The Flesh and the Devil (61 page)

         
And that, she realized, was what had worried her as she
surrendered to him

         
- the conviction that he had another reason for doing this,
some reason that he would never allow her to guess. It made her feel helpless,
almost humiliated, yet she could not think how to make him tell her so that she
would feel less like ... less like his whore, she thought with a pang that even
she recognized as being absurdly, ironically belated.

         
She whispered

         
'Why do

         
you want a sword?' but

         
he did

         
not answer her.

         
Dona Jeronima took a swift turn about the bedchamber and
came back to Juana, her eyes belying the amused curve of her lips and her fan
fluttering at dangerous speed. 'Oh come now, you are jesting, Margarita. Leave
me so soon, after only three weeks! Why, we are dizzied with invitations. Half
the gallants in Villenos spend their waking hours inventing ways to please you
- what is it you lack? If you are tired of the old faces, Don Bautista is to
have some guests, that should divert you - Why, two of your new gowns are not
yet come from, the seamstresses! You cannot desert me now - it is impossible
and unkind.'

         
'I am sorry, senora. I know I must seem ungrateful, but I
must go.' Juana gripped the back of a chair, wondering what had become of her
strength. 'I lack peace, that is all, I always told you that I meant to seek
refuge in a sisterhood.' She spoke with a sudden yearning desperation. 'I
thought I might forget what is past if I stayed here with you, but it is too -
but I cannot, and I had rather not stay to be a charge upon you. And while I am
so easily wearied, I know,' she added, with a flash of her old spirit, 'that my
company is no pleasure to you.'

         
Dona Jeronima bit her lip. 'I assure you, your company is
the greatest of pleasures to me. I cannot abide the thought of losing you so
soon. Come, you are sad, that is all; you have been thinking of that
serving-man who betrayed you, and it has made you melancholy. Forget him,' she
advised as Juana flinched lightly.

         
'Use some other to console or revenge yourself, and that
will rid you of the memory of him.‘

         
'I doubt that.'

         
The thin brows lifted at Juana's tone. 'That is not what I
heard you telling the big Englishman on the night of our feast! Then you were
full of setting a torch to the past, like a sensible girl. Have you changed
your mind since?'

         
Juana let out her held breath slowly and carefully before
she said, 'Oh, that was because I thought the Englishman dull, and I said what
I did to provoke him. They say that all his race are slow of tongue -'

         
'My dear, you have the strangest opinions! A man like that,
and you think him dull! Next you will tell me that you think Don Diego Ruiz is
ugly,' she added on a testing note. 'No. He is very handsome.'

         
Juana spoke colourlessly. Don Diego thought so, too, her
thoughts added, but she stayed silent as Dona Jeronima touched upon some of the
governor's son's more ostentatious virtues in a brief, half-mocking homily. It
was a habit , her hostess had, Juana had discovered, to bring up the name of
one or other of her several suitors and enumerate his virtues, watching her the
while with the alertness of a street-trader engaged on some piece of
bargaining. Now she listened in weary silence until the speech was done, then
nodded unmoved, her fingers twining nervously in the pearl string about her
throat. 'I am sure he is all you say. But about my going —' 'Yet again! I shall
have to reproach you, Margarita, if you persist in that. Not yet, I tell you!
Later, perhaps, you may go-if you still wish to - but Don Diego and the rest
will be made desolate if you abandon them so soon. Besides, the rest of the
town is on tenterhooks to know which of the throng you will choose in the end,'
she added on a delicately probing note. 'I am told that some vulgar wretches
have even wagered on it.' Juana looked blank. 'Choose?' she echoed. 'Surely you
have noticed how much our young men admire you?' Dona

         
Jeronima enquired with a tinge of asperity. 'Several of
them have confided in me thatthey have hopes, and have asked me to speak to you
for them. I have not done so, but. . . .'

         
'It would be labour lost.' Juana's eyes were brilliant with
a mixture of anger and fright, and she did not noticethe hardening of the elder
woman's composed face. 'I could not-I have no interest in-in men.'

         
DonaJeronima shrugged and turned away with a great air of
rueful resignation and a smile that did not match the hardness in her eyes.
"Truly not?

         
We must look for some broken hearts in the town, then, it
seems. But I hope you will not shun their company because of it,' she added as
Juana tried to speak. 'We are invited this afternoon to go to the Molina loge
at the arena outside Cadiar - they are trying out some young bulls there, and
the de Frontenera brothers made me promise to bring you after your last
default. If the young men bore you, there is always the old Conde! He is back
from Toledo, and you may jest with him while his wife courts the Englishman, if
you can make him hear you.' 'He-Senor Stanford-is not gone, then?' Juana tried
to sound disinterested, but her throat hurt her. 'Not he-he lingers.' Dona
Jeronima stroked her hollow cheek with the tip of her fan, a meditative look on
her face. 'The tale is that he has some matter of business to settle -I think
he said a debt, but I do not know whether he meant his or another's. Ah, take
care - never mind, never mind. . . .' She spoke through Juana's instinctive
gasp of distress, 'Sanchia will pick up the pearls; just have a care not to
tread on them. What were you about, to tug at the string like that?'

         
Hardly aware of the pearls that trickled from her lap like
drops of frozen cream, Juana said almost inaudibly, 'I thought he had gone.'

         
Dona Jeronima had gone to summon Sanchia and did not hear
her, and without raising her eyes Juana bent to pick the loose pearls out of
the folds of her skirt. Returning, Dona Jeronima eyed her lowered head in
exasperation.

         
'They will never be restrung in time for the ball tomorrow
night, but it is no matter, I shall think of something else for you - perhaps I
may lend you something of mine. What do you wear, the blue gown with the gold
and silver?'

         
Juana agreed without looking up, her fingers still moving
automatically while the rest of her body was frozen to numbness. Despair seemed
to wall her in. Felipe hated her, she was thinking, enough to risk his own life
to make hers wretched. It was like the night she had locked herself in her
chamber for safety, and he had still found means to come to her. She had been
sure that she was safe then, too. What would he do, she wondered suddenly, if
he found a breach in her defences this time?

         
Dona Jeronima's voice ran on in the background, planning
and speculating, her words a smooth blur of sound that only ceased when, she
realized that her guest was not listening to her.

         
Senor Felipe Stanford from England was not, as Juana had
feared he would be, among the party attending the trial of young bulls at
Cadiar. The de Frontenera brothers played gallants to herself and Dona
Jeronima, keeping up a fund of rather ponderous compliments and badinage that
disguised neither the seriousness of their intentions, nor their obvious
rivalry for Juana's favour. They were strange brothers for the Condesa Elena to
have, she thought; grave where their sister was flippant, slow-tongued where
she chattered. But both had a hint of her opulent, rather sensual good looks,
and the elder, Francisco, bore a glint of fox-colour in his dark hair that
recalled Tristan's red mane almost unbearably.

         
Juana's attention to the activities of both bulls and men
in the dusty arena was wholly feigned, and it was with a sense of immeasurable
relief that she emerged from the Conde's carriage-borrowed by his
brothers-in-law for the occasion - to cross the Plaza Mayor. The dazzling light
and the shouts of the crowd in the arena had engendered another of her
persistent headaches, and at that moment the Casa de Herreros, which had begun
to seem like a silk-lined trap in her more fanciful moments, had taken on the
aspect of a haven.

         
Francisco de Frontenera had moved to her right hand and
Agostin to her left, leaving Dona Jeronima to bring up the rear with the little
page she had lately acquired. Fleetingly, Juana thought of the way the young
bulls had been herded out of their stalls, harried from left and right and
urged from behind, so that there was no way for them to go but forward.

         
Her steps faltered as she neared the fountain and she saw
the tall figure outlined sharply against the bright fall of water. Tristan had
not noticed her. He was deep in talk with what she thought at first must be one
of the Annendariz children, but the figure was too broad, too squat....

         
She must have made some betraying sound or movement,
because Tristan's head turned and his companion looked up quickly; the picture
stamped itself on her brain like a brand as she stared back. The sudden, alert
stillness of the two figures. Green eyes, lazy yet indefinably menacing,
piercing her like arrows, and the belligerent-looking face of the dwarf. Then
Pedrino patted Tristan's leg with one miniature hand and went toddling off
across the square, while the red-headed man straightened to his full
overpowering height and came towards her.

         
It was only then that she noticed the braided suit of
grey-blue, the short cloak with the clear blue lining, the beribboned boots and
plumed hat. He looked like the epitome of what he aped with such cool, sardonic
relish - a landed gentleman in search of recreation - rather than the
calculating opportunist she knew him to be in truth.

         
His brilliant gaze ran deliberately over her, assessing the
outward signs of pale cheeks and shadowed eyes, the tension of her slender body
in the scarlet gown she disliked, before he swept an unhurried bow and turned
to Francisco.

         
'Your pardon, Senor de Frontenera, but the Conde humbly
requests the return of his carriage. Your sister requires it.'

         
The brothers exchanged looks, and Agostin said stiffly, 'We
were about to return. Could she not have waited?'

         
Tristan's massive shoulders moved in a barely perceptible
shrug. 'She grew impatient, and as I knew you would return this way and was
bound here on business of my own, I won the privilege of being her messenger.'

         
'What was the manikin you talked with there, was he your
business? '

         
Francisco enquired offensively. 'I thought all such
vagabond freaks had left the town when the fiesta ended.'

         
Tristan nodded, his eyes expressionless. 'He was indeed,
senor. I had word that he was here and wished to see me, and because I have a
care to know true friends from-what is your Spanish word? –
equtvoctuors-
'
 
the foreign accent was subtly accentuated —
'I took leave of the Condesa to come here and meet him. And I have benefited by
it, for the ridings he brought will be of use.' 'Good or bad?' Juana's voice
did not sound like her own. 'Some of both, senorita. I am honoured by your
concern.' He gave a slight bow, his gaze disconcertingly steady on her face as
he spoke. 'I have had word that the household I lately left has suffered an unexpected
loss - the lady of the house has died, overborne by the travail of nursing her
sick husband back to health.'