The man who answered the great oak door was familiar to me, one of my grandmother’s house servants. I thought he might recognise me, but he did not, and instead stood staring at me, speechless, in a manner that was somehow disturbing. My stomach clenched.

‘Is your master at home?’ I said. ‘Senhor da Alejo? I am on my way to Lisbon, and bring news of his relatives in Amsterdam.’

The man continued to stare at me, then he swallowed and shook his head. He still seemed unable to speak.

‘His wife?’ I said. ‘The Senhora?’

He looked at me as if I were mad, and found his voice at last. ‘The mistress has been dead these seven years. She died in the Inquisitorial prison in Lisbon.’

He squinted at me suspiciously. ‘How do you not know this, if you are a friend of the family?’

I stared at him. Suddenly I was cold, and shaking. Remembering.

That last time we had arrived here, when we three children had hung out of the carriage window, jostling to see who would catch the first sight of the house. Mama trying in vain to persuade me to behave like a lady, Felipe nearly tumbling head first over the side. Then my grandparents were there, welcoming us into the ancient stone-flagged hallway, so cool and welcome after our hot journey.

‘Come, Caterina,’ said my grandmother, ‘you are almost a young lady. You should not tumble about like a wild boy.’ But she laughed as she spoke.

My grandfather kissed me on the forehead, then held me at arms’ length.

‘You have grown two handspans at least since last summer, Caterina. You will be as tall as I before you are done.’

My grandmother had led us through into the high-ceilinged salão, with its floor inlaid with those same blue and white azulejos tiles. We had drunk fruit juice and eaten the fig pasties which were always Isabel’s’ favourites. And mine too, though I pretended to be too grownup to snatch at them as she and Felipe did.

Standing here now, I looked beyond into the same hallway behind the servant, the hallway which led to the salão where we had eaten the fig pasties.

T heir voices sounded in my head.

My grandmother concerned. ‘You are pale, my dear. Are you ill?’

My mother . ‘It’s nothing but the heat. It came early in the city this year. I’m glad to be home here amongst the mountains.’

Minha avó. Mama.

I tried to hide my feelings, but I think I must have revealed something. So my grandmother had died at the very time that we, too, were taken.

‘We did not know,’ I said at last. ‘The . . . the cousins in Amsterdam have written, but received no reply for many years. It is sad news I shall have to take back to them. But your master, when do you expect him to return?’

He shook his head again, and now I saw that his eyes had filled with tears.

‘He went to Lisbon on business three weeks ago. We knew nothing then of this English invasion and the return of Dom Antonio. Word came yesterday. The master has been taken by King Philip’s men and executed without trial. But we knew nothing here of Dom Antonio’s plans, nothing – he was no part of it!’

The world seem to spin around me and I closed my eyes, leaning my forehead against the hot door frame to keep myself from sinking to my knees. I had thought, surely, that my grandfather, of all the family, would be safe. We had brought this death upon him. Dom Antonio’s expedition. Drake’s thirst for plunder. Our stupid blundering and delays at Coruña, our triumphal landing at Peniche. What had it accomplished but the deaths of Portugal’s finest nobles, whether or not they supported the Dom? Three weeks ago he was here, my grandfather. Only three weeks ago. While I sat idle on the Victory in the harbour at Coruña.

And my grandmother had died all those years ago, when we had lain in the Inquisition prison at Coimbra.

Taking me firmly by the arm, the servant led me into the house and made me sit in the cool salão and brought me chilled golden wine.

‘I am sorry to have distressed you with this news, Senhor,’ he said, ‘and the heat . . .’

‘Yes,’ I said dully. ‘The heat.’

‘May I know who you are, Senhor?’

‘Christoval Alvarez,’ I said automatically.

‘Alvarez? The master’s daughter married a Dr Alvarez. You are related?’

‘Yes.’

I roused myself. There was one more person I had come seeking. Surely they could not all be dead.

‘Your master’s granddaughter, Isabel,’ I said, hardly daring to ask, ‘my . . . my cousin Isabel. Is she here?’

‘Oh, nay, Senhor Alvarez. To see her you will need to go to the farm of the master’s tenants, the da Rocas. Do you know the da Rocas? Their farm is through the forest. In the valley on the other side. I will give you directions.’ He was a kind man, still looking at me with concern. I could not tell how much my face had given away. ‘Will you take some food first?’

I refused the food, but listened to the directions, for I could not exactly remember the way. Why, I wondered, was Isabel still at the farm, where she had been placed all those years ago for safety? Why was she not here, in my grandfather’s house? But my sister was alive! I would see her again in less than an hour.

 

Chapter Thirteen

To reach the da Rocas’ farm by the quickest way, I took the half remembered path through the forest of Buçaco. As I child I had loved the forest, a place which always seemed to me an enchanted realm, full of mystery. I knew that it had become the custom, in our Prince Henry’s time, for his expeditions to strange foreign parts – to West and East Africa, to the lands of Arabia, to India and the spice islands far to the east, and later still to Brazil – to bring back saplings of exotic trees and to plant them here, in the native forest of Buçaco. So now our indigenous species of pine and holm oak and lesser trees were interspersed with these strange trees whose names I did not know, but which seemed to carry with them the cries of parrots and birds of paradise, the screams of monkeys leaping amongst their branches, cold-eyed snakes coiled about their feet, and predatory tigers lurking behind their trunks. In the century and more they had stood here, many of them had seeded young descendents, so that a great matriarchal tree would be surrounded by a cluster of daughters and handmaidens.

Although I had set off in haste from my grandparents’ home, the forest, as always, filled me with a sense of awe, so that I slowed my horse first to a walk, and then stopped under a tunnel formed by unimaginable trees whose trunks soared far above my head, and whose branches met and intertwined in the mysterious green light. My grandfather had told us this was a holy place, where monks and hermits had lived in times past, but secretly I had disagreed. To me it breathed an air much more ancient. It was a place where myth was born, a forest from Homer or Vergil, or from the strange jumbled folk tales our nurse used to tell us. Arthur’s knights might have ridden here, but in my imagination they were not the sanctified and cleansed knights of French chansons. They were primaeval. Demi-gods amongst mortal men, who haunted such places as the forest of Buçaco still. Even now, I could not rid myself of these feelings. I dared not turn my head, for I could sense them breathing behind me.