It was hard for a child to grow up with the death of one of its parents, but even harder for one parent to be alive and a child be denied contact. She could remember her mother answering her own naive childhood questions as to why her parents were not together and married.
‘Your father’s family would never have allowed us to marry, Fliss. Someone like me could never be good enough for him. You see, darling, men like your father, from important aristocratic families, have to marry girls of their own sort.’
‘You mean like princes marrying princesses?’ Fliss remembered asking.
‘Exactly like that,’ her mother had agreed.
‘I had no idea that things had gone as far as they had when Annabel was sent away,’ the Duchess was saying now, looking rather grim.
‘I was conceived by accident on the night she and Felipe parted. Neither of them had intended … My mother said my father had always behaved like a perfect gentlemen, but the news that she was being sent away led things to get out of control.’ Fliss immediately defended her mother, feeling that she was being criticised. ‘My mother didn’t even realise at first that she was pregnant. Then when she did her parents insisted that she write to my father to tell him.’
She wasn’t going to have the Duchess thinking badly of her mother, who had, after all, been an innocent and naive young girl of eighteen, desperately in love and heartbroken at the thought of being parted from the man she loved.
‘That was when my mother received a letter back saying that she had no proof that I was Felipe’s child, and that legal action would be taken against her if she ever tried to contact Felipe again.’
The Duchess sighed and shook her head. ‘My mother-in-law insisted. In her eyes, even if your mother had previously been acceptable to her as a wife for Felipe, the fact that she had allowed him such intimacies …’ The Duchess gave a small shrug ‘In families such as ours there is something of the long-ago traditions of the Moors with regard to the women of the family and the sanctity of their purity. In Vidal’s grandmother’s day girls of good family never so much as left the family home without the escort of a duenna to guard their modesty. That is all changed now, but I’m afraid a little of what has been passed down in the blood lingers. There is a certain convention, a certain fastidiousness, a certain requirement within the family that its female members abide by a moral code and that—’
‘That brides are virgins?’ Fliss suggested.
The Duchess looked at her. ‘I would put it more that the men of the family are very protective of the virtue of their women. It has always been my belief that had Vidal’s father returned safely to us here in Granada he would have insisted that your mother’s innocence was honoured and your position within our family recognised. You are, after all, a member of this family, Felicity.’
The sight of the young maid coming out to ask if they wanted fresh coffee had Fliss shaking her head and excusing herself. It had been a long day. And tomorrow would be an even longer one now that she had insisted she wanted to see the house that had been her father’s home, which he had now left her. A day in which she would be spending time in the company of the one man her instinct for self-preservation told her she should be spending as little time with as possible.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘FELICITY, I KNOW that Vidal plans to leave immediately after breakfast tomorrow morning for the estate, so I won’t keep you up any longer.’
The Duchess and Fliss were drinking their afterdinner coffee, sitting at a table on the vine-covered veranda outside the dining room.
Fliss had been very relieved indeed to discover that Vidal would not be joining them for dinner, as he already had an engagement with some friends.
It was true that she was feeling tired—drained, in fact, by the tension of the day—so she thanked the Duchess for her kind consideration and stood up, agreeing that she was ready for bed.
Having suspected that even though there would only be the two of them for dinner the Duchess would dress formally, Fliss was wearing her black dress, thankful that she had packed it. The jersey dress was an old favourite, and it looked good on her, she knew. She had bought it in a sale, and even then had baulked a little at the price, but the matt black fabric was cleverly cut and draped, and Fliss had quietened her conscience by saying that the dress was an investment piece that would earn its keep in terms of cost per wear.
She had washed and dried her hair before dinner, noticing that the sun had already lightened some of its strands.
It was not quite midnight—early, she knew, for the Spanish—but she had to smother a yawn as she made her way back to the main hallway and the stairs, through a succession of rooms all with imposing double doors that opened one into the other in the classical fashion, each one of them filled with heavy and no doubt extremely valuable antiques.