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16

The Village

In July, they went to Spain. Sir Andrew said it was a new beginning for the three of them: living proof of the turning over of the new leaf that Theo had agreed to after the Olympia debacle. They could start being a family, just as Sir Andrew had always intended.

It was Elena’s first visit to Spain as well as Theo’s. Sir Andrew had close connections with the country. He had spent a significant part of his youth in Barcelona and Andalusia, where his family had business interests going back generations—something they had in common with many other English aristocratic families who had stayed loyal to the true faith through the Reformation and the persecutions of Queen Elizabeth. Like Theo, he had been bilingual for as long as he could remember.

He had wanted to take Elena to Spain as soon as they were established in London, but she had resisted, unable to cope with the prospect of another journey, albeit one much shorter than the crossing of the Atlantic. Now she agreed, and the voyage had been a success unmarred by Bay of Biscay storms that had been predicted but never materialized.

From Gibraltar they drove along the coast to Málaga, where they ate lunch on the terrace of an expensive restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean, shaded from the noonday sun by an arbor of magenta bougainvillea flowering in rich profusion.

They had been given the table with the finest view and Theo noticed how the waiters hovered obsequiously close to Sir Andrew, ready to respond whenever he signaled to them. He looked like he owned the place, Theo thought. A senorito among his lackeys.

At the end of the meal, the ma?tre d’ brought a dusty bottle to the table, showed it to Sir Andrew for his approval, and then carefully poured two-thirds measures into three tulip-shaped glasses.

“He’s too young, Andrew,” said Elena anxiously.

But Andrew brushed aside her concern. “Nonsense,” he said. “I was drinking wine at my father’s table when I was half Theo’s age. It’s time he learned about the good things in life.”

“Smell it first,” he told Theo. “Like this.” He gently rolled the dark amber liquid from side to side as he bent over the glass, inhaling deeply.

Theo imitated him.

“Now what can you tell me?”

“Nuts,” said Theo. “Hazelnuts. And salt, maybe. I’m not sure.”

“Good,” said Andrew, smiling. “And now drink slowly, savoring the taste on your palate.”

It wasn’t what Theo had expected. He had drunk wine a few times, but this was different: cold and dry and with a sharp, tangy flavor all its own, which he couldn’t put into words. And then afterward there was a woody taste that he didn’t know whether he liked or disliked.

Sir Andrew laughed, seeing the indecision on Theo’s face.

“Do you know what it is?” Sir Andrew asked.

Theo shook his head.

“Sherry—it’s an old amontillado fermented and fortified when I was not much older than you in my family’s vineyards in Jerez, and then aged in oak casks in the vaulted cool of the bodegas. The aftertaste you were trying to understand is partly derived from the wood, which has to come from the Eastern United States. Quercus alba—the American white oak: no other tree will do. I was in New York buying casks when I met you and your mother, so in a way it is sherry that has brought us together.”

“So this is yours?” asked Theo, pointing to his glass. He was impressed, in spite of himself. He’d always known his stepfather was rich, but he’d thought of his wealth as just money in a bank, not income derived from something real and romantic like a Mediterranean vineyard.

“Yes,” said Sir Andrew, turning around the bottle to reveal the Campion name on the label as if it were a party trick. He pointed to the center, where there was a small picture of a woman in traditional Spanish dress with a rose in her hair and an enigmatic smile on her lips. “That’s my grandmother,” he said proudly. “My grandfather loved her, which is why he put her face on his bottles. She died before I was born, so I don’t know how she felt about it, but I do remember my grandfather taking me down the stone stairs into the cool, dark vaults when I was a boy and telling me that his sherry was a homage to her beauty. There were tears in his eyes. It’s my most vivid memory of him, one that I treasure.”

“She was Spanish?”

“Yes, but her mother was from Mexico. Like yours. Perhaps I will buy another vineyard and put Elena’s face on those bottles,” said Sir Andrew, raising his glass to his wife, who blushed and laughed, drinking in the compliment. But Theo bridled, clenching his fists under the table. He had been fascinated by the sherry, but now he was angry again. He hated the way Sir Andrew acted the grand senor and paraded his marriage as if it were a Hollywood romance. It made Theo remember how his father had done the same, sitting over dinner at the family table in New York, describing his meeting with the young Elena in Penn Station. And now he was forgotten as if he’d never been, devoured by the Brooklyn worms, while Elena gazed starry-eyed at her second husband as if he were her first. At moments like these, Theo’s gut ruled his brain, and no amount of rationalization could stop him hating his mother and stepfather.

He drank the rest of the sherry at a gulp, but Sir Andrew didn’t notice, having eyes only for Elena.

After lunch, they drove into the center of the town and parked near the cathedral, standing in the square outside to admire the ornate stonework of the facade and the white tower soaring above it into the cloudless summer sky.

“There were meant to be two,” said Sir Andrew with a smile.

“Two what?” Theo asked.

“Towers. They ran out of money to build the south one, which is why the Malaguenos call the cathedral La Manquita—the one-armed lady.”

Just at that moment, the bells in the tower began to ring: a joyous pealing—perhaps a wedding was being celebrated inside the church—and Theo looked across to his mother, who was craning her neck upward, past the belfry to the dome and cupola shining in the sunlight. The ecstatic expression on her face made him think of his father again, gazing up at the silver spire of the Chrysler Building on an equally beautiful summer’s day four years before, and he was filled with a sudden sense of loss and vulnerability that pierced him like an arrow. Unexpected and razor-sharp.

Elena turned toward him, holding out her hand, but he instinctively drew back, seeing the tears in her eyes. His mother’s uncontrolled emotion repelled him, just as it had when he was a small boy, but Sir Andrew had the opposite reaction, immediately going over to his wife and putting his arms around her.

“What is it?” he asked. “You can tell me, my love.”

“It’s just it’s the first time ...”

“The first time what?”

“The first time I have been in a country where the people speak my language and practice my religion. This beautiful church is the heart of this town. I can feel it beating—” Elena pressed her hand to her side as her voice broke. “Oh, I wish I had come here before,” she went on, composing herself. “But I always feel so weak, as if I can’t move or change anything. It’s always been like that, but it’s worse now, somehow. I don’t know why.”

Elena had her back to Theo, but he could hear what she was saying even though he didn’t want to, and he could see his stepfather’s face as he held her. Sir Andrew was frightened and Theo felt the fear, too, running through his veins like a contagion. He tried to suppress it but only half succeeded, knowing that the old terror of losing his mother was waiting in the wings, ready to spring out at him again like an evil genie released from its bottle.

Elena pulled away from her husband and took a handkerchief from her handbag, patting her cheeks and blowing her nose. She was smiling now and she turned to Theo, holding out her hand again, which this time he reluctantly took.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you hate it when I make a scene, but I can’t help it. I’m crying because I’m happy. Because we are here, the three of us. In this place where God is too. Don’t you ever feel that sometimes?”

Theo had his eyes on the ground, saying nothing. He wouldn’t lift them because he felt sure that everyone in the square had come to a halt and was staring at them, even though he found that the opposite was true when he looked around a moment later, after Sir Andrew had provided the perfect answer.

“Like the sun shining in the rain,” he said. “You are that because you feel everything—be it joy or sadness—without filter or translation. It’s why I love you.”

Elena nodded, and Theo could see in his mother’s eyes that she felt understood. But by her husband, not her son. And Theo was on the outside, looking in, locked away with only bitter irony for company.

From Málaga they drove away from the coast across a rolling treeless plain the color of brick and yellow oxhide. The road was unsurfaced—little more than a wide track—and they stayed in third gear, bouncing through potholes and sweating profusely in the dry heat. The azure sea with its silver waves, lost to view behind them, seemed like a fading dream from which they had now awoken to the hard reality of a desert land. There was at most a trickle of water in the dried-out streambeds in which stunted pink and white oleander bushes clung to life alongside the ubiquitous gray-green agaves with their coarse, spiky leaves. Behind the car, a cloud of fine dust thrown up by the wheels hung in the still air like a curtain.

Sometimes they stopped to drink water and let a passing wagon drawn by a team of straining mules go by. Theo saw how the drivers shouted and cracked their whips and pitied the poor creatures anchored to their traces as they labored slowly on under the merciless hot sun. A lifetime of uncomplaining drudgery until they finally dropped dead, leaving their carcasses behind to be sold for leather and glue.

At a crossroads, a cart brightly painted with vines and flowers and laden with olives had been pulled to the side of the road under the shade of a grove of thick-leaved poplars. The driver was asleep in a hammock slung between the high front wheels, while his mule slept, too, standing up with only its tail twitching involuntarily against the attentions of the flies. A few yards farther on, a small wayside shrine made of peeling painted wood contained a chipped blue-and-white statue of the Virgin standing on a makeshift plinth. At Elena’s insistence, they parked and went over. A small bunch of wildflowers was lying on the ground at the Virgin’s feet, wilting now in the heat, and beside it, a handwritten notice weighed down with pebbles begged passersby to pray for the soul of a child, Maria Fuentes, killed here by a madman.

There was no date and no explanation. No answers to the obvious questions that sprang into Theo’s mind—Why the killing? Why here? Just the hard, red plain stretching out on all sides baked dry by the sun. The child was dead. The madman had killed her. What was done was done. Elena crossed herself and prayed briefly before they returned to the car, leaving the driver and his mule still fast asleep under the trees.

Slowly, the road started to wind and climb toward the foothills of the distant snowcapped mountains. Men and women were working in the dusty fields, bent double as they hoed, and Theo was surprised to see teams of oxen pulling wooden plows. Nothing was mechanized except their car. It was as if they were driving backward, he thought, into a biblical world that had survived unchanged since the dawn of time.

They began to pass villages that appeared like splashes of white paint against the ocher-colored hills, with short columns of smoke rising into the still air above their crimson-tiled roofs. Outside one, they were stopped by a column of sheep moving slowly across the road like an eddying river. Below, a real stream defied the drought and trickled between the rocks where women with worn, leathery faces and hair tied up in kerchiefs were laundering sheets and shirts. They stopped their work and stood for a moment motionless, staring up at the car as if it were some alien visitor from another planet, and then as one went back to their washing.

“The peasant women are tough here,” said Sir Andrew, looking down. “They give birth in the morning and are back washing their husbands’ clothes in the afternoon. It’s always been the same.”

Theo saw his mother shudder.

There were more people on the road now as they drove on. Women with water jugs balanced on their heads as they walked and bent-over men coming down the paths from the hills with tied-up bundles of firewood and pine cones on their backs. Some were carrying such heavy burdens that Theo couldn’t see their faces. They looked like some strange species of tree creature, he thought. Not human at all.

“What do they do with all that wood?” he asked. “It can’t just be for themselves.”

“The bakers need it to fire their ovens,” said Sir Andrew. “They give the gatherers bread in exchange. It’s not an easy life.”

Such understatement! It was a terrible life, Theo thought. Not one worth living. He had never seen such work. The firewood gatherers endured worse than pack animals, who at least could stay upright under their loads. His mind reeled as he tried to imagine their wretchedness.

“Will we be there soon?” asked Elena, whose suffering in the heat made her oblivious to the misery of others.

“Yes. Very soon. These are my orange trees,” said Sir Andrew, pointing proudly out of the window toward carefully tended groves running down the hillside as far as the eye could see in long, even lines. “We send them to Scotland for marmalade in the spring. It’s a small business—not like the sherry—but profitable and guaranteed. The manufacturers in Dundee have to use these oranges because without them the taste changes. They tried switching to cheaper ones from Portugal in my father’s time and lost half their customers, so I think they’ve learned their lesson. The British are connoisseurs when it comes to their marmalade.” Sir Andrew laughed, and Theo wondered what else his stepfather owned. It was another version of Spain that he seemed to be projecting: a network of flourishing business interests flowing plentiful profits through the rural economy and into his capacious pockets, completely at odds with the vision of grinding poverty that Theo had been witnessing with growing disquiet outside the car window.

They passed a weathered stone calvary in a grove of silver-leafed olive trees and a sign announcing the name of the village as Los Olivos .

“Half a village and half a town,” said Sir Andrew with a wry smile. “Too big for one, too small for the other. The people have been arguing about it for years, but they can never come to a decision. So one day they are villagers and the next they are townsmen, and whatever you call them, they are insulted.”

Ahead, the village-town climbed toward the silver-domed belfry and spire of the church rising above the tessellated roofs in the shimmering sunlight, and beyond and behind that in the haze, the pine-clad foothills skirting the mountains. Higher and higher, leaving the plain behind.

They drove slowly up through the narrow, winding lanes. Here, in the lower quarter, the single-story houses were no more than hovels with collapsing thatch for roofs and their once-whitewashed stucco walls fading to mottled gray, matching the faces of the inhabitants whom they passed here and there, leaning back against the crumbling masonry, staring into nothingness. Only the children were mobile, running barefoot after the car in their dirty smocks, with their hands outstretched and white dust streaking their tousled black hair. They were shouting, but Theo couldn’t hear what they were saying through the closed windows of the car.

The confining walls on either side gave way as they entered a square with a small crumbling fountain in the center, dripping water into two galvanized tin troughs, where a donkey was drinking and a girl was filling an earthenware jug. Her face was turned away from Theo as she bent down, but she had a scarlet hibiscus flower in her hair—a stab of unexpected color amid the monochrome townscape.

Sir Andrew stopped the car, unable to go on because their way was blocked by an overturned cart that had lost a wheel. A sack or two of prickly pears had spilled out of the back onto the filthy cobblestones, and the children who had run after them into the square were busy picking the fruit up and dropping them as the thorns cut into their hands. The driver of the cart was yelling at them, but they paid him no attention.

Across the way, on the other side of the fountain, men in berets were drinking and playing cards at tables set up outside a small café, apparently indifferent to the commotion.

Sir Andrew wound down the window for a moment to shout at the driver to pull his cart out of the way, and Theo’s senses were immediately overwhelmed by the acrid smells of the barrio—animal excreta and urine and rancid oil and smoke—and raucous sounds, too—a radio somewhere playing tinny flamenco, two invisible dogs carrying on a howling duet, and, closer at hand, the shrieks and cries of the children.

A few moments later the way was clear and they drove on, leaving behind the children and the girl whose face Theo had still not seen and now never would. As the car turned out of the square, he just had time to notice a line of red graffiti reading Viva La AnarquíA , daubed on a wall that had previously been invisible behind the cart.

Looking back over his shoulder, Theo felt a secret excitement. The bent-over backs and the hollow stares of the peasantry were misleading. There was life here beneath the surface, and the same wish to change the world that Esmond had uncovered for him in England. Anarquía —he tasted the word silently on his lips, wondering who it was that had scrawled it so boldly on the wall with the trailing paint dripping down from the bottom of the letters like blood. He wanted to meet that person.

The car continued to climb and soon the village changed. The streets were wider now, and the houses were taller with tiled roofs and honeysuckle and bougainvillea trailing across their bright whitewashed walls, carefully pruned back from varnished oak doors and wrought iron grilles set over recessed windows. One door that they passed was open, and Theo caught a momentary glimpse of a shaded garden under fruit trees with a moss-covered fountain playing in the center, surrounded by ferns. A secret world hidden away from the burning sun.

Around a corner they came at last to a new square with the church at its center. Its architecture was entirely different from the rest of the village, built to last and to dominate. With its thick buttresses and iron-studded door, it seemed to Theo more like a fortress than a place of worship—a statement of intent in hard gray stone. The massive walls rose up above the surrounding houses to the open belfry that Theo had seen from below, with a heavy bronze bell hanging in its center. African swallows soared and swooped like tiny black airplanes around the dome, while the church’s gleaming silver spire soared above them into the blue sky like a spear aimed at the sun.

Elena wanted to get out, but Sir Andrew insisted on driving on.

“We can go to Mass tomorrow,” he said. “I will ask the priest. He is most accommodating. But now you’re tired and we must get home. It’s very close.”

And so it was. A few more winding turns and they were there, driving in through a wrought iron gate between two rampant marble lions set on high pillars, and up past an ornamental garden to a long white house terraced into the steep hillside with a stone figure of the Virgin Mary in a niche above the door, her hand outstretched in a gesture of beckoning benediction.

“Welcome,” said Sir Andrew. “Welcome to my childhood home.” And going over to Elena, he picked her up in his arms as if she were weightless and carried her over the threshold into the cool, dark interior.

From the beginning Theo loved the house. It was built on three floors with its back to the hillside so that only the bedrooms on the top floor had views up toward the mountains.

On the ground level there were stables and storerooms with nets of fruit hanging down from the ceiling rafters—quinces and persimmons and Sir Andrew’s own bitter oranges. There were hams, too, which kept through the summer if rubbed with salt, and jars of home-cured olives and dried apricots and figs stacked on shelves. A Shangri-La of food beyond the dreams of the emaciated peasants and children in the village below.

To the side, beyond the stables and the garage for the car, was the accommodation and office of Sir Andrew’s steward, who watched over the house and the orange groves in his master’s absence. He was a dour bachelor with hair tonsured like a monk’s and a high, protruding forehead that Theo liked to think had expanded over time to retain the statistical information that he kept stored away inside. His mouth was thin, and he never smiled but bowed slightly whenever he encountered Theo in the hallways—his bows to Elena were deeper and to Sir Andrew a true bending of the back. He was called Senor Madera—Mr. Wood—and was always addressed as such. Theo thought the name entirely apposite to his character, and all the time he was in the house, Theo never found out if Senor Madera had a Christian name.

Above the ground floor were the main rooms of the house. At one end, with its own set of stairs going down to the storerooms and pantries, was the large kitchen presided over by the housekeeper, Senora Constanza, whom Theo liked from the beginning. She was as friendly as Senor Madera was distant and delighted in serving him exotic-tasting treats whenever he came visiting, just as she had done for Sir Andrew when he was a boy. She was also welcoming to Elena, who spent many happy hours in the kitchen learning about Spanish cooking, while reciprocating with recipes for Mexican dishes that she had once made for Theo’s father on her Westinghouse electric range in New York. Such intimacy with a servant would have been unthinkable in Sir Andrew’s house in London, but here it came naturally, adding to Elena’s newfound happiness.

Beyond the kitchen was a large hall at the center of the house, suspended between staircases leading up to the bedrooms and down to the main entrance door. And from there, further paneled doors led into the dining room, where immensely heavy, elaborately carved chairs were assembled around a polished mahogany table that shone in the evening under the lights of a wrought iron chandelier, and then on into the salon with its red-tiled floor half covered with Moorish rugs, woven with geometric designs.

An oil painting of Sir Andrew’s grandfather hung over the big stone fireplace in the salon—shades of black portraying the clothing and hair and necktie with only the flesh of the face, the narrow starched white of the shirtfront, and at the bottom of the picture, a glimpse of a pale hand holding a watch chain relieving the dark. He had been painted in middle age after the death of his beautiful wife, whose image he had placed on his sherry bottles in sunnier days, and Theo thought he could sense the suffering in the face behind the narrowed eyes and the slightly pursed, determined mouth, which reminded Theo of his stepfather when he was laying down the law.

There were other portraits, too, just like in London, and sometimes Sir Andrew pointed up to them as if they were old friends when he was reminded in conversation of some exploit or failure of his dead forebears. This connection back into a personal past and the associated sense that Sir Andrew conveyed of being part of a tradition with values and duties inherited from those who had gone before him irritated and attracted Theo in equal measure. Sitting in the salon in the evening with a glass of Campion sherry in his hand, he gazed into the dancing flames of the fire, listening to his stepfather talk, and thought of the contrast to his own history. Behind his mother and father lay nameless ancestors killed in pogroms and persecutions in distant unknown countries, leaving him now rootless and alone, washed up on another foreign shore.

Was his stepfather offering him a way to change his fortune? A way to belong? Had he been right to reject the offer of his name that Sir Andrew had held out and then courteously withdrawn on that first day at Saint Gregory’s? Sir Andrew was the last of his line, with no son or heir. And yet, and yet ... Theo heard the voice of Esmond telling him not to give in to temptation and join the ruling class, but instead to think for himself and not stand idly by while the few oppressed the many. The burning wood on the fire had been brought down from the hills by half-starved men bent double to the ground. The truth was hidden behind the dishonesty of the picturesque.

After dinner Theo liked to go up onto the terrado , the flat clay roof terrace above his bedroom, and sit in the summer twilight, gazing out at the immense panorama of the Andalusian landscape stretching away on all sides. Here, he was raised up in the sky facing the full moon as it rose lamp-like over the line of mountains to the east, while down below the roofs of the houses descended toward the vast plain in which the lights of other villages twinkled here and there in the gathering darkness. In a line of deeper blue on the edge of the horizon lit by the last rays of the sunset, Theo thought he could glimpse the sea.

He concentrated his mind on listening to the sounds of the evening: the desultory barking of dogs; the drip, drip, drip of the fountain in the garden; and the soft cooing of doves settling for the night. And if he listened hard enough, he could sometimes hear the faint magical twang of a guitar played by some lovelorn boy outside the window of the girl he was courting, or so Theo imagined. He yearned toward the music but without having any way to reach it. It hurt, laying bare the pain of his loneliness and isolation, but the ache excited him, too, because it made romance seem real and not just the stuff of books. He thought of the girl at the village water trough, with the hibiscus flower in her hair, whose face he hadn’t seen.

And then the tolling of the church bell would wake him from his reverie and send him back down the cool stairs to his room, leaving the moon and the stars behind.

Theo loved the house, but he sensed, too, that it was coiled in upon itself, separated from the village and the land from which it was drawing its sustenance. It was like the other wealthy homes clustered around the hilltop, safe behind their iron gates with the church standing like a barrier between them and the barrio below.

He had seen how few people attended Mass when he reluctantly accompanied his mother and Sir Andrew to church on Sunday, two days after their arrival, and he instinctively understood that the church’s thick walls and high tower were there not to welcome and unify but to dominate and divide. In this town it was the wealthy who were riding the highway to heaven, while the poor peered up at eternity through the eye of a needle.

Theo had spent the last two years in a bastion of privilege in the English countryside, and he wasn’t slow to recognize that he had come to another rich man’s citadel. He remembered the stench that he’d smelled when Sir Andrew rolled down the window of the car on the day of their arrival, and the daubed red scrawl on the wall of the tumbledown square in the village down below— ?Viva la Anarquía! There was another world out there, close but far removed from the expensive books and tapestries in Sir Andrew’s salon and the musky scent of evening jasmine in his carefully tended garden. Esmond had taught Theo well, and he knew he must not remain on the terrado , looking down. Spain—the real Spain—was waiting for him, and he needed to go and find it for himself.

So, on that first Monday morning, he put an orange in his pocket and ventured out without telling anyone where he was going.

At first the way was clear as he retraced the route of their car journey from the church, which stood high above the houses like a beacon. But soon after that, he became lost in the twisting, narrow streets that all looked the same, with the sky no more than a strip of blue above his head. Downward, always downward, or so it seemed, but without ever coming to the end of the maze.

The smell of the real Spain became all too real now. The reek of rancid olive oil and garlic burning on invisible cooking fires kindled with rosemary and lavender brush was a pungent mixture of sour and sweet, but still not strong enough to overlay the universal stink of urine and excreta. The heat made Theo dizzy and increased his nausea, and he staggered over to the side of a broken-down house and regurgitated his breakfast into the gutter. On the other side of the street, an old woman with a face as wrinkled as a dried prune watched him with beady eyes, saying nothing. Flies buzzed around his spinning head and crawled in the vomit.

He called out an apology and then hurried on, ashamed and directionless, turning corners at random until he came out into another square even more run-down than the one through which he’d passed in the car on the first day. Two uniformed men wearing strange, shiny three-cornered hats sat on a bench in the far corner beside an open door, but Theo took no notice of them. He had eyes only for the gray fountain at the center, which he stumbled toward, desperate to drink. He swallowed greedily and pushed his face down into the trough as if he were a donkey. It was cool and he felt momentarily better, but now someone behind him had hold of his sleeve, pulling him back.

He looked around and there was no one. Down, and there was an old man with no legs, just stumps, pointing at them with one hand while he tugged at Theo with the other and began his ritual wail:

“ Por el amor de Dios y de Maria Santisima, una limosna, caballero, una limosna ... ”

Alms, alms ... Seized with an unreasoning panic, Theo twisted out of the beggar’s grip and walked quickly away, leaving the crying, angry voice behind as he turned onto the first street he came to, hoping that it would take him back up to the church instead of down, farther into the labyrinthine heart of the barrio.

Behind him he could hear footsteps, accelerating as his grew faster.

He wanted to run, but his legs wouldn’t obey his brain’s command. He was too weak and exhausted and so he just stopped and turned around, taking his pursuer by surprise so that they almost collided with each other.

The man started talking straightaway, with his feverish dark eyes jumping from side to side. Theo could barely understand what he was saying. He was on the brink of hysteria, and his heavily accented Spanish was almost like another language. It seemed to lack half the normal consonants, so that it sounded as if his mouth was full of pebbles. The unexpected language barrier increased Theo’s sense of alarm.

But slowly he began to make sense of often-repeated words—Senor Madera and Don Andrés, oranges, money—too little money and no money—and hungry—everyone hungry: he, his wife, his children. Each outburst was accompanied by a crazed nodding of the man’s head and repeated rubbing of his emaciated stomach.

Theo was frightened but also appalled. The man’s meaning was clear now: he had been paid so little by his stepfather’s steward that he and his family had been reduced to starvation and semimadness. But how did he know who Theo was? How long had he been following him? And what was he going to do next if Theo couldn’t give him what he wanted?

Theo never found out the answers to his questions, although he guessed later that the man must have seen him with his mother and stepfather outside the church when they went to Mass the previous Sunday and then recognized him when he was drinking at the fountain.

Behind the man’s back, the two Civil Guardsmen whom Theo had seen in the square were quickly approaching. Abruptly, one of them took hold of the man and pulled him back, and, when he began to protest, slapped him hard across the face with the back of his glove. As the man reeled away, the guardsman seized him by the collar as if he were an animal and began frog-marching him back down the street. The quick brutality—over in a moment—astonished Theo, leaving him rooted to the spot, at a loss for words.

The second guardsman was asking him for his name. “Theodore Sterling,” he whispered, but then added, “Campion-Bennett,” because he was lost and wanted desperately to go home. The name worked like a magic spell. The guardsman bowed and offered with elaborate courtesy to show him the way, and in a ridiculously short space of time, Theo found himself back in front of Sir Andrew’s house, feeling infinitely relieved and utterly ashamed.