Chapter Seven
CHAPTER SEVEN
It takes me longer to get to Spain than it should, and not only because I fly commercial the way I usually do. Or even because I wait to see my doctor before I go. It’s almost as if there’s a part of me that’s dragging her feet, in no rush to leap into the confrontation I know is coming.
Or possibly I prefer my fictional versions of the man who came into my life as abruptly as he left it.
An observation about myself that does not thrill me.
But I am not getting any less pregnant, and it will soon be impossible to pretend it’s just random weight I’ve gained, so in the second week of November I invent a job in Spain, leave the firm in Tess’s capable hands, and go.
I land in Seville, hole up in a lovely hotel that feels like a private hacienda, and dedicate myself to working out how, exactly, I’m going to get to the Marquess himself.
If it could be as easy as showing up on his doorstep, I would—but all my research tells me that the Marquess lives on a grand, old estate in the rolling hills of Andalucia that comes complete with a name and its own history.
The gates to keep the unwanted and uninvited out are implied.
And also visible when I look it up online.
I’ve been to Spain before. I had a client based in Madrid, and another in Bilbao.
But I have never been to this particular part of Spain with its whitewashed houses and dreamy hills.
A few days after arriving in Seville, and adjusting to the new time zone, I drive myself out into the countryside in my rental car.
Because I determined that the de Luz estate is open to the public at certain times each month. And lucky me, I make it over to Spain just in time for one of the house’s open weekends.
I’ve spent my few days in my lovely, airy hotel room fuming.
Mostly at myself. It’s true that I was a virgin that night. But I was not a young virgin straight out of the schoolroom, some trembling little fawn being taken down by the big, bad wolf.
Quite the contrary. I might have deliberately chosen not to get that close to another person over the years, but in the meantime, I didn’t exactly live a sheltered life.
I know perfectly well that I should have used birth control. I should have discussed it, at the very least. Then insisted upon it.
I can’t forgive myself for forgetting. For somehow being so swept away in the magic of that night and that man that I…became someone else. Someone reckless and irresponsible, when I’ve never had the luxury to be either.
But the funny thing is, no matter how annoyed I am with my own failures, now that I know I’m pregnant it’s as if my stomach is settling into the truth of it.
And so do I.
Because I find myself rubbing my belly, but not because it feels weird any longer. These days I’m talking to the baby that’s growing inside.
“Just you wait,” I whisper. “We’re going to have a great life, you and me.”
Because as I drive myself along the winding roads that lead the way to the bit of countryside where the man I know and yet don’t know at all lives—in and out of picturesque whitewashed villages clinging to hillsides, through olive tree alleys, through vineyards, past bell towers and haciendas, cortijos and fields, all the way to a set of huge, imposing gates that look as if they’ve stood just so since medieval times—I know one thing with deep certainty.
I will not be weak. I will not be my father. I will always protect this child, no matter what happens. If that means from my baby’s own father, then so be it.
But before I give birth and all the days after, I will make certain that my baby knows that it is loved.
These are the things that sustain me across the ocean, through my handful of days in Seville, and out into the lands known as a part of the Patrias estate.
But none of this, I remind myself as I drive, excuses him.
He should have been more concerned about protection against exactly this result, given that he is the one with these apparently vast lands and a title already in question.
At the very least, he should not have disappeared the way he did—without a trace, if I’d been someone else—knowing perfectly well that no steps were taken to ensure this didn’t happen.
Not, I can acknowledge, that I was in any fit state to negotiate such things myself.
The massive gates are open today, which does not make them any less imposing. I drive through them at the requested slow pace and I don’t really want to admit that everything inside of me is jittery and strange and something like…
But I don’t want to think that word. I’m not excited . This is a business call, nothing more.
Because I’ve done a lot of furious thinking on the way here. And I’ve had three days to sit in a hotel room, asking myself what I really want from this. From him.
It’s not apologies, not really. I can already sense how insulted I might be if he attempts to apologize for this child within me.
What I do want, and will insist upon, is that we come to some agreement about how this child will never want for a thing. Not one thing, ever. No matter what happens to me. So that if my business disappears tomorrow, the child will be just fine.
My child will never find itself on a train to New York City, hoping for the best.
No way is this kid going to live like I have.
I feel so jittery by the time I catch up with the group that’s assembled for the house tour that I’m half-afraid that they’re not going to let me walk inside with them.
I park and walk toward the assembled throng slowly, breathing in the sweet scent of flowers on the mild breeze.
This is nothing like November in New York, dark and bitter.
Here it’s a bright, blue day, the sun golden and warm.
It has to be seventy degrees here in front of the grand, sprawling house.
Paradise, I think.
Maybe I would pretend I was someone else, too, so no one would chase me here.
When I reach the group I brace myself to be turned away, though that wouldn’t be a hardship here.
We’re standing on a sloping lawn that stretches lazily toward a lake and a tangle of trees, and there are the sounds of happy bells in the distance.
I have the odd thought that I could be happy here, too—
But that’s not why I’m here. And none of the other tourists really look at me, so it looks like I get to go inside.
I’ve gone to the trouble of haphazardly disguising myself, which wasn’t really any trouble at all.
No masks or heavy stage makeup or prosthetics or any of the rest of the tools of my odd trade.
But I have braided my hair on one side, which is unusual for me, and crammed a baseball cap with a sports team logo on it on top of my head, which is unheard of.
I’m wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of sneakers, like any other American tourist.
Which is, I suppose, what I am today.
What I should not look like is the sharp, sophisticated Manhattan businesswoman he met just over four months ago.
Much less that wannabe Cinderella he took to a ball, and then left behind.
So I guess that makes me the shoe.
I stick to the back of the group, my mind going a thousand miles a minute as the docent leads us up to the grand, Moorish arch that rises at the front of the house, then beckons us to follow her into the grand courtyard that waits on the other side.
There is a fountain, and beyond it, a grand set of stairs, and that’s where we’re led. Then inside to a foyer that has clearly been created solely to impress.
And I’m indoors, something else seems to take me over, sweeping me up in a tight, hard grip that reminds me of his.
I know it’s not him. It’s this house. His house.
I feel like Elizabeth Bennet when she first sees where Mr. Darcy lives.
It’s the inescapable weight of his history, and ancestry, and all the things it means to be the eighteenth of anything. All the generations that led to him. Much less a name like his, that according to the internet and our tour guide stretches back across time and marks him as a Grandee of Spain.
Whatever that is.
All I could tell is that it is a designation that is spoken in tones of reverence, at least here.
What I know for certain is that my family’s ancestry reaches back to a boat from somewhere far to the north of here.
And not one of the boats with a name that’s taught in schools.
Just any old boat, unremarkable and unremembered, that delivered a load of weathered peasants from one hardscrabble land to another.
And in all the time since, we might have pulled ourselves out of abject poverty but we would never, no matter what we did, turn into this .
I thought the plane he took me to France on was pretty special. I thought that first villa was lovely and gracious in every regard. The house where the ball was held, on the other hand, was nothing short of remarkable. Extraordinary, even.
But this is not a house, grand or otherwise. This is a palace.
And even that is too tame a word to describe it.
I’m only catching snatches of the tour guide’s lectures on the art and history, issues and politics, that are intertwined with this family, this house, and the story of Spain itself. There are stories of kings and queens, court intrigue, political upheavals, and ancient scandals.
But what I can’t help thinking is that this is the kind of wealth and consequence that doesn’t have to shout. Because it is a shout. In and of itself.
Its continued existence is its own bullhorn, sounding down through the centuries.
The very fact of this place, built as a fortress and prettied up a bit more each generation. As a gift to this or that Marquess to his wife. Or as a mark of ego. Or simply because it was fashionable to have fewer battlements and more ballrooms.
At the end of the day, I realize, these grand old homes are record keepers. Storytellers, room by room, stone by stone. And they bear the marks of all the history they’ve weathered, just as they whisper of the futures they’ll contain.