Chapter XI #2
Suddenly, she was a child, alone and burdened by too many silks and jewels, trapped in a dark hallway. A figure looming over her with lascivious arms reaching, reaching, reaching—
A hot streak of humiliation; a vision, vivid and sharp as a fever dream, of Romero being pushed into the mud outside. Of him being swallowed whole. Of her walking over his body, relishing the pull of the mud, the silty glimmer of the ore mixed with water—
“No,” she said sharply. She adjusted her rebozo primly around her shoulders.
“As I will soon be mistress of this hacienda de minas, I want to see its workings.” She hoped that this flaunting of her soon-to-be status would remind Romero that she was untouchable.
That he should speak to her with respect.
Even if her voice wobbled a touch. “I will have someone explain your work to me. Senorita,” she said, pointing at María Victoriana, who had now turned toward the commotion and gaped at the sight of her.
“Will you speak with me? Show me a place where I may observe unobtrusively.”
“Of course,” María Victoriana said. “This way.”
Alba followed the girl’s gesture to the scale, holding her head high as people moved out of her way.
“Ignore Romero,” María Victoriana muttered as Alba drew near. “That theft will get him in trouble with the patrón, and he knows it, so he’s drunk. I mean, he usually is, but not this early.”
“That is…an unfortunate circumstance,” Alba said. “If it is disruptive to your work, I can speak to Carlos or Heraclio about it.”
María Victoriana made a rude sound—half laugh, half darkly amused snort.
“I’d like to see them care, for a change. Oye, tonto,” she barked at Elías, “I said less mercury, didn’t I?”
She turned to face the bustling azoguería before her, as stiff-backed and imperious as if she were its general.
To Alba, she said: “Outside is where the harina—the crushed ore—gets mixed with salt and then mercury into a slurry. Here is where we measure the mercury. First, you must know how high-quality the ore is.” She pointed at the small piles of black powder on the central table, replicas of the larger ones outside.
“Then, you measure the amount of mercury needed to refine it. That is what our new azoguero is struggling with. He apparently knows everything about mercury,” she added with a healthy dose of youthful sarcasm, “but can’t seem to figure out how much to use. ”
Elías’s cheeks colored at María Victoriana’s comment. If he felt Alba sneaking glances at him, he did not acknowledge this—he kept his own gaze demurely downcast.
Nothing but trouble . A murderer. A convict condemned to the infamous mines of Almadén, who would never have survived its conditions if he had not been both unyielding and dangerous.
And yet.
Not only did he defer to the refining expertise of a young girl but, as Alba passed, the curl of his shoulders spoke of nothing but shyness.
She tugged at the tangled threads of this paradox, scraps of a lilting lullaby winding through her mind, as María Victoriana spoke. The girl leaned over the table and ran her finger through glittering powdered ore, explaining to Alba how to identify quality by its color.
“My father was chief azoguero,” she said as she straightened. “He taught me everything he knew. If it weren’t for me,” she added, lowering her voice with a surreptitious glance at Romero, “I don’t know if we would be talking about this mine becoming profitable at all.”
Romero continued to take the wooden paddle to the white sack. Mercury dripped sluggishly through the cloth. It looked as if he were beating a corpse that bled quicksilver.
“It’s lucky that we have you,” Alba said solemnly.
“Oh,” María Victoriana gasped, then snatched Alba’s left hand. She lifted it into a shaft of light that cut into the room from a high window and admired the cut of the emerald on Alba’s fourth finger. “That used to belong to Senora Monterrubio.”
She used such formal language to refer to her own aunt—truly, there must be no friendly ties between these relatives. If there were, this sharp girl would have been formally educated, raised in Zacatecas, forced into tight dresses and starched crinoline and heavy jewels just as Alba had been.
But she had not been. Perhaps that was for the best.
Alba kept a firm stone wall between her and strangers. This stranger, however, had somehow found a crack in the mortar.
What is your place in this world? she wanted to ask her. And can you help me find mine?
“Never thought Carlos would ever get married. Especially not to someone sensible,” María Victoriana said, releasing Alba’s hand. “Senora Monterrubio almost never came up here. It’s good to know how the mine runs.”
She stepped back from the table and motioned for Alba to follow her to the scales.
“Over here, by that burro, is where we weigh the mercury,” she said, jerking her chin at Elías.
He had a jar of mercury in his hand and was pouring it into a small jícara container to set on the scale.
“Papá always said that you can tell the quality of ore by sight, but you weigh the mercury with your heart.”
“I was sorry to hear of his passing,” Alba said, lowering her voice. “That must have been difficult for you both.”
“It is. For me.” María Victoriana’s voice thinned, as if it were struggling to navigate a thickness in her throat.
Elías said nothing. He lowered the jícara container onto its side of the scale, but his hand shook. Quicksilver spilled, speckling the base of his thumb with drops of moonlight.
Alba leaned forward to see how much had spilled, to see how it moved—
“Stand back,” Elías said. Alba obeyed the gruff command as swiftly as if she had been burned. “It’s poison. Never touch it.”
“But you are,” she said.
He placed the mercury on the scale and did not reply.
“It’s less now,” he said to María Victoriana. “Tell me what you think.”
The girl squinted at the scale. “It’s fine. You can put that aside for mixing. Now do it again.”
Alba watched as Elías followed the girl’s orders. María Victoriana was not a cruel overseer, but she was sharp with her brother.
It was difficult to remember that they were siblings. Each must take after their own mother, for beyond the difference in height, María Victoriana was all rounded edges and quick, confident movements. There was a softness to the set of her expressions that blunted her sharp tongue.
“See, his shakes are why Mamá won’t let me touch mercury,” María Victoriana said, pointing at Elías’s hands. “By the end, Papá couldn’t even write. It gets your hands first. Then you lose your mind.”
“I would prefer not to hear that, thank you,” Elías murmured as he weighed out more mercury, measured and deliberate. This time, it did not spill.
“I bet this one is really doomed, because he worked in a mercury mine too,” María Victoriana said. “For years .”
Elías sketched a sideways look at Alba. To gauge her reaction?
To see whether she knew? She kept her face carefully impassive—she discovered, with a small lilt of surprise, that she did not want him to know that she and Carlos had been speaking about him.
It felt invasive. Inappropriate. It would mean admitting that she thought about him when she left his presence.
“I prefer not to discuss that,” he said. A slight edge to this—perhaps María Victoriana was prodding a wound that should be left alone.
“Yes, but then Papá said you went to China to study alchemy,” María Victoriana said. “That’s what Abuelo Arcadio wrote.”
China? Convict, murderer—and he had been to China ? The tangle of knots tightened.
“Constantinople is not in China,” Elías said as he measured out more mercury.
“Constantinople!” Alba repeated, too taken aback to conceal her wonder. A city so distant that it seemed it could be populated by fairy tales.
Was it her imagination, or did the corner of his mouth twitch? Was he resisting a smile?
“Pay attention,” María Victoriana interrupted. “This montón of ore is less good.”
Elías adjusted the pour of mercury. Another worker called for María Victoriana; she turned and shouted back at him, then, with an impatient huff, crossed the room to answer whatever question he had.
The men here listened to the girl. They respected her knowledge. A twinge of envy tightened in Alba’s breast. Who would ever listen to her that way? Never her parents, likely not Carlos. In what matter of expertise could she ever claim such authority? What had she done in her life?
Vanishingly little.
She needed more . Marrying Carlos was the first step. Maybe once they were wed she could travel. Go to Europe. Go beyond Europe.
“What is it like?” she wondered aloud, leaning back against the wall behind her. “Constantinople, I mean.”
Something in her chest longed for him to speak as she might for a drink of something cool on a hot day.
Shyness danced over her skin. Since when had she ever thought that about a man’s voice?
She wasn’t a girl infatuated with some acquaintance’s unobtainable older brother.
She was a grown woman. An engaged one at that, even if it was an engagement born from mutually beneficial —as Carlos had phrased it—prospects and not romance.
She was merely curious about this paradox of a man—convict, alchemist, maligned yet gentle. He was a knot to untangle. That was why she wanted to hear him keep speaking.
Elías did not answer for a long moment. He focused on changing the weights on the other side of the scale.
“It’s hard to know where to begin.” The gruffness in his voice eased.
“It’s larger than your capital here. Built on seven hills, like Rome, and cloven in two by a great passage of water, one of the deepest and swiftest in the world, which they call the throat .
” He gazed past the weights on the scale, into the wall and through it, as if he were seeing clean to the other side of the world.
“You will never feel smaller than when you take a boat across it. You feel suspended between two worlds. It feels…I felt I have never been more apart from the world and at once as if I am at its very heart.”
Alba felt her heartbeat in her ears. What convict could spin spells like that with his words? It was as if the whole azoguería fell away from them and they were embraced in the crisp, cold quiet of that courtyard back in Zacatecas.
The more she tugged at this knot, the more impossible it became.
“Will you go back there?” she said, keeping her voice low. “When you get rich quick and run away as fast as you can?”
There— that was a smile, though a reluctant one, tugging at his otherwise stoic expression.
He shrugged. “I should.” He paused as if changing course. “I borrowed money to make my way here. I need to repay it. But after that, I’m not sure.”
The whole world was at his fingertips. This was an envy unlike any she had felt before: a bright, immense yearning, swelling in her like a bird with cramped wings longing to take flight.
“You already have such riches,” she said, “being able to even dream of such a life. Unbound to anything. Free.”
A soft exhale—it was almost a laugh, but it was too dry to be amused.
“You, of all people, know what riches truly are,” he said. “Silver and jewels, bought and paid for.”
“You know that’s not what I mean,” she said. “Some of us are shackled to the world we are born in. We cannot change. We cannot leave .” The bitterness of her own voice tasted like ash. “We can only dream of bigger cages.”
“Looking forward to the wedding, I take it?” Elías said.
That stung. Was he mocking her? It didn’t matter—the spell was shattered. The floodgates opened, and the noise of the azoguería rushed in.
Alba straightened sharply.
María Victoriana was returning; she gave the girl a clipped excuse for her departure.
“I’ll see you at Mass,” she said. “Hasta luego, senorita.”
She turned her back on Elías. She did not bid him farewell.