A Divided Inheritance (50 page)

She wanted to get there before the men, to practise some feints that Señor Alvarez had shown her on the new diagram in the upstairs room. It was better to try them alone – far too
embarrassing to attempt them in front of the men. So she did not even wake Gaxa, but washed hurriedly in the Sevillian soap she was so fond of and, shivering, dressed herself.

Her step was springy as she bounced down the Calle San Pablo towards the bridge. The aroma of yeast drifted by, as the Morisco bakers began to open their shutters behind her; she noticed the
clink of hammer on the cobbler’s iron last as she passed by his shop.

At the yard she pushed on the gate, but it rattled against the bar. Someone must have heard her for a few moments later it swung open and Ayamena was there.

‘Ey, ey!’ she said, in surprise, from behind her manto. ‘Here already?’

‘It’s a lovely morning,’ Elspet said. ‘Look, no rain!’ She told her about how Martha had gone home to England, for she knew she would ask after her, she always did.
It was the only thing they had to bind them together.

Ayamena dipped her head and shook it slowly back and forth. ‘You will miss her,’ she said.

Elspet swallowed, looked at her shyly and admitted that she would. ‘It was nice sometimes,’ she said, ‘to talk in English.’

‘Yes. The mother tongue. Is important.’

‘You miss your own language? Do you have a chance to speak it much?’

Ayamena’s expression suddenly became wary. ‘Excuse me, mistress,’ she said, ‘I have something cooking.’ And she hurried away. Elspet could smell nothing cooking
though, and no smoke came from the oven chimney.

She could not wait to go and admire her handiwork from the night before, so she hoisted her skirts and hurried up the stone steps to the training chamber for a quick peep. The door was already
ajar, perhaps Señor Alvarez would be there.

At first she could not take it in, the black pool of ink, a red spatter that could be blood, the prints of men’s muddy boots. Shreds of torn and crumpled paper lifting slightly in the
breeze. She stared, one hand clamped over her mouth.

The door to the library was open. She skirted round the edge of the room, avoiding the mess, hardly daring to look in.

A whirlwind might have been there in the night. Books were littered everywhere, divorced from their covers, the pages tossed about the room. The leather bindings gutted from their pages, the
leaves ripped apart. One of the volumes of Agrippa lay on the ground, its pages blurred with wet. It was only then she smelt the stink of piss. She bolted from the room.

‘Señor Alvarez!’ she cried, beside herself. ‘Señor Alvarez!’

He appeared in the yard in a moment, pulling on his doublet, and mounting the steps. ‘Yes, yes,’ he called, as he came, ‘I know. It was last night. Someone came in the dark and
did this.’ He must have seen her horrified face, for he gestured at the floor. ‘It is only a bit of paint. It can be done again.’

‘Again?’ she was aghast. ‘What’s happened to it? Who did this? And the library?’

His face fell. He passed his hand over his brow wearily. ‘The library too? I haven’t been in the library.’

She nodded. He groaned, and walked with her to the door. He stood at the door and she saw him press his lips together. ‘We must see what we can salvage.’

‘But who did this?’

‘Someone who bears us a grudge, by the look of it,’ he said, moving away.

How could he be so calm? ‘It’s ruined. When we left it was exact, just like Agrippa’s diagram. You saw it.’ She was speechless a moment with anger. ‘The Agrippa,
it’s on the floor . . . I can’t believe anyone would do this. And Martha’s gone.’ Her voice threatened tears.

‘Sit down a moment,’ Alvarez said. He took her by the arm but before she could reach the chair she was holding tight to him, and his arms closed around her in an embrace. They were
still for a long moment. She felt his hand pressing her to his chest, heard the thud of his heart. Finally, he moved away to look down at her, holding her by the arms.

‘Things change.’ He swallowed, as if to take control of his voice. ‘The perfect seal is inside you now, is it not? The essence of what it is?’ He spoke urgently.
‘Think now. The four elements, and a fifth, the quintessence.’

She could not answer him, for her mind was racing, blood beat at her temples. She took a deep breath.

‘Try to understand me,’ he said. ‘What matters is that the knowledge is inside you. No one can take that away. It is more real than any painted glyph. You have made it real
yourself by your own work.’

He was looking at her with that peculiarly intense stare that he had. She nodded. It calmed her. He was right, last night they had absorbed something, as if the circle and the cross had been
burnt somehow into their bones. She searched inside herself for the sensation of the pattern, and surprisingly, felt it hum there, like a vibration, subtle but insistent.

He moved away further until her hands lingered in his. ‘Understand me, the training comes first. Before everything else.’ She felt the cool air as his fingertips slid away.

She swallowed. It was a rebuff, and she felt its keen edge.

He gathered up a few papers and looked at them as if unsure what to do with them. Eventually he said, ‘Perhaps my students do not really need the training floor. We will clean up, and put
things in order. But it could be that this is timely. We do not need the diagram as much as we might suppose. Perhaps you do not need a maid. We will try today without, heh?’

She looked up at him. His eyes locked with hers. Heat spread up her chest to her neck. He was about to speak, but then seemed to think better of it. Instead, he signalled her to the door. She
followed him out. As he went he banged his shoulder into the door frame, and let out a muffled curse.

Zachary looked over to the kitchen door to catch sight of Luisa. Last night she had brought blankets and cushions and they had spent long, wakeful hours in each other’s
arms. He could not tear the vision of her nakedness from his mind. She had been concerned at his cut head, but her tender solicitations had led to more than he had dared hope for. Now he was in an
agony of expectation, looking for her to appear.

But Etienne, Girard and Pedro demanded to hear his story once they had set eyes on the seal. Zachary described his assailants, parted his oiled hair to show where he had hit his head, and
praised Señor Alvarez’s swordsmanship in routing the three men. The little group were subdued, it gathered them all together against this common enemy. They sat on the steps, eyeing
the weak morning sun and the scudding clouds, before buckling on their sword belts and taking off their sleeves.

‘Don’t you think it odd that the señor asked us to take the pattern into ourselves, and now this?’ Alexander said. ‘He knew, don’t you think, that something
like this would happen?’

‘How?’ Zachary asked. ‘He can’t have known those men would come here and do that.’

Etienne said, ‘You’re not suggesting someone let them in?’

‘No, of course not. Just that he knows things – I think sometimes he has powers that we do not have – that somehow he knew something like this would happen.’

‘Pah,’ Etienne said, rolling his eyes.

‘You think he can tell the future? Like M’sieur Nostradame?’ Zachary was amused.

‘No, maybe not that, exactly.’ Alexander backed down, uncomfortable. ‘But don’t you think it’s odd?’

‘It’s all part of the training, that idea of putting the symbol into memory,’ Girard said.

Etienne spat into the dirt and wiped his lips. ‘A coincidence,
c’est tout
.’

‘Perhaps Alexander is right, I was reading the Agrippa. He has the opinion that everything is linked together in a chain of causal effect,’ Elspet said, venturing an opinion for the
first time.

Alexander caught her eye and smiled, but Zachary said, ‘As far as I can see, if Señor Alvarez knew it was going to happen he should have locked the gate.’

Etienne protested, ‘It was locked when I left, I heard him do it, bolted from the inside.’

‘Then I think someone must have been inside the yard already, maybe hiding in the kitchen to let the others in,’ Elspet said. She told them about the noise in the kitchen and the
broken jar.

‘Why the hell did you not say anything?’ Zachary spluttered. ‘We could have stopped them. Those three thugs nearly killed me. If it hadn’t have been for Alvarez, I would
have been nailed to the ground by now with a rapier through the chest.’

She tried to explain but he shook his head in derision. ‘So much for being alert and watchful,’ he muttered. Then he leaned in towards the others, conspiratorially. ‘But
I’ll tell you this: last night I passed by Don Rodriguez’s sword school.’

‘What?’ Etienne said.

‘You blazing fool. You went there after we left?’ Alexander was incredulous. But then his curiosity got the better of him. ‘Did you find out anything?’

‘No. Not a sign of those men. Maybe they weren’t from there after all. But there’s something going on. A whole army seems to be training there. In the middle of the
night.’

‘How so?’ Girard asked.

‘There’s a long tent set up in the yard – alongside, like a barracks. I sneaked round the side and looked through a gap in the wall. There are piles of muskets and shot, and
soldiers that looked like they were drafted in from all over Spain. They were parading and drilling in the yard in full plate armour.’

‘But Rodriguez’s men – they are swordsmen, not musketeers, are they not?’ asked Alexander.

‘No. You must have made a mistake. Spain is not at war. Unless the English plan once more an attack,’ Etienne said pointedly, looking at Zachary.

‘Hey! Don’t go blaming the English. Anyway, they’d come from the sea. This looked like a land force – foot soldiers, musketeers, pikes.’

‘Sounds like Don Rodriguez is planning a rebellion to me.’ Girard shook his head.

Etienne flapped his hand dismissively. ‘What for? Who he rebel against? I think Zachary makes a mistake. Rodriguez always has many men training. It signifies nothing.’

‘I’m telling you all, this was no ordinary training. And then I walked over to the bend in the river. There are more ships there now. There are sixty or more gathered on the
Guadalquivir. Slave ships and mercantiles, and a host of other smaller craft.’

‘See, I tell you,’ Etienne said. ‘The English, they send a fleet.’

‘It’s not the English,’ Zachary said. ‘I can tell. These aren’t war ships – that’s what I’m telling you. They look like trading craft. It’s
sinister, them all waiting out there like that.’

‘Have you told anyone?’ Elspet asked.

‘Told anyone what?’ asked Señor Alvarez appearing from the house.

They all looked to Zachary to see if he was going to say anything.

‘Nothing.’ He clammed up, and his face flushed bright red.

Señor Alvarez gave him an irritated look. ‘Idle talk wastes time and energy. Go arm yourselves.’

Elspet hitched up her skirts and tucked them into her apron. Zachary was already heading towards the pile of swords and bucklers.

‘No,’ Señor Alvarez shouted, ‘not with those,’ and he pointed to the corner of the yard where a motley collection of besoms and pails had been gathered. ‘The
upstairs training hall – I want it spotless.’ They smiled regretfully to each other and got to work.

They worked hard all morning. They went about the tasks silently, partly because their disgust at what had been done was sobering, and partly because there was a lot to do.
Zachary and Elspet worked in the library side by side. They washed the floor as best they could, wringing out the cloths in the bucket. What would Father have said to see them both scrubbing in the
stench like servants? When she looked out of the window she saw Alexander and Pedro rinsing pages from the books in the trough and weighting them down with stones to dry in the breeze.

Zachary seemed not to notice her, his eyes were faraway as if he only had half his attention on what he was doing. This was unusual, for it was usually Girard the draughtsman who daydreamed out
of the window. Zachary sat back on his haunches.

‘Why do you stay?’ he asked her in a low voice. ‘It has been many weeks now.’

For the first time she saw it was a genuine question.

She answered him frankly. ‘I don’t know. I wish I did. At first it was because I did not trust you, but now I suppose it is because I want to have my future settled – for you
to come home to England with me, so we can sign the papers. I need to know how I will live now my father is gone. And it is all the more urgent now that Wilmot is no longer in charge of the
warehouse –’ She paused, but then more words seemed to tumble out without her bidding – ‘and partly it is because I like the training . . . I mean Señor Alvarez,
there’s something about him . . .’

He put down his cloth and met her eye. ‘Do they know about Wilmot? Greeting and the men at the chambers, I mean?’

‘Greeting. Oh – oh yes. I wrote. I had to. I asked him to put the head warehouseman in charge until I could return.’ She tried to keep her tone flat, without accusation.
‘And I had to write to Dorothy – David’s wife – of course, to tell her. I told her if I could, I would make a donation – for the children.’ She looked to gauge
his reaction but he just nodded. ‘Wilmot was good to me, and I think it only fair. He might still be alive if it wasn’t for me.’ She stopped, aware that talking was not permitted.
She heard the dribble of water as he wrung out the cloth.

He scrubbed the cloth over the patch of floor in front of him, then sat up again. ‘It’s a good idea.’

She was amazed. He was actually agreeing with her about something. She galloped on in a whisper, whilst he was listening. ‘There will be a lot to do, to get the business straight, and
I’m not sure the deputy overseer has much head for figures, and I’m sure he’ll be ruling the roost with David gone. And the house has been locked up too long. All the drapes will
need airing and . . .’ She flushed, realizing she had been carried away. The unspoken question hung there between them, though she did not push him to answer it.

‘After last night, I thought I had a duel to fight,’ he said. ‘I wanted to get even, seek revenge on whoever did this. And I hate to be beaten. But I am beginning to see that
it serves no one if I go after them. No one but myself, I mean. It is only my pride it satisfies. They will think us cowards if we do nothing, but I do not care if men like that think ill of
me.’