26: Beatriz

26

BEATRIZ

Present day

I WAITED WITH PALOMAin the study outside my bedchamber. The latter was filled with more people than I thought it had ever seen: Padre Andrés, José Mendoza, and the caudillo Victoriano Román, who was the local military officer charged with maintaining order in the district of Tulancingo. He and his men had arrived with surprising alacrity, given the hour at which we sent for them. Román’s men now walked the property, looking for evidence of bandits.

We had asked for the doctor as well, but he was not in town. His wife told our messenger that he was nearly a day’s ride away at Hacienda Alcantarilla, tending to the feverish pregnant daughter of the hacendado. He would come to us as soon as he could.

Paloma stood at the doorway. At her insistence, I had changed into actual clothing, but I had not touched my hair, nor put on stockings or shoes: my feet pacing the rug were still dirtied with cracked mud from the courtyard.

“Doña Solórzano.” Román called for me from the bedchamber.

I looked up, startled. Paloma’s brow furrowed with concern. “They need you,” she whispered.

I knew that. Still, I hesitated. I didn’t want to pass through the door to my bedchamber, but I had to.

I swallowed the dread in my throat and stepped into the room.

Andrés and José Mendoza stood closest to the door, near my vanity. Román was on the far side of the room, opposite them. He gestured up at the wall, brusque and authoritative. “Is this window normally left open at night, doña?”

I meant to keep my eyes on him. I tried as hard as I could. But against my will, as if drawn by gravity, or the weight of horror, they fell to the bed.

Rodolfo lay on his back, tangled in sheets. His face was pale, his eyes open, glassy and frozen wide with horror, just as Ana Luisa’s had been.

Like Ana Luisa, he was dead.

That was where the similarities ended.

Blood soaked his shirt and the sheets, blackened and gruesome in the light of morning. It reached the foot of the bed; it spilled on the floor. It had even fanned out to the stucco wall beneath the window where Román stood, waiting for my reply.

His throat was slit from ear to ear like a butchered sheep. The red edges of the cut were profane in the light, but I could not look away.

I could not.

Not even as Rodolfo’s head turned to the side in an avian-sharp movement, his eyes jerking side to side, scanning, then falling on me. His beautiful bronze hair fell back against the pillow as his back arched, as if he were lifted by a thread tied to his rib cage.

His eyes were fixed on me, but they were unseeing. Glassy and vacant.

Then he spoke.

Or rather, something animated his lips, moving them in stiff, wrenching movements. The voice that emerged was not his, nor even a man’s. It was a girl’s voice, a young woman’s voice, shrill with anger.

“Answer him, bitch.”

Silence rang in my ears. I tore my eyes from Rodolfo, looking wildly to Andrés. José Mendoza. Román. They all looked at me expectantly.

They had not heard the voice that came from Rodolfo. They had not seen him move his head so sharply it made the loose ends of the cut in his neck slide against each other like the lips of a monstrous mouth.

“Answer him!”

My gaze shot back to Rodolfo. That voice. Those movements distorting what should be a dead, stiff face, moving my husband’s features in uneven, spasm-like jerks.

“Tell him the truth!”

Darkness crept along the edges of my vision.

Distantly, I heard the words she may faint; Andrés was at my side, taking my arm and backing me out of the room.

“Tell him the truth!”

No one else could hear that voice. Nor see that movement, though it happened right before their eyes, in the cold light of morning.

It was Paloma who took me down the stairs and out the front door as quickly as she could, who knelt by my side as I fell to my knees and vomited into the dead flower bed next to the entry stairs.

I heaved violently, until acid stung my nose and my eyes burned. Paloma took a kerchief from a hidden pocket and wiped my face, her own still and solemn. She guided me back to the steps and sat me down at her side, holding me upright with a firm, steadying grip on my upper arm.

“I’m sorry,” I said, crumbling the kerchief up in a tight fist.

Paloma released her hold on my arm and rubbed my upper back with an equally firm hand.

You’re one of us, now, she had said. You’re trapped in San Isidro, just like the rest of us.

And there was nothing I wanted more than to be anywhere but San Isidro. I wanted to be back in the capital, scalding my hands and my pride with hot laundry water as I washed Tía Fernanda’s dirty underclothes. At least Mamá was by my side. At least I slept soundly. At least when the dead passed, they stayed dead.

My eyes filled with tears. How scornful I had been of Mamá insisting I should marry for love. How convinced I was that I was right to be practical, to sacrifice a loving partnership like she and Papá had for an estate in the country and financial security.

But what had my sacrifice won me?

Hacienda San Isidro. Madness and torment. This could never be a home for my mother, no matter how hard I worked to fix it, no matter how much porcelain and glass arrived from the capital. No matter how many exorcisms tried to drive the evil from its bones. Mamá would never plant flowers in this garden, nor orange trees nor birds of paradise nor the olives that the hacendados had discussed introducing to their own properties at dinner.

It was a cursed place.

It could never be home.

Not for her. Not for me.

“I want to leave,” I whispered, head in my hands. “I want to leave and never come back.”

Paloma resumed rubbing my back. “Where would you go?”

“I have nowhere.” The realization cracked my chest open like a tlachiquero’s machete opening the heart of maguey. A single, true strike, severing off a part of me that I hadn’t known was there. A hope that somehow, I could convince Mamá that all would be well in the end.

“Are you sure your family won’t have you?” Paloma asked softly.

I shook my head. Mamá wouldn’t even receive my letters, much less me.

Perhaps she interpreted it as no, I wasn’t sure, for she kept speaking. Her words held a comforting weight. Perhaps the soothing, magnetic quality of Andrés’s voice was not the trace of a witch’s power, but rather a mark of their family.

“Family is all we have when things fall apart,” she said. “I am glad Andrés is here. You know . . . he was gone for so long.” A moment passed, heavy with words unspoken. I sniffed pitifully and wiped my nose with her kerchief. “It was a good thing that you brought him back to us. We need him.”

“I know,” I said. The words came out nasal from the tears.

“His return earned you much respect among the pueblo,” Paloma added. “That is not something easily won. We have had little love for the Solórzanos, least of all the wives they bring from the capital. Especially not when the last one banished Andrés.”

“What happened, that he was banished?” I asked, grateful for something to focus on. Anything but the idea of Mamá turning away letter after letter from me.

Paloma looked out at the garden. The mist had lifted, but the day was gray, and in its light the flower beds looked especially lifeless and forsaken.

Though she was a servant and I the patrón’s wife, that did not mean I was any more entitled to what she knew than she was to my own troubles. Any other time, I would have backed away. Respected the sorrow that so clearly hung around her like a shroud.

But a deep intuition, or perhaps dread, or perhaps even fear told me I had to know.

“What happened?”

She inhaled deeply through her nose, and her dam burst:

“I told you I heard rumors that the patrón raped someone who worked in the house. That was a lie. Mariana told me it happened, then later, she told me she was with child. She was frightened. I asked Andrés for help. Titi . . . I mean, our grandmother, had many cures, and I knew she had taught him the one to end pregnancies. He had just returned from Guadalajara. I think he brushed up against the Inquisition there—he was afraid. But I pushed him to do it. Doña Catalina saw him bring me the cure. She threatened him. Cast him out. And then she turned on me.” She barely drew breath, she was speaking so quickly. “We watch each other’s backs. That’s how we survive. But I—” Her breathing hitched; tears made her eyes glassy, reflecting the gray light of the morning. “She was cruel. She told me she would not tolerate bastards and kept beating me until I told her who the cure was for. Mariana wouldn’t have. Mariana was stronger than me. But I gave in, and a week later, Mariana was dead. Doña Catalina ordered her to take candelabras up to that ledge in the formal dining room, even though we never had guests and no one used that room. Only Doña Catalina was there when Mariana fell . . .” Her voice cracked. “Doña Catalina killed her, I’m sure of it, and it’s all my fault.”

Sobs seized her. She leaned into me; I slid an arm over her shoulders and held her tight. The clouds did not part, but the sky was lightening. I tilted my face up to it. I wanted to spirit us away, lift her and take her with me somewhere, anywhere but here.

But there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to seek refuge. Nowhere to find peace.

Slowly, Paloma caught her breath. She sniffed. “That bitch got what she deserved,” she whispered.

I stiffened. “I thought she died of typhus,” I said slowly, my voice sounding distant as it echoed the words that Tía Fernanda had once stage-whispered maliciously behind my back.

Paloma lifted her head. “Who buries someone who died of typhus in a wall?” she cried.

Juana, Juana . . .

From the crumbling wall in the north wing, the skull grinned out at me, mocking me with its too-wide smile and crooked, broken neck. I thought of Juana mocking me for thinking someone was buried in the wall, releasing me so I fell back into the cold dark of the north wing.

As you wish, Doña Beatriz. Your word is the patrón’s.

Juana hated me because I threatened her authority. I was her brother’s wife, a check on her power in the kingdom of San Isidro. She must have hated María Catalina because she, too, was a symbol of Rodolfo, how Juana’s life of privilege and freedom was nothing but a lie. That it could all be taken away in a moment.

For Juana was a bastard.

Rodolfo kept this secret. Out of misplaced loyalty to her or his own pride, he had never told a soul. Not even me. And when he threatened to treat her as he believed she deserved, when he threatened to disown her . . .

It wasn’t the house that killed Rodolfo. Not like Ana Luisa, no. He never felt the cold, he saw no apparitions nor heard dissonant laughter, because the house—María Catalina—liked Rodolfo.

But Juana?

Juana killed him.

She must have killed María Catalina too, for the same reasons. She was the one who buried her in the wall, covering up evidence of her crime and showing her brother the grave behind the capilla.

Shouts and swift footsteps sounded from beyond the courtyard gates. Paloma and I looked up as Juana appeared in the open doorway, flanked by two of Román’s troops.

“There she is!” she cried, voice wretched from weeping. She was a portrait of perfect anguish, her hair dirty and wild around her tear-streaked face. The men broke into a run, charging me and Paloma.

It was as if the world slowed and went silent as realization dawned on me. That was why the caudillo and his men had arrived so quickly: they had already been on their way. For Juana had summoned them.

Paloma yelped and leaped to her feet. But where was there to run?

The clean skirts of Juana’s work dress swirled around her legs as she stopped walking. She lifted a finger and pointed at me.

I was frozen to the spot, even when Paloma grabbed my arm and tried to wrench me to my feet. For when Juana met my eyes, my blood ran cold: there was a hardness in her gaze that pierced me like a bayonet.

She had planned this.

“That’s the bitch who killed my brother,” she said.