From behind the pillar where she hid, Nene’s eyes rose up to the vista behind them. The lush and vividly green pastures were being watered, as they were every evening thanks to the new state-of- the-art irrigation system her father had invested in, the droplets catching the light in the sunset and throwing out prismatic rainbows. In the next field over, the hides of the velvet-flanked herd gleamed as the animals shuffled slowly in the dying heat, heads down, horns up. It might have been a bucolic scene but for this confrontation, shattering the crowning peace and throwing it down on the ground in great, jagged shards.

Still unseen from her hiding place behind the post, she watched as the men jostled on the spot, their arms jerking their weapons spasmodically but their feet rooted – for now – as they jeered and heckled, spitting towards Señor Martin’s feet, repeating their calls for the fields to be turned over. Anger twisted their faces, violence glittering in their eyes, but they were still yoked, still reined in – just. This was still a protest, not yet a mutiny.

Nene knew exactly what they wanted. Even as protected as she was, she had overheard the countless pleas for land on which to cultivate crops that would feed their families. People were starving through lack of land and lack of work too, for far from their rights being protected, anyone at La Ventilla found in possession of union papers was summarily dismissed from the Mendoza payroll.

Every time her father called a meeting with her brothers, she stood on the other side of the closed doors and listened to them talk business. She had heard them admit that by law the labourers should not work sixteen hours but eight, that they should get extra pay for extra hours, that union papers gave them protected rights. All of this was official decree, and yet the law appeared not to apply to them. The Civil Guard never enforced the new Republican government’s mandates and the estate guards were never punished for the extreme violence they meted out to anyone caught gathering acorns, windfall olives or collecting up firewood . . . Somehow, they were free to do as they pleased. The law didn’t apply to them.

Montez and Vale, her eldest brothers, now twenty and twenty-two, were only too eager to reinforce the status quo. Occasionally she heard Arlo try to speak up, to offer a com-prom ise viewpoint to their totalitarian position, but he never got more than a few sentences out before he was silenced, his opinion as the third son almost as unimportant as hers.

Almost, but not quite. As a girl, she had the least power of all – whenever she had tried intervening, beseeching her father to give up one field, just one to keep the peace, he swatted her away like a bothersome fly, even slapping her one time when she had been too forceful, telling her that this was men’s business, she couldn’t understand . . .