The moment young William Phillips—“Willie” to his family—saw the Spanish Contessa descend the gangplank, he felt the world lurch. His breath caught, his heart thundered, and his small fingers gripped the rough wood of his uncle’s cabbage stall for support. She was like nothing he had ever seen in Port Dominion, nor anywhere else in his tender years: a vision swathed in scarlet and black, her gown embroidered with threads that seemed to glimmer with their own secret fire.
Her black hair tumbled in gleaming waves, her eyes dark and fathomless. The faintest curve of her lips suggested mystery, mischief, power. To Willie, the Contessa seemed less a woman than an enchantress stepped out of a book of tales—an enchantress meant for him alone.
Suddenly, he was "in love"...
Around her bustled an army of porters and servants, straining under trunks of clothing, heavy dark furniture, boxes marked with Spanish seals, and the creak of barrels filled with her wines and sangrias. It was not merely the arrival of a noblewoman; it was an invasion, a slow and stately claiming of Dominion Square. The crowd gawked, murmured, shifted in uneasy fascination.
Willie gasped. The sound escaped before he could swallow it. Somehow—impossibly—her head turned. For an instant that burned itself into the boy’s soul, her eyes found his, and her lips softened into a smile. A smile only for him, and him alone. Like a precious, gleaming, gemstone suddenly found shining in the muck and mire of a muddy field.
One heartbeat. One look. One smile. Destiny.
He felt aflame. And then it was gone. She moved forward, her gaze drifting elsewhere, her train of followers spilling into the street like the tide.
Beside him, his uncle Edwin chuckled low in his throat, dragging a hand over his stubbled jaw. “Aye, lad, I saw it too,” he muttered, his gaze fixed openly upon the Contessa’s swaying figure. “By God, I’d steer my ship into that harbor on the darkest night, papist flag or no.” He then coughed lightly and cleared his throat, "But don't let your Aunt Emma know about this, or what I said, or there'll be hell to pay for both of us."
His words dissolved into a rough laugh, half-choke and half-growl, before he turned back to haggle with Mrs. Balder, who was fingering his cabbages and peering at them with a suspicious and judgmental eye as though she expected them to confess sins.
Mrs. Balder, pursing her lips, sniffed at the sight of the Contessa and her entourage. “Hmph. Spanish airs! Mark my words, nothing good comes from those who cling to Rome or all those that follow the Catholic ways and their pope.” Yet even she watched the noblewoman pass, her eyes narrowing not from disdain alone but from something nearer to envy.
Two fishermen, mud still on their boots from the docks, paused mid-step. One whistled under his breath. “Ain’t never seen such a lady in these parts.” The other crossed himself swiftly, muttering of omens and bad luck.
From the balcony of the King’s Arms Inn, the innkeeper’s wife, Mrs. Dunstable, leaned upon the rail, her apron dusted in flour. “Look at her, George,” she murmured to her husband inside. “A storm in red silk.” George Dunstable only grunted, casting a worried glance at the wine barrels marked with Spanish stamps. “Storm, aye. Storm that’ll cost us all before it blows through.”
But Willie heard none of it. His head was light, his chest hot. For the first time in his young life he felt not only love but its twin shadow—jealousy—as he watched the crowd devour her with their eyes.
The Contessa passed from view, leaving behind only her smile seared in memory, and the uneasy hum of a town already altered by her arrival.
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