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Theo didn’t respond. He had no basis to disagree with Antonio’s reasoning, but at that moment he was in no mood to share his friend’s pessimism. He remembered the way Maria’s attitude to him had changed from contempt to gratitude during their encounter, and he replayed in his mind the promise she’d extracted from Primitivo to leave not just Antonio alone, but him too. Surely she wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t care about him.

In contrast to his companion, Theo walked back up the hilly streets with a spring in his step. He was glad he’d gone to the shop. A few hours earlier, he’d woken in despair, but now he felt something very like hope bubbling up again in his overworked heart.

But his mood didn’t last. At home he wandered the house, unable to settle to anything, waiting for news. It was hardest to cope at night because he knew that that was when the attack would come. He stood motionless on the terrado for hour after hour, staring down toward the square, looking for the sudden leap of flames in the darkness, while the moon traveled serenely through the glittering constellations above his head. His nose twitched like a hunting hound’s as he sniffed for the smell of smoke, but there was nothing. The air stayed still and hot without a breath of wind, and the silent village spread out below seemed suspended in time, waiting.

It made it worse that he could do nothing and tell no one. He sought distraction in company, but then withdrew when his mother peered into his tired eyes and asked him suspiciously what was wrong. She had become calmer as the weeks had passed since her outburst at lunch, and even laughed sometimes in the kitchen with Senora Constanza as they cooked paella together, arguing good-naturedly over the ingredients. Theo liked to be there then, running out to the garden to cut sprigs of oregano and thyme and coming back to stand close to his mother as she used the sharp knife in her petite hand to cut and chop and peel with extraordinary precision and rapidity. Sometimes she would notice him watching and would run her fingers through his hair like she used to do, and for a moment it was as if they were back together in the apartment in New York before their troubles began.

But such moments didn’t last. The laughter would subside and the look of stretched fragility would return to her pale face and he became frightened that her health would collapse again, just as it had before. On the day after Maria had turned him away, he went into the salon in the evening and found his mother lying on the sofa with a cushion under her head. Out of the blue, the thought came to him that she was dead.

She was so still, and in the fading light he could not see her breathing. But instead of going forward to find out the truth, he hung back in the doorway, clinging to the remnants of his uncertainty. It was as if he could glimpse the desolation that awaited him when she was gone and wanted to keep it at bay for as long as possible. If he didn’t go close, she could still be alive, and he couldn’t give up on that chance.

He stood without moving, almost without breathing, matching her immobility, holding on to the moment. And she opened her eyes.

“Why are you standing there like that?” she asked, smiling. “You look like a ghost.”

“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “You looked so peaceful.”

“I was,” she said with her brow creased, puzzled for a moment, as if she was trying to remember a vanishing dream. “But I’m happy to see you, too, my son.”

She looked at Theo quizzically and beckoned him over and took his hand, and he knelt down beside her because he couldn’t stay towering above her. It was too awkward.

“Are you all right?” she asked, looking into his eyes. “I’m your mother. You know you can tell me if something’s wrong.”

He wanted to. He would have liked to pour his heart out to her, but he couldn’t. She wouldn’t understand, and it would make her sick to know the secrets that he was keeping from her. He felt desolate as he surveyed the chasm, years in the making, that now lay between them.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, getting to his feet and crossing over to the window where he stood, looking down past the church toward the wide tiled roof of the ayuntamiento.

Another night passed, and Theo’s nerves were stretched to the breaking point. He couldn’t stand the suspense. He had to see Maria and ask her what was happening, even if it meant a return of her anger and contempt.

But then, just as he had formed the resolution and was about to act on it, she came to him.

He was at lunch in the dining room with his stepfather when Constanza came in to announce that there was a visitor waiting at the door. Elena had woken with a migraine and was lying down upstairs.

“Who is it?” asked Andrew.

“A girl,” said Constanza. “She didn’t give her name.”

“Tell her to come back tomorrow,” said Andrew irritably. “I haven’t got time today. I’ve got to go out again after lunch.”

“But she wasn’t asking for you, sir,” said the housekeeper uncomfortably. “It’s Master Theo she wants. She said he’d know what it’s about, even though I told her that it was irregular.”

“Irregular?” repeated Andrew.

“She’s on her own, sir,” said Constanza, looking distressed.

“Oh, I see,” said Andrew, turning to Theo, who had already gotten to his feet. “Do you know who this young lady is?”

“Yes, I do,” said Theo, moving toward the door. “And it’s all right. I’ll be back soon.”

He went out without waiting for an answer and ran down the stairs and opened the door.

Maria was standing on the threshold. He’d been thinking of her constantly, picturing her face in his mind, and now here she was where he had never expected to see her, turning dream into reality. He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her and hold her and stroke her hair, and perhaps he would have done if she hadn’t started talking straightaway. In a flurry, with her words tumbling out in a cascade of staccato half-whispered sentences, as if she couldn’t hold them in a moment longer. He had never seen her so agitated.

“I had to come. Jesús has chickened out and Antonio won’t help. Says he’s washed his hands of me. And there’s no one else I can trust except you ...”

Theo pulled the door shut behind him and took hold of Maria’s arm. “Not here,” he said urgently. “Go to the top of the hill. I’ll follow you. We can talk about it up there.”

She looked for a moment as if she was going to keep talking, but then she nodded and walked quickly away.

Theo went to the gate and stood waiting for several minutes, looking back nervously toward the house to see if his stepfather was coming out. But the door remained closed, and he set off up the hill.

He realized he hadn’t gone this way since the previous summer, when Antonio and he had ridden their mules up into the mountains. It seemed like a lifetime ago now, and he felt a stab of regret for those days when Andalusia had seemed so vast and timeless and beautiful. Before Antonio’s father took the mules away and his daughter captured Theo’s heart, narrowing his life away from the sierras and the pine forests toward the drab interior of Jesús’s father’s shop down in the barrio.

He found Maria sitting on a stone at the turning in the track that led to the old tumbledown cottage where Antonio had said the witch lived. On any other day, Theo couldn’t have imagined anything he would have wanted more than to be alone with her in the countryside, lying hidden together in the sun-bleached wheat fields, but now he wished fervently that Antonio was here, too, to back him up. His old friend might believe in witches and flying broomsticks, but he also possessed a healthy endowment of common sense, unlike his sister, and Theo had had enough time now to realize that burning down the ayuntamiento was a truly terrible idea. It wouldn’t achieve anything except an incitement to rage and chaos and some awful punishment for the perpetrators, which was what Carlos wanted, of course. More martyrs for the cause meant more recruits. Carlos was a fanatic who cared nothing for individual suffering, not even his own. He’d have forgotten Maria by the time he arrived at the next town.

Theo knew that he needed to try to make her understand this, even if Antonio had failed. This time he couldn’t hesitate like he did before. But she didn’t give him a chance to speak. As soon as she saw him, she took his hand and began to talk, rushing on from where she had left off in front of the house.

“It has to be tonight,” she said. “It’s the old woman’s day off, and if we wait until tomorrow, she’s going to notice her keys are missing and tell someone. Jesús only got them today, and then straightaway he said he was scared. He started sniveling and wailing, and Primitivo was going to force him, which he could’ve done easily—he’s scary when he wants to be—but I told him no. I know I’m going to do a whole lot better in there, finding the records, than that crybaby. Carlos should have chosen me in the first place, but he didn’t because I’m a girl, which is stupid. A lot of the Anarchists are like that. They’re all for liberty and equality until they get home to their wives and daughters and start telling them what to do ...”

She stopped, having lost her thread, and Theo took his chance to jump in:

“You shouldn’t do this, Maria. Your brother’s right. It won’t do any good, and if they catch you—”

“They won’t,” she said, cutting him off. “Not if we have someone watching outside. And it can’t be Jesús. I don’t trust him. He’ll cut and run the first chance he gets.”

She let go of Theo’s hand and got to her feet, breathing heavily. “Will you help us?” she asked, staring down at him. “Yes or no?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he said, playing for time. There had to be some way to make her see how crazy all this was.

But she was already turning away. “I shouldn’t have come,” she said furiously, stamping her foot. “I should’ve known what you’d say. We’ll do it on our own. We don’t need anyone’s help.”

She began to walk away down the hill. Quickly, without looking back. Soon she was at the turn in the track, and then he couldn’t see her anymore. He was alone with the incessant trilling of the invisible cicadas making a mockery of his hopes and the heat and dust of summer stifling his breath.

He ran. Without thinking, he ran. He had to. Thought could come later. She heard him and turned, and the sun was on her face so that it glowed golden, framed by the burnished cloud of her hair—a hundred shades of brown.

“I’ll do it,” he said breathlessly as he caught up to her. “Not because I agree, because I don’t, but because I don’t want you to get caught. Because I—”

“Because, because,” she said, laughing, and reached out toward him, laying her hands on his shoulders, where they had never been before, silencing him. And kissed him. Once.

Taken by surprise, he didn’t respond. Just reeled, feeling as if he would fall, even though he was standing on solid ground. And when he recovered, she had already stepped back and was talking, as if nothing had happened. As if everything was the same as before, which perhaps it was, for her. He didn’t know what she had meant by the kiss, and he didn’t have the words to ask her to explain.

“We’ll meet by the church at two o’clock,” she told him. “You’ll stay by the arch when we go in, and if you see anything, you shine this three times,” she said, reaching into her shoulder bag and handing Theo a square green Bakelite box with a magnifying glass lens set in the center. “Look, it’s easy,” she said, showing him. “You just hold it up and press the switch backward and forward. One of us will be watching all the time.”

“How will you get out?”

“There’s a back door in the lane behind the square. That’s how we’re going in too.”

Theo gulped. He felt like he had a hundred questions to ask, but he couldn’t think what they were. Maria reached out and took his hand. “Thank you,” she said. “Carlos was wrong. I knew I could count on you.”

He didn’t understand. She’d said the opposite two minutes before. But she’d brought the flashlight, so maybe she did know. Understood him better than he understood himself, while she remained a mystery to him, continuously throwing him off-balance every time they were together.

Where they were standing, they were in sight of the houses at the top of the village and she moved away now, taking a path that led off to the left. “I’ll go down this way,” she said. “You’re right. It’s best if we’re not seen together.”

A moment later she was gone, but he remained where he was, as if rooted to the spot: a bizarre, effigy-like figure holding a flashlight up toward the sun.

He took the flashlight home and sat looking at it on the terrado . Everything about the day felt unreal. How had he got to this point when he had intended the opposite? It made no sense. He felt like he was in a fairground hall of mirrors in which everything was an illusion.

Everything except the flashlight. Square and squat and solid, sitting on the top of the wall with its tiny bulb in the big reflector bowl, looking back at him like an eye floating in silver water.

He looked at the eye and knew he would go. He had no choice. He had given his word. For better or worse.

He dressed in black and would have rubbed charcoal on his face if he had any. He felt like a character in one of the boys’ adventure books he had read voraciously in his first year at Saint Gregory’s to distract himself from his loneliness, and he kept the thought in his mind, remembering how those stories always had happy endings.

Outside, his nostrils filled with the rich scent of evening jasmine as he crossed the garden to the gate. The full moon enabled him to see his way, but also filled him with foreboding, because if he could see, then he could be seen too. He was alert to every sound. The unexpected creak of the gate as he pulled it open had him looking back fearfully toward the black windows of the house, and in the road a soft repeated hooting made him look up sharply into the staring yellow eyes of an eagle owl, perched utterly still on the long branch of a cypress tree.

He pulled his soft hat down over his ears and hurried on toward the church, walking around it once before he took up a position under the overhang above the entrance door, figuring this at least kept him out of the moonlight.

He pulled back his glove to look at his watch, counting the seconds down as he prepared himself for the noise of the church bell striking the hour. But when it came, the clang was louder than he expected and he shuddered, feeling each tolling as a knell.

Maria didn’t come, and he worried that he had missed her. She hadn’t said where to stand, but surely this was the logical place?

Or perhaps she had had second thoughts. Maybe Antonio had talked to her again and gotten her to see sense. And he would be able to go home whistling a tune, because he would have done nothing wrong. Out for a walk in the night because he couldn’t sleep.

He stepped outside the doorway to look around. The archway leading to the main square was only a few yards away and beyond, in the shadowy distance, he could just about make out the long, flat outline of the facade of the ayuntamiento. Where Maria’s journey had begun in the improvised art gallery two years before and where perhaps now it was going to end. A dog barked somewhere, and then everything was still.

Overhead, the church bell struck the quarter hour. How much longer should he wait? Another five minutes. Surely that was enough? He was wide awake and desperately tired, all at the same time, and his heart was beating too fast, thumping inside his chest. Even though it was a warm night, he felt cold sweat forming on his forehead. Just a moment to close his eyes was all he needed. Just one moment of rest ...

Suddenly he was aware of someone coming up behind him. He went to turn but he couldn’t, because there was a gloved hand over his mouth and another on his arm, holding him in a viselike grip.

“Keep your mouth shut!” said a voice that he recognized as Primitivo’s. Through his shock, Theo could feel Primitivo reveling in his superior strength, communicating through his hands that he could do with him as he liked. Release him or hold him or squeeze the life out of him if he chose.

“Fuck off,” said Theo, rounding on Primitivo as soon as he’d taken his hands away, so that their faces were only inches apart. He was furiously angry but retained enough presence of mind to whisper the profanity, hissing it through his teeth.

Primitivo laughed. “You were asleep,” he said accusingly. “Fat lot of good you’re going to do us like that. You might as well have stayed home with your sugar daddy.”

“At least I turned up, unlike your friend,” Theo shot back. “You should show some gratitude.”

“Shut up!” said Maria. “Shut up, both of you! We need to work together to do this. Theo’s going to be fine, aren’t you?” She had her hand on Theo’s arm and reached up and touched his cheek for a moment, resting the tips of her fingers on his skin as she looked into his eyes.

He trembled. Her touch compelled him. “You can count on me,” he said. “You know that.”

“Yes,” said Maria softly. “I do. Now let’s go. I’ll show you where to stand.”

They went through the archway and Maria stopped, pointing back to a small recess where the wall met the rounded column of the arch. He could see at once that it was a good position, facing the ayuntamiento, but commanding a wide view of the square with the café on one side and the stone arcade on the other.

“What do I do?” he asked.

“If you see anyone, wait and see what they do. There’s no point drawing attention to yourself unnecessarily. But if it looks like they could be trouble, shine the light. Three times, like I said. One of us will be watching all the time. And when you see burning, then you run.”

Burning! The word unnerved him and he longed to make one final last-ditch attempt to make her see reason and walk away, but he knew that it was hopeless. They were here now and there was no going back.

“Good luck!” he said, putting out his hand.

It felt like a quaint gesture, belonging to his school in England but out of place among Anarchists, and Theo felt like even more of a fool when Primitivo sneered at his outstretched hand as if it was an object of ridicule.

But Maria took it and held it, looking into his eyes as if sealing a compact, before she turned away and followed Primitivo down the stone arcade and into the darkness.

He watched, gazing out into the square that he had come to know so well in its many different guises. He thought of the girls walking the paseo in the evening, slow and loose and seductive, and he remembered the white sheet screen stretched between the plane trees, transporting the villagers as if on a magic carpet to Dracula’s castle. In his mind’s eye, he could see the patient, sun-worn faces of the peasant women squatted down by their wares beneath the arcade, and Maria’s face when he first saw her there with Antonio: she was so beautiful that he didn’t understand why everyone didn’t stop what they were doing just to look.

And now, enveloped in the darkness, the square had another character: sinister, deserted, but alive with expectation, as if it could spring to life in a moment.

Up ahead, Theo saw a beam of light in the ground floor window of the ayuntamiento. They were inside.

And immediately, over to his left in front of the café, he sensed an alien presence. The moon had disappeared behind a bank of clouds, so he couldn’t be sure, but he thought there were shapes moving beside the stacked tables and chairs.

Were his eyes tricking him? Was fear making his brain conjure up mirages in the night? He darted into the arcade and hid behind a stone pillar from where he had a better angle of view, looking straight across the square. He was sure he could see them now: shadowy figures creeping forward with rifles in their hands. Momentarily, the moon peeped out from behind the clouds, and he caught a glimpse of a Civil Guard’s three-cornered hat. They were close to the door of the ayuntamiento.

Up above, Theo could see lights wavering in the windows of the third floor. He had to act now. A minute more and they would be trapped. But if he flashed the light, would Maria see him? She’d told him they’d be watching, but would they, now that they’d reached their goal and got inside the registry? And even if they did see, would they act on the warning? All he knew for certain was that the guards would notice, and then he’d have to run, and after that there would be nothing more he could do.

He had to make Maria understand she had to get out. Immediately. And there was only one way to do that. Running forward past the fountain, he took aim and hurled the flashlight up toward the window on the third floor, in which he could still see the lights.

He launched it like a discus, and as he stumbled to regain his balance, he heard the sound of glass smashing and an outbreak of confused shouting up ahead.

This time there was no paralysis. He pirouetted on his right foot and ran back toward the arch. He needed light now to see his way and, as if in answer to his thought, the moon was out again, breaking free of the clouds, and he was sprinting up into the streets above the church, just as if he was making for the try line at school.

After a minute he stopped, ducking into a doorway. Lights were coming on in several of the houses, and a man in a white tasseled nightcap leaned his head out of a window, looking for the cause of the commotion.

Theo knew he needed to be quiet. He was desperate to get home, but he forced himself to wait until the houses were dark again before he began to pick his way softly and slowly through the winding streets until at last, after what seemed like hours, he slipped in through the iron gate of his stepfather’s house.