A Stormy Spanish Summer (3 page)

She might have been surprised to discover that Vidal drove his own car, but she was not surprised when he slowed the car down and then turned in towards a huge pair of imposing double-height studded wooden doors. This area of the city, with its air of arrogance and wealth, was perfectly suited to the man who matched its hauteur—and its visually perfect sculptured classical magnificence.

Fliss was relieved to be distracted from that particular thought by the sight of the sunny courtyard they had just entered, its lines perfectly symmetrical, and even the sound of the water splashing down into the ornate stone fountain in its centre somehow evenly timed.

The house—more a palace, surely, than merely a house—enclosed the courtyard on all four sides, with the main entrance facing the way they had come in. On the wall to their right a two-storey archway led into what had looked like formal gardens from the glimpse Fliss had seen before Vidal had brought the car to a halt alongside a flight of stone steps. The steps led up to a wooden studded door that matched the style of the doors they had just driven through. Around the middle floor of the three-storey building ran what looked like a sort of cloistered, semi-enclosed walkway, whilst the windows looking onto the courtyard were shuttered against the late-afternoon sunlight. On the stonework above the windows Fliss could see the emblem of Granada itself—the pomegranate—whilst above the main doorway were carved what she knew to be the family’s arms, along
with an inscription which translated as ‘What we take we hold’.

It wasn’t just the way her job had encouraged her to look at new areas with an eye to their tourism potential that caused her to note these things, Fliss admitted. She had made it her business as she grew up to read as much as she could about the history of Vidal’s family—and of course that of her own father.

‘Does it ever concern you that this house was built with money stolen from the high-ranking Muslim prince your ancestor murdered?’ she challenged Vidal now, determined not to let the beauty and the magnificence of the building undermine her awareness of how the fortune that had bought it had been made.

‘There is a saying—to the victor the spoils. My ancestor was one of many Castilians who won the battle against Boabdil—Muhammad XII—for Ferdinand and Isabella. The money to build this
palacio
was given to him by Isabella, and far from allowing the murder of anyone, the Alhambra Decree treaty gave religious freedome to the city’s Muslims.’

‘A treaty which was later broken,’ Fliss reminded Vidal sharply. ‘Just as your ancestor broke the promise he made to the Muslim princess he stole away from her family.’

‘My advice to you is that you spend more time checking your supposed facts and rather less repeating them without having done so.’

Without allowing her time to retaliate, Vidal got out of the car, striding so quickly round to the passenger door that Fliss did not have time to open it. Ignoring
his outstretched hand, Fliss manoeuvred herself out of the car, determined not to let herself be overwhelmed by her surroundings and instead to think of her mother. Had
she
felt intimidated by the arrogance and the disdain with which this building frowned down upon those who did not belong to it but who were rash enough to enter? Her mother had loved her time in Spain, despite the unhappiness it had eventually brought her. She had been hired by Vidal’s parents as an au pair, to help Vidal with his English during the school summer holidays, and she had always made it plain to Fliss just how much she had liked the little boy who had been her charge.

Was it perhaps here in this house that she had first seen and fallen in love with Vidal’s adopted uncle—the man who had been her own father? Fliss wondered now. Perhaps she had seen the handsome Spaniard for the first time here in this very courtyard? Handsome, maybe—but not strong enough to stand by her mother and the love he had sworn he felt for her, Fliss reminded herself starkly, lest she get carried away by the romantic imagery created by her surroundings.

She knew that her mother had only visited the family’s house here in Granada very briefly, as most of her time in Spain had been spent at the
castillo
on the ducal country estate, which had been Vidal’s parents’ main home.

The thought of what her mother must have suffered caused a sensation inside Fliss’s chest rather as though iron-hard fingers had closed round her heart and squeezed it—fingers as long and strong as those of Vidal He had played his own part in her mother’s
humiliation and suffering, Fliss thought bitterly, and she turned quickly away from him—only to give a startled gasp as her foot slipped on one of the cobbles, causing her to turn her ankle and lose her balance.

Immediately the bright sunlight that had been dazzling her was shut out as Vidal stepped towards her, his hands locking round her upper arms as he steadied her and held her upright. Her every instinct was to reject his hold on her, and show him how unwelcome it was. He moved fast, though, releasing her with a look of distaste, as though somehow touching her soiled him. Anger and humiliation burned inside her, but there was nothing she could do other than turn her back on him. She was trapped—and not just here in a place she did not want to be. She was also trapped by her own past and the role Vidal had played in it. Like the fortress walls with which the Moors had surrounded their cities and their homes, Vidal’s contempt for her was a prison from which there was no escape.

Walking past him, Fliss stepped into the building, standing in a cool hallway with a magnificent carved and polished dark wood staircase, to take in the austere and sombre magnificence of her surroundings.

Portraits hung from the white painted walls—stern, uniformed or court-finery-dressed Spanish aristocrats, looking down at her from their heavily gilded frames. Not a single one of them was smiling, Fliss noticed. Rather, they were looking out at the world with expressions of arrogance and disdain. Just as Vidal, their descendant, looked out on the world now.

A door opened to admit a small, plump middle-aged
woman with snapping brown eyes that swiftly assessed her. Although she was simply dressed, and not what Fliss had been expecting in Vidal’s mother, there was no mistaking her upright bearing and general demeanour of calm confidence.

She realised her assumption was wrong when Vidal announced, ‘Let me introduce you to Rosa, who is in charge of the household here. She will show you to your room.’

The housekeeper advanced towards Fliss, her gaze still searching and assessing, and then, ignoring Fliss, she turned back to Vidal. Speaking in Spanish, she told him, ‘Where her mother was a dove, this one has the look of a wild falcon not yet tamed to the lure.’

Fresh anger flashed in Fliss’s own eyes.

‘I speak Spanish,’ she told them both. She was almost shaking with the force of her anger. ‘And there is no lure that would ever tempt me down into the grasp of anyone in
this
household.’

She just had time to see the answering flash of hostility burn through the look Vidal gave her before she turned on her heel to head towards the stairs, leaving Rosa to come after her.

O
N THE
first floor landing Rosa broke the stiff silence between them by saying in a sharp voice, ‘So you speak Spanish?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Fliss challenged her. ‘No matter what Vidal might want to think, he does not have the power to prevent me from speaking the language that was, after all, my father’s native tongue.’

She certainly wasn’t going to admit to Rosa, or anyone else here, her early teenage dream of one day meeting her father, which had led to her secretly saving some of her paper-round money to pay for Spanish lessons she’d suspected her mother would not want her to have. Fliss had come to recognise well before she had reached her teens that her mother was almost fearful of Fliss doing anything to recognise the Spanish side of her inheritance. So, rather than risk upsetting her, Fliss had tried not to let her see how much she had longed to know more about not just her father but his country. Her mother had been a gentle person who had hated confrontations and arguments, and Fliss had loved her far too much to ever want to hurt her.

‘Well, you certainly haven’t got your spirit from either
of your parents,’ Rosa told her forthrightly. ‘Though I would warn you against trying to cross swords with Vidal.’

Fliss stopped walking, her foot on the first step of the next set of stairs as she turned towards the housekeeper. Her body had immediately tensed with rejection of the thought that she should in any way allow Vidal to control any aspect of her life.

‘Vidal has no authority over me,’ she told the housekeeper vehemently. ‘And he never will have.’

A movement in the hallway below her caught her attention. She looked back down the stairs and saw that Vidal was still standing there. He must have heard her—which was no doubt the reason for the grim look he was giving her. He probably wished he
did
have some authority over her. If he had he may have prevented her from coming to Spain—just as years ago he had prevented her from making contact with her father.

In her mind’s eye she could see him now, standing in her bedroom—the room that should have been her private haven—holding the letter she had sent to her father weeks earlier. A letter which he had intercepted. A letter written from the depths of her sixteen-year-old heart to a father she had longed to know.

Every one of the tenderly burgeoning sensual and emotional feelings she had begun to feel for Vidal had been crushed in that moment. Crushed and turned into bitterness and anger.

‘Fliss, darling, you must promise me that you will not attempt to make contact with your father again,’ her mother had warned her with tears in her eyes, after
Vidal had returned to Spain and it had been just the two of them again.

Of course she had given her that promise. She had loved her mother too much to want to upset her—especially when …

No!
She would not allow Vidal to drag her back there, to that searingly shameful place that was burned into her pride for life. Her mother had understood what had happened. She had known Fliss was not to blame.

Maturity had brought her the awareness that, since her father had always known where she was, he could quite easily have made contact with
her
if he’d wished to do so. The fact that he had never done it told its own story. She was not, after all, the only child to grow up not wanted by its father. With her mother’s death she had told herself that it was time to move on. Time to celebrate and cherish the childhood and the loving mother she had had, and to forget the father who had rejected her.

She would never know now just what it was that had changed her father’s mind. She would never know whether it had been guilt or regret for lost opportunities that had led him to mentioning her in his will. But she did know that this time she was not going to allow Vidal to dictate to her what she could and could not do.

In the hallway below, Vidal watched as Fliss turned on her heel and followed Rosa along the landing to the next flight of stairs. If there was one thing that Vidal prided himself about—one characteristic he had worked on and honed—it was mastery of his own emotions and
reactions. But for some reason his gaze—normally so obedient to his command—was finding it necessary to linger on the slender silken length of Fliss’s legs as she walked away from him.

At sixteen those legs had been coltishly slender. She had been a child turning into a woman, with pert small breasts that pushed against the thin tee shirts she’d always seemed to wear. She might have behaved towards him with a calculated mock innocence that had involved stolen blushing half-looks, and a wide-eyed pretended inability to lift her supposedly fascinated and awed gaze from the bare expanse of his torso when she had walked into the bathroom whilst he was shaving, but he had witnessed the coarse reality of what she was: promiscuous, and without morals or pride. By nature? Or because she had been deprived of a father?

The guilt he could never escape wrenched at his conscience. How many times over the years had he wished unsaid those innocent words that had led ultimately to the forced ending of the relationship between his uncle and his au pair? A simple mention to his grandmother that Felipe had joined them on an expedition to the Alhambra here in Granada had been their undoing—and his.

There had been no way that the Dowager Duchess would ever have allowed Felipe to marry anyone other than a woman of her choice. Nor would she ever have chosen a mere au pair as a bride for a man whose blood was as aristocratic as that of his adoptive family.

As a child of seven Vidal had not understood that, but he had quickly realised the consequences of his
innocent actions when he had been told that the gentle English au pair of whom he had become so fond was being dismissed and sent home. Neither Fliss’s mother nor Felipe had had natures strong enough to challenge his grandmother’s authority. Neither of them had known when they were forced to part that there would be consequences to their love in the form of the child Fliss’s mother had conceived. A child whose name and very existence his grandmother had ruled was never to be mentioned—unless she herself did so, in order to remind his uncle of the shame he had brought on his adoptive family by lowering himself to conceive that child with a mere au pair.

How justified his grandmother would have believed her ruling to be had she lived long enough to know what Felipe’s daughter had become.

Vidal had felt for Felicity’s mother when the two of them had returned early from a visit to London to discuss various private matters to find that not only was Felicity having an illicit teenage party that had got badly out of hand, but also that Felicity herself was upstairs in her mother’s bedroom with a drunken, ignorant lout of a youth.

Vidal closed his eyes and then opened them again. There were some memories he preferred not to revisit. The realisation that he had inadvertently betrayed his au pair’s love affair. The night his mother had come into his room to tell him that the plane his father had been in had crashed in South America without any survivors. The evening he had looked at Felicity sprawled on her mother’s bed, her gold and honey-streaked blonde hair
wrapped round the hand of the youth leaning over her, whilst she stared up at him with brazen disregard for what she had done.

Brazen disregard for
him.

Vidal’s chest lifted under the demanding pressure of his lungs for oxygen. He had been twenty-three—a man, not a boy—and appalled by the effect Felicity was having on him. Revolted by the desire he felt for her, tormented by both it and his own moral code—a code that said that a girl of sixteen was just that—a
girl
—and a man of twenty-three was also exactly that—a
man.
The seven-year age gap between them was a gap that separated childhood from adulthood, and represented a chasm that must not be violated. Just as a sixteen-year-old’s innocence must not be violated.

Even now, seven years later, he could still taste the anger that had soured his heart and seared his soul. A bleak black burning anger that Felicity’s presence here was re-igniting.

Vidal flexed the tense muscles of his shoulders. The sooner this whole business was over and done with and Felicity was on a plane on her way back to the UK the better.

When Felipe had been dying, and had told him how badly he felt about the past, Vidal had encouraged him to make reparation via his will to the child he had fathered and then been forced to abandon. He had done that for his uncle’s sake, though—not for Felicity’s.

Upstairs in the room Rosa had shown her into, before telling her that refreshments would be sent up for her
and then leaving, Fliss studied her surroundings. The room was vast, with a high ceiling, and furnished with heavy and ornate dark wood furniture of a type that Fliss knew from her mother’s descriptions was typical in expensive antique Spanish furniture. Beautifully polished, and without a speck of dust, the wood glowed warmly in the light pouring in through the room’s tall French windows. Stepping up to them, Fliss saw that they opened out onto a small balcony, decorated with waist-high beautifully intricate metalwork, its design classically Arabic rather than European. Try as she might, Fliss could not spot the deliberate flaw that was always said to be made in such work, because only Allah himself could create perfection.

The balcony looked down on an equally classical Moorish courtyard garden, bisected by the straight lines of the rill of water that flowed through it from a fall spilling out of some concealed source at the far end of the courtyard. Either side of the narrow canal were covered walkways smothered in soft pink climbing roses, their scent rising up to the balcony. On the ground alongside them were white lilies. The pathways themselves were made from subtle blue and white tiles, whilst what looked like espaliered fruit trees lined the walls of the courtyard. In the four small square formal gardens on the opposite side of the rose walkways, white geraniums tumbled from Ali Baba–sized terracotta jars, whilst directly below the balcony, partly shaded from the sun by a sort of cloistered, semi-enclosed area, there was a patio complete with elegant garden furniture.

Fliss closed her eyes. She knew this garden so well.
Her mother had described it to her, sketched it for her, shown her photographs of it. She had told her that it was a garden originally designed for the exclusive use of the women of the Moorish family for whom the house had been built. It was obviously an act of deliberate cruelty on the part of Vidal to have given her this room, overlooking the garden he knew her mother had loved so much. Had he given her the room her mother had slept in? Fliss suspected that he hadn’t. Her mother had told her that she and Vidal had occupied the top storey—the nursery quarters—when they had come to stay with Vidal’s grandmother, who in those days had owned the house, even though Vidal had been seven years old at the time.

Fliss turned back into the room. Heavily embossed with a raised self-coloured pattern, a rich deep blue brocade fabric hung at the windows and covered the straight-backed chairs placed at either side of the room’s marble fireplace. The cream bedspread was piped in the same blue, with tasselled blue brocade cushions ornamenting its immaculate cream width. The dark wooden floorboards shone, and the antique-looking blue-and-cream rug that covered most of the floor was so plush that Fliss felt she hardly dared walk on it.

It was all a far cry from her minimalist apartment back at home. But this decor just as much as the decor she had chosen for herself was a part of her genetic inheritance through her father. Had he not rejected her mother, had he not denied them both, she would have grown up familiar with this house and its history, taking it for granted. Just as Vidal himself did.

Vidal. How she loathed him. Her feelings towards him were far more bitter and filled with contempt than her feelings towards her father. Her father, after all, had had no voice. As her mother had explained to her, he had been forced to give them up and to turn his back on them.
He
had not opened her letter pleading to be given a chance to get to know him and then told her that she must never ever try to contact him again. Vidal had done that.
He
had never known her personally and looked at her with a gaze of cold contempt, then rejected her and walked away from her, as Vidal had done.
He
had never scorched her pride and burned a wound deep into her heart with his misjudgement of her. Vidal had.

It was here in this house that decisions had been made. They had impacted on her and on her parents in the most cruel way. It was from here that her mother had been dismissed. It was here that she had been told that the man she loved was promised in marriage to another—a girl chosen for him by his adoptive family, who was in her final year at an exclusive school that groomed highly born girls for their marriages. A girl, as her mother had told Fliss, Felipe had sworn to her he did not love and certainly did not want to marry.

It hadn’t mattered what Felipe wanted, though. All his promises to Fliss’s mother, all his protestations of love, had been as beads of light caused by the sun’s rays touching the drops of water as they fell from a fountain. So beautiful and entrancing that they stopped the heart, but ephemeral and insubstantial when it came to reality.

There had only been time for the two of them to
snatch a final goodbye embrace and share the fevered illicit intimacy that had led to her own conception before they had been torn apart—her mother sent back to England and Felipe instructed to do his duty and propose to the girl who had been chosen for him.

‘He swore to me that he loved me, but he loved his adoptive family too and he could not disobey them,’ her mother had told her gently, when she had asked as a girl why he had not come after her.

Her poor mother. She had made the mistake of falling in love with a man who had not been strong enough to protect their love, and she had paid the price for that. Fliss would never let the same thing happen to her. She would never allow herself to fall in love and be vulnerable. After all, she had already had a taste of how that felt—even if her feelings for Vidal had merely been those of an inexperienced sixteen-year-old.