Later that day, experiencing a curiously detached sort of emptiness and hollow, bleak sense of resignation, she was nevertheless propelled by hunger to wrap herself in her housecoat and stumble in the general direction of the glass room on unsteady legs. To her surprise, the Señora Castellan was already there drinking tea and nibbling on toast and marmalade.
'I take it you didn't find your way to Port Haven,' she said with a small smile when she noticed Kara, 'and that you were so desperate to get there that you appropriated my old bicycle. I hope you gave it a little oil, first: it has been hanging on that wall in the shed for a very long time.'
Kara found herself staring, unable to imagine the prim and proper Señora Castellan doing something as girlish as letting her hair down and riding a bicycle.
The Señora must have understood Kara's look, for she chuckled and said, 'Oh, yes, I was quite the wild one in my younger days. My late husband thought I was the most exciting, most exotic creature he'd ever laid eyes on. You'd never think, to lay eyes on me, that I was the little country girl from Menerbes he fell in love with so many years ago. Do you know Menerbes?'
Kara shook her head.
'Well, let me tell you something of it. Menerbes is a small town in the south of France, very near the Spanish border. Like all border regions in Europe, the people there are multilingual, and are of two heads, two hearts and two cultures. Menerbes has the look of an old Latin town. Some of its houses have thick walls of adobe, tiled roofs, old-fashioned hearths that are still used in the old-fashioned way for cooking and heating- the hearth in the house I was born in was very much the heart and soul of the place.
'My father owned several orchards, and my job was to ride that bicycle along the unpaved country lanes to where the men were working and take them their meals, which were made by Maman and their wives.
'There was a young man, a Spaniard from a very old family, who lived in a castillo high up on a hill above the orchards. I thought him very cold and aloof, and he all-too-obviously found me very young, undisciplined and uncultured. Or so I thought.
'But one day I found myself caught in the most ferocious rainstorm, and there was me, too proud to admit that I had foolishly ignored the signs in the weather, and therefore too proud to ask for anyone's help as I struggled all the way home.