And there, standing out like the place from which all fairytales were conceived, stood a white-walled, red-roofed castle, complete with battlements and cylindrical towers, and even a drawbridge beneath which the stream ran while the dirt road stopped in front of it.
‘This is perfection,’ Caroline whispered.
Luiz stiffened sharply, as if the sound of her voice had woken him from a daze. But he said not a word—not a single word. He just put the car into gear and set them moving again—with a whole new level of tension sizzling around him that kept Caroline’s tongue still.
Going down into the valley was not as hair-raising as it had been climbing up to it. Instead of teeth-tingling sheer drops on one side they were zigzagging down through a series of carefully cultivated terraces that spread out on either side of them. It was all so lush and green and obviously fertile that it was no surprise to find herself recognising just about every fruit-bearing shrub and plant imaginable growing here.
The road eventually brought them out in the valley bottom, just behind the village. Driving through the village itself was another experience entirely. People were out, strolling or just chatting to their neighbours, while dogs barked around the feet of playing children. It was like entering another world. Nothing about the place seemed quite real. Not the dark-eyed, dark-haired simply dressed people or their immaculate white homes with their brightly coloured painted doors and shutters.
And the sense of unreality deepened when everyone went still and stared as they drove by.
Oh, my, Caroline thought, they know who we are! Or at least, she amended that, they know who Luiz is. And she felt the hairs on the back of her neck began to tingle as she watched them stare curiously in through the sun-tinted car windows at Luiz’s stern dark profile.
‘Do I start referring to you as el conde now?’ she asked in a shaky attempt to lighten the tension.
‘Try the Vazquez bastard,’ Luiz gritted.
And that was the point when she began to lose her patience with him, because while Luiz was busy seeing himself as the Vazquez bastard, he was blinding himself to what these people were seeing when they looked at him.
They were seeing the lean, dark, arrogant profile of one of their own. They were seeing their own black silk hair and olive-tinted skin and dark brown eyes that stated, quite plainly, Here is one of us. Their expressions were not deriding or hostile, or even vaguely contemptuous, they were simply curious.
If anything, it was the glances she received that brought other forces to the fore. For what was she to these people? She was a pale-skinned, blonde-haired utter stranger, with eyes the colour of amethysts. Nothing even remotely familiar about the way she looked to them.
When the road opened up into the village square, with the sweet little church in its centre, the people all jumped to attention—except for one young man, who ran across the square then into the church. Mere seconds later, a priest in his simple black robes appeared in the opening. Very tall, very thin, and with a shock of white hair framing his lined face, he watched them pass by with a solemn shrewdness that made Caroline’s insides tingle.
‘Is this the church where we are expected to marry?’ she asked in a choked little voice.
‘Yes,’ Luiz replied.
‘Then don’t you think we should have stopped and at least passed the time of day with the priest?’ It was censure and anxiety rolled into one question, because she didn’t want to offend these people, and she was sure that once Luiz had got over whatever it was that was slowly killing him he wouldn’t want to think that he had offended anyone either.
Luiz shook his head. Not once did he let his eyes divert from the way ahead as he grimly kept them moving across the square and through the next gauntlet of curious spectators.
He didn’t even relax when they left the village and began to pass between the neatly tended fruit groves. Orange groves, lemon groves, peach and apricot groves. ‘How can a place like this be bankrupt?’ she questioned on a fresh bout of awe. It was all so rich in everything that life could offer.
‘Through the extravagances of its previous owners,’ Luiz informed her cynically.
He had to mean his own father. ‘Nobody owns something like this,’ Caroline objected. ‘They are merely guardians, whose responsibility it is to take care of it all during their term of office. And if they can’t see what an honour and a privilege that has to be, then they deserve to lose custody.’
‘Spoken like a true lady to the manor born,’ Luiz derided. ‘Maybe I should just cut my unworthy losses and sign it all over to you.’
‘And you can mock me all you like, el conde,’ she sniped right back, ‘But if you can’t grasp the concept of what I am saying then maybe you should do just that.’