Chapter 17
Minerva
The days smudged together, blurred by headaches. I struggled to adjust to my new sleeping arrangement. Even though I told myself it was no different from sleeping in the same room as the rest of my family, I woke frequently, reacting to one person’s whistling snore or another’s mid-dream mumbling.
Dreams, when I had them, were tangled and restless. I kept finding myself on the steps that led up to the fourth floor. I kept stepping onto creaking floorboards and turning.
I saw coffins. No, they were bigger than coffins. They were sarcophagi, hewn from single blocks of black volcanic stone.
First three, then two, then one.
In dreams, I stepped up the groaning stairs, my heart pounding harder and harder as I drew closer to the top.
I couldn’t stop myself. My feet were too heavy, and moved even though I didn’t want them to.
No matter how hard I tried to turn my head, I couldn’t look away from the expanse of the fourth floor as my head rose above the narrow staircase.
As I emerged and stepped onto dusty floorboards with heavy feet, I couldn’t look away, even though I wrenched myself hard enough to wake with a start.
My neck was sore for a full day after dreams like those.
The rain broke for the first time since Senora Encarnación’s death. I took my afternoon break in the garden, sitting beneath the trellis of jasmine. The clouds seemed thin. Though it was silvery and weak, the afternoon light had a touch of warmth to it.
From there, I could see the windows of the room where Senora Encarnación died.
They were opaque, mirrorlike. My reflection was a smudge of dark green uniform and dark hair beneath the trellis.
If I were to see my reflection any closer, I had no doubt it would be as wan as the face I saw in the mirror this morning.
Waxy beneath what weak spring color clings to my cheekbones.
Sunken. Tired. Purple bruises beneath my eyes to rival Leoncio’s.
My eyes trailed up the walls of the house, following the vines to the fourth floor.
I never dreamed of Senora Encarnación. Nor of the dark shadow that descended on her that day, even though it was as vivid in my mind’s eye as if it had happened this morning.
A motion caught my eye from somewhere to the right, so far behind me I could have missed it.
A boy about my age stepped out from the maze of paths of the garden, looking around as if he were lost. He was dressed in a servant’s clothing, but his shirt was nothing like those of the male staff of la Casa de las Gardenias—its cut struck me as old-fashioned.
It brought to mind the portraits in Casa Azafrán.
The blood stilled in my body. Hairs lifted on my arms.
I didn’t know him, but for some reason my body did, and it was frightened.
“I’m sorry for startling you,” the boy said. He was near enough that the crunch of his shoes in gravel set my teeth on edge. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“You don’t work here.” That meant that he shouldn’t be here. Not unless Octaviana had brought on new staff, which I was certain I would have heard about in the kitchens.
Or at least I thought I would have. Lately, my attention was scattershot and weak. Sara scolded me for careless mistakes. Even Cosme, whose attention rarely turned to me since I left the ranks of the liveried servants, seemed to notice how often I tripped in sight of la senora or shattered glasses.
“I’m a servant from a nearby household,” the boy said. “I was wandering the jungle on my break and must have gotten lost.”
He didn’t look worried to have discovered himself in Octaviana’s realm. He should have been. Anyone in their right mind would have been.
“You need to get off this property before la senora finds out,” I said. If he was found, he would of course be punished, if not interrogated as a spy and shot.
And I—if caught speaking with him—would be implicated.
Octaviana already had little need for me. If anything, I’m sure she would be thrilled to rid herself of the last evidence that her aunt had ever stayed in la Casa de las Gardenias.
The boy looked up at the house curiously.
“Is your senora Octaviana del Valle?” he asked.
Anyone who actually worked for a family wealthy enough to have a house outside of the city would know that.
The innocence in his voice must be feigned.
“My people talk about her. Even my senora says she’s cruel and wicked. Is that true?”
“Minerva, I need you!”
Sara’s voice. Coming from the direction of the house. I looked over my shoulder and saw the top of her head bobbing closer over the sharp plumage of birds-of-paradise.
“I said get out of here,” I snapped at the boy. It tasted sharper than I expected.
“All right, all right,” he said, holding up his hands defensively. “I’m gone.”
And just like that, he was.
As if the air had opened a doorway and snatched him through it.
Gone, like the absence of the echo of my footsteps on the stairs.
“There you are.” Sara’s voice was right behind me. “Eugenia left the terrace doors open to the piano room and a bird flew in. It shit everywhere. Come on.”
I followed, but not without checking over my shoulder. Twice.
The boy was truly gone. No crunch of gravel beneath shoes; no sounds of an escape.
The only thing left was an eerie silence in his wake.
Birds in houses are a bad omen, Armando often said.
The next hour or so was filled with mops and rags as Sara and I swept up shattered vases and wiped away streaks of white-and-black bird droppings.
I was too distracted to be amused by Sara’s descriptions of the bird sweeping frantically around the piano room, sending sheet music flying and two of the other maids running from the room screaming.
I didn’t like how today felt. It rolled around my mouth like the aftertaste of food gone off.
It was not until that evening, when the del Valles were eating and Sara and I were getting brooms and supplies to prepare the living room, that I brought up the boy.
Though I did so as casually as I could muster, the look she slid at me over her shoulder from the fireplace was so cutting that I froze in the act of lighting the lamps at the back of the room.
“There are no ‘nearby households,’ ” she said harshly. “This is the only house on the whole mountain.”
So I was right to distrust him.
“Could he be a spy?” I wondered. “Should I tell la senora?”
Sara rocked back on her heels, contemplating the empty fireplace. She did not start the fire; I did not reach up to turn on the next lamp. Silence curled around us like the muddy evening dark of the room.
“Don’t say a word to la senora,” Sara said at last. She spoke to the fireplace more than she did to me. I strained to hear her words clearly. “Sometimes, people who work here…see things. Hear things.”
My heartbeat stumbled. “What kind of ‘things’?”
“La senora forbids talk of it.” She did not address me directly. She sent the advice over her shoulder. “If you want to keep your position here—and I’m telling you, you really do—keep your head down and keep working. And don’t talk to me about it anymore.”
“All right.”
“If you do, I’ll tell la senora that it’s you who’s been spreading superstitious gossip,” she said. “Because unlike you, I have a sense of self-preservation and want to keep this job.”
She turned back to the fireplace, her movements sharp and purposeful as she lit the kindling.
The darkness that hung in the back of the room seemed to curl closer.
I carried that sensation with me as Sara and I began turndown service, speaking only when work demanded that she ask me for the duster or a fresh set of linens as we passed one another in the hall.
Sara worked faster than I. Either she had run out of patience waiting for me or had other tasks to attend to, because by the time I was done with Octaviana’s room, she was gone.
All that remained to do was Leoncio’s quarters.
A task we passed back and forth like a small pet neither of us wanted to hold for fear that it might bite.
The door creaked. It shut with a click behind me.
I brightened the lamps as much as they would go.
I turned down the bed as quickly as possible, then returned to the sitting room that Leoncio had transformed into a sort of study.
Golden light fell on a desk scattered with scrawl-covered papers and pots of ink, abandoned pens and dark bottles with barely legible handwritten labels.
Across the settee behind the desk, dried flowers were pressed to paper and written about in an untidy hand.
blood-orange marigolds—the sap from the stems irritating to skin—but what about mouths—feed to dog
Cosme said Geraldo de las Casa’s hazel used as pesticide in the south—add
víspera irises = useless
Elsewhere in the house, small round tables that populated other sitting rooms were used for vases; he had books stacked on his. Other tables had shallow boxes.
They were lined with insects.
I flinched; then, a moment later, I realized they were all dead.
Two bright golden scorpions were speared to the bottom of a box by long silver pins; one was turned inside out, its shell peeled away in various places on its body and curving tail.
Butterflies, venomously bright, lay skewered in tidy rows.
Small labels described where they were found and what venom could be extracted from their bodies.
I peered closer at the butterflies. At the gem-dark gleam of their wings in the lamplight; at the shadows their delicate antennae cast on the paper to which they were pinned.
In my mind’s eye, I watched a shadow rip itself away from the wall and lunge at Senora Encarnación.
Poison killed Senora Encarnación, but what of that shadow? It left her curled and broken, dry and husk-like.
Behind me, a door creaked. I froze.
“I wouldn’t touch anything if I were you.” A smooth, smug voice. “It’s dangerous.”
My pulse throbbed in my ears. Behind me, I heard Leoncio—for who else could it be?
—shut the door and walk toward me. He had never addressed me before.
Never so much as looked in my direction.
The way Sara spent as little time as possible cleaning his rooms and Filomena’s recent bloom of palm-size bruises on her neck and upper arms convinced me that this was a good thing.
To be invisible was to survive. This dictum ruled my life long before la Casa de las Gardenias, but now it was law.
And I was no longer invisible.
I was an insect caught beneath a merciless magnifying glass, anticipating the pin he would use to spear me to the spot.
Slowly, I straightened. I folded my hands before me in a sign of respect. Kept my eyes lowered.
Leoncio’s shining shoes stopped on the richly patterned rug. Directly before me.
His laugh was dry and creased in a way that made it sound like it should belong to someone much older.
“The look on your face!” he crowed. There was a pistol at his hip, its handle intricately carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
“Don’t worry, nothing here is toxic enough to kill you.
At least not in the amounts that I have.
” I flinched as he unbuckled the holster and pistol from his waist. He noted this nervousness; it sparked an acidic, sly smile.
“And this, ha! I need to reload it after every shot.”
He cast it carelessly on a table. It spun slightly, then stilled, its barrel pointed at me. “She only allows me one bullet a day,” he said, laying a dollop of sarcasm on the word allows. “As if I don’t know where they are kept.”
I swallowed.
“I beg your pardon,” I murmured politely. “I was just leaving.”
I began to, but he caught me by the waist. My spine went wooden.
“Don’t be afraid of my collections,” he purred.
I could count the veins that laced the shadows beneath his eyes. They were blue, as delicate as spiderwebs beneath his fair skin. He was older than the childhood portrait Senora Encarnación cursed at in Casa Azafrán, but something more than age lined his eyes.
“You can come look at them whenever you like,” he said. “There’s precious little entertainment up here otherwise.” The weight of his hand on my waist curved to my back and slipped down, resting on my rear. My heart was a bird in my throat, my feet ankle-deep in mud. “Isn’t it so boring?”
I could feel his breath on my face. It was stale.
I would be the next specimen pierced through the sternum and added to his collection unless I ran.
“Very, senor.”
Two words, but they were enough to break the spell.
His hold on me loosened; I stepped past him and crossed the room toward the door. Palm to cool handle. I twisted it, and fumbled, for my hand was clammy.
As I shut the door behind me, that laugh slipped through the narrowing gap. Dry as a corn husk underfoot.
I took the stairs two at a time. Midway down the first flight, I realized I had forgotten my broom and full basket of laundry.
I turned, heart pounding erratically, and retraced my steps to snatch them, then I was tumbling down the stairs again, shying away from the shadows that reached at me from the walls, tearing at my hair, swirling into my ears and clouding my vision.
It was not until I reached the bottom, scalp and lower back wet with sweat, that I realized that an echo had followed my footsteps all the way down.