The Spanish Marriage (10 page)

The sun made a pattern of sparkling slivers between the raw
boards of the hut when Dorothea awoke the next morning; she found herself
wrapped willy-nilly in blankets and clothes, her hair tangled. Matlin was not
beside her, was nowhere to be seen. She allowed herself a long, delicious moment
to stretch, to remember, and to smile. Then she rose and began to dress,
shaking her creased clothes out and bundling together the blankets and last
scraps of their ridiculous make-believe dinner. When she had two neat bundles
piled by the door and had removed the most obvious traces of their brief
tenancy in the hut, Thea pulled her shawl up to cover her hair and stepped into
the sunshine.

Matlin was standing by the mules and fussing intently with
the harness.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Thea began slowly.
She felt shy, uncertain of whether she should go to him, as she wished to do,
or wait for some sign. His back was to her, and she could not see his face.

“At least it does not look like rain,” he agreed
after a minute. “We’re starting out late, and we’ll have to
find someone to take us across the river” He turned, scowling in
concentration at the knotted lead rein twisted between his fingers. “Can
you be ready to ride in a few minutes?”

The excitement and pleasure drained from Thea slowly,
leaving only a chill, weighty apprehension. Something was wrong; she had done
something to displease him. After last night it should be so different between
them; he had called her his wife. He had made her so, for the love of God; so what
was wrong now? Stiffly, she thrust the parcels of food and blankets toward him.
“Here.”

“Is that everything?” Matlin asked calmly, tying
the blankets onto his mule’s saddle.

“Yes.” Without waiting for his help Thea led her
mule to a fallen tree and, with some difficulty——the tree was half
rotted——managed to mount without Matlin’s assistance. He then
nodded as if he had confirmed a thought to himself.

It was the longest, hardest, most disenheartening day of the
journey. They kept to smaller roads and travelled as quickly as they could make
the mules move, stopping before noon to ferry across the Douro, then starting
off at the same brisk, distant pace. Thea, staring moodily ahead of her, wondered
over and over: What did I do? Matlin had been kinder when they were only——married.
In the light of day the gentle lover of the night before was gone, and the
sometimes amusing companion of the roads as well. He was a cold, efficient
stranger, silent and curiously unforgiving.
What did I do wrong?

If I wait, she thought. If I wait and am very patient and
very good——idiotic word to use. If I
am
good and faithful and
he sees that I don’t mean to inconvenience him, perhaps he will begin to
love me a little. I thought last night he had begun to do.

“Is something wrong?" Matlin's?” Matlin’s
voice broke into her thoughts.

Thea looked up and realized that her mule had stopped. Last
night was, after all, last night. “Forgive me,” she said, keeping
her voice steady. The urge to weep had been with her all day, but as her
confusion grew her anger did too; it helped her to answer him in kind, coldly;
it helped her to maintain her dignity a little. Thea dug her heels into the mule’s
dusty sides and urged it forward again.

o0o

Matlin had wrestled with his conscience, a brutal headache,
and his balky mule all morning. Of the three his conscience was the worst. No
matter how he approached it, what he had done could be considered little short
of rape. God knew he had not meant for the evening to end that way. Married or
no, Thea was only a child. What had the Superior said, that afternoon at the
convent? Thirteen, fourteen years old? She should have been playing in the
schoolroom, giggling, and learning French verbs and delicate pianoforte pieces.
He had been foxed, and the girl had seemed willing, but what could that have
been but ignorance? Now, today, she would not let him near her, kept him at arm’s
length even to the point of crawling awkwardly onto her mule without his
assistance. He had offered her his protection for the journey, and what had he
done? Abused the right, taken advantage of a marriage which he had never
intended should be more than a fiction…....

Looking sideways at her, he remembered the touch of her hands,
the taste of her lips still damp with wine, and he felt desire, followed
immediately by a deeper sense of self-loathing. From now on, he thought
furiously, he would keep as far from her as possible, avoid the slightest
temptation. When they arrived in England he would offer her her freedom on any
terms she liked.
His wife,
he thought, and was miserable.

They rode along the border for some time before they
crossed, without incident, about fifteen miles south of Villarino de los Aires.
By sunset, when Matlin brought them to a tiny inn, Thea was so tired that she
rocked in her seat and suffered Matlin to lift her down from her mule without
protest. They stood in the yard for a moment just so: Thea within the circle of
her husband’s arms, staring up submissively, waiting. He thought he read
fear in her eyes and stepped back at once.

“Dorothea, believe me,” he began in an
undertone, in English. “I won't...won’t....” Then, as a
sottish farmer stumbled out of the inn and passed them, he switched to Spanish.
“I apologize for what happened last night,” he elaborated
unnecessarily. “You need not fear that such a thing will happen again.
I——Just accept my apologies. We’ll sort out this sorry
arrangement when we reach home, I promise you.”

The farmer had been waddling in aimless, drunken circles around
the yard; Thea, not at all certain of what Matlin meant, except that he had
regretted sharing his bed with her, murmured “Shhh” and started
complaining loudly in Spanish, fretting over the missed wedding, all the favors
gone because she had had the ill fortune to marry the slowest man with the
slowest mules in all Galicia. The drunkard seemed waveringly amused but not
particularly interested in this domestic quarrel. He drifted off in the general
direction of the road.

“I take your meaning,” Matlin told her. “I
won’t slip from my character again, I promise.” He began to make
loud, repeated apologies to her Manuela, as they picked across the path to the
inn door.

Exhausted, Thea listened while Matlin arranged for their
lodging and for the purchase and preparation of dinner. Again she would sleep
in the ladies’ room and tonight it was a relief to her. The language here
was an odd mixture of Spanish and Portuguese, slurred and rapid; it served as a
reminder that although they had crossed the Douro and the border they were not
safe. Matlin seemed to manage the business well enough, and here they took his
problems in Spanish for the faults of a Spaniard uneasy with Portuguese; since
their fright in Peñausende he had been adding little mannerisms to support his
character as Miguel, the slow farmer.

“Miguel,” Thea said at last, achieving a weary,
shrewish tone without effort. “I am tired. I do not wish to eat. You, with
your slow mules and your slow tongue, have kept me from my cousin’s
wedding; do not let them keep me from my bed.” She looked with hope at
the landlord’s wife, a fat, sighing matron who smelled of sweat and
garlic. The woman returned Thea’s look measuringly, liked what she saw,
and began to take Thea’s part, abusing Matlin and her own husband on the
girl’s behalf. After a moment of rapid invective the woman swept Thea
along with her to the women’s dormitory; they had a few minutes of
gossip; then the woman exclaimed, “Señora, you look like a ghost! Sleep
now; in the morning you shall eat, yes, I shall cook your breakfast myself,
with these hands. That brute of a husband shall not trouble you again.”

Thea took that promise, cold comfort indeed, to sleep with
her.

o0o

They followed the banks of the Douro southward the next day.
The French were as much in evidence in Portugal as they had been in Spain, or
perhaps more so, since Portugal was now, putatively a captured nation. Not only
soldiers but French agents were everywhere, and Matlin had no wish to raise a
question in anyone’s mind, even if they seemed friendly. “There is
enough come-and-go across the border, families visiting and so on; if we act as
if we are what we say we are, I misdoubt we shall have trouble,” he
assured Thea rather heartily. “But better not to seem too careful, either.”

They skirted Lagoaça and, as they travelled, heard less and
less of the Spanish-inflected Portuguese; it was harder to make themselves
understood as they travelled. “Should we make up a new story? Why would
Spanish peasants be travelling in Portugal now?” Thea fretted.

“I have a friend in Peso da Regua,” Matlin told
her. “I have hopes he can help us get to Oporto quickly. In which case, I’d
rather we not create yet another story to remember. If we cover enough ground
today, we can reach his place tomorrow .''.”

Thea nodded. It had begun to feel as if they had always been
travelling, would always be travelling. Her life in England, the months in the
convent, even the first days of their journey seemed like another lifetime
away. Everything dated now from the night they had spent together in the hut. “How
far are we from Oporto now?”

“If I’ve judged the way correctly, about three
days. Roybal, my friend, should be able to give us news of what ships still
anchor in Oporto. There always used to be some privateers flying their own
colors off the north coast of the city. Think: in a week we’ll be sailing
home.”

The thought should have been more comforting than it was.
What home? Thea wondered grimly. She was easily tired, the adventure had become
nothing more than a sad, plodding drudgery of travel without even the comfort
of daydreams to ease the trip. Riding along, jolted by the familiar slow trot
of the mule under her, Thea tried to believe that something would happen to
make things right between them. The litany began again in her head: If I am
very good, if I wait, perhaps…...if just loving him will do it, and I am
very patient. When she glanced at Matlin it was hard to believe that any
patience could wear down that distance.

o0o

Matlin was privately as surprised as Thea when he brought
them to the gate of Roybal’s home, a small estate a few miles west of
Peso da Regua. The villa into which Señor Roybal welcomed them seemed palatial
to Thea now, and his welcome, unblinkingly courteous, was the kinder for the
fact that he was putting himself and his family in danger by sheltering them.
The man took his lead from Matlin, who embraced his friend, announced that
Miguel and Manuela had arrived at last, and addressed Roybal liberally as
cousin. Roybal, his wife, and his daughters, who were summoned to greet their “cousins,”
were uniformly thin, tall, and brown-complexioned. The three girls had their
father’s large, protuberant eyes and their mother’s generous mouth
and jutting lower lip; the sight of the whole family smiling made Thea giggle
mildly. She was to sleep on a real bed, the sheets poorly washed and aired no
doubt, but a change from straw ticking and unfamiliar women sharing with her.
They were to dine with Roybal and his family; a chicken would be freshly killed
and cooked.

“It sounds like heaven,” Thea muttered to Matlin
nervously. “But won’t someone wonder who we are?”

“Roybal has a reputation as an openhanded man, and besides
that, we’re cousins. They take their family seriously here. The
Portuguese have no reason to love Bonaparte, Thea; it’s only the French
we have to fear.”

Roybal took them strolling around the villa, past the
chicken house and a cooking shed where a small crowd of men were receiving a
dole of bread and a cup of soup. Matlin pointed this out to Thea especially as
evidence of Roybal’s generosity. Looking at the faces of the men waiting
for their food, Thea was not reassured.

After dinner Senhora Roybal took Thea and her three
daughters away to one end of the parlor where they sat before the fire and
giggled and gossiped, and mended a huge pile of torn linen with long, careless
stitches. Senhora Roybal seemed to have no curiosity at all about these
suddenly acquired cousins, and Thea was happy to smile, to stitch, and to
listen to the low-voiced conversation in broken English, between Matlin and
Roybal where they sat, across the room.

“I am ashamed, almost, to be Portuguese,” she
heard Roybal say once. “We were so busy watching the Spanish, those
imbeciles, suffer their stupid cuckold king and his Austrian wife and her
lover, that sausage maker they made Prime Minister, all the time thinking
ourselves fortunate with our Prince John. The old Queen is mad as a hatter, and
the Princess little better, but our Prince, ah! a pious man and a man of sense
who knew who his friends were. Then, to waver and waffle until the damned
French were in our country and forced him to run away to Brazil.” Roybal
spat into the fire.

“You’re a little hard on him: with Bonaparte’s
troops on his border....”

Roybal would hear no good of Dom John. Thea listened, trying
to understand a situation she had only vaguely heard of in Spain. Senhora
Roybal, seeing her guest’s eye stray to the men at their wine, smiled and
shook her head. “Such things they talk,” she said carefully, in
Spanish, and rang for chocolate.

At last the smiles and polite nodding was done. Thea and Matlin
were shown to a chamber which, naturally, their hosts expected them to share,
but once inside the door Matlin indicated firmly that Thea would take the bed;
he would sleep on the floor near the door. “You need not worry...”
he began.

Thea cut him off with a cool, “I know.”

“Roybal has promised to take us to town in the
morning. He knows of a man there with a barge, and if we sell the mules we can
buy passage to Oporto and cut two days from our travelling time. Get some
sleep.”