And then they had been alone listening to the iron tenon of the heavyweight very old and rusty, lock settle into the deep mortice in the granite frame of the door.
The women had looked at each other for a moment.
‘So, do you,’ Melody had returned, unable to stop a crooked smile spreading infectiously across her face and filling her suddenly twinkling green eyes.
In truth, they were both very nearly unrecognisable from the coiffured, expensively dressed women who, a fortnight ago, had luxuriated in the hospitality of the Hacienda de las Conquistadores, been wined and charmed by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and wandered the streets of Chinchón like two fairy princesses.
Most obviously, their long hair had been crudely shorn off their heads. Now their hair was raggedly cut short as if they were boys, in places the ‘cut’ had been so close to the scalp that from a distance an observer might surmise they were Alopecia sufferers. In the flight from Chinchón and since they had both lost weight although probably no more than a few pounds but in places which now gave each a much leaner look, and eyes which were suggestively, rather than actually a little hollowed out. Melody’s fair skin had started to acquire a wind-burnt tan; while Henrietta’s fading girlhood freckles seemed somehow pronounced.
They had stared at each other for some seconds before falling into a clinging, sobbing embrace which had lasted many minutes. Eventually, they had begun to absorb their new surroundings. The grubby leaded glass of the small not quite square window situated above head height allowed in very little light and their vision slowly adjusted to the murk.
A palliasse lay in the corner of the cell farthest from the door, on it were two folded blankets. Under the window was a small, knobbly table upon which there was a single, small candle-holder but no candle. The nuns had placed a large earthenware jug◦– perhaps holding as much as two pints of water◦– and a pewter plate with several lumps of black bread and, wrapped in a white linen rag, a wedge of very hard cheese on it. Upon inspection they discovered that somebody had, thoughtfully, scraped a little of the mould off the cheese. There was the normal crudely fired bowl-cum-chamber pot beneath the rickety table under the window.
“Home sweet home,” Melody murmured.
The two women had not been able to exchange a single word after that first morning at the monastery. Now they did not know what to say.
“I was working in the kitchen garden when the panic started a few days ago,” Melody offered.
“I was in the chapel,” Henrietta returned. “The only time they don’t have me working is when I’m on my knees praying!”
The older woman smiled and the Governor of New England’s youngest daughter giggled involuntarily.
‘The panic’ had quickly evaporated only to recur again, and again, with the women being ushered hurriedly to their cells at regular intervals over the last few days. Today, ‘the panic’ was of a self-evidently different intensity, not just the appearance of a stranger or a passing pilgrim at the gate of the monastery.
“I never really paid much attention to my Latin classes at school,” Melody confessed, “but I seem to be getting a crash course here!”
Her grasp of Latin had been well-honed during her training for the Bar; however, she too was out of practice and in any event, had never really taken to the language as a tool of spoken communication. It did not help that many of the nuns casually employed positively archaic forms of Biblical and other liturgical texts. What had impressed her was that practically all the nuns she had come into contact with, many of whom seemed to be from peasant or labouring classes where traditionally, girls in Spain had not been taught to read and write, were significantly more fluent in Latin than either she, or she suspected, Henrietta were.
“They’ve been keeping us away from the East Cloister,” Henrietta speculated, that’s where the monastery school is. I’ve heard children’s voices several times in the mornings. The younger woman spoke in a whisper. “Do you have any idea where this place is?”
“Somewhere north of Madrid. At least twenty, twenty-five miles to the north judging by the country we trekked through with Don Rafael.” Melody sighed. “That already seems like an age ago…” She had collected her wits again now. “I thought I heard an aeroplane before they called me inside that first time?”
“I heard a commotion in the gatehouse later that day.”
Melody was tight-lipped.
“It didn’t take them very long to find us, did it?” Henrietta went on, chewing her lower lip.
“No, it might not be that,” Melody said tartly, relenting immediately. “The whole country is in turmoil, so far as we know. At a time like this, old scores get settled. Old debts called in. Places like this might look like easy meat for deserters, chancers, local bigwigs who think the Mother Church or the Medina Sidonia family have lost their grip on things. Besides, up here in the mountains we’re an awfully long way from anything you or I would recognise as civilisation, or the rule of law.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought about it like that,” Henrietta admitted sheepishly, badly wanting to be reassured.
“This place might be a closed book to the local Inquisition, for example,” Melody explained, deciding the best thing to quell her own fears was to carry on talking. “As for that aeroplane, well, there’s nowhere for it to land around here.”
“Bandits could just take over,” Henrietta posited. “What’s to stop them?”
“God,” Melody replied, with greater confidence than she felt. “The Mother Church is the one constant and we both know that the Catholic hierarchy tends to revert to an eye for an eye interpretation of Holy Scripture when somebody treads on its turf.”
“That’s true…”
“We’ve forgotten something,” Melody grinned.
“Oh, what?”
“This,” Melody breathed, kissing her lover open-mouthed as the women renewed their embrace.
Later they lay together, entwined for mutual warmth and mental solace, listening to the faint, distant sounds of the great citadel-like religious house.
No hue and cry came to their ears.
There were no heavy◦– or in fact, any◦– footsteps in the corridor on the other side of the impregnably locked door to their cell. Presently, evening drew on: they rose to nibble bread and pick at the cheese, which tasted bitter and stank unpleasantly as they broke through its crust, slaked their thirst with caution not knowing when the water jug might be re-charged and hurriedly crept back beneath the blankets to keep out the chill which quickly radiated from the thick walls of the castle keep when night fell.
Eventually, they slept.
Much later Henrietta blinked awake.
Candles burned nearby on the floor and on the table below the window, and a dark form loomed over the women, seated unmoving in a chair.
“Do not be alarmed,” the man said in a gently amused, unthreatening low baritone. He had spoken in English with a vaguely Canadian twang which might have originated anywhere in the Maritime Provinces or the upper colonies◦– Maine, Vermont or New Hampshire as easily◦– as in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia.
“Melody,” Henrietta hissed.
“I’m awake,” the older woman muttered, trying to prop herself on an unsteady elbow as she peered into the gloom. She did not ask the man who he was.
She already knew that.
As to what he was doing here in the Mountains of Madrid…
Well, that was the mother and father of all conundrums!
The last time she had spoken to Captain Paul Nash, an aide-de-camp to the Military Attaché of the United Kingdom Embassy in Madrid, he had struck her as a typical upper-class dimwit. The man had made a clumsy pass at her at that Embassy reception soon after she got to Madrid, and she had rebuffed him with barely veiled contempt. Which, she had assumed, was why they had not had a lot to do with each other since. During that first encounter and the others when their paths had crossed, he had affected a positively effete hoity-toity upper-class accent which was so over the top it would have embarrassed a member of the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace!