Leonie by Elizabeth Adler Page A

relatives, lawyers, priests … and everyone in black. My father’s brother, who now inherited the title, explained finally what had happened. He said that they had gone to a better place and were happy there. He took me to see them. They were lying side by side in coffins lined in white satin, they looked so lovely—just the way they always looked—but they didn’t hold out their arms to me. I was five years old and they had gone forever. And so had all the loving, the spoiling, and the sharing. I, who had been the center of their universe, was to live with my uncle and aunt and their eleven-year-old son.”
    Caro took a sip of her wine and sighed deeply. “It wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for my aunt. Of course, looking back I realize that she and my mother could never have been friends. Aunt Macarene was a plain woman who’d done well to marry the second son of a good family. She was strong and domineering and uncle was an academic man, lost in his world of ancient manuscripts and texts in Latin and Greek. Aunt Macarene ran his life and now she ran mine. From silks and muslins and colored ribbons woven through my hair by my mother’s loving fingers, I now wore blue serge and a white pinafore and stout shoes. My hair was brushed back so tightly into its braid that I could feel it pulling my scalp. I had meals in the schoolroom and was kept in the nursery at night so as not to disturb uncle, or so she said. I think I must have cried for years and years—every night my pillow would be soaked.” Her eyes met Léonie’s in understanding. “I was so lonely, Léonie—like you. My cousin was older, away at school, uninterested in my misery. Uncle had inherited the estates, but it had been my mother’s money that had kept up the houses so beautifully, that had paid all those servants, bought all the extra extravagant pleasures, and I had inherited it all. I suppose my aunt coveted it for her son—what good were estates and titleswithout money? Gradually she managed to deprive me of everything I was used to and had loved: my mother’s little dogs were no longer there, my pony was sold, lessons were long and dull—there was nothing to open up my mind, to excite the imagination or curiosity. It was no use appealing to my uncle—he was often away giving lectures on his favorite classical heroes, and besides, he wouldn’t have understood. ‘Your aunt takes care of all that,’ was all the response I ever got. I had to wait until I was sixteen to shock him into action. He had just emerged from his study as I was crossing the hall and, still lost in his translation from the French, he spoke to me in French. When I couldn’t reply, he was stunned. He engaged a French tutor for me at once.”
    Caro leaned forward, smiling at Léonie. “I rarely had the opportunity to meet boys my own age, let alone attractive young Frenchmen of twenty, with dangerous eyes. And I’d never met anyone who found me attractive!” She laughed, remembering. “I was clasped in my one and only embrace when my aunt walked in.”
    Léonie drew in her breath sharply, caught up in the agony of that moment.
    “Of course”—Caro shrugged—“that was the end for both of us. He was gone and my aunt demanded banishment for me, too—and not just from Barcelona, but from Spain! A convent in Paris was my destination. I lasted a few months within those demanding gray walls and then I escaped—it wasn’t difficult—they didn’t expect girls to run away. I was alone in Paris in my convent gray. I went straight to the Paris branch of my mother’s bankers, where I knew I had money, but Aunt Macarene had managed over the years to have the funds transferred to their own Spanish bank. She had been clever. As executors she and my uncle claimed that it had been used to pay off monstrous debts accumulated by my parents’ extravagant life-style, and that it had been used for my benefit. Very little was left for me. But—Alphonse was that