Devil's Darling

by Violet Winspear

  ‘So I did,’ the señora admitted.

  ‘I’m sorry if it came as a shock to you.’

  ‘It really came as no surprise. As soon as Diabo told me you were English I knew that traditional enemies had met on the field of battle, and that it was going to take a high degree of love and tolerance for such a marriage to work.’

  ‘And now you see that it isn’t working.’ Persepha lowered her glance and watched as a lizard skimmed across the sunlit tiles of the patio with the wing of a butterfly poking from its jaws. She gave a shiver... was it the same butterfly which had led her to the chapel, where she had seen the Don paying homage to a memory? Having lost heaven he settled for hell ... it could be nothing else for either of them, not without love to heal the wounds of battle; to soothe away the sting of quick words spoken by two people with quick tempers. Love made fun of the fighting ... but hate only left resentment and pain.

  The lizard flickered out of sight among the ferns, there to feed on its delicate victim.

  ‘Ah, here comes the girl with our breakfast,’ said the señora. ‘I have quite an appetite this morning. Usually I don’t eat until mid-morning. Chica, what have you brought us?’

  The girl smiled vividly at the Don’s grandmother, and whisked off the snowy napkin to reveal a marvellous tortilla, rich with eggs, chopped ham and herbs, crisp at the edges, and served with country bread which had been freshly baked that morning. The aromatic smoke of the coffee came drifting from the spout of the silver pot, and the cream was thick in the jug.

  ‘Everything looks delicious!’ The señora brought her hands together in a pleased motion. ‘No wonder, Persepha, you take breakfast on the patio if they treat you like this. A gesture of gratitude, eh, that they don’t have to carry trays up and down the stairs as in the days—’ The Don’s grandmother broke off her words, and then lifted the lid of a little silver dish, disclosing fresh strawberries on a bed of orange slices. ‘Es bueno, who could wish for more?’

  ‘It’s usually apricots and rolls, and sometimes figs,’ Per-sepha smiled. ‘This is in your honour, abuela.’

  ‘Will the señor be joining you for breakfast?’ the girl asked, before departing with the empty tray, its contents having been laid upon the table.

  ‘I don’t think so - he may have gone riding.’ Persepha swallowed a slight dryness from her throat. ‘I saw him earlier and he was clad in his riding breeches and boots.’

  As she spoke and lifted the silver pot, feeling the almost desperate need for coffee with cream, she saw him again in her mind, standing there in the chapel with a finger of sunlight across the shining tips of his boots that were never spurred, though his horses were high-cour-aged and took a lot of handling. That day long ago, when death had closed the eyes of the woman he loved, he had, according to Carmenteira, ridden his favourite horse to its last breath.

  He would be riding now, Persepha knew it, galloping hard across the pampas on Satanas, his present favourite.

  ‘Have coffee ready for him in the kitchen, Mafalda,’ she said. ‘I should imagine he’ll be back in about an hour.’

  ‘Si, señora. Enjoy your food.’ The girl was gone with a swirl of flared skirt, the sunlight catching blindingly on the surface of the silver tray as she swung it, careless and happy in her youth, not all that much younger than Persepha, who yet felt as if a weight of responsibility and decision rested on her own slight shoulders.

  ‘You have an excellent mastery of Spanish,’ remarked the senora, as she shook pepper on to her tortilla. ‘Diabo has been teaching you?’

  ‘Not deliberately. I gradually picked it up, and I know a little before I came here. You take cream, señora?’

  ‘Gracias. A while ago you called me abuela - grandmother. I would prefer that, for it sounds less formal. And what does Diabo call you? We Latins have a liking for diminutives, and you have a rather strange, long name. Not quite English, I think.’

  ‘No, it’s from mythology. I was named by my guardian who was something of a classical scholar when a young man. He meant to be a writer, and then found his talent lay elsewhere. He was a famous gambler - did the Don tell you?’

  ‘He will confide in me gradually.’ The señora tasted her breakfast and smiled her approval. ‘As good as it looks. Now, what does he call you so that I may, with your consent, use the same name?’

  ‘He has never shortened my name.’ Persepha realized this with a sense of surprise. ‘I do believe he rather likes it. Or perhaps the mythological story attached to it.’

  ‘Which is?’ The señora quirked an eyebrow and for an instant Persepha saw a resemblance in this woman to the man; shades of his ironic humour and his tendency to mock her when she was being too serious.

  ‘I - I’m sure you know the story.’ Persepha drank her coffee with desperate thirst. ‘The dark lord of Hades took a bride and her name was Persephone. For half a year she was forced to share his world, and then she was permitted to go home to her family for the remainder of the year.’ ‘But I understand that you have no family - Persepha.’ The smile had gone from the señora’s eyes. ‘And I hope you don’t plan to leave my grandson’s world - he would only fetch you back.’

  ‘Like a wife in purdah,’ Persepha couldn’t resist saying.

  ‘Like a wife, not a foolish child. He doesn’t shut you up and not allow you the freedom of his hacienda. You can go where you please, but there are men in this region who do treat their wives with far more harshness than Diabo would ever show any woman. He has his faults, but he has something beyond price when it comes to a woman - he actually likes the look and taste and feel of a woman, and he doesn’t regard them merely as breeding machines. Are you aware of this, or are you too naive to recognize a real man when you find yourself married to one?’

  All at once her voice had sharpened and grown scornful, matching the look which she flung over Persepha’s person. ‘He said you were young, but I never dreamed you were infantile.’

  ‘Th-that’s unfair!’ Persepha felt as if she had been slapped. ‘I think I’ve taken it rather well, being dragged here to Mexico to be the wife of a high-placed, high-handed Don, who really wants me for only one thing—’

  ‘Be proud of it.’ The señora snapped her fingers so her rings glittered and flashed fire in the sunlight that fell through the boughs of the tree shading the table.

  ‘You say he doesn’t regard a woman as a breeding machine, but that’s all he wants from me - a child,’ Persepha choked, having tears and a little too much pepper in her throat. ‘A son to take over his precious estates and his herds of cattle and his stables of horses and his farms full of Mexican retainers and their parcels of children. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t love me, for what has love to do with the getting of a baby? It’s enough that I arouse the animal in him—’

  ‘Enough of that!’ The senora flung down her cutlery with every vestige of the Don’s own chilling anger. ‘How dare you speak of my grandson in that manner - where did he find you, in the docks of some English port where the women use the language of men?’

  Persepha flushed hotly ... she hadn’t meant to lose her temper or her dignity, but it was really too much that she be expected to play the lovelorn bride just to please a woman who was as basically contemptuous of her as everyone else she met here. Only the maids were friendly, and only because they couldn’t take her seriously as their mistress. To them she was just the boudoir toy of the señor hidalgo, to whom all the staff went when anything important cropped up, such as an outbreak of fire in the kitchen, or a child falling off the stable gate. Mexicans were panicky, she had discovered, but to the master they ran rather than the mistress when accident befell them or their children.

  She would never be the mistress here ... and in blind haste she thrust back her chair and sprang to her feet. Her face was white, so that her eyes seemed over-large and a burning gold-brown colour, like pools of pain. ‘I don’t want a child from him,’ she cried out. ‘I’d sooner throw myself over a balcony than give birth
to it!’

  As her words rang out on the patio, a lean dark hand swept aside a curtain of plumbago and a tall figure, booted and breeched, stepped into view. That he had caught those wild, unhappy words was plain on his face. That they had struck him like a lash was apparent from the bitter twist to his mouth.

  Persepha saw him from the corners of her eyes, and she ran in fear and fury from him and all that was part of him, making for the outer staircase that led up to the gallery, from whence she could reach her room. She meant to go, to insist on it, and with his grandmother in the house he couldn’t hold her against her will. Neither of them could be that uncivilized ... that cruel.

  She reached the staircase and because she knew that the Don had caught her words, she feared that he would catch her and she ran in a wild terror up those stairs.

  ‘Persepha!’ Her name rang out behind her. ‘Little fool, you will break your neck!’

  She didn’t pause, though her heart seemed to for a second. He was pursuing her, and if he once touched her ... no, she cried the word, and fled him along the gallery, hearing the sudden thud of his boots on the tiles. She reached the arched entrance that led into the interior gallery, and she could feel the perspiration breaking through her pores, making her silk shirt cling to her, while her loosened hair whipped her neck and face as she cast one single glance behind her.

  He looked as dark and terrible as Mars in pursuit of Rhea ... an almost crazed look on his face as if he meant to punish her severely for what she had said ... and what she had said was unforgivable, and a sob broke from her as she reached the door of her room and caught wildly at the handle. She dashed inside, but even as she slammed the door behind her, she had no sanctuary from him, for he would come through the connecting door from his own room and she’d be trapped in here with him and his justifiable anger.

  Oh God, to say it to his grandmother! He would never forgive her for that ... it had been like striking the old lady, whose remaining hopes on earth must be centred on seeing a great-grandson at the Hacienda Ruy, proof to her Spanish heart that the family would go on.

  Persepha glanced round wildly ... where could she go? Then she saw the doors standing open at the other end of the room, leading out to the balcony that overlooked the gorge. She’d be safer out there, for he wouldn’t rant and rave under the close eye of heaven, and he might let her go before this hell of a marriage broke her heart, or he broke her neck.

  She was at the glass doors and about to step on to the balcony when he thrust open the door from his room and appeared in the aperture like a figure of doom itself.

  The look of him was too much for Persepha ... how was she ever going to reason with a man whose face expressed a sort of agony, as if only by hurting her could he assuage the pain and fury which he felt. She whirled and ran to the parapet of the balcony, looking herself like a vixen who had been hunted to the edge of her reason and had nowhere else to go. She clung there, crying out and gripping the stone, when his angry hands caught at her and wrung his name from her for the very first time. It was like the cry of a woman dying, or giving birth, and then all she saw in all the world was his dark face as he literally tore her from the parapet and swung her into his arms.

  ‘That you won’t do!’ The words were thick, choked, as if with passion and tears. ‘Not again will a woman do that in this house!’

  And then he was carrying her back into the bedroom, and in a sudden helplessness she burst into tears and they were spilling down her face when he laid her on the bed, and laid himself across her body. ‘Do you hate me so much?’ he groaned. ‘Would you throw yourself to the stones rather than live with me?’

  She heard him, but she was too shaken, too distressed, to be able to make sense of what he said. She lay there, held to the bed by his hard frame and the grip of his arms, and she could feel him watching her, his eyes as dark as night with a storm at their centre. It was his silence, his stillness, which finally stilled her own weeping, and as the tears died away, the meaning in his words drifted back.

  Throw herself to the stones? Over the balcony and all the way to the hard ground, to lie there broken and no longer aware of sunlight or moonlight; of hate or love.

  ‘I wasn’t...’ She shook her head. ‘Not that... I was afraid and there was nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Afraid?’ His face was so still, and yet his eyes seemed alive with a number of expressions ... the disbelief she recognized, and it was so incredible that he should think she had been going to throw herself off the balcony.

  ‘Yes, you looked so furious over what I said - oh, why can’t you let me go and be done with it? What kind of satisfaction does it give you to hold on to me when you know - it isn’t that you’re truly sadistic, but pride of possession is so deep in your bones, and you only want me so that I - I’ll give you a baby—’

  ‘Only for that?’ The line of irony etched itself beside his mouth. ‘My dear fool, if all I wanted from any woman was a child, then I’d do better by far to marry a fecund and affectionate Mexican girl, who would be happy to be pregnant every year for the next dozen years. Hell or heaven itself knows why I married you, but I won’t have you so unhappy and afraid that you’ll smash yourself on the stones of my courtyard ...’

  As he said this a spasm of sheerest torment went across his face, and all at once his hand touched her face, curving itself to her cheek and her neck and drifting down to her shoulder, where it stayed itself. ‘Once before in my life I have had to see a woman broken and bleeding down there, and I promise you, Persepha, that if you are so desperate to leave my house, then you shall leave.’

  She heard him, but her heart didn’t leap with the joy of relief ... the words that lingered, that beat in her brain, were those he had spoken before he had said that she might leave.

  ‘Is that how she died?’ Persepha almost whispered the words, for she was a little afraid of them, of speaking aloud of that someone who was sacred to him.

  ‘Yes.’ A deep sigh lifted his chest, and then as if he realized that his weight was crushing her, he drew away, and instantly her body felt cold, abandoned, and she had the strongest urge to grab at him and hold him close and hard again, so that nothing, not even a shadow, could come between them. The sensation was so acute it was a pain and her fingers gripped the lace bedcover, uncaring if they ripped it. She wanted him ... wanted Diablo, whether or not he loved her.

  Suddenly she felt that she grew up and could face what had seemed impossible to endure . . . suddenly she knew how hellishly he had suffered when that other woman had died in that awful way.

  ‘How could she do it?’ Persepha asked softly. ‘How could she hurt you like that when she knew you loved her?’

  ‘She knew I loved her, but she blamed me for Alvarado’s death.’ The words came jerkily, hesitantly, as if he had never thought to say them, least of all to her.

  ‘You mean—’ Persepha stared at his dark and tortured face. ‘She loved your brother?’

  ‘But of course.’ His eyebrow twisted, not in the old quizzical way, but with a wry puzzlement. ‘He was the son she loved best, even though I loved her so much. Madre mia, so charming and lovely, and so delighted always to see Alvarado in her own image. Slender, with her great eyes, and the easy way of going through life. He was her saint, I was her devil and her devil incarnate when Alvarado developed polio after he and I had gone out to the reef where a tiger shark had its hide. It had come in close to the beach and taken the legs of a young fisherman, and it was Alvarado who challenged me to go with him to capture and kill the shark. Madre said I should have refused to go, and kept Alvarado from going. But he would have gone, nevertheless, and because I feared that the shark might attack him in the way it had that other young man, I went with him. We killed the brute, using an Indian sea-bow loaded with steel-headed darts, and afterwards there was a fiesta in town, with everyone celebrating the chase and the kill.’

  The Don paused and his eyes dwelt with an unseeing sadness on Persepha, who lay there quietl
y, just looking, and listening intently to his every word. He had called the woman madre mia, and she had almost cried out with an ecstasy of relief. Without actually lying old Carmenteira had implied that the woman in the photograph had been his sweetheart... in truth she had been his mother.

  ‘In those days it was a dirty sea and a beach fit only for scavengers, and there was polio on the outbreak at the time Alvarado and I swam there for well over two hours, hunting the shark. It was only a matter of days before he was attacked by the severest symptoms. An iron lung was rushed from Mexico City, but to no avail. My young and handsome brother, so delightful to know, and with so much to live for, choked to death with no ability left in his laughing lungs for them to draw breath. Madre mia never left his side and she had to watch him die in agony. Afterwards, in words that I shall never forget, she told me that she wished it had been me who had died. That I was a reincarnation of the Devil because I had taken Alvarado out into the sea to be tainted by all that foul water. I was too hard, too much an iron man, as my father had been, to ever fall victim to polio. But because Alvarado had been lighthearted and a joy to all eyes, he had been taken.’

  Again a long and painful pause, and by this time Per-sepha was dying to hold him and comfort him; to show him that she no longer believed him to be entirely a devil ... only the kind of devil that circumstances had made him. A man who blamed himself for his mother’s suicide.

  ‘It happened,’ he said, almost inaudibly, ‘the evening of the funeral, just as the sun was dying, and no sun dies anywhere as it does here, in a sort of agony of flame and beauty. I heard her scream, and I was the first to find her. It happened six years ago, and the Hacienda Ruy was a house of shadows for a long time. Then one day I met a man named Charles Paget who showed me a miniature, and who requested that if ever I was in England I would ensure that his daughter was not in want or trouble. To me, when your guardian was no longer alive to care for you, you seemed in want and trouble, and you also seemed like the sunshine in my life again.’