Villa Aurelia

Chapter One: Salt and Cypress

The road to Villa Aurelia climbed for eleven kilometers out of Palma, hugging a cliff that dropped away so suddenly on the left that Kate Daley stopped looking at it and looked instead at the back of the driver's head.

"You will get used to it," the driver said. He had introduced himself at the airport as Pedro Barquero, head of security, and had taken her suitcase out of her hand before she could argue about it. He drove the way he spoke: without waste. "Everyone is frightened the first time. By the third week you will complain that it is slow."

"I'm not frightened," Kate said. "I'm calculating how many catering vans can get up this road at once."

In the back seat, Olivia Netherby lowered her sunglasses. "Two," she said. "Three if the second driver is Italian."

Pedro's eyes flicked to the mirror. It was not quite a smile, but something moved in his face and then stopped, like a door opened an inch and shut again.

Kate had spent eleven years learning to read rooms in the first ninety seconds. Airports, ballrooms, kitchens, back corridors where the real decisions happened. It was the only talent she'd ever fully trusted. Her mother had run a twenty-eight-seat restaurant outside Sacramento for thirty years and had taught her that the moment you walked into a space you should already know where the exits were, who was unhappy, and what was about to burn.

So when the car came around the last bend and Villa Aurelia appeared, Kate started counting before she started admiring.

The estate occupied its own headland. Ochre stone, pale green shutters, a roofline of clay tiles that had been baking in Mediterranean light for two hundred and forty years. Terraces stepped down the slope in five tiers, each one planted, each one edged with cypress trees standing at attention like a receiving line. There was a chapel. There was an orangery with glass so old it made the fruit inside look underwater. Somewhere below the last terrace, invisible from here, she could hear water moving.

"Oh," said Olivia. "Oh, we're never leaving."

"Six months," Kate said. "Then we leave with a portfolio."

The drive was lined with more cypresses, forty of them, and the car crunched between them into a gravel courtyard where a fountain the size of a small swimming pool threw water at the sky in a bored, endless way.

Pedro got out. "Miss Daley. Before you meet anyone, I give you the protocols."

"I read the briefing document."

"You read forty pages. I will give you the four that matter."

Kate liked him immediately, which surprised her.

He walked her through the loggia and into a hall floored in black and white marble, cool as a cellar after the heat outside. Portraits climbed the staircase wall: men in high collars, men in uniform, one woman in a grey silk dress with her chin lifted like a challenge.

"One," Pedro said. "The west wing is family. You do not go there. Not for a florist, not for a lost phone, not for anything. Two. Every person who comes through that gate has been vetted by me, including the boy who brings the ice. If you add a name, you add it to me seventy-two hours in advance, in writing."

"Seventy-two," Kate repeated. "Not forty-eight?"

"Forty-eight is for people who like surprises." He kept walking. "Three. No photographs of the interior. Ever. Not for your own records. If you need to remember a room, remember it."

"And four?"

Pedro stopped at the tall doors to the garden and turned to face her. He was maybe fifty-five, built like a man who had once had to carry other men. "Four. Discretion. In this house, discretion is not a courtesy. It is the whole job. Everyone's job. Mine, yours, the gardener's." A pause. "You will hear things. You will see things. They are not stories to tell."

"I've worked NATO," Kate said. "I've stood in a room where two foreign ministers who officially weren't speaking to each other split a plate of langoustines. I didn't tell anyone then. I won't now."

This time the door in his face opened a little wider. "Good," he said. "Come. Señora Estrada is waiting, and she does not like to wait."

—

Beatriz Estrada received her in the orangery, seated in a wicker chair with a small dog asleep on the tiles beside her and a coffee cup in front of her that she did not touch once in twelve minutes.

She was sixty-six and looked engineered. Silver hair cut to the jaw, linen the color of bone, a rope of pearls that had clearly been worn every day for four decades and had gone slightly soft with use. When Kate came in, Beatriz did not stand.

"Miss Daley." Her English was excellent and deliberately unhurried. "You are the American."

"I am. Thank you for having me."

"I did not have you. The agency sent you. My son approved the contract." She gestured to the chair opposite, and Kate sat. "You did the gala in Brussels."

"I did."

"Four hundred people, and the Norwegian delegation arrived two hours late because of weather, and no one noticed." Beatriz's eyes were very dark and completely unmoved. "That is why you are here. I want you to understand what you are managing. This is not a season of parties. Between May and October, in this house, agreements are made that do not appear in newspapers for two years. Three prime ministers have been persuaded on that terrace. My husband's father hosted men here in 1974 whose names you would recognize."

"Then I'll make sure the wine is cold and the room is quiet," Kate said.

Something crossed Beatriz's face. Not warmth. Assessment.

"You will be given the north office, a golf cart, and the assistance of Señora Ferrer, who has run this household for twenty-nine years and who you will never, under any circumstances, contradict in front of the kitchen staff." A beat. "You will eat with the staff. You will not attend the events as a guest. If a minister speaks to you, you will answer him briefly and then remove yourself. Do you find that offensive?"

"No," Kate said. "I find it clear. I prefer clear."

Beatriz's mouth moved a fraction. "Then we may survive each other." She looked down at the dog. "One more thing, and I say it to everyone the agency sends, so do not take it personally. This family is watched. Constantly. There are people who would pay a very great deal for a photograph of the wrong two people in a doorway of this house. Your discretion is not a preference of mine. It is the condition of your employment."

"Understood."

"Good." Beatriz lifted a hand, and it was clearly a dismissal. "Welcome to Villa Aurelia."

—

Outside, Kate stood in the shade of a lemon tree and let out a long breath.

Olivia appeared beside her holding two glasses of something with ice in it that she had certainly stolen from a passing tray. "Well?"

"She told me my place, gave me a set of rules, and threatened me in three languages of politeness."

"So a normal Monday."

Kate laughed and took the glass. Beyond the terrace wall the sea went out forever, flat and hammered silver in the late light, and for one unguarded second she felt something she hadn't felt in a long time, which was that she had arrived somewhere that mattered.

"Six months," she said. "Then we go home with a portfolio and a bank balance and I finally put my own name on a door."

"Daley Events," Olivia said. "Boring name."

"Daley and Netherby, then."

"Better." Olivia clinked her glass against Kate's. "To not falling in love with anyone rich."

"That's not a real risk," Kate said. "I've never met a rich man who was interesting for longer than a canapé."

Olivia looked out at the water and smiled into her drink and said nothing at all, which, Kate would think later, was the most prophetic thing her best friend had ever done.