Chapter 10
Minerva
My work did not end after Senora Encarnación went to bed.
I could finally catch up on folding and storing the linens that I brought down to be laundered at the beginning of the siesta.
This meant descending to the bustling laundry room and the kitchen, where I worked at the long central table.
I was invisible to the cooks as they put away the last of the washed dishes, shared a drink, and gossiped gaily about the house’s goings-on, but I didn’t care. I was surrounded by noise and light.
For a time.
Inevitably, each sheet was pressed and folded. Every stocking found its pair. And it was time for me to heft the basket onto my hip and carry it to the third floor.
Apart from the echo of my footsteps, the house was quiet at this hour. Octaviana and Eugenia had retired; Leoncio flitted about the house like a poltergeist, up to who knows what. No light emanated from under the door to his suite on the second floor.
Sweat trickled down the small of my back as I reached the third floor. I would be breathing easier if I used both hands to carry the basket of linens, but if I did, I wouldn’t be able to also carry a lamp.
My ungainly walk was made more of a saunter by the basket balanced on my hip; the glow of the lamp swayed drunkenly from side to side as I searched for the linen closets.
These doors led to drawing rooms; this, to the piano room where Eugenia practiced.
Next was a games room with an enormous, cave-like fireplace and a billiards table.
My annoyance increased with my sweat as I passed the door to Senora Encarnación’s suite. Two doors remained before the hall dead-ended into a window. The first: a storage closet filled with rows of sealed glass jars of glimmering, dark embers. Chispa, before it was lit.
If one of the liveried staff were to find me here, they might think I was trying to steal the chispa.
But to what point and purpose? Unlike in the Capital, here there was no way I could smuggle it out of the house and sell it, like Senora Encarnación once accused her friend’s maids of doing.
Once past the gardens, the high wrought iron gates lined with spikes would stop me long before I even reached the treacherously steep path down into the valley.
The scrape of movement overhead. It was the same scrape, like that of heavy furniture being moved, that had caught my attention as I ran the bath.
I shut the door quickly.
The scraping sound lingered at the back of my mind with the light touch of a fingertip as I located the linen closet at last, set my lamp on the ground, and began putting things away.
I had now opened every door on this floor.
If there was no staircase from the third floor to the fourth, not even for servants, then how did one get up there?
And who was up there, making those noises?
As I shut the door, a groan slipped through the quiet hall. Long and agonized.
For a moment, I did not move.
I heard the groan again. Heat flushed my cheeks. I was wrong. That groan was decidedly not agonized.
A girlish giggle rose in its wake; a young man’s muffled voice. Footsteps. The creak of an opening door.
I extinguished my lamp. I didn’t care who decided to fuck in the empty drawing rooms on this floor; that was none of my business. I simply didn’t want to be seen.
“Ay, dios, we can’t let your cousin hear us! Her room is just beneath us.”
That was Filomena’s voice.
Bodies thumped against a door down the hall; the rattle of a door handle.
I absolutely did not want to be seen by Filomena.
I shoved the basket into the linen closet and snatched my darkened lamp. Behind me, there was a door.
I reached for the handle; paused.
I could have sworn there was not a door there before. Senora Encarnación’s suite filled all the space between the door and the corner of the house; where else would such a door lead to? I should have been able to see it from inside her suite.
“Leoncio, please!” A gasp; more giggles. “Let me check the hall.”
I wrenched the door open.
A moment too late.
Filomena had cracked the door open and peered into the hall. Her hair had come out of its elegant knot and fell around her face; her cheeks were dark as she looked left.
Directly at me.
Our eyes met.
She held my gaze, and slowly, ever so slowly, lifted a finger to her lips.
Then she withdrew into the room.
“It’s clear,” I heard her say—perhaps panic heightened my senses, for it sounded so much louder than she had been speaking before.
I flung myself through the doorway, not caring what kind of closet it was or where it led.
But instead of leading into Senora Encarnación’s suite, the door led to a space barely wider than the chispa storage closet.
A spiral staircase filled it from wall to wall.
I shut the door behind me and lit my lamp.
Dust motes caught the light as I looked up.
I had found the servants’ stairwell at last.
This isn’t right, a small voice whispered in my skull. Back away.
Voices in the hall. Footsteps stumbled and then grew louder. A thump against the door, followed by more giggles; I jumped, nearly dropping the lamp.
I fled upward. No echo followed my feet up the staircase.
I lifted the lamp high, so as not to trip, and my head crested the opening of the fourth floor.
Filomena’s voice seemed so distant now, as if I had traversed three flights of stairs instead of one.
The rattle of the door handle, however, I heard with a crispness that sent my heart to my throat.
They would enter the stairwell and either go down or up; where could I flee if they chose the latter? Where could I hide?
My lamp was the only light as I stepped up and straightened.
“Hello?” I whispered.
A wide, empty hall stretched before me, far wider than the corridor beneath.
At this end of the house, the spaces off the hall were not fully enclosed rooms, but what appeared to be storage areas, walled off from one another but not from the front, where they were open like the horses’ stalls in the carriage house.
The ceiling sloped down from the center, following the shape of the roof until it was so low that the windows filled almost the whole space from floor to ceiling.
It made the windows appear even taller, even leaner, than the ones on the lower floors, though from the outside of the house they all appeared to be of uniform size.
“Who’s up here?” I called softly.
No response.
I stepped forward, testing the floorboards.
Some creaked; others did not. I trod slowly as I peered into the storage stalls.
Looking to my right, opposite the hall from Senora Encarnación’s suite, I saw furniture—chairs, like those in the dining room, stacked in neat rows.
A side table or three, covered in a thick layer of dust. Abandoned lamps veiled in cobwebs.
I turned to the left, lamp held high, to examine the space that sat directly above Senora Encarnación’s suite.
Perhaps I had been wrong about the scraping sounds. Perhaps a family of rodents made its home up here, or monkeys from the forest. I braced as I turned toward a small corner, directly above my bedroom, waiting for the chispa light to fall on a nest of rats or worse.
Golden glow reached into the darkness and touched dark boxes. Three of them.
I frowned. The floorboards creaked beneath my feet as I stepped forward; I froze, my palms gone slick.
The only items in this space, above my room, were not pieces of furniture. Not armchairs or tables or even boxes.
What I thought were boxes were too long. Too shallow.
These were coffins.
The dust on the floorboards had fresh tracks, evidence of them having been pushed to one side of the room.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
For despite the fact they had been moved, despite the scraping I had just heard overhead, I was the only soul on the fourth floor.