Don Ibrahim smiled to himself, with fatherly tenderness, as he watched El Potro's hard profile at the window. He was proud of El Potro's loyalty. Many of the earth's powerful men could not have purchased such devotion. But maybe some day, when he was on his last legs, Don Ibrahim would be asked if he had done anything worthwhile in his life. And he would answer, with his head held high, that he had had a faithful friend in El Potro del Mantelete, and that he had heard La Nina Punales sing "Cape of Red and Gold".

"Come and get it," said La Nina at the kitchen door, wiping her hands on her apron. Her black kiss-curl, fake beauty spot and blood-red lipstick were all immaculate but her eyeliner was somewhat smudged, because she'd been chopping onion for the salad. Don

Ibrahim noticed that she cast a critical glance at the bottle of Anis del Mono. She still didn't approve of what they were doing.

"You can't make an omelette," he said in a conciliatory tone, "without breaking a few eggs."

"Well, the ones I've just fried are getting cold," answered La Nina, setting her jaw stubbornly.

Don Ibrahim sighed resignedly and poured the last few drops of petrol into the bottle. He mopped up the spillage and put the cloth back in the ashtray. Then he placed both his hands on the table and levered himself with effort out of his chair.

"Trust me, my dear. Trust me."

"Churches shouldn't be burned down," she insisted, frowning. "That's for heretics and communists."

El Potro, silent as ever, moved away from the window and raised his hand to the cigarette in his mouth. I must tell him not to come near the petrol, Don Ibrahim thought fleetingly, still concerned with La Nina.

"God works in mysterious ways," he said, to say something. "Well, this way doesn't look good at all."

La Nina's failure to understand pained Don Ibrahim. He wasn't the kind of leader who imposed decisions on his troops. He preferred to reason with them instead. They were his tribe, his clan. His family. He was searching for an argument that would settle the matter, at least until after their fried eggs, when out of the corner of his eye he saw El Potro head past the table on his way to the kitchen, and instinctively go to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray. Just where the petrol-soaked cloth was lying.

Ridiculous, Don Ibrahim thought. Of course El Potro wouldn't do such a thing. But he turned to him anxiously anyway.

"Hey, Potro," he said.

But El Potro had already thrown his cigarette end into the ashtray. Don Ibrahim, trying to stop him, knocked over the bottle of Anis del Mono with his elbow.

An Andalusian Lady

"Can you smell the jasmine?"

"What jasmine? There isn't any."

"The jasmine that used to be here in the old days."

Antonio Burgos, Seville

If there was such a thing as blue blood, then the blood coursing through the veins of Macarena Bruner's mother, Maria Cruz Eugenia Bruner de Lebrija y Alvarez de Cordoba, Duchess of El Nuevo Extremo and twelve times grandee of Spain, must have been navy blue. Her ancestors had taken part in the siege of Granada and the conquest of America, and only two ancient houses of the Spanish aristocracy, Alba and Medina-Sidonia, could claim longer histories. The wealth that went with her titles, however, had long since disappeared. The estates and assets were gradually swallowed up over time and history, so that the tangled lines of her family tree were like strings of shells washed up empty on the seashore. The lady who sat sipping Coca-Cola opposite Lorenzo Quart in the courtyard of the Casa del Postigo was one month and seven days away from her seventieth birthday. Her ancestors could travel all the way from Seville to Cadiz without leaving their own land. King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia held her over the baptismal font. And after the Spanish Civil War, General Franco himself, despite his dislike of the old Spanish aristocracy, couldn't avoid kissing her hand in that very same Andalusian courtyard, bowing reluctantly over the Roman mosaics that had paved the patio since they were brought straight from the ruins of Italica four centuries earlier. But time moves on relentlessly. So read the motto on the English clock in the gallery of mudejar columns and arches decorated with rugs from the Alpujarras and with sixteenth-century bureaux that would have ended up in Seville auctions had it not been for the generosity of the banker and family friend, Octavio Machuca. Of past splendours there remained only the fragrant courtyard full of geraniums, aspidistras and ferns, the plateresque railings, the garden, the summer dining room with its Roman busts, a few pieces of furniture and some paintings on the walls. And in the midst of it all, with only a maid, a gardener and a cook in the house where she'd grown up with a staff of twenty, lived the white-haired lady with a string of pearls round her neck, a tranquil shadow leaning over its past. She offered Quart more coffee and cooled herself with an old fan decorated, with a personal dedication, by Julio Romero de Torres.

Quart poured coffee into the slightly cracked cup. He was in his shirtsleeves. The duchess had been so insistent that he remove his jacket because of the heat that he'd had no choice but to obey, hanging it over the back of his chair. He wore a black, short-sleeved shirt that showed his strong, tanned forearms. Clean-cut, good-looking and wholesome, he looked like a missionary, in sharp contrast with the small, hard figure of Father Ferro sitting beside him in his stained, threadbare cassock. On the low table set out next to the central fountain there was coffee, hot chocolate, and, rather eccentrically, a bottle of Coca-Cola. The old duchess remarked that she hated drinking Coke from a can. It tasted different, metallic that way. Even the bubbles felt different.

"More chocolate, Father Ferro?"

The parish priest nodded briefly without looking at Quart and held out his cup. Macarena filled it under her mother's approving gaze. The duchess seemed pleased to have two priests in her house. For years Father Ferro had arrived on the dot of five every afternoon except Wednesdays, to recite the rosary with the old lady. Afterwards he stayed for coffee, in the courtyard if the weather was good, in the summer dining room if it was raining.

"How lucky you are to live in Rome," the duchess said, opening and shutting her fan. "So near His Holiness."

She was remarkably bright and vivacious for her age. Her hair was white with slight hints of blue, and there were liver spots on her arms, hands and forehead. She was slim, slight, had angular features, and skin that was as wrinkled as a raisin. Her almost non-existent lips were outlined with lipstick, and from her ears hung small pearls identical to those of her necklace. Her eyes were dark like her daughter's, though age had turned them watery, red-rimmed. But there was still resolve and intelligence in them, and a light that often turned inwards, as if memories were moving across them like passing clouds. She had been fair-haired in her youth, as Quart saw in a portrait of her by Zuloaga in a room off the hall. So Macarena must have got her black hair from her father, a handsome gentleman in a framed photograph near the Zuloaga portrait. The duke consort was dark, with white teeth, a thin moustache, hair combed back, and a gold tie pin fastening down the points of his collar. Had one fed all these details into a computer along with the words "Andalusian gentleman", thought Quart, exactly that photograph would have come up on the screen. He had found out enough about Macarena's family history to know that in his day Rafael Guardiola Fernandez-Garvey had been the most handsome man in Seville. He was also cosmopolitan, elegant, and in fifteen years of marriage had managed to squander the remainder of his wife's already reduced fortune. If Cruz Bruner was a consequence of history, the duke consort was a consequence of the worst vices of Sevillian aristocracy. All the businesses he embarked upon ended in resounding failure, and only his friendship with the banker Octavio Machuca, who always faithfully bailed him out, saved the duke consort of El Nuevo Extremo from winding up in jail. Ruined by his final project, a stud farm, he ended up penniless, his health destroyed by flamenco parties till dawn and several litres of Manzanilla, forty cigarettes and three cigars a day. At the end, he shouted for a confessor, just as in old films or romantic novels. He was buried, having confessed and received the sacraments, in the uniform of a gentleman of the Real Maestranza of Seville, with his sabre and plume. All of Seville high society was present at the funeral. Half of those attending, a gossip columnist said maliciously, were cuckolded husbands there to make sure that the duke had truly been laid to rest. The other half were creditors.