Chapter X #2
“And this is Senora Carolina Hernández. She is a figure of importance to the townspeople.” This name caught Alba’s ear and drew her attention: Carlos’s voice had shifted—it now had an edge that was not kind and that sounded unlike him.
This was a middle-aged woman, though younger than Mamá, shielded from the January cold by a bright red patterned rebozo that brought color to her cheeks and highlighted how her black hair was reddened by the sun.
Her assessment, when it fell on Alba, felt uncommonly sharp— this was what it was like to be analyzed as the future wife of the owner of the mine.
She felt she was beneath one of the expensive magnifying glasses Mamá used for her own embroidery, each and every one of her imperfections enlarged for this woman to see.
Alba straightened beneath the weight of her regard. She ignored the darkness that began to thicken at the corners of her vision. Her monthly blood was very early, it seemed.
“It is very nice to meet you, Senora Hernández,” she said. She meant it to be warm, but each syllable chipped her teeth like ice.
Carolina’s eyes widened. Her nostrils flared. She took a step back from Alba, then spat at her feet.
Alba gasped—in surprise, in shock.
“You have no place here,” Carolina said.
“I beg your pardon?” Carlos snapped.
But no one heard him. Carolina had given a pronouncement. One that had the threat of a roll of thunder, that moved through all those gathered around Alba at the door of the chapel. Whispers took flight like a flock of sparrows, leaping thick and all at once, clouding the air with dark wings.
Carolina lifted her right hand as if she were going to make the sign of the cross. She touched two fingers to her forehead, above where her brows met. Then she lowered them to her left hand and touched them to the veins on the inside of her wrist.
The shadows at the edges of Alba’s vision grew thicker. One hand rose to her breast, then to her throat—she could not breathe, she could not breathe .
Blackness shuttered around her in a swift, deafening blow.
—
As they sat before a rustic meal of fried eggs and tortillas made from roughly ground maíz, Mamá reported that Carlos caught her when she swooned.
“Socorro says that woman has a reputation for acting strangely,” Mamá added after speaking to the cook to ask for a cold compress for Alba’s head. “We will waste no more breath on her.”
It did not shock Alba when Mamá declared to the silent breakfast room that she would be returning to her room to rest her nerves after the events of the morning, and that Alba would do the same.
Alba obeyed resentfully. Curiosity curled thirsty at the back of her throat; she longed to slip unseen through the townspeople and listen to what they had to say about what had passed between her and Carolina.
But these were a close people, wary of outsiders.
She would learn nothing from them, not now, anyway.
Not after Carolina had marked her as wholly unwelcome.
Why had Carolina reacted so strongly to her presence? What manner of sign had she made with her hands? She would have to wait until Carlos reappeared—he and Heraclio had been conspicuously absent at breakfast—to ask such questions.
She kicked her thoughts impatiently around her room, pacing like a caged hound, until she could abide its four walls no longer. She gathered some embroidery and left.
She flexed her hands as she walked. They ached from the cold.
Zacatecas grew chilly over the winters, but she felt a deep ache in her bones, as if she had been bitten by something with ice for venom and could only be cured by being dunked in a bucket of sunlight.
There were no such buckets of sunlight to be had, not on a slate-gray morning like this.
But there was an abandoned patio that overlooked the chapel and what once might have been a garden.
It faced south, or southeast enough that it received light.
She dragged a chair out, wrapped herself in a thick, stiff rebozo, and began to work on a piece of embroidery with cold-stiffened fingers.
She waited in vain for any scant drip of sun.
Here among the fragile, blackened skeletons of plants frozen to hard ground, it was almost comfortable. It was quiet.
Until the drag of wooden chair legs on stone announced that someone was joining her.
It was hard to look at Carlos’s face without picturing how it had appeared in her dream that morning: a slick of slaughter, the whites of his eyes bright as bone against viscera.
She forced herself to keep looking at him as he pulled the chair next to her and sat.
“You found my favorite spot.”
“Just waiting for the sun,” she said.
“Don’t hold your breath. It could be days.”
His humor was a translucent thing. It hid nothing. The laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth were slack and deep, giving his face years it had not earned.
She extended a hand and touched his arm. The warmth of another body soothed the ache in her bones. Her fingers were stiff from needlework.
“I apologize on behalf of Senora Hernández,” he said. His words were stiff, staccato and crisp as the fall of a pickaxe on stone. “Of course you are welcome here.”
His eyes caught on something behind her; a frown deepened the lines of his face. When Alba turned, she caught a glimpse of dark hair and blue skirts before they vanished.
Someone had been eavesdropping on them.
Carlos leaned back, his expression settling into something resentful. “They simply won’t leave me alone,” he muttered.
“Who?”
“My uncle’s mistakes,” he said darkly.
Alba raised her brows, seeking explanation.
“Victoriano had a second family out here. He and Senora Hernández had a daughter to whom he gave the Monterrubio name,” Carlos supplied, still watching the place where the skirts had disappeared.
Perhaps Alba’s brows lifted higher without her intent, for he added quickly, “I don’t plan on mentioning it to your parents, trust me.”
“Mamá would certainly be scandalized,” Alba said.
“She won’t hear a thing. The workers have strict orders to say nothing about it.”
How long did she have before Mamá learned the truth of Carlos’s family and their mess and reached for her smelling salts?
Two weeks? A matter of days? She would prevent it as best she could—she had to, for she could already imagine Mamá wanting to put an end to the engagement even more than she already did.
She let her eyes linger on where the skirts and dark hair had disappeared. That eavesdropper often haunted the house: She was a girl dressed in fine skirts with tattered, too-short hems; her knuckles were gauntlets of tarnished rings.
Was she spying on Alba? Was she curious about her? Did she know something about why her mother was so opposed to Alba’s presence?
Or perhaps…perhaps they knew something about the foundling that Victoriano had given to her father twenty-five years ago.
They were Victoriano’s family, after all.
It was unlikely the girl knew anything directly. She was younger than Alba, perhaps by nine or ten years.
But Carolina?
She would know. And she was the least likely person to tolerate Alba asking her questions.
But the girl…she was someone who had been raised in this place.
She would know its secrets and rumors. She could ask questions and pry where it was too conspicuous for Alba to do so…
perhaps even ask her mother. And if she was attached enough to finery to wear rings on every finger and keep the elegant skirts she had outgrown…
well, Alba was not attached to finery. She would easily part with a trinket or three to buy the girl’s help and discretion.
Carlos had carried on speaking. He sounded a bit exasperated; she caught the name Victoriano and the words shameful and reputation . He turned his gaze on the chapel; his features settled into a brooding expression that she did not often see.
“He never came into town, did he?” she asked. Anything she could find out about Victoriano could be useful, especially if she planned to approach the daughter. “I don’t remember meeting him.”
Carlos shook his head. “He preferred it up here, if you can believe it.” A delicate sniff; he obviously could not.
But as sunlight began to seep through the low clouds, as the gray began to dissipate and become the piercing white blue of late morning, Alba thought she could believe it.
She had an uncanny sense when she put her foot to the earth that first day.
She felt as if a sickness had settled in her breast, an apprehension so powerful it seemed close to dread.
The mountains rose dizzyingly around her, threatening, dark, as if they had an awareness, as if they knew her.
As if they could track her movement back and forth across their central basin.
Their presence could strike either terror or awe; they gave an austere beauty to Mina San Gabriel, an asceticism to the days that was the opposite of life in Zacatecas.
“And his son is no less of a wreck,” Carlos said. “If you really want to keep your mother from things that might scandalize her, I’d start with avoiding him.”
There was a serrated edge to his voice that caught Alba by surprise; she had no choice but to add Carlos’s blatant dislike of his cousin to the list of things that made her curious about Elías.
Everything she heard from Carlos was at odds with what she had experienced: the rush of comfort she felt with Elías at the wedding ball in Zacatecas, the gentleness of his hands and lullaby as he led her out of the mines.
And yet that had vanished, evaporating like a dream interrupted, when he snarled like a cur at Carlos. Elías evidently had two sides at least, if not more. A knot of threads that she had no business untangling.
She stroked the embroidery silk in her lap thoughtfully. The first problem here was that Alba was villainously skilled at untangling knots in her needlework, and she knew it. Nothing could resist her obstinance, and this pleased her.
The second problem was that she had been raised being denied little.
Her curiosity would win, in the end. There was no point in resisting it.
She tugged at a thread, testing its give.
“The convict?” she asked, voice innocent.
Carlos cast a look around them, over his shoulder, to make sure no one was listening. Or perhaps to ensure that her mother was not leering over their shoulders, waiting to be scandalized, waiting to snatch Alba away from this marriage and Mina San Gabriel both.
He leaned toward her.
“He was condemned to Almadén for murder. Four years of forced labor. Should have died there,” he said in a lowered voice, its husk barely above a whisper.
“Abuelo Arcadio wrote that it almost ruined the family name, whatever it’s still worth back in Spain.
It would certainly ruin our reputation here. ”
Alba’s brows would grow stiff with the effort of reaching for her hairline if Carlos kept talking.
“I shall not cross him,” she said firmly.
Her mind drew back to the mine, to Elías’s hands covered in blood. To her own hands, drenched in blood.
“You really shouldn’t,” Carlos said, ignorant of how her mood had dipped dark. “He’s nothing but trouble.”