The Flesh and the Devil (43 page)

         
‗it is the town where I lived before I became a
mercenary.‘ His voice was satiric. ‗And I have friends there who will
help me by sheltering my stolen bride –

         
unless they are too dumbfounded by the shock of seeing me
married.‘

         
Using all her strength, Juana snapped a recalcitrant
string; she would not need it again, she told herself. Out of an unexpected
depth of hurt, she responded,

         
‗Would they help you if they knew the real reason that
you married me?‘

         
‗I shall not tell them –‗ he had risen,
cat-swift, to his feet –‗ and neither will you. I will not have my
friends troubled.‘

         
The farthingale slid down to lie in a pool of white at
Juana‘s feet and she stepped free of it, retreating from him. He had to bend
his head beneath the rocky roof; all at once she no longer felt as safe as she
had while he knelt beside the fire.

         
Ignoring the authoritative note in his even voice, she
answered defiantly, ‗If they knew the truth of it, your friends would
despise you.‘

         
The silence was so long that her eyes were drawn back to
him against her will, fascinated by the bitterness in his oblique eyes. ‗Hardly
that, I think, but I shall not tell them for all that. They might find the
truth almost beyond belief.‘

         
To her owe surprise, Juana slept that night – in snatches,
it was true, but her arousal was more often due to mere discomfort that she had
expected to assail her. Hungry and cold and disturbed as she was, when she lay
down on the cave floor next to Tristán, sheer fatigue of body and mind swept
her at once into oblivion.

         
She woke to find the light of dawn filtering over the rocks
and Felipe Tristán bending over her. In that first instant, drowsily, her mind
was aware of nothing but a sort of voluptuous curiosity to know what that
strange, impassive face had looked like before an enemy blade had slashed one
side of it to ribbons. She lay still, staring up at him without flinching with
eyes that were still hazed with sleep.

         
Not handsome, she thought; not handsome ever. His face was
too uncompromising, almost mediaeval; it looked like the face of an image
carved for a tomb, with harshly-graven lines and odd, disconcerting shadows.
The eyes looked like glittering crystal set in a mask of metal, set in hollows
that resembled the exaggerations of a clumsy sculptor, ringing their oblique
brilliance with shadow: they must always have been strange, evens slightly
repelling. But the mouth . . . unmarked, it should have been almost classical,
a shapely contradiction of those jutting, overdramatic bones. As she realized
the trend of her thoughts Juana let her eyelids fall and turned her head away
too quickly.

         
‗The senora‘s breakfast,‘ she heard him say crisply. ‗Eat
it quickly, we have far to go today.‘

         
She lifted a hand to rub her eyes, shielding her expression
at the same time, and answered peevishly, ‗Let me lie.‘

         
The thundering of her heart was almost shaking her, and she
hoped that it was not audible to him as he knelt so close to her; but then he
rose his feet and turned towards the mouth of the cave, his words floating back
to her, openly derisive.

         
‗I have done so; you should be graceful for my
courtesy. How many husbands would let their wives alone on their wedding
night?‘

         
Juana‘s lips were trembling as she sat up and hugged her
knees. He had brought her last of the bread they had with them, and berries –
the saints only knew where he had found them – and the unexpected kindness had
hurt her almost more than his cruelty. She felt like a hare caught up in an
eagle‘s talons and then dropped carelessly in a strange terrain – still shocked
by the magnitude of an incredible escape yet knowing that she must be wary of
new dangers that she did not yet know to recognized. Miguel de Arrelanos was
surprise and not a little displeased when what sounded like a madman came
riding up to his door at the hour when his household was settling into the
quiet of an afternoon siesta. He himself had not yet retired; he was in his
chamber, struggling with the composition of a letter to his eldest daughter,
when he heard the intruder setting up a clamour to see him. He hoped that old
José would have the wit to deny him until a more seemly hour, for the delicate
task of combining parental severity with a veiled apology for sending Juana
away was proving more difficult than he had expected. From the disordered
fragments that he had glanced from his sister since her return, unheralded and
distraught, two days ago, Miguel had had the first inkling that his judgment
was not infallible in all things. Beatriz had seemed almost frantic at the
thought of leaving Juana in the keeping of Senor de Castaneda.

         
A tap at the door made Miguel out down his pen with a look
of resignation, which quickly gave place to concern. Senor Jaime was ridden
back, his servant told him, and in a rare state of the mother. He insisted on
seeing the senor at once and said that it concerned the Senorita Juana. Miguel
frowned.

         
‗Young de Nueva? But he has scarce had the time to go
as far as Andalusia and return – but perhaps he brings letters with him. Bring
him to me here, Arturo.‘

         
His servant nodded lugubriously. It boded ill, in his
opinion; he had known that no good could come of meddling with matters in
places as remote as Valenzuela. If the senor had asked his opinion at the time,
he could have had it – it was folly to cross a termagant like the Senorita
Juana by forcing her to wed where she would not, and worse folly still to send
the man she loved to enquire after her welfare when things went awry. By his,
Arturo‘s, reckoning, the senor had brought it all on himself. He shuffled away,
taking his time, and eventually delivered the newcomer to Miguel de Arrelanos
with a look of foreboding which failed to gain the attention it deserved from
either his master or Jaime de Nueva, so that he withdrew, disgruntled.

         
Jaime was shaking with exhaustion, his dark eyes wild and
his face haggard and unshaven. He had not paused to take up cloak or hat when
he ridden off through the rain, and his once-fine clothes were wet and streaked
with mud and dirt. He looked so different from the mannerly boy who had begged
to be employed as Miguel‘s messenger that the elder man‘s expression hardened
to hide his sudden concern.

         
‗Well, Jaime?‘

         
The young man lifted his disheveled black head and spoke
with a curious blend of defiance and apprehension. ‗I rode back with all
speed, senor, to tell you

         
– your daughter is married.‘

         
‗Married!‘ Miguel‘s somber eyes lit. ‗She has
made up her mind to Duque Bartolomé, then?

         
‗No man knows what has become of the Duque. He ran
away and hid himself sooner than marry Juana – your daughter; they were
searching the castillo for him when I came away. The Duque de las Torres told
me.‘

         
Tensely, too absorbed to notice the effect of his words,
Jaime sketched the situation as he had found it when he arrived at the Castillo
Benaventes. Miguel sat back in his chair and listened with a face like stone.

         
‗I cannot believe it,‘ he responded heavily, at last,
when Jaime had done.

         
‗That Senor de Castaneda should allow . . . Juana
told you that Duque Bartolomé

         
was – was lacking, you say?‘

         
‗That he was an idiot, and violent, little better
than a beast. And I learned that they keep him caged, with bars at the windows
and a keeper to oversee him. She said that he attacked Michaela, and that
afterwards the girl had killed herself.‘

         
‗And after that Duque de las Torres did not consider
my daughter safe. I see. He, a strange, cares more for her safety than I did
when I sent her to marry a man I had not even seen. Yet how could I have
known?‘ His greying head lifted abruptly, a keen question in his eyes. ‗How
is Juana married, then, if Valenzuela was still missing when you left? And why
did you not wait to bring her back with you?‘

         
‗You mistake, senor. I – I did not say that she was
married to the man you chose for her.‘

         
Miguel stiffened abruptly. ‗Do you mean that you have
dared, when I honoured you with my trust in this affair, to marry my daughter?‘

         
‗Not I – nor any man you knew existed!‘ A
half-hysterical, half-scornful laugh up in Jaime de Nueva‘s throat. ‗He
is a foreigner who was employed as the Duque‘s keeper, or so they told me at
the castillo. He was discharge while I was there, and set to accompany us –
your daughter and I – and deliver her to you in the Duque‘s name. But instead
of that, he – he took her and sent me on.‘

         
He thrust a grimy hand through his tangled hair, shielding
his eyes for a moment. ‗I do not know how he contrived it, but he told me
that Juana had married him willingly. She denied that, even there before him,
but she did not deny that they were wed. I ought to have guessed something
before, when she asked me if I could forgive a trespass committed under
enforcement, but I did not dream of any such matter.‘

         
Miguel had been ominously silent, but now he interposed
roughly, ‗Are you saying that you came tamely here to tell me this at the
villain‘s bidding, leaving Juana alone with him?‘

        
Jaime moistened his lips. The memory of Juana in another
man‘s arm, the look on her face as she let Felipe Tristán‘s head lie on her
breast had dogged him through the long nightmarish ride, but he could not speak
of it now. Anger rose in him, hot and fierce, against his assailant – so he had
become in his tired, resentful mind. In that instant he heard his own voice
say, ‗He drove me off, senor – he and his hired cut-throats. They jeered
at me, and turned me off.‘ He added violently,

         
‗Surely it is better for you to learn in time to
catch that filch and hang him than for me to prize my reputation above your
daughter‘s rescue?‘

         
‗True enough.‘ Miguel‘s hesitation was barely
perceptible, and he made a slight, dismissing gesture as though he did not want
to consider the matter too deeply. ‗How many of the rogues came against
you?‘

         
Jaime swallowed. ‗Four, senor,‘ he blurted.

         
Miguel nodded. ‗It would have been unwise to offer to
fight against such odds. I shall have them hunted down, never fear! Now sit
down, no foolish ceremony –‗ he pushed the half-written letter aside and
took up a blank sheet –

         
‗and tell me how I must write to this Duque de las
Torres. Best to write to him, since it was he who sent the rogue with you. It
seems he was deceided in this mercenary as much as I was in Senor de
Castaneda.‘

         
Thankfully, Jaime took the chair beside the desk. He was
trembling now that his tale was told; after all, he reasoned, it made little
difference to the story in the end. Juana had been abducted as surely as if she
had been taken by a score of brigands. He was about to reply to the question
when the door opened softly and a gentle-faced girl of about sixteen appeared
on the threshold.