The Stand-In Bride

CHAPTER THREE

DESPITE the surgeon’s fears Isabella came through the operation well, and awoke in the early hours. The three who had waited for the news emerged into the dawn, tired and slightly disorientated. Sebastian hailed a cab and urged Maggie into it.

‘I should go home,’ she said, yawning.

‘Later. We have matters to discuss.’

In the short distance back to the hotel she slipped into a half doze. Through it she could just hear Catalina prattling away in a non-stop monologue, punctuated by Sebastian’s bored ‘Really?’, ‘Indeed!’ and ‘Quite!’

At the hotel he ordered breakfast to be sent up. While he made phone calls the two women went to Catalina’s room, where she stripped off and announced that she was going to have a bath. Maggie would have liked to do the same but she had to settle for borrowing one of Isabella’s ‘granny’ cardigans in a shade of deadly grey, which she slipped on over her bare shoulders.

When she returned to the sitting room, breakfast had arrived. Sebastian grimaced at the sight of her dowdy attire. ‘It suits Isabella better,’ he said wryly. ‘She is past being attractive to men.’

‘And I,’ Maggie retorted with spirit, ‘am indifferent to men.’

‘That is a lie and we both know it,’ he asserted calmly. ‘But this is neither the time nor the place to discuss that.’

‘Never and nowhere! That’s the time and place to discuss it.’

‘Sit down and eat. We have to decide what to do.’

‘We?’ Maggie enquired ironically.

He refused to rise to her bait. ‘Catalina and I will leave for Spain tomorrow. I need you to come with us and remain until the wedding.’

‘Certainly not!’ Maggie said without hesitation. ‘And leave Isabella alone here where she doesn’t know anyone? How can you be so inconsiderate?’

‘If you would allow me to finish,’ he said with some asperity, ‘I could tell you that while you were out of the room I arranged for her sister to fly to London. She will arrive this afternoon, and stay until Isabella can travel.’

‘I’m very happy for them both, but I gave you my notice yesterday, and nothing has changed.’

‘Nonsense, everything has changed,’ he said impatiently. ‘Even you must see that.’

‘Yesterday I was a disreputable woman who was dragging Catalina into dens of vice. Now you’re ready to forget that because I can be useful to you.’

He had the grace to redden. ‘I may have spoken hastily. Catalina has given me a full account of your evening, including the fact that she pressured you into buying that erotic dress.’

‘It’s not erotic,’ she said quickly, drawing the edges of the grey woolly together.

‘If it wasn’t erotic, you wouldn’t be wearing that thing over it.’

‘I’m surprised you believed Catalina,’ Maggie said, hastily changing tack. ‘Surely you know that under my influence she tells lies?’

‘She’s told lies since she was a little girl,’ Sebastian admitted wryly. ‘You have nothing to do with it. Besides, I always know when she’s lying, and this time she wasn’t.’

‘When did she tell you all this?’

‘In the cab, half an hour ago.’

‘Oh, that’s what she was saying. I was half asleep and just heard her voice distantly. And, of course, your replies. I could tell you were simply fascinated.’

He gave her a black look. ‘It’s true I don’t take easily to the prattling of children,’ he said defensively.

‘Well, you’d better get used to it, if you’re going to marry her.’

‘Can we stick to the matter in hand?’

‘That’s easy. You say, “Come to Spain”; I say, “No way.” End of conversation. What do you want me for, anyway?’

‘I’m Catalina’s guardian as well as her fiancé. From tomorrow she will be living in my house. She must have a chaperone.’

‘In this day and age?’

‘Spain is not England. Our belief in propriety may seem a little old-fashioned to you, but it’s important to us. I hope that you’ll change your mind, for her sake. She’ll need a female companion in the last weeks before our marriage.’

Something constrained in his manner caught Maggie’s attention and a suspicion crept into her mind. ‘I see what it is,’ she said. ‘Propriety, my foot! You want me to keep her occupied so that you won’t have to listen to her chattering.’

A hint of ruefulness crept into his eyes, and for a moment he almost allowed himself to grin. ‘I feel sure she would be happier for your presence. Please oblige me in this.’

‘But this is December. Your wedding isn’t until next March.’

‘I forgot to mention that I’ve arranged for it to be moved up to the second week in January.’

‘Forgot to mention-? Did you forget to mention it to Catalina, too?’

‘I have every intention of telling her when she comes out to breakfast.’

‘And suppose she has other ideas?’ Maggie demanded, incensed almost past bearing by this high-handedness.

‘We’ll ask her, shall we?’

Catalina appeared at that moment, dressed in slacks and sweater. ‘Oh, good!’ she exclaimed when she saw the breakfast table. ‘I’m so hungry.

‘I was just explaining to Señora Cortez that official business obliges me to bring forward our wedding date to next month,’ Sebastian said smoothly.

Catalina gave a little scream. ‘But I can’t be ready by then. I haven’t even chosen a bridal dress.’

‘Señora Cortez will help you decide when we return to Granada.’

‘Oh, Maggie, you’re coming to Spain? That will be wonderful.’

‘Now, wait-I haven’t said-besides, you’ve missed the point. He’s changed the date without consulting you.’

Catalina gave a resigned little shrug. ‘He does everything without consulting me. This bacon looks lovely.’

It was hopeless, Maggie realised, trying to make an impression on Catalina’s butterfly mind. Last night Catalina had talked bravely under the influence of Maggie’s strong personality. Today she was under Sebastian’s even stronger influence. She listened while he explained that Isabella’s sister would be arriving that afternoon, and the three of them would be leaving next day.

‘As easy as that?’ Maggie said, nettled by this casual way of arranging matters.

‘Of course it’s as easy as that,’ he said in some surprise. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

‘It would take too long to tell you.’

‘Everything is easy for Sebastian,’ Catalina said, tucking into her food with relish. ‘People just do what he tells them.’

‘Other people,’ Maggie said firmly. ‘Not me.’

‘Oh, Maggie, please!’ Catalina wailed. ‘You can’t just abandon me. I thought you were my friend.’

‘I am, but-’

How could she explain to this wide-eyed girl that she had sworn never to return to Spain, and especially to Granada, where her heart had been broken and her spirit almost destroyed? If it had been anywhere else…

But perhaps, after all, it had to be Granada, where the ghosts she’d fled still raged. Maybe she’d run for long enough, and it was time to turn and face them.

‘All right,’ she said slowly. ‘Just for a short time.’

‘Oh good!’ Catalina exclaimed. ‘I’m so glad you’ve given in.’

Before Maggie could take exception to the phrase ‘give in’, Sebastian said, ‘You’re mistaken, my dear. Giving in is for weaklings. A strong person like Señora Cortez makes tactical concessions for reasons of her own.’

And this time there was no doubt of it. He smiled.

It was annoying that everyone and everything seemed to jump to do Sebastian’s bidding, but that was the reality, Maggie had to recognise. Isabella’s sister arrived later that day, full of effusions at Don Sebastian’s ‘generosity’. He took her to the comfortable little hotel just around the corner from the hospital, and then to see Isabella. Watching the sisters greet each other, Maggie conceded that he’d done exactly the right thing.

She was less delighted by his insistence that she take over Isabella’s old room for their last night in England. ‘I can’t stay alone in that suite with Catalina,’ he said firmly. ‘The world would assume that I’d allowed my-er-ardour to overcome me, and she would be compromised.’

He gave her a look in which humour and cynicism were combined, and she suddenly had to look away.

The next day the snow began in earnest as they reached the airport. Maggie knew she would miss spending Christmas in England, but it might be nice to fly away to a warmer climate.

In no time the plane had climbed out of the snow and they were heading south to Spain, where the land was still brown. For the last half hour of the flight Maggie resisted looking out of the window, but she shut out the thoughts that troubled her. Far below lay all the stark magnificence of the country that she wasn’t quite ready to face yet, to which, eight years before, she had come as a bride.

In some respects she had been like Catalina, barely old enough to be called a woman, eager for life, sure that every mystery could be explained with reference to her own limited experience. And so terribly, tragically wrong.

At eighteen she’d lost both her parents in a car crash, and at first had been too stunned to realise anything but her loss. When she finally overcame the worst of her grief, she found that she was well off. Two insurance policies and a house didn’t amount to great wealth, but it was financial independence.

She had been close to her parents, and still living at home in a happy cocoon. Suddenly she was pitchforked into the world, deprived of the loving protection she’d always taken for granted, and with enough money at her disposal to make stupid mistakes.

She made several, mostly harmless ones. But then she met and fell in love with Roderigo Alva. And that had been the stupidest mistake of all.

They were introduced by friends on what was to be his last day before returning home to Granada. By the end of the evening he had deferred his departure indefinitely, to Maggie’s delight. At thirty, he was older than any man she had dated before, yet he’d kept the lightheartedness of a boy. He was full of laughter, and he plunged into life’s pleasures as though afraid they might be snatched away. His face was swarthily handsome, and his lean, elegant body moved with the grace of a cat. How wonderfully they danced together, and how desperately every dance increased her mounting passion for him.

He told her about his import-export business in Granada, the wonderful deal he had just pulled off. Everything about him seemed to confirm the picture of a successful man, son of a wealthy family who’d made his own fortune by hard work and skill. He was always well dressed and he showered expensive gifts on her.

He was enchanted to find her one quarter Spanish, and able to speak his language. Her dazzled eyes saw only a man of the world, who might have had any woman, but who declared that she was his first true love. She was eighteen. She believed him.

When she announced their engagement, the few family members she had left begged her to wait. ‘You know nothing about him-he’s so much older than you-’ She brushed the warnings aside with the blind confidence of youth. She loved Roderigo. He loved her. What else mattered?

Unlike the boys of her own age, he kept his hands to himself, insisting that his bride must be treated with respect. But he wanted to marry her in England. She would have liked to have the wedding in Spain, with his family there, but Roderigo overbore her.

Later she wondered what would have happened if she’d held out and seen his home before committing herself. Because then she might have discovered that his ‘business’ was little more than a shell, that his creditors were dunning him and some of his activities were under investigation by the law.

Or suppose he’d come to her bed before the wedding? With her passion slaked, she might have seen him with clearer eyes, and not rushed headlong into legal ties. That too he had prevented, ensuring that when they reached Spain the cage door had already slammed shut behind her.

She rubbed her eyes, knowing the moment was drawing nearer when they would land. Beside her, Catalina was checking her face in a small mirror. On the far side of the aisle Sebastian sat absorbed in papers, as he had been since they took off. There was something down-to-earth about that sight that made Maggie feel she had been fanciful.

Now she forced herself to look out of the window at the white-capped Sierra Nevada mountains far below her, just like her first view of them on her honeymoon. Then she’d been blissfully happy. Now her heart was grey and empty. But the mountains were unchanged.

Had any bride ever had such a romantic honeymoon, skiing by day and making love by night? Roderigo was technically a skilled lover and in many respects their physical life was good. Perhaps even then she sensed something wrong, but she was too young and ignorant to know what it was-that she was doing with her whole soul what he was doing only with his body.

She met his family, not the solid merchants he’d described, but shysters living on the edge of the law, prosperous one day, hand-to-mouth the next. If they made money, they spent it before it was in hand. His mother wore expensive jewellery which would vanish-re-claimed by outraged shopkeepers, tired of waiting for payment.

The only one of the family Maggie took to was a young cousin, José, a boy of fifteen, who idolised her and constantly found excuses to visit their house. His infatuation was so youthfully innocent that neither she nor Roderigo could take offence.

Maggie had blotted out many of the details of that time, so that now she could no longer be sure exactly when she’d begun to see that Roderigo lived mainly on credit. He had expensive habits and very little way of servicing them. The ‘business’ was a joke through which he could claim tax breaks without making a profit. And why should a man bother with profit when he’d just married a wife with money?

He went through Maggie’s modest wealth like water. When the ready cash had gone the house in England was sold and the money brought to Spain. Maggie tried to insist that it should be banked for a rainy day, but he bought her an expensive gift and swept her off on vacation, both of which she paid for.

He silenced her protests with passion. In his view, as long as he was a good husband in bed, she had nothing to complain of. When she argued he began to show the other side of his character, the bully. How dared she criticise her husband? This was Spain, where the man was the master.

Maggie began to see with dreadful clarity that Roderigo was a fair-weather charmer, delightful while things were going well, but unpleasant when life was hard. And over the four years of their marriage, life grew bitterly hard. In that time she grew up fast, changing from a naive girl into a clear-eyed woman, surviving the disintegration of her world. Romantic dreams vanished, replaced by a realism that was almost, but not quite, cynicism.

She managed to cling onto a little money, standing up to Roderigo in a way that once wouldn’t have been possible. But it was a waste of time. When threats didn’t work he simply forged her signature, and then the money was gone.

Why hadn’t she left him, then? Looking back, she often wondered. Perhaps it was because, having paid such a terrible price for her love, she couldn’t bear to admit that it had all been for nothing. And besides, she was pregnant.

When she found out she entertained one last pathetic hope that Roderigo would finally discover in himself a sense of responsibility, and put some work into his business. Instead, he resorted to crime, petty at first, then more serious, always just managing to get away with it. Success went to his head. He grew careless. A theft was traced to him, and only the best efforts of an expensive lawyer got him off. His confidence grew. He was untouchable.

Then the police called again. A man had broken into a wealthy house in Granada, and been disturbed by the owner. The thief attacked him and fled, leaving the man in a coma. Roderigo’s fingerprints had been found in the house.

He protested his innocence, swearing falsely that at the time he had been at home with his wife. Sick at heart, Maggie refused to confirm the lie. He was arrested, tried and found guilty.

The day before the trial began she went into premature labour. Her six-month daughter was born, and survived a week. During that time Maggie never left her side. The news that Roderigo had been found guilty and sentenced to ten years seemed to reach her from a great distance.

She would never forget the last time she saw him, in prison. Once this had been the man she loved. Now he stared at her, hard faced, his eyes bleak with hate. ‘Be damned to you!’ he raged. ‘You put me here. What kind of a wife are you?’

Exhausted and grief stricken from the loss of her child, she fought for the strength to say, ‘I couldn’t lie. You weren’t with me that night.’

‘I wasn’t in that house-not then. I went there once before, that’s why my fingerprints were there-I stole a few trinkets, but I harmed nobody. I swear I wasn’t there that night. I never attacked that man.’

She gazed at him, wondering why he seemed to be at the end of a long tunnel. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said bleakly.

‘But you must believe me. My lawyer-there is to be an appeal-you must help him-’

‘I’m going back to England. I never want to see you again.’

‘Curse you,’ he raged. ‘Curse you for a false bitch!’

‘You curse me Roderigo, but I also curse you, for the loss of our child. I curse the day I met you.’ The tunnel was getting longer, taking him further and further. ‘My baby is dead,’ she whispered. ‘My baby is dead.’

His anger collapsed, and he began to weep. ‘Maggie, I beg you-don’t go! Stay here and help me. Maggie, don’t go!’

She had left the prison with his cries ringing in her ears. José, now a lanky young man of nineteen, was waiting for her. He took her to the airport and kissed her goodbye with tears in his eyes.

It was José who wrote to her three months later to say that Roderigo had died of pneumonia. He had simply lain there, refusing to fight for his life, waiting for the end. Maggie, who’d thought her misery could get no deeper, had discovered that she was wrong.

To despair was now added guilt. Her dreams were full of Roderigo’s cries, swearing his innocence, begging her to stay and fight for him. He had been a bad husband, selfish and deceitful, spending her money, turning on her, destroying her life. But her conscience accused her of being a bad wife, deserting him in his hour of need. If she had stayed, perhaps he would be alive…

She had fought back in the only way she could, by denying the past. She resumed her maiden name, blotting out Roderigo from every corner of her life. Her passport, her driving licence, the rent book to the shabby little apartment which was now all she could afford, all proclaimed her Margaret Cortez. Roderigo Alva might never have existed.

It was only sometimes, in the darkness, that she heard him still, shrieking his desperation and fear. Then she would bury her head beneath the pillows and pray hopelessly for an absolution that would never come.

At Malaga Airport a car was waiting to take them the hour’s journey through the Andalucian countryside to Granada. Catalina was filled with excitement. ‘I’m so glad to be back,’ she said. ‘You will love it here, Maggie.’

‘Whereabouts in Spain did you live before?’ Sebastian asked from Catalina’s other side.

‘In the city of Granada,’ Maggie replied briefly.

‘So you know this place?’ Catalina sounded disappointed. ‘You didn’t say. But then, you never talk of that time.’ She patted her hand sympathetically. ‘Forgive me.’

‘We’re not actually going to the city, are we?’ Maggie said, anxious to forestall one of the girl’s sentimental outbursts. ‘I believe Don Sebastian’s house is a few miles outside.’

‘In the foothills of the Sierra Nevada,’ he said. ‘It is the most beautiful place on earth.’ And for the first time Maggie thought she detected real emotion in his voice.

He was silent for a few miles, then he said, ‘There,’ in the same tone. And she began to understand.

Don Sebastian’s ‘house’ could be seen on one of the lower slopes. It was actually more like a small Moorish palace, sitting serenely overlooking the valley. It seemed to be built on several levels, and even from a distance Maggie could perceive its beauty, how it extended into gardens, towers, rambling this way and that in leisurely style.

The car had begun to climb a road that twisted and turned among elm and cypress, giving her glimpses of the lovely building, that were snatched away almost at once, to be replaced a moment later with a closer look, even more beautiful.

They came at last to some wrought iron gates that opened, apparently of their own accord, to let them sweep through. A little more climbing and they were there, the front doors standing open and a middle-aged man and woman waiting ready to greet them. Maggie guessed these were the chief steward and housekeeper. Behind them there was a crowd of servants, who had evidently come to see their new mistress arrive.

Hands reached out to open the car doors. Sebastian slipped a reassuring arm about Catalina’s shoulders and led her forward to meet her household. But he glanced back to make sure Maggie was close behind, and introduced her with an easy courtesy that prevented any awkwardness.

The housekeeper showed Catalina to her room. It had a grandeur suitable for the future mistress of this mini palace, and she danced around it gleefully before seizing Maggie’s hand and taking her along the corridor to another room, almost as lavish as the first.

‘This is yours,’ she said.

‘This?’ Maggie echoed, overwhelmed by the gorgeous red tiles on the floor, the mosaic-inlaid walls and the huge draped bed. There was history in this room as well as beauty, and a subtle, ancient magic that elicited her fascinated response. Along the outer wall were two tall, horseshoe arches, hung with heavy net curtains. Set between the arches were floor length windows that opened onto a balcony.

Dazed, Maggie allowed Catalina to lead her out onto the balcony with its magnificent view down the valley and across the distance to Granada, and the hill on which stood the glorious Alhambra Palace. It was early evening and darkness had fallen, showing the gleams of light from the collection of buildings that made up the palace.

Directly under the balcony Maggie could see one of the courtyards of Sebastian’s house, and something struck her.

‘This is like a smaller version of the Alhambra,’ she murmured. She had visited the splendid Moorish palace several times, and recognised the emphasis on highly decorative mosaics, the arches supported on pillars so impossibly delicate that it seemed as though the building was about to fly away.

‘That’s what it’s supposed to be,’ Catalina told her. ‘They say that the Sultan Yusuf the First built it for his favourite, in the style of his own palace. All the other concubines lived in the harem, but he kept her here, hidden away from the world. He was murdered by another man who also loved her. When she heard, she came out onto this balcony where she could look across the valley, and stayed here until she too had died from grief. They say her ghost still walks in these rooms.’

‘If they say that, they talk nonsense,’ Sebastian said from the curtained window. He had come in behind them so quietly that neither of them had heard him. ‘Why should any man force himself to travel fifteen miles for one woman when he could reach the harem in a moment?’

Maggie felt her annoyance rising at the sight of him standing there, so assured, his face full of wry amusement at what he plainly considered female fancies. Yet even then she had to concede that his tall body and proud head had a magnificence that matched his surroundings.

‘He might want to keep her apart if he loved her very much,’ she observed. ‘You, of course, would find that incredible, Señor.’

‘Totally incredible,’ he agreed dryly.

‘Oh, you’re so unromantic!’ Catalina scolded. ‘I love to think of the Sultan standing at a window of the Alhambra, gazing up to where the favourite stood on this balcony, calling her name across the valley. Maggie, why do you laugh? It isn’t funny.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she choked. ‘But you said he wanted to keep her hidden from the world. She wouldn’t be much of a secret if he was bawling her name across fifteen miles.’

‘How unromantic you are!’ Sebastian chided her in Catalina’s words, but he was grinning. ‘And, for the record, Sultan Yusuf wasn’t murdered by a jealous lover. He was assassinated by a madman. And no ghost walks these rooms, Señora-don’t be alarmed.’

‘I wasn’t alarmed,’ Maggie told him crisply. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts. Not that kind, anyway.’

The last words were spoken half to herself and made him glance at her with a quick frown. But he said nothing.

‘You have no souls, either of you,’ Catalina said crossly.

Sebastian stood back, indicating for them to return inside. ‘Forgive my intrusion, ladies. Señora Cortez, welcome to my home. I hope the hospitality meets with your approval.’

‘It’s overwhelming,’ she said, indicating the splendid apartment. ‘Much too fine for me. I’ll get lost in all this.’

‘Be sure that I’ll send out a search party for you,’ he said. And he actually smiled right at her, almost inviting her to share a joke.

He shouldn’t do that too often, she thought. It was dangerous.