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there an hour! I was thrown into a frenzy, attempting to pull out and straighten my finest day dress, which had become fatally wrinkled in transit. And the matching hat? Where was it? Which box? Oh, why hadn’t I spent the evening arranging my new possessions? I’d certainly obsessed over them during those hectic days in London, imagining what the “superior” would think of the gorgeous, sleek creature who met his admiring eyes. Oh, I was a ninny!
    A mere fifteen minutes later, dressed in my favourite half-striped, half-tartan day dress and with my cheeks pinched severely for colour, I was scanning the dining room for an impatient-looking man seated alone. The only single male was at the window and never looked up. Myeye caught a flamboyant couple beside him—the woman was leaning towards her companion, and as I watched, she pointed me out with a purple-gloved finger. The man nodded, wiped his lips, and rose. My heart leapt into my throat as I smiled and went towards them. This was not what I had expected: Certainly this imposing woman would see that my hair, under the superficial sheen of a quick brushing, was still tangled and heavy with sleep. Damn and damn again. Had I pinched my cheeks sufficiently? I hoped I looked the part, whatever the “part” was supposed to be.
    The man stopped a pace or two from me, bowed his head, and clicked his heels. Then he gestured for me to go past, ushering me towards the woman with his hand at my back. “ Mi querida, ” he murmured to her softly, continuing in English, “I believe this is young Miss Gilbert. Let us make her supremely welcome.” His voice was deep and mellifluous and made me feel a little less apprehensive. The woman did not get up but held out her gloved hand, fingers drooping. Surely she didn’t mean for me to kiss it? I gave her purple fingers a little shake. She pulled them back.
    â€œSit, my dear, here,” he said. “We have been eager to meet you, haven’t we, darling?”
    The woman said nothing. I sat and he followed, pinning me warmly in place between them. “I trust you had a pleasant night?”
    â€œOh yes, thank you, sir. I mean, Señor Grimaldi?”
    â€œThat is I. Allow me to introduce my wife, the famous Doña Concepción Rodríguez.”
    Famous? Oh dear, why hadn’t Hernandez told me? Now I’d look an imbecile as well as untidy.
    â€œI am most pleased to make your acquaintance, madam—I mean—”
    â€œYou have not heard of me?” She looked me up and down with disdain, her accent thick and evocative. Unlike Señor Hernandez, the sound of this woman’s Spanish-flavoured English was exotically sensual, and I determined then and there to study it with fervour.
    Physically, Juan de Grimaldi was powerful and intimidating; Corsican by blood, he’d been a lieutenant in the French National Guard under Napoleon, and following the emperor’s defeat, when King LouisXVIII decided to send a massive army of one hundred thousand men across the Pyrenees to help restore Ferdinand VII to his Spanish throne, Grimaldi had volunteered, then stayed in Spain. When I met him, he was about forty-five years of age. He’d been running Madrid’s two principal theatres, the Cruz and the Príncipe, for over a decade. His wife, Concepción, had been a young company actress at the Cruz. Married to Grimaldi, she’d held the title of prima dama for a dozen years or more. At the end of the recent war, after Grimaldi fled back to France from Spain, she’d had to support herself and their numerous children, then pack them all up in order to join him in Paris.
    Hernandez had told me all this. At the time of our meeting, Señora Rodríguez was about forty and beginning to look it; I had the impression that she was terribly tired and terribly jealous. To go to breakfast (and to meet her husband’s new female associate, if that’s what I was,