Secrets of Castillo del Arco (17 page)

The old man’s words came back to him. He’d taken the words at face value. They had seemed cold but they had made sense. And he had intended to keep himself apart. He would not love her; he could not afford to, not if he was to set her free.

He hadn’t meant to love her
.

He pulled the car to a halt near a
horreo
, a corn shed that looked like a miniature stone cathedral, his palms sweating on the wheel.

He hadn’t meant to love her.

But he did
.

He looked at the
horreo
, reminded of the stone castle where he had brought her and then abandoned her. What would she be thinking? How would she be feeling? After giving her the cold shoulder since their wedding, they had shared a night of exquisite pleasure—he had lost count of how many times they had made love—and then he had cold-heartedly walked away.

His hands were sweaty on the steering wheel.

Their love-making had been so frantic and desperate that he had not even thought to use protection.

Even now she could be carrying his child
.

What had he done?

He had run from the truth. He had not even been able to bring himself to tell her he loved her. Surely she deserved at least that?

But then, she deserved so much more. She deserved an explanation. She deserved his apology. After which she probably would not want his love.

But he had to tell her.

He put the car into gear and turned it around on the
narrow road, only then noticing the dark bank of cloud that extended along the coast. And with a sizzle of apprehension he was reminded of another time, another day long ago, when the cloud gathered heavy over the castle and he had been rushing to get back.

Only to have his world crash and burn when he had.

He wasn’t superstitious; he didn’t believe in Natania’s gypsy folklore that she would spout whenever she got the chance. But, still, there was a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach and he put his foot down.

She slipped the key into the lock where it fitted like a hand in a glove and held her breath, turning it with a solid click. She looked around, wondering if anyone had heard her. But Natania was busy in the kitchen and Marco was with her. Besides, the way the wind outside was building, nobody would possibly hear.

She turned the knob, easing it around, her heart hammering in her chest as she pushed open the door. It was dark, soft, grey light filtering in through a grimy window, dust motes playing in the shifting air. She found a switch and flicked it to and fro but nothing happened. And then she could see enough in the dim light to make out a dresser, an oil lamp on top, a stack of boxes in one corner and a circular staircase rising up on the other side of the room.

Everything was musty. The dust tickled her nose and she thought about leaving. Some kind of store room, he had said, and she could believe him. Clearly she had imagined it when she had thought she had seen someone entering.

But why would Raoul keep it locked and why would he secrete the key in his desk downstairs?

Something banged upstairs and she jumped. Then it banged again. A shutter come loose in the wind, she guessed.

The staircase beckoned. Maybe the answers were upstairs, in the turret room itself. She found matches by the lamp, lifted the glass and held a match to the wick, hissing and spluttering, filling the glass and the room with soft white light. Then, holding it carefully, she started to climb the creaky stairs.

Outside the wind started to howl, a sound that conspired with the banging to make a home in the back of her neck, prickling as if someone unseen had run their finger along her skin.

She shivered.
Next she’d be seeing ghosts
. Warily, tentatively, she peered through the hole at the top of the stairs, the doorway to the turret room. It was dark but for the shutter slamming repeatedly against the wall letting in a thready glow of grey light. She stepped up into the room, holding out the lamp as she circled, stunned beyond measure.

It was someone’s idea of a fantasy bedroom, something from
The Arabian Nights
or similar. The bed was low and covered in rich red silks and brightly coloured cushions with gold trim and tassels, dusty now, but still a glorious splash of colour. The walls were hung with jewel-coloured silk wall-hangings and covered in portraits: a ballerina, stunningly beautiful, photographed in costume in every ballet imaginable,
Swan Lake, Giselle, Romeo and Juliet
.

And there on the dresser was a close-up of her laughing into the camera, beautiful, glamorous and so full of life. Gabriella put down the lamp and picked up the picture in her hands.

To Raoul
, she had written in large, elegant letters.
All my love, Katia
.

Katia.
Raoul’s first wife
.

A chill went down her spine. This was Katia’s room, kept as it must have been when she was alive. Kept locked and preserved, like some kind of shrine.

Was that why he hadn’t wanted another wife? Was that why they had come here, to be close to his first wife. Because he was still in love with Katia?

Pain lanced her heart. She’d thought she had sensed something holding him in reserve. It had not been there when he had made love to her; he had loved her then.

Or so she had thought
.

Raoul drove the last few kilometres with a growing sense of dread. It wasn’t the approaching storm, but the fear that Gabriella had already left. What had she to stay for, after all? He had left her. There was nothing for her here.

But as he neared the castle something else caught his attention and froze his blood solid. There was a light on that shouldn’t be there, a flickering light in the turret room—
just as there had been that day all those years ago
.

And suddenly he wasn’t afraid that she had already left.

He was afraid that she had stayed …

* * *

The wind howled around the windows, cold fingers searching for a way in, the shutter banging endlessly, threatening to shatter what was left of her already bruised and battered nerves. She put the picture down and crossed to the window, testing the latch. It was stuck, probably grown shut through years of disuse.

Down below she could hear the surf smashing against the cliff, sending spray raining skywards. The window budged, little by little. If she just pushed a little harder, it would come unstuck.

He took the stairs three at a time, bellowing for Marco and Natania, wishing Gabriella would stick her head out of a door and demand to know what was wrong, fearing all the time that she would not—that he was already too late.

He reached the landing and turned right, standing panting and gutted when he saw it—the door to the turret room open, the flickering light from the lamp dancing down the stairs.

‘Gabriella!’ he shouted, leaping onto the stairs. ‘Gabriella, where are you?’

She pushed against the glass with all her weight just as the clap of thunder burst from the skies, but it was the feeling that someone had just called her name that had her looking over her shoulder at the same moment the window finally gave. She didn’t have time to see if there was anyone there; the wind clamped icy fingers around the open window and flung it open, dragging her from her feet. She screamed, clinging to the catch, her legs battling for purchase on the window sill while the surf boiled and spewed on the rocks below.

‘Nooo!’
he roared, feeling the past come crashing back, dark and horrific.

This could not be happening again!

He flew across the room, red spots before his eyes, the colour of blood in the white sea foam. He caught hold of her leg and then her waist. ‘Let go!’ he yelled at her. Her fingers were still wound deathly tight around the window clasp.

Finally she seemed to realise he had her and let go. He spun her inside, into his arms and against his frantically beating heart, stroking her hair with one hand, keeping the other wound tightly around her while the wind swirled and screamed into the room. ‘What the hell were you doing?’

‘The shutter was banging.’

‘No,’ he said, relief giving way to anger. ‘What the hell were you doing in here?’

She pushed him away, ran her hands through her hair as if she was fine, but she was trembling and as white as a ghost, her chest rising and falling quickly as she tried to catch her breath. ‘I was looking for a password for your computer so I could book a flight out of here. I found a key instead.’

‘And you thought you’d go exploring?’ Behind them the shutter and the window both slammed, rain slanting inside, feeling like icy needles against their skin. He growled and yanked the shutter closed before securing the window.

‘You told me it was a store room.’

‘It is.’

The storm let loose outside, the thunder overhead,
lightning piercing the gloom and letting loose a fresh burst of rain against the shutters. ‘You didn’t tell me what it stored. You didn’t tell me you kept it as a shrine to the woman you love.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘What else could it be? No wonder you said you never wanted another wife. You already had one—all her photographs, all her mementos, locked away safe and sound for whenever you wanted to spend a moment or two with her. I never believed you slept downstairs near the kitchen. This is where you spent the first two nights of our marriage, isn’t it? Tucked away with the memories of a dead woman!’

And he cursed himself for thinking he could lock away his past behind a closed door and keep it there for ever. ‘You have no idea how wrong you are.’

‘Am I? You brought me here because you couldn’t bear to be apart from her. You married me, but once we were here you had no use for me. Because there was no room for me in our marriage, not when you had her.’

‘No!’

‘Because you are still in love with her!’

‘No! That’s where you are wrong. If this room was kept as a shrine, it was as a shrine to my own stupidity—a reminder of how naive a man can be when he believes in love.

‘I stopped loving Katia a long time ago when I discovered my love was worth nothing. When she used this room to betray me!’

She looked around uncertainly. ‘Katia …?’

‘She brought her lovers here. Her little secret room,
her
love nest
, complete with an escape route in case someone came looking. In case I called for her.’

She shook her head, holding her arms around her waist, her hair stuck down around her face. ‘I didn’t see any escape—’

‘There is a railing outside the window—or there was—and footholds in the rock. Easy enough when the weather was fine, perilous when it was not. But she didn’t seem to care. It was a game she played, you see, a risky, dangerous game—trying to outsmart me, and succeeding. Until that storm-ridden night.’

She swallowed, remembering the surging sea, angry and frothing below the castle like a wild animal snapping and snarling to be fed, and felt a chill run down her spine. She could not imagine trying to be out there with just a railing and footholds between her and the violent sea. ‘Katia died here, didn’t she? She and her lover fell to their deaths.’

‘Now do you understand why I keep that door locked?’

He turned away, closing his eyes to blot out those images, his hands fisting in his hair. But he could still picture the scene just as clearly as if it had happened yesterday—Manuel, already disappearing from view as Raoul had run up the last few stairs into the room, roaring and almost frothing at the mouth in his fury and rage; Katia urging Manuel to hurry, as she herself had taken one look at Raoul, her eyes bright with the thrill of the game, her hair whipping around her face and her laughter still ringing out in his mind.

He had been so angry and filled with rage, rage that
filled the black empty hole from where his heart had been ripped; he had been paralysed with shock. His feet had been stuck to the floor while his world, his dreams and his love had disintegrated around him.

For she had betrayed him.

She had laughed at him
.

And, even when he had heard the grating, tearing sound of metal from rock, even when he had heard Manuel’s cry as he had fallen from the broken railing—even when he had heard Katia’s desperate cry as she had realised the game was no longer fun—he had stood there a moment too long, transfixed, broken and shattered, wondering what the hell had gone wrong.

A moment of inaction he would pay for for his entire life.

He reeled away from the window. What use was a pathetic lock? He should have bricked up the door to this poisoned room and its sordid memories years ago.

He felt her hand on his shoulder. ‘Raoul …’

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘You would not want to touch me if you knew.’

‘If I knew what?’

‘The truth. I came back to tell you. I could not leave you like I had, not without you knowing everything.’

Spiders crawled up her back; the light from the lamp flickered ominously. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean the truth about why I married you.’

T
HE
air in the turret room was too thin to breathe, the raging storm outside a soundtrack for what was going on in her head. Here, in this room, her future lay in the balance. He had come back. He had left her this morning but he had come back, as she had wanted him to, as she had prayed. Except now she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.

‘So why did you marry me?’

‘Gabriella—Bella—I have so much for which to seek your forgiveness.’

‘No, forget about forgiveness. Tell me why you married me. Clearly it was not, as I imagined in my pathetic little brain, because you loved me.’

‘I … It shames me to say that it was not.’

She squeezed her eyes shut and sagged into a chair, uncaring about the dust that welled up in a cloud. Right now she had more important things on her mind, like the heart that lay trampled and bleeding all over the floor. ‘Then tell me why.’

‘I made a promise. To a man I loved and respected above all others. A man who had been like a father to me. Even though I knew it was wrong, even though I
knew I could not be the husband you needed, I made that promise to him.’