Chapter 14
Minerva
I sat in the servants’ dining area, elbows on the table and head in my hands. One of the kitchen staff whisked away the bowl I had vomited into and left a cold glass of water in its place.
It sat untouched between me and Cosme.
Between me and Octaviana.
Usually, at this time—half an hour to lunch—the liveried servants wolfed down their meals before waiting on the del Valle family. Whenever footsteps approached the kitchen, they skittered to a stop. Whispers were exchanged; voices faded.
“Minerva.” Cosme’s voice was level and calm. “La senora needs to know precisely what happened.”
“The tea. Something was wrong with the tea,” I croaked. She drank; she could not breathe.
And then…
A shudder seized me.
Cosme’s voice faded in and out.
“Someone knocked over the tea,” he explained to Octaviana.
When people finally came, the shadow was gone.
It was too late. Servants descended in cacophony, elbows and limbs akimbo, hands flying and pointing every which way.
The teacup and pot were upended. The fall cleaved them into pieces and spilled their contents like so many guts.
Shoes stepped through it; some even slipped.
There were no answers to be found in the tea now.
How very convenient. A voice wafted up like a curl of smoke from the back of my mind.
I shut my eyes to replay the scene in my mind’s eye. I was screaming, somewhere on the rug before Senora Encarnación; Cosme lifted me to my feet. Faces appeared from the swirl of green livery: Filomena and Antonio, Leoncio’s footman. A maid or three.
Who moved the side table and sent the teapot flying? It was impossible to know. But—
“Antonio brought the tea service,” I said, opening my eyes. “And then…she began convulsing.”
They didn’t even cover Senora Encarnación when they took her away. She was laid on a stretcher, curled up in agony like a cockroach.
She didn’t die alone in Casa Azafrán, like she feared she would, but she shouldn’t have gone like that. No one deserved to die like that.
Especially not Senora Encarnación.
I won’t be around forever, she often said as she revealed that the day’s clothes shopping errand in Colonia del Norte was not for her, but for me. One day you’ll have to find work in the home of a new family. Perhaps a new-money family. Hm. They’ll be more snobbish than they have the right to be.
It was the gift of a full wardrobe, from dresses in dark tones to shining shoes; from airy, delicate stockings to undergarments made of buttery silk.
Given and dismissed as if it were nothing, even though I saw the bill handed to her on a small silver tray at the end of the visit and calculated that it was the same as a year of my wages.
Too clever by half to be illiterate, she would murmur sleepily as I read to her at night. No one in my house leaves cleverness to rot, you hear me?
And no one in her house would be disloyal to her. Not even after her death.
“There was a…a darkness.” I forced the words out at the table. “A cloud of darkness came and attacked her. It sucked something out of her.”
Left her a withered, scorched jalapeno, blackening and curling in on itself.
I could almost hear Octaviana and Cosme exchange a look.
“I don’t understand,” Cosme said slowly. “You saw someone hurt her? Who?”
“Not a person.” I lifted my head by centimeters. I swallowed. “A cloud of darkness. It came from the shadows. It hurt her.”
This time, I saw the look they exchanged. Octaviana’s face was pale and tired, but the lift of a single brow to her hairline brought some life to it.
The child has lost her mind, that look said.
I bit my tongue. What proof did I have that a monstrous being peeled itself out of the shadows and sucked something that looked like chispa out of Senora Encarnación?
“I think it would be best if Senorita Trevino lay down,” Cosme suggested.
“No.” The word snapped out of me like a reflex. I don’t know where the bite in my voice came from, but it tasted angry. “La senora was just attacked. What will lying down do? She’s dead.”
“Enough, Senorita Trevino.” Octaviana swept her eyes over me, weighing me. I’ve used a tone, as Cosme would say to Filomena when she was short-tempered. I didn’t care. “Are you well?”
“I saw…she was all I had.” My voice broke. A heavy weight pressed on my chest, so thick that I could barely breathe. I would not cry. Not in front of Octaviana. Not in front of Cosme. Not even as my eyes burned and the weight threatened to crush my lungs. “No, senora, I am not well.”
There was not a glimmer of wet in Octaviana’s eyes. Her aunt had died a violent, sudden death. And this was her reaction? Flat as a pool of standing water?
My throat seared with sudden rage. Turncoats. Weaklings. I wanted to ball my hand into a fist and shake it at the portraits in Casa Azafrán.
“Tía Encarnación had a weak heart,” Octaviana said. “She was ill for a long, long time.”
How would she know? She never visited, never wrote.
Octaviana’s was a portrait Senora Encarnación cursed at with vehemence—not because Senora Encarnación was angry, or because she was self-righteous about loyalty, but because she hurt.
Because she was lonely. Because her family had turned their backs on her.
They were turncoats, changing their loyalties as easily as the ribbons in their hair and the brooches at their throats.
Saying so would certainly count as having a tone, and Octaviana would deserve it, for her infuriating calm.
Patience, she had told Eugenia.
The word slipped down through my memory, a draft of clarifying water.
Senora Encarnación did not die of a weak heart.
Her death was not an accident.
“Drink your water and collect yourself,” Octaviana said.
Perhaps Octaviana sensed a change in me.
Perhaps she could see the rod that now straightened my spine, for she was all flint in return.
“Without a patroness, you are currently unemployed. You have a choice: you may stay in la Casa de las Gardenias in my employ as a maid, or you may take your final wages from serving Tía Encarnación and leave. An armed messenger will escort you as far as the Capital, from which point you will carry on to find your people alone.”
I had no people.
The thought was as swift as a reflex. It struck the bruise of Armando hard enough to make me reel. No, that was not true. Arnulfo still lived. But Arnulfo—
Anyone connected with the democratic regime is in danger.
I had seen enough in the papers. The Capital was a war zone. And the only person I had already had a death sentence.
He was running with the target of the Viceroy’s men on his back, heading to the mountains.
There was no way I could find him in the mists and the jungle.
No way I could even scale mountains like these, with their sides so sheer that the path disappeared and messengers used ladders with ropes attached to their waists to reach the summit.
My palms grew slick at the very thought.
I was cornered.
I must have looked it, because Cosme’s voice cut in, softening the machete-sharp edge of the silence between Octaviana and me.
“Respectfully, senora,” he said, “the girl has had quite the shock. Perhaps she needs time to think.”
Octaviana leaned back, her shoulders loosening. She had been tense as she faced me. Coiled as if to lash out in defense.
She knew I had seen something happen. She knew I smelled something rotting at the heart of the del Valles.
“Very well.” Octaviana was as cool as mist as she rose from the table. “You have until dinner to decide whether you will stay or go, Senorita Trevino.”
“Thank you for being so gracious, senora,” Cosme said. “I’m sure Senorita—”
But Octaviana cut him off mid-sentence: “I will add one thing to your consideration. The terms of my employment demand that all who serve in this house abstain from low-class gossip about superstition. Is that clear?”
No talk of a dark cloud, of that thing, descending on Senora Encarnación. No talk of how it reached into her throat and yanked forth gold, leaving her dry as a dead beetle’s empty shell.
I swallowed the curl of nausea in my mouth.
“Clear, senora.”