by Lily Graham
Cesca crooked her arm inside her mother’s and they leant against each other for warmth, the sea thundering in their ears. As they neared the house, Cesca saw the light beneath the door and paused. Her mother turned to her, her body stiffening, her dark eyes mirroring the fear in Cesca’s own.
The house was cold, and there was a rank smell that hit her nostrils as she stepped inside, like death, and misery. A man sat in the shadows of the kitchen, slumped forward in a chair. A lantern was burning low on the table before him.
He startled when he heard the door, raising tired, wary eyes. Cesca sighed in relief as recognition bloomed. It was Antoni, her brother.
She closed the door behind her, and their mother rushed forward to embrace him. He closed his eyes as they hugged, taking a moment of comfort in what had been a long and dangerous voyage. He’d had to load the feverish passenger into the rowing boat from Ibiza by himself, and he’d paddled for most of the night to reach Formentera, travelling by darkness to ensure that no one saw him. It had cost him his last bit of strength to get to their house unseen.
‘I’ve done something… something perhaps foolish. Forgive me.’ He looked exhausted, but his face was anxious and it made her nervous.
Cesca frowned. It was only then that she saw the other man lying on a pallet on the floor. This was where the rank smell was coming from, she realised. The man’s body was starved, his clothes filthy and worn, his long hair bedraggled and matted with dried blood. His eyes were glazed, and he mumbled feverishly.
‘My God, what happened?’ she breathed, stepping forward to see the stranger better. She closed her mind to the stench and listened to his heart and lungs, the way Señor Garcia had shown her all those years before when she’d first become the doctor’s apprentice at the age of eleven, when his wife had died and her father had volunteered her for the role of his assistant, much to everyone’s surprise. She put her head to his chest, listening to his ragged breathing.
Her mother seemed to have grasped the danger they were in better than Cesca though, understood what bringing a stranger here to this island meant. What it could end up costing them.
‘Antoni,’ she breathed. Her hand gripped his shoulder and she looked unsteady on her feet. ‘What have you done?’
Her brother’s eyes closed in stark acknowledgement of all that he was asking of them.
‘Did anyone see you?’
‘See you?’ asked Cesca, failing to understand her mother’s concerns as she felt the man’s pulse. Antoni had brought injured animals and friends home for her to care for many times in the past, so why was this such a concern to them both now? She assumed he was simply one of his brother’s crew, someone they hadn’t met from the big island. She didn’t stop to wonder why he hadn’t called for a doctor there. Her first interest was her patient. She could ask those questions later, but for now they were wasting valuable time. ‘I think we’d better fetch Señor Garcia. This man’s sunk into a fever and the doctor might have something stronger to help lift it – my supplies are a bit low. Mare, will you go?’ she asked her mother, casting an eye around the small farm kitchen to where a new collection of herbs was drying, towards a small shelf that held small ceramic jars full of the tinctures and cures she used most frequently. Over the years, she’d built up a small medicine chest that had been bolstered through Antoni’s travels across the seas – each voyage he returned with new things she’d asked for on a list. But the severity of this man’s starved and feverish state called for a more experienced hand.
Antoni shook his head. ‘Francesca, we can’t call him, not yet – not until you understand. I must explain.’
Cesca looked up, away from the sick man, with a frown and pushed back a thread of auburn hair that had fallen across her forehead into her kerchief.
‘Explain what?’
‘The Inquisitors were going to kill him if they got hold of him. There was nothing else I could do.’
Cesca still looked puzzled, so her mother made an impatient sound. ‘He’s a runaway, Cesca,’ she said, explaining. ‘A marrano, correct?’ she said, looking for confirmation at her son, who simply nodded. Marrano was another name for secret Jew, like them.
Cesca gasped. ‘From where?’
‘Majorca, though his brother was born in Bayonne, I gather. They were fleeing investigation.’
Investigation often meant prison or torture or, worse, death, they knew.
‘His brother?’
Antoni explained about the capture, about what his crew and he had done to save them. The promise he’d made to a dying man. ‘I have to go back tomorrow, to avoid having anyone come looking here, but I had to bring him here, to you – I think you could save him, Cesca. You’re the only one I can trust with this. Could you help him?’
She swallowed, grasped her brother’s hand. ‘I’ll try.’
Their mother hadn’t said a word. Antoni looked at her again. He flexed his jaw, didn’t drop his gaze. ‘I didn’t have a choice.’
Cesca nodded. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You didn’t.’
‘But…’ said their mother, her eyes large, and dark with fear.
She knew the stories about the people from the Holy Office, the ones who came in the dead of the night, sniffing out the truth – the Inquisitors. How people said that they had rubber wheels fitted to their carriages so they could come silently in the dead of the night. How they took away the girls. Always the girls… And how they tortured them, how they got them to speak. She feared for her daughters.
Cesca shared those fears, but she touched her mother’s arm. ‘We can do this, we can protect him, like the islanders protected us.’ She meant the islanders who had taken in the bands of Majorcan refugees who’d escaped to this island, like her grandfather and grandmother some fifty years before. She raised her chin as a thought occurred to her. ‘He’s our cousin. That’s what we’ll say if anyone asks.’
Brother and sister obviously shared the same thought.
‘Rafael,’ concurred Antoni. ‘I’ll speak to Tio Alfonso when I return to Ibiza, before we set sail.’
Their cousin Rafael, from Ibiza, had just passed away. No one knew about it yet – perhaps no one ever would, if this man took his place.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Esperanza, her younger sister, when she came home later that morning. Her dark eyes were full of mistrust.
The trouble was, she’d said it three times already and it was wearing Cesca’s already frayed nerves. She took a breath, and explained. Again.
‘He was a prisoner who was about to be handed over to the Inquisitors. They might have killed him otherwise. Is that what you want?’
Esperanza’s dark eyes were unchangeable. ‘I understand that, I’m not some monster, Cesca. But should we go to prison for him? For some strange chueta?’
‘Esperanza,’ admonished Cesca, darting a look at the man they’d moved closer to the fire.
Chueta was a dirty word. It meant swine. ‘He’s one of us.’
They were chueta too, only no one called them that here, because here, on the island of Formentera, they were free, because their family had escaped. They’d made a pact with some of their best friends from Majorca in the dead of night, many years before, to flee here. He was just like them, apart from the passage of time.
Esperanza scoffed. ‘No, he’s not. He’s a peasant runaway. That was years ago now and we brought something to the island – workers, people willing to work the salt pans. We brought food, clothes, money – he’s here with nothing and putting us in danger, threatening to expose us all. He should have just converted to Christianity properly. I would have if I lived there.’
Cesca looked at her sister in bemusement.
‘Why? Why should you be forced to give up your faith and your culture just because of someone else’s beliefs?’
‘We did, didn’t we – or else why would the whole island be sporting new crucifixes and telling each other to play the part simply because some stranger from mainland Spain has come here?
’
News that a stranger from Barcelona had come to the island had set everyone’s nerves on edge. No one knew what he was really doing here and very few bought the story that he was here to study the flora and fauna, which is what the stranger had told some of the elders.
Most thought he had been sent as an emissary from the Holy Office to check that there were no people practising the laws of Moses here. The Holy Office seemed to do that every so often, usually about once a decade, when they remembered – it was good to be seen to do your job, which was to excise any last remaining Jews. The Inquisitors had come before, and they’d left without finding any evidence. The islanders had made sure of it.
Cesca stared at her sister now in disbelief. ‘That’s different. We have to play the part when we are asked. It’s part of our protection.’
‘Protection or imprisonment?’
‘Protection. You’re a fool,’Spranza. Here we get to be ourselves, because the other islanders have been tolerant – the only difference between the prisoner in our care and us is that he wasn’t lucky enough to live here from the start.’
Esperanza’s dark eyes widened with disbelief. ‘Lucky? To live here?’
‘Yes.’
‘A poor island in the middle of nowhere that most people are surprised isn’t completely abandoned, where no one comes to visit except for barbarian pirates? Where hardly anything grows except salt and a few straggly herbs?’
Cesca shook her head. Her sister just didn’t get it. It was tough here, and poor, it was true, but they did better than most. Their finca had figs, olives, oranges, lemons, hens and a goat, and with their brother as captain of a ship belonging to the Rimbauds, key officials of the main island, Ibiza, they were doing better than most.
‘We’re free here, and that’s what counts.’
Esperanza scoffed. ‘You think so when we can’t ever leave. And we can’t ever truly be who we really are. That’s not freedom, Cesca. That’s prison.’
Antoni left the next day at dawn, taking the small boat back to Ibiza, to his uncle’s house. Cesca watched him leave. She’d got up before dawn and followed him down to the beach. It was important that he went back, that he played the part. People were going to start looking for the man in their kitchen soon, and Antoni couldn’t give them any reason to look on this island. Especially now that someone from mainland Spain was here, snooping around. It worried him that this was happening now. He hadn’t known about the stranger when he’d thought of bringing Paulo’s brother here to his sister’s care, but it was too late now. They couldn’t move him; they’d just have to hope that the stranger from Barcelona left as soon as possible, and that he never heard about the man they were hiding in their home.
He pushed the boat into the water, giving Cesca a last kiss on the cheek. They’d said everything they needed to say. It would be up to them now to keep it secret.
Chapter Thirteen
Formentera, present day
Maria’s story was interrupted by the elfin-faced boy who’d been playing outside. He tore inside now with a gurgling laugh before launching into rapid Catalan while he tugged at her skirts. He was followed closely on his sandy heels by an army of six- or seven-year-olds, who, it appeared, were all demanding lunch.
Maria laughed even as she waved a finger at him for interrupting her tale. She introduced us and I found out that the imp’s name was Ben, short for Benito.
I helped her to dish up the stew, marvelling at how different children were here compared to back home as they began attacking their bowls of seafood stew with gusto, blobs of fresh tomato sauce dribbling down their waggling chins. Most of the children I knew had a diet that ranged from fish fingers to sausages and chips. I still remembered the meltdowns Sage would have at that age when I ventured anything as exotic as un-crumbed chicken.
We didn’t get a chance to discuss further what Maria had told me about my long-lost relatives, the names of whom swam in my mind: Cesca, Esperanza, Antoni… I didn’t even know if the man they’d taken in, who they decided to pretend was their cousin, had survived. I had so many questions, but with a house full of interrupting children, I knew they would have to wait.
I was at once a stranger, yet family too, and I was treated as such. I found myself enjoying Maria’s company, and my welcome into her lively home.
After lunch, I left, promising on Maria’s request to come back the following afternoon. She promised me that she would tell me more.
As I cycled alongside the dry scrubland, the scent of wild rosemary, mixed with the briny scent of the ocean, filled my senses, perfuming my thoughts of the past.
My head swam with all that I had heard, as I tried to reconcile the stories Maria had told me with the knowledge that these people were part of my family, and that I had come from them.
I thought of the sea captain Antoni, and his brave sister Cesca. A nurse who had somehow learned everything from a local doctor? I couldn’t help but admire her gumption. That couldn’t have been easy in those times.
I would like to think that had I been in their place I would have reacted like them, taken in someone who needed me, but would I have? Or would I have reacted like the other sister, Esperanza?
‘She was young, and she had a lot to learn, and you know those are the people who learn the hardest,’ Maria had said when I’d interrupted her story to question how Esperanza couldn’t have seen how fortunate she was during the Inquisition to have lived here. But I couldn’t blame her exactly for not wanting that man in her home initially. Not really. Not if I were honest, and his being there could have meant that my family were put at risk. I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t have behaved just as she had. Would I have risked everything like Antoni and Cesca had, for a stranger?
I arrived home with a head full of questions and got stuck into cleaning the kitchen, all the while filling James’s ashes in on what had happened.
‘So, of course you know that you were right – there was a story there. I’m sure you’re feeling very proud of yourself right about now.’
I looked at the urn and rolled my eyes as I went to the sink to wash out a rag covered in inky black dust. He was proud of himself, I could tell.
‘It’s incredible to think that it all happened here, in this house.’
I couldn’t help wondering how different the villa was now than in the past, when Cesca and Esperanza were alive. I pictured the shelf full of herbs and tinctures. The family seated round a table. Not this one of course. I was quite sure nothing as hideous as this old, wonky Formica table had been around back then.
I made myself a cup of tea and decided to phone Sage. She’d want to hear about Maria, I knew.
I found reception at the bottom of the garden, and my daughter’s incredulous voice came through strong on the crackling line.
We spent the first ten minutes chatting about her studies, and how she had thrown herself into her work, which I was glad about. Then I told her about the last couple of days, including meeting Maria.
She gasped. ‘You’re kidding, Mum?’ said Sage as I relayed to her what Maria had told me about our family. Though it was difficult to convert it into a telephone conversation over a somewhat faulty mobile line. ‘They were secret Jews?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, still trying hard to believe it myself. ‘Well, that’s what she says, anyway. She’s been telling me a bit about it – about our past. It’s pretty incredible actually.’
‘Wow, that’s really cool, I wish I was there with you! I thought it was great and everything about the house— well, no, I thought it was bonkers of Dad actually,’ she said, with a laugh that I couldn’t help echoing.
‘But to find out that there’s family still living on the island! That’s insane. I can’t believe he left you a letter like that and had done some digging into the past while he was stuck in hospital.’
There was a pause, and I could hear the catch in her voice. ‘It’s— God, it’s so Dad. He really loved you.’
I sniffed,
my fingers twisting the wedding band on my thumb, tracing over the small gem. ‘Don’t start, or I’ll lose it, too.’
She made a funny little half sob, half laugh that tore at my heart, and then she sucked in a deep breath and said, ‘Okay, you’re right. So, what’s she like? Does she look like us?’
‘Actually, yes. She looks a bit like Gran, but she’s got dark eyes, like you.’
‘Wow. It’s incredible to think that there’s been this link here to that side of the family all this time, people living there with the same eyes, similar faces and chins… incredible. Sad too in a way.’
I knew what she meant – if James hadn’t bought this house, hadn’t set me on this path, I’d never have met her. I would never have even known that she existed. The secret would have just died with my grandmother.
‘So, what does that mean for you now that you’ve found her? You can’t just come home in a few days like you planned, can you? I mean she’s old, isn’t she?’
I blinked, taking her words in. I stared back at the house, almost looking at it differently as a result. I hadn’t considered that far really.
‘Must be well into her nineties, but she seems incredibly healthy and spry,’ I said.
‘But still…’ she pushed.
I closed my eyes. Sage had a point. A woman in her nineties couldn’t be around for ever. I wouldn’t get this time back – I had to make the most of the time she had left. I understood that now more than anyone. I hadn’t been planning on extending my trip longer than the week. ‘You’re right, I can’t just leave now, can I?’
‘Yeah, exactly, you can’t,’ echoed my daughter. ‘Anyway this will be good, Mum. At least I’ll know you’re getting out and stuff. I have my studies, so you don’t need to worry about me, and Uncle Allan can check in on things at home, and Gran, I’m sure.’
They’d been round to the house to water plants and that sort of thing while I was away, and it was true, they wouldn’t mind carrying on for a while, till I came back. But how long would that be?
