Chapter 15
Minerva
By dinner, my black dress was folded in my trunk.
The trunk itself was carried down three long flights of stairs with the help of another two maids and now sat at the end of a simple bed in the maids’ dormitory on the first floor.
No chispa lit the way to the dormitory as the sun set, its blood-streaked arms consumed by the evening’s mist. Candles and simple matches were placed by each bedside.
It was by candlelight that I put on the dark green dress given to me by Sara, one of the other maids, and tied a white apron around my waist.
“You’re going to want to fix the way you tie it in back,” Sara said.
She was about my age, with brown hair and light eyes.
I don’t think I ever noticed her before joining the ranks of the maids.
She moved from room to room like a mouse, silent, invisible.
“La senora is very particular about appearances.”
That was the only thing anyone said to me all afternoon and evening, even when I sat at the table in the servants’ dining room and shared a meal with them.
When we had finished eating and cleared our plates, Filomena entered the kitchen with a used plate on a silver tray, nose held high, as one of the maids took the plate away and handed her a crystal glass filled with frozen lime ice, the palate cleanser on the night’s menu.
She shot me a sideways look. Her sleek hair gleamed, arranged into its customary elegant knot at the nape of her neck.
“Working your way back down to where you started, I see,” she said, her voice all singsong venom.
“Down, down, back to the slums you go, little rat.”
With a swish of fine skirts, she vanished into the dining room. Her perfume lingered on the air: an earthy floral, something that reminded me of irises.
Perhaps the other staff were cool toward me because they expected that behavior.
The liveried servants were a class apart from the maids and the stable boys, the cooks and the gardeners.
I didn’t have the energy to show them otherwise.
Instead, I took a feather duster in silence and followed Sara to the living room.
She carried a brass bucket of firewood, her steps swaying as she balanced its weight.
“While they eat, we prepare the living room for when they retire,” she explained.
This involved drawing the curtains, whisking away dust from the side tables and ash from the previous night’s fire from the mantel, brushing the rugs so that it looked as if nary a foot had stepped on them since they were woven.
I followed Sara’s instructions as she knelt in front of the fire and arranged kindling in a fragrant heap. When it crackled greedily, she rocked back on her heels and surveyed my work in one efficient sweep.
“Go over the rug once more. And turn those down,” she said, pointing at the lamps in sconces along the walls. “Then we’ll be finished.”
Shadows peered over my shoulder, their presence brushing the back of my neck like a draft, as I followed her instructions with clammy fingers.
“Lower,” Sara said from the fireplace. “They like the atmosphere.”
“If they like it so much they should just read by candlelight,” I muttered as I returned to the first lamp. It was located in the back of the room, where the shadows were deepest. The golden particles fluttered and softened, curling down to the bottom of the lamp and resting there like embers.
Now the shadows were so thick it was easy to imagine them coiling around each other, solidifying into a long-clawed limb and reaching—
A soft, amused snort from the fireplace. I leaped backward, but it was only Sara.
Only Sara, I reminded myself sternly. Sara. Myself. We were the only souls in the room. I repeated this as I turned down all the lamps.
It felt as if the darkness could hear my mantra. I could feel it mocking me.
Watching me.
Relief skittered over my skin as we left the living room, closing the door behind us with a click.
“We leave the firewood pail to the left of the fireplace for Cosme to refill as necessary,” Sara said. “Now we turn down the beds.”
The familiar echo followed our footsteps up the central staircase to the second floor. One, two. One, two. Rhythmic as a heartbeat. We paused, turning on lamps along the wall of the staircase as we went.
“Eugenia goes to sleep first, so we start there,” Sara said, leading me to the left when we reached the second floor.
I kept my curiosity tucked behind a passionless face as we entered Eugenia’s chambers.
Instead of dark green, like so much of the house, they were decorated with bright ivory and gold, with enormous mirrors and shining vases.
My eyes trailed over cosmetics and jewelry cast carelessly aside on the vanity as we arranged pillows and turned the lamps low, counting the many dark bottles.
I can’t bear her, though.
We headed to Octaviana’s side of the second floor, down the hall to the right of the staircase.
The decor was soft roses and mauves. I scanned Octaviana’s vanity for bottles as Sara recited instructions.
I should pay more attention, but Octaviana’s voice suffused my skull like the distinctly gardenia, matronly fragrance of her room.
She had a weak heart.
A weak heart could not cause what I saw.
I followed Sara’s instructions to go to the bathroom and take out bath soaks in expensive ceramic bowls.
“First the lavender, then the soaking salts, then the oats,” Sara called from the other room. “There is a ledge in the wall next to the tub. Put them there, in that order. Remember that, because you’re on your own for this room tomorrow.”
Ideas solidified with each clink of ceramic bowl on tile.
The liveried servants thought themselves above the maids.
They were snobbish and reserved, mistaking proximity to wealth with moral superiority.
But they were almost always in the company of their assigned del Valle.
They were limited—as I was with Senora Encarnación—to their assigned wing of the house.
While serving Senora Encarnación, I wore blinders, like the dark horses that took our carriage up the winding road to this awful house.
Now I could see everything.
Without Sara with me tomorrow, I would be alone in Octaviana’s rooms. If I worked quickly enough, I could examine anything I wanted.
Senora Encarnación’s death was not an accident. I could prove it.
To whom, or for what?
For Senora Encarnación.
And perhaps, a small, burning part of me thought, for something more.
I was alight with possibility when we turned to Leoncio’s wing. These rooms were as dark as Senora Encarnación’s, their decoration incorporating more wood and fewer vases.
“Leave the lamps bright.” Unlike in the other rooms, where the presence of an extra pair of hands meant that Sara observed and corrected me and was slower in carrying out her chores, here she moved with a terse speed.
She was coiled and ready to spring. “He goes to bed last. Usually around midnight, but sometimes he comes up here earlier. You have to be sure to finish the other rooms on schedule, so that you’re done with this room while they’re all still in the living room,” she added. “Never get caught up here alone.”
Swift, wooden steps carried her out of Leoncio’s suite, back toward the pile of used linens and dusting cloths that we left by the staircase.
I cast a final look around the boy’s rooms. At the books left open on tables to diagrams of beetles and bright jungle flowers, at the magnifying glasses, at the scattered papers on the desk.
At least in here, the lamps were brighter.
Not that it lifted the darkness much.
It reached out and caressed my neck as I turned and shut the door behind me.
I’m here, it seemed to remind me. I’m always here.
Gooseflesh raced over my cheeks as I joined Sara at the stairs. I let my feet fall extra heavily on the steps and waited for the accompanying echo.
None came.
“That’s odd,” I said.
Sara looked up at me, pausing half a flight below. “What?”
“The echo. It’s gone.”
“What echo?”
“You know, the echo.” I retraced a few steps. “Whenever you walk up or down the stairs, there’s an echo of your footsteps.” To demonstrate, I came back down, letting my feet fall heavily.
All I heard were my footsteps on the stair. Nothing followed.
Nothing but cavernous, hungry silence.
I searched behind me, looking up at the second floor, as if doing so would reveal why there was no echo. Chispa glinted off the dark polished wood of the banister.
I took two more steps, almost stomping.
“Shh,” Sara chastised. “La senora will hear you.”
“There’s always an echo,” I said. I took a third step.
Silence.
“I’ve been here for three weeks longer than you.” Sara’s voice sounded as if it were coming from far, far away. Beyond the glow of the chispa, in the dark mouths of the halls of the second floor, the darkness deepened. Flexed. “And I’ve never heard an echo.”