by Joan Aiken
‘Mama, Papa, here is Senor Brooke, who was so good to Juana – or, as he is called in England, Lord St Winnow.’
I bowed, they inclined their heads without speaking.
Dona de la Trava, meanwhile, laid aside her veil. Turning towards her, as she gestured me to a seat, I had a view of her face for the first time and was hard put to it not to gape like a clown. For she was the most beautiful person I had ever encountered, with perfect features, large dazzling black eyes, her face a faultless oval, and, above all, a skin of such pink-and-white velvety fineness and delicacy that one could only compare it, tritely, to the petals of flowers, white jasmine or geraniums.
‘Do, please, be seated, Senor Brooke,’ she was repeating graciously.
Feeling curiously ill at ease, between her startling beauty on the one hand and the two old toads on the other – how could she possibly be their daughter? – I perched myself nervously on a gilt and satin chair. Servants offered coffee, small dishes of cakes and confectionery, and flasks of hollands, sirops, and cordials. I took a cup of coffee. I noticed that the old parents were helped to liberal drams of schnapps.
‘Well, Conchita – can the young senor get your children back from that devil in human form?’ croaked Senor Escaroz.
‘I pray that God will help me to do so, senor,’ I said. ‘But until I know where he has taken them, it is not easy to make a plan.’
‘Conchita – show the young gentleman little Luisa’s letter.’
‘It is in my bedroom. Excuse me.’ And she slipped from the room.
At first after she had gone, the two old creatures sat silent, sipping their schnapps. Then Senor Escaroz demanded, ‘And you are the grandson of the Conde de Cabezada?’
‘I have that honour, senor.’
‘Your grandfather is still alive?’ asked the old lady.
‘Yes, senora, God be thanked.’
‘He holds very scandalous political opinions, so I have been told,’ she remarked acidly.
‘If he does, senora, he can harm no one by them, for he is severely crippled and confined to his chair.’
‘Hum!’ she snapped, as if to say, that is just as well.
‘How do you come to have an English title?’ said her husband in a suspicious tone.
‘My father was an English officer, serving in the French wars. And his father – who is still alive in England – bears an English title.’
Plainly they were about to ask what this was, when Conchita returned. She had a rose in her hair, I noticed. Had it been there all the time, under the veil? The hair was amazingly plentiful, thick, lustrous and soft-looking, swept up into a great black coil over her temples.
‘See,’ she said, ‘here is my poor little Luisa’s letter.’
It had plainly been written in haste on a crumpled, stained sheet of coarse paper.
Dear Mama
Do not be anxious about us. But we are rather sad. Papa keeps us locked up, in case somebody tries to take us. And he says he will kill you if you come or send Uncle Amador. Or he will kill himself and us as well. He says he will take us into the mountains where there are bears. Nico sends you a kiss.
Luisa
While I was reading this, I heard Senor Escaroz say to his wife in a low tone, ‘What about the book? Do not let Conchita forget about the book,’ and she made some mumbling reply.
‘See, here are the children’s portraits,’ Conchita said to me, and she showed me three gilded and heart-shaped ornamental frames, in which were three angelic little faces with pink cheeks and rosy lips. The girl was like her mother, though without Dona Conchita’s dazzling beauty; the boy quite different. Like his father, perhaps. He had a bony, heavy-browed face. The smallest one was merely a round-faced baby.
‘Pretty children,’ I said politely, handing the pictures back. ‘You must miss them very badly, senora.’
She nodded several times without speaking, and I wondered how old she was. Not, surely, more than twenty-six? Without her veil, she did not look even that. If Nico, the eldest, was nine – if she had been married at seventeen – ?
‘When shall we set out?’ I said. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘First we must see the Reverend Mother again. So that she can give permission for my cousin and her companion, Sister Belen, to ride with us.’
I did not at all see why the Reverend Mother could not have done that today; but there was no sense in finding fault. I felt much pity for Conchita, though, who must have been desperate to start in search of her children.
‘I will bid you good evening now, senora,’ I told her, ‘and, perhaps, see you tomorrow again at the convent? And then I hope we shall be able to start on our journey without further delay.’
She looked doubtful.
‘It will be too late to start tomorrow. We could not hope to go very far –’
‘How far is it to where your husband’s brother lives?’
‘Berdun? At least forty leagues.’
Two days’ riding, I supposed; with three females in the party we could not go as fast as Pedro and I had done on our own.
Old Senor Escaroz croaked out something about the need for provisions for the journey, and an armed escort. I thought Dona Conchita looked at him with impatience – almost with dislike. But her voice, as she answered, was calm.
‘All that will be taken care of, Papa.’
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Until tomorrow. Buenos tardes. Adios – ’ to the two old toads, who again silently inclined their heads. ‘We will start the following day at dawn – all being well.’ And I went out into the damp and chilly night. There had been no suggestion that I should stay to dinner; for which I was greatly relieved. I thought the Escaroz parents seemed decidedly hostile towards me. But perhaps they were opposed to the whole scheme.
Having asked the porter which road led back into town, I struck off downhill. The rain had somewhat abated, but still the way was long, and I was damp and ravenously hungry by the time I reached our inn. I found Pedro in the public room brooding over a glass of wine; from his morose expression it did not seem that he had had any success with the girls of Bilbao; and so it proved; he said they all turned up their noses at him and laughed at his Gallegan accent.
‘But you?’ he said eagerly. ‘How did you fare? Did you see your young lady?’
‘Only a brief glimpse, if that,’ I told him. ‘But her cousin was there. The one whose children have been stolen.’
‘So: where do we go next? And when do we start?’
Having received such a snub from the girls at the paseo, Pedro had no wish to stay any longer in Bilbao; it was a dismal dank place, he said, crammed in its valley, and he was sorry to hear that we were not to set out until the morning after tomorrow. Over supper (some excellent fish) he cheered up a little and asked a great many questions about Conchita and her parents.
‘Did they receive you kindly? Civilly?’
‘She, yes; her parents, no.’
‘The Devil fly away with them, then! Although you have travelled all the way from Salamanca to rescue their grandchildren!’
‘Well, they were not uncivil, precisely – perhaps they don’t want their grandchildren rescued.’
Of what had the old people’s manner reminded me? They seemed unsure how to deal with me – as if I were some piece of unfamiliar material, as to whose utility they were unsure. I had felt them wondering – could I be moulded? Shaped? Made into something that might serve them?
After we had eaten we retired to our bedchamber, for the public room was noisy and full of smoke. Pedro soon slept, but I lay awake, hour after hour, looking at the square of sky that formed the window. Juana can see that same sky from the window of her cell, I thought, only a mile away. Do nuns sleep in cells, or in dormitories? There would be so many questions to ask her, if she was of a mind to answer.
The bells slowly tolled the hours of night, and I thought, she can hear those same bells. I remembered the last night we had spent together, in the forest of Iraty, up in the
Pyrenees, not so far distant from here. We had both been exhausted, quite at the end of our strength, after a terrifying encounter with a man who seemed to be possessed by a devil. And then, when I woke up, the following morning, Juana was gone . . .
At all events, I thought, nothing can, ever again, be so bad as that time. And Manuel de la Trava cannot possibly be either as evil or as frightening as that man was.
Just the same, I felt desperately uncertain and lonely. And Pedro’s company did nothing to lessen that loneliness.
Silently, inside my head, I said a prayer to God to be with us in our enterprise; and then, at long last, I fell asleep. Just before drifting off, I saw again the face of Conchita de la Trava – so beautiful, so sad, so full of piteous appeal. Oddly, it reminded me of some other face that I had recently seen – where, whose could it have been? Not beautiful, by no means sad or appealing, but similar – why could I not remember the owner of it?
Next day the procedure at the convent was as before. Except that Dona Conchita was not there. Nor, so far as I could see, was Juana. The Reverend Mother received me, just a fraction more graciously than she had on the previous day, and told me that my proposals had been favourably received, and it was permitted that I should rescue the de la Trava children.
I did not remind her that I had been invited to come and that all had been arranged already; I stood silent and polite, waiting.
‘So you may set forward at dawn tomorrow,’ the elderly nun said. ‘Sister Belen and Sister Felicita will be ready for you, waiting at the main gate.’
‘May – may I not see her – them – beforehand, so as to give them advice – instructions – ?’
‘That will not be necessary.’
I said, ‘Will the sisters be supplied with warm clothing? Heavy footwear? We shall probably have to go into the high mountains’ (thinking of the child’s letter) ‘where it may be very cold. And perhaps they should be armed – able to defend themselves from wild beasts, or brigands?’
The Reverend Mother drew herself up.
‘Young man, when the blessed St Teresa travelled all over Spain with her nuns, they would have scorned to provide themselves with weapons. They were protected by the hand of God. No brigand would dare to lay a finger on them.’
‘Brigands might not – but what about bears?’ I objected.
(Secretly, I was not so sure about the brigands either. The ones I had encountered would have made little distinction, I thought, between saints and ordinary people.)
‘Remember St Jerome,’ said the Reverend Mother curtly. ‘The sisters will need no protection, apart from the holy habit of their Order.’
I was far from satisfied – and she had said nothing about the warm clothes – but saw that it would be useless to argue. Inwardly resolving to equip the expedition if need be from my own purse – for my grandfather had seen me handsomely supplied with money – I bade farewell to the sour-faced Mother Superior and said that I hoped to return her sisters to her in safety before too long a period had elapsed. Of course I hoped nothing of the kind; I hoped – what did I hope? I hardly knew.
As I took my way to the visitors’ parlour earlier I had been accosted by a small, pale-faced nun who, glancing about her nervously, had whispered that Sister Milagros would like a word with me after I had seen the Reverend Mother.
On my way out, therefore, recalling this, I asked at the portress’s lodge if a message could be dispatched to Sister Milagros, saying that I was now at her service. But the portress told me that Sister Milagros had been sent on an errand to the other side of Bilbao and would not be back for some considerable time.
‘Oh well, I do not imagine it can have been of great importance,’ I said, ‘since I do not know the sister. She left no message?’
‘No, senor. But the sister did know you. She was transferred here from a House in Santander where she had met you, she said.’
One of the kind nuns who looked after my parrot while I travelled to England.
‘Tell her, then, that I am very sorry indeed to miss her, but shall hope to see her on my return. I suppose she wanted to talk over old times and ask after the parrot.’
‘No: she had something she wished to give you,’ said the portress. ‘But, as you say, it will have to wait.’
Pedro and I spent that day in purchasing various stores and tools, also arms, that we thought might be of use. Senor Escaroz had said that he would furnish transport for his daughter and the two nuns. Pedro and I had provided ourselves with mules, as before.
‘For if we must go into the mountains,’ Pedro said, ‘horses would only be an encumbrance.’
We were not a little dismayed, therefore, next morning, arriving at the Escaroz mansion (for it had been arranged that we should escort Dona de la Trava from there to the convent) to discover that she proposed to make the journey in a great top heavy carriage, drawn by four fat horses, and provided with two smart but knavish-looking outriders, likewise mounted on horses.
I tried to be polite about it.
‘Is this well thought of, senora? We may have to make our way along wild mountain roads – they may be narrow and steep – would not a smaller conveyance be more practical?’
‘But I have to take Juana, and that other sister,’ objected Conchita, widening her great dark eyes. ‘And we shall have the children, don’t forget, on our return. And there is all my baggage –’
‘Baggage?’
She had brought, we discovered, three portmanteaus, two hat boxes, and a great wooden case. I supposed that it contained clothes for the children who probably, poor things, had not a stitch to their backs.
Pedro and I looked at each other and shrugged. Perhaps we would find a pretext to leave a part of this inconvenient load somewhere along the way. There was only just room for the provisions that we had brought to be squeezed into the trunk – the coachman, meanwhile, compressing his lips and hoisting his shoulders as if we had insisted on thrusting in a most unreasonable quantity of useless gear.
‘We had best hope the poor sisters are not cumbered with too much luggage,’ Pedro muttered in my ear.
In fact, when we halted at the convent gate, we saw two white-robed sisters waiting outside, neither of them laden with any baggage whatsoever. The coachman opened the door, they mounted swiftly into the carriage, and we were away in a flash, without any word said, and without my having been granted a single glimpse of their faces.
4
Conversations with Dona Conchita; Juana and Sister Belen speak in Latin; a night at Irurzun
Soon, leaving the valley of the Nervion, our road started to climb, up and up, over the steep, north-facing slopes of forested mountains. The forests were of tall, slender trees, ilex, acacia, beech, and pine; wonderful gusts of damp fragrance came from them, on the rainy wind, for the acacia trees were all in clouds of white blossom. And, among the grass around their feet, tall white orchids bloomed. I hoped the carriage windows were open so that Juana could see and smell the flowers; she had been exceedingly fond of flowers, I remembered.
After a while, when the road became very steep indeed, the coachman brought his lumbering, top-heavy conveyance to a halt, grumbling that the horses must have a rest.
‘No wonder, with all that load of carved gilt the poor beasts are obliged to drag,’ muttered Pedro. ‘At this rate it will take a week to get to Berdun.’
On the next steep slope, the coachman decreed that his passengers must get out and walk. The two white-robed sisters did so without argument, swinging along ahead on their sandalled feet, with heads bent, talking together in low voices. I still could not decide which of them was Juana, for their hoods almost covered their faces, their loose robes concealed their build, and they were about the same height. Stupid shyness overcame me, and I was reluctant to break in on their conversation.
Meanwhile, Dona Conchita was not at all prepared to be put out on the roadway and required to proceed on foot. She apologized repeatedly in her soft musical voice – but, she s
aid, she had not expected to be obliged to walk, the shoes she wore were wholly unsuitable, such an indignity was quite, quite out of the question.
By good luck, one of the outriders’ horses was a quiet, docile beast, and so the man dismounted and led it along while she rode on it, sitting sideways with remarkable grace, considering that she was mounted on a man’s saddle. I noticed that her feet were indeed tiny, and that the little silver-buckled, black velvet slippers she wore would certainly have been cut to pieces after a hundred yards’ walking on this rough, stony road. Had she not, I wondered, thought to bring any more practical footwear?
By now a fine drenching mountain rain had begun to fall.
‘Those poor sisters will be soaked to the skin,’ Pedro said perturbedly, looking after them. ‘That skimpy white calico they wear will not protect them at all.’
‘Give them our cloaks,’ said I, passing him mine, which had been rolled and strapped to my saddle. ‘Our jackets are thick enough to keep us dry.’
Pedro threw me a puzzled glance, evidently wondering why I myself did not take this opportunity of speaking to the two sisters; however he rode on ahead and soon caught them up. At first I saw them shake their heads, as if declining the offer; but at length, evidently, he managed to persuade them that it would be foolish to let themselves be drenched to the skin so early in the journey, and they shrouded themselves in our warm riding capes.
Dona Conchita rode up on my right side.
She, I saw, was now all wrapped in a voluminous grey fur cloak with a fur scarf over her head, so that nothing could be seen but her beautiful pink-and-white face and those large velvety eyes.
