The Caged Tiger

She had been lucky—very lucky, she acknowledged wryly. The chance entering of a competition in a women’s magazine had led to a contract for illustrations for a magazine serial and from there to her present work on children’s books. She was not rich, but she had enough to buy a small flat in a Pembrokeshire village; enough to keep Jamie and herself in modest comfort, but not enough to give the little boy the warm winters he needed until his strength was built up.

After dinner while Rodriguez served coffee in the sala Sebastian came and sat beside her.

‘You must try to forgive Ruy,’ he told her awkwardly in a low voice while his brother was speaking to the manservant. ‘He has changed since his accident.’ He shrugged explicitly. ‘Who would not, especially a man like Ruy who was always so…’

‘Male?’ Davina supplied wryly, watching the blood surge faintly beneath Sebastian’s olive skin. ‘Oh yes, I can guess at the devils that torment him now, Sebastian, but what I can’t understand is how your mother dared to conceal from him that she was sending for me.’

Sebastian shrugged again, this time avoiding her eyes completely. ‘You have seen how Ruy reacted. Just as she knew that you would not come if you knew the truth, so she knew that Ruy would not allow you to be sent for. He has his pride…’

‘And was deserted by the woman he loves,’ Davina supplied.

Sebastian looked surprised and uncomfortable. ‘That is so, but my brother is not the man to enforce his emotions on a woman who does not want them. You need have no fears on that score, Davina.’

‘I haven’t,’ she told him dryly. ‘I’m well aware that the only reason I’m tolerated here is because of Jamie; the son Ruy has always refused to acknowledge… the son who even now he tries to pretend might not be his…’

The telephone rang and Sebastian excused himself hurriedly, leaving her alone. Stifling a yawn, she closed her eyes, meaning only to rest them for a few minutes.

Whether it was the faint hiss of the wheelchair, or some sixth sense alerting her to another’s presence that woke her, Davina did not know. When she opened her eyes the sala was in darkness apart from one solitary lamp casting a pool of soft rose light over the ancient Persian carpet.

‘So, you are awake. I seem to remember that you had difficulty before adjusting to our hours.’

‘You should have woken me before.’ A glance at her wristwatch confirmed that it was late—nearly two in the morning. They were the only occupants of the room, and her sense of vulnerability increased as she realised that Ruy had watched her as she slept, observed her in her most unguarded moments. No, not her most unguarded, she acknowledged seconds later; those had been when they made love. She shivered involuntarily, the light shining whitely on Ruy’s teeth as he bared them mockingly.

‘Why do you shake so, querida?’ he asked dulcetly. ‘Can it be that you are afraid of me? A man who cannot move without the assistance of this chair? You fear the caged tiger, where you would not fear the free?’

It was on the tip of her tongue to point out that caged tigers could be unmercifully lethal, driven to scar and wound by the very virtue of their imprisonment, and so it was with Ruy himself. In him she sensed all the dammed-up power and bitterness of a man for whom life has lost its sharp sweetness and turned to aloes on his tongue.

‘What is it you fear most, my little wife?’ He was close enough for her to smell the sherry on his breath and to remember with contracting stomach muscles the taste of his lips on hers. ‘That I shall exact payment for your desertion of me; for depriving me of my son?’

‘You could have come after us,’ Davina reminded him levelly. ‘If you’d really wanted us….’

He made a harsh, guttural sound in his throat, his eyes darkening to anger. ‘Is that what you wanted in a husband, Davina, a man who would prove himself to you over and over again? And the man you left me for? The Englishman who meant more to you than your marriage vows—what happened to him, or did he no longer want you when you stopped calling yourself the Condesa de Silvadores?’

Davina had never been able to think of the title in connection with herself, but she was too bewildered by what Ruy had said to pay too much attention to his reminder that she had stopped using his name when she left his house. There had been no man in her life since the day she met Ruy, apart from his son, and it infuriated her to think that he dared to berate her about some imagined lover when he…

‘There was no one!’ she started to protest angrily, but Ruy’s expression said that he did not believe her.

‘No?’ he sneered. ‘You are lying to me, querida. You were seen with him in Seville. And it is known that you left Spain with him, taking my child with you.’

From the past Davina conjured up the memory of a bearded, fair-haired fellow-Briton she had met in Seville. He had been an artist, and with this common bond between them they had started talking. Davina dimly remembered that her mother-in-law had found them chatting enthusiastically to one another in a small pavement café, and she, innocent that she was, had assumed the older woman’s contempt sprang from discovering her drinking coffee in such a shabby little place, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, she realised that the Condesa must have thought she was having an affair, perhaps as a means of getting back at Ruy. So now she knew why Ruy had been so reluctant to believe that Jamie was his—and she hadn’t helped. Although she had known of her pregnancy she had said nothing for several months, trapped in the bitterness of knowing herself unloved and keeping the knowledge of Jamie’s conception to herself as though she could use it as a talisman to ward off the threat of Carmelita.