Two households, both alike in dignity… From ancient grudge break to new mutiny…
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes… A pair of star-cross’d lovers…

No doubt you will recognise the preceding abridged quotation, from the prologue to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Romeo is a Montague, Juliet a Capulet – their love is thwarted at every turn by the legacies of their families, who have long feuded.

In my new novel, Legacy, I did not set out to retell Romeo and Juliet; for ‘never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo’. But I did want to explore how difficult family legacies can become obstacles to love.

Rodrigo (Ruy) Rueda de Calderón is the son of Luz and Andrès in Masquerade. This is his family tree:

Andrès’s parentage is another story of legacy entirely, but you can see here that Ruy is descended from the core family in my Andalucían Nights trilogy: Alexandra and Salvador are the protagonists of Indiscretion, and Luz and Andrès are the protagonists of Masquerade.

Here is Luna’s heritage:

Luna’s family is not related to Ruy’s, but it is very closely connected through historical liaisons and events. Isabel Herrera was once engaged to be married to Salvador de Rueda, Ruy’s grandfather, before he met Alexandra (and Isabel has never got over her jealousy). In the same generation, Alexandra became entangled with Felipe, who was determined to marry her.

I will let Isobel summarise the story, from her own unique – and twisted – angle, in this extract from Legacy:

‘As soon as she arrived from England, Alexandra de Falla managed to ingratiate herself with her Spanish family and proceeded to manipulate Count Salvador until I was quite forgotten. She even promised herself to my brother, Felipe, at the same time, and was caught with Don Salvador on the very night Felipe was to announce their engagement.’

‘It was truly scandalous and, I can tell you, for months our family was the subject of humiliating stories in aristocratic Spanish circles. To add insult to injury, history repeated itself a generation later when Luz de Rueda did the same thing to poor Adalia. Everyone knew that Adalia was virtually engaged to Andrés de Calderón. They were inseparable, but it didn’t stop Doña Luz.’

In fact, Luz did not steal Andrés away from Adalia, but the Herreras have a particular way of rewriting history to make themselves the innocent victims. Their jealousy drives them to keep up a feud with the de Ruedas and the de Calderóns, whom they hate.

What of Luna Ward, then, the main character in Legacy? Her mother is the self-absorbed Adalia, her father an American businessman. When their marriage broke down when Luna was seven, Adalia left, returning to Spain and leaving Luna at boarding school in the States. Once her mother died, having drunk herself into an early grave, Luna had very little connection to Spain, other than her uncle, Lorenzo, who made a habit of visiting her for a while when she was a young girl. But he was not a man who made Luna wish to connect to her Spanish heritage at all.

When Luna’s boss asks her to travel to Andalusia to write an exposé on an alternative health clinic there, she knows that she will be returning to a place whose spirit infuses her blood. But she is entirely unprepared for the family history she will uncover. The de Ruedas and de Calderóns have every reason to be wary of her, given her ancestry, and – if she subscribes to Isabel’s version of events – so too could she be judgemental of them.

The question for this new generation, Luna and Ruy, will be: to what extent should family legacy define you, and to what extent should you break with tradition and forge a new path?

One thing is certain, if the lessons of Romeo and Juliet are anything to go by: love and legacy make for a complication combination.