Chapter 1 Where We Learned to Hide #2
“Have you thought about your mother? About bringing a servant’s daughter home as your wife and expecting her to accept it?” I searched his face. “She’ll make our lives miserable, Leon. You know she will.”
“I don’t care whether she approves.”
“You care about her. And we’d have to go on living there after the wedding, after everyone had finished telling you what a mistake you’d made.”
His expression tightened, but he kept hold of my hand.
“They don’t get to decide that for me.” He stepped closer. “I want you there, Ysabel. I want to wake up with you and know you’re staying. I want to come home and ask how your day was without waiting until we can hide somewhere to hear the answer.”
I looked down because I could feel myself starting to cry. He took my other hand, bending a little to catch my eyes.
“Tell me if you don’t want that.”
“Of course I want it.” A laugh caught in my throat. “I’ve been trying very hard not to want it quite this much.”
He smiled then, with such naked relief that I wanted to kiss him and shake him for making it sound so possible.
“You haven’t even got a ring,” I said.
He glanced at my hands as though that had only just occurred to him. Then he lowered himself onto one knee in the dirt.
“No. I haven’t. I didn’t know I was going to ask you this afternoon.” He looked up at me, holding both my hands. “But I know I want you to be my wife. I’ll give you everything I have if you’ll just say…”
“Yes.”
He laughed, and I said it again, crying properly now. He was barely on his feet before I put my arms around him, and his mouth found mine while I was still trying to tell him.
When I told Mamma, she stood in the kitchen with flour on her hands and listened until I had finished. I had expected questions. Instead, her face crumpled, and the happiness I had carried into the room caught painfully in my chest.
“Mamma.” I reached for her. “Please don’t…”
“That world will eat you alive, Ysabel.” She wiped her cheek with her wrist, leaving a pale streak near her temple. “Those people don’t know how to love without conditions.”
“He loves me.”
“I know.” She took my hands, looking down at them before she could look at me. “I’m frightened for you. That’s all.”
I had no answer that could make the fear unreasonable. I knew the house she had worked in, the people she had spent years being polite to. I knew she was imagining me having to smile at them for the rest of my life.
“I want to marry him,” I said quietly. “I’m happy, Mamma.”
She studied my face for a long moment. Then she touched my cheek, leaving flour there too.
“Then I’ll learn to live with the rest.”
Leon told his mother Vera we were engaged. Her opposition changed neither his answer nor mine, but we understood that waiting for her approval would mean letting her decide whether we married at all.
So we arranged a small ceremony away from the estate. My parents would be there. Vera knew what we intended, and when the day came, we left without her blessing.
That morning, Mamma kept smoothing my sleeve while Papa stood beside us in a shirt she had pressed twice. I could see his eyes following her hands, as though he was grateful she had found something to do with them.
“It’s straight,” I whispered.
“I can see that.”
“You’re still doing it.”
She stopped, her palm resting against my arm. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes, but she was smiling.
“You look lovely.”
Papa nodded. He seemed about to say something, then cleared his throat and nodded again. I reached for his hand and squeezed it before turning toward Leon.
He was waiting a few steps away. The moment he saw me coming, he smiled, and I felt the nerves in my stomach loosen enough to let me breathe.
“All right?” he asked when I reached him.
“I think so.” I slipped my hand into his. “You?”
“Ask me in a minute.”
His fingers were trembling. I looked down at them, then up at him, and he gave a small, helpless laugh.
“You noticed.”
“I always notice.”
He held my hand more firmly, and I stayed close while the ceremony began. I heard the words being spoken to us, but what I remember most clearly is Leon turning to face me when it was his turn to answer.
He said my name without hesitation. Ysabel Cabral. He looked at me as he made his promises, and I could feel my parents behind me, the two people who knew exactly what it had taken for me to stand there.
When my turn came, my voice shook on the first words. Leon brushed his thumb across my hand, and I finished looking straight at him.
Then there was a ring on my finger, and he was smiling at me as though he had been waiting his whole life to be allowed.
“My wife,” he murmured.
I laughed through the tears I had failed to hold back. “You sound surprised.”
“I’m trying to get used to how good it sounds.”
He kissed me, and for once I didn’t have to listen for anyone coming. Mamma was there. Papa was there. I could hold my husband’s face in my hands and kiss him back for as long as I wanted.
Afterward, Mamma hugged me tightly enough to undo all her careful work on my sleeve. Papa shook Leon’s hand and kept hold of it, his eyes moving between us.
“Look after each other.”
“We will,” Leon said, and I nodded because I meant it too.
We returned to the estate married.
On the journey home, I kept turning the ring with my thumb while Leon held my hand. Neither of us had forgotten what waited for us there. Vera would still be Vera, and the people who thought I didn’t belong would have one more reason to talk.
But I looked at the man beside me and believed we could bear it together. I had spent two years letting go of his hand before anyone could see us.
I thought I wouldn’t have to anymore.
Leon’s thumb brushes my ring, bringing me back to the alcove. His shirt is still gathered in my fingers, his arm still around my waist, and beyond his shoulder the afternoon light falls through the gap in the tapestry.
"Where did you go?" he asks.
"Our wedding."
His face softens. "Your father nearly broke my hand."
"He was being welcoming."
"Was he?"
"You'd have known if he wasn't."
Leon laughs and draws me closer. I rest my cheek against him, where I can feel it in his chest.
Two years married, and he still holds me as if there is nowhere he would rather be. Here, with the tapestry between us and the corridor, I can believe him.
I stay a little longer.
"What time is it?" I ask, because I can feel the light shifting and I know we've been here longer than we should have been.
"Does it matter?"
"You know it does. Your aunt's birthday dinner is tonight."
Leon sighs, but he doesn't let go of me. "My aunt is turning eighty-seven. She won't notice if I'm a few minutes late."
"She'll notice if you don't show up at all, and so will your mother."
"My mother notices everything. It's her most exhausting quality."
I smile despite myself, because this is the other thing I love about these stolen moments.
The way he talks to me like we're co-conspirators, like we're still the two people sneaking around behind everyone's backs, like the world hasn't caught up to us yet.
The truth is more complicated than that.
The truth is that we got married and moved into this house and his mother runs most of his social calendar, and sometimes I feel like a guest in my own life.
But I don't say that. Not now, not when the afternoon has been so easy between us.
"I should go start the biscuits," I say instead. "I promised I'd bring something."
"You don't have to bring anything. The villa will have plenty of food."
"I want to. They're my grandmother's recipe, the almond ones. Your aunt liked them last time."
Leon's expression does something complicated, a softening mixed with something else I can't quite read. "You don't have to keep trying to impress them, Ysabel."
"I'm not trying to impress anyone. I'm bringing biscuits to a birthday party because that's what people do."
He looks at me for a long moment, and I wonder what he sees.
The servant's daughter who somehow ended up with his ring on her finger, probably.
The woman who still knows her way around a kitchen better than she knows her way around his mother's dinner parties.
I used to think that would change, that I would learn to move through his world the way he does, effortlessly, like I belonged there.
Two years later, I'm still waiting for it to feel natural.
"I'll come help," he says.
"You'll get flour on your good shirt."
"I have other shirts."
"You have a meeting with the estate manager in an hour."
"The estate manager can wait."
"Leon." I put my hands on his chest and push gently. "Go do your work. I'll make the biscuits. I'll see you when it's time to leave."
He catches my hands before I can pull them away, bringing them to his lips. "I don't deserve you."
"Probably not," I agree, and he laughs again, and I slip out from behind the tapestry before I can change my mind about leaving.
***
The kitchen is my favorite room in this house. It's large and practical and smells like olive oil and garlic, and the staff who work here still treat me like one of them, which is either comforting or painful depending on the day.
Today it's comforting. Today I need to do something with my hands, something real and concrete that I actually know how to do.
I gather the ingredients for my grandmother's almond biscuits from memory: flour, sugar, ground almonds, eggs, a little orange zest.
The recipe lives in my body more than my mind, the measurements approximate, the technique learned from years of standing at my mother's elbow and watching her hands move.
She learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers, a chain of women passing down something precious through kitchens that didn't belong to them.
My mother would laugh if she could see me now, making peasant biscuits in a Don's kitchen to bring to a rich woman's birthday party. She'd laugh and then she'd cry and then she'd tell me to stand up straight and stop apologizing for taking up space.