Free Meeting in Madrid by Jean S. Macleod Page A

tears.
    ‘It belonged to my mother,’ she gulped, ‘but my father gave it to Lucia on their wedding day. It is the Pablo ruby and it should have been mine. It has been handed down in my mother’s family for many years.’
    Wondering if this might be the main cause of dissension between Teresa and her stepmother, Catherine began to unpack her suitcases, hanging up her dresses once more in a capacious wardrobe and folding her underwear neatly in the dressing-chest drawer. For how long this time? Dona Lucia’s dislike of her seemed to hang above her head like the Sword of Damocles, yet it would be Don Jaime who would finally ask her to go.
    She crossed to the windows to look out, opening one of them to step out on to the creeper-covered balcony which overhung part of the patio, and suddenly the scent of stephanotis was all around her. It hung in the still air like incense, cloying, overwhelming, dangerously sweet, holding her there in the darkness until she was aware of a movement on the terrace beyond the thin silver thread of the fountain. A man and a woman were standing out there, half in shadow, half revealed, and the woman was too tall to be anyone but Lucia.
    Catherine stepped back involuntarily. Lucia and Don Jaime? She could not see the man plainly enough, but the two were undoubtedly deep in conversation until Lucia finally made a gesture of dismissal and the second figure dissolved into the shadows cast by the motionless palms. Lucia came towards the house along the colonnaded stretch of the patio, glimpsed here and there before she finally disappeared inside, but once she had gone from the terrace her companion of a few minutes ago returned. It was not Don Jaime. The man was shorter and more sturdily built and he wore a poncho over his clothes, as if he had just come in after a long journey. The horse he had been riding followed him out of the shadows, led on a long rein.
    Catherine drew a sharp breath of relief, although why she should have thought that it was Don Jaime down there on the terrace when he could have spoken with Lucia openly in the house she could not imagine.
     

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    The meal they shared at ten o’clock that evening was traditionally Spanish. It was served in the long, whitewashed dining-room whose windows opened on to the colonnaded end of the patio overlooking the fountain, and the superb black oak refectory table and high-backed chairs with their intricate carving were a joy to Catherine as she took her place beside Ramon, who seemed to be in excellent spirits now that his young niece was safely home. Teresa sat facing them with her back to the windows, and Don Jaime settled Lucia in the armchair at the foot of the table. He himself sat down at the head, very much the master in his own house, saying grace with an authority which stopped Teresa in her tracks as she began to speak.
    ‘I had forgotten,’ she apologised when he had finished. ‘In Madrid people do not always say grace.’
    ‘ “There is only one place better than Madrid and that is Heaven?” ’ Ramon quoted teasingly, but she chose to ignore him.
    The servants entered with their first course, led by Eugenie carrying a huge tureen of soup while Alfredo followed with a tray of ice-cooled melon and the delicious jam o n serrano which Catherine had already sampled in Madrid. The dark red mountain ham, cured in the sun, would be at its best here, she thought, as Eugenie put the tureen down on the table in front of Lucia and handed her the silver serving ladle.
    ‘What has happened to Manuel?’ Ramon asked as they ate. ‘I did not see him come in.’
    Lucia stiffened.
    ‘Surely it is not of great importance what becomes of Manuel,’ she suggested icily. ‘He comes and goes as he wishes, attending to the horses, as he is meant to do.’
    Ramon opened his mouth to reply, but decided against the impulse.
    ‘I hope he has been looking after Seda for me while I’ve been away,’ Teresa remarked.
    ‘Every day,’