Marianna

by Nancy Buckingham

  MARIANNA

  Nancy Buckingham

  Chapter 1

  1878

  Miss Marianna Dalby was blithely unaware, that hot August morning, of anything unladylike in her demeanour. Seated on the tree-shaded bank of the irrigation channel beside the swarthy peasant youth, she might almost have been of similar humble stock. Her shoes and stockings were cast aside, her dress and petticoats were dragged up above her knees, and her bare feet dangled in the coolness of the levada’s swiftly flowing water.

  Shoulders touching, heads close, they held between them a scholar’s exercise book, its ruled pages filled with ill-formed, laborious handwriting. Marianna was reading from it out loud and nodding her head, equally unconscious that with her fair hair brushing silkily across his cheek, the seventeen-year-old boy was finding concentration difficult.

  ‘What’s this word here?’ she demanded, stabbing a forefinger at the page. ‘Oh, “priest” — you mean the senhor pároco. You really are a duffer, Jacinto. I told you only yesterday that the rule in English is “i” before “e” except when it comes after “c”.’

  ‘But I cannot understand this rule, Marianna. Why should it be so? Explain to me, please.’

  Caught out for an explanation, she tossed her head disdainfully. ‘It’s just something you have to remember. Look at all these other spelling mistakes you’ve made, dozens of them. Really, Jacinto, if you want to improve yourself you’ll have to do a lot better than this, or everyone will laugh at you.’

  Jacinto was one of the many children of her father’s feitor, Eduardo Teixeiro, the Dalby estate’s overseer and its chief tenant. Jacinto had long been Marianna’s special companion during the summer months when well-to-do families, Madeiran and English alike, moved to their quintas in the hills to escape the greater heat of the capital, Funchal, down on the coast. He was clad this morning in clean but ragged white cotton trousers and a loose blouse, and had no boots with him, boots being a luxury reserved for Sundays and festas. Beneath his pointed carapuca hat and his curly black hair was an arresting face, with high cheekbones and angular chin; he had a straight nose, a wide, sensitive mouth, and dark eyes that were alert with intelligence. At his right temple a small scar shaped like an arrow showed white against his brown skin. It was a face which had many times provided a challenging subject for Marianna’s pencil and sketch pad; a face which now revealed to her that she had wounded his manly pride.

  ‘Do you never make mistakes when you are learning things at your school?’ he asked, staring directly into Marianna’s clear blue eyes.

  ‘I suppose I do, sometimes,’ she conceded, and bowed her head to continue reading what he had written.

  This was Jacinto’s very first attempt at composition, a task she had set him the previous day. The kind of subjects she recalled being set at an earlier stage in her own education, like ‘The historical personage I would most like to meet’ or ‘My favourite hobby’, seemed somehow inappropriate, so she had told him to write about his family and their daily life.

  ‘You can describe the different jobs you do around the fazenda, like gathering brushwood for the bakehouse oven and milking the cow,’ she suggested helpfully. And when Jacinto still looked bewildered, she had added on an inspiration, ‘I know, write down everything that happens this afternoon, and also what you think about it. Take this exercise book and the pencil, and when we meet again tomorrow I’ll read through what you’ve written.’

  Now she was reading his essay, and Marianna had a guilty realization of what it must have cost Jacinto to produce these three or four pages. Had he settled down in a corner of the family room late the previous night with the smoky illumination of a tallow candle, and prey to the mockery of his brothers and sisters? Or had he risen at first flush of dawn to steal a quiet hour before the day’s work began?

  He had written, Little Silvano came with me to the house of the preist to take him an egg and some ripe figs from our tree. He gave us God’s blessing for the gift. He asked me when it would be his turn to get water. I said that Pai hopes the levada will be running for our valley tomorrow in the morning. I think the good father is worried that he will be called to perform the last rites for old Lopez’s wife just when the water comes to his land so he will miss it this time. On the way home I played tunes on my machete and taught Silvano a new modinha. I think he cannot sing very well yet. But he is only very little. When we got back Pai said I must take my enchada to the terrace above the cowshed and chop away the weeds from the vine roots. It made me sad. The grapes are not many and very dry and small. I think there will not be four goatskins of wine from all the vines on our fazenda this year.

  Marianna looked up at him anxiously. ‘Is the vine plague really so bad again? I know papa has been dreadfully worried all the summer, but I was hoping that things would get better before the vintage.’

  ‘Pai says that next year we should uproot all the vines and plant sugar canes and banana trees in their place. He has told the fidalgo this, many times. Your father will not listen to him, though.’

  ‘But papa must have grapes for his winery, Jacinto. Without them he cannot make any wine to ship abroad.’

  ‘Then the fidalgo must be quick and find a cure for the plague. People say that the Englishman at Sao Joao is treating the roots of all his vines with some special kind of mixture.’

  ‘Oh, that won’t do any good,’ Marianna said scornfully. ‘Papa says there is no cure at all for the phylloxera. We must just pray for the epidemic to be over before all his stocks of wine are gone. Or what will become of us?’

  ‘You and your father will never go hungry, Marianna. There will always be enough to fill your bellies — simple, plain food such as we poor folk eat. Half of the vegetables and other crops which Pai and the rest of the caseiros grow on the fidalgo’s land must go to him, that is the law.’

  Marianna heaved a thoughtful sigh and returned to her reading. But the next few words shocked her into a state of embarrassed confusion.

  Old Pedroso brought his boar to put to our sow. But the wretch would not get on with it. He just lay down in the yard and grunted.

  ‘You shouldn’t have mentioned a thing like that,’ she protested in a shaky voice.

  ‘Why not? You told me to write down everything that happened yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘But don’t you see, it’s not nice. I mean ... well, it’s improper.’

  ‘Improper?’ Jacinto fingered the scar at his temple. ‘But it was so funny, Marianna. We were all crowded round, prodding the stupid beast and telling him to hurry up. But it was no use. I think that he has grown too fat to mount a sow any more. That’s what Pai told Pedroso, and they had a real battle of tongues about it. The old rogue claimed that only last week a sow his boar had served gave birth to a litter of fourteen, and not a single runt among them.’

  ‘Stop it, I don’t want to hear any more,’ Marianna shouted. I’m going home.’ Thrusting the exercise book into his hands, she jumped to her feet and shook down her yellow print dress, then gathered up her shoes and stockings.

  ‘You can’t go home yet,’ Jacinto protested. ‘You said that this morning you would show me how to do those new sums — decimal fractions. You promised that you would, Marianna.’

  ‘It wasn’t a real promise. I didn’t say cross my heart, did I? Anyway,’ she went on with a jerk of her head, ‘I’m sick of your lessons. They’re all you ever think about. I’m sorry now that I ever let you wheedle me into teaching you.’

  Jacinto was silent and Marianna saw that his eyes were stormy with anger.

  ‘You need not trouble yourself then,’ he said bitterly, ‘if you don’t wish to give me any more lessons. I can learn all the other things for myself, without your help.’

  ‘Good! It’s been a
frightful bore, having to teach you lots of simple stuff that I did years and years ago at school.’

  Jacinto lifted his muscular shoulders in a shrug of indifference. ‘Anyway, I shouldn’t rightly be here. This morning I am supposed to be digging yams and Pai will be in a dreadful rage when he finds out that the work has not been done.5

  “Go and dig the silly yams, then, if that’s what you want to do.’

  ‘I didn’t say that I wanted to, Marianna,’ he protested.

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  They were back on safer ground, squabbling like children. It was as children that their friendship had begun, four years ago, after the death of Marianna’s mother from cholera — a particularly cruel twist of fate, everyone said, for it was the same dread disease which had been responsible for bringing her parents together in the first place, each of them having suffered the tragedy of losing both their parents in the course of a few days during the terrible outbreak of 1856. Her father, at the age of thirty-one, had inherited the Quinta dos Alecrims with its vineyards, and the wine shipping business which had been established by his great-grandfather, Tobias, a century before. And just six weeks later he had taken himself a bride.

  Marianna was in her twelfth year when her mother died, a lost and lonely little girl with no brothers or sisters, no cousins or other relatives, only her father. In her grief and desolation she had taken to wandering aimlessly in the countryside around the quinta. Jacinto had come across her one day sitting crouched under a terrace wall, her legs drawn up and her head bent to her knees. Setting down the basket of pine cones he carried on his head, the boy timidly touched her sleeve. Marianna had felt strangely comforted by the look of tender compassion in his dark eyes. He addressed her in his own language, English at that time not coming easily to him.

  ‘Do not be sad, Menina Marianna. Your noble mother is safe in the arms of God now.’

  It was difficult to restrain a fresh flow of tears. ‘I know that,’ she gulped, ‘but I wish that God had let her stay down here on earth with me and papa.’

  ‘You must bow to the Good Lord’s will, menina. You cannot bring your beloved mother back, however much you wish it. But she is watching you from heaven and she would not want to see you so unhappy.’

  Death was a familiar visitor to Jacinto and his kinfolk, and Marianna took courage from the peasant boy’s philosophical acceptance. During the summer days that followed she found in his company a sense of peace and reassurance which even her own father was unable to give her. Marianna loved her papa, of course she did, but she saw so little of him. Even when her mama had been alive, it was rare for him to be at home in the evenings, and during the summer months he usually remained in Funchal and only came up to the quinta at the weekends.

  This odd friendship with Jacinto would soon have withered and died, no doubt, except that Jacinto had shown a remarkably quick intelligence. With greedy determination he sought to learn everything he could from Marianna about the world beyond his peasant community — the cosmopolitan world he had glimpsed so temptingly and so briefly during those infrequent visits to Funchal when he took his father’s surplus vegetables to the market, and once a year when the whole family went to the city for a festa. Jacinto seemed insatiable in his thirst for knowledge, and his questions often went far beyond Marianna’s own personal experience, for she herself had never once left the island. But she had read a good deal and had often mixed with visitors from other lands, including those many invalids who came to winter in Madeira’s beneficent climate. For anyone who was prepared to listen, there was much to be learned about life abroad.

  Almost from the first Jacinto had persuaded Marianna to converse with him in English so that by now he spoke the language fluently. And during the past two summers, at his urgent pleading, she had been giving him lessons in reading and writing. Also arithmetic — though Marianna would have preferred to omit this subject from the curriculum, since it was humiliatingly apparent that Jacinto’s natural ability at figuring was far superior to her own.

  Their brief quarrel forgotten, the two of them began wandering homewards. They had come to one of their favourite spots from where they could look along the valley’s length to the distant glitter of the sea. Below them the ribeiro threaded a silver ribbon in its rocky bed, overhung with trees and fern. Her father’s estate lay on both sides of the valley, the land rising in a series of tiny terraces, each one upheld by a dry-stone wall. The terraces had been constructed generations ago and were diligently maintained as the only means whereby the Madeirense could wrest a living from the soil of their cruelly mountainous island. The caseiros’ cottages were scattered up the hillside, mostly with a small thatched cowshed placed-nearby in which was housed the family’s single cow, kept as much for the manure it provided as for the good milk. The vines were trained on high trellises and (not to waste a single inch of land) beneath them grew a variety of vegetables — cabbages and cauliflowers, yams and sweet potatoes, onions and beans and maize. At the end of the valley the mountains soared majestically to meet the sky, riven with deep clefts where bright, glinting waterfalls leapt and tumbled;

  Their way home was along the course of the levada, one of Madeira’s hundreds of channels which had been laboriously cut in the volcanic rock to bring precious water from springs in the high serra, twisting and turning for many miles along the edges of the gorges and ravines to irrigate the growing crops. At certain points the levada ran so close to a dizzying drop that Marianna stepped down into the water itself and waded, to feel a little safer. Jacinto scorned such caution and kept to the narrow maintenance path that was scarcely more than a parapet. His surefootedness and blithe unawareness of danger was something she begrudged him, begrudged all the country folk. To walk as Jacinto was walking now, on the very edge of a precipice, would make her sick with fear.

  The levada abruptly changed course, leaving the side of the ravine and entering a grove of chestnut trees. Fans of sunlight slanted through the leafy canopy, striking blue fire into the hydrangeas that scrambled everywhere in wild profusion. The air was warm and close, filled with a sweet, indefinable fragrance. Once or twice they spotted a wild mountain strawberry that was fruiting out of season, and they paused to taste the tiny, bright red berries.

  Presently they came to a cottage with a lemon tree at the door, its foliage dark green against the whitewashed walls. On the thatched roof some fat yellow pumpkins had been ledged to ripen, and maize cobs were draped over a trellis, A few scrawny hens scratched around in the dust, each hobbled by an old boot or length of rusty iron chain. A brindled mongrel dog, flopped out in the shade, lifted its head occasionally to snap at a fly.

  Two women dressed all in black sat together on a low stone wall, where they were able to catch the full brilliance of the morning sunlight for the fine stitchery of a tablecloth they were embroidering between them — work done by so many of the country women to bring in a few extra reis. In appearance there was little to choose between them; with their faces wrinkled and their mouths toothless, they were a pair of ugly old crones. But in fact the one was the daughter of the other.

  ‘Bom dia, Menina Marianna,’ they called, making a token of rising to bob her a curtsey without disturbing their work. ‘May the Good Lord’s blessing be upon you.’

  There was a coolness in the greeting, though, which Marianna failed to understand. Artfully, she went forward and admired the tablecloth.

  ‘You do such beautiful needlework,’ she enthused. ‘I could never embroider a quarter as well, no matter how long I practised.’

  The younger woman responded with a thin smile, then glanced slyly at Jacinto.

  ‘Our Tereza now, there’s a one for beautiful embroidery. Don’t I speak the truth, old woman? Our Tereza is good at so many things. A fine wife she’ll make for a young man, and her father offering a bit of land to go with her. It will be a fool who does not snatch her up.’

  Jacinto coloured in embarrassment and scuffed at a stone with his bare toe. />
  ‘A fool for all he’s called Clever One!’ the older woman agreed with a cackle.

  Marianna knew the girl they spoke of well, for Teresa was employed as a maidservant at the quinta during the summer months. A dull, lumpish creature of fourteen or so who always managed to look slovenly even in a newly-washed apron. It was ludicrous to imagine that such an unattractive girl could ever hope to capture someone with Jacinto’s good looks and superior brain.

  ‘Ho, ho, Senhor Clever One!’ she teased him as they strolled onwards. ‘So when are the nuptials to take place?’

  ‘Pai keeps on and on about it,’ he mumbled, his face sullen. ‘He says it’s high time I was wed.’

  The thought of Jacinto getting married was hateful to Marianna. He was seventeen now, an age by which his brother Miguel was long since wed and had already fathered his first child; while their sister Amalia was betrothed, though she was barely fourteen as yet. And there could be no gainsaying Jacinto’s rapid change towards manhood — a deepened voice and a chin that sprouted stiff black stubble, which he shaved off proudly each Sunday before the early Mass. Even so...

  ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Not just because your father says you ought to. People should only get married when they fall in love with someone.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you to talk,’ he said.

  ‘But not that awful Tereza!’

  He shrugged. ‘She may not be pretty, but there are many worse girls. My mother says that Tereza has the hips to bear fine strong babies. She’ll make a good enough wife for me, when the time comes.’

  Marianna heard only his words and missed the underlying bitterness in his voice. Trying to dispel her odd depression, she jumped across the levada and struck up the hillside towards a dragon tree that stood alone in a little clearing, its branches rising from the gnarled trunk like the fingers of an imploring hand.

  ‘I’ll race you,’ she called and broke into a run. But the tangled undergrowth was rough on the untoughened soles of her bare feet, slowing her. With Jacinto pounding close behind, she spurred herself on and trod carelessly on a piece of dead branch, which sent her flying headlong. Her knee scraped an exposed boulder and she cried out in pain.