The Cazalet Bride

by Violet Winsper

  'Yes, I do like that,' she smiled, 'it's like corn in the house to ensure bread on the table and it would seem to work as the Cazalet oil is so renowned. Do you know,' her eyes glistened, 'Andalusia sounds just my kind of place.'

  'We will hope so.' He inclined his head in his serious way, and she had a sudden mad and impossible impulse to ruffle his smooth black hair, to see him shaken out of his cool containment into the abandonment of emotion. What would he be like then, this proud autocrat who was shot through with the superstition of his land, cour­teous as the Castilian knights of long ago, reserved and aloof as the cool peaks of the Sierras that frowned down upon the sun-ambered plains of Andalusia?

  He rose from their table and she lingered a moment to apply a dash of lipstick - war-paint, she amusedly told herself, for wasn't she about to take on a job that had some very challenging aspects to it? Ten minutes later she and the Don were being bowed out of the inn by the proprietor and she was slipping into the long estate car and settling back against the soft upholstery for the long drive across country. Her employer slid in beside her, lithe and lean and darkly masculine. As he switched on the ignition her eyes dwelt on his hand with its well-shaped, deeply indented fingernails, dark hair curling at his wrist where the requisite amount of starched cuff showed just below his sleeve. The strange intimacy of the moment struck through Ricki and she tightened her hold on the leather handbag which his friend the Gondesa had given her. There was no going back now, she thought, as the car rolled out of the shadows of the Callede Torres into the sunshine of the main plaza. Her journey to Cazalet's farm in the valley had begun.

  Spanish mornings are gold-washed, free of the trying heat of the sun's zenith which sends people indoors to the shuttered coolness of their houses for the siesta, and soon the car was out in the country and the Don had stepped up their speed. The estate car was a hardy vehicle that took little heed of the pot-holes of Spanish roads, and because of the ease of its squabs Ricki bounced quite comfortably as they sped along.

  The Don, a hint of a twinkle in his eye, did the honours of a touring guide and whenever they passed places of interest he told her something about them. The camara­derie you could assume with an Englishman was not entirely possible with this autocratic Spaniard, but he had the Latin gift for description and Ricki suspected that he again thought of her as a child who needed enter­taining on a long journey. She didn't mind. She rather liked the sound of his deep bass voice, and when the ruins of an old Castilian castle were outlined on a hill and she wanted to take a look at them, he stopped the car with a shrug of his shoulders and indulged her whim. He talked about the battles between the knights and the Moors, lounging against a broken battlement with a cheroot in his hand, the warm breeze ruffling his hair out of its usual smoothness. Ricki didn't have to close her eyes to imagine him in dark gleaming armour, mounted on a destrier, the face-pieces of his helmet hiding all but the devilish gleam of his eyes. Arturo de Cazalet belonged to those times.

  'A sword of Spain, the icebrook's temper,' flashed into her mind.

  They returned to the car and drove on for another pour or so, until the heat grew really trying and he popped in the courtyard of a vine-covered tasca and said they would have lunch there. Ricki was thirsty, but she didn't have to tell him so; directly one of the waitresses came to their table he ordered a couple of iced horchatas. Ricki clasped her glass in both hands, revelling in the coolness.

  'I hope you are going to be able to stand the heat of the south.' The Don frowned across at her, his glance taking in the red-brown tendrils that clung to her temples and somehow intensified the paleness of her skin. 'The Granja is much protected from the sun owing to its situation in a valley, but Andalusia is very hot country and now and again we are subjected to a sultry blow called the solano. The peasants say it is like the breath of a dragon and, indeed, the air at those times does seem full of a fire that plays on the emotions and shreds the temper.'

  'I'm mopping up all this warmth like a sponge,' she assured him. 'It's lovely after the chilliness of Ireland and England.'

  'But you are rather pale - I thought ' he gestured with a hint of male impatience towards the heat hazel that lay over everything beyond their vine-sheltered table.

  'Oh, this?' She flicked a finger at her own cheek. 'Don't take any notice of my lack of colour, senor. I have what is called Irish skin. Very fashionable in the poke-bonnet and veil era, but a bit of a bind these days when a girl likes to get a nice nutty tan.'

  'I see.' He laughed and she widened her moss-green' eyes at the sound. So he could laugh, though it was a bit like a subterranean rumble, as though mirth had lain unused and undisturbed in him for a long time - a couple of years or longer! Ricki turned her eyes carefully away from him and took a look at the other people lunching here. Sun-darkened farmers mostly, smocked and breeched, long canes resting against the edges of their tables, their penetrating country eyes shaded by the brims of ancient felt hats. Some of them were eyeing her European looks and clothing with frank curiosity; she sup posed they were comparing her greyhound lines with the more buxom contours of the Spanish girls who waited on the tables. She had heard that the more old-fashioned type of Spaniard liked his women well rounded.

  She and her employer lingered here in the coolness over a lunch of cold, spiced gaspacho, then omelettes rolled round meat and vegetables, and finally fresh fruit salad, which was so artistically arranged and delectable here in Spain. Especially delicious were these little sugared grapes, Ricki thought, tucking into them with youthful appreciation.

  'You are now ready for some coffee?' the Don inquired, having watched her enjoyment of the grapes with a hint of sardonic amusement.

  'Yes, please!' She nodded, tendrils of her tawny hair dancing at her temples. 'The food and the sun are making me sleepy, and I don't want to fall asleep in the car and miss our entrance into Andalusia.'

  He ordered coffee, then regarded her with faintly quiz­zical eyes. 'I am trying to remember what it felt like to be as young as yourself,' he remarked at last, 'and on the threshold of a new experience.'

  'I don't see much silver in your hair, Don Arturo,' she scoffed, adding daringly: 'Nor did your joints creak as you were climbing in and out of the car.'

  'One can be old in more than years,' he rejoined, some­what moodily. 'Even so, most Spaniards of the middle thirties are well married and the fathers of growing chil­dren.'

  'Well, what's stopping you from getting married?' The words were out before she could stop them and, too late, she put a hand to her lips, horrified by a remark which would have been accepted as a mere piece of backchat had she been in the company of a young houseman back home. Coffee was brought and she took hold of her glass in a fever of embarrassment. 'Oh!' She put down the hot glass as quickly as she had picked it up and gave her fin­gers a shake.

  'You are over-impulsive,' drawled the Don, 'but having played with fire and burned your fingers, perhaps you will be more careful in the future.'

  The tingle in her fingertips spread all over her at that remark, and she resolved to keep a check on her tongue in future. He was too quick at cutting you down to size for forgetting he was the patrono. They continued their journey about half an hour later and now he drove so swiftly that all passing scenery was turned to an uninteresting blur. Ricki sat staring out of the window, disliking the dark, withdrawn man at the side of her. She wished fiercely that she had never met him and agreed to work for him. It was obvious a woman had injured his pride, and now all other women must suffer for it. There was no doubt in Ricki's mind. He couldn't bear the thought of marriage because the beau­tiful Conquesta had chosen to love his brother instead of him. Well, the poor girl had not enjoyed the gaiety and sal of Leandro de Cazalet for so very long it was as though a curse had been put upon the romance!

  Shadows were lancing across the land when the passed under the towering Sierras. The lean brown hands on the wheel of the car no longer showed white lines of knuckles and their speed had slowed. In
a while he said to her: 'Welcome to Andalusia, Miss O'Neill.'

  Ricki gritted her teeth, uncertain whether to laugh or cry at such arrogant courtesy after hours of a silence so chilly that she had barely felt the heat. She wanted to retort that he didn't have to be polite. The hint had been taken that she was only the physio-attendant and she wouldn't step out of line again in a hurry.

  'Are those mountains the Sierras?' she asked in a stiff voice, knowing full well they could be nothing else - dark jagged teeth that seemed to snap shut on her freedom al the car skimmed beneath them.

  She gave a little shiver of apprehension, noticing here and there the strange shapes of cacti pointing grey-green' fingers in patches of desert; the palm trees were stubby and frondy, and there were many limestone rocks with a bare pallor.

  'Soon the countryside will grow more pastoral.' The Don seemed to feel her disappointment and her silent criticism. There!' He suddenly gestured to the left of them, where a hillside was covered with woolly sheep and brown goats whose neck bells clanged under their tufted chins as they gave sudden skittish leaps.

  'The lad with them is a serrano, a hill shepherd who guards the flock during their summer pastorage,' the Don told her.

  'The sheep are all colours!' she exclaimed.

  'That is from the varying colours of the soil,' he ex­plained. 'It dyes their wool.'

  Ricki glanced back out of the car window and saw as in a frame the spaciousness of the plains, the shepherd lad standing motionless as his flock milled about him, and the ice-blue crests of the wild mountains turning pewter under the westering sun. Then the car stirred a cloud of obscuring dust and she sank back, knowing she had glimpsed something of the nature of the Spanish in that mixture of the pastoral and the untamed.

  Now, indeed, were they entering a more fertile region and Ricki saw men and women in large straw hats busily at work in terraced fields. Herds of red-ochre cows munched placidly at the clover, with here and there a rice-bird standing on the strong haunches like a sculp­ture. Mules and donkeys wended past the car, small mov­ing hillocks of wood, cork or vegetables, and Ricki saw closely her first Andalusians. Lithe middle-sized men with sun-seamed faces and lively dark eyes. They wore the country smock and leggings, and the shabby felts that were respectfully touched but not raised; these men of the soil were caballeros at heart who knew themselves equal to all men and subservient to none. Ricki liked the look of them; they had, she thought, something of a Gaelic toughness and charm about them. They would be quick to anger, but also quick to laugh, and there would be poetry in their songs and legends.

  The car passed an old ruin of a watermill and all along the banks of the stream frogs could be heard croaking. It was an evening sound and shadows were deepening to a grape tinge when at last they came into the region where the Cazalet land was planted richly with oats, barley and rye; tobacco, maize and clover. Also there Were the mulberry groves, and the olive trees! Ranks of them growing black against the rusty earth and looking bible-old. Strange gnarled little trees, yielding the life oil of this land of plains and valleys.

  A village and a church were suddenly etched on a craggy hillside ahead of them, and when they drew near Ricki saw lime-washed houses suspended on the rim of a huge, widening valley of sheer rock with a dense bottom­land of shrubs and trees. To live in one of those houses would be like living in mid-air, she thought. You would feel like Miranda of the Balcony!

  She grinned at her own whimsy in the gloom of the car and knew, with a quickening of her heartbeats, that they were nearing the end of their journey. The village fell away behind them and the headlights speared a path on the ravine ledge along which they were now driving. Ricki heard in a while the turmoil of rushing waters beneath them and she gave herself up to the strange almost fatalistic sensation of being whirles through the night to an uncertain destiny by the dark, grim-profiled man beside her.

  'Soon now we will be at the Granja,' he said. 'You must be feeling tired.'

  She agreed that the long drive had tired her, chilled by a harshness in his voice which told her that her tired ness was of no real interest to him. She gazed out at the darkness and saw her face dimly reflected in the glass of the window. Her eyes were huge, like those of a child who needed her bed and someone comforting to tuck in the covers and press lips that cared to her temple. Oh, long gone were those days, childhood days and then, like the touch of a ghost, it came to Ricki that it was on this precarious ravine road that Conquesta and her husband had been killed!

  The Don shifted gear and Ricki felt her stomach go over as the car began to travel downhill. He was unaware of her eyes upon him, but the pain and tension in him were reaching out to touch her and she gave a sudden uncontrollable little gasp.

  'This is a bad road in the dark, but lam used to it,' he said, curtly. 'See, we now turn on to the track that leads to the Granja.'

  Ricki relaxed her grip on her bag, but the thuds of her heart were still shaking her. He turned briefly to look at her and the gleam from the dashboard showed his strong, almost savage cheekbones and the hollows beneath them. Lines were etched beside the extreme darkness of his eyes - never had eyes been so dark, without a ray of another colour to catch and hold the light. 'You have guessed that my brother and his wife were killed on that road back there, eh?' His nostrils flared at the edges with the emo­tion of the moment. 'What you cannot know is that Leandro had decided to take his wife and child for a drive in a car of mine. There was something amiss with the brakes, which I had noticed the day before, but he did not know this and I was calling at one of the other farms. Had I been at home ' his expressive shrug finished the rest of the sentence.

  'You blame yourself, in part, for the accident?' Ricki gasped.

  'Can I do otherwise?' The car bumped over a rut and Ricki gritted her teeth. 'I should have remembered that Leandro was in the habit of regarding my possessions as his own.'

  Bitter, significant words, Ricki thought, shaken by relief as the headlights shone suddenly on the high, outer walls of the Granja. They drove under an immense arch-way into the plazuela, a large patio of stone, with -wrought-iron lanterns that showed in a ghostly way the shapes of the buildings inside the patio and the outline of the old Iberian farmhouse itself. The place looked at once fascinating and forbidding to the girl who had come to live and work there.

  Dogs barked and a man came running out of a stone house at the side of the entrance way. He was pulling on a jacket which had big gilt buttons gleaming on it. 'Patrono, Ricki heard him exclaim, 'we were not expecting your arrival until the morning. Did my Benedito misunderstand your telegraph message?'

  'I decided after all not to break our drive but to come straight home. How have things been, Marco?' The Don had swung out of the car and was extending a helping hand to Ricki. She stepped out on to cobbles, and when his hand released hers she still felt its lingering strength. Marco was the guar do jurado, the sworn guard of an important family who wears a brown uniform, leather leggings and a broad-brimmed hat. With a curious eye on Ricki, he assured Don Arturo that el nino had been quite content during the absence of his uncle.

  'Thank the good Dios for that.' The Don spoke rather dryly, then he took Ricki lightly under the elbow and drew her into the ray of light from one of the wall-bracketed lanterns. 'This is Miss O'Neill,' he told Marco, 'and she will be in charge of the boy from now on.'

  'Welcome to the Granja, senorita' Marco's English was rough but understandable, for Ricki had been told by her employer that during his father's lifetime he had spent a couple of years in England learning business methods, and Marco and his wife had gone with him to look after his apartment and cook for him.

  'Senor, you are home already?' A big, swarthy woman hastened across from the guard's house, her starched apron making a rustling sound at each step, the lantern light on her gleaming black hair. Ricki was unsurprised when the woman ducked in a reverencia. Her entire appearance against this background called for a curtsy to the master with his look of lean, dar
k, inborn authority. This was another world, almost another century, Ricki realized. Here the feudal past was still very much a part of the lives of these people.

  The woman was Marco's wife, Sophina, and she was full of talk as they crossed the patio and entered the Granja through an arched doorway. Ricki noticed that there were several storeys to the farmhouse, each one with its own outside gallery reached by wrought-iron staircases. The eaves of the immense roof overhung the galleries, no doubt to provide shade during the sun-filled days.

  Ricky felt lost and small in the great hall of the house, which had a vaulted ceiling networked by beams from which hung chandeliers of wrought-brass. These were unlit, but in wall sconces there were lamps that smoked faintly and threw shadows. A great central table stood on passive carved legs, set round with high-backed chairs in front of a carved cavern of a fireplace with side niches in which kitchen lads had crouched to turn the spits on which pig and calf had been roasted in the old days.

  The hall was forbidding and yet fascinating to Ricki, with its floor of close-set cobbles and the tall reading-desk on which stood a big leather-bound Bible in which were recorded, no doubt, the births, marriages, and deaths of the long line of Cazalets.

  So absorbed was Ricki in looking round the hall that she gave quite a jump when Don Arturo spoke to her. Sophina will show you to your room, Miss O'Neill,' he said, a faint smile in his eyes at the way she was staring at crossed pikes and poignards on the stone walls. 'A meal will be sent up to you, and you can eat it in bed. I am sure you must be almost asleep on your feet-you must for-give me for subjecting you to such a long and tiring drive.'