Chapter IV
IV
Alba
The best thing about entering a ballroom with Carlos Monterrubio was how he moved: He was a creature wholly at ease in the candlelight and the music that echoed off gilded walls.
He had told Alba that when his parents brought him to Nueva Espana, they had booked the passage on loans and mad faith in a flooded mine, hanging on to a noble name and reputation by shredded fingernails.
He used to hide from the cruel children of the other mineros, ashamed of his family’s reputation and how they criticized his clothes, his accent, his home.
And now?
It was as if he were born to walk into wedding receptions like this, filled with bejeweled dukes and the wealthiest merchants in Zacatecas.
He shook the hands of the bride’s and groom’s fathers and joked alongside the bride’s brothers, his laughter as golden as the sparkling wine from France and the rings on the men’s fingers.
The worst thing about entering a ballroom with Carlos Monterrubio was that he wanted to be there. He was not born to hide in the dusty dark. He shone. He was meant to be there. And as his fiancée, Alba had to be at his side.
With him, there was no commiserating about how the evening was stretching too long or how her shoes pinched her toes, nor about how late the other mineros might be out drinking.
He was kindling aflame with life in a room full of people.
The questions he asked strangers and acquaintances stemmed from genuine curiosity; the laughter that followed was rich and warm.
He roamed the room like a mountain cat, never resting, the faces and names of the people he spoke with blurring together.
If Carlos was a candle, Alba was the shadow it cast. Always a half step behind, flickering with unease at his every move.
“Shall I get you another glass of Champagne?” He bent his head down to her.
His whisper was a shade conspiratorial; his eyes danced as gaily as the couples in the center of the ballroom.
“I just heard that the bride’s father had it shipped from France at great expense.
It would be rude to let it go to waste.”
His was a boyish sort of ebullience. He had not outgrown it in their lifetime of acquaintance; he probably never would. It never failed to soften the bristling edges of any annoyance that built in her chest.
Marriage to him was a victory. Any discomfort she experienced now—or at any other social function at his side—was immaterial compared to the freedom that awaited her past the altar.
A parlor of her own, cavernous and silent.
A bright window by which she would embroider for hours, uninterrupted, content with the hum of silken floss through her fingertips and its vivid gleam in the sunlight.
No one telling her what to do or how to dress or where to go. No parents. No children.
She flipped her fan open and batted it gently before her face, as if she were warm. A coquettish gesture, another piece of a game they played.
“It would be rude,” she agreed.
But as he walked away, he took her smile with him. Her cheeks slackened.
This was the way it was: warm words, the practiced dance of flirtation. Enough to make any onlooker in Zacatecas believe that they were such lucky young things, to be marrying for love instead of money.
She watched him cross the crowded room back to her, a slim flute of Champagne in each hand, nodding at greetings and returning smiles with a flash of white teeth.
He wore the appreciation of women young and old in the room like it was tailored to his shoulders: carelessly, effortlessly.
Their fingertips brushed as he handed her the glass with practiced grace.
Alba knew she was envied. But it was envy for the wrong things: Her real conquest was not a golden Monterrubio, heir to a mine that was slowly stepping into its promise.
Victory, to her, was what she had avoided by making this deal with Carlos. She toasted that: She was untouchable now. She had gambled and she had won.
Carlos touched the rim of his glass to hers with a satisfying chime.
“We’re celebrating,” he said. “Don’t ask me why.”
He could have flung a door wide open, gesturing with aplomb to a room within, and that would have been more subtle. She could not help the amusement that tugged at the corner of her mouth.
“I never ask,” she said. “I demand to know.”
“At least demand in a lower voice.” As a rule, she hated it when men winked; Carlos was the only exception. “Drink, and I’ll tell you.”
The bubbles raked the roof of her mouth.
Between the collar of pearls at her throat and how tightly the seamstress had sewn her into this heavy dress, she had scarcely eaten.
The alcohol would go straight to her head.
It didn’t matter. The room was already lively, echoing with shouts and laughter. Surely she was not the only one.
Carlos lowered his voice, bending his head to her again. “We’ve received a large amount of mercury from Spain,” he said.
Alba hoped no one noticed how high her brows rose. “But the merchants from the capital—”
Carlos raised a finger to his lips with a twinkle in his eye that was more than Champagne. “They’ve come and gone, yes,” he said. “This was acquired by other means, shall we say.”
“Do tell,” Alba said, lifting her glass to her lips.
“I will not,” Carlos said. “It’s a family secret. You’ll just have to wait.”
Alba’s heartbeat stuttered. If the Monterrubios could buy their way out of Papá’s debt, she would have no more leverage. Would Carlos leave her before the altar?
“A toast,” Alba said. “To family secrets.”
Carlos lifted his glass to hers. “To family secrets.”
This time, when they sipped, his eyes did not stay locked on hers. They skipped over her shoulder to the crowded room beyond. Something beneath his face shifted, resettled.
“Come with me,” he said, extending an arm to her. It was somewhat stiff—with anticipation? Nerves? “There’s someone I want to introduce you to.”
People parted like waters before them, the golden couple of Zacatecas new money. The candle and its shadow. They moved as one to the far side of the room, where a small group of men in dark clothing talked in a circle.
“He’s newly arrived from Spain,” Carlos said. “Will you make him feel welcome?”
Alba’s mouth parted in surprise. That was why Carlos was suddenly nervous.
“Your old friend!” she said. “The one from your letters. The soldier.”
At this, a figure in the circle turned, moving with the confidence of a man who knew he was being talked about and knew it only ever meant good things.
His hair caught candlelight as if it were made to, softly, as the finest silk might.
It was tawny brown; so, too, was his skin, as if he had spent a long journey under the sun instead of in the dark interior of a carriage.
The effect this had on his eyes spurred Alba’s heart to her throat in surprise: They were pale, and piercingly so, like a blinding January sky.
“No longer a soldier,” said Carlos.
“Or perhaps still a soldier,” the man said. He had stepped toward Alba, but it seemed as if he had barely moved. It was as if the heavens and earth had conspired to resettle the ground beneath his feet. He took Alba’s hand and bowed gallantly over it. “Albeit in the army of Christ.”
As he rose, his clothing made clear what she had been too distracted by his face to tell: He was a priest.
“This is Bartolomé Verástegui Robles,” said Carlos.
“Senorita Alba, I presume,” he said. A swift appraisal of her features; this was over almost before it began.
Nothing was worthy of note. But he lingered on her clothes: There was wealth blatant in every piece Mamá had chosen for her, from the pearls in her upswept hair to the fabric imported from France and its expensive, ostentatious beading.
She had to walk slowly or risk fainting from the dress’s weight.
Bartolomé shot Carlos a look. A look she often saw exchanged among men, one that they thought women could not parse: Well done , it said. It never left a good taste in her mouth.
“It is a pleasure to meet you at last,” he said.
Something made her feel as if she were off the music, a beat behind the other dancers, jostled and heavy-footed and trying to figure out where she had misstepped.
Why the melody struck a flat note in her skull.
It was something in Bartolomé’s pale eyes, in the way he stood.
No—she could not help feeling ill at ease around the childhood friend whose arrival Carlos had so eagerly anticipated.
“And what brought you from Spain?” she asked. Make him feel welcome , Carlos had said, but instead she was scrambling for purchase. “Surely silver does not tempt men of God.”
Her question was forward. She knew it from the arch look she could feel more than see Carlos slide sideways at her. But she needed something, anything, to fill the space between them.
“Indeed, no,” Bartolomé said. His smile was a smooth thing, slipping over broad white teeth like fingertips over silk. “The temptation that drew me to the Indies is of a different sort. There are souls to be won here, senorita. Souls to bring into God’s embrace.”
The way the words fell from his lips, in his accent, sent Alba hurtling back three days to the airless confines of the confessional.
That is a sin.
Her stomach twisted, at once queasy with certainty.
She recognized his voice, but surely he could not recognize hers.
There had been a long line of people to give confession that afternoon, from the daughters of dukes to well-dressed solarero landowners who had come in for Mass from outside the city.
No one could pick a single voice out from a crowd like that.
Not even with the details she had included in her confession.
Or could they?