by Anne Weale
Cassia’s first sight of the former marquesa was from a window in his apartment while she was in the bathroom, freshening up after the drive from Castell. Looking down from the first-floor window, she saw a tall, slender woman, her hair tied back with a soft chiffon scarf, pacing the paving surrounding a fountain pool. She was simply but elegantly dressed in a white shirt and navy skirt with matching tights and shoes. Cassia knew from her movements and the way she kept checking her watch that she was nervous too. The knowledge calmed her own jitters.
When, a short time later, they finally came face to face, her anxiety evaporated. She saw at first glance that Simón hadn’t exaggerated his mother’s simpática personality.
They shook hands and smiled at each other, and then the older woman looked up at her son and said, with a catch in her voice, ‘I thought you had to be exaggerating, but I see you weren’t. She does put them in the shade.’
Then she turned back to Cassia, saying, ‘The de Mondragón wives have included many famous beauties, some with characters to match their faces and some not. Simón told me you were ravishing, but that it was your other qualities he found irresistible. I was beginning to be afraid he would never find the right girl, but at last he has, and now I can stop worrying about him. My name is Joceline.’
She let go of Cassia’s hand, but only in order to give her a more demonstrative welcome—a hug, and kisses on both cheeks.
On the morning of her wedding day, Cassia woke up in a bedroom at the Parador de San Francisco, the State-run parador she had always loved, originally a monastery founded by the Catholic monarchs after recovering Granada from the Moors.
In her many explorations of the Alhambra she had often peeped through the gateway of the parador, but had never expected to find herself staying here—and especially not as the bride of a grandee.
It had been Simón’s decision not to have the big fashionable wedding customary in Madrid society. Instead, they were being married quietly in a city where she felt at home and where Señor Alvarez could take the place of her father.
Simón had organised everything. Her only responsibilities had been to choose her wedding dress and a trousseau for a honeymoon on a faraway island in the sun, where the only things to do would be swimming, sailing and making love.
She had spent her last night on her own in Room 305—a very small double room with a private sitting room in the tower above it. This, she presumed, was where they would sleep tonight—their flight to their secret destination having been arranged for tomorrow.
She had had breakfast in bed, and was up and dressed when Joceline and Toni came for her. All three were going to a salon to have their hair done. Toni had driven down from Castell de los Torres the previous afternoon. She was still staying there, painting pictures of windows.
One of them she had framed and presented to Simón and Cassia as a wedding present the night before. She had not brought Jack to the wedding. He was now in charge of a second batch of teenagers, and Cassia’s place had been taken by a capable local girl.
Saying goodbye to Jack had left Cassia with an ache in her heart that she would continue to feel until he found someone to love him as he needed to be loved. Whether he and Toni now had something going between them was impossible to tell.
But a sexual relationship, however enjoyable, could only ever be second-best, a substitute for the real thing, thought Cassia as, walking down the hill to the city centre, she listened to Toni telling the former marquesa about a wedding in Paris that she had attended recently.
‘I can’t wait to see our bride in her lovely dress,’ said Joceline, giving Cassia an affectionate glance.
In one of several recent heart-to-hearts she had confided that her first wedding had been a terrifying occasion. Having lost her own mother, she had been bullied by Simón’s formidable grandmother into agreeing to a Spanish ceremony of almost royal formality and splendour, made more daunting by Joceline’s then inadequate command of her bridegroom’s native language.
Her second husband had flown in the day before, and was now keeping Simón company at the Hotel America, also within the boundaries of the Alhambra. Joceline and Toni had hurried Cassia past it after leaving the parador. Although neither was really superstitious, they hadn’t wanted her to be accidentally seen by her bridegroom.
Only the wedding guests were staying at the Castillo del Sultán, and there were not many of them. Simón had been ruthless in pruning the list to fewer than a dozen particularly close friends. Parties for other friends would take place at a later date. Today was to be the intimate occasion he felt a wedding should be.
It was late afternoon when Simón gave Cassia’s elbow a gentle squeeze and said, ‘Time to change, darling.’
Although they weren’t really leaving Granada tonight, he had thought it would wind up the festivities in an appropriate way if, after changing their clothes, the guests saw them off in his car. But they would only be going as far as the cemetery, for Cassia to leave her flowers on the ledge of John Browning’s vault.
Toni helped Cassia to change from her white lawn and handmade lace wedding dress into a summery frock. Although it was only just May, all Europe was having a heatwave, and here in the south the days were hot, the nights balmy.
‘You look so radiant that I could almost wish someone would come and sweep me off the shelf,’ she said in Spanish as she dealt with the hooks and eyes.
* * *
Even the short visit to her father’s grave could not cloud Cassia’s happiness. She felt that today was the real beginning of her life.
‘Are you tired?’ Simón asked as they drove back down the hill, past the place where the tour buses parked. By this time of day the last bus had gone, as had the rows of cars now to be seen all year round near the Generalife gardens where, only a few months ago, she had sat worrying about Simón’s motive for asking her to dine with him in the Mirador suite.
‘Not very. It wasn’t that sort of wedding. But I’m glad the others will have left when we get back.’
Later this evening, when everyone had had time to rest, his mother and stepfather were hosting another party at a restaurant in the Albaicín.
‘So am I,’ he said, giving her a smile with a glint of devilment in it. ‘Our engagement has been a test of restraint for me.’
She didn’t pretend not to understand what he meant. From this day forward there would be no more subterfuge, no more prevarication. ‘It didn’t have to be, Simón.’
‘I know, but it wasn’t for long.’ He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. ‘We may just have time to look at the sunset from one of the Alhambra’s miradores. Would you like that?’
The suggestion was unexpected, but she realised that, yes, she would like to begin their honeymoon by watching the sun go down from one of the balconies inside the sultans’ palace.
‘It would be lovely, but aren’t we too late? I think they’ll have closed,’ she said regretfully.
Sometimes the Alhambra was open at night, but not always.
Simón drove through the arched gateway used by taxis and motorists staying at the parador. Leaving the car in a place where she didn’t think cars were supposed to be left, he jumped out and locked the driver’s door. As she got out she thought that he would sprint towards the ticket office. Instead he came round and, taking her by the hand, strolled leisurely towards the doors where visitors surrendered their tickets. Perhaps he was planning to slip the doorkeeper a tip.
‘What about the car?’ she asked. ‘Won’t you be fined for leaving it there?’
‘You worry too much.’ His dark eyes sparkled with amusement. ‘Who’d fine me on my wedding day?’
‘But we’ve nothing to prove that we are just married.’
‘We shall have to hope they take our word for it.’
At the entrance, the attendant smiled and said good evening.
‘I’ve left my car near the ticket office. Could you have someone take it up to the parador, please?’ Simón ha
nded over the keys.
‘Certainly, Excellency.’
‘How is it that he knows you?’ Cassia asked. ‘Do you have some connection with the Alhambra?’
‘He saw me this morning, when I came here to arrange for us to watch the sunset. By special dispensation, we’re going to be allowed to wander about unsupervised.’
‘You arranged this! What a lovely, romantic thing to do.’
‘A wedding night is a romantic occasion.’
He put his arm round her waist and they strolled through the deserted rooms with their honeycombed ceilings and walls inscribed with mysterious Arabic inscriptions.
With no one else there it was magical. No footsteps but their own. No other voices. Only the sound of the fountains and water courses, and then, faintly, somewhere far off, the music of Spanish guitars.
‘As one can’t rely on the nightingales, I asked some gypsies to play for us,’ Simón explained as they looked across the ravine at the rooftops of the Albaicín. ‘But they’re not here. They’re over in the other gardens. We shan’t be disturbed. The whole Alhambra is ours, from sunset to sunrise.’
Much later, after the gypsy guitarists had returned to their caves on Sacromonte, he took her to a moonlit room where the pools of silvery light fell from star-shaped openings in the roof, and the diaphanous folds of a transparent tent of fine gauze were stirred by soft currents of air. Inside the tent was a wide divan.
It was like a scene from the Arabian Nights—baskets of scented roses in every corner, their heady fragrance mingling with the exotic incense from burning pastilles which would keep the room free of mosquitoes.
Cassia realised that these preparations must have been made while they were drinking champagne in the Tower of the Princesses, listening to the throbbing guitars and a fine tenor voice singing ‘Granada’ which, as it died away, was followed by another surprise. From the dark cypress groves of the gardens on the neighbouring hill came fiery meteors and sparkling cascades of colour—the fireworks which were a traditional celebration at even the humblest Spanish weddings.
When she was lying in his arms on the spacious divan, inside the misty folds of their bridal pavilion, Simón said huskily, ‘Do you remember the night I walked you home? The thought of you all by yourself in that gloomy house kept me awake. Since that night I haven’t wanted any other woman. Now that you’re mine, I never shall.’
She knew that it was a promise he would keep. Walking back to this main part of the palace from the Torre de las Infantas, pausing to gaze at the reflections of palms and pillars in the still surface of a pool, they had both revealed thoughts and feelings not shared with anyone else.
Simón had told her how his grandfather’s libertine ways had been the outcome of an arranged and loveless marriage. How he himself, as a boy, had admired and been greatly influenced by his grandfather, inheriting his attitude to women, but always with the secret hope that his own marriage would be different.
With her arms round his neck and his eyes burning with the ardour deliberately held in check until this perfect moment, she lost her last vestige of reserve and felt only a passionate longing to be his—body and soul.
‘Make me yours…now,’ she whispered.
As he began to kiss her, somewhere outside she heard a nightingale singing.
eISBN 978-14592-7765-6
A Night to Remember
First North American Publication 1996.
Copyright © 1996 by Anne Weale.
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