Free The Muse by Jessie Burton Page A

cried.
    â€˜Don’t be a coward,’ said Sarah.
    Teresa caught Olive’s eye, and smiled, and Olive felt furious to be so publicly humiliated. Isaac pulled out a live chicken, its loose feathers floating to the floor, scaly feet dangling comically in his grip. The bird’s reptilian eye swivelled; fear twitched in its toes, tensing into claws. With his left hand, Isaac kept it still on the floorboards. It was making a muffled cluck, straining for the cool of its mistress’s bag. Slowly, Isaac placed his right hand on the back of the bird’s head, and cooing quietly, he tightened his grip. With a determined twist, he broke the chicken’s neck.
    The bird slumped onto Isaac’s palm like a stuffed sock, and as he took his hand away and rested the creature on the veranda, Olive made sure he saw her look down at the drying bead of its eye.
    â€˜You will eat today,’ Teresa said, directly to Olive. Olive couldn’t tell if this was an offering or an order.
    â€˜I’ve never seen anything like it so up close ,’ said Sarah. She gave the newcomers a radiant smile. ‘I’m Sarah Schloss. So who are you two, then?’
    â€˜It’s just a bloody chicken,’ Olive snapped, her heart contracting as Isaac Robles laughed again.

 
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    2
    T eresa watched the group move indoors as she collected her offerings from the veranda. She hadn’t wanted to come; it looked so obvious to her, so needy. There’s another rich guiri turned up with his wife and daughter , Isaac had said . You should see the car, the travelling trunks. There’s a gramophone roped to the roof. ‘Who is he?’ she’d asked her brother, but neither he nor anyone in the village knew. All that was clear was that a week ago, the duchess’s old finca had finally got some new inhabitants.
    It was not that unusual for wealthy foreigners to come to this corner of southern Spain, with their industrial inheritances and discontentments with city life. Indeed, Teresa had worked for two sets of them before. They came down via Paris or Toulouse, Madrid or Barcelona, laden with boxes of watercolours and novels – and typewriters to write their own novels – and initialled trunks, which sometimes fell onto the road because of their clumsiness with the local mules. They were bohemian millionaires, or, more commonly, the bohemian children of millionaires, from Texas, Berlin, or London, wanting to dip their brush and dissolve in the sierra like one of their barely used watercolour squares. They arrived, they lived for a bit, and most of them departed.
    Teresa could see out of the corner of her eye that Olive had not gone inside. The toes of her woollen socks had been inexpertly darned, which Teresa thought was a shame. ­People like this should dress better. Olive came towards her and knelt down. ‘I’ll help you,’ she said – in halting Spanish, which was surprising. Under the girl’s fingernails were crescent moons of vivid green paint. Her bob haircut needed a trim – untamed, it coped her head like the cap of a wide mushroom. When Olive smiled, Teresa was struck by how Sarah’s features had been repeated in her daughter’s face, but it was as if they had missed a beat and become a jarring echo.
    â€˜I’m still in my pyjamas,’ Olive said, and Teresa did not know how to reply. That much was obvious, wasn’t it? She picked up the floppy chicken and shunted it into the satchel.
    â€˜It’s beautiful here,’ Olive went on, weighing one of the lemons in her palm. ‘My Baedeker says North Africa isn’t far. “ The Catholic kings wrenched this land from the Moorish Caliphates. Crucifying heat in the summer, and skin-­peeling cold in the winter, enormous night-­time skies all year round ”. I memorized it.’
    She seemed