Masquerade (4 page)

Glaring at him, she lifted her chin with a haughty movement of her head. ‘Why not? Anyway, what they did to me and your uncle was not evil?’ She ran a hand through her untidy hair and turned away from him as if to hide the effect those painful memories had on her. ‘May God and all the Saints preserve you from ever being in prison. In the summer we were scorched with heat, eaten up with vermin. In the winter we slept, without either bed or rug, on the cold stone floor, with one wretched meal a day of coarse
rancho
or foul-tasting soup to fill our starving bellies. The place had hardly any windows, no drains worth speaking of – the stench was unbelievable. But we are gypsies and we’re not supposed to be able to feel or smell.’ She turned sharply back round. ‘Do you want me to continue my list? My brother died young, in a filthy hovel, away from his people as a direct result of that and those wretched
gajos
.’

Leandro returned the look steadily. ‘Your brother knifed Don Salvador, who would probably have let you go if not for that. Don Salvador was taken to hospital. There was no choice, the police had to get involved.’

‘Why?’ she retorted resentfully. ‘They could have called the family doctor and let us go. After all, it was thanks to me that Don Salvador became a whole man again in the first place. If it hadn’t been for my gifted hands, he would still be lying in his bed, a shadow of himself and no use to anybody.’

She walked over to the table to drain the last of the manzanilla in her glass and shook her head, her fiery eyes fixed on some invisible
point. ‘There is an old Moorish saying: “He eats the dates and then attacks with the stones.” Those people think of us as dirt. Our caste is ostracized by them and they spit on us at every opportunity.’ Her voice began to rise. ‘Do not speak to me about evil. He who sows the thorn does not reap the grape. And in this case they would be reaping only half the thorns they sowed.’ She spoke vehemently, her whole body trembling with the force of her hatred.

Leandro guessed any other woman would be letting her tears fall but not Marujita, the gypsy queen. Instead she wore her pain like a battle shield. Suddenly, he pitied her and took her, still quivering with anger, in his arms. He smoothed her hair, trying to soothe the hurt away, and kissed her forehead tenderly. ‘Please,
Mamacita
,’ he whispered hoarsely in her ear, ‘don’t make me do this, I …’

But she pushed him away with the strength of a virago, eyeing him with contempt. ‘Huh, you’re soft like your father! I have brought a coward into this world.’ She laughed then, though it was more like a bitter cackle.
‘Un ombre de versa
, a real man would be proud to take his revenge but you whimper like a woman. I will die of a broken heart before this illness kills me. What’s more, I will leave this earth ashamed to be your mother and curse you forever from my grave.’

Leandro took another step back as though she had struck him. The force of her vitriol shook him deeply. Until then he had never realized how much his mother had been consumed by the hostility she felt towards Luz’s parents. She was as pathetic in her wrath as she was frightening yet what was more disturbing to him was the idea that some of her darkness might have infiltrated his blood, imprinting itself upon his own nature. That he was the son of this vengeful, dying gypsy queen with a duty to carry out her
venganza
now lay on him heavily like an iron cloak.

He turned without a word and left his mother standing in the cave, the chain of the locket still wound tightly between her fingers, her eyes a blaze of black fire.

It was early morning when Luz woke up. At first, she seemed to have lost her bearings. Then, still in a dreamy state, she realized she was in her own room. A vague memory kept returning of the previous day’s incident on the beach and the time spent in the gypsy encampment. Initially in a haze, then clearer, as though her mind had taken in details that at the time she had scarcely noticed, she remembered the powerful smell of smoky log fires and cooking food, the shrill banging of a hammer on iron that echoed noisily in her head and seemed to increase the pain across her eyes, the clamouring of children’s voices and the sense of a glittering-eyed woman leaning over her. But, first and foremost, it was the face of the young gypsy that kept floating into her mind’s eye. She saw his features in detail now: the prominent cheekbones in a narrow, burnished face, the short nose and the generous mouth with full, curved lips. Most of all she remembered his eyes, those elongated green eyes set under perfect brows that had ensnared hers and burned with such fire she had been conscious of little else.

For a while she remained still, aware of a rare sense of wellbeing. She felt strangely rested – odd after the previous day’s events. Then, in some alarm, she realized she was still fully dressed and that she was wrapped up in a blanket. How had she got here? Who had brought her back? It must have been him. Who had let him in? Carmela and Pedro were away for the night; they were due to return today so it couldn’t have been them. Then she remembered she had left both the gate and her window open, not expecting her outing to be a long one. How did he know her house? It was not as though she was well known down in the town – up until now she had only spent time at L’Estrella during the holidays. And Zeyna … she remembered her horse had bolted. Had the mare found its own way back to L’Estrella?

She tumbled out of bed. Beyond the French windows opposite, the sea glistened in the distance. The sky was a clear and endless blue, paling at the horizon; the air was soft and the whiteness of the light filled it, dazzling her eyes, still full of sleep. Lost in thought, she
went to the bathroom and ran herself a bath. She washed quickly then pulled on her jeans and a loose white shirt tied at the waist with a white leather belt. Images, voices, scraps of conversation kept rising then receding to the back of her mind like the ebb and flow of tidewater. The only thing that remained clear was the disconcerting impact of the
gitano’s
eyes and the way it had shot through her like a bolt of lightning. It still startled her when she thought of it.

As she surveyed herself in the mirror, she noticed that her locket was missing. She cherished that pendant more than any of her other jewels for it contained the miniature portraits of her mother and father. It never left her neck. It had belonged to her great-grandmother, Doña Maria Dolores, who had given it to Luz on her tenth birthday, a year before the old lady died. Luz was definitely wearing it when riding on the beach.

For a moment her parents’ warnings echoed dimly in her head and the disturbing thought that the young gypsy might have taken it crossed her mind. She dismissed it immediately. Even if she couldn’t vouch for any of the other gypsies, something told her this one was different. He would never do such a thing.

No, the chain must have broken when she fell off her horse, she thought gloomily. It would probably be hopeless to attempt to find it on the beach, though she would certainly try; and the idea of reporting it lost to the police, as she would have done in England, was pointless here in Spain, she conceded. The morning would have to be spent doing some important chores she had put off, including making arrangements for the rest of her things to be shipped from England, but as soon as that was done she would go down to the beach to look for it. Perhaps she might bump into her rescuer and she could thank him personally for his kindness, she told herself. But before any of that, she had to make sure Zeyna had come back and was unharmed.

The house was quiet. Pedro and Carmela had obviously not returned yet. She went straight down to the stable block. Zeyna was there in her box, happily munching on a handful of hay. As Luz
reached out and patted her mare’s nose, the animal snorted and started to paw the ground.

‘There, there, my beautiful girl, calm down. We’re not going anywhere together today. I just wonder how you got here and who put you in your box.’
It must be the gypsy
, she thought. This afternoon, after searching for her locket, she would go looking for him. She felt her pulse race and her stomach churn at the idea of seeing him again. There was something about the gypsy that sparked an unknown thrill deep inside her.

Luz went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee, taking it back up to her bedroom with some fruit. She loved the fruit in Spain – the peaches and oranges had such a delicious scent and they tasted of sunshine. So much more succulent than the pale imitations endured back in England, she thought with a sigh, biting into the sweet flesh of an apricot.

The sun was benevolent today so she seated herself comfortably on the veranda. A particularly fecund crop of orange and lemon trees hung like illuminated lanterns on one side of the terrace, backed by the whitewashed walls of the villa.

A veranda encircled the house on two floors and the entire outside walls were festooned with green creepers, purple wisteria, morning glory and pink-stained bougainvillea, which spilled over the awning roofs. In the cool interior of the villa, the elegant and rustic look of exposed beams, white walls, high wood-inlaid arches and warm flagstone floors were typically Andalucían.

Count Salvador Cervantes de Rueda had bought the summer house in Cádiz to celebrate his wedding anniversary and his only daughter’s twenty-first birthday. On the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, the house looked across to Puerto de Santa María and the church where he had first caught sight of Alexandra. Their daughter had been conceived in Cádiz, the ‘city of light’, on the last euphoric night of their honeymoon and when she came screaming lustily into the world, nine months later, both Salvador and Alexandra instantly agreed that Luz, meaning ‘light’ in Spanish, was the only fitting
name for their adored little girl. She had now grown into a charismatically beautiful and spirited young woman.

Luz loved the house on the cliff –
La Casa Sobre las Nubes
, the house in the clouds. The villagers had given it this name because on some moonless nights, when the far-off lights shone from its windows, it seemed to be the only bright spot twinkling in the darkness, suspended above the clouds. Salvador and Alexandra named it L’Estrella, the star.

After L’Estrella was purchased, Luz spent most of her time there. She loved the sense of freedom it gave her to be perched high above the sea, as if in a magical tower, removed from the cluster of other village houses dotting the cliff further down. It didn’t matter whether her parents accompanied her there or not – it was only forty-five minutes away by ferry from Puerto de Santa María and transport into the mainland. Anyhow, she used her father’s small motorboat or the family launch to take her to and fro across the water, which was much quicker. Sometimes she would remain at L’Estrella for a few days; the housekeeper, Carmela, and her husband, Pedro, made sure she wanted for nothing. They lived in a separate annexe in the grounds; Carmela took care of the cleaning, laundry and cooking while Pedro looked after the horses and the garden.

The bright and airy summer house was so different from the imposing hacienda of El Pavón and for those who knew her well, it was little wonder that Luz found as many excuses as possible to escape here, where she could be near the wild and windswept cliffs and let the invigorating smell of the sea fill her lungs.

The views from her vantage point on the terrace at the back of the villa were wondrous; there was so much incident to the ever-changing skyscape and to the land itself. It was as if nature was behaving like a magician with a wand, revealing or concealing vistas of the most beguiling beauty. Under a huge arc of sky, where racing cotton-wool clouds folded and unfolded, appeared and disappeared, an enamelled sea the colour of pure cobalt spread itself in front of her. Dancing waves unwound over stretches of glistening white sand,
extending infinitely in a straight line. On the opposite shore Puerto de Santa María, the shimmering salt plains and marshy wetlands of Las Salinas behind it, was edged by a far-off screen of pine trees and the masts of ships. In front of the town, boats and yachts painted in bright Van Gogh colours bobbed up and down in the port.

Luz’s thoughts meandered back to the previous day and the gypsy youth. Events only vaguely recollected when she woke up that morning gradually clarified in her mind. She realized most of the time she had not been deeply asleep, more like visited by a strange faintness, a sort of doziness where her eyelids felt as though weights were forcing them shut and her hearing was fuzzy. How her blood had thundered when the gypsy lifted her up after the fall and later, when he put his arm around her to help her drink, a tingling feeling ran through the whole of her body as she sensed the warmth of his lean strength against her. Though he was rugged – his jaw firm and with a hard, piercing stare in those green eyes – there had been something infinitely soothing in his deep voice when she tried to raise herself up from bleary-headed stupor to be civil.

Despite her twenty-four years and having spent most of them in a modern and liberal society, particularly compared with that of Spain, Luz was surprisingly conservative in her ideals. Her disposition was a complex mixture of passion and principle; her acute physical drives and boundless energy did not translate into a liberal attitude towards sex. Most of her English friends had done with their virginity by the time they were her age. She was by no means narrow minded but to her it represented a precious one-time gift, whether in marriage or outside it, that she would preserve until the right time and the right person came along – and for Luz that had simply never happened. She considered the act of love to be just that, provoked by deeply felt emotion, and for love itself to be a passionate adventure. Her English friends teased her, claiming her Spanish genes were to blame for such a regressive philosophy, labelling her an old-fashioned romantic and sentimental fool, but she simply shrugged and laughed and kept to her principles.

Luz was pulled in two directions: it was the troublesome Latin fire in her blood that tempted her to follow her passions in exactly the way her friends encouraged but, ironically, it was the traditional notions of
la honra
in her Andalucían upbringing that also held her back. Luz’s Spanish nature was both the agent of her passions and her protection from them.