Chapter IV #2
Especially if they were intimate with the Monterrubios, perhaps with their financial situation…how much had Carlos told his old friend about the state of the mine? Or, for that matter, the mutually beneficial nature of his relationship with Alba?
She kept her smile broad. Her face felt pinned and starched. Her mind spiraled down paths that grew narrower and narrower, and that robbed her of breath. She said something in reply, something empty and pleasant. Carlos agreed; more pleasant nothings.
Her heart was beating too quickly. Sweat pooled in the low of her back, sticking to the too-tight laces of her undergarments. She gave her half-finished glass of Champagne to a passing servant. Its taste had soured in her mouth.
“Are you well, senorita?”
Bartolomé was watching her. Could he see past the mask she wore? She prayed not. She almost laughed at the absurdity of the thought— Please, God, let me hide from your faithful servant. As if such a prayer would be answered.
“I could use some air,” she said. Her voice struck an affected note.
What she said was true—the drum of dancers’ feet and the ring of violins and glasses clinking and laughter rattled against her skull.
There were too many people moving and breathing in the same room; too many bodies filling it with heat and the tangy aroma of sweat wrestling to be free from the perfume that smothered it.
She unwound her arm from Carlos’s. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “If you see my mother, tell her…” The last thing she wanted was for Mamá to find her and fuss over her and dab her forehead with a heavily scented handkerchief. “Distract her, won’t you?”
The understanding that crossed Carlos’s face was warm.
“I’ll buy you all the time I can,” he said. “Shall I find you water as well?”
It was a safe thing, the friendship that bound them. She could almost hate herself for using him so brazenly.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “All I need is air.”
She had been to gatherings at this mansion before; if she recalled correctly, there was a courtyard off the ballroom. She set her sights on the door at the back of the room and pressed forward, slipping past people, answering greetings with a wan smile or pretending she hadn’t heard them at all.
Are you well? Bartolomé had asked. He read her quickly and easily. Anxiety took this information and spun it around her mind like a top. There was no hiding from him forever. Eventually, he would match her name and face to her sins, and then what?
Loyalty to Carlos would not break the vow of the confessional, but could it bend it?
Bartolomé could pretend to be ignorant of his conversation with Alba and still dissuade Carlos from marrying her.
He could convince Carlos that she was manipulative.
Disrespectful. Untrustworthy. And therefore harmful to the Monterrubio family name and to the reputation that Carlos burnished so carefully—so desperately—among mineros, merchants, and nobles at every social gathering.
Bartolomé could shatter her future. Her freedom.
She inhaled sharply to calm herself. The confessional was a sacred place. Even if he were able to miraculously match her voice to one of the hundreds he had heard that day, vows would prevent him from breathing a word of it.
And she would never confess to him again, that was for certain.
She shook off these thoughts with a stiff shudder as she passed through the doorway at the back of the ballroom and into a dark hall.
A draft from her right indicated the direction of the courtyard; she followed it.
She had no shawl, and January past sunset was piercingly cold, but she wanted to feel cold. It would clear her head.
She stepped into the courtyard.
A shadow to her left moved sharply away from her. A yelp in the dark; her breath caught in her throat, crisp and sharp.
“You frightened me,” a male voice said, tripping over the words as if in surprise.
“You frightened me. ” Alba’s hand had flown to her chest; her heart raced beneath her palm.
Gooseflesh rose over the backs of her arms; from the shock or the cold, she could not tell.
Her breath clouded the air, barely visible in the dark.
It felt like being submerged in a freezing bath. It felt biting and good.
“I needed some air,” the man said. “I thought no one else would be out here.”
“So did I,” Alba said. “On both counts.”
Being alone in the dark with a strange man was not a position that she wanted to be found in as a newly betrothed young woman.
She sucked in the icy air, aiming to clear her head quickly.
In a moment, she would be shivering too much to speak; she would return indoors and face the rest of the evening.
Perhaps Mamá would have had her fill of seeing and being seen by now—a wan, optimistic wish, but a wish all the same.
“It’s packed in there,” the man said. “Aren’t zacatecanos supposed to be the richest men in the world? You’d think they could build bigger rooms with all that plata.”
That was an outsider’s observation. But yes, now that she thought of it, you’d think that they would.
“Did you recently arrive from Spain?” she asked, trying to make the man out in the dark.
Not a single torch was lit in the courtyard.
There was no moon, only a smattering of sharp, faraway stars, and it was difficult to discern his features.
He was tall, that she could deduce, but his clothes…
she could not make out their color or style, only that there was more white than would appear in a priest’s dark clothing.
So he was no companion of Bartolomé’s. Good.
Her shoulders released tension that she had not realized they were holding.
“Is it that obvious?” he asked.
She shrugged. Perhaps it was the accent—he struck syllables at a clip that caught her ear, that felt other .
But it was also the nature of Zacatecas: It drew men from afar like flies to a deer’s carcass in the sun.
Whether the mines were producing silver or not, there was always someone new to pick over the bones and see if what was left still had ore to give.
“There seem to be a lot of new arrivals these days,” she said, thinking of the one she had fled in the ballroom.
“Here to make their fortune?” the man asked.
Bartolomé was a priest, but the paleness of his eyes had hidden little.
Hunger brought him to Nueva Espana—that much she knew from Carlos and the years of letters.
Bartolomé was the third or fourth son of some rich family, the only one who had yet to make his mark on the world.
The military, it was thought, would bring glory; when that failed him, he sought out the cloth.
He sought souls to convert, he said. Was that so different from seeking notoriety from wealth?
“So it seems,” she said.
“Then I am far from extraordinary,” the man said. “Here to get rich quick and run away as fast as I can.”
He was wrong. The thought of running away was unusual for a recent arrival. “Run away? From what?”
Her eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness; she caught his sardonic gesture toward the doorway that led back inside. “Family, you know.”
She did. Oh, she did. And because he was, perhaps, the first to ever mirror such a feeling back to her, she found herself intrigued. Who was he? “I know the feeling well.”
“Greedy and rotten to the core.” His laugh was half a sigh, both relieved by her reply and colored by exasperation—it inspired a swell of camaraderie in her breast. She was no longer eager to flee.
She found herself fighting against the chill, rubbing her forearms fruitlessly against winter’s bite, so that she could linger in this conversation.
“The sooner I can afford to get to Acapulco, the sooner I’m getting on the first ship that will take me,” he said.
“Headed where?” Alba asked.
“The Philippines, China, I don’t care,” the man said. “Anywhere, as long as it’s far, far away.”
The dark of the courtyard was what the dark of the confessional should feel like: weightless.
Open. Night’s chill had wicked away her sweat and left her feeling clearheaded and relaxed.
Perhaps the man felt the same. Perhaps as he looked at her—which she could feel he was doing, if not see it, and for once, she was not disgusted by it—he saw past the pearls and starched facade and the tight dress as heavy as battle armor.
Perhaps he saw a person.
His voice, when he spoke again, sounded as if he were sharing a secret, uncurling fingertips around a closed fist to reveal the treasure hidden inside. “Do you want to dance?”
Her laugh was like a sudden clap of hands, bright and startled. Was he flirting with her? Impossible. Men did not flirt with her. She was the only daughter of a wildly successful merchant, and that made her the sum of a financial calculation, the handshake at the end of a bargain.
“I don’t even know your name,” she said.
“And I don’t know yours. But you’ve already won my greatest secret,” he said. “Surely that’s worth more than a name.”
That was a lie. When people gave away secrets, they peddled in surface metals, never reaching for the deepest ore. Not unless their hand was forced. Even then, some things would always remain buried. Some things should never see the light of day.
But it was a pretty thing to say.
Perhaps it was the Champagne. The cold air making her feel bolder than she was. Perhaps it was her curiosity about this unusual person that provoked her to extend her hand to him.
She gave him a little lift of the chin. She could be flirtatious right back, could she not?
“Fair enough,” she said. “Shall we?”
His palm was calloused and warm.
When they stepped into the light of the ballroom, the first thing she noticed was the back of his hand. It was sunbrowned, dappled with small white scars and burn marks—the hands of someone who worked.
His clothes were dark, and—as she had judged in the courtyard—were not those of a priest. They were not the clothes of a particularly wealthy man either—the lines were clean and well tailored, but without the ruffles and extravagances she was accustomed to.
None of the nobleman’s frills that surrounded them as they walked onto the dance floor.
The violins struck the opening notes of the contradanza. She was rusty—she and Carlos had not danced in weeks. This would be interesting.
She turned, and they faced each other.
The noise of the ballroom fell away behind her.
If she had seen him before speaking to him, she might have been afraid.
His face was sharp, windblown; his mouth was broad and did not look as if it smiled easily.
His hair was dark, long and straight and pulled away from his face, accentuating high, blunt cheekbones and a gold ring in one earlobe.
Perhaps he was nearly thirty. But perhaps he was younger, and it was the squint lines at the corners of his eyes that gave the impression of someone who had seen much of the world and was wary of it.
But his eyes were dark, doe-like. Expressive.
Even soulful. They remained fixed on her face as the dance progressed with a softness that soothed the unease she had been carrying in her shoulders.
There was something in the way he caught her hand every time she extended it as the dance required that slowed her heartbeat. Slowed time.
Comfort in the presence of men was not something she had much experience with.
She doubted that it could be achieved through a single dance.
But something had passed between them in the dark courtyard that might be a distant relative of comfort.
Of ease. Or trust. That might resemble it, in shape and feel.
She meant to ask for his name. She opened her mouth, but was overcome with a wave of shyness. It had been much easier to speak to him in the dark.
A shriek shattered the ballroom.
The violins screeched. Dancers halted and collided; a glass smashed shrilly, then another.
The man took Alba’s hands in his and halted their dance, his eyes searching the crowd for the cause of the disturbance. He had subtly placed his body in between the sounds of a scuffle and Alba.
“She fainted!” a voice cried.
“Ah, it was the bride,” the man said, eyes fixed on the disturbance on the far side of the room. “Fainting at your own wedding. That’s not a sign of bad luck, is it?”
It didn’t seem to be a sign of good luck.
Voices slithered around the ballroom, passing words from ear to ear. She fainted, they say she has a fever . By dawn, the news would pass far beyond the direct witnesses of the event and be served as gossip with the next morning’s sweetbreads and coffee across Zacatecas.
“Alba!”
Carlos had appeared, pushing through the crowds, Bartolomé at his side.
Carlos thrust out a hand to her. Come , it said.
It was an entitled gesture. It was unlike him. She hesitated, but the man had already released her hands and bowed to end the dance. He vanished into the crowd and was gone.
She didn’t even know his name.
“I see you’ve met the convict,” Bartolomé said.
Alba whirled her head toward Bartolomé and Carlos in surprise. “Who?”
“My cousin,” Carlos said, a darkness settling on his brow. “Elías.”