The Flesh and the Devil (49 page)

         
She stared, startled, conscious of a dreadful foreboding
that was beginning to grow inside her. She wanted to crush the painful thing
before it came fully to life, but she quelled the longing to cross her arms
protectively and said instead,

         
'From a woman?'

         
'You must allow me my privacy.' Tristan slipped the packet
into the breast of his doublet, his eyes expressionless, and after an instant
she managed to smile scornfully. 'I am surprised that you waste time with
remembrances of the past when they cannot profit you,' she retorted. 'It is a
strange thing for a mercenary to do.'

         
'True, but this is no love-token, or else I should not keep
it. The other I carry has given me a distaste for such toys.' The green eyes
glinted derisively.

         
'What other?' Fascinated, she watched his fingertips brush
his cheek matterof-factly, and said as though the words were forced from her, ‗A
love-token? I thought – some battle-you said you were a soldier.'

         
'I was a young fool, too, with too much ambition.' His very
lack of emotion was somehow satiric, and she shivered. 'When I was near twenty,
I aspired to love above my own degree, and my mistress bade one of her richer
suitors to cool my ardour. Because she was so very beautiful –‗ his eyes
held hers – ‗she took care that the deed would give her good sport, and
he and his friends gave me this for my impudence, then took me and showed me to
her. It pleased her very much - she was delighted to see how they had cured my
impudence.'

         
‗But they did not cure you.' Juana spoke
suffocatedly, turning her head away.

         
'Perhaps not, but it taught me to ensure that I would not
be served so again. Now I no longer go cap-in-hand to any woman, no matter how
rich or how fair.'

         
Juana stiffened, keeping her face averted, and after a
moment he said in his normal crisp tone, 'Have you done with those trinkets
yet?'

         
She stared blindly down at the jewels in her hands. She had
been holding them so fiercely that the shape of the settings was embedded in
the flesh of her palms, and when she opened her hands they adhered to them for
an instant before falling away. 'Keep the silver bracelet for as long as you
can,' she said, and moved away.

         
‗The stripling's gift?‘ he enquired dryly, tossing
the silver links and catching them deftly in his palm, Juana shrugged,
uncaring. She had spoken without thinking only to assert her will, and had
chosen at random; the bracelet had been her brother Ugo's gift.

         
'It came from someone I loved, and who loved me, but it is
no matter. Sell it when you will.'

         
An almost inaudible exclamation made her turn her head to
see him staring down at her with a look that made her color ebb; then the
grotesquely emphatic lids were lowered over Tristan's eyes, and he bent to pick
up the saddlebag as Elisabeta came bustling in.

         
'You here at this hour, Felipe? You have had some success?'
– ‗I thought so.'

         
Tristan did not look up as he spoke, but Elisabeta's shrewd
gaze went at once from one to the other. 'Ah, the little one is impatient! I
can understand, niria

         
— one wants everything at once when one is young, but not
even Felipe can work miracles! You have years ahead of you to look for new
countries, and a little delay is not life or death, is it?' Tristan smiled
slightly. 'It may be, if we cannot go before pursuit catches up with us. I
shall not lightly be pardoned for stealing my master's bride,' he added rather
grimly, 'it seems I cannot curb my taste for rare things, in spite of the
danger it brings me.'

         
Elisabeta, surprisingly, snorted. 'If you mean Elena de
Prontenera, you are far better off marrying Juana here — the man she married
instead of you drank himself to death inside a year, and now she is wedded to a
half-blind man twice her age, who neither knows nor cares how often she
cuckolds him! She was never much above the town flirt, but now she is become
the town harlot. And fat, too,'

         
she added venomously. Tristan gave a startled laugh. 'Do
you see her often?'

         
'Now and again, passing through the streets as though she
fancied herself the Queen! But you mean to tell me,' Elisabeta's voice rose
accusingly, 'that Juana was to have been married to a Dugue?' She added as
Tristan nodded, 'You are risking your life, Felipe!'

         
'Certainly, if you shout my affairs from the windows like
that.' Juana caught her breath as he slung the saddlebag over his shoulder,
remembering that he had carried Bar-tolomé‘s corpse as lightly. As if he sensed
her tension he turned to look at her, his green eyes strangely compelling. 'But
there was no help for it, was there, Juana?' he enquired softly. 'Husband - or
no husband.' - 'No help,‘ she agreed.

         
Elisabeta nodded fondly. It was plain that she was enjoying
what she thought was a romantic interlude, her fancy imbuing the scant facts of
Tristan's story with all theelements of an impetuous, irresistible love. She
would never understand, Juana thought ruefully, that their pairing had been
conceived in nothing but hatred and unwilling desire, and brought to life in
the train of violent death.

         
The sounds of the revelling in the street outside had risen
to a higher, more excited pitch, and the quiet in the room was filled with
exclamations and shouting over some diversion or other, close to the house.
Tristan was still gazing at Juana with a faint smile that seemed to mock her
inability to denounce his implied falsehood when Luis's voice was heard outside
and the moment shattered.

         
'Elisabeta! Elisabeta!‘

         
All three of them turned towards the doorway, and as they
did so Luis burst in. His swarthy face was deeply-lined with concern, and he
was pulling off his apron as he came.

         
'Elisabeta, we must find Felipe! Send Alfonso to the market
square, and I shall go myself to the Avenida-' He broke off, his harassed
expression giving way to relief as he saw Tristan. 'Felipe, thank God you are
here. Some strangers have just ridden in - gipsies, I think - from Andalusia,
and the word is that the Duque de Valenzuela has been found dead! It is all
over the countryside, they say!'

         
Juana felt as though she had been enfolded in a cloak of
ice. Her teeth began to chatter, and before her eyes blackness advanced and
receded. Sometimes it clarified into the outlines of the room and Luis's
anxious face, sometimes it blinded her in a dark tide; she was aware that
Elisabeta was looking at her in startled question, and wondered whether her
face betrayed her. Somewhere she heard Tristan say 'Bartolomé?' and wondered
how he could sound so maddeningly calm.

         
'Your Duque - Valenzuela - is his name Bartolomé? They say
that he disappeared weeks since, and these gypsies were questioned for his
kidnapping. While they were at 'the castillo the news came that his body had
been found. They were hustled out without another word, they said, and were
never told how he died

         
- as well that you two ran away from there when you did or
else you might be suspected!‘

         
Juana crossed herself instinctively, not even hearing that
Tristan replied. In these past days she had allowed herself to lapse into a
dream-world, she was thinking; or rather she had let herself forget what she
did not want to remember, the brutal fact that a man was dead. However bestial)
however loathsome, Bartolomé de Benaventes y Rioja had been a man, and he had
died because he had impeded Felipe Tristan's purpose. So outlandish was the
memory of that twilight scene in the Castillo's wine-cellar that her brain had
cancelled it, lulling her conscious mind into the comfortable belief that its
consequences could not affect her. Her own new-discovered Love and Tristan's
ruthless domination had seemed far more real and important.

         
But whether Tristan had been telling the truth when he said
he had merely let Bartolome die or whether he had killed him with his own
hands, he could be caught and indicted for his murder, and she with him. It was
to no purpose-to let him subjugate her mind and heart as he had her body,
because there could only be one ending. He was a ruthless, a killer in all but
the name, even if he had told her the truth; and he had no feeling for her
beyond desire. She had almost forgotten that, to him, she was only another
Spanish woman to be used and despised. He would have been sardonically amused,
no more, if she had confessed her love, Juana thought. The danger had been
close, but the shock of Luis's news had brought her to her senses just in time.

         
Elisabeta was exclaiming over her pallor and urged her to
sit down. She felt the elder woman's warm hand close over her cold one, and
gripped it feverishly.

         
'Sit down, Juana, you are not well. Here, lean on me.' This
dreadful news. . .

         
.' Juana heard her own voice, faint and unsteady, and her
head tilted back to meet Tristan's gaze. He looked at her only for an instant,
and then turned to address Luis.

         
'I knew that the boy was sick in body and mind - he was
becoming harder to control with every month that passed and I told his uncle of
it.' His face was the secret mask again, ironic and unrevealing, not a trace of
emotion in its impassive set. 'Is it known what caused his death?‘