Only Sofia-Elisabete Read online

  ISBN: 978-0-9985716-8-3 (epub)

  ISBN: 978-0-9985716-9-0 (mobi)

  ISBN: 978-1-7367866-0-4 (print)

  © Copyright 2021 by Robin Elizabeth Kobayashi

  Cover design by Bruno Vergauwen, www.brunovergauwen.com

  Cover images © Shutterstock

  1825 gown reproduction by PudlestonMakes, https://pudlestonmakes.co.uk/

  Map design by Sailor Schifferli Design

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  S ofia-Elisabete Stories

  I, Sofia-Elisabete, Love Child of Colonel Fitzwilliam

  Twelfth-Night Cake & the Rosings Ghost

  Only Sofia-Elisabete

  Table of Contents

  Map

  Part One: Andalucía, Spain – Spring 1825

  Principal Persons

  1. Fandango

  2. Exile

  3. Impossible

  4. Salada

  5. Evil Eye

  Part Two: Madrid & Beyond – Summer 1825

  Principal Persons & Creatures

  6. Solano

  7. Novio

  8. Pilgrim

  9. Ci-ci

  10. Luna de Miel

  Part Three: England & Scotland – Autumn 1825

  Principal Persons

  11. Topsy-Turvy

  12. Hans Place

  13. Faithful

  14. Kitt’s Tears

  15. Imaginarians

  Historical & Literary Notes

  About the Author

  Map

  PART ONE:

  Andalucía, Spain

  Spring 1825

  Principal Persons

  In Sevilla

  Sofia-Elisabete Fitzwilliam, myself

  Doña Marisa, my mother

  Don Rafael, my stepfather

  Javier, my younger half-brother

  Emmerence Odet, my Swiss governess

  Felipa, my dueña (a chaperon)

  Pinto Morales, the husband of Felipa

  Antonio de Silva, a bolero dancer

  One-Eyed Lincelada, a gypsy fortune-teller

  In Cádiz

  Don Luis de Luna, my grandfather

  Zia Gómez, a healer and my grandfather’s servant

  Kitt Munro, a young Scotsman

  Julián Paz, a guide and friend of Kitt Munro

  Madelina Lucena, the belle of Cádiz

  Gil Lucena, the brother of Madelina

  1. Fandango

  A one-eyed fortune-teller in Triana, the gypsy quarter, predicted that my love story would be an unbelievable tale—a tale that wandered into shadows and light. My nine-year-old self thought it a good joke at the time, that I would ever be in love, because there was nothing sillier in my opinion than two people, or ghosts even, wooing each other. But before I could protest, One-Eyed Lincelada tied a string of beads round my neck while she chanted some ancient gibberish. And so, the spell being cast, I came under the power of this gypsy and her one eye, a yellowish opal of an eye that looked east, and west, and south, but never at me when she spoke.

  “You must always wear these blessed red beads,” said One-Eyed Lincelada.

  “Even when I sleep?” I clutched the magical necklace that I mustn’t take off.

  “The andalucita beads protect against evil eye—mal de ojo.”

  My chaperone, the dueña Felipa, crossed herself three times over.

  The evil eye did not signify to me. Like others my age in Sevilla, I wore a stag’s horn tipped in silver to guard against mal de ojo, and if anyone dared to cast me an evil glance, this horn would receive it and instantly snap asunder.

  The gypsy continued on, “The evil eye cast by a woman is more powerful than a man’s.” She would sell me garlic amulets, along with the necklace, for my protection. Her open-air shop tucked away in the ruins of a convent did a brisk business.

  My thoughts suddenly began to wander as children’s often do. What had those flirting gypsy girls argued about at the flower stall? And what secrets did the horse sorcerer whisper to his mare? Were those really smugglers leaning against the grimy crumbling walls? They spoke a rough caló, the language of the gypsies.

  “Buñuelos! Calientitos!” came a droning cry in Castilian. The smoke from a hot-fritter stall wafted towards me. Instantly my stomach hungered. Fritter, fritter, give us a fritter, it demanded, with a rumbling roar.

  “A fritter cake—I must have one,” I whispered to my dueña.

  “Hush!” Felipa gave me an ugly eye.

  One-Eyed Lincelada clapped her hands twice, right in front of my face. “The beads I gave you will bring you closer to your dreams—”

  “Oh, I love to dream! I have a big imagination.” I came under her power once more and her way of thinking.

  She snarled as though I were the stupidest girl on earth. “With these beads, you will find a true path—”

  Felipa gripped my arm. “It’s your destiny to be a married woman who bears fifteen children. I shall see to it.”

  “Fifteen!” I certainly didn’t want to bear with any children like my brother Javier.

  One-Eyed Lincelada snapped at Felipa, “Let the girl discover her own destiny.”

  Her gypsy sister, a fierce black-eyed hag who traded in maledictions—May your life come to an untimely end! May dogs devour you!—grumbled that I should be honored that One-Eyed Lincelada had favored me, a wild slip of a girl, with these beads. Oh yes, they knew all about my past, which was how she sourly put it.

  I gaped at her. “You know that I was once a foundling until my father claimed me—”

  “Claro que sí.”

  “—and then, my mother stole me away when I was five, but my father found us?”

  “Sí! Sí!” the gypsy sisters sang as one, nodding to each other.

  The beads on my neck twinkled like stars, this despite the dingy morning air. I rather liked them, these pretty beads, but there was something else I wanted more at the moment.

  “I say, do you have a magic potion that will turn my brother into a lizard?”

  One-Eyed Lincelada spat out, “Tonta! Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  I bristled when she called me a fool. That’s when, to my amazement, I saw her black-tufted ears and white whiskers and spotted fur. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? The Castilian word for lynx is lince. As the seer of truth through the darkness, she must have been a lynx once upon a time, a dwarf tigress with a proud spirit and white beard and large padded paws for walking on snow in the Sierra Morena. But why did her gypsy sister, that old hag, resemble a bat, hanging upside-down? Creatures of the night stand for ignorance and other bad things.

  The gypsies’ surliness didn’t bother me, now that I knew their secret selves—the creatures they really were. When you’ve been raised as I have, on tales of witches and sorceresses and strange fantastic monsters, everything and nothing makes sense in this world, a world divided in halves, night on one side and day on the other, and in between the two extremes is twilight, that grey mist where nothing is clear, and if you tried to understand something without believing in it, then you would be lost in the fog forever.

  From that day forth, I flaunted my magical beads. I refused to surrender
them to my mother, Doña Marisa, who had snatched the stag-horn from me. Her ire at a pitch, she blamed my dueña, Felipa, an over-superstitious woman, for taking me to see the gypsies. Doña Marisa said the gypsies were liars and cheats, and not to swallow their nonsense. I frowned at her lie, when she, herself, went often to Triana for fortune-telling.

  So I said, “I’m going to love a ghost. That’s what the gypsy told me.”

  “What silliness!” cried she.

  “And the gypsy said these beads that I wear will reveal my true path.”

  “Your true path, like mine, is marriage, a husband, a home and children.”

  “But I don’t want to be like you.”

  She pinched my check so hard that she scraped me with her orange-diamond ring.

  A headstrong child I was then, curious about One-Eyed Lincelada’s prediction. Who was this great love—this ghost—of my unbelievable tale? And would I have to kiss him? Ay! I supposed I ought to if we became sweethearts.

  That same summer, when we fled to the countryside to avoid yellow fever, I met an insufferably cross boy, the English ambassador’s young son, for whom I did not care sixpence. I blurted out to him, “I ought to dislike you because you are the most despicable boy in the world. Yet, somehow, I wish to know you. Do you not despise and wish to know me as well?” He chose to despise me and he thumped me on the head.

  By the time I was turned eleven, I knew better than to say such stupid things. It was the summer of 1821, and I was ready to quit Sevilla. Two years abroad had been enough to satisfy my need to know better the mother who had made me. But my father, who had promised to return for me, never came back.

  My step-mamma in Scarborough wrote that my father was ill. He had suffered a terrible injury, but not to worry, he would get better. Then her letters mysteriously stopped. Had those letters been destroyed by someone, or perhaps swallowed whole by the monstrous Spanish post? In my weakest moments, I feared that my Scarborough family had forsaken me, that no amount of magical thinking and prayers and Masses said for my father could get me home to them.

  “You belong to me—only me,” said Doña Marisa.

  “I want to go home.”

  “You are home. Think and act Spanish. No more English.”

  I cried, and then I moped for months.

  Left adrift for years in a world blended of religion and magic, I clung to the hope of anything, including an unbelievable love—well, except for the ghost part, which I conveniently pushed from my mind. What girl wouldn’t want an earthly love? To give up on it meant doom, the life of a spinster, unloved and forgotten. The problem was that, like other chaste and virtuous girls, I led a secluded life, a prisoner really, rarely seeing any young handsome men of note, except those whom I observed from my window or in church on festival days.

  It now being 1825, the year I would turn fifteen, I despaired that nothing good would ever happen to me.

  Then Maundy Thursday came, and it was cold and bright, and the sky, so deep blue, like a dream of blue violets, hinted of spring. The bells in every steeple pealed with joy. My insistent dueña, who accompanied me to the religious procession, urged me on, pointing her fan at young men, old men, all sorts of men, until finally we found him.

  He was in appearance lithe, tall, muscular as a matador, with smooth brown skin and dark twinkling eyes. He styled himself Antonio de Silva, son of a hidalgo, a gentleman of the lower nobility. No one cared that he wasn’t. The twenty-two-year-old son of a boot maker, this Antonio liked to dance all the popular dances—the bolero, the fandango, the seguidilla. He was, in fact, the most improbable hero. Even so, I made him my hero, my majo, one of those beaux of Spain known for their defiant independence.

  Weeks passed on. Then, one afternoon, unusually dog-day hottish, I chanced to speak with Antonio, a striking figure wearing a broad-brimmed hat pulled down low. He wore short breeches and leathern gaiters and shoes, a silver-buttoned vest over a white shirt, an embroidered jacket and a crimson sash encircling his waist in many folds. A brown cloak had been flung over his shoulders in the Spanish way.

  He, with a matador-like swagger, stepped past our crumbling white mansion in the San Vicente quarter, glancing into the patio. Our grated gate stood wide open during the day as is the friendly custom. The third time he happened to be strolling by, he caught me peeping at him from behind the Moorish colonnade.

  “Señorita, your beauty ravishes …” he whispered out.

  My red beads became warm against my neck. No handsome young man had ever spoken to me before.

  He beckoned me with his finger. I shook my head, afraid to speak to him or even to look directly at him, because those things meant courtship here. A young maiden I was and everything good and proper.

  He whispered part of another pretty saying. With a hesitant step, I emerged from the shadows of the colonnade. Yes, yes—easy surrender! Truly, I am an unworthy girl.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He placed his hat on his breast. “Your heart beats …”

  I stepped closer and closer. “I cannot hear you.”

  “Shall I give you …?” He touched his lips, with a delicate hand.

  Overpowered by his scent—a tantalizing blend of oranges and thyme and tobacco—I gripped the gate post, fearing that I would faint in the heat.

  “Oh, please tell me what you said.” The truth was, I could barely understand his half-finished words, because he ate up consonants like a true Sevillano, and more so than most.

  He, noticing my blushing admiration for his velvet-trimmed hat, removed a silk tassel from it, and he presented this tassel to me.

  “Señorita, are you the niece of Doña Marisa?”

  I nodded and lied about it like my mother said I should.

  “Do you dance the bolero like her?”

  I nodded again, afraid to gaze too long at his dark eyes.

  He said, “You surprise me, for one who is half-English.”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “Doña Marisa told me. She is a good dancer and muy salada.”

  Some part of me felt envious of the well-salted Doña Marisa—she so witty, vibrant, full of life. But I dared not tell him that she had once been a Portuguese bolera, dancing in Lisbon, and before that, a chestnut-seller, roasting her chestnuts near the river Tejo, and before that, a water-seller, climbing up and down the steep hills of that city, which was how she met a thirsty British officer—Colonel Fitzwilliam, my natural father—during the Peninsular War. She, however, refused to speak Portuguese anymore. Because of that, she forbade me to speak my mother tongue, but I secretly disobeyed her.

  Just then, Doña Marisa came into the corridor, waving her fan energetically. I secreted Antonio’s tassel behind my back.

  “Antonio, what are you and Sofía whispering about?” She fluttered her eyelashes at him, for an outrageous flirt she could be.

  He bowed to her. “Doña Marisa, I lay myself at your feet.”

  “I kiss your hand, sir,” she replied in the customary way.

  “Will you attend the bullfight this evening?”

  “My husband, Don Rafael, cannot take me.” She affected a pretty pout with her red lips.

  “It would be an honor for me to escort you then.”

  All at once, she brightened up. “I accept your offer. My son will come with us.”

  Javier, my nine-year-old half-brother, was going?

  I cried out to Doña Marisa, “I want to go with you and Javier.”

  “No, no, no.” Her eyes widened in horror.

  “Señorita, do you enjoy the bullfight?” Antonio raised a brow at me.

  “Do I!” I swallowed my lie. “The blood is water, the slayer the hero.”

  Doña Marisa snapped her fan together. “Niña mía—my child, you must stay at home this evening.”

  “I shan’t stay home.” Quickly I struck an attitude; unfortunately, I never got my way.

  “Where did your good-for-nothing dueña go off to …” Doña M
arisa spun round to clap her hands. “Felipa!”

  My dueña, a squat woman with a decided moustache, came running.

  Doña Marisa ordered Felipa to take me away—I, the silly señorita, who would cause a scene again at the Plaza de Toros, the bull-ring. At the time of my first bullfight, I had been a child, seated with other girls, one of them just six years of age. They stood on their chairs, to clap their hands and scream with wild delight, “Mátalo! Kill him!” Disgusted by them and everyone, I howled to the skies at this gruesome spectacle of mangled bulls and horses, getting myself booed by the blood-thirsty crowd. But that was an age ago. I was nearly fifteen now.

  “Please, Doña Marisa.” I begged her ten times.

  Felipa clutched my arm to reclaim me, and she tut-tutted me for my obstinacy. She steered me up to my room on the first story above, where I tossed myself onto the bed, a mere trestle with two woolen mattresses. “Go away, Felipa!” I told her, and I covered my face with the sheets. In that manner, I hid my humiliation for missing the bullfight with Antonio, yet, inwardly, I was glad of it, that I wouldn’t be made to sit through another bloody slaughter.

  And so ended my first flirtation with this majo and too soon.

  One longish day passed, and then another, and on the third day, I spoke alone again with my majo. As it so happened, I was in the patio garden gathering violets for a love potion when pandemonium broke out—a not uncommon occurrence at our household.

  Javier went into a tantrum because Punto, the dotted rabbit, had vanished. My brother, wearing his brown velvet trousers and jacket and frilled white shirt, stamped his way down into the patio. With boyish arrogance, he ordered the servants to search for his beloved pet. I was hoping he wouldn’t bother me, but he had seen the magic violets in my hair. He gave me a doubly suspicious eye.

  “Suu-suu, did you turn my Punto into chorizo again?” Only Javier, with his imagination nearly as big as mine, believed I could turn the rabbit into a sausage. To him, every rock, every tree, every lizard was someone or some creature placed under enchantment, trapped for eternity in another form.