‘Yes. Like I said.’ Marina’s eyes looked down quizzically at the note before looking back at Charlotte again. The bill was for twelve euros.

Charlotte nodded. ‘Okay. Well that’s a shame, sorry to have bothered you. I must have the wrong person,’ she said, deliberately keeping things oblique. ‘Thank you for your time.’

She took her bag from the back of the chair and walked past the woman, sensing the weight of her stare on her back, almost able to read her questions hanging unspoken in the air.

‘Wait – your change!’ Marina called after her.

Charlotte looked back casually, almost lazily and smiled. ‘It’s fine,’ she said with a shrug. ‘You keep it.’

Chapter Five

Ronda, June 1936, four years later

Indigo carried his head well during the pirouette, his neck arched and staying on the bit, and he maintained his cadence through the move, but Nene felt her legs and back aching from the unnatural position, the pommel between her thighs beginning to bruise the tired muscles.

‘Sit up, up. Straighter,’ the instructor barked, the long training whip trailing in the sand as he walked in tight circles in the centre of the ring, his eyes narrowed into thin slits as he scrutinized her and the horse’s forms – their silhouettes, comportments; they had to flow as one to succeed together. She was nothing without the horse and he nothing without her; they were truly the sum of their parts and sometimes she felt she was only important, visible even, when she was on his back, as though he was a base lifting her up into her father’s line of sight.

For Nene, it had been love at first look, un coup de foudre as the French said, and she had all but begged for her father to buy him when chance brought them into each other’s orbits. The magnificent blue-black stallion had originally been a birthday present for the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the land – Don Bartolome de Palencia, who was a personal friend of exiled King Alfonso; Don Bartolome had dreamed his daughter Pepita would make him proud and become an Amazona on Indigo, but the weakly girl was terrified of the beast and had humiliated herself and her father when, at the fiesta at the de Palencia latifundio, she had screamed in fright trying to feed him a carrot. A carrot!