I was taking in more. The alcove had been fitted with small, elaborately-wrought cupboards, some of them decorated with Moorish designs, some of the finest marquetry. Mostly their doors stood open, displaying the contents of the shelves. Babies’ clothes were there in abundance; tiny garments of silk and lace, some outdoor garments of wool, embroidered in Moorish patterns, as if this waxen tableau, dressed and with their jointed limbs rearranged, might be taken out for their airing when the harsh winter winds tore at the castle garden. There were bonnets with ribbons, and little knitted socks to put on their wax feet. Some of the clothes had faded or yellowed with age; many were quite new. The Marquesa moved among them, touching them, feeling the various fabrics. When she spoke, her voice was more gentle than I imagined it possibly could be.
‘You care for them well, Mariana. Your children flourish.’
The blank, ravaged features turned towards her, the lips twisted, but she did not speak.
‘Mariana dresses all her children herself. Shawls and caps and dresses and petticoats. There are no more beautifully dressed children in the whole of Spain.’
Those delicate, pretty hands pressed together, then they smoothed the ruffles of her white silk dress. Gently she touched a cradle, and set it rocking, adjusted a sheet about the shoulders of the sleeping infant. I caught myself then … now I was beginning to believe that these really were children.
Unable to bear it any longer, I turned and ran down the length of that room of Moorish splendour, opened and slammed the door behind me. The companion waited there. Looking at my face, she made an exclamation of concern, and led me to a chair.
I bent my head between my knees, struggling to control the faintness that threatened. In the heat I shivered violently, as if I had come from a place of horror.
* *
We sat in the courtyard, in the deep shade of a tree that must have struggled for centuries to grow in that rocky place. Perhaps I had experienced a period of unconsciousness. I seemed hardly to remember how I got there. The collar of my dress was unbuttoned, and the Marquesa was bathing my face with a damp cloth. Finally she pressed it into my hand. ‘You are better. Drink some wine!’ I was both ordered to drink the wine and feel better. The Marquesa would have little patience with those who grew faint, nor would she for long have continued to bathe my face.
‘You saw her? ‒ that poor demented woman who plays with her dolls as if they were children? ‒ who believes they are children. Your grandfather married that woman. That woman is Lady Blodmore. She is also the daughter of Santander.’
I sucked in the dry air, and brought the wine glass once more to my lips. The words didn’t make sense. The woman seated beside me was mad. As mad as the poor creature playing with her dolls.
‘You don’t believe it? Neither did I ‒ for a time. Neither did Santander, until he was forced to believe it. That woman ‒ she was promised, betrothed to the eldest son of the Duque de Burgos. She was to make the greatest marriage in Spain, bring great honour to Santander. He guarded her well, but he also trusted her well. He brought her to stay at my palacio at Sanlucar, so that we could go over to Doñana for the autumn hunting. And I had brought Blodmore. The two came together. They became lovers under our eyes, and we did not see it. She was seventeen, he was thirty-three. They were married secretly, and the girl, Mariana, was with child. Except for that, Santander could have moved swiftly to have the marriage annulled, with a good chance of success. Blodmore was Protestant, and they had defied the laws of the Church in not seeking permission. But the girl was already pregnant, and Santander did not know which way to turn. He did not inform the Duque. There was still hope, but little hope because the girl was madly in love, and even if the marriage had been annulled, she swore she would tell the Duque herself, that she would never give up Blodmore or her child.
‘And you?’ The words came out weakly.
She shrugged. ‘I was a woman scorned. Cheated. This little chit of seventeen had taken the man I wanted. In my own house they had become lovers. From my own house they had stolen away to be married. By a Carmelite Friar. Santander made certain the man was silenced. No ‒ he did not have him killed, though Santander is capable of it. The friar was sent to an enclosed order in the far north of Spain. For twenty-five years he has not spoken to another in the outside world. The page bearing the record of the marriage had been removed from the register at Sanlucar. Such things we were able to do, Santander and I. The rest ‒ the rest was the hand of God.’
I was coming to life again, strength returning. ‘Was it the hand of God which caused you to marry Don Paulo?’
She looked at me, the anger now evident in that pale, thin face. ‘I do what I choose. God does not tell me what to do. I married Santander because I chose to do so.’ She had no need to say she had done so in a passion of rage and jealousy against my grandfather and the young girl, Mariana, who had taken him from her. I wondered again at the fashion in which these waves of passion seemed, in their season, to rule our lives. My grandfather, my mother, myself ‒ all swept away, all caution, prudence and reason gone. And this woman beside me ‒ for all her power and position, for all her habit of command ‒ it had been sheer, blind jealousy, the need to revenge herself on my grandfather which had impelled her into a marriage that had been one of convenience only.
‘We separated them at once, of course. Santander was for sending the girl away to my estate in Galicia until the child was born, putting it out that she had been ill and must recover her strength before her marriage. Blodmore, poor fool, was ordered from my house, and took himself to Jerez and bought that place to begin to prepare a home for Mariana. A feeble, hopeless gesture … He should have known me better than that. He should have known I would not let him have things so easily … he should have known.’
I thrust at her, growing angry now, ‘Maria Luisa told us that Don Paulo’s daughter died of smallpox ‒ which she caught from you ‒ at that palacio at Sanlucar.’
The pale face flushed. ‘Do I look as if I have suffered smallpox?’
‘Some people are not marked. She is marked.’
‘The smallpox came from a stupid maid who had been in contact with some sailor in Cadiz. I, of course, had been vaccinated.’
I did not believe her. People like the Marquesa never suppose they would fall victim to the diseases of the common sort. I wondered if, twenty-five years ago, vaccination had been a routine practice unless there was an outbreak which drove people in fear to seek protection. A girl and a sailor from Cadiz … it easily could have come that way, but it was possible the Marquesa had been the first to contract the illness. No one but these two, the Marquesa and Don Paulo, would ever know with certainty.
‘Mariana contracted it. She was very ill. We expected her to die. It would have solved a lot of problems if she had died. No one should have been able to sustain the fever she suffered and still live. But she lived. Every day Blodmore came, begging admission, and every day he was sent away ‒ for his own protection he was told. She recovered very slowly, her face marked, as you saw. I did not believe the child could still have survived within her, but the doctor said it still lived. When she was able to be moved, we brought her here, away from the humid air of the coast. She came in a closed carriage, and no one ever saw her leave Sanlucar, or enter here. I brought women from the north to care for her, and told everyone she was a young, distant cousin, in need of a long rest, and the sun of Andalucia. By then it was evident she was to bear a child. It came at barely seven months. It lived for two days, then died. But the fools had stupidly allowed her to see the child. They had allowed her to hold it. In her weakened condition her mind spun fantasies ‒ what fantasies who knows? But the dead child was too much for her poor mind. When it died she wept and screamed for it, until, in desperation someone snatched a doll from one of the children of the castle servants here, and put it in her arms. Then she was quiet, and comforted. Since then she has known nothing else, appears to want nothing else.’
‘
But my grandfather ‒ you cannot have kept him away when she was so ill, when the child was born.’
‘When a living child was born, we admitted him. It was his child. A son. His heir. We admitted him to see Mariana. The smallpox that had taken her beauty must have been a terrible shock to him, but I have to grant to him that he never faltered. He began to make plans to take her and his son back to Ireland. Then the child died, and her reason went with it. Once again she suffered high fever. Childbed fever. Once again we expected her to die. It would be better if she had. Blodmore stayed here, went to her bedside frequently, but in her fever she did not know him. For weeks it dragged on. And then the fever receded. She is strong, like her father. She survived. Only once did she look at Blodmore and know him. Her poor weakened mind associated him with her suffering, the loss of her child. There was hysteria and once again, fever. The doctor forbade him to see her. He waited. For months more he waited in that house in Jerez. Then, when he was once more admitted by the doctor, Mariana had regressed to her own childhood. She knew her father, she knew me because by then I was as familiar as her attendants. She knew her dolls. She did not know Blodmore. Since she shrank from strangers, she shrank from him. She seemed to have some memories of her former beauty, because she would sit before her mirror, pulling at the craters on her face, as if to tear them away. She seldom spoke. Several times Blodmore tried to draw from her some memory of him, but there was none. His time in her life had been brief, and it was obliterated. All she wanted was her child again, and another child was what she never could have. Even Blodmore was defeated in the end.’
The harsh but nervous laugh broke through again. ‘Oh, I have to admit that he behaved well ‒ he behaved well then, when the damage was done. He would have taken her back to Ireland with him, hideous and feeble-minded as she was. He would have taken her to live in the house in Jerez, if she had wanted that. But still she shrank from him, cried for her father, and her child, and wanted no part of him. In the end he recognised that it would have been the greater cruelty to take her from here.
‘So he returned to Ireland and never came again. Each year Santander tells me, the profits from Blodmore’s share of the bodega are deposited with the bank to be used for her needs. Santander, of course, refuses them. So Blodmore went back to Ireland, with a living wife who was no wife. Some stubbornness or sense of remorse held him back from trying to have the marriage annulled. Over this point he would certainly have encountered Santander’s opposition. It would have been a terrible thing, a public scandal with repercussions reaching very far. To the world, Santander’s daughter is dead. Blodmore agreed to let it be so.’
I was thinking of the single sheets of paper, one for each year, bearing the Santander signature. Ella está viva. She lives. Only his death had released my grandfather from the vows of his marriage. The living shell of it remained here, in this castle at Arcos, under the bright Andalucian sky.
‘He greatly wronged us ‒ me and Santander.’ She was speaking now quite softly, after a long pause. Perhaps she had been letting me ponder all she had said, letting me see how it had marked our lives. ‘He died without an heir, and his beloved Clonmara went to Richard Selwin. And I brought Richard Selwin back here, and offered him Elena and a large dowry. In the end, my blood, the blood of my family, will inherit Clonmara. And now you have come, and the Blodmore strain is back with us once more. You will bear Santander’s first legitimate grandchild ‒ who knows what other by-blows are around? This is the child of his beloved Carlos. I decided that you should know what it is you have done, what weight lies on your shoulders. I had chosen to have Blodmore, but with one look at a wide-eyed girl he lost all that I could have given him.’
‘He loved her. He must have loved her!’
‘He lusted for her. It is as simple and as common as that. Your family seems to make a habit of these kinds of hasty marriage. Blodmore’s first wife ‒ utterly unsuitable, but it didn’t matter to him. He wanted her. He got her.’
‘He loved my grandmother. I’m quite certain of that. I’m certain too that he must have loved Mariana.’ I would not stop defending him. I knew now the agony he must have endured during that year of exile. I loved him more. ‘If …’ I said. ‘If he had been allowed to have Mariana after they had been married, everything would have been all right. Yes, I know … Don Paulo was more ambitious for her, but with my grandfather she would have been happy. He would have taken her back to Clonmara and the child would have been healthy and would have lived. There would have been other children, living children, not wax dolls. My mother would have had brothers and sisters. But you separated Mariana and my grandfather. You threatened that poor girl with annulment, with bearing her child in secret. You deprived her of her husband’s presence, the very sight of him. All to satisfy your own jealousy. You married Don Paulo to show that you could marry any man by lifting your finger ‒ Don Paulo, her father!’
‘You go too far, girl! I did not ask you here to ‒’
‘And I did not ask to come. I did not ask for the knowledge you’ve forced on me. Is it to have still more revenge you’ve brought me here? It’s useless, you know. You can’t reach into the grave. He’s dead! He died among those who loved him. He died doing the thing he most loved to do. He is buried where his heart lies. That you can’t touch!’
‘So … the mouse stirs and squeaks and pretends to be a lion. Believe me, girl, you will know … you will know what you have done. You will know it, and say nothing ‒ nothing to anyone. Not to that drunken fool, your mother. Not to that vain, charming weakling, your husband. Not to that long-nosed nobody, Maria Luisa. You are a Blodmore. You have his blood. They tell me your own father is a scoundrel. Your mother is a disgrace. This is what you bring to Santander! Twice in his life you Blodmores have struck to his heart. How he hates you! Live with the knowledge, girl. Do not think you have rights ‒ you have no rights in this family. We owe you nothing. Think of this feeble-minded creature here, and know that you owe us everything. Live to repay it. But repayment will take a lifetime. It will take all the energy and dedication you possess. Although Santander loves him, in my opinion Carlos is a poor sort. But you have married him and you will ‒ you must ‒ be the perfect wife, whatever treatment he cares to hand out to you. You will not run off as your mother did. You will stand by your promises. You will measure up to our standards now. You will do as we say.’
I rose. ‘I will do what I believe is right. I think I had better leave, Marquesa. The sun is hot, and it is a very long way home.’
I was striding across the courtyard when her voice reached me again.
‘You will eat before you go, girl. You will eat for your child.’
I turned slowly. ‘Yes. Yes ‒ you are right, Marquesa. I will eat for my child. I will have a healthy child, you know. We Blodmores are strong people.’
And before their eyes, in total silence, I ate a huge lunch. I drank wine, and had my glass refilled by the hand of Don Paulo. No servant was present to wait on us. It was entirely private. The Marquesa’s eyes seldom left my face, nor did Don Paulo’s, and yet I felt strangely liberated from the fear of them. They had told the worst there was to know; no longer did some unknown enmity haunt me. That morning I had been pale and trembling and nervous; many times I had wanted to be sick. That stage of my pregnancy seemed to leave me. I remember I strode from the Marquesa’s presence, having thanked her for her hospitality, and received no reply. I strode down the steep slope to where the carriage waited, refusing Don Paulo’s arm. On the drive back to Jerez I sat erect, and did not once reach for a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from my forehead. It was as if a rod of iron had been thrust into my back. For my grandfather’s sake I would have to be all the things they did not expect me to be; I would have to find strength where I had not known it existed. And I would love my child, shield it from them, if I could. I pondered the story I had heard, the living witness to it I had seen. Ella está viva. She lives.
* *
My mother was
at the vineyard house when Don Paulo’s carriage finally took me there. She swept me into her arms.
‘Oh, my darling! Maria Luisa only told me today! Yesterday she said you were visiting. I didn’t notice … Charlie, it’s true? ‒ you’re going to have a baby?’
‘Yes, Mother. A baby ‒ a child.’
Carlos was there, in the background, letting my mother have her way for the time being. ‘Oh, Charlie ‒ oh, Charlie!’ And she held me tighter.
Then her head came up. ‘But, darling, I’ve been waiting all day. All day you’ve been gone … with … with him!’
Very gently I disengaged her arms. ‘Yes, Mother. Don Paulo was kind enough to send his carriage for me. He took me to see his castle at Arcos. It is like a fairy-tale, Mother. Some time perhaps you’ll see it.’
‘I have never seen the castle at Arcos,’ Carlos said. ‘Except from the outside. It really belongs to the Marquesa de Pontevedra.’
I took off my gloves with great care, smoothing them. ‘Ah yes. The Marquesa. I met her. She is in residence. A … a great lady.’
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 20