Chapter 28
Minerva
I was sitting in the kitchen, blearily sipping the cinnamon-spiced coffee usually reserved for the cooks, when the message arrived.
It was just past dawn. Last night, I slipped into bed and stared at the ceiling, heart pounding. If I drifted off, it was when the sky outside the windows was graying.
Sara raised a single brow when she spied me sneak some coffee to have along with our usual breakfast of tortillas and hot scrambled eggs.
“Nightmares,” was my simple explanation. “Slept terribly.”
She accepted this answer and was eating her own breakfast in silence when the chaos of the kitchen paused. Our attention fixed on the windows, as if we were all moths drawn to the gray light outside.
Two rows of guards marched up the drive from the gate, their steps beating like a drum. Their uniforms were tailored and their guns gleamed.
“The replacement guards,” a cook said, somewhere to my left. He let out a low whistle. “That was quick.”
“Hope you said your goodbyes to Daniel,” another said to him.
“Oh, I did,” the first cook said, wiping his hands on his apron with a belabored sigh. The light from the window caught every line in his face, deepening the grief that rested there. “I knew he was dead the minute they said the spy had escaped.”
Something in his voice made me realize that he meant it when he said dead. It was not simply a turn of phrase.
I had moved my Hounds. I envisioned Senora Encarnación plucking fallen Mouse pieces off the board, face impassive but for a lift of her brows. Gumption, she said admiringly.
Instead of mother-of-pearl shining through the gaps of her gnarled fingers, the pieces were coated in blood, fresh and ruby slick.
Blood streaked across the board in graceful arcs as she moved her next Hound.
One of the oncoming guards shouted to the others; they split into two groups and marched into the fog.
All but one.
He marched to the front door, a sealed envelope in one hand.
We learned, later that morning, that the message was placed on Cosme’s silver tray and brought to Octaviana at the breakfast table.
When Cosme retreated to the kitchen for our daily morning meeting, he hit a wall of curiosity.
I kept my eyes on my hands, folded in my lap.
“That came directly from the Viceroy,” he said.
In the message, the Viceroy wrote that he was deeply grieved to hear of his cousin Encarnación’s death. She was one of his childhood playmates, one of the last connections he had to those times long past.
I imagined her tucking the letter in her pocket, her pursed lips a blasphemous echo of Senora Encarnación’s. None of them, not one, grieved Senora Encarnación.
I wondered if they would now, to make a show of it for the Viceroy.
The thought left a sour film in my mouth.
Turncoats. Traitors.
I remembered how she lifted the green bottle of champagne in Casa Azafrán, gleefully victorious, at the news of el Presidente’s death. At the promise that the Viceroy—her cousin—would retake power and rule with an iron fist.
But something in her was different than the rest of them. She had principles. She cared for her people.
She had loyalty.
The pieces on this board were not black and white. This wasn’t a game.
Later, as I cleaned, I imagined myself mopping up blood from the polished floorboards. It didn’t matter whose it was. It was there, and I was cleaning it up.
As I swept the garden paths, I watched Octaviana surreptitiously as she walked, shadowed by Cosme. Since Senora Encarnación died, I was not as often in the gardens as I wanted to be. When one of the other maids felt too ill from her monthly cycle to work, I happily took her assignment.
Monthly cycles, I had rediscovered in the last few months, were awful.
My first few were wretched affairs where I felt dirty and stained, sickened by how the betrayal of my body forced me to rely on the stepmother and her knowledge.
When hunger descended on our family and my blood vanished along with the food on the table, I could not regret it.
“You didn’t have it for years?” Senora Encarnación had said, threadbare brows arching in surprise, when I explained why I was wincing with pain.
It was my second month at Casa Azafrán. “That’s good,” she added.
“You’re no longer starving like a dog.” Then she considered me—my pallor, perhaps, or the grimace-like set of my mouth.
“The yellow bottle has pain pastilles. Take two, but no more than three times a day.”
A few days later, a collection of such bottles appeared on my nightstand, so I did not have to go into Senora Encarnación’s medicine cabinet at all.
I have not been in pain since.
Evidently Octaviana did not see fit to provide her staff with any such luxuries. She did not think about the well-being of her staff; this did not surprise me at all. If anything, I was a bit grateful for it. It allowed me a chance to watch her.
From this distance, with her long sleeves, there was no chance I would be able to make out if she had replaced the amulet or not. But I could see her brush her fingertips over the leaves of gardenias—careful not to touch the blooms—pensively.
“Cosme,” I overheard her say.
I perked up my ears, my broom stilling.
Filomena’s voice floated through my head. But others see things. Watch your back.
I resumed sweeping leaves. Octaviana’s voice was a murmur, buried by the sounds of my shoes in the gravel and the distant hooting of monkeys in the far-off jungle.
I couldn’t make it out.
I could only hope.
Later, hope turned to delight when Ygnacio descended upon me in the evening. I was in Leoncio’s room, a place where I felt much more relaxed than I used to, especially when the rooms were haunted.
The thought alone made me want to laugh, unhinged and a bit wild.
“She did it,” Ygnacio crowed. He dropped unceremoniously onto Leoncio’s chaise, lifting his arms and clasping his hands behind his head as he leaned back into the pillows. “She’s invited the Viceroy.”
It would be noticed if I let out a cry of victory. Lack of sleep had sanded away my inhibitions, though, so I allowed myself to fling my hands into the air in victorious fists.
A thought dampened my joy as quickly as it welled up, and I lowered my arms. “But we have no guarantee that he’ll accept.”
“Well…” Ygnacio drew the word long, watching me, as if he was weighing what he was about to say. Picking his words carefully. How very unlike him—he was always so quick to speak. “Octaviana wants him to come very badly. It would look very good for her. So she dangled some bait.”
I raised my brows. Gestured for him to continue, my impatience palpable on my tongue.
“The Viceroy has been invited to come pay his respects to Encarnación’s grave,” he said. “There will be an evening of drinks and dancing in her honor, for Encarnación so very much loved seeing la Casa de las Gardenias full of light and festivities. Officers and wives are also invited.”
I snorted dismissively. “What grave?”
They had done nothing to commemorate Senora Encarnación’s death. They hadn’t even had a funeral service. For all I knew, she was in a box in a garden shed, cold and curled up and alone.
I felt an ache in my breast when I thought of her rheumy looks, her throat clearing, her slow walk up the stairs at night.
Her insistence on me reading to her to improve myself.
Her gifts of clothes and medication. When my father descended on Palacio Monterrey, she put her cane between me and the world.
I had looked after myself for so long. For once, there was someone who thought to look after me.
Now she was gone, and her relatives were using her for their own political gain. They sneered at her in life; in death, they would use her memory to curry favor with the Viceroy.
I wanted to stand in Casa Azafrán at Senora Encarnación’s side and raise my fist alongside hers to shake at the family portraits.
A new grief hit me then, dizzying and swift: I wouldn’t return to Casa Azafrán, would I?
Ygnacio shrugged in response to my question. “They’ll come up with something, I’m sure.”
“Where is she?” I wondered. He watched me without his usual reptilian coldness. There was something gentler about his face. “You’re here. So where’s she?”
Another shrug. “She left behind no chispa.”
As if he had nothing to do with it.
I didn’t want to look at him anymore. I made my way to Leoncio’s room to turn down the sheets, swallowing the lump in my throat.
His footsteps were silent, but I knew he was following. Watching me.
“Go away.” My voice cracked.
“I would be very happy if she were never commemorated like she will be when the Viceroy comes.”
“I am aware,” I snapped. “You did kill her, after all.”
“I’m not sorry about that,” he said, softer than he was before. “But I am sorry that I hurt you.”
I turned to face him, but there was no one. No ghostly apparition, no shadows, nothing.
The room was empty, but for me.