The Spanish Marriage by Madeleine Robins

grimly. She was easily tired, the adventure had become
nothing more than a sad, plodding drudgery of travel without even the comfort
of daydreams to ease the trip. Riding along, jolted by the familiar slow trot
of the mule under her, Thea tried to believe that something would happen to
make things right between them. The litany began again in her head: If I am
very good, if I wait, perhaps…...if just loving him will do it, and I am
very patient. When she glanced at Matlin it was hard to believe that any
patience could wear down that distance.
    o0o
    Matlin was privately as surprised as Thea when he brought
them to the gate of Roybal’s home, a small estate a few miles west of
Peso da Regua. The villa into which Señor Roybal welcomed them seemed palatial
to Thea now, and his welcome, unblinkingly courteous, was the kinder for the
fact that he was putting himself and his family in danger by sheltering them.
The man took his lead from Matlin, who embraced his friend, announced that
Miguel and Manuela had arrived at last, and addressed Roybal liberally as
cousin. Roybal, his wife, and his daughters, who were summoned to greet their “cousins,”
were uniformly thin, tall, and brown-complexioned. The three girls had their
father’s large, protuberant eyes and their mother’s generous mouth
and jutting lower lip; the sight of the whole family smiling made Thea giggle
mildly. She was to sleep on a real bed, the sheets poorly washed and aired no
doubt, but a change from straw ticking and unfamiliar women sharing with her.
They were to dine with Roybal and his family; a chicken would be freshly killed
and cooked.
    “It sounds like heaven,” Thea muttered to Matlin
nervously. “But won’t someone wonder who we are?”
    “Roybal has a reputation as an openhanded man, and besides
that, we’re cousins. They take their family seriously here. The
Portuguese have no reason to love Bonaparte, Thea; it’s only the French
we have to fear.”
    Roybal took them strolling around the villa, past the
chicken house and a cooking shed where a small crowd of men were receiving a
dole of bread and a cup of soup. Matlin pointed this out to Thea especially as
evidence of Roybal’s generosity. Looking at the faces of the men waiting
for their food, Thea was not reassured.
    After dinner Senhora Roybal took Thea and her three
daughters away to one end of the parlor where they sat before the fire and
giggled and gossiped, and mended a huge pile of torn linen with long, careless
stitches. Senhora Roybal seemed to have no curiosity at all about these
suddenly acquired cousins, and Thea was happy to smile, to stitch, and to
listen to the low-voiced conversation in broken English, between Matlin and
Roybal where they sat, across the room.
    “I am ashamed, almost, to be Portuguese,” she
heard Roybal say once. “We were so busy watching the Spanish, those
imbeciles, suffer their stupid cuckold king and his Austrian wife and her
lover, that sausage maker they made Prime Minister, all the time thinking
ourselves fortunate with our Prince John. The old Queen is mad as a hatter, and
the Princess little better, but our Prince, ah! a pious man and a man of sense
who knew who his friends were. Then, to waver and waffle until the damned
French were in our country and forced him to run away to Brazil.” Roybal
spat into the fire.
    “You’re a little hard on him: with Bonaparte’s
troops on his border....”
    Roybal would hear no good of Dom John. Thea listened, trying
to understand a situation she had only vaguely heard of in Spain. Senhora
Roybal, seeing her guest’s eye stray to the men at their wine, smiled and
shook her head. “Such things they talk,” she said carefully, in
Spanish, and rang for chocolate.
    At last the smiles and polite nodding was done. Thea and Matlin
were shown to a chamber which, naturally, their hosts expected them to share,
but once inside the door Matlin indicated firmly that Thea would take the bed;
he would sleep on the