The Shores of Spain (29 page)

Tapping in the hallway alerted her a moment before the marquesa shoved the door open. It banged against the wall. The marquesa was a wizened creature, bent and leaning over an ivory-handled cane. She wore mourning, a dress in heavy black silk perhaps a decade out of fashion. A jet and ivory brooch adorned the high collar that framed her pale face and thinning white hair. Instead of looking frail, she looked fierce.

“What right do you have to come here?” the old woman snapped in a voice that wasn’t frail at all. “Why do you think you can come and disturb me?”

The woman spoke to Joaquim, so Marina kept her mouth shut. She stepped in front of Alejandro, as if she could protect him from the old woman’s spite by keeping him out of sight.

“My name is Joaquim Tavares.” Joaquim inclined his head respectfully toward the old woman. “And this is my wife, Marina.”

Marina bobbed a curtsy, but the old woman didn’t even glance in her direction.

“You didn’t answer my question, young man.” The marquesa tottered toward the leather chair and sat down in it. She set her cane against the chair’s high back and laid her withered hands on the chair’s arms as if it were a throne. “Why are you disturbing me?”

Joaquim held his hands folded like a penitent. “I live in Portugal, but my mother was born here in Catalonia. She was Rosa Castillo i Quintana, your granddaughter.”

That sparked no hint of interest in the old woman’s hard eyes. “What of it?”

Marina rubbed her hands together. She wanted to shake the old woman, but this was Joaquim’s fight.

His dark eyes narrowed. “I only wished to introduce myself to you.”

“You’ve done so,” the marquesa said, waving one hand. “You can leave now.”

Joaquim took a slow breath, but Marina could see his clenched jaw. “I also have a younger brother,” he added, “recently graduated from the university at Coimbra.”

The woman glared up at him. “Do you think I don’t know who you are? You are a policeman and your brother is a builder of boats. If I wanted to contact you, I could have at any time. I chose not to acknowledge your mother, nor will I do so with her children, not even the one who isn’t a bastard.”

Marina hadn’t caught all those words, but that last comment had been clear. Before she thought better of it, Marina snapped, “Do not insult my husband.”

That had come out in Portuguese, but the Catalan must be close enough that the old woman understood. She glared at Marina for the first time. Her face had fine bones, hinting that she would have been handsome when young. “Why not? It’s true, isn’t it?”

Marina bit back her reply. Clearly the woman wanted a fight.

The marquesa turned back to Joaquim, waving dismissively in Marina’s direction. “And who is this common girl you’ve taken for a wife? If you hoped to raise your station in life, you could have done far better.”

A smile spread across Joaquim’s face. Marina wasn’t fooled by the expression. He was furious now. “I married for love, madam, not to . . . raise my station.”

“Ha! My daughter married for love, and what became of her? Dead before she was twenty.”

Joaquim shook his head. “Then why did you not take in my mother? Did you wish to punish her because you were angry with her mother?”

“My daughter chose to marry outside our kind,” the marquesa said. “Why should I take in that man’s child?”

“Is kindness beyond your experience?” Joaquim asked softly.

Marina guessed they were past trying to earn the woman’s goodwill.

The marquesa harrumphed and grabbed her cane, leaning forward as if she might swat Joaquim with it. “The world has never been kind to me.”

“You knew my mother was mistreated, yet did nothing about it,” Joaquim said. “She was your only grandchild. How could you hold her mother’s faults against her?”

The woman pushed herself back to her feet. Joaquim, unable to help himself, moved forward to help her rise, but stepped back when she swung her cane at his shins. “You know nothing of my daughter’s betrayal. You know nothing of who you are.” And then she spotted Alejandro, still obediently sitting in his chair. “And who is this? Your bastard? I know you haven’t been married long enough to have a child.”

Marina’s breath went short. Her jaw hurt from holding in the words that threatened to spill out of her mouth. Apparently the attack angered Joaquim as well. “Alejandro is my foster son,” he snapped.

“Don’t give me that,” the old woman returned, pointing a gnarled finger. “My eyes still work, and that boy looks too much like you to be anything else.”

Marina watched as Joaquim struggled to answer civilly.

“Alejandro is my half brother,” Joaquim managed. “Since our father is dead, I intend to raise him as my son.”

With that the marquesa turned her back on Joaquim and tottered out of the room, her cane crashing angrily against the wooden floor. Joaquim turned to Marina, his face pale and his jaw set. “I have my answer now, don’t I?”

She came around the couch and put her arms about him. He rested his cheek against her hair. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered against his waistcoat, wishing now she hadn’t pushed him to come.

“Did you understand all that?”

“I missed a few words,” Marina admitted. “But I got the general idea.”

He took a deep breath. “Let’s go home.”

She knew what he meant. Not Portugal, but the hotel. He just wanted to be somewhere where they could be alone. “It’s good we asked the driver to wait.”

Alejandro said nothing as they made their way back out to the carriage, but once they’d settled onto the seat, he peered up at Marina. “She isn’t nice.”

Marina ignored Joaquim’s clenched jaw. Alejandro would have caught most of what the old woman had said to Joaquim . . . and what she’d said about
him
. “I know she wasn’t, but perhaps she doesn’t feel well today. Since she’s older than us, we have to try to be respectful anyway.”

Alejandro regarded her doubtfully, his eyebrows raised.

“Try,” she repeated softly.

Joaquim shook his head. “It’s hard to believe she would treat her daughter that way just because she married a Spaniard.”

Marina wrapped an arm about Alejandro’s shoulders and was glad when he didn’t flinch away. “It’s never just one thing. Families have convoluted reasons for why they act the way they do. They have all manner of expectations to be failed and feelings to be hurt.”

Joaquim squeezed her hand. “Remind me, when we have children, never to let something turn me away from one of them. If I say something foolish, remind me of how I feel today.”

It was comforting that he was thinking in terms of the future. “I won’t forget.”

*   *   *

B
ARCELONA

T
hey left the train station in Barcelona and stopped to eat before heading back to the hotel, but when they finally got there, they had news. The young man from the American embassy had left a
message. Joaquim took the sealed note from the desk clerk and when they reached their room, he stopped only to drop his hat on the entryway table before he opened the envelope.

“What does it say?” Marina asked.

Joaquim read down to the bottom of the note. “Mr. Pinter would like us to come to the consulate again. Apparently the missing American turned up at a hospital last night.”

“The one who came from Paris?”

He tossed the note on the bed and let out a breath in frustration. The Americans were helping, but this particular gentleman had been nothing but problematic. “Yes. I have a strong feeling this man’s lost Leandra as well. We just have to hope he has some information for us.”

After freshening up, they headed back to the consulate. This time Pinter met them just inside the consulate’s outer doorway. He eyed Alejandro and expressed surprise that they’d located him, although not that they’d kept him. He must have read the message the embassy had forwarded from Duilio, claiming Alejandro as a member of the Ferreira family.

Pinter led them up to the second floor of the building rather than the back hallway they’d visited before. The guard outside the door agreed to keep an eye on Alejandro. Marina seemed reluctant, but since this involved Alejandro’s mother, she agreed that it might be better for them to hear any news first and then tell the boy. So after producing a chair for him, the guard led them into the bright room behind Pinter and then left, closing the door.

On a white-draped bed lay a man with longish blond hair that brushed his shoulders. A dark stain splattered across the front of his expensive linen shirt, dried blood from his swollen nose. A cut over one eyelid had been stitched closed. He held a damp towel to one side of his jaw, but that didn’t hide the bruising there. A suit jacket that looked to be of silk and wool lay over a chair next to the door, ripped up the back where someone had evidently grabbed the skirt
of it. Whatever he’d been doing before he landed in a hospital last night, it had involved a fight.

“This is William Adler,” Pinter said. “He’s a specialist at the Paris embassy, and has an interesting tale to tell you, Inspector Tavares.”

The man in the bed turned his eyes toward Joaquim. One showed red at the corner. “You’re the Portuguese we’ve been waiting for?”

The man spoke Portuguese. Joaquim felt the tightness in his shoulders ease, out of relief that he wasn’t going to have to work to understand him. He’d expected Spanish or English. “Yes, I am.”

“And who exactly sent you?”

“The Portuguese ambassador to the Ilhas das Sereias. Your ambassador there gave us her blessing, more or less, although she didn’t mention you, Mr. Adler.”

“She didn’t know I was coming here.” He dropped his head back against the pillow. “So you work for the Foreign Office in Portugal? Which one? Northern or Southern?”

“Neither. I’m a police inspector from Northern Portugal, and although we have our prince’s permission to pursue this, it’s not an official inquiry.”

He pointed at Marina then. “And who is she?”

Marina glanced at Joaquim.

“My wife,” Joaquim said, choosing the path of least information. For some reason, Pinter hadn’t handed over that detail to Adler, hinting at a lack of trust.

“You brought your wife along?” Adler started to laugh, but coughed instead. He grasped his side with his free hand and grimaced. “Cracked ribs,” he choked out after a moment. “Send her home, man. These people don’t hesitate to hit women.”

Joaquim didn’t intend to let that happen to Marina. “Which people?”

“They were Mossos,” Adler said, “but this wasn’t any normal police matter, not about her being sereia. Leandra wouldn’t tell me why they came for her.”

Joaquim drew over a chair for Marina and one for himself. “Why don’t we start at the beginning? Why did you come here in the first place?”

“My aunt contacted me to ask some questions about Leandra—about whether she had stripes on her legs, of all things—and then told me she was alive,” Adler said.

Yet another thing the ambassador hadn’t mentioned—that she was Adler’s
aunt
. She’d contacted the man in Paris, and he’d rushed here to find Leandra. “Your aunt is Madam Norton?” he asked to be sure. “The American ambassador?”

“Yes,” Adler said.

“But she didn’t send you here?”

Adler flushed. “No, but how could I have stayed away?”

Had the man abandoned his post to come to Barcelona? “Let’s go back further,” Joaquim said. “How do you know Leandra in the first place?”

“I met her when I visited my aunt on the islands, about ten years ago.”

“And?”

“And the day before we were to take ship to America, she was arrested by their government. A few days later we heard she’d been sentenced to execution.”

That was not what Ambassador Norton had claimed. “Why was Leandra going to America with you?”

Adler gave him a bloody-eyed stare. “Because she was in love with me, you dolt.”

They’d suspected the American ambassador was holding back information. She should have told them that Adler and Leandra had been planning to run away together. “For all I know she was going to go to work for your American navy,” Joaquim pointed out. “You didn’t specify, so I needed to hear you say it.”

Adler looked away. “Now I believe you’re a policeman.”

Joaquim ignored the dry comment. “After you heard she was to be executed, what did you do?”

“We were scrambling to figure out exactly what happened. My aunt didn’t have grounds to file any protest, and to be frank, the sereia government wouldn’t have cared if she had. They have such a tight grip on their people that no one would interfere, and the press there wouldn’t dare print a word about such things.”

Joaquim glanced at Marina again. She nodded, confirming Adler’s guesses. Joaquim turned back to the American. “When you knew Leandra back on the islands,” Joaquim asked, “did she tell you whether she was working for the Ministry of Intelligence?”

“She was,” Adler said. “But she wanted to get away from them.”

“Why?”

“They were asking her to do things she didn’t want to do. They wanted her to cut her hands.”

Cut her hands
meant having the webbing between her fingers removed. Joaquim resisted the urge to glance at Marina’s gloved hands. “And she was refusing?”

“Yes,” Adler said, an ugly expression flitting across his features. The anger in the man’s tone was unmistakable. “It’s been done since, and not particularly well.”

“So she wasn’t cooperating with the ministry’s demands?”

“No.” Adler sighed. “That wasn’t why they arrested her, though. They must have learned she was planning on running away with me.”

Madam Norton had claimed Leandra was picked up for being overly friendly with
her
. “Did your aunt know about your relationship with Leandra?”

“No. Not until afterward.”

That could explain the disparity between their statements. It was possible both Americans believed they were responsible for Leandra’s arrest. It was also possible neither actually was. “And you heard nothing about Leandra in the time following her execution?”

“Nothing. My aunt sent me home after that. I was stationed in Lisboa for a couple of years, and then I was shipped to the Paris office,” Adler said. “But when I saw her on the street Sunday, I had no doubt. It was my Leandra.”