Vendetta in Spain

by Dennis Wheatley

  De Quesnoy nodded. ‘It certainly seems probable that they will make another attempt to kill me. I am most grateful for your Majesty’s concern for me.’

  For a while they talked on; then Don Alfonso told the Count that he would be in San Sebastian until the end of the month, and added that as soon as he could move about without discomfort he must come to lunch or dine at the Palace. A few minutes later he got into a trial six-cylinder car that the new Hispano Suiza Company had just made for him, and drove away at top speed.

  De Quesnoy was then carried down to the beach with Gulia walking beside him and, a little belatedly, they had their morning bathe. After it, when they had settled themselves in their deck chairs, she remarked:

  ‘I would not care to be in Don Alfonso’s shoes.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘From fear that you might be assassinated?’

  ‘He might be at any time; but it was not of that I was thinking. That poor young man has inherited every sort of trouble. Ever since he assumed power four years ago he has been compelled to change his Government every few months. The priests are constantly at him to maintain them in sucking the people’s blood and forcing bigotry upon them; the Army has been the other dominant power in Spain for so long that the Generals show open resentment at every reform proposed for it; and in opposition to the other two the Liberals never cease to press him to introduce more democratic measures. It needs only a really serious clash between the Right and Left to start another of our civil wars. If that happened he would lose his throne.’

  ‘I think you unduly pessimistic,’ de Quesnoy replied. ‘He is intelligent, courageous and has already won the love of the great mass of his people. He has also shown a tact in handling his Ministers that is quite astonishing in one so young. I should be much surprised if he does not find the means for keeping the Blacks, Whites and Reds from one another’s throats.’

  ‘He may as long as he does not feel himself to be personally involved. But he can be very high-handed and is extraordinarily pigheaded on some matters, such as the prerogatives of the Crown. Yet, unless he is prepared to sacrifice some part of what he considers to be his rights, a time is certain to come when he will find a great part of the nation against him. Another thing: now that he is a fully grown man women will begin to play a part in his life and an evil or arrogant one could have a disastrous influence upon him.’

  ‘He is certainly handsome enough for any number of pretty baggages to throw themselves at his head,’ the Count said with a smile, ‘and as time goes on they will, of course. At present he is said to be deeply in love with his Queen, but one can hardly expect that to last for ever. After all, it’s more or less a tradition that Kings are entitled to amuse themselves with mistresses as a relaxation from the burdens of State; so no one will count him much to blame if his name becames coupled with that of one or more lovely ladies. But I see no reason why he should allow them to dominate him.’

  ‘Just think of his ancestry,’ Gulia exclaimed.

  ‘His father was far from being a bad King, and his mother is a most admirable woman in every way: both wise and saintly.’

  ‘That his father’s first wife, Mercedes, happened to be his Queen does not alter the fact that he allowed himself to become so besotted about her that when she died he lost interest in everything. And look at his grandmother, Isabella II. There was a born whore if ever there was one. She chose the succession of Generals whom she allowed to ruin the country as though they were stallions, and put each through his paces in her bed.’

  Unnoticed by Gulia, de Quesnoy gave her a side-long glance, as she hurried on. ‘Then her mother, Maria Cristina. She was so obsessed with her Captain of the Guards that she had nine children by him, and all of them in secret. When the last of them was only a few hours old she had to put on her State robes and read her official speech at an opening of the Cortes. If allowing oneself to be forced into such a position is not enslavement to passion, tell me what is?’

  ‘Poor woman,’ the Count commented. ‘But you are right, of course, that the Bourbon blood is particularly easily inflamed. We can only hope that Don Alfonso’s share of it will not become overheated to the detriment of himself and his country.’

  Meanwhile he was thinking how surprising it was that Doña Gulia should have compared Generals to stallions and spoken of the Queen putting them through their paces in her bed. In high society and mixed company only the most oblique references were ever made to such matters, while it was unheard of for a lady even to mention such a subject when conversing alone with one of her husband’s men friends. He then remembered that her parents were middle-class intelligentsia, and that such people, while highly respectable, regarded it as hypocrisy to hedge themselves about with unnatural prudery. Not being a hypocrite himself, he decided that it was refreshing to talk to a beautiful and intelligent woman who was not ashamed to speak her thoughts with frankness. And that was precisely the effect that Gulia had intended her words to have upon him.

  After a few more days the Count’s leg was strong enough for him to walk unaided in the garden or down to the beach, and de Vendôme suggested that it would make a change for him to go in to San Sebastian. Gulia and Doña Eulalia accompanied them and after leaving the two ladies to do some shopping the Prince drove on through the old town, then along the coast road which almost encircles Monte Urgull, the great castle-topped hill that dominates the harbour, the bay of La Concha, and the city. Pulling up at the road’s extremity they sat for a while, now facing inland, to watch the yachts tacking in the bay with, beyond them, the long curved beach of golden sand swarming with holiday-makers enjoying the September sunshine, and at its furthest extremity Monte Izueldo, on a lower slope of which, set in its lovely garden, stood the Royal Palace of Miramar.

  Next day they lunched there with the King and afterwards watched him play polo. Soon after they entered the reserved enclosure a number of Gulia’s friends came up to her in turn. All of them asked where she had been for the past three weeks and reproached her for declining invitations they had sent her. She explained that she had been looking after a guest who had been seriously ill, and introduced de Quesnoy to them. This resulted in a dozen invitations to lunches, dinners and bathing parties; but each trip in de Vendôme’s car had brought on one of the Count’s headaches, so he begged to be excused from any social engagements until he had had a further week’s convalescence.

  Afterwards, while watching the game, his headache wore off, and he wondered a little uneasily if his refusal had been less due to that than a preference for spending long hours on the Cordobas’ private beach with Gulia rather than to re-enter the social whirl.

  That evening an episode occured which gave him further cause for some uneasiness. For some time past he had been well enough to change and dine with the family, and at dinner that night de Vendôme remarked to Gulia:

  ‘I hear you have put off the Villalobars’ from coming to stay. Isn’t that rather a pity? It was so jolly here in August with the house full of people; but for quite a time now we’ve had no company at all—not even a dinner party.’

  De Cordoba promptly replied for his wife. ‘My dear boy, you seem to forget that we have had other things to occupy us. When our friend Armand arrived he was at death’s door; so naturally we got rid of the people who were staying here then as soon as we decently could.’

  ‘Naturally,’ agreed the Prince. ‘I should have been the last to expect you to do otherwise. But he has been well enough to enjoy talking to other people for quite a while now, and I should have thought you might open up the house again.’

  ‘Yes,’ de Cordoba nodded, ‘I see no reason why we shouldn’t.’ Then he glanced at his wife and added, ‘Why did you put the Villalobars’ off, Gulia? After all, it was a long-standing engagement.’

  She shrugged the superb shoulders that rose from her green chiffon frock and replied, ‘Having cancelled our invitations to half-a-dozen other people during the past three weeks I suppose it has become a habit, an
d I did it without thinking. But, anyway, the burden of entertaining falls much more heavily on the hostess than you men realise, and I’ve been very glad of the respite.’

  De Quesnoy had been about to express his regret that his presence there should have upset their autumn programme, but in view of Gulia’s last remark he felt that it might be a little tactless to do so. As far as the other two were concerned he felt no qualms of conscience. The Conde, when not immersed in big financial deals, was always happy to go off on expeditions to hunt butterflies for his collection, and the young Prince led a very full life. Being deeply religious he spent several hours a day at his devotions, and in the rôle of an extremely active President on the councils of numerous Church charities; then he was frequently in attendance on the King and for the rest of the time enjoying himself at parties, mostly in Biarritz, since far greater numbers of the Spanish nobility spent this season of the year over the frontier in the smart French watering-place than in San Sebastian.

  However, after their bathe next morning he did raise the matter with Gulia by saying, ‘In spite of what you said at dinner last night about entertaining meaning a lot of hard work for the hostess, I fear that devoting your time to me, as you have during my convalescence, must have deprived you of a lot of enjoyment. Even if you hadn’t had people here to stay, you must have refused many invitations to luncheons and dinners, and could often have driven into Biarritz.’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I can see most of my friends any time and a great many of the invitations come from acquaintances whom I wouldn’t mind if I never saw again. In Spain, as you must know, except over a luncheon or dinner table women of my class are given little opportunity to converse with men. We are expected to be quite happy making small talk with our own sex; and you can have no idea how ill-educated, stupid, narrow-minded and altogether boring most of the women of the best families can be.’

  ‘From having met a number of them I think I can,’ he smiled.

  ‘Then you will understand how greatly I have enjoyed escaping from them to be with you.’

  ‘In spite of the fact that if we carried our political beliefs to their logical conclusions we would cut one another’s throats?’ he twitted her.

  She laughed. ‘Yes, in spite of that. After all, politics aren’t everything in life. There is another side to it, the personal one; and that is much more important.’

  ‘I agree; and we certainly have a great many things in common.’

  ‘We have; but I should never have found that out if you had not been temporarily incapacitated for ordinary activities, which has led to us spending so many hours alone together. You can’t think how I shall miss our talks when you have gone.’

  ‘And I shall too.’ He spoke with complete honesty. ‘There can be few women of your age who have such a good brain—except perhaps for professional blue-stockings—and as far as I am concerned they don’t count. To have heard sound argument on a great variety of subjects coming from the lips of a woman of your beauty and distinction has been a wonderful experience, and one that I shall long remember.’

  ‘Thank you for the compliment,’ she smiled. Then, with a little sigh, she added: ‘I don’t get many these days.’

  ‘Then I’m to blame for that. It’s because you have given so much of your time to me instead of getting out and about.’

  She shook her head impatiently. ‘I don’t mean the vapid expressions of admiration with which I am bombarded by José’s friends. I was thinking of the honest compliments that I used to receive before I married, from young professors and women who were making something of their lives.’

  ‘None of us can have everything,’ de Quesnoy brought out the old platitude philosophically, ‘and surely the acknowledgement of your mental attainments while living in your uncle’s circle at the University cannot have meant more to you than being the Condesa de Cordoba.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ she murmured a shade uncertainly.

  ‘Oh, come!’ he rallied her. ‘You have palaces, servants, jewels and beutiful clothes. You bear one of the greatest names in Spain, and that of a charming and intelligent man who adores you.’

  Suddenly she turned her head and looked straight at him. Her big dark eyes held his as she asked, ‘What grounds have you for assuming that he does?’

  For a moment de Quesnoy was nonplussed, then he answered a shade uncertainly, ‘Well, it is obvious that José has no interests other than his bank, his butterflies and yourself.’

  ‘Ah!’ her eyes flashed. ‘You would have been nearer the mark, my friend, if you had stopped short at “butterflies”. To have a flutter with his favourite specimen is his real reason for going each week to Madrid.’

  There was no mistaking her meaning, and the Count felt acutely embarrassed. The very last thing he wished to do was to discuss with her the private relations between her husband and herself, and he thought it in the worst possible taste for her to have let him have even a glimpse of them.

  Yet, after a moment he found excuses for her. Although she looked the part of a youthful great lady to perfection, she was not so by birth. She had been brought up in a very different atmosphere: one in which people were guided more by reason than by inherited prejudice, and were courageous enough to say what they thought frankly—even if it meant being sent to prison. She was a clever woman forced to choose her friends from a circle of, mostly, pleasant fools. She was by nature independent, but now shackled even in her home to a duenna. She was an anarchist in theory and a Republican by conviction, who lived surrounded by die-hard Monarchists.

  It struck him, too, that she had paid him the rare compliment of confiding to him her views on many matters; views that she could not possibly have aired to her husband, much less her sister-in-law, the Infanta, or any of the people with whom she came in frequent contact. For some reason that he did not attempt to fathom she had singled him out from all the others and treated him as a trusted friend. If, then, she now wished to tell him of her private life, and he refused to listen, it would destroy the delightful bond that had been established between them and hurt her grievously. After all her kindness to him he could not possibly do that.

  Having swiftly collected his thoughts, he said, ‘You mean that José keeps a mistress?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. I found out only by accident. I came upon a letter from her which he had most stupidly left lying among some other papers he gave me to look through. When I charged him with it he did not deny it. I gather that she is an Andalusian dancing girl and quite a star turn with the castanets.’

  De Quesnoy was mildly surprised to learn that his staid friend kept a mistress, but it did not even occur to him to doubt Gulia’s statement. Although it was no longer considered comme il faut for a noble openly to take pride in being the accepted lover of some leading ballerina or songbird of the opera, it was still an age in which all over Europe great numbers of rich men, more or less secretly, kept pretty young women in small houses or pleasant apartments; and their wives had been brought up to accept such a situation as nothing to make a great fuss about.

  Meanwhile Gulia was going on. ‘I feel sure that he conducts his affaire most discreetly, and would not admit to it even among his best friends. But he did not marry until getting on in life, and I suppose having a girl who is outside his own circle with whom he can entirely relax had become a habit with him.’

  ‘How long ago is it since you found out?’ the Count inquired.

  ‘Just on fifteen months, but I imagine that it had been going on for a long time before that; or if not with this particular woman, then with others.’

  ‘And how long have you been married to him?’

  ‘A little over three years.’

  That was not very long, de Quesnoy reflected. But he knew well enough that a man who for twenty years or so had lived with a succession of pretty women could still tire of one who was exceptionally beautiful in a comparatively short time. Only a mental bond created by true love could hold a couple together for
a long period of years, and evidently no such bond had been created between José and Gulia. It could only be that he had desired her, marriage had been her price, and she had accepted him for the wealth and position she would enjoy as his Condesa. After a moment, de Quesnoy asked:

  ‘Did you not make an effort to persuade José to break off this liason?’

  She shook her Titian gold curls which, after taking off her bathing cap, fell like an aureole round her pale face. ‘No. I fear I was too proud for that. I told him that I would not share his embraces with any woman, and drove him from my room. I told him that I would not allow him to return to it until he could give me his word that he had decided for good to give up sleeping with harlots. But he never has.’

  While she spoke she was looking away from de Quesnoy, and his glance ran over her as she lounged in the deck chair. She had a face and figure that might even have tempted Saint Ignatius Loyola to rise from his shrine at not far distant Pamplona. ‘What a waste,’ he thought. ‘What a waste, for this divine creature to be leading the life of a nun.’

  At that moment Ricardo came over to tell them that their luncheon, which they were having on a table outside the bathing huts, was now ready; so the conversation proceeded no further.

  It was Ricardo who, a few days later when helping the Count to dress, told him that an intruder had been seen the previous night in the garden. The old man who planted and tended it with the assistance of two youths had left his cottage to walk across it to his potting shed for the purpose of sowing some seeds in boxes, because he subscribed to the ancient belief that certain plants thrived better if their seed was inserted in earth by moonlight.

  He had come upon the intruder outside the drawing-room, peering into it through a chink between the curtains. On hearing him approach, the man had turned and run off; but the gardener had seen him well enough to be certain that he was no one employed about the place, and described him as a tall, broad-shouldered dark man in his early twenties.