Synopsis

The Guardian of Secrets, an epic historical family saga, of love, war, and revenge, spanning four generations, from 1912, Kent, England to, Spain and its 1936–39 civil war.  

In present day Spain, María Martinéz Merrill is dying, but welcomes the end of her long life. She is one of the last of her generation. A survivor of the Spanish Civil War; a hellish war, long ended but still lingering in her mind like the familiar caress of an old friend.

When her granddaughter, Lucia, arrives for a visit, María finds the perfect opportunity to share her dark world filled with shocking family secrets, guarded in old journals and written decades before by María and her mother, Celia Merrill.  

María forces herself to relive her tormented past in order to convince Lucia to veto the   sale of the family estate whilst her children plot behind closed doors to dismantle and destroy everything she has built...

Excerpt

It soon seemed that the whole of Madrid had upped sticks and moved camp to the Jarama valley. Fifty battalions had been mustered, converging on the Jarama area in hundreds of trucks, tanks, artillery units, and ambulances. They drove slowly and carefully through the muddied dirt tracks and the cornfields destroyed by the heavy traffic. Everyone in the convoy had been told repeatedly that the stakes were high and that should they fail, they would leave the back door open, allowing the nationalists to enter Madrid. For the first few weeks, María could think of nothing but the job she’d been sent to do. There were enormous losses, estimated at between twenty and twenty-five thousand, on the republican side, and the International Brigades also lost thousands in the first few days of fighting.

Day after day, María watched the orderlies leave the tents, carrying out amputated limbs and corpses, mopping up blood from the floors that filled buckets to the brim, and dumping mountains of bodies for a later burial. When the fighting eased off for a short

while, her life became a monotonous existence of muddy fields of olive groves, rain-drenched trenches, and food that consisted of watery soup or congealed stew. María acknowledged that the doctors and medical staff tried their best to save the dying men,

crying for their mothers and asking with hope in their eyes if they were going to live, but the reality was that they just couldn’t cope with the seriousness of injuries inflicted on the battlefield.

The normal passage of time didn’t exist anymore. The wounded came in day and night—they were everywhere—and the shortage of doctors and nurses was becoming increasingly apparent. María was only a trainee nurse at best, but she found herself giving

injections and administering anaesthetics for doctors who no longer cared who did it. Soldiers with stomach wounds were the worst, for she had been warned not to give water to those patients. She did disobey that command on occasion, though only when she thought that a drink of water was the only comfort she could give to a man who was going to die anyway.

After a while, the medical station found itself right at the front, stuck there without the possibility of moving back again because of the risks to the stretcher-bearers. To make things worse, the dressing stations were carried into sheltered ditches and trenches that made them increasingly vulnerable to enemy fire, not to mention a dirty and muddy place to work.

María handed the wounded who