Chapter XVII
XVII
Alba
Birds chirped. She flinched from the morning light; waking with a start was never comfortable, not in this place.
Her nightdress clung to her stomach and thighs—she had sweat in the night and become trapped in it.
As she sat up, strange dreams still littered the back of her skull like the aftertaste of metal, as if she had chewed the inside of her cheek in sleep and woken with the taste of old blood on her tongue.
She shook her hair out; snarls caught on her fingers. The pillows here, too, had minds of their own—her plaits had never disobeyed her before sleeping in this bed. But so it was. She would untangle the knots and confront the day with a splash of cold water to the face.
And it would be a good day: She felt well rested for the first time in days. Locking the door before extinguishing her candle had allowed her to slip past her tangle of anxious thoughts into a deep sleep.
Then she set her feet on the floor.
It was as if the ground beneath her shifted. As if someone had taken her world and flipped it as neatly as a tortilla on the stove.
She felt gravel beneath her soles.
After she had scrubbed her feet and dressed to go downstairs, she set her hand on the door. Belatedly, as she turned the knob, she remembered that she had locked it behind her when she came to bed. How silly of her to forget, she would have to get the key from her bedside—
But with a gentle give beneath her palm, the door swung open.
—
She paced the drawing room until Mamá summoned her for lunch; she moved her food around her plate with practiced interest. Neither Carlos nor Heraclio had joined them.
“It’s the workers, unfortunately,” Bartolomé explained.
Mamá nodded sagely as if she knew precisely what he was talking about before he even continued.
“Heraclio and Carlos finally enacted discipline for idolatry and destroyed the mercury barrier they put around the town.” Here, Mamá’s eyes widened—like Alba, she appeared not to have known about this worship of false idols.
“Their mood is quite foul today,” Bartolomé continued, sounding absolutely delighted by this fact.
“Carlos asked me to pass along his regrets and apologies.”
“Apology accepted,” Mamá said, adding, with an exaggerated shudder, “I, too, would be in a foul mood if I knew there was a murderer in our midst.”
Visions flashed through the back of Alba’s mind like memories, as if they had happened already and were unchangeable past: Bartolomé gasping and straining, clawing at hands gripping his throat; Bartolomé’s hair weightless, almost playful, in the breeze of free fall; Bartolomé’s body striking stone, far, far below her, and cracking with a sound like dried chicken bones.
Bartolomé splayed like a bright dancer against the dark rock of a ravine.
Alba’s fork shuddered against her plate. The sound put her teeth on edge; from the ripple of movement that went around the table, it was clear it had affected Mamá, Papá, and the priest similarly.
Mamá shot her a reprimanding look.
“Mija, are you unwell?” Her lips pursed as she took in Alba’s appearance.
She had not done her hair as tidily as she had earlier in their stay at Casa Calavera, nor had she dressed with as much precision and care.
What was the point? Carlos scarcely saw her; even then, what use was there in impressing him?
“Thank you, Mamá, I am perfectly fine,” Alba said.
She was going mad. The sight of meat on her plate made her want to vomit. She wanted to fling it against the walls of the room. Watch the tough pork slide down whitewashed stucco, trailing thin juice in its wake like blood.
A vicious hiss broke this reverie: the priest .
It was as if she were hearing it in her ear and not in her mind; she could feel the sibilance against her ear and the tender flesh behind it.
“And I, for one, am glad the murderer is not Senor Elías,” Papá declared, ignoring the interaction between Mamá and Alba. “It’s not every day one finds oneself in the company of an alchemist. I have so many questions.”
Bartolomé made an agreeable sound into his soup. His brows were raised…were they? Alba could not be caught studying his face, and the glance she stole did not settle her curiosity.
“What is an alchemist, anyway?” Mamá asked dismissively. “Some kind of pharmacist? I wouldn’t expect a tradesman in the family of my daughter’s betrothed. Nor”—she added, with a sip of her drink—“would I desire it. But the heart wants what the heart wants, doesn’t it, mi nina?”
Alba chewed at the sawdust food as deliberately and thoughtfully as was required to hide the madman’s smile that threatened to play at her mouth. If only Mamá knew precisely how undesirable Elías was. Convict, murderer .
“No, not at all,” Papá cried, incredulous. “An alchemist is a mystic! He is versed in arcana and science and—”
Mamá’s sigh was long-suffering. “You read too much.”
“And you read not enough if you cannot appreciate how interesting that is!” Papá said, jabbing at Mamá across the table with his fork.
“This is someone who has studied the transmutation of metals . And they have him doing incorporo work like a common minero. Bah! He is too interesting for them by half.”
Mamá turned to Bartolomé with a scoff. “That sounds like the work of charlatans, Padre. Don’t alchemists make deals with devils?”
So subtle had been Bartolomé’s lack of attention that it had escaped Alba’s notice: how a soft glaze had come over his eyes, veiling a wandering mind. Then, at once, he sharpened, a sun breaking through a heavy layer of gray clouds to blaze down on one’s brow.
He was next.
Next .
She knew this with a profane certainty. Knew that next meant someone racing to the chapel looking for Heraclio, their pallid brow beaded with sweat and hands shaking from shock.
She set her fork down. Her own hand trembled.
Images from a nightmare abruptly remembered did not a death sentence make.
She could tell herself it had been a dream.
A terrible dream, yes, but just a dream.
She could tell herself that she was a fool to give the intruding thought any credence.
She could ask herself if she felt ill and tell herself to go back to bed.
She should leave Casa Calavera altogether, flee the mine, back to Zacatecas, to the ends of the earth, anywhere but here, anywhere but near that mine …
She brushed at her ear, miming tucking a loose lock of hair behind it.
That voice felt apart from her mind, outside of her skull, and she felt as if she could bat it away as she would a fly.
She was not going to leave the mine. Not when Carolina was here, dangling the secrets of her past a hair’s breadth out of her reach.
Not when leaving the mine meant leaving Carlos.
Meant surrendering herself, her spirit, and her body to a stranger, and nothing would make her do that.
Nothing. She stabbed her food with her fork—though she had no intention of eating it—and ignored Mamá’s sideways look at her lack of manners.
“There are superstitions, of course,” Bartolomé was saying.
“But the real alchemists are scientists, first and foremost,” Papá said. “I wonder if Heraclio would permit me to watch the amalgamation process,” he added, half to himself. “Mercury is the source of so many mysteries. It’s almost supernatural.”
“I shan’t allow it,” Mamá said, setting her napkin down on the table with an emphatic slap. “You won’t go near that poison. Didn’t you see how his hands shook?” she asked. “These azogueros all die an early death. And for what? Money?”
She and Papá slipped into another of their shrill dances, an argumentative mode that displayed their worst qualities: shrewishness and nagging, poor listening and interruption. At home, Alba would watch the clock. Within two minutes, without fail, they would be joking and teasing each other.
Here, she had no clock to watch, and no patience to spare.
She stood abruptly. A sweep of nausea hit her behind the throat. “I will lie down early, I think.”
All eyes turned on her, including those of Bartolomé. She felt herself shrinking away beneath her skin at the sensation.
“I slept poorly,” she said. A weak excuse.
“Don’t we all, in this place,” Mamá agreed. “I shall retire as well.”
It was not what Alba had wanted to hear.
It meant that her plan had to wait until full siesta instead of beginning directly after lunch, for Mamá was not, in fact, all that tired, and Alba could hear her shuffling about her room and calling for Papá.
She even came into Alba’s room to check on her twice.
The afternoon grew long. Alba waited.
When at last the house was drowsing in the little warmth that afternoon afforded, she rose from her bed.
She was not meant to notice that Elías stayed in the workshop during mealtimes and siesta.
She only noticed his absence because it would be impossible not to, with such a limited host of faces at the table and so few bodies coming and going from the house.
It was not because she yearned for his presence.
It was because—if Papá were to be believed—as an alchemist, he was someone who rubbed elbows with the supernatural. He might be the only person who listened to her with an open mind.
Her path took a loping route, one that brought her out of sight of the house and around the back of the workshop. Then, without knocking, without so much as a hello, she pushed open the door.
It swung inward with a lusty creak.
Elías sat at the table. His body was positioned so that if he lifted his head, he would be looking directly at the door, but he bent over a book.
His elbows were on the table. One hand was curled into a loose fist on which he rested his cheek; the other was blackened with ink as he took notes in the margins of the book.