Chapter 11
Elena learned the house by its sounds.
She learned it because she could not walk it freely.
In the first week she had been told politely that the west wing and the south gallery and the stables and the chapel and the kitchen garden were not places where the se?ora should walk, that the courtyard and her own rooms and the east colonnade were more than sufficient for her comfort.
The woman who had told her this was named Ortiz, the housekeeper, a small woman of about fifty with gray hair pinned severely back and a face that betrayed nothing, who had said it without looking at Elena and who had then curtsied and had gone about her business.
So Elena had learned the house by its sounds.
The morning bell at the chapel at six. The kitchen beginning at five before the bell, the clatter of the water buckets in the courtyard below her window, the call of the cook to the scullery girl in a Spanish that had a Parral accent older than the wars.
The noise of a stable at a big hacienda, twenty horses or more, the stamp of them in the stalls.
The arrival of the mail rider at ten, three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, his horse distinctive because it had a limp in the off hind leg that struck a half-beat different from every other horse's walk.
The afternoon lull. The hour of the vaqueros returning from the far pastures around five.
The second bell at six in the evening. The quiet after.
She learned Don Rodrigo kept a schedule.
He took his coffee at seven in his study in the west wing.
He rode out at eight and did not come back until noon.
He dined at one, alone, in a small room off the main sala, the sound of the silver on the plate reaching Elena's window faintly if the afternoon was still.
He read in the afternoons in the library, which was directly below her room, and she could hear him turning pages, which was a thing she had not known a person could hear from a floor above until she had listened to it for a week.
At three in the afternoon he walked in the courtyard, and he walked alone.
He walked in a slow regular pace, his hands behind his back, his head slightly bent.
He walked for half an hour. He went up the east side and across the top and down the west side and across the bottom, and then he did it again, twice, always the same route, always the same pace.
He walked the three o'clock walk every day.
Elena understood, by the end of the first week, that the three o'clock walk was for her. Don Rodrigo did not look up at her window during his walks. He did not slow beneath her window. He did not, in the first week, lift his head once during the entire half hour.
The walk was for her to see the house from her window and to know that he was in the house and to know that he was not leaving the house and to know, ultimately, that she was not leaving the house either, because nobody left a house whose owner had total control over them.
In the second week of his walk, Don Rodrigo began to look up.
Not often. Once in a half hour walk, perhaps twice.
He would lift his head at the corner of the courtyard where his turn was and his eyes would go along the second floor, not stopping at her window particularly, taking in the whole floor and then going back to the stones in front of his feet.
He considered it a courtesy, the look. It was a man acknowledging that he remembered she was a guest in his kingdom.
In the third week he began to pause.
Not long. A heartbeat. At the corner where he turned back up the east side, which was the corner closest to her window, he would stop for a moment before he turned. His back would be to her. He would look at some fixed point ahead of him. Then he would turn and walk on.
In the fourth week he began to speak.
He came into the room where she and Lupita and Carlos took their midday meal.
He had come twice before and had spoken to her about practical matters, the food, the servants, whether there was anything she lacked.
This time was different. He came in and took the chair at the far end of the table, with the length of it between himself and them, and he looked at Carlos and he said, in Spanish, "The boy looks like his mother. "
"And his father," Elena said.
"Yes, I see another face in him too."
He looked at Carlos a long time. Carlos stared straight ahead. Elena had taught him to ignore Vega, and Carlos had understood.
"Carlos," Don Rodrigo said. "A good name. An old name. He was born in the north, I think. You had him in Tejas, did you not?"
"Yes."
"He is a son of Tejas, then. In the legal sense. Though the blood is Mexican on one side."
"On both, se?or. On his father's side also, his grandmother."
"Ah," Don Rodrigo said again. "I did not know."
"There is much you do not know about my husband, se?or."
She had not planned to say it. She heard herself say it and she did not wish it back. One thing he did not know about her husband was that he could be a very violent man, not with his family ever, but if he ever got ahold of Don Rodrigo, she wasn't sure she could save the hacendado's life.
Don Rodrigo looked at her. It was the first time he had looked at her directly since he had sat down. His eyes were tired. She had not noticed before that his eyes were tired.
"I am sure you are right, se?ora."
He stood up and left the room, and that was when Elena understood the second thing about him, which was that he was tired, and that his tiredness had been there for a long time.
The hacienda had held Elena and Carlos for the first four weeks and then one afternoon there had been activity in the courtyard and Elena had gone to the window and had seen her sister, her youngest sister, Lupita, being helped down from a horse by a vaquero and being led across the courtyard with a small bag in her hand, and Elena had put her hand to the window glass without thinking, and on the glass she had made the flat print of her own palm.
Lupita had come with her the day she and Carlos had been brought to the hacienda, but she'd been sent away after a few days. Now, she'd returned, and Elena wondered why. Lupita came up the stairs and into the room and had put down her bag and had put her arms around her sister.
They hugged for a long time without speaking.
Finally, Lupita had said, "He sent for me. His man came to the house. He said Elena has asked that her sister be brought to her, for company. Mamá said yes. She said yes because she did not know what else to say."
"Of course."
"I came willingly. I came for you."
"I know."
"Is Carlos here?"
"He's playing hopscotch in the room next door using a wood scrap for a hoppy taw. He has his shoes off so that he doesn't make too much noise. Del?"
"At the jail in Ciénega del Norte. Alive last week. I do not know about this week."
"Mi amor."
"I know."
Lupita had opened the door to the next room, and Carlos had let out a shout when he had seen her, and that was the only shout Elena had heard from him in a month.
Elena had stood in the door and watched her son hold her sister, and she had understood that Don Rodrigo had given her Lupita for a reason.
Don Rodrigo had brought back Lupita because he wanted Elena to be comfortable. A comfortable woman was a woman who might, in time, stop fighting. A woman with her sister was less alone. A woman less alone began, perhaps, to entertain ideas she would not entertain in isolation.
Elena understood the strategy.
It would not work because she watched Don Rodrigo, and she had understood him by the end of the first week, and she would not be moved. And she knew, without a doubt, that Will Fain was coming. There was not a single doubt in her mind. She knew too that he wouldn't come alone.
She would not be moved even if it took a year.
She would not be moved even if it took two.
Don Rodrigo had time. Elena had time also.
The difference between them was that Don Rodrigo was waiting for her to come to him, and Elena was waiting for her husband to come for her, and she knew her husband would come first.
She told herself this every night in her own bed, with Carlos asleep beside her and Lupita in the room next door, she told herself that Del was alive and would remain alive and would come, and Will would come with him, and the thing between her and Don Rodrigo would end not in her walking across the courtyard one night with her hand out, but in Don Rodrigo's gate being opened from the inside by a man he had trusted and Don Rodrigo sleeping through it maybe unless Del got his hands on the old don.
Belief was not certainty. She knew the difference. She was a grown woman and she had buried two uncles and a father, and she knew that what a person believed and what the world did were two different animals that did not always run together. But belief was a thing a person could carry.
And every afternoon at three she stood back from the window, not at the window, and she watched Don Rodrigo walk his route in the courtyard, and she did not let him see her watching.