Chapter XVI
XVI
Elías
The stables were predominantly empty; the mules were already at work in the mines.
Unlike the stables of the Monterrubio residence in Zacatecas, they were neither large nor ostentatiously decorated.
Like most buildings in this hellhole, it was white stucco, with stains that smeared across Elías’s vision.
Adobe brick. Dirt floor. His knees dragged against the ground until he was unceremoniously thrown onto it.
He caught himself before he skidded far; pushed himself up and whirled—
The door of the room slammed shut. The scrape of a rusty bolt; a clang of finality.
“That’ll keep him,” Carlos said. “Stand guard. I need to speak to my father.”
Elías’s mouth lifted into a snarl. How dare he.
Good thing he was already accused of murder. It might make what he did to Carlos less shocking. He rushed the door, raising his fists. It was wood, it had cracks, it would give beneath the force of his rage, nothing could stand before him—
If Heraclio didn’t have to pay Elías, as Abuelo Arcadio had promised he would, that meant more money for him and Carlos.
Elías stopped. Fists high, head drumming. Mouth gone dry as hay.
It was true, wasn’t it? If they took his mercury but didn’t pay their end of the deal, there would be more silver to line their pockets and fill their ugly, rotten mansion in Zacatecas.
Shame rose in him like a sun, like a blazing, lidless eye, to stare at him until he took the words back, swallowing them whole.
It was not his mercury. It was mercury he had stolen. From people who trusted him.
A madman’s laugh soared in his chest. He dropped his hands and let it ring, throwing his head back, filling the storeroom with irony. Indeed, how dare they steal what he had rightfully stolen. How dare their avarice outstrip his.
They didn’t really believe he killed Romero. Did they? Or did it even matter?
They were trying to get rid of him, as they always had when he was a child—from the moment Victoriano had first brought him to meet them, it felt like.
“Fuck this family,” he declared at the locked door.
He turned and faced his prison: horse feed, tack, buckets. A hay bale would be his throne. He resigned himself to it and brooded over his kingdom. Perhaps they’d send him to another prison. Perhaps another condemnation to hard labor in penal mines awaited him.
The idea seized him like the nightmare that recurred every time he put down his head.
Chains and lashes and going down, down into the dark, with no way to reach Fátima, to tell his wife—the one person left in the world who cared for him, in her own complicated way—where he was, or beg forgiveness for what had happened.
Even thinking her name was a blow to a deep, yellowed bruise.
He had been condemned to Almadén when he was needed .
And when he at last emerged, years later—
A scuffle outside the door.
Carlos’s voice, surprised and exclaiming. Then another, accusing. Self-righteous.
“Where is Heraclio? I demand to speak with him. With both of you, at once.”
The priest? How odd.
It shouldn’t have struck him as odd that Carlos, much less Heraclio, would actually listen to the man, but that was what he thought when the three entered the storeroom.
Well, Carlos crept, braced as if for an attack; Heraclio strode, his face red with anger, and perhaps shame.
Bartolomé swept in with the righteous fury of a storm, demanding that the men at the door shut it and let no one else in.
His pale eyes alighted on Elías; they were not warm when they found Elías’s crossed arms and sullen lean against the storeroom wall. It was as if Bartolomé had swanned into the room to save, for saving was his duty, and had found that which the Lord enlisted him to save lacking.
“What is the meaning of this, Padre?” Heraclio began.
At the same time, Bartolomé spoke over him. He barely raised his voice, and yet it filled the room, devouring everything in its path: “He didn’t do it.”
Heraclio’s face transformed in surprise.
Carlos whirled on the priest. “How could you know that?”
“What proof do you have?” Heraclio wondered.
“He didn’t do it,” Bartolomé said. Flat, plain. But from his lips, it was a commandment.
Carlos sputtered. “You were at dinner last night, you saw how angry he was. He’s killed a man before, another crime of passion is—”
“He didn’t do it.”
Elías straightened. This was getting interesting. He did not kill Romero, no—but he had been prepared to take the fall. He was already falling. And he had not even bothered to grab for purchase or for any hand extended to him.
For who would speak for him, who would believe him? Who would reach out? His life was one of falling and striking the ground and rising on shaking limbs when he had gathered his strength and breath, and not a moment before. No one had ever helped him.
“Padre, how do you know this?” Heraclio asked, shooting Carlos a meaningful look. Calm down , it said. Keep it together .
Carlos looked as if he had no intention of keeping anything together, especially when Bartolomé spoke again.
“Senor, I cannot tell you,” he said.
Betrayal transformed Carlos’s features; he sputtered, his fury an indignant thing, as if the priest had taken a dagger and stabbed him. “Did someone tell you in confession?”
Bartolomé’s posture went rigid, his voice like ice as he turned on Carlos. “He did not do this.”
“Why would you side with him?” Carlos demanded, his voice cracking. “You’re my friend, not his. This isn’t fair.”
“Stop being childish,” Heraclio snapped. “This isn’t about fairness.”
“That’s exactly what this is about. Justice .” The righteousness in Bartolomé’s voice seemed to cause him to grow several inches. His virtue loomed over man and son.
It occurred to Elías that he would lay a fine amount of silver on the table to see this moment immortalized in a painting. If he ever made it out of here with what he was due, perhaps he would commission one.
“I will not allow the innocent to be condemned when there is no proof of wrongdoing, only evil suspicion. Not when I have the power to stop it.”
“You dare call me evil ?” Carlos’s shirt was damp with sweat, his face flushed and taut with anger. “Is that what this is coming to?”
Bartolomé remained level. This was not a fight to be won by bringing himself to Carlos’s level, and he seemed to know it. A lesson that perhaps Elías could study.
“There are judgments being drawn from this man’s past to his present,” Bartolomé said. “It is un-Christlike to throw the first stone.”
Carlos threw it anyway.
“He is a murderer,” he spat.
“He did not harm Romero,” Bartolomé said.
“Then who did?” Heraclio thundered.
Bartolomé was a blade as he turned on Heraclio, gleaming with an archangel’s white rage.
“You,” he said, pointing at Heraclio. “If you were not so blinded by prejudice, by arrogance, both of you”—and here he pointed at Carlos as well—“would see that there is a sickness among the people here. An evil spreads among your workers, your flock, beneath your very noses.”
So the priest had found the shrine, had he? Carolina had more to worry about than Elías poking his nose where it didn’t belong.
“Idolatry,” Bartolomé spat. “Worship of the Devil.”
Carlos took a step back. It was only when he did that Elías felt pressure against his shoulder blades and realized that he, too, was leaning away from the heat of Bartolomé’s anger.
For he was angry .
“I let the natives keep their customs as a privilege,” Heraclio said. “So long as they come to Mass as well. They have more energy to work when they’re not fighting us and are more likely to obey when they have things that can be taken away.”
As if the shrine were a toy given to a child.
“There is a line that surrounds the village, carved into the earth and filled with mercury. I have been told it has magical properties and is meant to ward off an unnamed evil that has been brought here. The people are frightened. And so they turn to sin,” Bartolomé thundered.
“They are your responsibility, and you turn a blind eye as they stray off the path toward darkness.”
So that was where the stolen mercury had gone. Romero had harangued Elías for its disappearance for nothing.
Carlos scoffed. “Enough melodrama.”
Bartolomé turned his thunder on Carlos.
“Would you say that if this evil were to touch the very people you care about? Your family? Your guests?”
Alba.
Elías’s mouth dropped open.
That was what this was about.
He had told himself it was a trick of the light, last night. It was his eyes struggling to adjust to the dark. He was seeing things. He was surprised. That was all.
But he had barely slept; whenever he drifted off, he slipped into the same nightmare, one where those eyes—no, that lack , that darkness, those pits —found him, and he was running, running, running, but no matter how hard he pumped his leaden legs, they were at his back, breathing down his neck…
Something was wrong with Alba. Wrong in the way that a dream could be wrong: Its appearance could be bright, quotidian, unremarkable, or even beautiful, but if the dreamer looked upon it and tasted visceral fear sinking into his skull, then it was no dream at all, but a nightmare. Looking at Alba last night…
She needed help. Bartolomé must have sensed it too.
Carlos had shut up at last. His jaw was clenched and a muscle twitched below his ear. His eyes glistened. Did they smart with shame? Elías’s would, if he had been so roundly scolded by a friend.
And that friend was not finished yet.