The House of Adriano (19 page)

“Do not hesitate to refuse if you would prefer another companion,” he said in an icily remote voice. “I quite understand your feelings. You voiced them very clearly that evening in Melbourne.”

“I didn’t mean anything like that at all,” she denied quickly. “You took me by surprise, that’s all. I should love to go to the Escorial Palace.”

Her hesitation had been caused by the fact of wondering whether she had heard right. Now all she could think of was to correct the erroneous impression he had received. When one was in love one snatched at every crumb, it seemed.

“With me - or should I arrange for Senor Renfrew to be your escort?” There was something almost merciless in his regard. “There is no need to prevaricate. As I said - I shall quite understand. I am, after all, the most detestable creature you have ever met.”

Aileen bit her lip, wondering how she could ever have said such a thing.

“I’m sorry. I
... I didn’t really mean it. I was upset at the time.”

“Perhaps, but when one is ... upset, the truth is usually spoken. There is no restraint.”

“I suppose I did mean it at the time,” she admitted. “But since then...”

“You may perhaps have changed your mind slightly?”

Slightly!

She gave him a quick glance, but his face was still as expressionless. It was hard to tell what he was thinking. She could not believe that her opinion could really mean anything to him. She was of no importance in his life. If anything, it was probably just the natural desire of any human being not to be disliked.

“I should apologise for some of the things I said and ... and I have changed my mind.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “That was hard to say, wasn’t it?”

“Not really. Just a little awkward. And ... and I’ve realised for a long time that you could have stopped me having any further contact with Peter. You didn’t have to bring me out here.”

The faint smile came back to his face at that. “So perhaps there may be an armistice now that matters are arranged to the satisfaction of both of us?”

She glanced upwards and smiled almost shyly. “I think an armistice would be a good idea.” He was not to know, of course, that it had some time ago become a complete surrender on her part.

A momentary silence fell and she found herself glancing at him unobtrusively, with the same hidden and hopeless yearning. The morning sunlight was shining through the window on to the thick black hair, drawing blue glints from it and shading the aquiline planes of his face. As always, she could not help dwelling on how attractive he was, not in any “matinee idol” sort of way, but something that came from those
hawk like
features, the firm mouth and brilliant dark eyes, skin drawn tautly over high cheekbones, and eyebrows that even had a slightly satanic curve to them. He looked far too attractive to be altogether safe to a woman’s peace of mind - especially her own peace of mind. No wonder Alesandra was so intent on becoming
h
is wife, not only for the position but the man as well, no doubt.

Suddenly he turned his head and looked at her fully, and she had to veil her regard quickly, but he seemed to have noticed nothing, smiling in a charming but, she was s
u
re, quite impersonal manner.

“Then you accept my invitation to El Escorial?”

“Yes ... and thank you,
senor
.”

He frowned as he glanced down at his watch. “It is almost time for lunch, and unfortunately I must go out immediately afterwards.” He glanced up, smiling again. “We shall have to arrange this expedition to El Escorial for another day, I am afraid.”

Aileen thanked him again, and knew she would secretly count every minute until that time arrived.

After lunch the house settled down to the traditional siesta through the hottest part of the day. Duarte, however, had gone out, as he had mentioned before lunch. She had wondered at one time what these business appointments were and where all his money came from, apart from the estates of which the Castillo Marindos formed part, but had not liked to enquire. After all, it was not really her business, but from one or two remarks dropped by Dona Teresa she had gained the impression that he was a member of a large and powerful business syndicate that took in many different trades.

The rest of the day passed in slow, warm tranquillity. Duarte was not home in the evening either - apparently he was dining at the Pereira house. In the morning Bart telephoned and asked her if she would like to go for a drive.

“I’d love to - but do you mind if I bring Peter? The tutor is sick and there aren’t any lessons for the time being.”

“Trying to cramp my style?” Then he laughed. “O.K., I was only joking. Bring him by all means. Anywhere in particular you’d like to go?”

“I’ll leave that to you. Duarte has promised to take me to El Escorial at some time or other. I don’t know the other worthwhile spots to visit, except maybe the Prado.”

She
did not notice that
she had used Duarte’s
Christian
name
so naturally and easily.

Bart arrived about fifteen minutes later to pick them up. His manner with Peter was easy and unstrained, and once or twice Aileen caught the boy looking at him speculatively.

“Are you a cowboy?” he asked at last, out of the blue.

Bart grinned. “’Fraid not.”

Peter looked a little puzzled. He was sitting on the front seat, between Aileen and the man.

“You come from Texas, though,” as if that alone should have made Bart a cowboy.

Bart admitted to owning a ranch and to spending some time on it, but said that he could not really lay claim to being a cowboy, adding that not everybody in Texas was a cowboy either. Peter seemed somewhat disappointed but brightened up when Bart described his ranch and the real cowboys who did work there.

After they had been driving for a short time on a well-kept road they came to a little town, and Bart left the car in a shady plot of ground. Adjoining it was a vast building that looked almost ugly.

He nodded towards it. “El Escorial.”

Aileen looked startled. “That’s the Escorial Palace!” It did not seem possible that the bare, forbidding building should be the place everyone talked about, then suddenly another aspect of the matter struck her and she turned to him with an expression of dismay. “But I’d promised to come here with Duarte!”

He shrugged, apparently quite unconcerned. “You can still come here with him if you feel like it. I didn’t know anything definite had been arranged. You said you wanted to see it and you might have waited any time before he decided to bring you out, so...” He finished off the sentence with a shrug.

Aileen bit her lip, not liking to appear ungrateful, but at the same time she wished he had not brought her here.

Bart raised a laconic eyebrow at her expression. “I didn’t realise it meant as much to you as that. Maybe I ought to feel jealous.”

“Of course not.” She flushed slightly, hoping the quick denial was not too quick. She could not admit even to Bart how she felt about Duarte and what his promise to take her to El Escorial had meant to her. “It’s nothing like that at all,” she went on. “It’s just that... well, we had something of a misunderstanding about it.”

“Maybe we should drive straight back, then.”

Although he spoke lightly, there was something a little hurt in his expression, so she shook her head.

“No ... that would be silly.”

“Anyway, you can’t see everything in one visit.”

She was probably making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill. It could not mean anything to Duarte whether or not he was the first one to bring her out here and, in any event, perhaps he need not know about it. She could still come out here with him.

“It took twenty-one years to build,” Bart commented as they went towards the building. “Three thousand people were employed on it the whole time.” He pointed off to the south. “Over there are the Los Ermitanos mountains. Philip II, the guy who built the place, used to sit on a rock seat at the foot of them, watching the building going up.”

Aileen frowned a little. “Philip II - wasn’t he the one with the Armada?”

Bart nodded with a grin. “That’s him. And you know something - even to this day they blame the weather for the destruction of the Armada, not the English.”

Aileen laughed. “Well, that’s one way of getting over a defeat.”

Her first misgivings on learning where Bart had brought them died away as they approached the great monastery-palace. Whatever it had been in the past, it was now one of the show places of Spain.

“They call this the Patio de los Reyes,” Bart told her as they walked across a sunlit patio that was flanked by shady cloisters and, high up, set with the statues of dead kings.

There were endless galleries inside, and here the gloomy appearance of the ou
t
side disappeared and the grey granite walls were embellished with some of the world’s finest canvases.

“Goya,” Bart said, pointing to one of them. “That’s a Tintoretto over there
...
El Greco ... Zurbaran,” name after
name, some of the most famous names in the world of art.

Aileen gave him a curious glance, somehow never having associated him with an appreciation of art.

“You must have quite a liking for this sort of thing.”

“I guess I have,” he admitted with a nod. “I have a small collection of my own back home.”

They went on, looking at one fabulous treasure after another ... incredible tapestries, sculptures, altar frontals ... manuscrip
t
s so valuable no price could be put on them ... needlework, porcelain, clocks. There was a vast library that contained a copy of every book published in Spain ... and a wonderful porphyry mausoleum where the bodies of Spanish kings lay. Last of all they visited th
e
strangely frightening chamber where Philip II had died in 1598. Somehow, in spite of the priceless treasures contained within its walls, Aileen could not help feeling an instinctive kind of relief as they came out into the sunlight again, because in spite of the fact that later kings of Spain had not shared Philip’s forbidding outlook on life there was something forbidding about the building which the later embellishments could not take away.

From El Escorial they took a road northward into the mountain slopes of the Lower Guadarramas, a lovely mountain range where there were good ski runs in winter.

“Used to be bears there not so very long ago,” he told her. “There are wolves and foxes around even today.”

“Really?”

She looked so startled that he grinned again. “Don’t worry. We’re not going off the beaten track ... and only to the foothills in any case.”

About seven miles from El Escorial they crossed the northwest road that ran from Madrid to the Biscay coast and went on, climbing steeply along a winding road, with the air becoming noticeably cooler.

They stopped at the top of a fairly high hill and Bart drove the car off on to a grassy verge. The view was magnificent, down into a long valley that swept off into misty distance, the thin line of a road connecting half a dozen villages, with here and there larger houses, probably belonging to estate owners, or maybe even hotels.

“Like it?”

“It’s magnificent.” She turned back to him, smiling slightly. “For a non-resident of the country, you seem to know quite a bit about it.”

He shook his head. “Not much really ... but I’ve been out here on a few other occasions and you tend to remember some things more than others.”

Whatever direction the conversation might have taken then, it was summarily interrupted by Peter, who had apparently decided that before they got too engrossed in discussions on the scenery it was time to inform them that he was hungry.

The picnic lunch that Bart had had packed by the hotel where he was staying was the sort to tempt even a laggard appetite, and they were all healthily hungry by then. The drinks in vacuum flasks were deliciously cool, and after their lunch they lounged back against the thick boles of trees that hung a cooling canopy of leaves above them, but on the journey back she began to remember the fact that she had first promised to go to the Escorial with Duarte, and even though she once again told herself that it could not matter to Duarte, there was still a fear that it might somehow spoil the new friendship that was growing up between them. It was precious to her, all that she could ever have from him, and she did not want to lose it.

Duarte was not in when they returned home, but Dona Teresa listened smilingly to Peter’s excited account of where they had been. By some whim of fate he happened to remember the name of El Escorial perfectly.

Dona Teresa nodded approvingly at Bart, who had come in to take coffee with them.

“A good choice. It is a gloomy and forbidding building, but its contents are well worth seeing.” She smiled her roguish little smile. “I remember that once I memorised certain statistics.” Her head went on one side as if she was trying to remember. “Three hundred rooms and two thousand seven hundred and sixty-three windows, twelve thousand doors, eighty-six staircases and eighty-eight fountains.” She laughed softly. “It was a whim that took me as a child.
Dona
Luana was most annoyed when I would recite like a guide book
... and also all the numbers of the interior courts and cloisters ... the chapels and holy relics.” For a moment she seemed lost in the past, then she turned to them again. “And where did you go after that? The road to the Lower Guadarramas is most attractive.”