3

3

THE TOUR RODOLFO GAVE me of the main house was brief. The housekeeper, Ana Luisa, would give me a more thorough introduction to its inner workings later in the day, he said. Though he had spent his childhood in this house and had many fond memories of it, he came and went too infrequently during the war to understand running it as well as she.

The house’s walls were thick, stucco and whitewashed; though the sun shone bright outside, cool shadows draped the halls. The building was arranged in a U shape around a central courtyard and was two-storied only over its central, largest section. The southern branch housed the kitchen and storerooms and was Ana Luisa’s domain. At the north end of the central wing, a staircase led to an upper floor composed of bedrooms, the suite of the patrón, and several empty drawing rooms.

As Rodolfo and I returned downstairs, I noticed a narrow passage to the right of the foot of the stairs. Its doorway was boarded up, a hasty job of mismatched wood and rusting nails.

“Juana told me there was damage in the northern wing,” Rodolfo said when he noticed how I paused, my attention drawn to the doorway. He took me gently by the hand and led me away. “An earthquake, or water, I can’t remember which. I will have Mendoza look into repairs.”

I tilted my chin up as we entered a formal dining room, tracing Moorish tiles imported from the peninsula by his forebears to a high ceiling. A narrow ledge ran around the circumference of the room, nearly twelve feet off the ground.

Rodolfo followed the line of my gaze. “When my parents used to have parties here, the servants would take candelabras up there,” he said. “It was as bright as an opera house.” Then his smile at the memory faded, and a shadow passed over his face. “Never go up there. A maid fell from there once.”

His words struck the air off-key, distant and slightly dissonant.

I shivered. Contrary to what Juana said, drafty was not the term I would have chosen to describe the chill inside the house. It sank into my bones like claws. The still air tasted of the staleness of an underground storeroom. I wanted to throw open all the shuttered windows, to let in fresh air and light.

But Rodolfo escorted me swiftly onward, closing the door with a snap behind him.

“We will dine somewhere more comfortable tonight,” he said.

Tomorrow, I promised the room. Tomorrow I would throw light into all its shadowed corners, order paint to be mixed to tidy its soot-soiled stucco.

From behind the door, the room laughed at me.

I froze. Rodolfo kept walking; my hand slipped out of his.

Had I misheard? Was I imagining it? I was certain I had heard light, bubbling laughter, like that of a wicked child, reaching through the heavy wooden door.

But it was empty. Behind that door, I knew the room was empty. I had just seen it.

“Come along, querida.” Rodolfo’s smile was overbright, strained. “There is much to see before dinner.”

And there was. Gardens, stables, household servants’ quarters, the village, where the tlachiqueros and farm workers lived, the general store, the capilla . . . San Isidro was a world unto its own.

Rodolfo left me in the care of Ana Luisa for a tour of the rest of the house, and I immediately wished he hadn’t. She was brusque and humorless.

“This is the green parlor,” she said, gesturing into one room but not entering. It had a single fireplace that was soot-stained; the walls were white, the floorboards scratched and tired.

“It’s not green.” My voice landed hollow on the empty space.

“The rug used to be,” was Ana Luisa’s only answer.

Like her voice, the house was devoid of color. White, brown, shadows, soot—these were the smudgy palate of San Isidro. By the time the sun was setting, and Ana Luisa had finished guiding me around the servants’ courtyard and the tidy capilla, I was exhausted. The house and the grounds were in various states of disrepair; the amount of effort it would take to prepare them for Mamá daunted me. But as Ana Luisa and I returned to the house and I took it in from the courtyard, from its foreboding dark door to the cracked tiles on the roof, I could not stop a flutter of emotion from rising in my throat.

This house was mine. Here I was safe.

---

*   *   *SEVEN MONTHS AGO, I sprang from bed in the middle of the night, woken by pounding from somewhere in the house and shouting from the street. Heart in my throat, I stumbled into the dark hall and seized the handle of the parlor door with clammy hands, tripping over the rug. Light and shadows danced mockingly across dainty chairs and delicate wallpaper, across Papá’s worn map of his battles pinned to the wall opposite the second-floor windows.

I rushed to the windows. Flames filled the street below: there were men in military uniform, dozens of them, brandishing torches and dark muskets crowned with long bayonets, their steel grinning greedily in the light of the flames.

One of them pounded on the door, shouting my father’s name.

Where was Papá? Surely he would know the meaning of—

And then Papá opened the door. Papá was among them, his hair disheveled, a robe wrapped tidily around his wiry frame. He looked more tired than I had ever seen him, heavy shadows accenting the gauntness of his face.

But his eyes burned with hatred as he took in the men surrounding him. He began to speak, but even if I had pressed my ear to the window, I would not have been able to hear him, not from so far above, not over the din of the shouting. I was paralyzed as the men seized Papá by the upper arms and dragged him away from the house, into the street. He seemed so frail, so breakable . . .

Traitor.A single word rose from the din. Traitor.

Then they were gone.

Only a handful remained behind, their faces cast in shadow as they took the butts of their muskets and thrust them at the windows below. Glass shattered; men flung shining liquid and torches through the jagged teeth of broken panes. The men melted away into the night, and I could not move, not even as the smell of burning wood rose into the room and the floorboards beneath my knees grew warm.

Papá was not a traitor. Even though the man who became emperor and Papá began the war on different sides—Papá with the insurgents and Agustín de Iturbide with the Spanish—they worked side by side in the end. Papá fought for independence. For México. Every battle he and I marked in red ink on his map was for México, every—

Mamá’s shriek split my skull. I flung myself back from the window; my heel caught on the leg of a chair and sent me sprawling on the carpet. Heat scorched my lungs; the air rippled thick with it. Smoke rose in delicate columns through the floorboards as I pushed myself to all fours.

The map. I lurched upward, then to the wall, and reached for the pins on which it hung, hissing as they seared my fingertips.

“Beatriz!”

I ripped it down, folding it with shaking hands as I ran toward her voice. Smoke stung my eyes; my ribs seized with coughing.

“Mamá!” I couldn’t see, I couldn’t breathe as I tripped downstairs to the back door. Mamá grabbed me and yanked me into the street. Our backs sweated and blistered from the heat behind us; we were coughing, barefooted, shocked by the cold of the night.

Mamá had gone to the servants’ quarters to wake the household staff but found their beds cold and empty. Had they known? Had they known, and fled to save their hides, and never warned us?

They must have known. Someone must have told them what we learned in the pale, fragile light of the next morning: that Agustín de Iturbide, emperor of México, was deposed. Exiled. On a ship to Italy. And his allies? Even those who had been insurgents, like Papá? Rounded up and executed.

“Shot in the back like the cowards they were, that’s what I heard,” said my watery-eyed cousin Josefa across the breakfast table, sneering archly down her Roman nose.

With nowhere to go, Mamá took us to the home of the only family she had left in México, the only ones who still spoke to her after she married Papá, a man of a lower casta than she: that of Sebastián Valenzuela, the son of her father’s cousin.

“But Tío Sebastián hates us,” I whimpered as we walked, shivering, the veil of sweat the heat of the house doused us in turning frigid in the night.

Papá’s map crinkled against my nightdress, clenched protectively between my bicep and rib cage as we ran through the dark winding alleys of the capital. We rounded the back corner of the walls of my uncle’s house and collapsed on the muddy steps of the entrance to the servants’ quarters. Mamá said she couldn’t trust any of her or Papá’s friends. Not after what had happened. We had to come here.

“We don’t have a choice,” she said.

But Sebastián did.

His wife, Fernanda, made that perfectly clear as she took Mamá and me in. She could have left us on the doorstep. She could have turned us away, and Sebastián would not question her judgment.

It was true, and I knew it. My uncle had no love for us, never had, and only took us in out of whatever remaining scrap of childhood loyalty he felt for a cousin long disowned by the family.

He took us in, but he preached self-righteously at dinner our first day in his house how my father had made the wrong choices all through the war, first by throwing his weight behind the insurgents, then by compromising and forming a coalition with the monarchist conservatives.

Though I was exhausted and starving, my appetite vanished. I stared at the cooling food on my plate, unmoving.

“It is a tragedy, but it was bound to happen,” Tío Sebastián mused sagely. His too-long gray muttonchops quivered with each gluttonous bite he took.

I could not decide if the feeling that seized my throat meant to make me vomit or cry. Humiliation seared my cheeks. Papá risked his life for independence, and I had a map to prove it. His rivals must have betrayed him, lied about him. And he was killed. I lifted my head, eyes fixed on my uncle. I opened my mouth—

A soft touch at my elbow.

Mamá’s touch. Nothing she ever did was above a murmur, none of her movements were anything but graceful and soft, but her message was piercingly clear: do not speak.

I bit my tongue, the pork on my plate going blurry as hot tears pricked my eyes.

She was right.

If Tío Sebastián chose to turn us out, Mamá and I would have nowhere to go. The realization was like a slap to the face: no one would take us. Our lives depended on pleasing my mother’s cousin and the beady-eyed, petty wife who poured poison into his ear.

I forced food into my mouth. It stuck to my dry throat like glue.

That night, as Mamá and I curled together, forehead to forehead, in the one narrow bed Tía Fernanda would spare us, I sobbed until I thought my ribs would crack. Mamá brushed away the sweaty hair that stuck to my forehead and kissed my hot cheeks.

“You must be strong,” she said. “We must bear this with dignity.”

With dignity.

With silence was what she meant.

I could not inherit my father’s property. I could not work. I could not care for Mamá, whose face grew wan and peaked. Reliant on my uncle’s charity, on my sour aunt’s thin goodwill, I had nothing. I wore castoffs from my cousins, I was not allowed to study or go out, for fear my presence would lower the esteem of the Valenzuela name in the eyes of the other criollos and peninsulares. I was a body without a voice, a shadow melting into the walls of a too-crowded house.

And then I met Rodolfo.

When he entered that ball to celebrate the founding of the Republic, when his broad shoulders filled the doorway, a sense of peace swept through the room. The tide changed, the hum quieted. He was solid. Reliable. He had a commanding voice, rich and golden, his bronze hair bright in the candlelight. He was smooth and collected, with all the confident, quiet authority of an idol in his temple.

My breath caught. Not because of his easy, lopsided smile, or the coy, almost timid way he approached me to ask for a dance. Not because his youth and his status as a widower gave him a romantic, tragic reputation among Josefa and her tittering friends. But because of the silence with which the room watched him. I craved that. I wanted to cup a room in my palm, to tell it to be still, to tell it to hush.

If Rodolfo was aware of his powers of enchantment, he did not reveal it. Of course he wouldn’t. He was a military man, a protégé of Guadalupe Victoria, one of the generals who formed the Provisional Government that ousted and replaced the emperor.

By the end of our first dance, I realized that a politician like Rodolfo would not overlook my father’s legacy for long. If it did not frighten him off when we were first introduced, when he was told my surname—Hernández Valenzuela, indicating my father’s family and then my mother’s—then it might later.

And at twenty, I faced a ticking clock: marry soon, when I was seen as fresh and virginal and desirable, or marry not at all.

So when it became clear he was attracted to my laugh like bees to piloncillo syrup and to my eyes, my mother’s eyes, bright as Chiapas jade, I seized it.

When I announced to my mother that I would be marrying Don Rodolfo Eligio Solórzano Ibarra, she set down her embroidery into her lap without grace, mouth dropped open in surprise. The months since my father’s death had taken a toll on her: her pale skin no longer called to mind fine china, but faded, crumbling paper. Violet shadows weighed beneath her eyes, which had lost their vigor. Her cheeks, once haughty in their height, were hollow, thinned by exhaustion.

“You . . . Solórzano,” she breathed. “He’s one of Victoria’s men.”

I folded my arms across my chest. Yes, he served one of the leaders of the political party that had turned on my father.

“If you want to leave this house and stop mending Tía Fernanda’s sheets, he’s the only choice. Don’t you understand?” I snapped. Look around you, I wanted to scream. Mamá married for love and burnt bridges behind her. I didn’t have that privilege. I couldn’t afford her idealism. Not when I had Rodolfo’s proposal, not when I had the chance to get us out of Tía Fernanda’s house. I could secure us a dignified life. Rodolfo’s name, his money, his land—these could give us wings to fly.

Mamá closed her mouth, dropped her eyes to her mending, and did not speak another word to me. Not then, not in the weeks leading up to the wedding.

I ignored her absence at the wedding. I held my head high beneath my lace mantilla and ignored the whispers about Rodolfo’s family. About past romantic entanglements and mysterious illnesses that Tía Fernanda jealously relayed to anyone who would listen, her lips smacking like boots in thick mud, her stage whisper scraping like dry, too-long fingernails across the back of my neck.

I heard his first wife was murdered by highwaymen on the Apan road. Really? I heard she died of typhus. I heard she was kidnapped by insurgents. I heard she was poisoned by the cook.

Rodolfo was my salvation. I seized him like a drowning man seizes driftwood in a flash flood. His solidness. His name. His title. His shoulders that cut into Apan’s blinding sky like the mountains surrounding the valley and the calloused, honest hands that led me to the gate of San Isidro.

He was safe. He was right. I had made the one decision that was guaranteed to lift me from the grim fate to which my father’s murder had doomed us.

I only prayed that one day, Mamá could see my decision to marry him for what it was: the key to a new life.