Spring 1902

Spring 1902 is the moment Penelope Aldaya enters the world and Jacinta’s years of expectation acquire a living, if painful, focus. Her birth into the Aldaya mansion joins Jacinta’s private longing to the family’s wealth and shadows, while confirming that the child she had imagined as her own would never be hers.

Setting and Circumstances

By Penelope’s birth, Don Ricardo Aldaya had bought the mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo. The house had already acquired a reputation among the servants: they believed it lay under a powerful spell. Jacinta did not share their fear. What they called magic, she understood as the presence of Zacarias, appearing in her dreams as a wolf walking upright, far removed from the man she remembered.

Jacinta’s Expectation

Jacinta had spent years expecting a girl to whom she could give all the love she felt had poisoned her soul. She had imagined that child as the answer to her prayers and as the center of a sheltered, almost dreamlike peace. Penelope’s birth fulfilled the expectation of a daughter, but not the deeper hope that Jacinta might possess a child of her own: she recognized that this was not the child Zacarias had promised her.

Significance

The date therefore holds both fulfillment and deprivation. Penelope was born into privilege, but the emotional bond that would shape her childhood was formed through Jacinta’s labor and devotion rather than through the formal role of her mother. Spring 1902 begins the story of that attachment inside a mansion already marked, for Jacinta, by dreams and the persistent shadow of the past.