Chapter VII
VII
Alba
The breakfast room was cold the next morning. This was thanks in part to the frost on the ground outside, but primarily to Mamá.
She answered all questions with clipped monosyllables and pulled exaggerated expressions of suffering when Carlos asked how she had slept the night before.
Her back could not endure the spartan furniture of Casa Calavera, you see.
Her knees were not accustomed to stone steps and the chill.
She would have to send for her mattress from the city, and blankets as well, for the wool irritated her skin and caused her to wake in the night.
Alba moved her spoon around her plate. She had also slept poorly.
She woke by the door in the gray predawn with a start and a heart thrashing against her ribs, as if it were still trapped in a nightmare.
A few deep breaths and she had soothed herself.
She always sleepwalked in new spaces. This was normal.
Nonetheless, it left her drained. She had not yet summoned the will to counterbalance Mamá’s mood. Even the fire felt pummeled into submission—its crackles in the hearth were meek, almost apologetic for how it broke the silence.
It mirrored how Carlos had been since they arrived yesterday evening. The curl of his shoulders struck Alba as sheepish as he showed them around Casa Calavera, apologizing for the fact that the lone housekeeper and cook, Socorro, was busy in the kitchen.
“We keep a lean staff here,” he said. To his credit, Alba was impressed that he did not shrink away from Mamá’s look of horror that they were still waiting on more servants to join them from the city. “It is usually my father and me and few others. It seemed wasteful to employ a full staff.”
“That, or they couldn’t afford it,” Papá had muttered under his breath.
Alba cringed on Carlos’s behalf.
Money problems or not, it made sense that they would keep such a spare staff at the hacienda de minas.
It was a working home, not one for entertaining, and it looked it.
Most rooms were devoid of decoration; they contained unvarnished chests as storage for tools and instruments, thin woven rugs to ward off the chill, and simple wood furniture.
None of the windows had glass; the wooden shutters were kept closed to keep the cold out, and it gave rooms a sepulchral gloom.
Unable to sleep, Alba had risen and opened the window of her room, bracing herself against the chill.
It faced directly east. Dawn light poured into the room, breathing color onto the bed and the simple furniture.
The mountains were dyed a dark, gemlike blue; as the sun rose, they paled, and finally, as the white sun broke over their peaks and flooded the valley and Alba’s room with light, she felt ignited from within.
As if someone had set a spark to her kindling.
They were beautiful, in their own stark, unforgiving fashion. She wanted to admire them.
But instead, she had felt a tug at her rib cage. Away . She felt it more than heard it, long, dragging nails against the inside of her skull. Away .
Breakfast stretched long. A headache left her with little appetite; she left most of her food on her plate. She longed to be outside, away from the gloom and Mamá.
“Carlos, mi amor,” she said. Her voice broke the silence like shattering china. “Could I have a tour of the property?”
Mamá shot her a stern look.
Alba caught it. Held it. Mamá would not be embarrassed by this rebellion; Heraclio had eaten before dawn, and Elías was nowhere to be seen. Alba had not caught a glimpse of him since the road up to the hacienda de minas the day before.
Not that she was looking.
“Mamá,” she said, “that is not an inappropriate request. I have never seen a mine. For someone whose world is built on silver, it would be edifying to see where it came from, would it not?” She turned to Carlos.
Gave him a smile, a small one, one that she hoped was not too warm, but warm enough.
“Besides, I want to be educated about my husband’s work. ”
Carlos’s face softened; it had been held artificially stiff in a serene mask.
Mamá was getting to him. That was not generally something Alba wished on people, and certainly not Carlos, who had done nothing to call such punishment upon himself, but it would mean he would be eager to leave the breakfast room and show her around the property.
Exploring on her own was a part of her larger plan to uncover any decades-old rumors about a foundling, but in order to do so, she had to first learn where things were.
“I would be delighted to,” Carlos said.
Her smile grew, its warmth genuine this time.
Mamá ensured she was wrapped in a heavy rebozo against January’s chill, but she shrugged it off her shoulders as soon as they were out of sight of Casa Calavera. Chickens scattered before her swishing skirts as Carlos led her around the perimeter of the house.
Casa Calavera was situated in a high valley, the palm of a cupped hand.
Carlos told her the nicknames of the peaks that rose around it like fingertips: el águila and el Cerro del Lobo to the north.
In the east were las Tres Hermanas; in the west, Nevado de Hueso and la Senora del Sol.
Depending on the position of the sun, they traded shifts casting long shadows over the valley.
The one exception was an area of flat, high ground to the south of Casa Calavera, which was given over to the task of amalgamation.
As a result, Carlos explained, it was difficult to grow anything except in the very center of the valley, where Casa Calavera and its anemic kitchen garden lay.
Which was why the Díaz family was so important to the Monterrubio enterprise.
Without food, the mine could not operate.
Merchants like Papá were the ones who brought foodstuffs from estates in Michoacán up into the north of Nueva Galicia.
Without good relationships with the merchants, the mineros could not prosper.
“Is your mother…have I done something to offend her?” Carlos asked.
His hands were clasped behind his back as they walked.
He was dressed in simple attire, muted browns and grays, his sleeves clean but patched, his shining shoes replaced with workmanlike boots.
Were all mineros like this? One side of the coin was silks and powder and jewels, shining for all of Zacatecas society to see, and the other side more practical.
It suited Carlos. His shoulders were often lost under jackets and vests and layers of lace.
“I don’t believe so,” she said slowly. It was the truth—Carlos hadn’t done anything to offend Mamá.
Perhaps Heraclio had done something to offend Papá, though.
Papá’s grumbling about debts unpaid was deeply unsubtle.
Carlos was an unfortunate bystander; the fact that he existed, and that he was bound by promise to Alba, was what offended her parents.
The memory of the long line of mules struggling up the mountain trailed through her mind.
Judging from what Carlos had hinted at, they were laden with mercury.
So much mercury. Alba knew next to nothing about amalgamation, but every child in Zacatecas knew that quicksilver begot silver, and silver begot everything.
Perhaps her parents learning about this mercury would change their opinions on the Monterrubios and their financial situation.
Perhaps that would work in her favor—it might not fully placate Mamá, but the promise of debts repaid would certainly help Papá—and they would allow her to remain engaged to Carlos.
Her one task, now, was to maintain peace between Carlos and Mamá as much as she could.
“I don’t know why you would ask that,” she said, batting her eyelashes as she might a fan in a ballroom. She hoped the effect it gave was one of innocence, not blatant manipulation. “Mamá is never well in the mornings. It’s her joints.” She gave him an apologetic cringe. “They plague her so.”
Gravel crunched under her boots as she followed Carlos up the path, past a rickety workshop, toward the entrance to the mine.
“I should not bring you up here, as it will be crowded with workers, but it truly has the best views of the valley,” Carlos said.
Perspiration shone on his brow. It gave him a healthy, attractive look, especially when they climbed high enough to step into buttery morning sunlight.
When he reached down to her, to take her hand and help her over the crest of the final rise, he resembled a painting of an angel on some chapel ceiling.
San Miguel Arcángel, reaching down to rescue her, a sinner, from temptations that would lead to her damnation.
She turned, and as she beheld the entrance to the mine, these thoughts melted like frost in the sunlight.
Workers shuttled back and forth from the mouth of the mine, looking as if they had settled into a rhythm already though the hour was still early.
The metallic percussion of pickaxes against stone rang sharp against her eardrums as she and Carlos wove through a motley fray composed of indios, mestizos, and espanoles alike.
The faces that beheld her were indifferent, suspicious, hard.
None were kind. None welcoming. Perhaps she should not have expected that—she was an outsider, an exotic bird in expensive feathers alighting among the crows.
She could not envision herself approaching any one of these men to ask after an abandoned baby found twenty-five years ago.
None of them looked as if they would so much as speak to her beyond a gruff buenos días .
None of them, especially the ones old enough to have been here a quarter of a century ago, looked willing to divulge any long-dead gossip. To her, or anyone for that matter.