'Juan, which artist might have painted your ward?' Raquel's lashes fluttered as she looked at him, as if sending some sort of love morse, one of those secret messages that pass between people having a romance.
He leaned in his white suit against a dark tree, while Senor Fonesca sat at his ease in a wicker chair, smoking a cigarette in a bone-coloured holder. 'Degas.' The senor spoke because Don Juan seemed to have no opinion to offer with regard to his ward. 'He alone could have sketched those slender limbs and those great eyes. Always his girls were slightly enchanted, as if like a summer cloud or a pattern on water they might vanish.'
'So, my dear,' Raquel arose with a laugh and a rustle of starched lace, 'you are not ras de terre like us? Papa, give the child another slice of almond cake ... we don't want her to float away, do we?'
'Go shopping!' the senor laughed. 'Juan, take away this spoiled daughter of mine and leave me with this child whose young mind is not cluttered up with fashion and cocktails and having fun!'
Don Juan smiled, gripped his stick and came across to Yvain. He stood in the attitude she knew so well, half leaning and looking down at her. 'Be a good pupil, nina, for I shall ask questions when we meet again.'
She met his eyes and found that he had become again her rather stern guardian. The shoulder she had leaned against was square and unapproachable, the hand that gripped the ebony stick could only have felt gentle in a dream.
'I hope you enjoy your day as much as I expect to, senor.' She gave her tutor a quick smile, for her guardian seemed not to want smiles from anyone but Raquel. She alone seemed to hold the key to his enigmatic personality.
'What shall I bring you?' Don Juan asked unexpectedly.
Her eyes widened until she seemed to see no other face but his, dark and distinguished and politely enquiring. She felt Raquel looking on, cool and amused, and yet with her fingers still upon the handle of her woven handbag.
'I ... I want nothing, Don Juan,' Yvain stammered.
'Not even a box of candies?' he asked, and this time there seemed to be a smile deep in his eyes.
'All right, candies,' she said, and smiled back tentatively at him. 'Not too sugary, please.'
'Caramels?' He quirked an eyebrow and then turned to Senor-Fonesca. 'We will be late returning, amigo, but I promise not to let your lovely daughter stray too far away from me.'
'Juan, you must not start acting the guardian with me ... you have no need.' Raquel laughed warmly and took his arm. 'I am not a teenager, you know.'
'I know, Raquel.' He smiled down at her, and to Yvain looking on his expression seemed very worldly in that moment. 'And now we had better be on our way if we are to catch the steamer.'
'Lo que tu quieras,' she replied, and Yvain heard Senor Fonesca draw in his breath, as if his daughter had admitted openly to being the Spanish grandee's willing slave.
Don Juan bowed briefly to the senor, looked a moment at Yvain, and then he and Raquel departed from the patio, the sound of his stick and her high heels dying away across the hall, followed by the closing of a door.
For a minute or so both Yvain and her tutor seemed content to enjoy the sense of peace that stole over the patio. It was as if conflicting emotions had been at war in the sunshine, but now there was only the natural sound of birds and the trickling of the wall fountain. The villa was a baroque structure with mellow walls, and there was a red oleander tree dripping scent and petals not far from where Yvain sat in a tub chair. Lovely flowers, she thought, but dangerous because of the poison in their sap.
'So, my child, you have a longing to learn things.' The senor made a steeple of his fingers and studied Yvain with a look of shrewd and friendly interest. 'Was it your own idea, or that of Don Juan? He is a young man of strong will, and it is unusual for a pretty girl to wish to study with a crusty professor the philosophy of art and literature. Most young girls have romance on their minds.'
She cupped an oleander flower and smiled shyly. 'I never had a real education, senor, and it's like a miracle that Don Juan should bring me to you to be tutored. I want to learn, to absorb, to grow up through learning. One stays immature without knowledge.'
'Ah.' A glint came into the senor's eyes. 'It might be thought unusual for a bachelor to have a ward, but it is the ward who is unusual. Juan is not a sentimental man. Had you been the foolish sort, I am sure he would have packed you off home with some money and a polite bow. He tells me you have no family?'
'Not any more, senor.'
'That is sad for you, and lonely. Everyone should have someone, which is one of the cliches I don't mind using. Perhaps you look upon Juan as a sort of uncle?'
'No — ' She broke into a smile that turned to a laugh. 'I can't really imagine myself calling him Tio Juan. He's much too aloof and important ... he's the lion of this island.'
'And you regard yourself as a caprice of his?'
‘Yes.’
'Do you know, my child, that there is cruelty and loneliness in the Spanish male?'
'I know it now.'
'Juan has given you cause already to know it?' Senor Fonesca leaned forward, his eyes intent upon her face. 'In what connection?'
'He objects a little to my friendship with Manrique Cortez. I... I suppose he considers me too immature to know how to handle a sophisticated person like Rique.'
'You enjoy the company of this young man, eh?'
'Not having had many friends, senor, it's always nice to find one. Rique's gay and good-looking and — '
'You feel flattered.' The senor smiled. 'Which is only natural. Having a daughter of my own, I know how much it means to a girl to be thought appealing.'
'Dona Raquel is beautiful.' Yvain spoke sincerely, though she had doubts about the beauty of the other girl's nature. 'She must always have been admired.'
'From a child,' her father admitted, not without a gleam of pride in his eyes. 'She resembles her mother, but Anna was gentle and kind and our few years together were very happy ones. My Raquel is a bit of a handful, and I am inclined to pity in advance the man whom she decides to marry.'
Yvain was absently shredding the petals of a flower, and she had a vivid mental picture of Raquel's jewelled hand tucked into the crook of a white-clad arm. Raquel Fonesca had decided that, it would be to her advantage, and also exciting, to become the bride of the Marques de Leon. What, then, would happen to Don Juan's ward? 'Of what are you thinking, my child, with your eyes all misted with mystery?'
Yvain looked at her tutor and summoned a smile. 'Life, when you come to think about it, is a very mysterious thing. Is it true that our path is plotted even before we are born?'
'El destino?' The senor looked thoughtful. 'I am inclined to think that each of us has a crossroads in his life - ah, you open wide the brown-gold eyes! Have I said something significant, senorita?'
'Yes - it's strange.' The petals dropped from her hand as she studied her palm, in which a fairground gipsy had seen a crossroads. She told her tutor of that palm reading and waited for him to smile, but he didn't.
'The true Romany has the gift of clairvoyance,' he said. 'Your guardian's mother was a Spanish gipsy, and I sometimes wonder if she knew in advance that her marriage to Juan's father would end in tragedy. The old Marques de Leon would not accept the girl, and when tragedy struck and she became a widow she fled with her baby son to South America. Juan grew to manhood there, and being strong-willed and ambitious he made good without the help of his father's family. It was out in Lima. . . .'
Senor Fonesca broke off and studied Yvain's intent young face. 'You have the capacity to listen quietly to a man ... has Juan ever unmasked to you or revealed a little of his pain?'
'His pain?' she echoed, remembering moments when he seemed lost in a dark sea of brooding, the lines etched deep beside his mouth. Times when his frown frightened her and she kept out of his way.
'That leg of his still troubles him. In the beginning the doctors out in Lima wished to amputate, but he wasn't having that and he travelled all the way to
England, where he placed himself in the care of a bone surgeon who set about rebuilding the leg, a protracted and agonizing series of operations, months of being encased to his hip in a plaster cast, setbacks, torment, his nerves drawn taut by the onslaughts of pain. It was a miracle that he kept the leg at all, which was shattered and crushed when the horse he was riding broke a hoof bone. Juan liked to gallop at a fast pace across the wild country and his mount was bounding up a hillside when the accident happened. Juan was thrown, the horse rolled upon him and his left leg was crushed.'
Yvain caught her breath and pictured vividly what it must have been like, the headlong fall of the horse, the plunging, lashing brute strength, pinning the Marques by his left leg.
'He must have been all alone,' she said in a stricken voice, 'out there in the wilds.'
'For some hours, until some vaqueros came along and found him, delirious in the hot sun, the horse dead beside him from the bullet he had fired to put the animal out of its misery. He once told me that only the thought of the gun in his belt kept him sane during those waiting hours. He knew he could go the way of the horse if his agony became too great to bear.'
'Only someone with a will of iron could have borne such a nightmare,' Yvain whispered. 'The pain, the hot sun, the awareness that he was alone and helpless.'
'Don Juan is both a Spaniard and a gipsy, my child, of the kind who set out long ago to conquer new worlds and who suffered tortures and made others suffer. Because of that strength born in him, that control of emotions and nerves, he survived the accident, the exposure in the sun, the long months of slow healing, and he returned to Spain, to dwell alone in the haunted splendour of the castillo. Haunted for him because of the unhappiness his mother had known there.'
'I've seen her portrait,' Yvain said softly. 'It would be hard for him to forgive those who had hurt her. How could they, when she was like a lovely dark rose?'
'Yes, Rosalita.' The senor's gaze dwelt sombrely on the roses that grew against a wall of the patio. 'I met her on a brief visit to the island. In those days I had a professorship at a college in Madrid and I had not yet made my home on the Isla del Leon. I met Rosalita only a short while before she and Juan's father left the island never to return. She had a glow about her, a kind of witchery. The Marquesa, Juan's grandmother, was a forbidding and unbending woman. She had chosen a girl for her son to marry, but he chose to make a gipsy dancer his wife ... not only his wife but the future Marquesa ... and for that his family never forgave him.'
'How snobbish!' Yvain exclaimed. 'To think class and wealth more important than love!'
'Senor Fonesca gave the soft, slightly cynical laugh of middle-age. 'The passions of youth, my child, have little value in the eyes of people who have never known them. In Juan's family it was natural for money to marry money; for prestige to be wedded to prestige. His father broke a long-established rule, and I sometimes wonder. . . .'
'Yes, senor?'
'About Juan, the son of a rebellious noble and a lovely gipsy witch. If it had not been for his accident, which quietened the restless spirit in him, I don't think he would have assumed his title or his position here. Juan de Leon is two men. Catch him unaware and you will see the caged lion in his eyes. At other times the ironic humour of the Spaniard who accepts what has to be. El destino.'
It was warm on the patio, yet Yvain gave a cold little shiver. Destiny could be cruel to some people, and she hoped that Don Juan was meant to find happiness to make up for the pain he had suffered. It had put lines in his face, silver in his hair, and deprived him of the ability to leap into the saddle of a spirited horse, to play tennis, to take a girl in his arms so they might enjoy together the fun and rhythm of a dance.
'How old is Don Juan?' she found herself asking.
'He's thirty-two, nina.'
'I thought him much older! Why, he treats me like an infant!'
Her tutor laughed. 'To Juan I expect you seem very young and innocent. I believe he lived up to his name out in Lima, a city of lively and exotic ladies.'
'Don Juan,' she murmured. 'The great lover whose heart was never touched.'
'The legend is that he did fall in love — just once.'
'Really?' Her eyes widened and filled again with the image of Raquel clasping his arm with jewelled fingers. He had glanced down at the Spanish girl with worldly eyes, admiring her beauty and wit, and perhaps ready at last to let his heart be captured.
'It is now time we began our lessons.' Senor Fonesca rose to his feet. 'The sala is cool and there, are books and objects of art for you to study.'
The sala — a room Yvain was to become very familiar with - was set out with furniture of the Isabella period. Dark, richly carved, so that the senor's art collection was more graceful and colourful by comparison.
Yvain noticed at once some delightful figures of children in terracotta and she was allowed to handle them carefully.
'You must love objects of art with a pang of the heart,' she was told.
'These are charming,' she said, but as she stroked the figures she felt nothing but an admiring interest. She looked at the paintings on the panelled walls, and saw the eyes of real people instead of the painted eyes. She felt shaken. Inanimate things, no matter how beautiful, could not give her a heart pang. Only people could do that. Only anger or compassion or joy.
'Charming,' she said again, and felt her tutor's eyes dwell shrewdly upon her.
'We will begin with the story of Titian.' The senor took a large book from the shelves. 'I think you will be more in sympathy with his personality to begin with . . . it is later on that you will be ready for the master.'
Her eyes questioned, large and honey-coloured. 'Leonardo da Vinci,' the senor smiled, but it seemed to Yvain that he meant and implied something quite different.
CHAPTER SIX
TODAY was Sunday... no lessons, and a note from Manrique Cortez to ask her to go for a drive around the island.
The letter was handed to her at the breakfast table, so she was obliged to ask Don Juan if it would be all right for her to go. He glanced up slowly from his own mail. 'I have said that I have no objection to the young man ... as a friend, Yvain. Of course you may go driving with him.' 'Thank you.'
'It would seem, in any case, that we must dispense with the idea of a duenna for you. I have received an answer from Dona Augusta with regard to my invitation to her.
She has to decline on the grounds that she has started a small business and cannot possibly leave it to undertake a service that would not be permanent.' His smile was a mere flicker of the tips. 'Do you think you can bear to remain at the castillo without a chaperone?'
'Why should I need one?' she asked.
'Why indeed?' He quirked an eyebrow. 'But I seem to recall that you had doubts about my intentions when the new clothes arrived from Madrid.'
'I know you better now, Don Juan.'
'Do you really?' He reached for the coffee pot and refilled his cup. 'You have now arrived at the conclusion that I am not like my namesake, eh?'
'He was a heartless philanderer.'
'And what am I?'
She gave a rather confused laugh. 'You are a man of sophistication, and it must have amused you terribly that I was gauche enough to misunderstand your kindness — ' 'Why do you insist on calling me kind, a most avuncular thing to be?' He drank his coffee black. 'My actions are rarely motivated by sentiment. I am a practical man, like most Spaniards, and I don't like to see youth and intelligence wasted, least of all on a vulgar woman. I am pleased by the progress you are making with Senor Fonesca. He tells me that you have a natural aptitude for our language. Come, say something in Spanish!'
'I couldn't!'
'Don't be coy with me!' The lift of his eyebrow was mocking. 'Try to behave as if I were Manrique Cortez.'
'That's impossible!'
'Why, because he's of your generation and I am old enough to be your uncle?'
'I ... I don't think of you as an uncle,' she protested.
&nbs
p; 'But you are afraid I shall pounce, so you refuse to speak
a few words of Spanish to me.'
'You ... make me feel shy.'
'Shall I turn my back?' he mocked. 'Really, Yvain, you say I am kind, but all the time you think me stern. Yes, Luis?' He glanced at the hovering manservant.
'Senor Cortez has called for the young lady, senor. He waits in his car.'
'Gracias, Luis.' Don Juan looked at Yvain. 'No doubt you are impatient to join your admirer, so we will continue our discussion another time. Yvain, remember what I said to you. You are my ward and I don't wish people to get the idea that young Cortez is courting you.'
'I shall be very circumspect, senor.' She was so looking forward to the drive that her eyes were sparkling as she jumped up from the table. 'I don't know what time I shall be home . . . '
'That is hardly a concern of mine.' Her guardian spoke coolly. 'I am going out myself.'
'Oh - I hope you enjoy yourself, senor.'
'I am sure you will enjoy yourself, Yvain.' He gave her a brief bow. 'Run away, child. Don't keep the young man waiting.'
'No - good-bye.'
'Hasta la vista, nina. ' He said it rather pointedly, as if reminding her that he wished her to speak Spanish now and then.
She sped away from his daunting presence, across the hall to where Luis held open the front door. As she passed the manservant she felt the flick of his eyes, not quite so unfriendly as they had been, as if the presence of a young person in the house was a novelty. 'You have a fine day, senorita,' he murmured.
'Yes, Luis.' She smiled at him. 'In England when we have such sunshine, the day usually ends with rain.' Luis glanced at the brilliant sky. 'I don't think the senorita need
worry.'
'There you are, Yvain!' Manrique stood at the bottom of the steps, his smile a flash of white against his dark olive skin. She ran down to him, registering his attraction in a cream jacket, black silk sweater, dark trousers and sandals.
He caught hold of her hands and swept his eyes over her.
She wore a white dress encircled by a bronze-coloured belt, and her shoes were of bronze. The sun found little lights in her eyes and in her switch of auburn hair.
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