Masquerade Read online

  ‘Juanillo.’ Leandro brought his horse to a stop and nodded a greeting. He had never liked his uncle and was irritated that he was still there.

  ‘Leandro,’ Juanillo responded in a gravelly voice, nodding back. ‘We missed you earlier.’ He regarded his nephew with a squint as the smoke curled out of his nostrils. His hawkish eyes were black as coal, with a hard edge that made many give him a wide berth when passing him on the street.

  Leandro met his gaze unflinchingly. ‘I was busy. I trust you and Lucas struck a good deal for your two horses and those mules you wanted rid of?’

  ‘I did – Lucas is a thieving rascal but I’ve always managed to make him see sense.’

  ‘I’m sure, Tío.’ Leandro dismounted and began unfastening the saddle.

  ‘Your business tonight must have been important to take you away for so long, sobrino, nephew.’

  ‘Important enough.’

  ‘Well, take care you don’t leave your mother alone for too long. There’s no more important business than family and Marujita’s already suffered plenty for hers.’ Juanillo took out a small whetstone from his pocket and played with it while smiling sardonically.

  ‘That she has, Tío.’ Leandro pulled the saddle off Ventarrón without looking up.

  ‘Be off with you, Juanillo!’ Marujita patted her brother’s back. ‘You’ve had enough brandy to kill the Devil in you today and I need to talk to my son.’ Her features were glowing, her midnight eyes shining with an intensity Leandro had never noticed in them before – he could see she was agitated.

  Juanillo allowed his gaze to linger a little on Leandro before he rose to his feet with his wineskin. ‘Yes, you talk to your son. And if the Devil wants to come and get me any time soon, he knows where I am,’ he grunted and lurched off into the darkness.

  When Leandro had put Ventarrón away for the night, the gitana emptied her pipe on the ground and stood up. ‘Come,’ she commanded in a tone that bore no contradiction, ‘we must talk.’

  Once they were in the privacy of her bedroom she poured a couple of glasses of manzanilla and sat in one of the wooden chairs flanking a low round table at the foot of the bed. She swigged at her glass and dangled a gold locket hanging at the end of a chain in front of him as he took up the chair opposite her.

  ‘Look what I’ve found,’ she chuckled.

  Leandro recognized it immediately. ‘Oh, Mamacita! Why did you have to take that?’ he said reproachfully. ‘I’ll get you a hundred gold lockets, if you want. You know you don’t need to do that any more.’

  ‘This is different, my son, you don’t understand. Saint Cyprian, the King of Sorcerers and patron of all fortune tellers, has finally answered my prayers.’

  Leandro’s mouth twitched with amusement as he gulped a mouthful of the sherry. ‘Mamacita, Saint Cyprian might be the patron of diviners but if I remember right, he gave up being the King of Sorcerers when he renounced Satan. He converted to Christianity and died a martyr. Trust me, he would not condone theft. I will take that back to its owner tomorrow.’

  His mother lifted her eyes to the ceiling. ‘You will do no such thing,’ she retorted, clutching the locket tighter. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you really are my son,’ she declared in an exasperated tone. ‘Listen to me carefully.’ There was urgency in her voice. ‘This illness claws at me like the Devil himself. I don’t have long to live.’

  ‘But if you let me take you back to the doctors, things could be different for you,’ Leandro stood up and started pacing. ‘If you would just try—’

  ‘I don’t need any more doctors,’ she cut in. ‘Doctors cannot give me more life than God intends. I have seen it in the fire … in my dreams … cast in the runes. I know my fate.’ Her grim expression turned to something fiercer as she studied Leandro’s face. ‘But my wish has been granted and only you, my beloved son, can carry it out to its final closure so I may die in peace.’

  A curious, blank feeling came over him, a kind of foreboding that froze him to the bone. ‘What are we talking about here?’

  Marujita opened the locket. Inside were miniatures of a man and a woman.

  ‘Don Salvador and the high and mighty Doña Alexandra de Rueda,’ the gitana enunciated triumphantly. ‘Can’t you see? They are that chit’s parents,’ she snorted. ‘My lifelong enemies: the whore who stole Don Salvador from me, and the man himself, who not only rejected my love but threw me in prison and was the cause of my eldest brother’s death.’

  Leandro paused as the meaning of her words sunk in. An icy heaviness took hold. ‘Mamacita, all this happened such a long time ago. Can’t you forgive and forget?’

  A sudden flush burned her cheeks. She rose to her feet, her finger stabbing at the air, sending her bracelets ringing again like a warning. ‘Don’t you dare speak like a gajo and forget you’re a gypsy. You are Marujita’s son!’ Her mien had altered with the speed of a chameleon changing its colour. The gitana’s eyes shone wildly and her features contracted in an ugly spasm, a look that had caused her to be branded Il Diabólica, the evil one, by some. ‘Gypsies never forget a bad deed, you know that. The evil actions of our enemies must be returned upon them or their children, it’s our law,’ she rasped, holding the locket up to him again as if the two faces contained within it were already her grisly war trophies. ‘La venganza de Calés is not something to be bargained with. Fate has put that girl in your way for a reason.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Leandro stared at Marujita. Even though he had often seen the darker side of her, she was scarcely recognizable to him at this moment. He had never anticipated that he would be placing Luz in danger by bringing her there. The story of Don Salvador and his wife from England was well known to him; his mother had bitterly reminded him often enough how it had affected their lives. And now he had unwittingly brought the daughter of Marujita’s sworn enemies straight to the gitana. The look in his mother’s eyes was clear and chilled his blood. So he was to be the instrument of her revenge.

  Leandro paused, watching her. ‘Why me?’

  Her laugh was bitter, more like a sneer. ‘Why me, he asks! Remember that because of them, you saw your first light of day in prison and, for that reason only, you were torn away from me. My baby son, wrenched from my arms. Even though you were only days’ old, you clung to me. I can still hear you crying as I watched you through the bars of my cell, disappearing down the long dark corridor of that prison.’

  There was pain as well as anger now in her dark irises and it caught at the strings of Leandro’s heart.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked quietly. He knew her well enough to dread the answer.

  The gitana moved over to him, her eyes shining coldly as she smiled up at her son. ‘You are a handsome young man,’ she whispered, brushing his cheek with her tapering fingers. ‘It is a known fact that gajo women go mad for Caló men. It would not be difficult to seduce her and if you get her with child, even better. Let’s see how her stuck-up family likes that!’ She paused to take a breath, which set off a fit of coughing. Leandro was in the process of turning away but she held up a hand. ‘Then … then, you will toss her aside as her father did me.’

  Marujita stepped back and flicked up her fingers, sending her bracelets jangling roughly. ‘She will be used goods. No honourable Spanish man will marry her after that. La honra in those aristocratic circles obeys rules just as fierce as ours. It will ruin her life and her parents will shed tears of blood, as I have. And trust me, their punishment will be nothing compared with the pain they caused me, your mother!’

  Leandro stepped back from her. ‘What you’re demanding of me is an evil thing. Do you really want your son to be a part of this?’

  Glaring at him, she lifted her chin with a haughty movement of her head. ‘Why not? Anyway, what they did to me and your uncle was not evil?’ She ran a hand through her untidy hair and turned away from him as if to hide the effect those painful memories had on her. ‘May God and all the Saints preserve you from ever being in prison. In the summer
we were scorched with heat, eaten up with vermin. In the winter we slept, without either bed or rug, on the cold stone floor, with one wretched meal a day of coarse rancho or foul-tasting soup to fill our starving bellies. The place had hardly any windows, no drains worth speaking of – the stench was unbelievable. But we are gypsies and we’re not supposed to be able to feel or smell.’ She turned sharply back round. ‘Do you want me to continue my list? My brother died young, in a filthy hovel, away from his people as a direct result of that and those wretched gajos.’

  Leandro returned the look steadily. ‘Your brother knifed Don Salvador, who would probably have let you go if not for that. Don Salvador was taken to hospital. There was no choice, the police had to get involved.’

  ‘Why?’ she retorted resentfully. ‘They could have called the family doctor and let us go. After all, it was thanks to me that Don Salvador became a whole man again in the first place. If it hadn’t been for my gifted hands, he would still be lying in his bed, a shadow of himself and no use to anybody.’

  She walked over to the table to drain the last of the manzanilla in her glass and shook her head, her fiery eyes fixed on some invisible point. ‘There is an old Moorish saying: “He eats the dates and then attacks with the stones.” Those people think of us as dirt. Our caste is ostracized by them and they spit on us at every opportunity.’ Her voice began to rise. ‘Do not speak to me about evil. He who sows the thorn does not reap the grape. And in this case they would be reaping only half the thorns they sowed.’ She spoke vehemently, her whole body trembling with the force of her hatred.

  Leandro guessed any other woman would be letting her tears fall but not Marujita, the gypsy queen. Instead she wore her pain like a battle shield. Suddenly, he pitied her and took her, still quivering with anger, in his arms. He smoothed her hair, trying to soothe the hurt away, and kissed her forehead tenderly. ‘Please, Mamacita,’ he whispered hoarsely in her ear, ‘don’t make me do this, I …’

  But she pushed him away with the strength of a virago, eyeing him with contempt. ‘Huh, you’re soft like your father! I have brought a coward into this world.’ She laughed then, though it was more like a bitter cackle. ‘Un ombre de versa, a real man would be proud to take his revenge but you whimper like a woman. I will die of a broken heart before this illness kills me. What’s more, I will leave this earth ashamed to be your mother and curse you forever from my grave.’

  Leandro took another step back as though she had struck him. The force of her vitriol shook him deeply. Until then he had never realized how much his mother had been consumed by the hostility she felt towards Luz’s parents. She was as pathetic in her wrath as she was frightening yet what was more disturbing to him was the idea that some of her darkness might have infiltrated his blood, imprinting itself upon his own nature. That he was the son of this vengeful, dying gypsy queen with a duty to carry out her venganza now lay on him heavily like an iron cloak.

  He turned without a word and left his mother standing in the cave, the chain of the locket still wound tightly between her fingers, her eyes a blaze of black fire.

  * * *

  It was early morning when Luz woke up. At first, she seemed to have lost her bearings. Then, still in a dreamy state, she realized she was in her own room. A vague memory kept returning of the previous day’s incident on the beach and the time spent in the gypsy encampment. Initially in a haze, then clearer, as though her mind had taken in details that at the time she had scarcely noticed, she remembered the powerful smell of smoky log fires and cooking food, the shrill banging of a hammer on iron that echoed noisily in her head and seemed to increase the pain across her eyes, the clamouring of children’s voices and the sense of a glittering-eyed woman leaning over her. But, first and foremost, it was the face of the young gypsy that kept floating into her mind’s eye. She saw his features in detail now: the prominent cheekbones in a narrow, burnished face, the short nose and the generous mouth with full, curved lips. Most of all she remembered his eyes, those elongated green eyes set under perfect brows that had ensnared hers and burned with such fire she had been conscious of little else.

  For a while she remained still, aware of a rare sense of wellbeing. She felt strangely rested – odd after the previous day’s events. Then, in some alarm, she realized she was still fully dressed and that she was wrapped up in a blanket. How had she got here? Who had brought her back? It must have been him. Who had let him in? Carmela and Pedro were away for the night; they were due to return today so it couldn’t have been them. Then she remembered she had left both the gate and her window open, not expecting her outing to be a long one. How did he know her house? It was not as though she was well known down in the town – up until now she had only spent time at L’Estrella during the holidays. And Zeyna … she remembered her horse had bolted. Had the mare found its own way back to L’Estrella?

  She tumbled out of bed. Beyond the French windows opposite, the sea glistened in the distance. The sky was a clear and endless blue, paling at the horizon; the air was soft and the whiteness of the light filled it, dazzling her eyes, still full of sleep. Lost in thought, she went to the bathroom and ran herself a bath. She washed quickly then pulled on her jeans and a loose white shirt tied at the waist with a white leather belt. Images, voices, scraps of conversation kept rising then receding to the back of her mind like the ebb and flow of tidewater. The only thing that remained clear was the disconcerting impact of the gitano’s eyes and the way it had shot through her like a bolt of lightning. It still startled her when she thought of it.

  As she surveyed herself in the mirror, she noticed that her locket was missing. She cherished that pendant more than any of her other jewels for it contained the miniature portraits of her mother and father. It never left her neck. It had belonged to her great-grandmother, Doña Maria Dolores, who had given it to Luz on her tenth birthday, a year before the old lady died. Luz was definitely wearing it when riding on the beach.

  For a moment her parents’ warnings echoed dimly in her head and the disturbing thought that the young gypsy might have taken it crossed her mind. She dismissed it immediately. Even if she couldn’t vouch for any of the other gypsies, something told her this one was different. He would never do such a thing.

  No, the chain must have broken when she fell off her horse, she thought gloomily. It would probably be hopeless to attempt to find it on the beach, though she would certainly try; and the idea of reporting it lost to the police, as she would have done in England, was pointless here in Spain, she conceded. The morning would have to be spent doing some important chores she had put off, including making arrangements for the rest of her things to be shipped from England, but as soon as that was done she would go down to the beach to look for it. Perhaps she might bump into her rescuer and she could thank him personally for his kindness, she told herself. But before any of that, she had to make sure Zeyna had come back and was unharmed.

  The house was quiet. Pedro and Carmela had obviously not returned yet. She went straight down to the stable block. Zeyna was there in her box, happily munching on a handful of hay. As Luz reached out and patted her mare’s nose, the animal snorted and started to paw the ground.

  ‘There, there, my beautiful girl, calm down. We’re not going anywhere together today. I just wonder how you got here and who put you in your box.’ It must be the gypsy, she thought. This afternoon, after searching for her locket, she would go looking for him. She felt her pulse race and her stomach churn at the idea of seeing him again. There was something about the gypsy that sparked an unknown thrill deep inside her.

  Luz went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee, taking it back up to her bedroom with some fruit. She loved the fruit in Spain – the peaches and oranges had such a delicious scent and they tasted of sunshine. So much more succulent than the pale imitations endured back in England, she thought with a sigh, biting into the sweet flesh of an apricot.

  The sun was benevolent today so she seated herself comfortably on the
veranda. A particularly fecund crop of orange and lemon trees hung like illuminated lanterns on one side of the terrace, backed by the whitewashed walls of the villa.

  A veranda encircled the house on two floors and the entire outside walls were festooned with green creepers, purple wisteria, morning glory and pink-stained bougainvillea, which spilled over the awning roofs. In the cool interior of the villa, the elegant and rustic look of exposed beams, white walls, high wood-inlaid arches and warm flagstone floors were typically Andalucían.

  Count Salvador Cervantes de Rueda had bought the summer house in Cádiz to celebrate his wedding anniversary and his only daughter’s twenty-first birthday. On the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, the house looked across to Puerto de Santa María and the church where he had first caught sight of Alexandra. Their daughter had been conceived in Cádiz, the ‘city of light’, on the last euphoric night of their honeymoon and when she came screaming lustily into the world, nine months later, both Salvador and Alexandra instantly agreed that Luz, meaning ‘light’ in Spanish, was the only fitting name for their adored little girl. She had now grown into a charismatically beautiful and spirited young woman.

  Luz loved the house on the cliff – La Casa Sobre las Nubes, the house in the clouds. The villagers had given it this name because on some moonless nights, when the far-off lights shone from its windows, it seemed to be the only bright spot twinkling in the darkness, suspended above the clouds. Salvador and Alexandra named it L’Estrella, the star.

  After L’Estrella was purchased, Luz spent most of her time there. She loved the sense of freedom it gave her to be perched high above the sea, as if in a magical tower, removed from the cluster of other village houses dotting the cliff further down. It didn’t matter whether her parents accompanied her there or not – it was only forty-five minutes away by ferry from Puerto de Santa María and transport into the mainland. Anyhow, she used her father’s small motorboat or the family launch to take her to and fro across the water, which was much quicker. Sometimes she would remain at L’Estrella for a few days; the housekeeper, Carmela, and her husband, Pedro, made sure she wanted for nothing. They lived in a separate annexe in the grounds; Carmela took care of the cleaning, laundry and cooking while Pedro looked after the horses and the garden.