A Stormy Spanish Summer by Penny Jordan Page B

two of you. She could be very unforgiving. In her eyes both Felipe and your mother had broken the rules, and deserved to be punished for doing so. Felipe had no money of his own, no home to offer your mother, no means of earning a living. His job within the family was that of managing the family orchards.’
    ‘And his grandmother wanted him to marry someone else,’ Fliss pointed out.
    ‘She did,’ the Duchess agreed. ‘My mother-in-law could be very harsh at times—cruelly harsh, I’m afraid. I confess that I could never warm to her, nor her to me. But Vidal’s father, like Vidal himself, was a very strong and moral man. He was in South America on business when his mother found out about the relationship. It is my belief that had he been here he would have done hisbest to see to it that matters were handled differently. As it was, he never returned. His plane crashed and everyone on board was killed.’
    Fliss drew in a sharp breath, unable to stop herself from sympathizing. ‘How dreadful.’
    ‘Yes, it was, for all of us, but especially for Vidal. He had to grow up very quickly after that.’
    Quickly, and into a man who was as harsh and unforgiving as the grandmother who had no doubt taken a hand in his upbringing, Fliss thought bitterly.
    It was hard for a child to grow up with the death of one of its parents, but even harder for one parent to be alive and a child be denied contact. She could remember her mother answering her own naive childhood questions as to why her parents were not together and married.
    ‘Your father’s family would never have allowed us to marry, Fliss. Someone like me could never be good enough for him. You see, darling, men like your father, from important aristocratic families, have to marry girls of their own sort.’
    ‘You mean like princes marrying princesses?’ Fliss remembered asking.
    ‘Exactly like that,’ her mother had agreed.
    ‘I had no idea that things had gone as far as they had when Annabel was sent away,’ the Duchess was saying now, looking rather grim.
    ‘I was conceived by accident on the night she and Felipe parted. Neither of them had intended … My mother said my father had always behaved like a perfect gentlemen, but the news that she was being sent away ledthings to get out of control.’ Fliss immediately defended her mother, feeling that she was being criticised. ‘My mother didn’t even realise at first that she was pregnant. Then when she did her parents insisted that she write to my father to tell him.’
    She wasn’t going to have the Duchess thinking badly of her mother, who had, after all, been an innocent and naive young girl of eighteen, desperately in love and heartbroken at the thought of being parted from the man she loved.
    ‘That was when my mother received a letter back saying that she had no proof that I was Felipe’s child, and that legal action would be taken against her if she ever tried to contact Felipe again.’
    The Duchess sighed and shook her head. ‘My mother-in-law insisted. In her eyes, even if your mother had previously been acceptable to her as a wife for Felipe, the fact that she had allowed him such intimacies …’ The Duchess gave a small shrug ‘In families such as ours there is something of the long-ago traditions of the Moors with regard to the women of the family and the sanctity of their purity. In Vidal’s grandmother’s day girls of good family never so much as left the family home without the escort of a
duenna
to guard their modesty. That is all changed now, but I’m afraid a little of what has been passed down in the blood lingers. There is a certain convention, a certain fastidiousness, a certain requirement within the family that its female members abide by a moral code and that—’
    ‘That brides are virgins?’ Fliss suggested.
    The Duchess looked at her. ‘I would put it more thatthe men of the family are very protective of the virtue of their women. It has always been my belief that had