept thinking: She's sure to come in soon. No, she isn't, she's dead. She's sure to come in soon—
I listened for her loud, slapping footsteps, for her cheerful bawling voice. They didn't come. Instead, to my horror, I heard a slow, measured, double clack-clack: the sound of two elderly ladies in high heels. If I'd had any sense I'd have run like a hare—but I hated to leave the warm red kitchen; besides, up to the last minute, I couldn't believe they were really coming here. They hardly ever set foot in the kitchen. But they did come in, one behind the other, stepping stately and scrawny, like a couple of old molting guinea fowls with their long necks. Doña Isadora and Doña Mercedes. They were in their usual black bombazine dresses, black mantillas, gray lace shawls wrapped round their shoulders, and black mittens on their hands. Each carried a fan, and Dona Isadora gave me a rap on the ear with hers as I scrambled to my feet.
"What are you doing in here, Felix?" she demanded in her high angry voice that was like a saw biting through stone. "You are supposed to be confined to your chamber. Why do we find you here?"
I could see dislike in every line of her long, thin, sour face, with the V-shaped upper lip overhanging the one below. She was my grandfather's sister and she hated me worse than poison. And I hated her back.
"Shall I summon Father Tomás to beat him, sister?" she suggested to my grandmother.
"Later, Isadora. We had better go on now, to Bernardinas bedside."
"You're too late," I gulped. "She has just died."
I couldn't help thinking how very unwelcome they would have been at that strange deathbed on the stairs. Bernie despised both of them.
"You have not answered my question," said Doña Isadora coldly. "Why are you here?"
"Bernie wanted to see me before she died."
The two old ladies looked at one another.
"A wholly unsuitable friendship," complained my grandmother. "Between the cook—the household cook—and my grandson. But what can you expect? God only knows who or what his father was. Yet born to my daughter—a Cabezada, who could trace her ancestry back twenty generations to the Conquistadores!"
"Is it to be wondered at that he prefers low company?" muttered Doña Isadora.
"Bernie wasn't low!" said I angrily. "She was kind. She wanted to give me some things of my father's—"
"What things, boy?" said Doña Isadora sharply.
She was ten years younger than my grandmother, and much more forceful. Doña Mercedes often drifted off into vague memories of her lost sons.
"I don't know what things. I haven't looked yet. This bundle.
"You had best open it directly."
I hated to open it under Isadora's supercilious stare, but there was no way of refusing. Slowly I undid the stiffened knots of aged linen, which, I now saw, was stained with streaks of brown—bloodstains, very likely—and spotted with grease too. It smelled as if Bernie had kept it alongside her chilblain ointment.
Inside I found another cloth, not a great deal cleaner, but softer and easier to undo. And inside that, a wad of folded paper, covered with faded writing. And inside that, a small brittle black plume and a few gilt buttons.
"What have you there?" inquired my grandmother in her vague way.
"I think it must be a plume from an officer's shako—"
"Not that, idiot!" snapped Great-aunt Isadora. "The letter."
I unfolded the paper. There were several pages of it. Doña Isadora twitched it out of my fingers and held it close to a candle—for a moment I feared she was going to burn it. But she peered at it with her shortsighted eyes. I noticed that her hands were shaking. In á moment, though, she said disgustedly—but as if this were no more than she had expected—
"It's nothing but gibberish! It must have been written by a maniac! The blessed saints themselves couldn't make head or tail of it. And furthermore," she added spitefully, "it is all covered with grease. That drunken old woman probably carried it about in her pocket for the last four years."
"Let me see the paper, please, Isadora," said my grandmother.
But she could riot decipher it either, and at last it was passed to me. I resolved to make it out, if it took me the rest of my life. But not in front of those two hateful, cribbage-faced old hags.
"Go to your room, Felix," my grandmother said. "You shall be dealt with in the morning. Come, Isadora; we had better go to the chapel."
And the two of them went slowly clacking away.
After waiting till they were out of sight I picked up one of the candles—which I was not supposed to take—and took a different route back to my room. I crossed the main hall, where all the weapons had once hung—but they had been taken away during the French wars, and never brought back. None of the decorations had been left, except a huge spotty mirror, fetched back from Venice many years ago by my great-great-uncle Carlos. The candle's reflection in it caught my eye, but I looked away because I did not want to see myself there. I knew only too well what I looked like: short, rather plump, and yellow-headed as a duckling, with a round face, a pointed chin, and blue, angry eyes; wholly unlike the portraits of black-haired, lanky-faced Cabezadas, with their hook noses and hol low cheeks, that hung in the dining room and all the way up the stairs.
"How can that boy be one of us?" Isadora had said a hundred times, peering at me in her beady-eyed, shortsighted way. "It's hard enough to believe that he was Luisa's child—even though I myself was present at his birth—"
I hated my own looks. Bernie used to call me Tigrito, her little tiger, because of my yellow hair, and because I fought such a lot, but that was no consolation. I longed to be dark, six foot tall, with a scar on one cheek; like my
great-grandfather, El Conde Don Felipe Acarillo de Santibana y Escurial de la Sierra y Cabezada, whose portrait hung in the dining room. What a hope! I would never be like him if I lived to the age of ninety-three.
Returning to my room, I locked the door. Then putting the candle on the chair, I unfolded the papers that my grandmother had reluctantly given back to me, and tried to make out the scribbled words on them.
Not one word could I understand.
It might have been written by a demented spider which had fallen into pale brown ink and then staggered drunkenly to and fro across the greasy sheets of thin gray paper. I stared at every line in turn—every word, every stroke of the pen—until tears came into my smarting eyes, tears of grief and rage as well as eyestrain.
What was the use of the stupid paper? I would never be able to read it. I might as well throw it away.
I almost did. But then I changed my mind. It was a relic of my father, after all; this soiled paper, scrawled with unreadable words, and the pitiful little plume, and the tarnished buttons, were all I had of him, things he had once touched. I wrapped them all carefully in the linen once more, and then clambered back into my cold bed.
Hours went by before I fell asleep. I thought of Bernardinas last words: "Go saddle the sea." She had stopped in the middle, but I knew the rest of the proverb: "Saddle the sea, put a bridle on the wind, before you choose your place."
Put a bridle on the wind ... I could hear the wind wailing outside, hurling itself against the massive stone walls, rattling the casement. And mixed with it, the crying of the sheep, like sad lost souls. Where was Bernardina now? Was her soul in purgatory, or had she gone to provide the angels with her baked butter cakes, chicory salad, beans with smoked pork, and semolina balls in syrup?
Trying to say a prayer for her, I fell at last into uneasy, dream-threaded slumbers.
When I woke next it was high daylight. The room was full of sorrow, which seemed to have stolen in like a mist. There was real mist outside, too; when, as was my habit, I clambered up onto the stone windowseat and looked out toward the Sierra, all I could see was a short stretch of pale stony plain, huddled with sheep in their damp coats. The distant snowy ranges were out of sight. I could feel their icy breath, however, in the wind that came through the fog, and I pulled on a thick sleeveless vest over my shirt and under my black jacket.
Bernardina has died. What am I going to do?
It was late, I knew, and didn't care. Presently Father Tomás came to reprimand me for not attending early mass.
"But Grandmother said go to my room and stay there—"
"Don't answer back, boy!" he snapped. "Come - along now, you are wanted in the saloon."
Dismally, I followed him down the stairs. I was only ever summoned to the saloon, now, when I had done something wrong.
The saloon was a large, handsome room, freezing cold, like all the rooms in that house except for the kitchen. My grandparents and great-aunts were all so old that I suppose they had ceased to feel the cold; they wrapped themselves in a few more shawls, that was all. Occasionally in the depths of winter my grandmother Mercedes would have a charcoal brazier placed beside her chair.
The walls were hung with linen wall hangings in dove gray and gold, and the furniture was all upholstered in gray satin. Marble side tables were protected by fringed damask cloths. Enormous walnut cabinets against the walls were filled with treasures of china and silver, which my grandmother and great-aunts polished themselves because the servants could never be trusted not to break things. The pictures, in thick gold frames, were of dead hares, great slices of watermelon, cut salmon, and bunches of grapes, painted so realistically that you expected the fish to drip. They were supposed to be very valuable, and so were the ornaments of Toledo steel over the fireplace. So were the gilded leather-bound books in the library, and the heavy chairs of studded leather, and the gray curtains interwoven with gold thread. Everything was a treasure in that house, and for years my grandparents lived in terror of the French, who might arrive and burn it all—or the English, who were just as bad. It was a piece of luck, that Villaverde was such a high-up, tiny, unimportant place that all the armies had missed it completely in their various comings and goings. For years the silver had been hidden under clay and sacking in the stables, the pictures perched on rafters in the barns. But now the various valuables were all back in their places. All that the house lacked was sons—my grandfathers four sons, Manuel, Carlos, Juan, and Esteban, who had died in the wars, one after another, at Talavera, and La Albuera, and two at the battle of the Bidassoa. And his daughter Luisa, who had died giving birth to me.
The old people were sitting in the saloon, silent as the painted fish in the pictures, munching their breakfasts: fried eggs, cups of chocolate, and toast, which they dipped in the chocolate. I preferred Bernardinas crispy churros to the dry bits of toast, but nobody was offering me any breakfast.
"Boy! Come here!" said my grandfather.
I went, trying not to look humble, trying not to look cocky, and stood in front of his invalid chair, which was made of oak, steel, and damask. The Conde was very lame, and had to be wheeled everywhere in this contraption, which was equipped with a side table, a writing desk, a lamp, and a mirror.
He was a handsome old man, my grandfather; his legs might be useless, but his back was straight as a musket. Smooth gray locks, eyes like chips of coal, a beak of a nose, a gray satin jacket, striped satin waistcoat, and a snowy cravat. His face, much lined, was the same color as his jacket—like pewter. He looked at me as if I were a weevil that he had found in his toast.
"You were to be confined to your room for three days. Yet you left it without permission."
"She asked for me—she was dying—" I began hotly. I had meant to keep my temper, but injustice always put me in a passion.
The Count raised his hand.
"That is not all. Father Tomás tells me that he found in your schoolroom a disgracefully impertinent poem that you had written about him, and a drawing so outrageous that I ordered him to tear up the paper before your grandmother or any of your great-aunts should chance to set eyes on it."
I couldn't help half a grin at the thought of their expressions if they had seen that drawing, but the Count added coldly, "Father Tomás has done so."
Miserable old pig, I thought. Trust him to go rooting about among my schoolbooks and papers while I was shut up.
I hope the poem stung his thick hide.
"Also," continued my grandfather, "when Father Agustín returned from his visit to the monastery at Lugo and retired for the night, he found among the coverings of his couch a dead fish. I have no doubt that it was you who put it there—such disgusting pranks have been all too common."
"I did not—" I began indignantly. Father Agustín was rather stupid, and I had not been able to resist the trick with his dangling waist cord, when it occurred to me, but I had no real grudge against him; at least the subjects he taught were a little more interesting than the prosing of Father Tomás; and he had once showed me how to make a kite.
"As if I'd put a fish in his bed! What a stupid notion! Besides, how could I? I was in my room."
"You have played such tricks before. And what reason have we to believe you?" said my grandfather coldly.
All the old great-aunts—six of them had flocked to this house, from every part of Spain, during the French wars, and had stayed ever since—nodded their mantilla'd heads up and down and hissed to one another: "Disgraceful, disgraceful! The boy's little better than a savage. But can you wonder? Poor Francisco—how I pity him, having such a troublesome charge."
Moan, moan, mutter, mutter, mutter. Isadora di rected a particularly mean stare at me; I daresay she was the one who had persuaded my grandfather that I must have put the fish in Father Agustín's bed; she was always carrying spiteful tales against me.
"I don't tell lies!"
"Hold your tongue, boy!" said my grandfather wearily. "It is the height of impertinence to speak to yo
ur elders until you are requested to do so."
"It isn't fair!" I burst out in a real rage. "I am the only person in this house who is not allowed to speak when I have something to say. Every soul about the place despises me. And yet I ám your grandson!"
"Oh, how outrageous to address his grandfather in such a way," muttered the old ladies behind their fans.
My grandfather, turning his face away as if he could not bear the sight of me, said to Father Tomás, who was standing by him looking like a hungry raven, "Take the boy away and beat him. Three strokes for leaving his room without permission, three for the poem and the drawing, three for the fish in Father Agustín's bed, and three for his impertinence to me. Twelve in all."
"Doesn't Your Excellency think he ought to have a few more strokes for the poem and the drawing?" said Father Tomás, obviously disappointed. "After all, he was not only ridiculing me—as if I should care for a boy's insults—but was making fun of Holy Church in my person!"
"Twelve will be sufficient," said my grandfather. "You may do it in the dining room. Then take him back to his chamber."
"You're a lot of old fossils!" I yelled, as Father Tomás dragged me away by my ear. "You and your silver plates and your china jugs and your dead-as-dust treasures.That's what I think of you all!"
Father Tomás was hauling me past a leather-and-gilt table on which there was a little alabaster statue of a boy. I snatched the statue as we wrestled past, and flung it onto the stone floor, where it broke into three pieces.
A hiss went up from all the old ladies.
"Oh! Look what he has done now! The monster! Why, he must have the devil in him!"
But my grandfather only said, "Three more strokes, Father Tomás, for the statue."
The dining room had a huge polished table, and more chairs of studded oxhide. Father Tomás tied my hands to one of the chairs with a cord from his pocket, and beat me with vigor. There was plenty of room for him to wield his cane—you could have fitted a couple of farm wagons into that room as well as the table and sideboard. I pressed my lips together so as not to make a sound; I could picture all the old things in the next room pricking up their ears as they sipped their chocolate, hoping to hear me blubber.