Free Luckstones by Madeleine E. Robins Page B

summer. Besides, my dear, I am afraid he has the most
gothick objections to foreigners. Not that you are foreign, of course,
but. . . ..” She glanced at Silvy’s impassive face with insensitive
meaning.
    Dorothea had hastily ushered Mrs. Haddersleigh from the
house; she heartily wished her at Jericho and returned to the drawingroom full
of apologies. Silvy was smiling.
    “That one,” she began disdainfully. “That
Mrs. Haddersleigh is an imbecile, but she is right. Niña, we will go to Spain!
Your aunts and uncles there will take us in; your grandfather, the Barón, he
will arrange a marriage. . . .”
    “Wonderful,” Thea said dryly. Silvy was not to
be stopped. For days, while their debating and considering went on, Thea was
overwhelmed with stories of Spain, of sunshine, and of gracious, happy people. “The
English are like frogs!” Silvy pronounced baldly. “I never wanted
your mama to come to this place, niña. Now, when we go back, you will
see what real people are.”
    The more that Dorothea had considered the matter, the more
it seemed the solution to their problems. There was no future for her now in
England but to go as governess, and Silvy would never have countenanced that. “You
are Ibañez-de Silva,” she protested when Thea first offered the idea. “Even,
you are Cannowen. Your papa would never have allowed such a thing!”
    “If Papa had wished to have a say in the matter,
Silvy, he ought not to have gone out with the Hunt on a morning when he was
still half-foxed and on a hunter he could not hold. Only think: we are nearly
penniless, and if I could find a position. . . .’
    Silvy had been immovable. She began to make inquiries about
travel arrangements, about selling Grahamley.
    “Oughtn’t we to write and to see if my
grandfather will take me in?”
    “Take you in? Of a surety, cara. We will write
and tell the Barón we are coming. You who have been brought up in this
cold country, do not understand. You are the daughter of the daughter of the Barón Ibañez-de Silva. Of course he will take you in. The Barón will
arrange all.”
    o0o
    “The Barón will arrange all,” Dorothea
repeated now, kicking a clod of dry, pale dirt, watching it disappear on the point
of her shoe. “Yes, he arranged everything deedily, didn’t he?
Thanks to the Barón poor Silvy practically catches her death of cold in
the street in Burgos! Thanks to the Barón we go flying off to a nunnery
like something out of Shakespeare! The Barón! Pfaugh. If I had my
grandfather here, I’d tell him. . . .”
    A sound like a low-voiced groan brought her out of her fine
reverie of vengeance. Surely it was impossible, a man’s voice within the
convent enclosure, but it was a voice nonetheless. Thea was almost certain. She
was fluent in English, Spanish, and French, but this sound was none of them.
    “Hola!” she ventured nervously. No use
trying English here; the English were enemies again, since the Bourbon king
Carlos had signed the treaty of Fontainebleau with Bonaparte. It might be a
French soldier—the thought made her shiver; she had heard stories about
the French troops marching through Spain. If it was one such, her borrowed
habit would be little protection from him. This complicity with the French had
been another of her uncle Tomas’s reasons, there at the inn at Burgos:
too dangerous to have a niece, even a half-Spanish one, with an English surname
and wheat-blond hair, as part of his household. “ Quien es?” she
tried again.
    There was no sound this time, but a faint rustling in the
brush by the ditch. Dorothea considered probabilities. A child from the
village, looking for berries; a goat, foraging; a Bonapartist spy; a
Fernandista, lost in the northern wilds and come to enlist the aid of the nuns
in the Prince’s cause. . . .
    “Fustian,” she said aloud. “Fairytales.”
She turned around again, away from the culvert. At her first step the sound
began again, faintly, a soft sporadic