Red Lotus (14 page)

Felicity could not answer him. She had never expected to see him revealed in such a way, the harsh intensity of his words underlining the depths of his feelings as nothing else could have done. He, who had lost his own land, could understand how Robert Hallam had felt about San Lozaro, and because of that he was trying to make sure that Julio would not throw away his splendid inheritance.

But was he going the wrong way about it?

"Julio had a job to do this afternoon," he said, as if he had read her thoughts. "There was a consignment of bananas due to be loaded for Puerto de la Cruz before three o'clock. A boat was waiting there. I left him with the instructions and the bill of lading. When I came back the bill and the bananas were still here—untouched. Julio had decided that it was more important to play."

Felicity looked up at him, aghast.

"But—did he understand?"

The smile he gave her was pityingly amused.

"My dear Felicity, Julio is eighteen years of age. He believes himself capable of accepting a man's role in life—in other ways."

She bit her lip, realizing how true that was.

"I had no idea about this," she said.

"How could you?" He strode to the edge of the patio, staring through the dividing glass screen which sheltered it. "I doubt if you could ever understand Julio."

"I am going to try," she answered firmly. "Will you leave him to me, Philip? At least for a week or two," she pressed when he did not answer at once.

"You cannot work miracles," he warned dryly.

"I could make the effort!"

She waited, and he turned slowly to look at her. His eyes in the artificial light were much darker but still fiercely probing.

"I would not like to see you getting hurt in the process," he said.

She thought the remark cynical and sighed.

"Need I get hurt, Philip?" she asked. "It is something I want to do. It is what -I came here to attempt, I suppose."

"Forgive me if I remind you that you had no idea how difficult it would be," he said.

"No," she confessed, "that is true. But I shall expect you to help me, whether you want to or not."

His mouth relaxed a little.

"What makes you so doubtful about my help?" he asked. "But, no! Don't trouble to answer that! I can do it for you, I think." His tone was suddenly dry. "You consider that I have an axe to grind. You would not be surprised, in fact, if I were slowly feathering my own nest here at San Lozaro."

"No!" she protested immediately. "Honestly, I hadn't thought of that, Philip."

"You flatter me." The firm lips twisted bitterly. "Have you asked Rafael de Barrios what he thinks?"

"No," she protested a second time. "I wouldn't do such a thing."

"But he has told you that he does not approve of me, I feel sure!"

"Does it matter?" she appealed. "We have to work together, Philip, for the peace of San Lozaro."

He looked at her keenly for a moment longer before he turned back into the shadows and went towards the hall. The whole house was very still, as if the sound of revelry had never disturbed it, and he looked relieved.

"It is because I believe that Julio would do better without the sort of friendships he has been making among the plantation workmen that I have had to insist like this," he said unexpectedly.

He was not trying to excuse himself nor was he going back on a decision once it had been made. He was merely stating a fact which he had decided she should know about.

"These men are riff-raff of the lowest order. It is Julio's misfortune to believe that they could ever be his friends," he added.

"I would like to think that we could offer him something better," Felicity said. "And Conchita, too."

He halted abruptly at the foot of the staircase and she thought that she had made a mistake, mentioning Conchita in the same breath as her brother. The colour seemed to have drained out of Philip's face, leaving it grey and haggard-looking, and his jaw was suddenly hard.

"Conchita is only a child," he said harshly, as he stooped to pick something from the floor at his feet.

Felicity saw what it was by the light of the staircase lamp above their heads. She saw the scarlet flare of the red lotus like blood lying between Philip's hands before he crushed the spray relentlessly and thrust the broken fragments into the pocket of his white coat.

SISA was excited.

"It's wonderful of Philip!" she cried, clasping her white-gloved hands in a rapture of expectation. "He has arranged everything. We are going to El Teide tomorrow, and Julio is to come with us because he has been many times before."

She had just returned from early-morning mass at the little sugar-icing chapel on the hillside and she had run in to tell Felicity her news.

"I have never been allowed to go all the way to the summit before," she confided, laying her rosary aside in its velvet box. "But Philip thinks I am old enough now to make the climb. It is because of you, I know," she added. "Philip wishes you to see the beauty of our island so that you will not go away."

Sisa's expression was full of love and Felicity's heart warmed in gratitude. There was the thought, too, of Philip, but she could not share Sisa's belief that he wished her to stay at San Lozaro. Her presence there meant nothing to him, except, perhaps, some sort of added responsibility which he had not expected to shoulder.

Since their talk of a week ago, she had not been able to contact Julio to try to fulfil her promise about getting to know him better and helping in whatever way she could. She still believed that a measure of sympathy and understanding was all that her cousin really needed, and perhaps the journey to The Peak would provide her first opening.

It might even be that Philip had arranged the climb for that very reason, although she could never be absolutely sure about Philip's motives. He worked harder than anyone else at San Lozaro, seeming to require next to no sleep, for he was always up and away to the plantations before the sun flooding in through her shutters had awakened her in

the morning. He returned in time for their evening meal, but she knew that he worked when they had all gone to bed. A light burned in the cell-like room he used as a study long after she had turned down her own lamp, and often, before she finally got in between her sheets, she stood at the unshuttered window of her room looking across the courtyard to the one lighted window on its far side, wondering if she couldn't have helped him with all that paper work, at least.

She felt shy about offering her help where the estate was concerned, however. Philip might think her unduly curious about her uncle's affairs, and she did not want that to happen. It might look as if she did not trust him, and she was quite sure that Robert Hallam had chosen an able administrator for the valley that had been his life's work.

The following morning they set out from the hacienda shortly after dawn.

"Wrap up well," Philip warned, and to Felicity's complete surprise, it appeared that he was coming with them.

"I take a day off occasionally," he said dryly, guessing her thoughts. "And this might be called a business trip, in a way. I have a call to make on the road up to Las Canadas which would mean half a day's journey, anyway."

Felicity's heart stirred uncertainly, throbbing hard against her breast. She was beginning to feel something of Sisa's sense of adventure, and it was satisfying to know that Philip was coming with them.

The crisp morning air was like a tonic and the sun came up, yellow and bright, over the shoulder of El Teide. It was several hours' journey to Las Canadas. They would climb The Peak during the night and watch the sun rise out of Africa in the morning. Julio had made all the necessary arrangements, and Philip seemed to have granted him the two days' holiday without question.

He came rather sullenly to the terrace when they were ready to leave. He had brought round the car and fumbled a lot with the hood and side-screens as Philip checked petrol and oil and packed their picnic hampers into the boot.

"I'm looking forward to this, Julio, more than I can say," Felicity told him, going round to the far side of the car where he was standing. "It is kind of you to agree to take us."

"There is an official guide," he muttered half resentfully. "Perhaps you would rather have had him?"

"No," Felicity said carefully. "It will be much nicer going on our own, Julio—as a family.'

"Philip wishes that I should take you," he said.

"He feels that you know the way as well as the guide," she explained. "You have been up many times, Sisa says." He gave her a quick, almost suspicious look.

"I did not think that Philip trusted me," he said.

"He does in this," she answered quickly. "In the things

you really know about, Julio. The things you do well." He laughed harshly.

"Shall I take my guitar, do you think, to play you a love song on El Teide?"

The unexpected cynicism disconcerted her for a moment. Julio could switch so abruptly from one mood to another.

"Why not?" she suggested lightly. "We have an hour or two to spend at the rest hut, haven't we?"

"Yes," he agreed, "at Altavista. Is Isabella de Barrios going with us?"

A small, chill sense of disappointment touched Felicity's heart.

"I don't know," she answered stiltedly. "Would you expect her to be going, Julio?"

He shrugged.

"Philip is going," he said.

They went up through the woods, away from the vine terraces and the sea by a winding road which took Felicity's breath away. It was not very broad, and it clung to the mountainside, with a sheer drop of several hundred feet in some places, going down darkly into the deep ravines which scarred the island's volcanic face.

Great trees stood all about them, giant chestnuts making a green skirt for the towering, conical peak that rose above them, white-crowned with its eternal snow cap against a sky of turquoise and gold. The silences and the stillness of all mountain regions reigned here, and after a while even Sisa became silent.

An eagle soared and a raven passed overhead. A white

mist hovered beneath them, drifting across the valley they

had just left, and the first cactus appeared at the roadside.

They were still alone in that high, lost world of rock and

scree rising gradually above the tree line. No following car had put in its appearance from the direction of Zamora and Julio did not mention Isabella again.

He sat between Felicity and Sisa, a slim-hipped boy today in his immaculately-cut riding breeches and silk shirt with the hand-worked monogram on its pocket, looking so unlike the Julio who slouched about the plantations in a pair of old jeans and a red sweat-shirt that Felicity's heart lifted at the prospect of reform. After all, she thought, glancing sideways at the handsome profile crowned by the mass of curly black hair, there was no need for Julio to consider himself inferior.

Pine woods began to thicken the way, stretching for several miles, and deep and dreadful gorges plunged downwards at their very feet. For the past half-hour she had been conscious of a deepening silence in the car, a reserve about her companions which she could not penetrate. Conchita, seated beside Philip in the front seat, looked uneasy, and Sisa's eyes were sad. Julio looked at Philip and swiftly away again.

They had come to a part of the road where it twisted in a precarious spiral along the edge of a ravine, a dark and terrible place gouged out of the earth by the violent upheaval of volcanic eruption hundreds of years ago. Its precipitous sides would not support vegetation of any kind. Not even a solitary tree clung to them, and the arid basin they formed was as black as a starless night. It looked like some hideous vale torn out of the depths of hell, a barren, dreadful place where no life could ever exist.

The silence in the car had grown oppressive, and suddenly Felicity saw Philip's bands tighten on the wheel, the knuckles standing out white against the bronzed flesh as he slowed the car down at the junction with a narrow road which went off into a ravine. Yet she knew, even before Sisa told her, that it wasn't the effort of driving nor the need for concentration which had forced the colour from his face and made him look oddly grey beneath his coating of tan.

"We are always made sad when we come this way," Sisa whispered at her elbow. "It was very near here that Maria died."

It was the only road, Felicity realized, the only way

Philip could have taken them from San Lozaro in order to reach The Peak.

She turned her head away, unable to look at him again. How often had he come this way since that dreadful day of tragedy when he had lost his love? How often had he been forced to live it all again because he had to pass near to where Maria had died in the way of duty? Because there was no other way.

She closed her eyes until she was sure that the ravine was far behind them, and when she opened them again the scene had changed.

They were high on a wide plateau now and there were no trees. The sun poured straight down out of a sky so blue that it seemed incredible at first. Julio had opened the side-screens and she could feel the heat of the sun on her skin, warm and caressing, like the touch of a lover.