The Cazalet Bride

by Violet Winsper

  'You Spaniards!' she exclaimed laughingly. 'Is a woman made only to be a wife and a mother?'

  'But of course!' There wasn't a fraction of doubt in Juanilo's voice. 'Woman is the shape of love. She should feel proud of being so. Enrique, my friend,' he flashed a smile at the other man, 'we should do something about finding this pretty nina a young man of Andalusia for her novio.'

  'Spare me!' she protested amusedly, though a warmth stole to her cheeks.

  'You do not fancy a Spaniard for your novio ?' Juanilo was enjoying this game; his eyes were dancing with glee, while Tia Rosina was smiling gently over her cognac and coffee. Tia Beatriz had retired to bed with one of the bad headaches from which she suffered now and again.

  T doubt very much whether a man of Andalusia could swallow the emancipated views of someone like me,' Ricki rejoined. 'Here in the south you people tend to cling more to the old ways, don't you ?'

  'Because so many of those old ways have an intriguing charm about them,' Juanilo asserted, with a hint of Spanish passion. 'You are not unmoved by those ways, senorita. I sense it when you speak. There is in your voice a note of awe, and warmth. Come, why pretend you are all for civilized veneers when below the surface you re­spond to the same things that thrill our women?'

  'You have only just met me, Senor Esteban.' She laughed, yet was shaken anew by the perceptivity of the

  Spanish male. How well these men understood women I How shattering it was - and yet exciting - to be with men who had fathomed women to their complex depths!

  'With some people one is always a stranger,' he said dryly. 'With others one is a friend from the moment the first greetings are exchanged. The eyes meet, thoughts are exchanged, and the simpatia is established. Many of your countrymen and women visit this land of ours, a good few of them stay to set up homes here. There are in­dustries run here by your people, but it is only to a few of them that one can say they have what we call espanolismo. You know what the expression means, Senorita Veronica - ah, an interesting name, that!' He snapped his fingers, delightedly.

  'You mean you think I have an understanding of the -Spanish,' she said, her cheeks warm from the compliment.

  'Exactly so. Don Enrique agrees with me, eh, my friend? He informs me that the young Jaimito has flourished in your care for more reasons than, that you are skilled in your work.'

  'Veronica has done wonders for the child, Tia Rosina said happily. 'She has eased fear from his mind and stolen away his grief. Already he is walking a few steps each day - how good it does my heart to see that! Arturo is greatly^ pleased with his nephew's progress.'

  'Ah, Arturo!' Juanilo's voice had changed, grown more sombre. 'He, too, should forget. To court regret and sadness will always cast a dark shadow over his life, and always people will say of his home that it is aquella sole-dad'

  That lonely place! The words went through Ricki, and she was deeply relieved when Juanilo abruptly changed the trend of the conversation. He turned to her, smiling. 'Talking of the old traditions of Spain,' he said, 'are you familiar with those associated with our marriage Customs, nina?'

  'Please enlighten me,'she said lightly.

  He proceeded to do so, and she was much taken with the one which still survives in the south, that of waiting with a lighted candle for the bridal pair at the threshold of their new home. The candle is held by a relative - the fire of the new hearth. There was a rustic warmth about the idea of guiding a young couple to romance with the soft glimmer of a flame, Ricki thought. Between them they could keep it burning and steady, or they could quench it. It all depended on the strength of their love.

  In a while Ricki noticed that Tia Rosina was nodding in her chair, and she gently touched her to wakefulness and suggested they go to bed and leave the men to their moon-talk.

  Noche buenas were exchanged, and Ricki and the little aunt went indoors and upstairs to their rooms. Before they parted, Tia Rosina expressed the wish that Ricki would remain a long time in Spain.

  'I'm afraid that's a promise I can't really make.' Ricki bent her head and kissed the faded-petal cheek of her favourite twin. 'I'll stay for as long as I'm needed, any­way, Tia Rosina.'

  I Each night the southern moon peeled off one more veil to reveal its golden glamour, and Ricki was awoken one night both by the shafting moon glow though the win­dows, and by the moist feel of tears on her cheeks. It troubled her to find she had been weeping in her sleep, and she wondered again if she was subconsciously pining for her father. She had so looked forward to this stay at the Salvadori ranch, yet since coming here she hovered between pleasure in her surroundings and a melancholy disquiet. Like a fitful sunshine her happiness came in spells; one moment she felt quite gay, then the next she was plunged into shadow.

  The little aunts had been wanting for days to take Ricki and Jaime to see Seville. ' "Quien no vista Sevilla No la vista maravilla" ' quoted Tia Rosina, so much more romantically inclined than her sister, though even Beatriz was inclined to praise Seville, the heart of Andalusia.

  But since Juanilo Esteban's arrival at the ranch, Jaime was less inclined for female company, and Ricki reluc­tantly agreed that he could stay and watch a tienta, a testing of local youngsters who wished to fight the heifers, while she drove into Seville with Don Enrique's sisters for a shopping and sightseeing tour.

  'The small one will be fine with us,' Don Enrique assured her. 'Go plunder the shops, you females, while we men enjoy ourselves in our own way.'

  'Please remember, senor, that Jaime is not yet as strong as your peons? she pleaded. 'If anything happened to him -Don Arturo would never forgive me.'

  'I am the boy's abuelito.' Don Enrique drew himself up, offended. 'I would sooner be trampled by my bulk than permit any harm to come to Jaimito. He is the little son of my heart, a small lingering ray of the sunshine that was extinguished when my Conquesta died.'

  The old Don rarely mentioned his daughter, and Ricki guessed that it hurt him to do so. She touched his sleeve. 'Forgive me. Of course you'll look after Jaime and see he comes to no harm. It's just that he has not been out of my sight for a whole day since Don Arturo placed him in my charge. I,' she smiled and shrugged, 'I am over-bur­dened with a sense of duty.'

  'You are over-burdened with too much heart, like a lot of women.' The old Don touched a gnarled hand to her soft young cheek. 'Enjoy yourself in Seville, my child Forget care and responsibility for this one day and be only the pretty turista from England. The shops of Seville will enchant you, and the wonders of the Alcazar will put stars in those green eyes.'

  He paused and studied her shrewdly. 'There have been a few shadows in those eyes, pequena. You are sad, I think, that your work is almost over.'

  'Yes, that's why I'm sad,' she agreed, knowing it to be only part of the truth.

  Seville was rightly named the heart of Spain. The atmosphere was one of gaiety and beauty, with a zest for living in the eyes of the people, and palms standing golden and green in its gardens. This was the city of seven hun­dred streets, and the most famous was the Calle de las, Sierpes, gay with cafes where the tables stood on the pave­ment, and shops where all manner of goods were for sale. Ricki bought a dress and a pair of evening slippers for Don Enrique's birthday party, then the three of them went further along the busy street to a shop where anti­ques were sold. The sisters wished to choose their brother's present from the paintings and ornaments on display and while they were in consultation with the manager, Ricki wandered to a side counter on which less valuable but even more intriguing objects were set out.

  Her eyes widened with sudden delight and she picked up an old and amusing musical box. Upon the lid sat a monkey, and facing it was an organ-grinder. When the music started the monkey danced about. Jaime would love it, Ricki thought at once, and she turned to a hover­ing assistant to ask the price. It was within her means and she bought the musical box, which made even Tia Beatriz laugh when she saw the monkey in action.

  It was now close on lunch time and they passed the pavemen
t cafes on their way to a more discreet restaurant. Lean, good-looking Sevillians sat at the outside tables, drinking strong coffee or aguardiente, smoking dark cheroots as they discussed business or the bullfight. Bold dark eyes appraised Ricki's slender legs and ankles as she passed by, and more than once there was an audible mur­mur of appreciation. Nowhere else in the world is a well-turned ankle more appreciated than in Andalusia; per­haps a lingering instinct in the blood of a people whom the Moors once ruled, where women wore veils and the ankle alone was the outward sign of attraction.

  Ricki was quite hungry by now and she thoroughly en­joyed a lunch of langostinos, giant shrimps, with a piquant sauce served in a lobster shell; veal kidneys with a selec­tion of vegetables, then juicy loquats with cream, fol­lowed by two cups of wonderful Spanish coffee.

  'You wish, of course, to see the Alcazar?' remarked Beatriz.

  'Yes, please.' Ricki was in no doubt about that. When she left Andalusia, she might never return to see the colourful palace that was said to be straight out of the Arabian Nights.

  'The road to the palace winds uphill .from here,' Tia Beatriz rose briskly and gathered up her purchases, 'so we will take a carriage and not bother to walk back to the parking place to the car.'

  Their carriage had a tasselled canopy, and the horse's harness was decorated with small bells and blue beads. Seville was quieter now a good section of its population had retired for siesta, and the gardens of the Alcazar were peaceful and lovely. Ricki wandered with the sisters through orange groves and beneath tunnels of roses. The little Moorish pleasure houses delighted her, also the carved fishponds shaded by lovely magnolia trees. The palace, seen from a sunken garden, was old and romantic- : looking, turreted, with a colonnade of archways and palms spread green and dark against the sky of blue.

  The mazes and groves had an air of mystery and be­witchment about them, and Ricki could well believe all the stories that were whispered about the Alcazar, palace of Pedro the Cruel.

  Cries were still said to echo from the dungeons beneath his private apartments, where the beauties who resisted him were locked up long ago.

  The interior of the Alcazar was fabulously carved and tiled, with columns of marble where odalisques had once posed, and corridors down which the ankle bells of slave girls seemed to tinkle. Ricki, a true Gael of Erin with a vivid imagination, could have spent hours, days, wander­ing about this old palace and its gardens, but dusk was falling and the time had come for them to return to the ranch.

  During the carriage drive into town where the car was parked, Ricki sat quiet, spellbound by the strange, cruel beauty of the Spanish past the past which intrigued Don Arturo, and which he read about in those many volumes that lined the walls of his study. She pictured him, passing the long, quiet evenings alone in his study, the lamplight playing over the strong, El Greco planes of his face, the smoke of a cheroot drifting in blue spirals past the unfathomable darkness of his eyes.

  She gave a little shiver and Tia Rosina at once pressed her hand and inquired if she felt cold. 'When the sun goes down, our evenings do grow cool,' she said.

  A symbolical contrast, Ricki thought. Fire and ice, neither of them mingling to produce a moderate warmth, but each a separate force that made these people both gay and alarming; emotional and yet aloof; superstitious in some things, and adult in others from childhood.

  Ricki felt a gladness shot with pain as she reviewed the weeks she had spent working in Andalusia. Here she had really grown up, and learned that her warm heart wanted more fulfilment than a career could ever give her.

  Don Enrique's birthday had drawn very close, and it was inevitable that Ricki should wonder whether her em­ployer would come for the festivities. She wasn't quite sure whether her disquiet was due to the thought of him coming, or staying away. Anyway, she was so restless one afternoon that as soon as she had settled her charge for his siesta, she changed into riding clothes and went down to the stables to saddle the horse which Don Enrique had put at her disposal.

  A farmhand was sprawled asleep in the shade of a tree, but the tramp of hoofs disturbed him and he awoke and pushed his straw hat back off his eyes. 'The solano blows, senorita? he exclaimed. 'It is not wise to go riding.

  'The wind isn't too bad as yet.' She cast him a confident smile from the saddle. 'I shall not be out very long.'

  Her mount cantered out of a side archway that gave on to the plains rather than the stretches of pasture land where the bulls of the ranch roamed black and sleek. Out in the open she at once felt the sultry breath of the solano, which had been blowing since early morning. She was aware that a particular heavy blow from the east could cause a dust storm, but so far this one seemed but a high, hot wind that made her feel a trifle breathless. The horse huffed a bit when she first set him into a gallop, but she felt a need right now for some fast riding; it would settle her restlessness, and there was peace in being entirely alone for a while.

  How different the sunburned vega from the random hills and green sweeps of Ireland, where she had learned to

  ride with her father. They had rented hacks from a local riding-stable, but there had not been in them a quarter; of the speed that was in this particular horse. His pace was a good one despite the heat and the growing sting of dust in the air, but Ricki didn't want to overtire him and in a while she slowed him down and glanced round for shade where they could rest before riding back to the ranch. A stranger to the plains, she could not get lost, for Don Enrique had supplied her with a horse that would always take her home to the ranch if she was in any doubt of its location.

  A patch of grey-green shrub and prickly-pear showed ahead and she made for it. There she slid from the saddle and looped the bridle around a branch of the shrub. She contemplated resting awhile with her back against boulder that reared above the turf, but she had done this once before on a solitary ride and had been attacked by the spiteful and tenacious ants that belonged to this part of the country. She wrinkled her nose and scratched her hand in distasteful recollection, wandering instead to the edge of the shrub to gaze upwards where an elevation of rock gave back in the stillness the sound of trickling water. She guessed there was a fall or a stream up there, and was about to make for it when another sound caught her attention.

  She swung round sharply and listened again. Now she heard it plainly, the angry, frightened bleat of a goat, and when she hastened round the ungainly shapes of prickly-pears that were taller than herself, she saw a goat, shaggy and brown, with one of its front hoofs trapped in a groove that the hot sun had opened in the ground.

  Ricki approached the animal, then paused, uncertainly, as it lashed out with its hindlegs and looked dangerous in its distress. Its eyes, green and malignant, glared at her, and she realized that it would be the height of folly to go forward and attempt to help the infuriated goat get loose! But she couldn't leave the animal bleating and straining like that, and after gazing thoughtfully at the groove that imprisoned me hoof, she decided that if the groove was drenched with water and became slippery with mud, the goat would be able to get free on its own.

  A minute later she was clambering up the rocks towards the sound of running water. It was a small fall running into a narrow stream, and for the next quarter of an hour, it might even have been longer, Ricki proceeded to fill her stiff cordobes with water and to carry it down to the sun-groove where the goat was imprisoned. It was hot work scrambling up and down the rocks, but eventually Ricki returned with yet another hat-full of water to find the goat had got free and made a hasty retreat.

  Ricki smiled her relief and pushed the damp hair back off her perspiring forehead. Her riding shirt was clinging to her, and she took a sudden alarmed look at the sky. A reddish haze lay over the sun, and eddies of dust were being whipped across the plains by a wind that had in­creased in velocity and now felt as though it were blowing off a furnace.

  She decided hastily that it was time to go, and ap­proached the shrub where she had tethered her mount who no longer stood t
here, brown and large, and sure of the way home!

  Ricki's throat went dry and she quickly scrambled up the rocks to see if he had slipped his tether in order to seek a drink, but the stream babbled on between the rocks and there was no reassuring horse with its head bent aver the water. Some time during her rescue operation, perhaps unnerved by the wail of the wind, her mount had slipped the tether she should have made more secure and gone off home without her.

  It was frightening, standing there all alone, lost on the wild plains with a dust storm coming on. Ricki replaced her cordobes with a shaking hand and tied her neck-scarf across her mouth to keep out some of the dust. She would have to stay here until the storm blew itself out. There was at least a bit of shelter among the rocks, and water nearby to keep thirst at bay. From all accounts a dust storm could last from one hour to several, and she could only hope that this one would soon blow itself out.

  She settled herself in the shield of a boulder, braving the ants in preference to the wind that was howling and puffing dragon-breaths of dust and heat ahead of its fury. It had been crazy of her to ride out and chance this, Ricki berated herself, knees drawn up and head tucked well down so that she felt half stifled by her scarf and her cordobes. The air grew choking, and her limbs began to feel as though they were dissolving in the heat.

  Time became a vacuum - a dust vacuum in which she was held in her crouching position until her hazy mind took in a sudden deathly stillness and she realized that the storm had dropped as suddenly as it had arisen. She tore the scarf from her dry mouth and rose out of her cramped position. With stinging eyes she took in the plains that looked wilder than ever. Shrubs had been torn out of the soil and carried for miles, and the strange prickly-pears were grey with dust.