Chapter XV
XV
Alba
Alba heard Mamá rise early. She lay silent in her bed beneath blankets, waiting for the shuffle of footsteps throughout the house that indicated that Mass would begin shortly.
She waited. Then, she stepped out of bed. Dirt smudged her toenails; her scouring of her soles with the freezing water must have been an imperfect rite, performed as it was in the dark.
She deliberately made herself late to Mass, for this was how she would find herself—as planned—falling in step with María Victoriana.
Establishing a rapport with María Victoriana at the azoguería had allowed Alba to confide in the girl before dinner yesterday about her search for a story about a foundling some twenty-odd years ago.
She did not provide many details, only that the manner was sensitive, and—for good measure—adding that she was asking on behalf of a friend in Zacatecas.
“My mother seemed to know something,” María Victoriana whispered. Alba had learned that she was fifteen, both old enough to appreciate the weight—and monetary value—of what Alba offered and young enough to be delighted by the idea of espionage. “When I brought up an abandoned baby in the mine.”
Alba kept her face schooled into impassivity. Let it be a pane of glass: translucent, unmarked. “What did she say?”
María Victoriana gave an exaggerated roll of the eyes. “That it was none of my concern. And refused to say more when I pestered. I did not want to pester too much, for the secrecy.”
“I understand.” Alba said, casting a quick glance around to ensure that Carolina was nowhere nearby. María Victoriana had told her she had been forbidden from speaking with Alba, and if anyone observed them together, she could be punished.
But their conversation went unheard, thank God—searching the path from the house to the chapel revealed no one in their vicinity but Elías, who walked some ways ahead of them.
She did not admire how his workmanlike clothes drew tight around his legs and waist, how obvious it was that, in addition to being tall, he had a powerful build.
She did not linger—nor had she as she sleeplessly watched the ceiling of her room grow paler with each step of gray dawn—on how effortlessly he had lifted and carried her. How weightless she had felt. How safe.
“What do you know of him?” Alba said, nodding at Elías ahead of them. She kept her voice low and conspiratorial. “I hear conflicting things.”
“Little. My father said I would like him.” María Victoriana snorted, the sound at once delicate and gruff. But then, when she spoke again, her tone turned thoughtful: “I’m not sure what I think yet. He says he wants to leave, but men never do when there’s this much silver.”
Elías ducked into the darkness of the chapel. Here to get rich quick and run away as fast as I can , he had said in the holy darkness of a courtyard in Zacatecas.
A swell of emotion caught her in an unexpected gust. She wanted to draw her rebozo tighter around her shoulders, but it had already struck. It sank deep into her chest.
Her time at Casa Calavera would end with her taking the Monterrubio name in a glittering cathedral, surrounded by flowers and laden with silver.
That was the price she had decided to pay for her freedom.
She was a merchant’s daughter; she knew a good deal when she saw one.
A lifetime with Carlos over a stranger who wanted nothing but to rule her life and possess her body? It was a bargain.
Elías was an obstacle, a distraction, but one that she could easily step around and pay little heed.
“He will. He loathes the others and wants to leave as fast as he can,” she said briskly to María Victoriana. “Best not to get attached.”
“When did you two talk?”
That was a shade of accusation if she ever heard one.
“Thank you so much for your help,” Alba said, slipping a golden chain out of a pocket hidden in her skirts.
María Victoriana snatched it away quickly and without any indication on her face that something had passed between them.
They drew perilously close to the chapel and Padre Bartolomé as he greeted the last of the late-coming parishioners.
They should separate, lest someone mark their acquaintance and report back to Carolina.
“Do you think your mother would ever speak to me?” Alba wondered aloud. “She seemed…she reacted strongly to my presence.”
“I don’t know. She’s stubborn,” María Victoriana said out of the side of her mouth as she stepped away. “But if you want to try, she’ll be in the kitchen this afternoon. She doesn’t usually help out in the house, but with all this company, Socorro could use the help.”
“Thank—”
Alba’s words were cut off as cries erupted from those gathered at the door of the chapel.
A young man had come at a run and dived through the people, shouting senor, senor , sweat flying from his brow and pumping arms dark with it. Frantic gestures, accusatory pointing.
Heraclio appeared, his face as white as his hair. Padre Bartolomé was now stiff as a wooden effigy, his face carved deep with shock.
A shift of gravel: Ahead of Alba, María Victoriana faltered. Then she turned and swept past Alba, retracing her steps toward the house. First briskly, then, when she reached the house and passed it, she broke into a run.
Something unnatural swam beneath Alba’s skin: both a feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong, and a sense, at once distant and quivering beneath her fingertips, that all was well.
And yet.
A flock of crows alighted from the roof of the chapel, smudges of soot against the gray sky. The chapel heaved gently, a breath of stillness, then it vomited its inhabitants out onto the path, their noise and movements both fevered and enraged.
“?Mija! Thank God you’re safe.” Mamá struck her with an iron-armed embrace.
She held her bag of smelling salts in one hand; this thumped against Alba’s back and tripped her breath.
“Emilio!” Mamá called out so close to her ear that Alba flinched.
“We must leave at once. I cannot endure this awful place, I cannot .”
“What is going on?” Alba sputtered through Mamá’s mantilla.
Mamá stepped back but kept a tight grip on her arm, as if worried that the slightest breeze would carry her away.
Papá was there; his eyes were not on Alba but on the chapel and the writhing mass of people before it.
“The azoguero is dead,” he said, grim and level. “That brute at dinner. They just found the body at the incorporadero.” He suppressed a shudder. “Drowned in slurry.”
“And he did it!” Mamá cried, as shrill and accusatory as the gesture of her finger pointing at the chapel.
Elías staggered into the light, shoved from the maw of the chapel. His shoe caught on a rock; he fell.
Alba’s heart flung itself to her throat.
“But—that’s impossible,” she breathed. “That’s not true.”
No one heard her. No one was listening. Carlos, hair mussed as if from a scuffle, leaped on his cousin and began to drag him by one arm.
Others came to his assistance when he cried for it, when he needed it to subdue Elías; three men piled on Elías and began to drag him through the dirt toward the stables.
Mamá’s grip was hard on her arm. “This is all too upsetting. Come, mija. I must sit and take my smelling salts.”
It could not be true. Yes, Elías was upset at the other azoguero last night.
Who could blame him? The insult to his mother, and to himself, was nothing short of shocking.
But it was impossible . She had heard Romero when they returned.
Elías went to his room. Or…well, he had said that he was going to his room.
Alba had believed him. Still believed him.
Unless they had found the body inside Casa Calavera—which they had not—then Elías could not have done it.
And she had heard Romero leave, for he was loud, and she had been sleepless all night, moving between turning over restless in bed and lingering at the window until dawn broke.
Elías had never followed. Elías had never left the house.
This she knew, for she was certain she had not slept. Or if she had, it had only been for a few moments. Dreamless snatches near dawn, perhaps.
But she would have seen anyone leaving the house to go toward the incorporadero and the mine. The path was in full view of her window, and unobstructed.
She had been walking toward the mine when Elías woke her. What if whoever had killed Romero had seen her instead?
“I hope Padre Bartolomé will say Mass later today,” Mamá was saying.
How could Mamá be so concerned about that, when an innocent man had been accused of an atrocity? When his own family was treating him so coarsely?
Rotten to the core . Elías’s voice floated back to her from that cold courtyard.
The mysterious shipment of mercury and Elías had arrived from Spain at the same time. Alba was no idiot. It had something to do with Elías.
Perhaps Heraclio and Carlos wanted him to take the blame for Romero’s death, even if they knew he had not done it. Perhaps, with Elías gone, there was more money to be had for Heraclio.
And Carlos.
But Carlos was not capable of such greed, not at the expense of a family member. Even one he raised his hackles and snarled at—that was protective. He knew Elías’s history and wanted to safeguard Alba from a perceived threat. That was not cruelty.
As Mamá strong-armed Alba toward the house, she cast a look over her shoulder at the many-limbed monster dragging Elías in the direction of the stables. At the blond hair that led the way.
That wash of horror had swept through her chest and limbs and pooled somewhere in her belly, where it began to sour, where it began to taste something like doubt.
Carlos had not listened to her at the mine when she said that Elías had helped her. Would he believe her now? Or would it take someone else’s voice to speak on her behalf before he paid attention?