Praise for
THE LINES BETWEEN US
“In The Lines Between Us, D’Harlingue has created a captivating debut novel filled with unique characters, exquisite details, and intriguing family secrets. A diary and letters furtively passed down over three hundred years from grandmother to granddaughter transport readers back in time and move them forward as the mysteries are elegantly revealed. This book is about women’s honor, overcoming heartache, and bravery.”
—JILL G. HALL, author of The Black Velvet Coat
“Rebecca D’Harlingue’s The Lines Between Us is a heartfelt and intelligent novel about love, family, and the ties that bind us to generations past.”
—MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS, author of The Last Watchman of Old Cairo
“In her meticulously researched epistolary novel The Lines Between Us, Rebecca D’Harlingue weaves a tale of familial love, brutality, and sacrifice during the seventeenth-century Spanish Inquisition. D’Harlingue’s elegantly crafted, intriguing story spans the Old and New Worlds, exploring the oppression and power of generations of women bound together by a dark family secret—and their modern-day descendant’s quest to uncover the truth about her ancestry.”
—KRISTEN HARNISCH, international best-selling author of The Vintner’s Daughter and The California Wife
“Well-kept secrets maintain unbroken lines connecting generations for three centuries in this arresting story about women and the compromises they must make for survival. The author immerses us in 17th-century Spain and doesn’t let us emerge until 21st-century America, when Rachel fills in the missing spaces. Well-written and engaging, the tale rings true and affirms women’s strength, desire to be heard, and fierce love of family.”
—LINDA STEWART HENLEY, author of Estelle
THE
LINES
BETWEEN
US
Copyright © 2020 Rebecca D’Harlingue
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published 2020
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-743-2
E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-744-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020906001
For information, address:
She Writes Press
1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
Book design by Stacey Aaronson
All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
To my husband, Art, for your love and encouragement
in all of my pursuits,
and to our children, Ben and Kate,
for giving us joy each day.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
OLD WORLD
Chapter 1 — Ana
Chapter 2 — Emilio
Chapter 3 — Ana
Chapter 4 — Emilio
Chapter 5 — Ana
Chapter 6 — Emilio
Chapter 7 — Ana
Chapter 8 — Emilio
Chapter 9 — Ana
Chapter 10 — Emilio
Chapter 11 — Ana
Chapter 12 — Emilio
Chapter 13 — Ana
Chapter 14 — Emilio
Chapter 15 — Ana
Chapter 16 — Emilio
Chapter 17 — Ana
Chapter 18 — Juliana
Chapter 19 — Ana
Chapter 20 — Juliana
Chapter 21 — Ana
Chapter 22 — Juliana
Chapter 23 — Ana
Chapter 24 — Juliana
NEW WORLD
Chapter 25 — Rachel
Chapter 26 — Rachel
Chapter 27 — Rachel
Chapter 28 — Rachel
Chapter 29 — Rachel
Chapter 30 — Rachel
Chapter 31 — Juliana
Chapter 32 — Rachel
Chapter 33 — Juliana
Chapter 34 — Rachel
Chapter 35 — Juliana
Chapter 36 — Rachel
Chapter 37 — Juliana
Chapter 38 — Rachel
Chapter 39 — Juliana
Chapter 40 — Rachel
Chapter 41 — Ana
Chapter 42 — Rachel
Chapter 43 — Juliana
Chapter 44 — Solomon
Chapter 45 — Juliana
Chapter 46 — Rachel
Chapter 47 — Juliana
Chapter 48 — Rachel
Chapter 49 — Mercedes
Chapter 50 — Luz
Chapter 51 — Dolores
Chapter 52 — Lizzie
Chapter 53 — Jenny
Chapter 54 — Rachel
Chapter 55 — Rachel
Chapter 56 — Helen
Chapter 57 — Rachel
Chapter 58 — Rachel
Chapter 59 — Rachel
Chapter 60 — Rachel
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PROLOGUE
It is more commonplace in story than in life that loved ones are witness to dying words that carry meaning or forgiveness. So it was with me, for, though I heard my mother’s words, they served only to confound and injure.
“I am like Ana,” she had said. “I have failed Juliana.”
But I knew no Juliana, nor an Ana who had disappointed. I knew only that my mother had left me and would not now explain. In my profession I interpret others’ words within boundaries prescribed by a meticulous author. That world is less than real, but there is no dire consequence for turning down a wrong path of understanding.
What would come to pass would cause me to rethink my mother’s final words, as when some occasion of joy or sorrow compels us to reinterpret all that preceded, as though the past could be purified or tainted by it.
Rachel Pearson Strand
St. Louis, Missouri, 2014
OLD WORLD
1
ANA
Madrid, 7 February 1661
Upon awakening, sequestered behind thick bed curtains, Ana couldn’t place the reason for her agitation. Then it came to her. Yesterday, in the study of her late husband, Emilio, she had come upon something totally unexpected. She had found a diary, a diary she had not known existed.
It had been over a year since Emilio’s death, and she had entered his study only those few times when she had needed to look for a medical reference. She never lingered. Yesterday as she had removed a volume from a shelf, she had seen a small, well-worn, leather-bound book behind it. She opened to the first page, and upon reading Journal of Emilio Cardero Díaz, she quickly snapped it closed. She had stumbled to a chair and after a few frozen moments had resolutely arisen and abandoned the room and the diary.
For many months after Emilio’s death, Ana’s grief had been a friend in its familiarity. Like a miser who cannot bear to see his riches dwindle, she had guarded her sorrow like a treasure, fearing that its waning would shrink her heart. She had lost the imag
e of him shortly after his death, and her inability to conjure it had left her betrayer and betrayed. Nothing had comforted. The emptiness could not be touched or taken. Ana had felt herself to be a woman who had asked very little of God, and to whom God, in His turn, had given very little.
Then, slowly, her healing had come so far that she could look at loveliness and see its curvature and depth, not the featureless plane that all had been before. What would this journal do to that fragile equilibrium?
Now as she lay in her bed, Ana knew that she could not ignore the book, that she would retrieve it that night.
“The Sánchez woman has been here with her sick child already. I sent her away, but there’s no doubt that she will return again. If she would harness into something worthwhile the persistence she uses in plaguing you with her problems, I’ve no doubt she could better her lot.” Clara felt no need to knock on her mistress’s door in the morning, nor to announce her presence in a gentler manner. In fact, she often employed the tactic of making some statement which was calculated to get a rise from Ana. The day was about getting down to business, and she was glad that Doña Ana had finally seemed capable of making herself useful again after the long desert of her grief.
Clara’s scheme did not work this morning, however, and she detected no life behind the heavily curtained walnut bed with its ornately spiraled posts. More than once after Don Emilio had died, Clara had urged Ana to take the curtains off her bed. That way, Clara argued, when she entered Ana’s room in the morning, she could determine whether her mistress was awake yet and guide her actions accordingly. Of course, this was a specious argument, for Clara’s purpose in entering Ana’s room was always to rouse her. But Clara was a woman who did not like concealment, and she reasoned that a widow had no need of the privacy of a curtained bed, especially in the scorching Madrid summer. Ana had proved more stubborn than Clara on this one point, and the curtains remained. Even Clara would not presume so much as to draw the bed drapes aside, so she placed Ana’s breakfast tray on the bulky marriage chest and left the room noisily, her displeasure apparent in her gait.
Assured of Clara’s departure, Ana drew back the curtains and endeavored to put the journal from her mind for now. Dwelling on it would gain her nothing. The bed was high, but her feet had no trouble reaching the floor. Ana was tall for a woman, a fact her father had frequently commented upon with distaste, as though her height were due to a lack of self-restraint.
Glancing toward the diffuse light from the oiled parchment windows, Ana was once again glad that she had not given in to her brother Sebastián’s pressure to have glass windows installed throughout the house. Here, at least in her private rooms, the parchment blurred and softened the world’s encroachment.
Ana wrapped herself in a loose robe, postponing the moment when she would don the encumbrance of the costume worn by women of her class. Recalling the comfort of the loose-fitting habit she had worn for eleven years while she lived in the Convent of Corpus Christi, Ana again reminded herself that the convent could be a refuge for widows.
She had entered the convent because, even with a father who had the king’s favor and was willing to pay a generous dowry, no groom had been found. She had lived with the nuns for eleven years but had not taken her final vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This was unusual, but Ana’s patience and kindness had deterred the Madre Superior from pressing the point.
Ana had not been alone in her lack of a special calling. For some it was an escape from poverty. Others were given to God by their families. If the family was wealthy, the convent received a generous endowment, and the girl might bring a servant with her. Life within was more restrictive, but worldly pleasures were possible. A young gallant might court one of the residents, spying on her through the grille of the choir, arranging to have poetry smuggled in, or even visiting his lady in the parlor. All of this could engender jealousy. It was possible to find peace in the convent, but also petty rivalries.
Still, Ana had been content there, discovering comfort and delight in the company of other women, having lived without mother or sister. Even so, she could not make up her mind to return, and her brother pressed her to stay out in the world. He had shown genuine sadness those years ago when Ana had requested of their father to allow her to enter the convent. It had seemed to her more desirable than becoming the maiden aunt in her brother’s house, a guest on the periphery of a real family.
In some ways, she had ended with that fate after all. She had her own home, but her brother had come to rely on her to counsel his motherless daughter, Juliana, who was now sixteen. Ana loved Juliana most deeply and was more than happy to fulfill this role, though there was always the reminder that Juliana was not her child. No, Juliana very closely resembled her beautiful mother. Juliana had been told that her mother died in childbirth, but in reality she had been taken when Juliana was one year old. No one was ever allowed to so much as speak the woman’s name, much less to mention the circumstances of her tragic end. Sebastián behaved as though he could obliterate through sheer will what to him was a disgraceful truth about the mother of his only child.
Despite what he had done, Ana loved her brother and knew that he had nearly been destroyed by the manner of his wife’s demise. So, since Emilio’s death, as Sebastián had imposed ever more frequently upon Ana to plan and supervise the elaborate dinners he gave for his political acquaintances, she willingly came to his aid.
Tomorrow was just such a dinner, and Ana sighed at the thought. She finished her breakfast of bread and let the thick chocolate drink that was so popular linger in her mouth an extra moment. She donned a plain dress, pulled her hair back into a simple bun, and went out to see what was ailing the Sánchez child.
Ana never hesitated to do all that her knowledge allowed her to do for a sick child. In this way, she told herself, she played out by proxy a woman’s role, for she had never had her own child. Though they had never spoken of it before their marriage, Ana and Emilio had each held the secret faith within their hearts that there might be a baby, for why would God deny them the blessings that He bestowed so lavishly upon others? When familiarity had worn through their initial shyness with each other, they had begun to speak of this wish. Ana was past her best childbearing years, but each thought that hope might not be in vain. Time passed, and Ana became pregnant but miscarried. After that, their loving became a chore, done methodically to achieve an end, no end in itself.
As no child came, they had slowly let their hope die, to appreciate what they had, to find their love again. Still, each time a youngster was brought to them for treatment, they had carefully shielded their eyes from each other.
“The rash is nothing serious, but I have an ointment that can offer your boy some comfort.”
“Thank you, señora, but if he does not need it to recover . . .” Ana suspected that her hesitation was due to embarrassment at having already encroached upon Ana’s charity. The mother had probably brought the child only because she had feared that the red marks mottling her son’s back were portents of a greater danger, for she had lost a daughter only the previous spring. The daughter had died in one of the hospitals for the destitute, and the woman had confided in Ana that she no longer trusted such places and for that reason had sought out Ana’s help. Though Ana knew from her husband that the charity hospitals varied in the care they offered, she did not try to convince the woman to place her child’s fate in their hands again.
“In fact,” Ana began, as she turned and rummaged through the jars on a high shelf, “every day I must inventory all of my medicines.” She continued, as though the ointment itself had now become her major concern, “I mix most of them myself, and some of them retain their potency for only a limited time.” She retrieved a jar and held it to the light. “Yes, this must be used shortly.” Having transferred the need from the child to the salve, Ana dipped three fingers into the jar and placed the unction on the palm of her opposite hand.
“This may feel a little cold, ch
ild,” she said softly to the boy, gently spreading the balm across his back in a circular blessing. As she traced his contours, the tension in the child’s body eased, but Ana did not notice when her comfort reached him. Her eyes saw only her own hand, and then not even that. Standing where Emilio had stood, her hand precisely miming the patterns she had seen a thousand times, she began to sink, to become engulfed by the sense of her dead husband. She yielded to the allure, and it was not that he was there with her, but that she merged with him and was subsumed in him, and there was consolation in that fusion. She did not wish to leave. This was not the rapture of the soul transfigured by the presence of God, as described by Santa Teresa de Ávila or San Juan de la Cruz, but it was consummation. Briefly she had escaped the prison of the body, which holds the mind hostage until death. Perhaps she would find this union with Emilio tonight as she read his journal.
2
Emilio
Journal of Emilio Cardero Díaz
Age 31
Madrid
January, Year of Our Lord 1639
Today I have seen the most wonderful play, The New World Discovered by Cristóbal Colón, written some twenty-six years ago by our great dramatist Lope de Vega. Lope shows to us a Colón who dares to dream amid a chorus of mockery. Surely his quest was not only for riches, but for truth.
I have always had the seed of desire to go to this New Land, not to conquer or convert, but to discover it anew for myself, to see what hope it offers. I will read what I can, and record my thoughts here, in preparation for the day when, free from obligations to my parents and siblings, I might make my journey.
February 1639
I have obtained a copy of a biography of Colón, said to be written by his son, Hernando. It was published in Venice some seventy years ago and was difficult to find. It is strange that so little has been written of this man, since Spain rode to glory on the discoveries of “el capitán de Isabel.” And what of those cries of “gold, God, and glory” that brought adventurers and holy men alike to the new lands’ shores? History will give its judgment to Colón, whose life affected the Old World and the New. Surely, though, the bringing of the Holy Faith to the poor heathens there cannot but be counted good.
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