A Divided Inheritance (47 page)

Elspet waited as they lifted up the trunk, but she could not bear to watch them lug it out of the door. When they’d gone, she called Martha, the money still in her hand. ‘Your
wages,’ she said, holding it out on her palm.

Martha glanced at Gaxa, and then back to Elspet, her expression doubtful.

‘Go on, take it,’ Elspet said, ‘it is only what you are owed.’

‘But mistress . . .?’

Elspet thrust the money into Martha’s hand and closed the maid’s fingers around it.

‘Thank you kindly, mistress . . .’ Martha began to back away.

‘And these.’ Elspet scooped up the rose silk and the farthingale in one swift movement and bundled them into Martha’s arms. ‘They are for you. I have no need of them any
more.’

Martha’s pale face stared back blankly from above the heap of silk; the farthingale dangled limply from one arm.

‘You admired them, didn’t you?’ Elspet snapped.

‘Yes . . . yes, mistress, of course I did, but—’

‘Then they’re yours. They will suit your colouring very well.’ She turned and walked to the door, and as she took the handle to close it, she saw Martha and Gaxa staring
incredulously at each other before Martha let the gown slide out from her grasp to drop into a heap before her.

Zachary stood on the balcony of the old empty house and gazed up into the night sky. A thin sickle moon like a thumbnail rested above the black rooftops. There was a smell of
damp vegetation drifting from the river, which glittered with the lights of night-time craft. Downriver towards the sea there was a larger cluster of lights from the fleet gathered there. His palms
were sweating, although the nights were cooler now. He hoped Luisa would come again, he had thought of nothing else all day. The silky feel of her long plait, the soft warmth of her lips. But she
had said the last time that it was awkward for her to come out alone, her father worried.

The creak of the door alerted him, and he smoothed down his doublet. He was nervous, he realized. He heard the light pat of her feet on the stairs, and suddenly she was in the room.

‘Papa thinks I’m with Maria,’ she said breathlessly.

He held out his arms, all nervousness gone. A sweet smell of frangipani oil came from her hair. She tilted her face so he could kiss her. He wrapped his arms around her and felt the lightness of
her ribcage through her thin cotton blouse; such a small cage to hold her beating heart. He felt protective of her, as if he should shield her from the world.

‘You smell good,’ he whispered.

She sniffed his hair, and then brushed his lips with a kiss. ‘So do you, Mr Deane.’

‘Luisa, you can’t keep calling me Mr Deane. Not now, when we’re . . . I said before, you can call me Zachary.’

‘But I like it. It sounds so, so English. Zachary is hard to say. I like Mr Deane. You will always be Mr Deane to me.’

He laughed. ‘But it sounds as though you’re my servant. And it’s not even my real name. My mother was Spanish. She was called Magdalena Medina. When she came to England, she
found it too cumbersome, and when we went to war with Spain she shortened it to Deane.’

She swayed back to look at him.

‘It’s not your father’s name?’

‘No.’ He did not say more. She looked at him closely, and almost spoke, but then changed her mind. He squeezed her hand.

‘Medina,’ she said. ‘I have heard my father talk of it. His family came from there. It is one of the largest cities in Araby. Perhaps your mother had some family there,
too.’

‘But wouldn’t that be a marvellous thing, to find, after all, we are related.’

‘No, it would not. Do you think I would do this with my relation?’ she said indignantly, kissing him again. ‘No, you are Mr Deane, the fine Englishman, and that’s all I
know.’

He walked her over to the balcony. He had found an old wooden chair on one of the lower floors and brought it up.

‘Look, I brought you a throne, to survey your kingdom.’ He sat on it and pulled her on to his knee, twined his hands round her waist.

‘What a night,’ she said, gazing out over the city. ‘Seville looks enchanted on nights like these.’

‘Is your father still intent on France?’

‘Yes.’ She pulled away. ‘He believes every bit of gossip. He has never been the same, Mama says, since they were forced out of Granada. He thinks it will happen again here, and
is making plans with Señor Alvarez to move us all again.’ She sighed. ‘I thought he had agreed to stay. I just want to feel the ground under my feet a little longer. And since
Najid came and told us about the expulsion in Denia, Papa’s even worse.’

‘What’s happened to your uncle? Is he still with you?’

‘No, thank heaven.’ She wound her hand into his. ‘But he’s as bad as Papa. After the shock wore off, he went crazy. He was all fired up with vengeance and now he’s
gone to join some other rebels in Cordoba. He’d heard a tale that some of the Morisco people from Denia never got to Oran, but were robbed by the crew and pushed overboard. Mama fears for
him, he hardly knows what he is doing. But she couldn’t stop him, he was like a raging bull.’

Zachary sighed. ‘The rumours worry me. I keep thinking that one day I’ll wake and find you gone.’

She leaned her head against his chest. ‘Not you too.’

‘Aren’t you worried?’

‘Only that I keep thinking I must be dreaming you,’ she whispered.

‘Does your father know we’ve been meeting?’

‘No. I’m not sure he would understand. You are . . . well, my parents would think I do it to hurt them, on purpose. And they have enough problems. But they guess something. Mama
looks at me, as though she is searching for an answer.’

‘Come here,’ he said, turning her head to kiss her again, ‘let’s give her something to look for.’

‘Ten o’clock already,’ said Fabian.

Etienne Galen looked around. At Don Rodriguez’s yard the great clock in the corner chimed its final bell, and as if on cue, Don Rodriguez appeared to join them, removing his mail gloves
and casting them with a thud on to the table. Fabian poured his master a drink.

‘Tired?’ Don Rodriguez asked Fabian, indicating one of the other men slumped on to his forearms on the table.

‘It’s those leaded shoes,’ Fabian said. ‘My legs were light as a feather when I took them off, I felt I could jump over mountains.’

‘So – I rest my case.’ Rodriguez grinned and swigged from his tankard, then wiped the froth from his moustache.

‘They do not use those at the school of Alvarez, I can tell you,’ Etienne said.

‘Yes, tell me more about what goes on there, I’m curious. Here’s your purse.’ Rodriguez passed Etienne a leather bag rattling with silver.

‘Thank you, sir. Like I say, it is no match for your training. They have not much equipment, little armour. The men read geometry and philosophy. Their minds, well, they may be learned,
but their bodies – they are weak.’

‘But what do they do?’

‘There are not enough men to make proper formation, so they drill on what Alvarez calls the swordsman’s seal – the circle and cross. But he has all foreign students, none from
Spain. Oh, except one. And a woman is there too.’

Rodriguez paused, his pewter tankard halfway to his mouth. He put the tankard down. ‘Alvarez must really be on hard times if he has sunk to training a woman. Are you sure? Carranza would
never have agreed to that.’

‘Yes, a woman is there every day. An Englishwoman, cousin of a student. Pretty.’

‘The Frenchman only has eyes for a pretty face,’ Fabian said. ‘Can she fight?’

‘
Pas un seul petit morceau
,’ Etienne said, shaking his head and laughing. ‘What do you think!’

Rodriguez snorted. ‘So you don’t think Alvarez will be an obstacle for what we have to do?’

‘No, sir. They are too few, and they have no discipline, and no focus. I am sure they are not in training for anything, except perhaps a duel or two. But Alvarez, he is something.’
Etienne let out a low whistling breath. ‘That man moves like water, impossible to scratch him.’

Don Rodriguez frowned. ‘To the untrained eye he has a modicum of skill, perhaps.’

Etienne swallowed, realizing he had made a gaffe.

‘But his are false methods,’ said Rodriguez. ‘The real
Destreza
is with Pacheco, and through him to me. There are two aspects to a fighting art; the fighting and the
art. Here we concentrate on the meat of it, the fighting, but Alvarez,’ he sneered, ‘he concentrates only on the art.’ He stood up. ‘A rumour reached my ears that Alvarez
took in some Moriscos from the barrio near the leather beaters, this is why I ask whether he will be an obstruction to our cause.’

‘It’s true. He hides the family of the mathematician, Nicolao Ortega,’ Etienne said.

‘Then it would be better to be certain his men will cause us no trouble. Foreign students, you say? Well, perhaps we can persuade Alvarez’s students to go back home. Besides, we do
not need two fencing schools in Seville.’

‘Surely we can just close the school down, if it is a threat to the expulsion?’ Fabian said, leaning in over the planked table.

‘No, not yet. There are no legal grounds until the proclamation for Seville is made. Harbouring these Morisco rebels and foreigners is not an offence unless they are proved to be rejecting
the Faith. At least it is not an offence yet. But that will change once the order is given for their expulsion. Then we will act quickly to disarm them. Until that time, we will have to be more
circumspect, disrupt their training, make sure they cannot be organized enough to offer resistance. Etienne, can you get us into the school at night?’

‘Certainly I can. Alvarez puts a bar on the front gate to the street, but the back, no one takes much notice of that. Two bolts only. The yard is left wholly unguarded. Why, what were you
thinking, sir?’

‘Best you don’t know. That way you will not be tempted to let anything slip.’ Etienne was about to protest, but Don Rodriguez waved him away with a gesture. ‘I know you
think you would not, but I know Frenchmen and their big mouths.’ He cast a few more coins on to the table, which glinted in the light from the torches as if they were red-hot. ‘An extra
five reales for you if you leave the bolts open, understood?’

Etienne scraped the discs from the table and they chinked as he added them to his bulging purse.

The day after her visit to
La Sangre
, Elspet was back in the yard at the training, wearing the carsey gown. By this she hoped to signal to Señor Alvarez that
she had followed his wishes. He was right; selling her things had felt like making a commitment, and now she was dedicated to the art of
La Destreza
just as much as the others.

The men looked and nudged each other, sensing something different about her when she arrived, but their faces were kind. She had tied her hair away from her face, like the Barefoot Beata,
Josefa. She attracted no attention now on her way to the fencing school as people assumed her to be a nun or a beata in her homespun and sandals. She soon discovered the new clothing was much less
of a hindrance and granted her much more freedom of movement.

For the next few weeks, as the weather had grown colder and wetter, they continued to study the books of Agrippa, Plato and the masters of geometry. They copied Dürer’s diagrams and
stepped through their measures on the painted circle and cross in the upstairs chamber under Señor Alvarez’s watchful eye. The circle was fading a little under their scuffing feet, the
letters and lines worn faint through use.

She always enjoyed partnering Alexander and Girard, and the stocky Pedro Gutierrez. She avoided Etienne if possible, for he kept seeking out her eye, and was forever making an excuse to stop and
hold her too closely by the arm to show her a technique.

Zachary seemed softer, less angry somehow, though there was still tension in her relationship with him. We are unhappy bedfellows, she thought. But she was beginning to understand him a little.
Like him, she relished the feeling of learning this skill, of feeling her whole body move behind the sword. The early mornings were for drills and repetitive exercises of thrust and parry, pierce
and feint. And in the evenings they studied the elements. They had moved on from fire and air now, and were working with water.