The Turquoise Mask

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “I accept what is in my blood, Amanda. And so must you. There are times when one must rule by the brand and the scourge. Come with me.”

  The falcon’s untamed ferocity was upon him again, and I shivered inwardly. I would hate to bring my grandfather’s anger down upon me.

  I’d wondered why he’d brought me to this room, and now I saw. He went to a door that I had thought was a closet, and opened it upon stone steps running down into darkness, at the end of which was a faint radiance.

  “A secret passageway?” I asked lightly.

  His tone reproved frivolity. “I do not like a room in which there is only one exit. Nor did the men who built this house. Step carefully now. The light is dim.”

  He went ahead of me with confidence, since poor vision did not matter here. He knew his way, his hands touching narrow walls on either side as he went down the steps. I followed with less confidence, letting one foot feel for each step as I went down. There were not many steps before the passageway leveled and moved toward the dim bulb which hung from the ceiling at the far end. There Juan Cordova stopped before another door. Before he opened it, he put his ear against the wood panel, listening to whatever lay beyond.

  “I think there is no one there,” he said.

  Under his hand, the door opened quietly, and I followed him into the softly lighted patio. The passageway had not taken us outside Cordova walls, but only by a direct means to the patio.

  I offered him my arm, but he had brought his stick and he moved down the flagstone walk without faltering, and I walked at his side. Ahead of us, at the lower end of the patio, rose the small adobe building with the peaked redwood roof that held the Cordova art collection. I knew where we were going now, though I didn’t know why our going there should be secret—something concealed from the rest of the house.

  A dim lamp burned in the upper part of the patio, its rays barely lighting our way to this lower end. The small building was a dark shadow among other shadows, and thick curtains had been pulled across its windows. I felt a tensing in me as we neared the door—as though I approached some revelation that was to be dreaded. Perhaps this was a feeling I’d caught from my grandfather’s manner, since it was as if he approached some blood rite that was half mystical in nature.

  At the door he took out the ring of keys he had brought with him, and as his hands moved over a square metal box near the door, he seemed to stiffen.

  “The alarm is already off,” he said.

  At the low sound of his voice, a portion of shadow detached itself from a patch of chamiso and came toward us.

  “What are you doing here, Clarita?” Juan’s tone was irritable.

  She emerged into dim light, wearing black again, as she had at dinner, her face pale under starlight. “I have been watching. Watching him.” She gestured toward the adobe building. “You need no key. He is in there now.”

  Juan uttered an exclamation of annoyance and pushed the door wide. Whatever his intent toward secrecy, it had been defeated.

  “Who is there?” he called sharply.

  From around a bend that led into a wing at the far end of the central room, Gavin Brand came into view.

  “What are you doing here?” Juan asked in quick suspicion.

  “You know I have keys,” Gavin said. “There was someone around outside a little while ago. I wasn’t quick enough to catch him. He got away from me.”

  “Got away?” Juan challenged skeptically. “In this enclosed space?”

  “He managed.” Gavin was curt. “Perhaps through the back gate, though there was no one in sight on the hillside when I looked out.”

  Or through the side gate into the Stewarts’ yard? I thought, though I said nothing. There was no reason for such a suspicion, and I wondered why it came to mind.

  Clarita drifted into the room behind us. “Perhaps it was I you heard? I have been here for a little while, watching you.”

  “I came in to check whether everything was all right,” Gavin said, paying no attention to her. “As far as I can tell, nothing has been touched. No one has broken in or taken anything from the collection.”

  I’d stood back a little during this interchange, looking about the interior of the building. It was strangely like a church, with its high cathedral ceiling raftered to a peak overhead, and a chapel-like hush in the room when the voices stopped. One felt a sense of that awe which was reserved for the mystical—as if this were a place of worship. As perhaps it was—Juan Cordova’s worship of the art men had created. I remembered that Sylvia had said he collected these things for his own passion and pleasure, and did not readily share them with others.

  On shelves along a portion of wall were sculptured pieces and fine carvings from Mexico and Central and South America, as well as ancient Indian pottery from all the Americas. But mostly there were Spanish paintings—not all of them from earlier centuries.

  I recognized a Picasso from the blue period—a man and woman standing on a beach at the water’s edge, with gray-blue ocean and sky all around, and blue reflected in the sand under their feet, in their very clothes. There was a gypsy study by Isidore Nonell, who had influenced the young Picasso—a swarthy-complexioned girl against a green wash background. The impressionist Sorolla had lent his sunlight effects to a woman in a head scarf walking among the flowers of a sunny park.

  In spite of his clouded vision, which kept him from seeing sharply, Juan Cordova knew every item in the room, knew its place and its history, and he paused to tell me about this art he had acquired over so many years. He was clearly not pleased that Clarita should be here or Gavin, since for some reason this was a tour he had wanted to conduct alone with me, without the knowledge of the household. But he bore up under the circumstances and gave his attention to the paintings and to me.

  I had exchanged a single glance with Gavin, and found him oddly guarded and not like the sympathetic man I’d met at the picnic place and who had driven me out to the rancho. He did not want me here, and I wondered why.

  “I have been thinking,” Juan said, his eyes on the wall of Spanish pictures, as though he strained to see them. “Perhaps the time has come when I should share some of my treasures with the world. In my own way.”

  Gavin was silent, waiting, and I sensed resistance in him. Clarita seemed to hang on her father’s words.

  Juan went on. “I have decided to select five or six Spanish scenes and display them at the store. Gavin, you will have a space cleared for them, so they can be hung well apart.”

  “The insurance problems will be enormous,” Gavin said flatly, “and there is no space.”

  “Then you will put away wall hangings, rugs, weaving, so you can make space.”

  “We are not a museum.” Gavin was angry but controlled. “The craftsmen you would displace depend on our sales for their living. If you want these things shown, loan them to a museum.”

  “They must appear under the Cordova name,” Juan said harshly.

  “Articles have been taken from the store lately,” Clarita put in. “Perhaps it is wiser not to risk what is valuable.”

  Juan ignored her, starting down the aisle. “We will speak of this later, Gavin. Come, Amanda, there is more for you to see.”

  There was nothing to do but go with him, though my sympathy lay with Gavin’s intention for the store.

  Before a portrait hung halfway down the room, my grandfather paused and touched my arm lightly. “It is there before you. Look at it well. That is Doña Emanuella. Unfortunately, she was not painted by a great artist, but the portrait is good, adequate. It conveys her personality, her likeness.”

  I looked up at a painting which had been done rather in the manner of Velázquez, though the artist had far from his mastery. He had portrayed a dark girl in a black lace mantilla, with a cluster of pink flowers pinned to the round neck of her yellow court dress. The gown came snugly in at a waist that seemed all the more slim because of skirts which flared widely over an under-frame at each side, in the seventeenth
-century style of Philip IV’s court of Spain.

  She stood half turned, and with one hand she seemed to beckon with a full-blown yellow rose. Her mouth had a sulky look, though gaiety danced in her eyes. I could imagine that I looked again at a portrait of Doroteo Cordova—and perhaps to a lesser extent and with a little more imagination, at my own face.

  “You see the resemblance?” Juan asked.

  “I suppose I want to see it.”

  “And a resemblance to yourself?”

  I was silent, and unexpectedly, Gavin spoke for me. “Yes, for herself too. There’s a chance likeness there. I saw it the first time we met.”

  Had that been part of the reason for the current of recognition that had leaped between us on that first meeting? Was it because he had seen Emanuella and Doroteo in me, rather than recognizing me for myself? I felt somehow disappointed.

  “There was passion in Emanuella,” Juan said. “Spirit. Fire.”

  “I am none of those things,” I said hastily, wanting to stand on my own ground.

  “Are you so sure?” Gavin said. “Perhaps you’re all of them more than you recognize. Not that I believe these characteristics have come down to you from a legend.”

  I glanced at him in surprise and saw the guarded look was gone, and in his eyes was that same warmth that had existed briefly at the rancho this afternoon. Because the look disturbed me, I turned away, knowing I might be too ready to respond. That way lay danger.

  Juan did not see this interchange, all his attention given to the portrait, as he peered to see its detail, but I heard Clarita’s faint sniff of disapproval. She was staring at me with a high flare of color on her cheekbones and a challenge in her dark eyes. I gave her look for look, while Juan went on speaking of Emanuella, and Clarita’s eyes turned away first, though with an air of proud disdain.

  “Emanuella was a great beauty and she married young and was mother to several children,” Juan went on. “I’ve always thought her reputed immorality overrated. She was a little wild but not wicked.”

  “Paul Stewart seemed to think otherwise,” Gavin said.

  “Stewart!” There was distaste in Juan’s voice. “He fell in love with her picture in his writer’s way and he wrote about her to suit himself. Just as he was half in love with Doroteo.”

  “He has never had a woman worthy of him,” Clarita put in irrelevantly, and I glanced at her in surprise. Clarita—Paul? Was he the man Sylvia had hinted about?

  “He’s supposed to have done a good deal of research on Emanuella in Spain,” Gavin said.

  “Research!” Juan was emphatic. “He colored his facts. He made her what she never was. Amanda, you can be proud of the bloodline that comes down to you from that glorious woman.”

  He really believed in that bloodline, I thought, and I looked up at the sulky, beautiful face with its crimson mouth, lightly tinted cheeks and smoothly combed black hair, glimpsed beneath the fine lace of the mantilla. For just a moment I felt close to my mother. Then the sense of nearness fell away and I was looking into the face of an enchanting stranger. It was romantic to think that some bit of this glamorous woman had come down to me, but I didn’t really believe it. She belonged to another world and another time.

  “When you speak of the bloodline, you can’t forget the other portrait,” Clarita said tartly. “The Cordovas must claim her too as a relative. Inés as well as Emanuella.”

  “I am not likely to forget.” Juan gestured and we moved on to look at more pictures.

  There was a portrait of Cervantes, in which a strange yellow-green light glowed from the landscape behind him, touching his long thin face and the ruff about his neck. Next came a bullfight scene, with a fallen matador and blood streaking the sand of the ring, and then one of Spagnoletto’s scenes of torture and martyrdom that would have made a good companion piece for the Inquisition painting in Juan’s bedroom. I preferred the following painting of a Spanish street on a misty, rainy night, with a glowing nimbus shrouding the street lamps. Before this I stood for a long while, studying the effect the artist had achieved so well with his pigments.

  There were others, but Juan Cordova grew impatient. “Enough of all this! You can come back another time, Amanda, and look to your heart’s content. Now we will see the masterpiece.”

  Strangely, Gavin hesitated. “Must she see it?”

  “But of course she must. Perhaps it will be her heritage someday.”

  Clarita made her odd little sound of distaste, and Gavin glanced at me with sympathy. “Don’t let it give you bad dreams at night.”

  I was curious now, and when Juan moved on toward the hidden wing, I walked at his side.

  The portrait dominated a small alcove. If the building was given over to the mystical worship of beauty created by gifted painters, this was the central image before which one did homage.

  The painting hung against one white wall, framed in gilt and nearly life size. Unmistakably the incomparable artist, whose work I had seen in museums and in reproductions, had painted this and it was dramatic in its impact. The subject was a woman gowned in dark bottle green which had been banded with strips of creamy white. Like the dress of the other portrait, her skirts were extended widely at each side over a hidden frame, but this time the waist was thick, the woman stunted. The size of the dog which lay at her feet with its ears cocked told her true proportions. She was a dwarf, with flowing dark hair and a flat, pushed-in face. There was a strange serenity about the face, yet the dark eyes that looked straight out of the picture had something frightening about them.

  “The dwarf,” I murmured, and felt a sense of shock. But surely the relationship to Juan was only, as Eleanor and Gavin said, a legend.

  “Yes,” my grandfather said. “Doña Inés. She was cousin to Emanuella and a maid of honor to Maria Teresa, the Infanta.”

  “Velázquez,” I said. “No one else could have done this.”

  Juan Cordova looked pleased. “I’m glad you recognize a masterpiece. Yes. Velázquez painted it. It is the famous lost painting of one of the dwarfs he liked to portray in Philip’s court.”

  “But how did you ever—?”

  “Come to possess it?” Juan Cordova chuckled, and the sound was sly, wicked. “That is nothing we need to go into now. It has had many travels before coming into my hands. Eventually it will be sent back to Spain. But for now, it is the portrait of an ancestress and I treasure it for many reasons.”

  “Not all of them pleasant,” Gavin said. “Perhaps you’d better tell her the story, since you’ve gone this far.”

  If there had been friction between them a short while ago, Juan seemed to have put it aside, but I did not think he would have forgotten.

  “Inés was a fiercely passionate woman,” Grandfather said. “And apparently she adored the cousin she could not resemble. She murdered one of her cousin’s lovers—or at least a nobleman she thought was Emanuella’s lover. She stabbed him to death in his bed one night. An attendant apprehended her and she was sent to prison. She was never executed because she went completely mad. So now you have the story of our famous dwarf. That, too, is the blood that comes down to us.”

  I stared at that strangely serene face, with the eyes that suggested madness, and I could not help shivering. I remembered my father’s voice speaking of that “damnable dwarf.”

  “Any such strain—if it ever existed—has obviously long since been diluted,” Gavin said. “Don’t worry about it, Amanda.”

  “It is there,” Juan Cordova contradicted coldly. “The passion, the fury, the lack of restraint. It crops out in all of us again and again. In myself. In Doroteo. In Eleanor. Even in you, Clarita. About Amanda, I do not know.”

  I looked up at the portrait with a growing sense of dismay. What Gavin said was surely true, yet I remembered the way my father had watched me, the way he had fought any signs of temper in me. But there was no reason to be afraid. No real reason.

  “I’m not like that,” I said.

  Gavin reached out
a hand and turned off the light that gave the painting its individual illumination. “I’ll admit it’s haunting. But you’ll throw it off as soon as you turn your back on it, Amanda. Your grandfather has too much of an obsession with these supposed female ancestors.”

  “I am proud of them,” Juan Cordova said, and I knew that, strangely, this was true. He actually took pride in fancying this wild strain in himself and in others of his blood.

  I was aware of Clarita there beside him, her dark gaze on the portrait with a certain avidity, as though she had, in this too, patterned herself after her father, worshiping at the shrine of the dwarf.

  “Perhaps you encourage the strain to exist,” I said to Juan. “If your children grow up haunted by that picture and its story, every small loss of temper might be frightening. Or—it might become something to indulge.”

  Gavin agreed. “Exactly. That’s what has happened to Eleanor. Juan has encouraged her to indulge herself in wildness because he’s proud of this supposed strain.”

  “The strain is there.” Clarita echoed her father. “We cannot escape it.” In the bright lighting that illumined the rest of the paintings, her face seemed stark, colorless—a Spanish portrait in black and white, with the eyes shining darkly in her pale face.

  The old man did not look at her. “This is not so,” he said in response to Gavin. “It isn’t possible to encourage what isn’t there. The strain is visible in all the Cordovas. But in Eleanor it is only a youthful unruliness.”

  “Then it’s time for her to grow up,” Gavin said. He sounded hard again and unrelenting. This was the side of him I did not like. He would approve and encourage—up to a point where a woman wanted to go her way. Then he could be as domineering as my grandfather. My feelings toward him were ambivalent, and in either phase I could feel the other side near. He would never be for long the kind and sympathetic man I had known this afternoon.

  I turned away from the now unlighted picture of the dwarf Inés, leaving it to its own demented gaze, and moved out of the wing. My steps echoed on the tile floor and Juan Cordova must have heard me, though he stayed where he was, speaking earnestly to Gavin. Clarita stayed with them. I didn’t want to hear any further arguments between them, and I returned to the painting of Doña Emanuella and looked up into those dancing, provocative eyes. There was no madness there.