Empress Bianca Read Free

of freshly squeezed orange juice that is only marginally inferior to that served at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. ‘You know I’ve always loved Mama and would never do anything to harm her,’ she says, stepping into forbidden territory. ‘But I’m worried about her. You know… all those stories going the rounds suggesting that she killed UnclePhilippe.’
    Leila nods sagely, her expression unreadable, at least to her granddaughter Antonia.
    ‘What do you make of them?’
    Leila shrugs in a way that conveys everything and nothing at the same time.
    ‘I need to know, Granny. You have answers that I need to know.’
    ‘Let me put it this way,’ Leila replies affectionately. ‘I hope you never have to live with the knowledge that any child of yours has the blood of not one, but two, people on her hands. Now, do be a dear and pass me the toast. And never let on to your mother that you believe she’s anything but the most wonderful person on earth. She’s not like other people. It’s not so much that she doesn’t have feelings as that she can turn hers on and off in a way ordinary people cannot. She is, I have to say, an extraordinary woman in every sense of the word. That’s both her blessing and her curse… and ours too.’
    ‘So you think she really had a hand in…’
    Leila cuts off her granddaughter in mid-sentence. ‘There are some truths that are best left unsaid. All that matters is that you know in own your mind what the truth is.’

Chapter One
    T he infant who would grow up to become Bianca Mahfud was born Bianca Hilda Barnett in Jaffa, Palestine, in 1930. Her background was as incongruous and exotic as she herself would turn out to be. Her father Harold Barnett was a Welsh surveyor who arrived in Palestine with the British Army after the Great War, when the British Mandate came into effect. Her mother was Leila Milade, a Palestinian whose paternal family owned orange groves in Jaffa and whose mother was from a Jewish mercantile background.
    But for the Great War, Leila would never have met, much less married, an Englishman. There were already enough suitable families in Palestine from which to select a husband; and, in the ordinary course of events, her father Joseph Milade would have spoken to one or two fathers with sons of a suitable age and arranged for them to call upon the Milade family with a view to arranging a marriage when Leila had turned seventeen.
    That was how things were done in those days. The fact that Leila was Jewish by religion would have made no difference whatsoever to her desirability, for Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in harmony, having done so for over a thousand years and to such a degree that intermarriage between the religions was an accepted feature of national life.
    Bianca Mahfud’s parents met one afternoon in 1920. Leila Milade was being driven home from school in the family buggy when the sound of a motorized vehicle backfiring frightened the horse, causing it to bolt. But for the quick reaction of Harold Barnett, then an army sergeant stationed in Allenby Square, Leila might have been killed as the horse tore towardsthe main thoroughfare. Harold, however, grabbed the horse’s stirrup and brought it to a halt without even considering the danger to himself. Only afterwards, when Leila was thanking him in French, a language he knew slightly from his time in France during the Great War, did he notice how extraordinarily beautiful was this blonde-haired, green-eyed creature with the high cheekbones and lush lips. Taking her to be French, Harold’s commanding officer ordered him to see her home.
    So began the friendship, then courtship, of Leila and Harold, which ended four years later in their marriage. This was a period when the unthinkable was becoming acceptable. Like many other parts of the world, the old order in Palestine was giving way to a new one, and in Joseph Milade’s household, a Britisher - any Britisher - was desirable by virtue of his nationality