Sandra saw the ghost in the patio, but only for a moment.
She threw open the back door of her grandmother's house—the house where she'd lived her whole life—onto the thick white fog that sometimes blanketed the north of Portugal on summer mornings.
The fog, milky-white and thick, pushed tendrils into the cool, stone-paved kitchen, like children's fingers exploring a candy box, and Sandra wrapped her arms around herself.
It was then she saw him on the patio—a man atop a tall white horse. A man with short red hair and piercing blue-gray eyes, looking straight at her.
"Who—" she started, stepping forward. But the fog roiled, and there was nothing there, nothing where she thought she'd seen a horse or a man. Which made perfect sense, she thought to herself, as she shivered, in her T-shirt and jeans. After all, the patio, with its pergola roof, through which green grapevines threaded, was at the back of the house, and it and the fields it bordered on were enclosed in seven-foot stone walls. A man might have climbed over it, but a horse—never.
She turned back into the house, shaking her head. She was imagining things. It was all the pressure of having to clean the house, of disposing—somehow—of the clutter of the four generations who'd lived in the house before her, of putting the house up for sale. Of marrying Miguel. Of moving.
She filled a teakettle, set it on the stove. The kitchen had a tiny sink, a narrow complement of cabinets, a single faucet. The gas stove, almost an antique, sat across the broad kitchen from the Franklin stove it had replaced.
The rest of the kitchen was cavernous and bare, calling for children or women chatting, for the bustle it had known for most of its existence. On the far side, [Change okay?] at the innermost wall, a broad pine table and twelve chairs sat, awaiting a family that would never cluster around it.
Sandra held the match, ready to blow it out, but frowned, instead, at the table. It, and the chairs, had been made by Sandra's great-grandfather. It had seen generations of children and grandchildren sit around it, enjoyed lively argument and calm conversation, wedding feasts and funeral dinners. And now all the family were gone, to Brazil, to Venezuela, to lands near and far, where their fortune seemed better, or to the grave, to sleep—as quaint Bible language would have it—with their ancestors. All except for Sandra, who would soon marry and go live in Miguel's condo. But what was to become of the table?
The phone rang, waking her. She blew out the match just before the flame reached her fingers, and tossed the burnt bit into the sink.
* * *
"Have you taken the day off from work?" Miguel's voice, issued from the old-fashioned black Bakelite phone in the hallway, all brisk curtness and businesslike, to the point. He spoke with the detachment of someone who is also typing a document, looking over a planner—anything but performing a single action at a time.
Sandra tried to suppress her annoyance at his remoteness. He was a busy port wine reseller, a man whose day to day involved tens of business calls. That she was his fiancée meant nothing. Theirs had never been an arrangement of love.
Oh, he told her often enough that he needed her. And it was true. He needed a wife to run his household, to organize his parties, to play the society lady to his successful business career. And she needed—she looked around at the narrow hallway, mahogany-paneled by some affluent Victorian ancestor, and crammed with occasional tables, silk flower arrangements and an old rosewood love seat—she needed someone to break the lonely days of her life since her grandmother's death a year ago. And someone to take her away from her job as a policewoman in downtown Porto—what remained of the medieval area of town, the most decayed and run-down of urban slums. She'd taken the job years ago with the idea that she could do some good, help some of the people down there, discourage juvenile offenders, solve crimes.
But she'd found herself bumping into the velvet ceiling of traditional Portuguese machismo. It wasn't that the men working with her thought poorly of her abilities—though they probably did—but that they thought it their duty to shield her from everything dangerous or even too unpleasant. And, unlike other countries, Portugal had no apparatus to enforce its antidiscrimination laws.
So her desk piled high, daily, with minor vandalism cases, with the cases of juveniles from other, more affluent parts of town who came to Ribeira to joyride in stolen cars, or to buy pot, or to cause a drunken disturbance in a picturesque restaurant.
She was held at bay from real life, from the police work she'd truly trained for. She was kept apart from the world that she'd hoped to improve.
"Well, did you take the day off?" Miguel asked.
"Yes." Sandra woke. "Yes, of course. I told you I was going to go through the attic today, see if I can get all the old letters and papers together and light a bonfire in the patio. Although if it will burn with this heat, it's something—"
"You know, you probably could sell those old pictures," Miguel said. "And the papers to an antique store."
"No." She might not recognize anyone in those pictures. She might not even know most of the people who'd sent letters from South Africa or France, or England—but they'd been relatives who had emigrated long ago. Or relatives of relatives. Or friends of relatives. She could no more sell them than she would sell her relatives. Not that she liked burning them. But modern life didn't allow for the sentimental clutter of generations past and she had to do something with it all. Best burned than violated by the hands of strangers, she thought.
Miguel didn't understand. He made a sound that was not quite a sigh—an exhalation of annoyance. "Okay. But, you know, the house is not going to bring much and—"
"I thought you'd agreed to take me in my shift," she said. He had. They'd been friends since childhood, and when they'd contracted their passionless match, he'd wanted her to quit right away, a year and half ago. To quit her job and get pretty dresses and start studying the role of a society wife. He'd offered to support her. He'd said she had no need of working. No need of putting herself through any unpleasantness.
"That's not it," he said. "I just hate to see you wasting money. People pay good money for old pictures, so they can pretend to have known ancestors."
She didn't answer. She'd long ago learned, in their childhood tussles and arguments, that the only thing Miguel couldn't counter was silence.
At length he spoke again, and his voice, momentarily engaged in their dispute, had become remote and calm again. "At any rate, I'm sending an antiques dealer over," he said. "For the furniture. Your grandmother's washstand, in her room, the one with the dog's heads, I'm sure it is worth a lot of money. And even that kitchen table. Primitive is in, you know."
"Couldn't we keep it?" she asked. "If it's in?" But even as she spoke, she could see the tiny dining room of Miguel's condo in Boavista, the most upscale of districts, long known as the Portuguese Hollywood.
Miguel didn't answer, which was his way of countering her ridiculous suggestion. "Anyway," he said, "I just wanted to make sure you would be there when the dealer came. And I wanted to ask if we could go out to dinner today?"
"Probably not," she said. "I'll be busy." He was so used to going out to dinner that his idea of getting together was meeting at an expensive restaurant. Where, doubtless, he would feel forced to hold her hand across the table, just for the sake of appearances.
He sighed at the other end. "All right, then. Another time."
And he hung up, without saying good-bye, as he usually did.
Sandra set the receiver down, dismayed. She could no more think of selling that table than she could think of selling the family pictures. She tried to imagine it serving as someone's fashionable dining-room table in some ultramodern apartment and cringed. To her, the table was too intimately associated with her grandmother, who'd raised her after Sandra's parents emigrated to Brazil.
They had left her behind because she was only one, and sickly. They were supposed to send for her. They were always supposed to send for her. But first, she'd been frail, and they'd been penniless. And then, as time passed, and they had other children, the matter had simply dropped away and Sandra had been glad of it. This was her home, this village of Aguas Santas, between the Atlantic Ocean and the mountain ridge that separated Portugal from Spain. This land of small family farms—so tiny that, from a plane, they looked like handkerchiefs dotting the landscape—had become part of her blood, as it had been part of the blood of her relatives before her.
She loved the broad main street, bordered on either side by two-floored houses, which touched each other on each side, presenting the impression of an unbreakable facade to the world. And she loved the life beneath those facades—the people who knew her because they'd known her mother and father, her grandmother, the passing generations of Sousas. She loved the sprawling private backyards and the fields extending beyond them.
But now her grandmother was dead, and her career might as well be. The people in the houses had seemed to disappear, as, increasingly old, they spent the time in their bedrooms or their beds. Children and grandchildren had already left, to nearby Porto or to more distant parts—to Lisbon, throughout Europe, overseas.
Only she remained. And she could not stand the loneliness anymore.
She'd backed up, till she sat on the bottom step of the staircase, holding her head in her hands. She did not want to leave the village, but she wanted to marry Miguel.
Oh, he wasn't the love of her life, but at almost thirty she knew that she was too rational, too analytical to fall in love. Love was something, like the ballads and stories her grandmother used to tell her—the stories of princesses and werewolves and the King Sebastian who would one day come back upon his white steed to mend all wrongs and set every maiden free.
In Sandra's world, she had to set herself free. And she'd been doing miserably at it.
Miguel had offered, and he was an old friend, not repulsive, someone she could live with. And even when he opposed her, he never treated her as a child.
Unlike the men at the station.
* * *
The phone rang. She got up. It was probably Miguel, who'd booked another furniture dealer. Or perhaps an old letters and photos dealer.
But when she picked up the receiver, the voice that greeted her was Costa, desk sergeant at the Ribeira station. "Sandra, come in," he said.
He sounded excited, or amused, like a man who is laughing, inside, at some joke.
"I'm taking the day off, remember?" She wondered if they'd planned some sort of party for her, as she was quitting to get married within the month. If she'd been a male, she'd have known that this secret laughter of Costa's meant they had already hired the stripper to jump out of the cardboard layer cake.
But she wasn't male. And she didn't think Costa or any of his confreres would even think of hiring a male stripper.
"I know, but you want to come in," he said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and right up your alley."
"My alley?" That meant, doubtless, that it was a particularly inventive form of vandalism, or perhaps the theft of a really expensive car by joyriding teenagers.
"No," Costa said. "You'll never believe this. It's a kid, twenty or so, picked up at the museum of Henry the Navigator. He was throwing a fuss, claiming to be King Sebastian."
"King Sebastian? Hold a moment." She'd heard the kettle whistle and ran to the kitchen to turn it off. Cordless phones hadn't been part of her grandmother's belief system, and Sandra had not thought it sufficiently worthwhile to push the matter.
How strange that someone had been claiming to be King Sebastian just as she was thinking of the legendary king who, tradition said, would return, despite close to five hundred years having passed since his death at Alcazar Kibir. When she returned to the phone, she had her answer ready. "Has he been checked for drugs?"
"Yeah. Clean. Not drunk either."
"But then he's mad. Surely he knows that King Sebastian died around 1580."
Costa made a sound like he'd just clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Oh, he knows. But he says he's returned, on a foggy morning."
Sandra thought of the patio, immersed in smoke, and the brief illusion of the man on the white horse. She sucked in a breath. She was going crazy. No, she was already crazy, or she wouldn't have seen the man. Perhaps it was the pressure of cleaning the house and moving.
Who could completely clean the pigeonholes stuffed full of papers in the library, the confusion of suitcases in the attic, the furniture and wood in what had once been her grandfather's workshop? Who could even hope to dispose of all of it—the varied clutter of generations?
Her mind told her Miguel could. But Miguel, though he'd grown up in Aguas Santas, was the son of recent immigrants, his parents having come from the city, Porto, to which Miguel had now returned. What could he know of the smell of wild roses down in the lanes amid the fields in the summer? What could he know of the houses, closed, rank on rank, keeping their own secrets, their own untouched, inviolate counsel through succeeding generations?
She shook her head. That had nothing to do with it. It was just the work.
"If you don't come in," Costa said, "they're just going to send him over to Conde Ferreira. And then, who knows when he'll get out."
Conde Ferreira, once the palace of the Counts of Ferreira and now the largest mental hospital in town, was a morass of paperwork and delay, a feud of dueling psychiatrists.
"I don't think he's that nuts," Costa said. "I think he just snapped, like Jorge last year, over the promotion examinations, remember, when he ended up downtown, holding the statue's horse?"
She remembered. Jorge, a young recruit to the force had tried to take the examinations to become an officer, and in the midst of studying, something had snapped, making him think he was some sort of medieval ensign to some long-forgotten king. He'd been found downtown, holding the stone reins of a sculpted horse.
As she was in danger of snapping, she supposed, over the stress of cleaning her grandmother's house.
But, in Portugal, where the ages and centuries, the past glory and the immense weight of lost empire always seemed to press close upon the living, this type of illusion could hardly be called madness, requiring incarceration. It was as though sometimes, the past, more glorious and much greater than the drab present, pressed upon the brains of the living till it found a point of entry, a weakened link.
Sandra remembered a girl—Isabel—in her fourth-grade class, who had decided she was the queen of the same name, dead in the thirteenth century and canonized shortly thereafter. Throughout the final quarter of the year she had talked about being the Queen Isabel and how her crown weighed heavy upon her brow. But the next year, after vacation, she'd come in fully restored. She was now a secretary in Porto, happily married and none the worse for the wear.
But if the boy went to Conde Ferreira, who knew? Psychiatrists didn't have the calm of the common people about this kind of thing.
She drummed her fingers against the mahogany paneling. "Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm coming in."
Even if her job was being a glorified social worker, she was still the only person in the station who had the slightest interest in saving the young.
She closed the kitchen door behind her, locked it, and left through the front door, to the little car parked nearby.
Driving into town, she thought that if she hurried, she could still be back in time to talk to the antique furniture dealer.
* * *
He was already in her office as she came in, sitting on the battered folding metal chair that faced her battered metal desk and the piles and piles of processes on it.
Sandra walked over to the desk, swept a spot clear for her butt, then half sat on the desk looking at the boy. She found this approach less intimidating with the young than sitting behind the desk.
"So, King Sebastian?" she said, raising her eyebrows just a fraction of a centimeter. "Very fashionably attired for someone dead that long."
The boy—though she supposed she should call him a young man—wore a black T-shirt and black jeans—both soaking wet. He had reddish hair, cut very short, and dark blue eyes, which looked down at himself, with great surprise, as though he'd never noticed his clothes. "Fashionable?" he said.
His voice was a pleasant midrange, his pronunciation clear.
"Yeah," she said, and smiled. She knew she didn't look like a police officer. That was always one of her advantages—petite, with dark brown, shoulder-length hair and a pointy face, she looked much younger than she was. Besides, wearing her ragged jeans and much-washed T-shirt, in which she'd been about to clean house, she couldn't possibly look like someone in authority. So maybe he would talk to her. Others had before him. "Now, suppose you tell me the real problem. Did you run away?" This, because though he looked twenty, he might very well be sixteen or seventeen, and surely being a runaway was the best explanation for his fantastic tale.
But he lifted his eyebrows at her, in surprise, and something like anger played on his gaze. "I didn't run away," he said. "I faced them all, the army of Alcazar Kibir. There were ten moors for each Portuguese, but I—"
"Oh, very good," she smiled. "Staying in character. Look, I'll level with you. You're a catch-and-release." She turned to her side and picked up his process from the pile on which she knew Costa would have set it. "Let's see, swimming in the river—really?" The river, down by Henry The Navigator's Museum and birthplace, was also distressingly close to the fishmarkets. Every morning, the fishwives would throw in fish guts, severed tails, lopped-off fins. Every night, they'd dump in the fish that hadn't sold. It was illegal, of course, but everyone did it, of course—like so many things in Portugal, a country where every citizen believed laws were direly needed for everyone else.
She couldn't imagine a worse place to go for a swim. It would be like swimming in decaying fish soup. Also, of course, a danger to the fishing boats coming in to dock. And a danger to himself, if hit by a fishing boat. "Were you trying to kill yourself?"
He shook his head. "No. The horse . . . We . . . I was in the river. When I knew where I was, I was in the river, and I don't know where my horse is."
Um . . . Perhaps he'd tried to kill himself and wouldn't admit to it. Or perhaps he had been somewhat drunk and the freezing, rushing water of the Douro River, come splashing down from the snows in the Spanish mountains, had sobered him up.
"Okay," she said. "So . . . Swimming in the river, then pounding at the door of the Navigator's museum, demanding to be let in, claiming to own the place."
He pushed his lips together, an expression of displeasure. "It is a royal palace."
"Quite so," Sandra said, not sure whether to be amused or alarmed. She settled for amused. The young man was so articulate, his diction so clean, she was sure he came from some middle-class family and that his antics were just one of those things. Which was exactly what people called it when one of their own came down with a brief historical dream of glory. They shrugged and said, one of those things.
"Look, altogether, your behavior is weird, but not worthy of much trouble. The only reason you were brought in, at a guess, is because someone thought you'd scare the tourists in the restaurants on either side of the museum. If this were confession, and I were a priest, I'd sent you off with an Ave and an Our Father. But I'm not a priest, and now that you've been brought in, the police have certain rules about releasing you. We have to make sure you're safe."
He shrugged. "I'm perfectly—"
"Yes, of course. But see, people who claim to be long-dead kings cannot be released on their own recognizance. If you have a mother, a grandmother, a father . . ."
"My father died before I was born," he said, and counted it on his fingers, as though disposing of various possibilities. "My mother married again, and my grandmother died."
From a foggy recollection of Sebastian's life, she thought that fit the history. But it probably was also exactly what had happened. This young man was probably as alone as Sandra herself but less able to cope with the possibilities.
"There must be someone who can claim you."
He stretched his arms wide, and opened his hands, palm up, in the atavic way of showing that one had no hidden weapons. "I have no one. My companions, the finest youth, the highest nobility of Portugal, died in that desert of Alcazar Kibir. Only I, called by my duty . . ." He must have read annoyance in her eyes, because his voice trailed off, and he shut up.
Two hours later, lunchtime nearing, she still hadn't got anything else from him. Nothing. Just the same stories, the same conversation that could apply to either himself or to the long-dead king.
The furniture dealer would be at the house now, and though she didn't want to sell to him, she had to do something with all that furniture, and selling it was only sensible. She should see the man and get the pain over with as soon as possible.
"You could sign me out," the young man said.
Sandra looked at him. He was smaller than she and, she judged, not skilled in personal defense. For all its attempts to protect her from true police work, the force had taught Sandra judo. A rare skill in Portugal, amid women and even more so amid young men, who tended to rely on their strength, whether they really had any or not.
She could sign him out. She had the rest of the afternoon to observe his behavior. If he were in the least dangerous, she could always return him or drive him to Conde Ferreira herself. And there was always the chance that, when faced with a car drive, with cleaning a house, with the prosaic realities of modern life, he would give up, relinquish the past he'd never lived, and face his present life.
And besides, the old lady next door had a young and vigorous caretaker. If Sandra screamed, someone would be there in seconds. The village, even in its present, weakened state, didn't believe in not getting involved.
"Fine," she said. "I'll sign you out. We'll get your things."
"I don't have any things," he said, and again opened his hands wide, displaying his palms.
Something about his palms bothered Sandra, but she couldn't think what. She'd got no more than a brief glimpse—too brief to examine them. And she wasn't about to ask to hold his hands.
"Fine. Then let's go. I have a used-furniture dealer to meet."
* * *
But when she parked her small car in front of her house, she glimpsed, through the still-thick fog, a big gray van driving away. Though not sure, she would bet, that this was the dealer, driving away.
She opened the door. The presumed royalty followed her in meekly. She found him some old jeans and T-shirt and insisted he go change from his soaked clothes. And then, as if he hadn't been there, she set about cleaning out old papers and letters and carrying them to the patio.
One basket, two, and when she came to pour out the third basket, the young man was sitting on the flagstones, digging through the papers and letters and pictures. He'd set the pictures on the ground in front of him, faceup. He had a couple of letters on his lap.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Just looking at the past," he said. "Before you throw it all away." He pointed at one of the pictures, a young woman in the attire of the beginning of the century, clutching a camellia. "This young woman was one of your great-aunts. She lost the man she loved, so she lived as an old maid to the end of her days. And this one—"
Nuts. Sandra dropped the basket and went inside to get another. Ridiculous. Maybe she would have to take him to Conde Ferreira, after all.
But when she came back down again, he'd put water to boil. "I think you need some tea," he said. "It's so foggy and cold."
She thought he might just have some concealed substance and plan to put it in the tea. So she said, "I'll make some."
Sebastian—for lack of a better name—sat at the table, looking at her, while she made tea in the great red-and-white teapot that had been her grandmother's. She poured the tea into two large teacups, and sat at the table, across from him.
"A large table," he said. "It should have a large family."
"It did once," she said. "My grandmother had seven children. But they're all gone, abroad. I'm the only one, and the house is too big for me, and I'm getting married."
He stared at her and sipped his tea. "It is these houses," he said. "That always seemed to me the essence of our people. Old houses, with a family that stays, with—"
"My family doesn't stay," she said. "They all leave." But then she thought of her grandmother, and her great-grandmother before her. There had always been someone left behind in the Sousa line. Someone who watched and waited, and wrote to all the various, spread-out branches. Keeping memory alive. Providing a home for the heart, if no longer for the bodies of those who had left. She remembered how her great-aunt Camellia had come back, when Sandra was very small. Come back in widowhood and lived with Sandra's grandparents for some years, until she found another husband. And there had been others through the years—defeated, destitute, or simply lonely, who could come and stay in the ancestral home.
Did Sandra have a right to dispose of it? She thought of those pictures out in the yard, the piles of pictures—of people who had left, people whose descendants probably still knew of Aguas Santas and the old house. Even her parents, her siblings. What if someone needed to return? What would happen if she didn't provide a place for them?
But then, what obligation did she have? Who were they to impose on her that way?
"When I was little," she said, "my uncles and aunts, and a couple of times my parents, all came back from their various places. My grandmother would put the table out on the patio, under the grapevines, and we'd all sit around it. They talked of the wonders of exotic lands, and I listened. It was like a fairy tale."
He nodded, drank his tea. "Portuguese have always traveled. But it is important to know where your heart is. Some people prefer to be where their hearts are. Your fiancé, you love him?"
She shrugged. "He's a good man."
It seemed to her, as she spoke, that she was growing tired. She was dreaming without sleeping. Across from her King Sebastian leaned in close. "Do you really want to leave? You seem to be part and parcel of this home. You sure you want to go? I went away and let my people fall captive to the Spanish dynasty, and that was the beginning of the end."
"No Spanish dynasty will buy the house," she said, smiling at the idea.
"No, but you'll be in a foreign house, a foreign place. I find," Sebastian said, his voice very distant, "that it's important to keep the past in the present and not to forsake what we are for other things. Look at me, four hundred years dead and still fulfilling my destiny. You have a destiny. You're supposed to guard the law, you're supposed to live in this house, to provide an anchor to your far-flung family."
"I don't owe anything to my far-flung family. And no one will let me be a real policewoman, no one will let me administer justice."
"Perhaps you haven't tried hard enough . . . If you want to leave all this behind, to give up, why am I here to rescue you? Why did your heart call to me?"
"I don't know." Through Sandra's mind ran the refrain of all those stories about King Sebastian, and she found herself repeating it. "And they shall find his sword and his doublet, his white horse, scraps of fog and his heart. The King Sebastian's."
She started awake without being aware of having slept. Or at least, she trembled, as one does when wakening. In front of her on the table, was her teacup and another—empty. [Change okay?] But the young man was nowhere in sight.
"Hey," she called, to the still air that still writhed with fog that even the afternoon sun couldn't dissipate or penetrate. He'd given her something to make her sleep. "Hey, where are you? What do you think you're doing?
She reached for the purse that she'd set on the kitchen counter coming in. It was there, and all her ID, all her money, all her cards still within. She strode out to the patio. He'd been interested in the pictures. Perhaps he'd stolen them to sell?
But the pile was there, seemingly untouched, and even the row of pictures he'd set aside was there still. He still might have stolen a stamp, but—
The sound of hooves made her turn, and there, amid the fog, the young man sat, mounted upon a white horse, a sword strapped to his side.
"What—"
But he lifted a hand, in a good-bye gesture—a hand whose palm looked as white and smooth as a doll's, and vanished, leaving behind him, for only a moment, the sound of a beating heart.
No lines. There were no lines on that hand. Of course, dead people, even those with a bad habit of returning, had no fate to run anymore. No lines. King Sebastian who came back to administer justice and set maidens free.
Sandra took a deep breath. Or perhaps just to show them they could set themselves free.
* * *
She was gathering pictures and envelopes into a basket when the phone rang. She took the basket with her, set upon her hip, as with the baskets of grapes she used to pick during grape harvest. "Yes?"
"The dealer was there," Miguel answered. "But you didn't open the door. He's going to come back. Keep an ear—"
"No," she said.
"What?"
"No. I'm not selling the furniture. I'm not selling the house."
"But why should you keep an empty—"
"Listen, if you want me, you take the house with me. You move here. It's only an hour drive to the city. And if you don't want me, you can find someone more suited."
"Sandra, can we talk about this?"
"No. And I'm keeping my job, too. I'm going to request a move to homicide, and I'm prepared to continue asking, until they give it to me."
He laughed. To her surprise, he laughed. It had been many years since she'd heard him laugh. Not since they'd been kids, friends, in high school.
"Gads, woman," he said. "Giving me terms, are you? All right. We'll talk. Dinner tonight? You can pick the restaurant, and we can talk. I don't want to give you up so easily."
Sandra took a deep breath. Talk. It was a start.
"All right," she said. "All right."
* * *