Pilgrim's castle

Yvain had been named after a character in a fairy-tale, a maiden who had been assisted by a lion in her fight against a dragon – and in her present situation she could not help feeling that the fairy-tale had come true. Shipwrecked while on a cruise, she had been washed up on to the shores of a tiny Spanish island, the Isla de Leon – Island of the Lion – and taken to the castle of the Lion himself, the autocratic Don Juan de Conques y Aranda, Margues de Leon. The Marques was kindness itself: he took her under his wing, made her his ward, arranged for her to stay at the castle indefinitely – a…