After the War: A Novella of the Golden City (5 page)

Nothing familiar
.

Once they were all inside the long entryway hall and the door closed behind them, Alejandro spotted a petite woman hurrying down the stairs from the second floor to join them. Her hair was brown, and her eyes were dark and large. This was Marina, Joaquim’s wife and the woman who’d raised him. She came running down the hall, threw her arms about her husband, and kissed his cheeks. Her clothes showed the same excellent taste as Joaquim’s, a simple dress in dark blue. Even though she didn’t need to work, she served on the board of the business firm her father ran.

She released her husband, turned to Alejandro, and held out her hands to take his. “Do you recognize me, Jandro?”

Her delicate features were pretty, and he suspected she was several years younger than her husband. He should
know
that sort of thing about his family, not just suspect it. “No, but you must be my mother.”

She kissed his cheeks. “I am overjoyed that you’re home. Joaquim kept promising me you would return someday, and I prayed he was right.”

“I’m grateful for your prayers,” he said, settling on what he hoped was a safe comment.

“And Serafina,” she added, “Joaquim says you’ll be staying with us for now, so why don’t I have the footman take your bags up to your room.”

A footman with a scar crossing his nose and one cheek came and whisked the bags away. Marina turned back to Alejandro. “Joaquim suggested we not give you too much to deal with at once, so the children are with their grandparents. They should be back in time for dinner, though, and will all want to talk to you then.”

There were five, if he recalled correctly from his talk with Joaquim. “Could I see a photograph, to practice their names?”

“There’s one in the sitting room.” Marina slipped out of the hallway into that room and emerged with a silver-framed photograph of the family.

It had to be at least three years old, because
he
was in it, proof that he belonged here. He had some resemblance to the girls. The youngest child, the only boy, looked to be in a christening gown
—
likely the occasion for the photograph.

“I didn’t know what was best,” Marina added. “I’ll leave the choice to you. Would you like to tour the house to see if it jogs your memory? Or perhaps just start with your room?”

“I would honestly appreciate the chance to change into clean clothes.” He’d been feeling grubby since he’d walked through the front door. “Joaquim told me I still have clothing here.”

“Yes, of course you do,” Marina said. “And I know Joaquim would appreciate a nap. He never travels well. Perhaps a quick breakfast?”

“We had breakfast on the train, darling,” Joaquim said.

“Oh, I forgot that. Then why don’t you all go up and rest.”

Alejandro made his way along the fine hallway with Serafina on his arm and headed up the stairs. “Which room is mine?” he whispered.

Serafina led him to a closed door only two away from the stairwell. It opened onto a large room that had recently been cleaned. It smelled of beeswax and freshly laundered linens. Alejandro stepped inside. A wide bed stood between two tall windows with iron-railed balconies outside. On the left side of the room, two doors led off into side chambers. A leather settee to one side of those doors had a stand next to it, with a coffee tray already waiting for them. This room made the one at the hotel look paltry. The burgundy bedding was finer than anything Alejandro recalled sleeping on before. This was a
prosperous
man’s bedroom. He’d clearly underestimated the family’s wealth. “Is Joaquim still in the police?”

“Yes.”

That had to be a matter of choice, then. Joaquim surely didn’t
need
to work, not given the grandeur of this house. He
chose
to.

Serafina dragged Alejandro toward one of the closed doors. “This is your dressing room.”

The dressing room smelled a little stale, but Alejandro suspected that all he would have to do was request that the servants clean his garments, and they would. He crossed to an armoire and opened it to discover more jackets and trousers than he thought he would ever need. He wasn’t accustomed to
choosing
. He took a deep breath. “What should I wear?”

“I’ll pick it out for you.” Serafina busied herself selecting a shirt and other garb, revealing that she had some familiarity with this room and his possessions.

“Did you live here while I was gone?” he asked cautiously.

Her hands stilled. “For a while,” she said softly. “When they told us you were dead, I went back to live with my parents.”

It was probably an awkward topic, but he risked it anyway. “Why didn’t you stay?”

“I . . . Joaquim believed you would come back, but I wasn’t sure.”

He felt his brows drawing together. “But you knew I wasn’t dead.”

“I didn’t think you were dead,” she whispered. “I just . . . didn’t think you wanted to come back. To me, I mean.”

Alejandro found himself gaping. Serafina Palmeira
—
who was beautiful and a talented singer and would be any man’s dream
—
wasn’t sure her husband had loved her.

What exactly had happened between them during those three days? Apparently there hadn’t been a great deal of talking, yet somehow she’d come out of that time with the impression that he would run from her.

He went to her side. “I’m back now.”

She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face against his tatty jacket. “Please let me stay.”

He wanted to get to the base of whatever was bothering her, but he would need to do it delicately. He laid his cheek against her dark curls and prayed that he would figure out the right words that would keep him in this life. And her in it as well.



Meeting the children had been chaos. The girls wept over him. His nephew
—
too young to recall him
—
gave him a strange look, followed by a glance at his father, but then seemed to accept Alejandro’s presence as inevitable. The children, on the whole, didn’t seem to taken aback by the fact that he couldn’t recall their favorite games or who had which room, but he
had
been absent for some time.

Serafina helped him, occasionally leaning close at the dinner table and whispering some fact into his ear. No one took his gaffes seriously, which was fortunate. They seemed inclined to be forgiving. Joaquim’s wife seemed to struggle the most.

“I promised your mother I would never let you forget her,” Marina said at one point. “I will have to tell you about her all over again.”

Ah, now he understood Marina’s worry. “I would appreciate that.”

“She was an amazing woman,” Marina said.

Joaquim had told him his mother had arranged to break all the sereia out of that far-away Spanish prison, and had suffered terribly in that quest. “Perhaps after breakfast tomorrow, we can talk.”



Wednesday, 23 June 1920

That was the course for the next two days. He sat with Marina while she told him all about his mother and the conspiracy that had set her in a Spanish prison in the first place. He had long talks with Joaquim regarding his past. Inspector Gaspar came to speak with him about the hex laid on him. His cousin Rafael came to talk to Alejandro about being a seer, a talent that Rafael shared, and said that his sons would come to see Alejandro eventually. Alejandro met what seemed like scores of cousins and children, all of Serafina’s sisters, and the Gaspar children. He listened endlessly, learning everything about Old Alejandro as if that man were a character in a play.

Flustered by all the names and relationships, he began making a chart to keep track. He did better once he’d written things down. It didn’t help, though, that Joaquim and Duilio had married sisters, or that Duilio’s widowed mother had married Joaquim’s father
—
or rather the man who raised him. Nor did it help that they all seemed to have children to remember. Instead of a family tree, it made a family tangle. Fortunately, everyone proved willing to chatter endlessly about his family’s past to help him figure it out.

The only person who
didn’t
talk to him was Serafina.

So after meeting with Gaspar again on the third day, Alejandro went to find his wife. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in their room, or the library, or the front sitting room. He asked the footman in the front of the house
—
Roberto, the one with the scar across his face
—
if he’d seen her.

“No, Lieutenant,” Roberto said. “She said she was going to meet with her sister this morning. At a bookstore.”

Alejandro felt his brows draw together. “Lieutenant? Did you serve in the war?”

Most of what Alejandro knew about that time had all come from a history of the Great War published the previous year by a Scotsman named Arthur Conan Doyle. Alejandro read it cover to cover, hoping the words would jog some memory.

“Yes, sir,” the footman said. “In the Second Division.”

That explained the scar. The Portuguese Second Division were posted on the front lines for eight months. After enduring a terrible winter, they were overrun when the Germans finally advanced on them. The Portuguese casualties had been high. “Did we ever meet?”

The footman shook his head. “No, sir. I heard you were in Angola for part of it.”

“I was.” Again, something he only knew from letters and that scar on his thigh. “Did you go straight to France?”

Roberto nodded. “Direct from training, sir. Then to Flanders. Wounded at La Lys and taken prisoner.”

The Germans had taken a lot of prisoners that day. From letters he’d sent to Joaquim, Alejandro knew that he’d annoyed his superior officers by protesting the condition of the Second Division several times. He’d known a catastrophe waited in their future, and had hoped to change some part of it. Roberto was evidence that he hadn’t succeeded. “But you’ve made a full recovery?”

Roberto rubbed a finger along the edge of his scar. It bore a hint of red along the edges, and pulled the outer corner of his eye downward. “My wife-to-be didn’t want me back, not looking like this. I was lucky to find work in the city.”

That reminded Alejandro how lucky
he
was. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

One corner of the man’s lips twisted, like a shrug. “The king himself came to talk to me in the hospital, sir. And the Duke of Coimbra visited there, too, though I didn’t talk to him.”

Alejandro was glad of that
—
that the country’s nobility felt some responsibility toward the men they’d sent to war. “Someday I would love to speak with you about your time in Flanders, if you’re comfortable with that.”

“Mr. Mendosa said you don’t remember any of it,” Roberto said doubtfully.

The butler would have talked to all the servants to apprise them of his condition, to avoid any embarrassing situations. “No, I’ve never remembered anything.”

Roberto shook his head. “Might be better that way, sir.”

Wounded and taken prisoner, Roberto’s experience had been far worse than his own. “Still,” Alejandro said, “at some time when Mr. Mendosa wouldn’t mind it, I would like to stand you a drink. Perhaps after hours?”

The footman seemed taken aback, but said, “If you’d like, sir.”

Foiled in his efforts to find his wife, Alejandro headed back to his bedroom to puzzle over his life. One thing there might tell him about Alejandro Ferreira
—
a series of two dozen notebooks on a shelf in his armoire in the dressing room. He’d only peeked at one before.

The notebooks, examined more closely, were of varying ages. In the oldest, the handwriting was childish, while others displayed a more mature hand. He chose a pair of the oldest notebooks. He carried them to the tea table in the bedroom, flipped on the light, and sat down on the settee to read.

Eventually, Joaquim turned up at his bedroom door. “Are you coming down to eat?”

That means I’ve been reading for a couple of hours now.
Surprised, Alejandro held out the notebook for Joaquim to see. “What did I copy this from, do you know, sir?”

Joaquim limped over and peered down at the pages. “Copy? What do you mean?”

“I’ve read it somewhere before,” Alejandro explained. “I can recognize books I’ve read before, even if I don’t recall when or where I read them.” It was one of the stranger aspects of his memory loss. He could remember
fiction
, but not
reality
. Everything he’d read in this notebook so far was familiar.