by Joan Aiken
Juana kept her eyes fixed on the floor and would not look at me.
‘Now, my daughter,’ the nun said to her, ‘Mother Agnese told me before she went that you were going through many deep troubles and soul-searchings, because you had given your promise to Don Manuel to look after his children, but you had also, and previously, given your promise to God to be a Religious. And Mother Agnese had advised you to remain in the convent and allow the children to attend school here, where you could be in contact with them. Is that not so?’
‘Yes, Mere Madeleine,’ Juana said in a low tone.
‘Mother Agnese suggested that the children should live with their grandparents.’
‘Yes, Mere Madeleine,’ Juana said again; her voice was even less enthusiastic.
‘Well, child, I have raised the matter with Senor and Senora Escaroz. And I can tell you that they don’t wish to have their grandchildren. In fact,’ Mere Madeleine went on briskly, ‘Senor Escaroz told me he didn’t care a snap of his fingers what became of the son of a seditious madman or the misbegotten daughter of a profligate courtier from Madrid.’ Mere Madeleine raised her brows disapprovingly as she pronounced these words. ‘I understand that their daughter Conchita had been a great disappointment to them, and they were interested in the children only so long as they believed Don Manuel to be dead and Nico his heir. On learning that he was alive, they gave me to understand that I might place the children in the Bilbao orphanage for all they cared.’
‘Well!’ I said cheerfully, ‘Juana, that frees you from any –’
‘A moment!’ Mere Madeleine raised her hand. ‘My dear Soeur Felicitee, you know I can speak to you as a friend, having been acquainted with you for the last five years. I have watched with the utmost sympathy your struggles to become a Religious. You brought energy, goodwill, courage, intelligence to the business; but, year after year, as you know, I have made you postpone taking your final vows. You asked me why, and I would never tell you. I tell you now. Your heart was not in it. You were not happy. I knew that from the start. Yet why did you call yourself Soeur Felicitee, I wonder? The truth is that you had no vocation. And the task that you have, here, of giving a home to those two children is, I believe, the one that God was saving up for you. And, believe me, it will be every bit as difficult as life in the convent. More so, perhaps! Nico will be delicate for some time to come; and I have it on good evidence that Pilar is a little Tartar.’
She smiled.
Juana looked up at Mere Madeleine – radiant, bewildered, cross, embarrassed, the tears peeling down her face.
‘But – Mere Madeleine – a home – how can I give them a home? I have sold mine –’
‘You forget, my daughter – when you leave you will have your dowry repaid – another factor which, I fear, may have been weighing with our dear Mother Agnese more than it ought –’
‘But how can I be sure that I can care for the children properly?’
‘Oh,’ replied Mere Madeleine with her bland look, ‘As to that – I daresay you will find some obliging person who will be prepared to help you in such a task.’
So then I made my bow and said, ‘Reverend Mother, my grandfather the Conde Don Francisco Acarillo de Santibana y Escurial de la Sierra y Cabezada permits to ask you if, supposing her vows should be withdrawn, I may pay my addresses to the Senorita Esparza –’
And at that, even through her crossness, the cornered Juana could not forbear an unwilling grin.
So we were married, with no parade and little ceremony, in the convent chapel, with Pedro acting as groomsman, and the two children in attendance.
‘This getting wed is such a famous notion, I’m going to work on Sister Belen to persuade her to come out of the cloister,’ Pedro muttered to me just before the service, while we were waiting for Juana to appear, looking prickly and self-conscious, in her white lace and silver crown, on the arm of the convent chaplain.
‘Pedro!’
‘I plan to keep writing letters to her,’ he said. ‘It will be hard work.’
I did notice that Sister Belen gave him an especially friendly greeting when healths were being drunk afterwards.
We started on the return journey to Villaverde very soon after the ceremony, for I was eager to get back to Grandfather with the least possible delay.
‘I am so longing for you and the children to be there. And for you to meet Grandfather – that will make me so happy –’
But – alas – that final happiness was not to be permitted.
Author’s Note
When I first decided to write about Felix at the age of eighteen, I hardly realised what a fearsome period of Spanish history I was going to plunge him into. The years between 1823 and 1833 are called by some historians the ‘Ominous Decade’ because such a lot of bad things were going on in Spain.
After what we call the Peninsular War, 1808–14, and the Spanish call the War of Independence, during which English, French, and Spanish armies skirmished all over Spain, with the English and Spanish allied to drive out the French, the country was desperately poor and in a state of upheaval. The upper classes were worried that there would be a revolution, as in France.
King Ferdinand VII had been exiled with his parents Carlos IV and Maria Luisa when, in 1809, Napoleon enticed them out of Spain by a trick, and put his own brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne. The Spanish people were longing to have their rightful king back, but when Ferdinand arrived in 1814, after Napoleon’s downfall, they discovered that he had a mean and vindictive nature. He soon cancelled the liberal measures that had been passed during his exile and began a regime of repression that lasted till his death in 1833. Nor was the trouble ended then, for his children were both daughters, his brother, Don Carlos, claimed the throne, and a long series of ‘Carlist Wars’ began. (The Salic Law of 1713 had barred girls from reigning, but Ferdinand had declared that law invalid.)
So, during the late 1820s when this story is set, there were three main parties in Spain: that of the king, reactionary and repressive; the Carlists, even more reactionary (they had an idea that the king was being influenced by Freemasons); and the Liberals, a surprisingly large group. These three groups were all in conflict, but the Liberals had the worst of it.
I wish I had more space to tell about the awfulness of Ferdinand (he seems to have spent his exile knitting socks for statues of the saints) and his parents Carlos and Maria Luisa. You have only to look at their portraits by Goya to see how weak, obstinate, vain, and stupid they were. And Goya’s paintings ‘The Second of May’ and ‘The Third of May’ show what happened when the French came into Spain in 1809, the year in which Felix was born.
One real character appears in this story. Mariano Jose de Larra was a Liberal journalist who spent his childhood in France during the War of Independence, with his family, who were Bonapartists. After the war, in the amnesty of 1818, they came back to Spain. De Larra soon began writing indignant essays, under the name ‘Figaro’, about the state of the country. One of them was called ‘To Write in Madrid is to Weep’. He said that trying to reform Spain was like ploughing the sea. Sad to tell, he committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight. He would have been glad to know that in the middle of the twentieth century Spain at last became a democracy.
About the Author
Joan Aiken was born in Sussex in 1924. She wrote over a hundred books for young readers and adults and is recognized as one of the classic authors of the twentieth century. Amanda Craig, writing in The Times, said, ‘She was a consummate storyteller, one that each generation discovers anew.’ Her best-known books are those in the James III saga, of which The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was the first title, published in 1962 and awarded the Lewis Carroll prize. Both that and Black Hearts in Battersea have been filmed. Her books are internationally acclaimed and she received the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the United States as well as the Guardian Award for Fiction in this country for The Whispering Mountain.
Joan Aiken was decorated with an MBE
for her services to children’s books. She died in 2004.
Also Joan Aiken
Other titles in The Felix Trilogy:
Go Saddle the Sea
Bridle the Wind
The Wolves Chronicles:
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Black Hearts in Battersea
Night Birds On Nantucket
The Stolen Lake
The Cuckoo Tree
Dido and Pa
Is
Cold Shoulder Road
Midwinter Nightingale
The Witch of Clatteringshaws
Lady Catherine’s Necklace
For further details on these and other Joan Aiken books, see: www.joanaiken.com
THE TEETH OF THE GALE
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 446 43072 9
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
Red Fox edition first published 1997
This ebook edition published 2013
Copyright © The Estate of Joan Aiken, 1988
Cover artwork copyright © David Frankland, 2013
First Published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, 1988
The right of Joan Aiken to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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