The Spanish Promise

by Karen Swan

  Mateo rose too. ‘And then you can join me afterwards in the library for that drink.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The two men crossed the room and Charlotte began limping ahead as fast as she could, trying to get to the stairs first.

  ‘I don’t know. Modern women,’ Mateo said, seeming amused as they reached her on the second step. ‘They simply will not accept help.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Nathan stood before her, staring down with that inscrutable expression that was his speciality. Without another word, he scooped her up. She felt a blush of embarrassment and mortification as he began walking easily, carrying her as if she were a tray, his eyes dead ahead.

  ‘As I said. Very good,’ Mateo nodded, approvingly. ‘The library’s down here, professor. Second door on the right.’

  ‘Really, I’m fine,’ she murmured in a low voice as soon as Mateo turned away and began striding down the corridor. ‘Please, you can put me down now. This isn’t necessary. I’m quite capable—’

  ‘Actually, I’m not sure you are capable,’ he said tightly as he climbed the staircase without any apparent effort. ‘You stood in front of a charging bull this afternoon, remember?’

  Hearing the scorn, she looked up at him as he carried her, his head lifted, jaw thrust angrily. ‘Nathan . . .’ she faltered. ‘I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘Tell me what?’ he asked stubbornly, pretending he didn’t know what they were really talking about.

  They were at the top of the stairs now but he made no attempt to put her down, striding down the corridor like she was a naughty child being sent to bed.

  ‘. . . I wanted to tell you about Stephen.’

  ‘You said he was no one.’

  ‘I . . . panicked.’

  He tossed her up slightly, readjusting his grip. ‘If you’re engaged, why aren’t you wearing a ring?’

  What? Oh. ‘. . . It’s being engraved.’

  He glanced down at her, gave a careless shrug. ‘Well, it’s not my business anyway, I already told you that,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said desperately. ‘Because you’re already married, something you conveniently left out of the conversation too! You can’t put all of this on me.’

  They were at her bedroom now, the door ajar, and he kicked it open so that it swung against the opposite wall. Without another word, he threw her onto the bed and stared down at her. ‘Poor bugger. I wonder if he knows what he’s let himself in for – marrying you in a few days when last week you were in bed with someone else.’

  She gasped, furious at his double standards. ‘You know it wasn’t like that!’

  ‘Actually, that’s exactly what it was like,’ he contradicted her.

  ‘You’re not . . .’

  ‘What?’ he prompted, throwing his arms out curiously.

  ‘You’re not just someone.’

  He stared back at her, in the same room but further away from her than he’d ever been. ‘No, that’s right, I’m not. I’m the lucky bastard that got away.’ He shook his head. ‘You know, I pity him. I really do. You’re so convincing, whichever part you’re playing.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Take a look at yourself, reinvented – working like you need to, helping people cope with being rich so that they don’t make the mistakes you made. Making sure they don’t end up as the party queen who goes off one weekend to a family friend’s wedding and comes back as the fucking bride.’

  She rose up onto her knees, trying to get to eye level with him, to get him to see . . . ‘Nate, please—!’

  ‘But you haven’t changed at all, not inside; you’re exactly the same now as you were then – using people to make you feel better. I was your wild card – the poor boy who didn’t give a damn about your rich friends and the right parties, and you liked that for a while. But I just couldn’t quite cut it, could I? I couldn’t save you enough. And so what’s he now? Another safety net?’ He held his hand up as she went to speak. ‘No, don’t even bother telling me. I’m not interested. Being with me, being with him, it makes no difference. You’re still so beautiful Lotts, so broken, so fucking tragic, never quite getting over Daddy’s death.’

  ‘Don’t you mention my father!’ she cried, her hand automatically rising to strike him, but he caught it – this time – holding her tightly by the wrist.

  ‘Still off-limits, is he?’ he asked, seeing how the tears immediately budded in her eyes. ‘You know, you can get married as many times as you like, but it doesn’t matter how often you change your name, you’ll still be his daughter.’

  The truth of his cruel words hit like a whip, making her sting and flinch. ‘I hate you,’ she whispered, feeling the tears fall.

  His eyes scoured her face, emotions he would never put voice to darkening his features and taking him far away from her. ‘Good. That’s for the best.’ And he dropped her wrist and walked out of the room.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Guadalajara, outside Madrid, March 1937

  It was a starless night, the moon a fragile silver curlicue in the unremitting black sky. She lay on her stomach, waiting as she’d been told, her eyes on the road as she recorded the number of vehicles coming up the pass. So far, she had counted nine armoured trucks, six panzers, and two armoured cars. And more were coming.

  She shifted position, the cold ground chilling her through the thick blanket; it had been one of the coldest winters of the century and her arms ached from their splayed position as she looked through the binoculars. She watched the lights coming up the narrow road, saw the soldiers in their round helmets, heads dipped tiredly, rifles between their knees: all of them someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s husband. A year ago it would have been her they were fighting for; now she was their quarry, hidden on a hillside under cover of darkness and counting them off as they headed straight into the ambush Miguel and the others had set for them, two miles from here.

  It was the first mission on which she had been allowed to accompany them. Miguel, for all his cruelties in private, was surprisingly protective. He didn’t want anything to happen to her – not by anyone else. She was his pet and he liked keeping her on a tight leash. But they needed more manpower; they had been badly hit by ferocious fighting in the Jarama valley, and even he couldn’t reasonably argue against using her in the offensive – she was young and fit and strong. The fascists’ hold was strengthening and they needed everyone they could get: man, woman or child.

  Another convoy was coming, she could hear the rumble of the trucks before she saw them, and she dipped a little lower for good measure, wondering where the others were stationed. They were spread out all over this hillside, tired eyes watching from the darkness, plotting, waiting . . .

  She knew Ivan was working up at the front with the American – a crack shot, he could keep his nerves cool and arm steady even when mortars were being shelled at him. Marina wasn’t sure she would ever get used to the sounds of war, the sweet smell of cordite . . .

  She had been told to watch out for the flare; that was the signal to abandon the raid and start running; above all to get back to camp with the machine gun strapped to her back. She wasn’t sure which asset was more prized by them – her life or the gun. Weapons were in desperately short supply, making their sabotage unit ever more valuable to the Republican powers as they disrupted the fascists’ infantry supplies and field operations.

  Briefly it occurred to her she had become a bandit. They were notorious back home, the area such a stronghold that a hundred years earlier, the government had been impelled to create the Civil Guard just to deal with them. Arlo used to run around as a little boy, pretending to be one, until the day their father had roughly explained that they were exactly the people the bandits had wanted to rob and hurt; he hadn’t slept for a week after that, waking in the night and crying, climbing into her bed.

  Arlo. Her other half, her gentle-spirited twin. She closed her eyes, feeling the pain that always came whe
never she thought of him. It was a physical ache, as though something had been bodily removed from her and left in its wake an endless hollow that couldn’t be filled or replaced. Her mother had always said they were connected by an invisible thread and she could feel it now, a nerve ending, exposed and raw. ‘You came into this world together,’ she would say. ‘And you must promise to stay in it together.’

  Instead, they had been separated before they reached seventeen, already worlds apart. There had been no other way: he could not leave and she could not stay. His every decision was rooted in fear – of his father’s anger, of his mother’s disappointment – and one word of her plans would have sent him running to them, because losing her was his biggest fear of all. He would have betrayed her just to keep her safe and she couldn’t allow that. She couldn’t live that way any more.

  But could she keep living like this? In the dark moments when Miguel took the pound of flesh that was the price for his protection, she made herself promises that she would see them again when the war was over. But it felt like an impossible dream. She was no longer the girl who had climbed out of that window. War had taken her innocence, her childhood, her hope—

  A sound whistled past her, a bullet screaming into the nubby bark of a tree just ahead. She gasped and ducked, her hands instinctively covering her head as she heard another spinning at high velocity. Her cheek pressed into the dirt and she dared to look upwards: the sky was glowing red and the distant crack of gunfire, of shouts, splintered the still silence of the night.

  She looked behind her but could see nothing. Not yet anyway. But those bullets had come from somewhere, someone was coming down and she couldn’t afford to stay here. Abandoning the blanket and her coat, she quickly scrabbled to her knees and wrestled the machine gun onto her back using the makeshift harness she had made with some dead fascist soldiers’ belts. It was heavier than she had expected and she struggled to stand; she was only supposed to have been safeguarding it here. Hers was the midway station – neither up nor down – and Quincy, the handsome American captain, had intended to bring it himself when he came back down. That was how he was: war hadn’t diminished his manners; if anything, it seemed to magnify their importance for him, as if he believed that those alone were all that was left to distinguish them from the beasts. If he only knew what an animal he served beside, Miguel doling out a nightly torture to her under his very nose and against which he was supposedly fighting. But she could say nothing; to ask for his help would be to demand his suicide. She had chosen freedom but it had trapped her as surely as any cage.

  As best she could, she began to run down the hillside, her feet slipping on the wet leaf mulch. She held her arms out, running from one tree to the next, partly to control her speed, but the legs of the tripod kept catching against the trees and alternately either wedged her in place or else sent her spinning. The mechanical rat-a- tat-tat of machine gun fire made her cry out in fear, unable to see where it was intended – her or someone else? Where was Miguel? Whatever else he was, he had kept his promise to her: he had kept her safe, kept her alive this long.

  Her legs wheeled, her arms pumping, lungs burning, eyes tearing. She didn’t know where she was, the road now out of sight and every tree looking like all the rest, but as the gradient steepened, the forest and needle-carpeted ground suddenly giving way to rock, she knew she was nearing the gorge. The cave was down there. Safety. Their agreed meeting point. She scrambled quickly around the boulders and granite outcrops that replaced the trees, grateful for the childhood that had given her a nimble agility, a childhood that could never have predicted she might one day be using those skills to run for her life with a machine gun strapped to her back.

  Sure enough, the land dropped away suddenly – the undoing of those who didn’t know to slow – and as she looked down she saw the oxbow bend of the river far below. The cave aligned with the three-quarter point along the top of the curve. She was nearly there.

  Her nails broke as she dug her hands into the rock face, the so-called path used by the wild goats barely as wide as her foot. Facing in, she shuffled along, knowing that one strong gust of wind might be all it took to unbalance her with the alien weight behind. But within a few minutes, she could already see the tips of the olive branches ahead. Only the unnatural angle of them betrayed that they had been cut and wedged in around the boulder that doubled as a door. It was a much-used bolthole – barely evident from across the gorge, far less from the sky as the fascists flew over in Hitler’s Luftwaffe planes.

  Her hands felt the mouth of the cave, finding the blessed curve inwards that took her deeper into the earth and away from the danger of man – his bullets, his mortars, his knives. Panting, realizing she was weeping, she pushed against the branches, into them, feeling them scratch her face as she found just enough width to wedge herself in and fall to her knees, away from the drop.

  Whimpers escaped her as she struggled with the harness; the ties had drawn tighter around her shoulders from where she had become tangled in the trees, the downward momentum drawing her onwards momentarily before being abruptly locked in place. Her fingers fumbled with the knots, still lazy with cold, and it was another few minutes before she freed herself and could let the gun fall. She cried out with relief, throwing her head back as she rolled her shoulders, easing out the cramps, before pulling the gun out of sight from the shelf and replacing the branches again. She squeezed sideways past the boulder into the black cavity, exhausted. It was damp, the air fetid, but she had done it. She was safe. She was—

  Not alone.

  A twig cracked underfoot and then she was thrown against the wall, a cold muzzle pressing against her head.

  ‘State your name,’ a male voice hissed, one hand grabbing her by the hair, holding her in place, the other reaching up and down her body, feeling for weapons. She did the same as she was pressed against the cave wall, reaching for something, anything – a stone as a missile, a stick as a knife . . .

  ‘Marina. Marina Marquez,’ she whispered, hating that she could hear her own fear. Taste it.

  There was a palpable silence, and then she was spun around again. And suddenly nothing and everything made sense.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘Ah, Charlotte, you slept well, I trust?’ Mateo asked as she appeared on the terrace and began hobbling over.

  ‘Like the proverbial,’ she smiled, even though the bags under her eyes clearly told another story. But if she looked bad, Nathan looked a lot worse. She could tell from a single glance that he was hungover: it was in the droop of his eyes, the stiff set of his shoulders. Not that she was surprised – she had been able to hear him and Mateo getting stuck in to the brandy, their voices drifting through the house in the early hours. It had been past two when he’d come up and she’d heard him go into the bathroom again at six so she knew he too had barely slept. At one point, she had heard the creak of the treads and seen his shadow stop by the bathroom door into her room. She had frozen, her eyes glued to the dim hovering shape, her heart beating like a jackhammer, all her anger beginning to ball in the pit of her stomach. If he so much as dared . . . She didn’t want his damn apology, not after everything he’d said. But after a while – had he been listening for the sound of her breathing? Crying? – he had moved away, the soft click of his door closing telling her it was safe again.

  She would have missed it had she been sleeping herself but she had forgotten to draw the curtains – hopping to the window had felt a hop too far last night – and she was stuck in that no-man’s-land of physical exhaustion and mental mania. Her eyes ached, burning to sleep, as she stared at the wall instead, mind whirling as she listened to the sound of him in the next room but one. She had heard him on the phone to someone – her? – his voice low and even, and then, exercising – push-ups, sit-ups, pushing himself hard, driving on. She just lay in bed listening to it all, these unremarkable everyday sounds of the man who had once been her world, the man who in the space of single days had seduced and th
en abandoned her, who had rescued and then forsaken her. She had loved him once but now she hated him, and he wanted that? He welcomed it?

  She sat down at the breakfast table with them both and poured herself a glass of juice, aware of Nathan’s hooded gaze flickering on and off her – taking in her hobble, her dress, her pale face, her silent contempt . . .

  The table was set out on the terrace below a rush-matted pergola, dappled light sprinkling through the slats onto the bowls of watermelon, peach, nectarines and plums. Jugs of freshly squeezed juices stood like rainbow chimes, grapefruits and oranges like bowling balls.

  ‘It’s good of you to join me early,’ Mateo said brightly. ‘I thought we should have a debrief before our guests come through.’

  ‘You must be looking forward to meeting your aunt,’ Charlotte said lightly.

  ‘Let’s say I’m certainly . . . interested.’ He looked at Nathan. ‘Now, we kept to our promise and didn’t talk shop last night—’

  ‘Your brandy was too good for that,’ Nathan replied.

  ‘Indeed. You must take a bottle when you leave. It’s hard to come by.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Charlotte watched the love-in with jaded eyes as she began cutting up a grapefruit half.

  ‘But tell me now, where are we? What have you found?’

  Nathan inhaled deeply, as though wondering where to start. ‘Well, we think we know why your aunt left – she was a Republican sympathizer. And her husband was an American who came over at the start of the war to fight as part of the International Brigade.’

  ‘. . . Republicans?’ Mateo asked as though it was a dirty word.

  ‘The political ideologies of the Left were pretty far-ranging – from socialism to full-blown anarchy; they could have been all-out communists or just forward-thinking liberals. But either way, that all came under the umbrella of Republicanism and that’s the side they fought for.’

  ‘Well, that would certainly account for things. Siding with the Left would have been a betrayal of all our family stood for – our principles. There would have been no way my grandfather could have condoned the match. He and all his sons fought valiantly for the Nationalists—’