(1/3) Go Saddle the Sea Read Free

one crippled arm, Don Francisco was glad to keep him on in the stable. Bob believed—he was the only one who did—that my parents really had been married. As they were both dead,
they
had no say in the matter. All my relatives in the big house were quite sure in their minds on the opposite side. My grandmother looked at me as if I gave her a pain, and Dona Isadora, my great-aunt, had masses said every single day for my mother, who had died, they said, in a state of sin, after having given birth to me.
    Bob said that my father was Quality. "Captain Brooke wasn't his real name," he told me. "Don't you let those toffee-nosed Cabezadas put you down. Pooh to
el senor Conde!
An English baronite is worth half a dozen Spanish counts any day. You are as good as they are, Master Felix, and don't you ever forget it."
    "Perhaps these things of my father's will tell me where to find his family," I said to Bernie, feeling the little bundle, which was wrapped in stained linen, thin and brittle with age and hot weather. My thumbs itched to untie it, but I felt it would be more dignified—as well as more polite—to wait till I was back in my own chamber.
    "Maybe—they will," wheezed Bernardina. "And my advice to you,
hijo,
is not to stay here, where you're despised. Leave this place and find your fathers kin. You've a right—to choose—where to hang your hat. You know what I always say—go saddle the sea—"
    She stopped speaking. A look of pure concentration came over her face—as if she were trying to remember some important name; or as if—I thought stupidly—she found herself obliged to dig out a bit of gristle with her tongue from between her back teeth.
    "
Manolo!
" exclaimed Bernardina suddenly.
    She lifted herself up, looking past me.
    I twisted my head round, thinking someone must have walked up silently behind my back. But nobody was there. Then I remembered that Manolo was the name of Bernie's baby, who had died long before I was born.
    One of the kitchen girls, coming back with a hot brick in a cloth, screamed piercingly and dropped the brick on the flagstones.
    I turned my head again in time to see Bernardina topple slowly and heavily off the step on which she was balanced; it was like seeing a great log, which had
been floating down a millstream, suddenly upend itself and go over the milldam.
    Isabella flung herself forward; I scrambled back down the stairs. But we both knew that what we were doing was no use. I think Bernie died before she fell. There she lay, on the granite flags, her great mouth open and her small eyes staring, still with that look of surprise. Dead as the stone on which she lay.
    Father Tomás swished back, tut-tutting irritably, and pushed us aside.
    "Go to your room, boy! And you, girl, fetch the others—fetch some strong women, and the porter, and one of the gardeners—tsk, what a way to die—"
    I went away quietly. There was no point in staying.
    Taking a different passage, I walked into the big kitchen, where Bernie had been mistress all my life long. It was a grand room. The walls and floor were covered with shiny red tiles, decorated by little blue-and-white diamonds and crosses. The fire burned on a wide platform, the step up to it marked out by more tiles, green-and-white ones, these; and a two-foot-wide shelf ran most of the way round the room. There was still plenty of fire in the hearth, and some candles burning, but nobody in the room; I daresay they had all run off to lay out Bernie and say prayers in the chapel. I pulled up a stool to the fireside and sat there shivering. I couldn't believe yet that Bernie was dead. Every minute I expected her to come roaring in through the door, calling out, "Hey, boy!
Hola,
my
little tiger! You want a
merienda
? Glass of beer? Bit of bread and chocolate? Just a minute, then—"
    It looked as if she had been making herself a
merienda
just before she had been taken ill. A pestle and mortar stood on the big scrubbed table with some chocolate in