by Joan Aiken
She shook her head, stumbling over a lump of masonry concealed among rough shrubs, and I caught her hand to help her. It felt warm and strong.
Then, in the distance, we heard a quiet, regular sound: clink, and then a thud; another clink, then another thud. A familiar sound, but unexpected here.
‘Somebody digging?’ whispered Juana, puzzled.
We reached the wooden door to the keep. De Larra let us in through it, waited, and closed it behind us. At the foot of the stair, where we stood in pitch darkness, he suddenly seized my arm.
‘Were you in the secret, about the book?’ he hissed in my ear. ‘Did you know about it? For if you did – as God is my witness – I will stick this knife through your gullet.’
I could feel the blade press against my windpipe, cold and deadly sharp. It made me cough.
‘Book?’ I spluttered. ‘What book, senor? I have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘The book that child brought, from her mother.’
Then I remembered the tiny volume, the handbook on birds, that Pilar had in her petticoat pocket, that Don Manuel furiously flung out of the window. A cold dread ran up my spine to the pit of my throat.
‘Of all the cold, calculated acts of villainy – ’ de Larra was saying. ‘Medea herself could not have equalled it. You swear that you knew nothing?’
‘As God is my judge, senor!’
‘Is that the truth?’ I could feel his ferocious mind, searching mine in the dark.
Juana said strongly, ‘El Senor Brooke is an honourable man, Don Jose. You do wrong to doubt him.’
At that, de Larra gave a great sigh, and the knife-blade dropped away from my neck.
‘Very well – very well – forgive me. But we have been nearly mad with helplessness and horror.’
‘Why, why?’ demanded Juana. ‘What has happened?’
Still without answering, he led the way up into the room where I had been before. The fire had gone out, but up here the large, unglazed windows gave light enough to see. We caught a faint sound of sobbing and whimpering, then perceived little Pilar, crouched by the body of another child that lay full length on the floor. Approaching more closely, I discovered this to be the boy, Nico, apparently ill or fainted; he moved and groaned a little, twisting about, and Pilar wailed, ‘Nico, Nico! Please don’t go, like Luisa! Don’t!’
‘Where is the other girl?’ I asked with dread.
‘Dead,’ replied de Larra. Pilar sobbed again.
‘Dead? But how?’
Juana had dropped on her knees beside the boy and was anxiously, carefully feeling his brow and his hands.
‘It was that cursed book their mother sent. That hag! That vulture! Vitriol runs in her veins, not blood – that she could plan and carry out such an act!’
‘The book? I don’t understand?’
Then I began to recall how the pages of the little volume were all gummed together and how Luisa had eagerly tugged them apart, licking her finger to moisten them.
‘You mean the sticky pages – ?’
‘Poisoned,’ he said. ‘Manuel guessed immediately that there was some wicked trick, and threw it away. But already both the elder children –’
‘Yes, now I remember. And – and the girl – she is dead? Already?’
‘First she went mad,’ said Don Jose curtly. ‘She ran, she laughed, she danced, she screamed that angels were dancing with her. Then she said that she was a bird and could fly – before her father could stop her she leaped from that window there –’
Juana, kneeling by the boy, had one hand pressed over her mouth in horror. The other arm was clasped round the sobbing Pilar.
‘Her father is out there now, digging her a grave,’ said de Larra.
‘And Nico – he also – ?’
‘He had not handled the book so much as his sister, Manuel says. But, you see –’
‘Have you given him anything?’ said Juana quickly. ‘He should have white of egg beaten in milk, or a mustard emetic –’
De Larra laughed shortly. ‘You think we have those things up here? We gave him water – as much as he could drink –’
‘But I don’t understand,’ I said slowly. ‘Even Conchita – even she – can’t have meant her children to die?’
‘No, of course not. Don’t you see,’ impatiently interrupted Juana, ‘it was her husband the book was meant for. It was Don Manuel. And she didn’t mean him to die; she meant to send him mad. So that she could claim his estate.’
I remembered Don Ignacio saying, ‘He must be mad, and die in his madness.’
‘But what a fool!’ Juana was going on furiously. ‘I always thought Conchita stupid, but not as stupid as that! A plan that might so easily miscarry –’
At that moment we heard steps on the stair.
‘Manuel,’ said de Larra in a quick warning voice. ‘Do not question him – he has been distressed beyond bearing –’
Don Manuel came in. He did indeed look beaten and ravaged, ten years older than when I had seen him last. At sight of us he checked.
‘Don Felix and Dona Juana are innocent,’ said de Larra at once. ‘They knew nothing. They feel for you, most truly.’
Indeed Juana, getting up, walked straight to him and clasped his hands in hers.
His face still stared past her. He seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. But two slow tears found their way down his cheeks, as she continued to press his hands.
Little Pilar ran to him and seized him round the leg.
‘Papa! Papa! Is Nico going to die also? Please don’t let Nico die!’
‘It is as God wills, child,’ he said wearily. He looked down at Pilar with, I thought, some revulsion; and I could hardly blame him. Then, apparently taking in, for the first time, the presence of Juana, he murmured, ‘You are – you are Sister Juana – who used to be Juana Esparza?’
‘Yes, senor. I have come to give you – ’ she stopped and swallowed – ‘to give you my promise about your children.’
‘I remember you,’ he went on slowly. ‘I always thought you – a good influence. A true friend. Will you – I have dug her grave and laid her in it. Will you come and say a prayer for my daughter Luisa?’
His words came loosely as if they drifted from him without direction.
‘Of course I will, Don Manuel,’ Juana said in deep compassion. ‘Let us all go. I will just make this poor boy a little more comfortable.’ She took off the blue cloak I had given her and folded it into a wad for him to lie on. Then she made a sign of assent to Don Manuel and we went after him down the stair, little Pilar following forlornly in the rear. She seemed quite quenched with crying – very different from the other occasions on which I had seen her.
The grave he had dug for Luisa was under the tree that Pilar and I had climbed. It was an oak.
The only tools he had been able to find for digging were a rusty iron bar and an old blunt axe blade. It must have been a formidable task, using such implements, in the hard and scanty soil; I could see that his hands were dusty and gashed and bleeding, on top of those earlier scars. He had hauled over part of a broken pillar to lie on top of the grave, in order to mark it, and keep off wild beasts.
Juana knelt down at the foot of the grave and the rest of us did likewise, wherever we happened to be placed. Dawn had come by now. A lark was singing nearby; we waited in silence for a moment or two, while its voice spiralled upward into the pale green sky, and while Juana collected her thoughts.
Then she said, ‘Most pitiful Father: we need not ask you to take charge of your dear child Luisa, for she is already with You and sharing Your eternal joy. But we do ask you to comfort her brother and sister. May their lives be as guiltless and free from harm as hers was.’
I could hardly feel this was likely to be true of Pilar, but doubtless it did no harm to ask.
‘Console this poor child’s bereaved father and help him to see his path clear ahead,’ went on Juana. Then she paused. I wondered if she was thinking about as
king God to punish the ill-doers who had caused Luisa’s horrible and untimely death. In the old days she would certainly have done so. Then she had a strong and passionate sense of justice and used to long for retribution against the people who had hurt her.
But she can safely leave all that to God? Surely she knows that by now? I thought.
Yes, Felix, said the voice of God in my ear. And you can safely leave Juana to me.
I almost smiled, the message came through so warm and clear, like a sudden blaze of sunshine in my mind.
Juana looked up over her joined hands, and met my eyes, for I was kneeling at the opposite end of the grave. She was frowning with concentration and resolve and glanced at me, just then, as if I were no more than a tree or a stone.
‘And I hereby give my solemn promise that as much of my life as they may need shall be devoted to the care of Luisa’s brother and sister; that I will help them to grow in grace and wisdom, and so free themselves from this wicked wrong and tragedy.
‘Please give me your support in this work, my dear Lord.’
‘Amen,’ said Don Manuel strongly, and so did the rest of us.
Then Juana recited a prayer for the dead, in Latin, to which we made the responses. After that she stood up, without self-consciousness, and held out her hand again to Don Manuel. This time he took it between both of his.
‘Thank you, child,’ he said huskily. ‘I do believe that you will do as you say. I pray God that my son lives to receive your care. And you restore, a little, my faith in human nature.’
‘If that is so, I am glad to hear it.’ Her voice was calm, quite matter-of-fact. She went on, ‘And now, Don Manuel, it is a hard thing to tell you, but I think you should leave this place without delay.’
‘Yes!’ said de Larra in heartfelt agreement. ‘Dona Juana is right, Manuel.’
‘But, the boy – ’ His face contorted in anguish.
‘The boy is in the hands of God. Your staying can make no difference. These young people will care for him as well as you can – better –’
Young people, I thought indignantly; how old are you, Senor de Larra, I should like to know? Not much older than I myself. But it was true that Don Manuel was older, was in his middle or late thirties – indeed he looked at this moment almost like an old man; there must have been a considerable gap in age between him and his wife. Perhaps that was why . . .
At that moment I saw Conchita herself coming over the grass.
She was dressed very stately, in black silk, with a black lace mantilla. She carried her great black ostrich-feather fan. True these things were a little dusty and mud-splashed, but she had plainly taken considerable pains with her appearance, and moved with great dignity, waving her fan from side to side as she approached.
Behind her came Don Amador, even more dusty and dishevelled, and panting a little as he endeavoured to keep pace with her.
I could see that Conchita was taken aback at the sight of de Larra. Myself and Juana she had perhaps expected, but Don Jose she had not, and his presence disturbed her, though she did her best to conceal the fact and came on composedly. What startled her even more was the appearance of her own husband, when he turned round and became aware of her. She drew a sharp breath and gazed at him with huge eyes.
He, for his part, turned completely white, so that his face looked like a shield, with the black eye patch and the diagonal line of its ribbon across his cheek. The good eye blazed with outrage.
‘You!’ he brought out harshly. ‘How in the name of the fiend did you get here?’
Having come as close as she dared, Conchita stood still and stared at her husband, her face gradually growing as pale as his.
Of course, I thought, she expected to find him run mad and raving. That was why she came. To be a witness to his madness. And now, since he is plainly not mad at all, but sane and sober as anybody else present, she does not know what to do.
‘How did I get here?’ she repeated slowly. ‘Why – by the tunnel, Manuel. You are not the only one who knows its location. Your brother Ignacio told me how to find it.’
She was staring at him, all the while, with a deep, distraught look, almost one of appeal. It was, I supposed, a couple of years since she had seen him; his appearance plainly shocked and disturbed her.
Dear God, I thought in astonishment, she loves him; in spite of having betrayed him and plotted his ruin and death, she does still love him in her own selfish, childish way.
‘Manuel!’ she exclaimed suddenly, as if they were alone together. ‘Can’t you forget all this wretched politics? Leave it! What is the good of it all? You will never gain your ends – whatever they are. And see what it leads to! Can’t we go back? Be as we were at first – when we were happy? We were happy once –’
‘Go back?’ he repeated, in that harsh, husky voice. ‘Go back? After the things you did? Do you see this?’ He gestured towards the grave. ‘Do you know what it is? Do you know who lies buried under there?’
She gaped at him in silence. She had not, up to that moment, taken in the fact that we were standing round a grave.
‘Your daughter Luisa lies buried there!’ he shouted at her. ‘Poisoned by the filthy book that you sent in with that other misbegotten brat. She is dead! And you say that we can go back?’
‘Oh – no!’ She let out a faint, horrified cry, dropping the fan, pressing her hands against her mouth. ‘No, it’s not true! It can’t be true! You are telling lies to frighten me – you monster!’
‘You call me a monster? I don’t know how you dare to show your face here.’ His control began to slip; he snatched up the rusty axe-blade.
‘Manuel – no!’ exclaimed de Larra. He, like the rest of us, had been held, watching Conchita in absolute fascination – though I could see by the look in his strange, light luminous eyes that he loathed her and would be glad to see her blown by a gale off the face of the earth. But now he darted forward and knocked the rusty blade from Manuel’s hand.
‘Leave her alone, Manuel, you fool! She is not worth a straw. She is trash!’
But Don Manuel moved on towards his wife with such a look of awful, terrifying resolution upon his face – indeed he looked like the Cyclops itself, with wide nostrils and compressed lips and that one blazing eye – that she, with a faint scream, took to her heels.
‘Mama!’ wailed little Pilar, ‘Mama!’ and scampered to intercept her mother.
‘Oh, get out of my way, you wretched little changeling! Haven’t you done enough harm? You were supposed to give the book to your father – not your sister –’
Conchita thrust the child aside and ran for a gap in the wall, crying ‘Amador! Stop him, help me, help!’
And Don Manuel went striding after her.
At that, we were suddenly all galvanised. De Larra was first through the gap, after Don Manuel, and I was close behind him, with Juana just after me, and Don Amador trailing unhappily behind us all.
Beyond the wall which encircled the keep a rough, wide slope of grass and boulders, scattered with ruined masonry, ran down to the outer bailey wall, which, on this side, was not complete. The wall, topping the cliff that surrounded the castle on three sides, had been built so as to take advantage of natural crags. And in a dozen places the masonry had crumbled, leaving the crags like teeth in a lower jaw with wide gaps between.
Down towards this wall Conchita ran at a crazy, terrified speed, stumbling and slipping among the tufty grass and brambles.
‘Dona Conchita! Stop!’ shouted de Larra. ‘We won’t let him hurt you. Manuel, stop!’
‘Stop!’ I yelled.
‘Stop!’ called Juana.
Even Don Amador, somewhere far to the rear, called reedily, ‘My dearest! Stop, I beg you – !’
But nothing arrested her frantic flight. Floundering, tripping, snatching brief glances over her shoulder, seeing Don Manuel gain on her, Conchita only ran the faster.
Arrived at the wall, where it was only five or six feet high, but rough and ragged
, crumbling on the inside, she flung herself upon it. In her dress she looked like a black lizard. Up the uneven slope of loose masonry she scrambled, and paused to look back only when she was out of her husband’s reach.
De Larra had come up with Don Manuel by then and caught hold of his arm. The touch seemed to recall him to sanity; he halted, shook his head with a dazed look, and rubbed his forearm across his eyes.
‘Conchita! I beg you, come down, my angel, or you will fall!’ begged Don Amador. The poor fat man looked ludicrously useless, gasping and exhorting his lady as he came puffing down the slope.
Now we were all ranged in a row below her while she crouched on the broken wall above us calling out, ‘Do not let him touch me!’
‘No one shall harm you, my precious angel!’ promised Don Amador.
And then I heard little Pilar’s voice behind me upraised in a scream of utter terror. ‘Mama!’
She, farther up the hill, had seen – her sharp child’s eyes had seen – what was not so clear to us, close at hand: the whole piece of masonry, loosened by Conchita’s headlong assault on it, was starting to topple outwards.
With what seemed a dreamlike slowness, though it can have taken but a few seconds, she and the wall tilted away from us, describing an arc like the setting sun – then, with one harrowing, horror-stricken cry, she vanished from our view among a cataract of tumbling rock and stone.
‘Jesu!’ said de Larra.
Leaving go of Don Manuel, he went gingerly to another part of the wall, a few yards to the side, and looked over. Returning, he shook his head and spread out his hands.
‘Not a hope . . . She is three hundred feet down, under a ton of rubble. And no particular loss to the world,’ he added in an undertone, but little Pilar was sobbing hysterically, ‘Mama – Mama – Mama – ’ and Juana was trying to comfort her, while Don Amador, looking utterly dazed with shock, repeated over and over, ‘How could you, how could you? Oh, Conchita, my dearest, how could you?’
I caught de Larra’s eye and muttered to him, ‘The advice that Juana gave was good. If they came by the way of the tunnel, others may. Why don’t you just go – now – take him away before anything else can happen. We will look after the children. Just go!’ I repeated.
