(1/3) Go Saddle the Sea (2 page)

So I climbed up another step or two. She groped about among the folds of the tent-like wrapper, and passed me a little bundle.

"Wh-wh-what's that?" I asked. I stammer when I am upset; it is a stupid habit that I can't shake off. It was horrible to see her lolling on the steps in that unlikely way, her face all gray and shiny, looking so different from the Bernie that I was used to finding in the kitchen, tossing her fritters and roaring out wicked songs.

"Things of your father's," Bernie said. "Bob gave them to me when he died."

"Why didn't he give them to
me?

Bob had been my fathers batman. After my father—who was a captain in General John Moore's army—had died at Los Nogales, Bob somehow made his way over the mountains to Villaverde, where my grandfather's house was. How he did it, no one ever knew, for he, too, was terribly wounded: one leg shot away, one arm useless, a bullet lodged in his spine, so he was all doubled up. The journey took him months and months. But he managed. Bob was the bravest person I ever met. He managed the journey, and even lasted some years after that, hobbling about the stables, doctoring the horses, and telling me stories of my father. He died when I was eight. He'd been very good to me. I still hated for him to be dead.

"He said to keep these for you till you were grown,"
croaked Bernardina. "He said, no use to burden you with them till you were a man, and able to fight for yourself. But I can't do that, can I? I shan't be here. And there's no one about the house that I'd trust; those aunts of yours are a lot of canting old snakes in sheep's clothing—that Isadora would put poison in your
garbanzos
as soon as look at you! So you must just have the things now. There's a lot of written stuff, but I haven't read it, not IP She chuckled. I knew that she could not read a word. "Then," she said, "you will just have to decide for yourself."

"Decide
what?

It was all too much for me to bear; in spite of gritting my teeth, clenching my fingers and holding my breath, I could feel a great sob snap in my throat. Tears came bursting out of both eyes.

"Oh, Bernie,
please
don't die!"

I was bitterly ashamed of myself. However much Father Tomás beat me for bad Latin—or for letting loose the pigs—or greasing the stairs, so that Doña Isadora slipped on them—I used to take pride in the fact that I never blubbered. Not even when Doña Isadora kept on and on about my being a Bad Seed and the death of my mother.

"I
must
go, my poor little pumpkin," Bernie whispered hoarsely—her breathing was very awkward, her words came in bunches. "
I'm
not wild about it, either, to tell you the truth—but when they call you, you've got to flit. And there's a bad thing in my heart, I dan feel it—it's not beating as it should. The question is,
what
are you
to do? You don't belong here, any ghost could see that. Bob always said that, if he'd been in better shape, he'd have taken you to England to your father's folk. But he knew he'd not last the journey. He did try to write to them once, but with his right hand gone and his left hand crippled, he could hardly scratch out the words; likely the letter never went where it should. No answer came, that I know. Anyway, Bob used to say that a cold home was better than none."

Bob had been English, like my father; the English I speak I learned off" him. But luckily he spoke Spanish as well, like a native, besides having such a wonderful gift with horses that, in spite of his one crippled arm, Don Francisco was glad to keep him on in the stable. Bob believed—he was the only one who did—that my parents really had been married. As they were both dead,
they
had no say in the matter. All my relatives in the big house were quite sure in their minds on the opposite side. My grandmother looked at me as if I gave her a pain, and Dona Isadora, my great-aunt, had masses said every single day for my mother, who had died, they said, in a state of sin, after having given birth to me.

Bob said that my father was Quality. "Captain Brooke wasn't his real name," he told me. "Don't you let those toffee-nosed Cabezadas put you down. Pooh to
el senor Conde!
An English baronite is worth half a dozen Spanish counts any day. You are as good as they are, Master Felix, and don't you ever forget it."

"Perhaps these things of my father's will tell me where to find his family," I said to Bernie, feeling the little bundle, which was wrapped in stained linen, thin and brittle with age and hot weather. My thumbs itched to untie it, but I felt it would be more dignified—as well as more polite—to wait till I was back in my own chamber.

"Maybe—they will," wheezed Bernardina. "And my advice to you,
hijo,
is not to stay here, where you're despised. Leave this place and find your fathers kin. You've a right—to choose—where to hang your hat. You know what I always say—go saddle the sea—"

She stopped speaking. A look of pure concentration came over her face—as if she were trying to remember some important name; or as if—I thought stupidly—she found herself obliged to dig out a bit of gristle with her tongue from between her back teeth.

"
Manolo!
" exclaimed Bernardina suddenly.

She lifted herself up, looking past me.

I twisted my head round, thinking someone must have walked up silently behind my back. But nobody was there. Then I remembered that Manolo was the name of Bernie's baby, who had died long before I was born.

One of the kitchen girls, coming back with a hot brick in a cloth, screamed piercingly and dropped the brick on the flagstones.

I turned my head again in time to see Bernardina topple slowly and heavily off the step on which she was balanced; it was like seeing a great log, which had
been floating down a millstream, suddenly upend itself and go over the milldam.

Isabella flung herself forward; I scrambled back down the stairs. But we both knew that what we were doing was no use. I think Bernie died before she fell. There she lay, on the granite flags, her great mouth open and her small eyes staring, still with that look of surprise. Dead as the stone on which she lay.

Father Tomás swished back, tut-tutting irritably, and pushed us aside.

"Go to your room, boy! And you, girl, fetch the others—fetch some strong women, and the porter, and one of the gardeners—tsk, what a way to die—"

I went away quietly. There was no point in staying.

Taking a different passage, I walked into the big kitchen, where Bernie had been mistress all my life long. It was a grand room. The walls and floor were covered with shiny red tiles, decorated by little blue-and-white diamonds and crosses. The fire burned on a wide platform, the step up to it marked out by more tiles, green-and-white ones, these; and a two-foot-wide shelf ran most of the way round the room. There was still plenty of fire in the hearth, and some candles burning, but nobody in the room; I daresay they had all run off to lay out Bernie and say prayers in the chapel. I pulled up a stool to the fireside and sat there shivering. I couldn't believe yet that Bernie was dead. Every minute I expected her to come roaring in through the door, calling out, "Hey, boy!
Hola,
my
little tiger! You want a
merienda
? Glass of beer? Bit of bread and chocolate? Just a minute, then—"

It looked as if she had been making herself a
merienda
just before she had been taken ill. A pestle and mortar stood on the big scrubbed table with some chocolate in it she'd been pounding, and a platter held a pastry cake sprinkled with salt, my favorite food. Maybe she was going to sneak it up to me in my room. Now I couldn't have touched a crumb of it. I kept thinking: She's sure to come in soon. No, she isn't, she's dead. She's sure to come in soon—

I listened for her loud, slapping footsteps, for her cheerful bawling voice. They didn't come. Instead, to my horror, I heard a slow, measured, double clack-clack: the sound of two elderly ladies in high heels. If I'd had any sense I'd have run like a hare—but I hated to leave the warm red kitchen; besides, up to the last minute, I couldn't believe they were really coming here. They hardly ever set foot in the kitchen. But they did come in, one behind the other, stepping stately and scrawny, like a couple of old molting guinea fowls with their long necks. Doña Isadora and Doña Mercedes. They were in their usual black bombazine dresses, black mantillas, gray lace shawls wrapped round their shoulders, and black mittens on their hands. Each carried a fan, and Dona Isadora gave me a rap on the ear with hers as I scrambled to my feet.

"What
are you
doing in here, Felix?" she demanded in her high angry voice that was like a saw biting through stone. "You are supposed to be confined to your chamber. Why do we find you here?"

I could see dislike in every line of her long, thin, sour face, with the V-shaped upper lip overhanging the one below. She was my grandfather's sister and she hated me worse than poison. And I hated her back.

"Shall I summon Father Tomás to beat him, sister?" she suggested to my grandmother.

"Later, Isadora. We had better go on now, to Bernardinas bedside."

"You're too late," I gulped. "She has just died."

I couldn't help thinking how very unwelcome they would have been at that strange deathbed on the stairs. Bernie despised both of them.

"You have not answered my question," said Doña Isadora coldly. "Why are you here?"

"Bernie wanted to see me before she died."

The two old ladies looked at one another.

"A
wholly
unsuitable friendship," complained my grandmother. "Between the cook—the household cook—and my grandson. But what can you expect? God only knows who or what his father was. Yet born to my daughter—a Cabezada, who could trace her ancestry back twenty generations to the Conquistadores!"

"Is it to be wondered at that he prefers low company?" muttered Doña Isadora.

"Bernie wasn't low!" said I angrily. "She was kind. She wanted to give me some things of my father's—"

"What things, boy?" said Doña Isadora sharply.

She was ten years younger than my grandmother,
and much more forceful. Doña Mercedes often drifted off into vague memories of her lost sons.

"I don't
know
what things. I haven't looked yet. This bundle.

"You had best open it directly."

I hated to open it under Isadora's supercilious stare, but there was no way of refusing. Slowly I undid the stiffened knots of aged linen, which, I now saw, was stained with streaks of brown—bloodstains, very likely—and spotted with grease too. It smelled as if Bernie had kept it alongside her chilblain ointment.

Inside I found another cloth, not a great deal cleaner, but softer and easier to undo. And inside that, a wad of folded paper, covered with faded writing. And inside
that,
a small brittle black plume and a few gilt buttons.

"What have you there?" inquired my grandmother in her vague way.

"I think it must be a plume from an officer's shako—"

"Not that, idiot!" snapped Great-aunt Isadora. "The letter."

I unfolded the paper. There were several pages of it. Doña Isadora twitched it out of my fingers and held it close to a candle—for a moment I feared she was going to burn it. But she peered at it with her shortsighted eyes. I noticed that her hands were shaking. In á moment, though, she said disgustedly—but as if this were no more than she had expected—

"It's nothing but gibberish! It must have been
written by a maniac! The blessed saints themselves couldn't make head or tail of it. And furthermore," she added spitefully, "it is all covered with grease. That drunken old woman probably carried it about in her pocket for the last four years."

"Let me see the paper, please, Isadora," said my grandmother.

But she could riot decipher it either, and at last it was passed to me. I resolved to make it out, if it took me the rest of my life. But not in front of those two hateful, cribbage-faced old hags.

"Go to your room, Felix," my grandmother said. "You shall be dealt with in the morning. Come, Isadora; we had better go to the chapel."

And the two of them went slowly clacking away.

After waiting till they were out of sight I picked up one of the candles—which I was not supposed to take—and took a different route back to my room. I crossed the main hall, where all the weapons had once hung—but they had been taken away during the French wars, and never brought back. None of the decorations had been left, except a huge spotty mirror, fetched back from Venice many years ago by my great-great-uncle Carlos. The candle's reflection in it caught my eye, but I looked away because I did not want to see myself there. I knew only too well what I looked like: short, rather plump, and yellow-headed as a duckling, with a round face, a pointed chin, and blue, angry eyes; wholly unlike the portraits of black-haired, lanky-faced Cabezadas, with their hook noses and hol
low cheeks, that hung in the dining room and all the way up the stairs.

"How
can
that boy be one of us?" Isadora had said a hundred times, peering at me in her beady-eyed, shortsighted way. "It's hard enough to believe that he was Luisa's child—even though I myself was present at his birth—"

I hated my own looks. Bernie used to call me Tigrito, her little tiger, because of my yellow hair, and because I fought such a lot, but that was no consolation. I longed to be dark, six foot tall, with a scar on one cheek; like my great-grandfather, El Conde Don Felipe Acarillo de Santibana y Escurial de la Sierra y Cabezada, whose portrait hung in the dining room. What a hope! I would never be like him if I lived to the age of ninety-three.

Returning to my room, I locked the door. Then putting the candle on the chair, I unfolded the papers that my grandmother had reluctantly given back to me, and tried to make out the scribbled words on them.

Not one word could I understand.

It might have been written by a demented spider which had fallen into pale brown ink and then staggered drunkenly to and fro across the greasy sheets of thin gray paper. I stared at every line in turn—every word, every stroke of the pen—until tears came into my smarting eyes, tears of grief and rage as well as eyestrain.