Lucy Gordon - The Stand-In Bride

‘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.