Whispering

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  ‘No. Never. He is deeply sworn to secrecy, And so am I! I didn’t mean to tell you, Harryo dear.’

  ‘I know.’ Smiling. ‘I wormed it out of you, didn’t I? And I’m glad I did. I long to meet your Luiz.’

  ‘I long to see him,’ said Caterina. ‘Or at least hear something. But you’re right, of course. He would never agree to my telling my father. How could he, when he has resigned himself to waiting until the war is over to clear his name.’

  ‘All very well for him,’ said Harriet. ‘But it hardly helps you, does it?’

  ‘Nothing seems to help me. But the first thing is money for your mother. Next time Jeremy Craddock comes, I will ask him for a loan. There’s no one else to turn to. If I tell him about my pictures, show them to him, perhaps he will believe that I will be able to repay him presently.’

  ‘If your father has not shut you up in that convent,’ said Harriet. ‘I think you should tell your cousin about that threat. He did promise to help, after all.’

  ‘And might feel forced to offer me marriage if he thought me hard pressed enough. And we both know how he talks of Rachel Emerson. Never, Harryo!’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ Harriet looked at her friend with surprise, and some interest.

  It was a relief to both of them when a summons arrived, for the day after next, from Madame Feuillide. ‘It must mean Luiz is back,’ said Caterina. ‘I think I have to tell him everything, don’t you?’

  ‘I wish I could meet him,’ said Harriet.

  Caterina received another summons that same afternoon, one that amazed her. ‘It’s from Luiz’s grandmother,’ she told Harriet after a swift look at the signature. ‘Father Pedro told me she was mad, but her note doesn’t read like that.’

  ‘When did you start believing what Father Pedro told you?’

  ‘You’re quite right. I’m a fool, Harriet, she wants to see me. It reads like a royal command.’ She handed over the brief note.

  ‘It does, doesn’t it? “Tomorrow, first thing. Ask for my son. You will be brought to me.” Will you go, Cat?’

  ‘Of course. She is his grandmother.’

  ‘ “Alone,” she says.’ Harriet had been re-reading the note. ‘How will you manage it, Cat?’ They were out on the terrace, quite alone, and she was glad of it.

  Caterina had been thinking about this too. It was unthinkable that a young unmarried lady should call on an older widowed man, but that was what the old lady told her to do. Strange suddenly to remember her so clearly. She had been a formidable old autocrat who kept to her own wing, sending out, from time to time, a sharp instruction that the children should play more quietly. It was an order that was always obeyed, but the old lady had been loved as well as feared, she remembered. Well, she was going to obey her now. But how? Father Pedro had told her the Sanchez house was a fortress, and it had looked like one when she and Harriet had driven by: closed, shuttered, lifeless. Impossible to drive up to that forbidding entrance and demand admission. She made up her mind. ‘You will help me, Harryo?’

  ‘You know I will.’

  ‘We’ll take our sewing and a cold collation down to the second terrace early in the morning, before the hour of visits, the time when Father Pedro prays with my father. I shall go on down and cross the ravine – don’t look so anxious, there is a path, it’s just a long stride. The servants do it all the time so there must be a way up on the other side. And you will sit and sew and look as if butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, and if a servant should bring a note, which is the worst that could happen, you’ll blush a bit and suggest I am off on a natural errand.’

  ‘But are you sure you will be able to get across?’ Less active than Caterina, Harriet had only been down to the bottom of the garden once. ‘That gap looks too wide to me. I am sure it’s only menservants who cross.’

  ‘I’ll wear my fullest skirt and take my scissors, slit it if necessary. I have to go, Harriet, and this is the only way. Think! She may have news of Luiz, something may have happened to him. They were always devoted to each other.’

  ‘Then of course you must go,’ agreed Harriet. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep guard for you. I just hope the weather doesn’t choose to break.’

  ‘No, all we need is the first autumn rainstorm and God knows what I would do. There is no way I can use the front door without causing a storm of talk in the town.’

  But the next day dawned fine and clear and the servants showed no more than their usual amazement at the young senhora’s odd habits when Caterina announced that she and Harriet were going to breakfast in the garden.

  ‘Time to go.’ Caterina stood up when the last dish had been removed. ‘Now, you must stay here, Harriet, and hold the fort for me.’

  ‘Do be careful, Cat.’

  ‘Believe me, I will.’

  No water was running yet down in the crevasse, though it looked very deep and alarmingly wider than she had remembered. But the signs that other people had crossed were obvious enough. Men in breeches or women in skirts? Now she looked at it with a calculating eye, she thought it must only have been men. She looked down at her muslin skirts, took out her scissors, changed her mind. It was going to be odd enough to appear from the bottom of the Sanchez’s garden without compounding the offence by doing so in a slit skirt. It was only one long stride, she told herself, and not a soul in sight. She hitched her skirts to her waist, took a deep breath, and strode it.

  How strange to find herself once more in these gardens where she had played so happily as a child, and to think of all the later times when Luiz had come hurrying down this path to stride across the chasm and meet her in the little summerhouse. Strange too to think that she had never even paused to look at the ruins of the little building where all her life had been changed. No time now to look back, she started up the long series of terraces to the house that was set much further back from the river than her own.

  It was all very quiet. The grapes had already been picked on the terraces that faced the sun, and the vines pruned back for the autumn. It was only when she got up to the top terrace of all that she saw an old gardener she remembered raking gravel between yew hedges, and summoned him imperiously. This must be carried off with a high hand. ‘You there, tell Senhor Sanchez that the Senhora Gomez has called on him.’

  He gaped at her for a moment, then swept off his battered straw hat in salute. ‘The Senhora Gomez! A sight for sore eyes if ever there was one. I’ll tell them in the house, minha senhora.’ And he hurried away towards a servants’ entrance, leaving her to stand and look at the view upriver towards the Serra and remind herself that there was no way she could be seen from the terraces of her own house.

  She did not have long to wait. A small black-clad woman came bustling out of the house, hands outstretched. ‘The Senhora Caterina, I thank the good God and all his angels. My lady said you would be sure to come, but I could hardly see how you would manage. But, come, she longs to see you.’

  ‘How is she, Carlotta?’ It had taken her a moment to recognise the woman, so aged and thin and anxious was she.

  ‘Old, minha senhora. Old and so brave. She is holding this household together with her two hands, her two poor hands. But you will see. Come! No, this way.’ Caterina had turned automatically to the remote wing where the old lady used to live. ‘The master is there now. It is better so.’ And before Caterina could ask the next question she had thrown open the door of the house’s main salon, a room Caterina could never remember entering before.

  ‘Caterina, dear child!’ The old lady sat enthroned in a massive straight-backed chair. ‘I won’t get up. It is too painful. Come and kiss me, child, and say you forgive us.’ She held out hands knotted into hard lumps, and Caterina took them very gently and bent to kiss the cold, white cheek.

  ‘Forgive?’ she asked.

  ‘For what we have done to you between us. My fool of a son told me nothing at the time, thought he was sheltering me. He shelter me! It’s a sad joke now. By the time I found out from the servants it
was too late. Your father had sent you off to England, and Luiz – Caterina, I have sent for you to talk about Luiz.’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ said Caterina

  ‘You won’t be. Sit down, child, here where I can touch you.’ One of the gnarled hands pressed Caterina gently down on to the stool set ready by the big chair, and rested lovingly on her shoulder. ‘Do they still call you Cat?’

  ‘My friend Miss Brown does.’

  ‘I am glad you have her. A true friend. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your father has not changed.’

  It was not really a question, but Caterina answered it just the same. ‘No, and now he has Father Pedro.’

  ‘I have heard about him. I may live shut up here, but I know what is going on. It just takes a little longer. I thought there was plenty of time. I am afraid I was wrong. You have seen my grandson, have you not?’

  ‘Yes.’ What was it about the old lady’s tone that chilled her so?

  ‘And believed his lies?’

  ‘Lies?’

  ‘Yes, lies. It hurts me as much to tell you, Caterina, as it will you to hear, but I must. I owe it to you for having failed you before, when you were sent off to England. My grandson has sold out to the French.’

  ‘Oh, no, ma’am, you’re wrong!’ Caterina breathed a deep sigh of relief. ‘That’s just what he is letting people think. He explained it all to me, but it is the deepest of secrets. If he did not feel he could tell you, I must not.’

  ‘You believed him?’

  ‘Of course I believed him.’

  ‘But should you have?’ The hand was moving gently, lovingly on her shoulder. ‘Think hard about it, and listen to what I must tell you. There are two sides to it, and I don’t know which is the worst.’ She took an audible, hard breath. ‘Yes, I do. When your father found the two of you, down in that summerhouse, it was Romeo and Juliet, was it not? Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?’

  ‘I’m glad you understand –’

  ‘It’s you who don’t understand, Caterina. Forgive me, but I have to tell you. Did you ever notice that all our maids were ugly, here in this house?’

  ‘We used to laugh about it.’

  ‘A pity you never thought about it, but why should you have, the child that you were. Now, you must. We hired ugly maids, my daughter and I, because if they were pretty, Luiz seduced them. We had sent two home, pregnant, to their families – What is it?’ Her hand had felt the shock in Caterina.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘You must, child, because it is true. I do passionately hope that nothing has happened between you and Luiz this time, that at least Madame Feuillide was there to protect you from that.’ She did not quite make it a question.

  ‘Madame Feuillide! You know about her?’ It was all too much to take in at once.

  ‘To my cost. I have no doubt she told you her romantic tale of flight from the French revolutionaries, and safe asylum here in Portugal. Did she tell you who gave her that asylum?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I did. We had been at school together in Paris. She was one of the little ones, but of course, when she came to me here I helped her. She rewarded me by seducing my son-in-law. Luiz was just a baby then. Perhaps my daughter was too wrapped up in him. God knows he was a beautiful child, one to warm your heart. They never had another. Things were never the same between them after I got rid of Madame Feuillide. Just as well. She had made him unfit to father a child. I am sorry to have to tell you this, but you need to know. He’s mad now, shut up. I let it be thought that it is I who am out of my mind, for very shame at his condition, and its cause. I regret that now. It was a mistake. One of the many mistakes I have made. And now I have to save you from paying my reckoning. You met Luiz at Madame Feuillide’s did you not? No breach of secrecy in admitting it; I have had a watch kept on her for many years. I know you did.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I did not trust her. Well, I had cause enough for that. How did she manage for money after we turned her out, my daughter and I? She has had no more help from us. That’s not what she told you?’

  ‘No.’ She had to admit it.

  ‘And I have no doubt that she told you the French missed her poor little house when they advanced on Porto.’

  ‘Yes. By a miracle, she said.’

  ‘A well-arranged one! But I have no proof that she is acting as a French agent. It’s been so difficult, shut up here as I am, thought to be crazy. Nobody would believe a word I said, they’d just call me an old madwoman and probably shut me up in a convent, and then what would happen to my son-in-law and the estate? I can’t risk it. I’m counting on you, Caterina.’

  ‘On me?’ Caterina was numbly trying to grapple with all the horrors she had heard. The unspeakable thing was that they made sense. Older, wiser and sadder now, she looked back on that brief passionate romance with Luiz and realised that the inexperience had been all on her side. How should she have known it then? And if he had been false in this, why believe anything he had told her?

  ‘Did he ask you questions?’

  ‘Yes.’ She had to face it. ‘Yes, he did. He wanted me to find things out for him. But, you see – It’s not what you think …’ She stumbled to a halt. Was she sure of this? Was she sure of anything? ‘I think I have to tell you,’ she said at last. ‘He made me promise not to say a word, but I think I have to tell you.’

  ‘I think so too, child. I promise it shall go no further. Perhaps I am doing him a grave injustice, just because of my suspicions of Madame Feuillide. God knows how much I hope that I am. We loved him so much, my daughter and I. Too much, I sometimes think, poor Luiz.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Caterina, horribly aware of the old lady’s use of the past tense. But she too was a lifetime away from the passionate child who had run down the long terraces to lose herself in her lover’s arms. ‘It was wonderful,’ she said. ‘We were so happy. We really were, ma’am, both of us. It was real. It was right. I am sure of that. Why didn’t they let us marry? I think it would have worked if we had been allowed to marry.’ Was she really putting it all in the past?

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the old lady sadly. ‘I don’t know, child, about that. What’s bred in the bone, you know. But that is just what I asked, when I heard about it, so much too late, after I got back from visiting my other daughter in Lisbon. The two houses, the two wine lodges, what could have been more suitable? I have no doubt that was what Luiz had in mind, and if I had been there that is what would have happened. I wonder if you would be grateful to me now? But I was away. Your father came storming around to the house, my daughter fainted and took to her bed – she was like that, poor Joaquina – and the two men came to blows. Fatal. There was no hope of rational discussion after that. Your father sent you off to England without another word, my son-in-law and Luiz said things to each other that neither of them ever forgot or forgave. I think Luiz found out about Madame Feuillide around then, his father had gone on seeing her, you see. No wonder she managed to infect him so fatally. I’m sorry, child. I am speaking to you as the grown-up woman you have to be.’

  ‘I am,’ said Caterina. ‘Poor Luiz, I do begin to understand a little. And then the French came –’

  ‘Yes, the French came, with their fine talk. You can have no idea, Caterina, how strange, how dangerous things were here in Porto, those two months that Soult was here. There was wrong on both sides during the fighting, remember. I think there always is. Innocent prisoners in the Porto gaols were dragged out by the mob and slaughtered in the streets. One of them was Luiz’s best friend. They had joined the Loyal Lusitanian Legion together; he had been arrested on some idiotic charge; it was all a mistake; you know what the law is like here in Portugal. But I don’t think even that was the worst of it for Luiz. You remember that my other daughter and her family went to the Brazils with the royal family?’

  ‘No, I had quite forgotten.’

  ‘A terrible mistake,’ said the old lady. ‘
If a Braganza were to enter this room tomorrow, I would not stand up and curtsey. Of course Luiz was tormented about it in the Lusitanian Legion; you know how men torment each other. Worse than women, I think. He was all at odds with everything when he met that French Captain d’Argenton who led the conspiracy against Soult. Can you blame him for believing the promise of an independent kingdom of Lusitania under the benevolent auspices of a reformed French republic, free from Napoleon?’

  ‘But that’s just it!’ Caterina was delighted not to have to betray Luiz’s secret. ‘That is what he believes, what he and his friends are working for.’

  ‘How I wish I thought you were right. I’m sure he did at first. He went with the French, when they had to run for it from Porto, in the hopes of helping to engineer d’Argenton’s escape.’

  ‘And d’Argenton did escape.’ Eagerly.

  ‘Yes. Up in the mountains, in the rain. Whether Luiz had much to do with it I rather doubt. He wouldn’t have been trusted very far, then, such a recent renegade from our side. But now, two years later, he turns up again under the auspices of Madame Feuillide. What are we to think of that?’

  ‘You are so sure she is a French agent?’

  ‘Short of proof, yes. That is where I am counting on you, Caterina. What did he want from you? It wasn’t just to talk of old times, was it?’ The hand on the back of her neck managed to be wonderfully friendly.

  ‘No. He wanted information. Asked me a lot of questions. I have been trying to find the answers to them.’

  ‘Such as –’

  ‘The cargo of our ship; Lord Wellington’s plans; the news from upriver. He said it was for his friends, the Friends of Democracy. So they would be ready when their chance came.’

  ‘And so it could have been, I’d almost believe it, were it not for Madame Feuillide. And for what I now feel about my grandson. Don’t trust him, Caterina, I do beg that you will not trust him. And for God’s sake, don’t yield to him. I feel that you haven’t?’

  ‘You are right.’ It was an odd relief to have that clear between them.