Chapter Eight

Ronda, June 1936, four days later

Nene pulled the brim of her hat low. She had stolen it from a peg in the maids’ quarters, the thin shawl and dress too. The dress was slightly too tight across the bodice and a fraction too short in the arms and length – she was so much taller than most other women – but comfort mattered for nothing right now. She just needed to move incognito through these streets, to pass through unrecognized and unmolested.

The bells were already ringing, calling out the mourners, and a steady stream of people were wending their way through the hilly cobbled streets to the Church of Santa Maria la Mayor. Dressed all in black, they looked like scurrying ants from this distance.

She hastened her stride, overtaking a family, the parents struggling to move at any speed with their young children, and she took care to keep her head dipped, her eyes averted as she passed. Her heart was pounding with the terror that she would be recognized and outed – for if that happened, she knew her safety could not be guaranteed. There were stories all over the wireless of atrocities being committed with alarming frequency against people being found in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Tensions since the elections in February had reached breaking point, with communities now pitched against one another: Republicans v. Nationalists; Carlists v. anarchists; Falangists v. communists. Skirmishes were becoming fights, protests revolutions. The country was scaling up its anger, the quivering tension becoming tighter every day. The rule of law increasingly counted for nothing and there was talk that even the military was going to revolt.

Nonetheless there had been no question of her not coming here. She needed to pay her respects to the man who had never been anything other than kind to her, who was the father of her best friend in the world; she needed to kneel before God and beg forgiveness that his life had been taken by her own blood without mercy or just cause. She had scarcely slept since it had happened; her appetite completely diminished, she had grown thin even in the space of four days and she knew her older brothers were watching her closely, looking for signs that she might betray them to their father and give the true account of what had happened.

But would he believe her if she did? Would he care? The Civil Guard had not even paid a visit to the estate, not a single question had been raised. Juan Esperanza’s death had simply been accepted. He had been inciting violence, fuelling a revolution; it was self-defence, that was the official line, and in the face of the Mendoza brothers’ great name and powerful brutality, who would dare refute it?

The peal of the bells lured her onwards, their mournful song beginning to vibrate through her bones as she walked between the giant yew trees that flanked the west door and joined the shuffling mourners filing into the church. It was a deceptively unobtrusive building from outside, the humble plain stone tower offset by balconied colonnades to one side, the narrow arched windows and minaret-turned-tower betraying the building’s original Islamic roots.