“I have told you yes, and sometime soon! But not as a suppliant. I have not lived all these years in exile to creep back under the festering cloak of Calvin. In England there are hundreds of thousands who would rise tomorrow if they received the calll One day it will come.”
Rodez was waiting for me impatiently by the door.
“Sir,” I said, “where are you lodged in Madrid? If I’m permitted may I wait on you sometime?”
“Your friend has my address. I shall be here for some weeks. I have spent much of my exile painting and there is an artist living in Toledo whom I wish to see.”
As I walked away down the long passage with Rodez he said cynically: “A relative?”
“… Distant. I had never met him before.”
“Spain has a good sprinkling of them English who have clung to the faith. But they are not popular. We are never sure if one or other of them will turn out to be a spy.”
“Who is Captain de Soto?” I asked. “Why does he entertain in this way?”
“I have told you: he is the secretary of Don Martin de Padilla, the Adelantado of Castile.”
“And what has the Adelantado to do with naval matters?”
“He is the supreme commander of our fleet. A seasoned veteran, not a weakling like Medina Sidonia who commanded in ‘88.”
“He is assembling another Armada?”
“Ah,” said Rodez,“have a care you do not ask too much or we may take you for a spy.”
That night Señor Prada was called again to the palace and sent word back that he would not be home. Rodez had gone with him; and Señora Prada went off to the theatre with a gallant. Father Rafael retired early to his room, and Isabella, who was in love with a young officer who had been posted to Valladolid, spent the evening in the patio plucking moodily at her guitar.
That left Mariana and me, and of course her duenna sitting cross-legged in a corner. We spent an hour on our language, but Mariana soon grew tired of it for she had less to learn than I and less incentive. Because of our lessons our friendship had ripened. In the course of work she had told me much about Spain and about herself; I had told her of England and Cornwall and my own life. But with an understandable reticence I had never mentioned Sue Farnaby.
Now she suddenly said: “Have you ever been in love, pincho? “
I hesitated. “… In a way.”
“In what way is that?”
“Well, yes … I have been in love.”
“With whom? Tell me now. A little girl of sixteen? a big girl of twenty? a married woman?”
I said: “Oh …” and laughed self-consciously.
“And this girl you have loved her?”
“I said so.”
“But there is different si, claro … depende … If you love perhaps like Isabella down below you swoon and sigh, you worship, you adore; very beautiful, but it is in the heart, no more. Or you may love make love, is that it? with the body, with the senses you are in passion. That is fierce, the thing itself. Which was yours?”
“The first.”
“Ah … so I should have think.”
We said no more for a time. Then she said:’
“Do you know what an amencebada is?”
“You know I do not.”
“In Spain, boys when they are twelve or thirteen are given a concubine mistress who teaches them about love. That is what such a woman is called.”
It was the first warm evening, and the gentle plucking of the guitar was sonorous and sad, punctuating the faint plash of water from the fountain. Mariana stood up and leaned over the balcony. She called something in a harsh voice to her sister and the playing stopped. She turned to me with gleaming eyes.
“Muy bien. If you will have the goodness to watch.”
Her black hair was parted in the middle, tied at the back with a ribbon and wrapped up in a carnation coloured taffeta scarf. She unwrapped the scarf. While she was doing it Isabella began to play again, but this time differently, fiercely: a strange music that I had heard before but only in the distance coming from lighted taverns or from a group of gypsies around a fire: a trembling passionate music full of sadness and sliding semi-tones. Mariana stood by the balcony’s edge, eyes closed, with a hand clasped to her face as if in torment; and she began to dance.
She had no castanets, no high heels. She danced on a tiny piece of tiled floor, twisting round, holding her hands on high and clicking her fingers. Even in sandals she was able to make a rhythmic rattling with her heels. She shook and swayed as she danced. She writhed like a serpent, weaving her hips as if round an invisible rope. She used her hair like a Gorgon’s till it came alive and turned me to stone.
The music stopped and she stopped and hung over the balcony looking down at her sister. You could not see her face for the cloud of hair. And in the corner her duenna sat quietly sewing.
“That is what I show you, Maugan. That assuredly is what is meant by love.”
“It’s a different thing.”
“It is the real thing.”
“I don’t know.”
“Ya se lo he dicho.”
“Yes …”
She took up the scarf in which her.hair had been bound and wiped her forehead and face with it. Then she began to wind up her hair in its ribbon.
Isabella began idly to pluck at the strings again. One of the black slaves came along the balcony on some errand but he did not glance at us; servants in Spain are well trained. Mariana gathered up her books, her gold embroidery on which she seldom worked and brushed past me. Her sandals slip-slapped away and I heard them going up to the next floor. In a few moments the old woman in the corner also got up and followed quietly after.
I tried to read but could not. Three images were in my mind: Sue; and Captain Burley; and Mariana. Were they all different sides of the same cube? I did not know. To me they were as different as pure air, foul water and fire. Every time I looked at the book, I saw Mariana. At last I decided to go to bed.
On the next floor I had to pass several doors to reach the wooden stairs to the attic. One door was open and Mariana was sitting in front of a mirror braiding her hair.
I went in. She laughed gently.
I whispered: “Where is … ?”
“Tartara? Dismissed, as she should be. I thought you would come.”
“T ,, A …
“Wait.” Mariana rose and shut the door behind me. Then she stood against it, her hands behind her waist, still quietly, cynically smiling. I went nearer to her. She took a step from the door and put her arms round my neck and kissed me, her breasts against my rough shirt. She was the same height as I was. Her mouth sought out mine.
I ran my hands up and down her back feeling the warmth and liveness of her through the satin, then slipped them round and grasped her breasts. But while we clung to each other in a voluptuous hunger that drowned my free will, a strange thing happened. I found I wished to escape from what I had seemed most to desire.
I remembered Sue Farnaby; I was hers not any other woman’s and I wanted no other. And I only wished to go at my own speed in love, not be dragged along down an ever steeper slope.
I jerked my head up and tried to unloose her arms.
“What is it? There is no one.”
“Mariana, it was someone, I’m sure.” She had given me the only possible excuse.
“No one will come in here.”
“No. Mariana. It is not just that. It it would bring disgrace on you “
I at last got free of her and went to the door. I did not dare look back, for I knew if I looked at her again I was lost.
“Maugan ! ” she said.
I went out.
For days after that I was a swimmer in cross currents too strong for me. Much of the time I was glad of what I had done, glad of a fidelity to Sue Farnaby and to an ideal of love more important than a hot groping passion in a shadowy bedroom. But ever and again I would be swept with a feeling of shame, as if by denying Mariana I had denied my new manhood.