Days of the Dead (27 page)

“Did Sor Perdita have an opinion about Josefa’s sanity?”

“You mean about whether Josefa would actually kill her brother in order to gain a place in a convent? Not directly. But Sor Perdita—whom I never actually saw, by the way, our entire conversation was conducted through a barred window that was curtained on the other side—spoke with some concern about what she called Josefa’s
immoderate enthusiasm
for the religious life. Coming from a woman who voluntarily sleeps without a blanket on a narrow plank with a one-inch stringer of wood nailed up the middle to keep her from getting too comfortable, this does not sound like sanity to me.”

January said, “Hmmn.”

“She did,” added Rose, “offer to copy out and send to me Josefa’s entire account of the wedding-feast and Fernando’s murder, which Josefa said was willed by God: she read it to me and there isn’t a thing in it that Josefa didn’t say to me last Wednesday. She had reams of Josefa’s complaints about her brother—only to be expected, Sor Perdita said, considering the way Fernando’s mother disgraced herself when she was a novice in the selfsame convent.”

“I’d forgotten that.” Momentarily distracted from his speculation as to how to break into the American minister’s house, January wondered if the conduct of Don Prospero’s second wife while in Holy Orders had anything to do with his unwillingness to let his daughter enter them.

As the carriage turned into the courtyard of the old palace, Señora Garcia was already dishing up tortillas and beans for the local men. Rose and January glanced at each other. God knew when Consuela would be back from the festivities at the de Bujerio town house, or whether she’d given the servants the night off. In Rose’s eyes January saw his own thought: Sir Henry Ward might invite them to his reception, but even if food was being served, there were almost certainly men there who would take exception to a black man eating it from the same table as they. Even January’s friend Lieutenant Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards would sit at an adjoining table when they had coffee in the market-stands by the levee.

“Have the carriage ready in an hour,” said January to Cristobál, who had ridden on the footman’s perch. “And have bath-water in our room when we come up. Señora”—he turned to Señora Garcia—“what can you do for myself and my wife in the way of supper?”

“All right,” he said to Rose over tortillas, beans, and some truly excellent stewed kid, “tell me how Maria-Exaltación de Borregos de Castellón managed to disgrace herself while in Holy Orders.”

“She became pregnant,” said Rose. “By one of the confessors, evidently. Sor Perdita concurs with the general consensus that she was an unconscionable flirt and extremely charming. She managed to attract Don Prospero’s eye while in her delicate condition, no mean feat when coupled with a novice’s veil.”

“Sor Perdita told you all this?”

“Oh, after a long talk and a great many confidences exchanged. As headmistress of a girls’ school—and I am one again, or will be as soon as we get back—I learned the right questions to ask and when to ask them. It’s astonishing how much like a girls’ school the atmosphere there feels, always supposing there are girls’ schools in which it is considered appropriate for the pupils to starve themselves, wear spiked iron belts under their clothing, flog themselves so that the walls of their rooms are spattered in blood, and occasionally—as a special treat for their friends—strip to the waist in the dining-room at meals so that others may admire their suppurating sores.”

“I don’t wonder no one eats much.” January poked his stew, suddenly less hungry.

“They take turns wearing an iron crown of thorns,” said Rose, taking another spoonful of corn pudding. “I only hope they rinse it off between-times. It sounds like a most insanitary practice. Maria-Exaltación de Borregos was sent to Mexico by her family from Sevilla in 1803, at the age of fifteen. Given the conditions in Spain at the time, Mexico was considered safer for a young girl. She was fair and extremely pretty, with light-brown hair like Fernando’s. I saw her portrait, done with her ‘shield of God,’ those painted circular things they carry. By the amount of lace, gold, and pearls on both the shield and the diadem she’s wearing in the picture, there was no want of money in the de Borregos family.”

“At five thousand pesos to enter the convent,” remarked January, “there mustn’t have been.”

“As you say. She was fragile and rather sickly, but that was considered ‘interestingly delicate’ in those days—I don’t imagine a steady diet of dry bread and water rendered her any more robust. She had no trouble turning every head she encountered. The priest by whom she was suspected to have conceived was sent away, and she bore the baby—a boy called Orlando—in the convent. Evidently there was discussion about whether to send her and her child back to Sevilla, but with fighting going on all over the high seas then, it wasn’t considered safe.”

“It wasn’t considered safe eight years later,” said January, “when I was trying to get trained as a surgeon and the best I could do was study with a M’sieu Gomez in New Orleans. Not that he wasn’t an excellent teacher,” he added, remembering the dapper, sardonic quadroon who’d guided his initial studies in the miracles of human bones, nerves, and flesh. “But there is only so much you can learn by observing and reading.”

Rose, who had had her own struggles being educated, nodded, a small crease of bitterness tugging at the corner of her mouth. “By that time the brother who’d brought Maria-Exaltación over here had died, apparently only weeks after contracting marriage to the lady who is now Valentina’s duenna. It would seem one keeps such ladies in the family, to provide for their support. And it was a moot point anyway, because several months before little Orlando’s birth, the widowed Don Prospero saw Maria-Exaltación while on a visit to Sor Perdita, who is his cousin. He was captivated.”

“I don’t expect Sor Perdita was pleased.”

“Well, she had nothing to say on that subject and said it at great length. But Don Prospero was no easier to deal with then than he is now. He made arrangements for little Orlando to be adopted by cousins on the other side of the family—Sor Perdita told me the boy died when he was thirteen or fourteen—and wed Maria-Exaltación in 1805.”

“After which she continued to flirt,” murmured January, “until her death in 1817, when Fernando was ten. At least I have Señor dos Cerritos’s word that she continued to flirt, though in fact if she was of sickly constitution, I think it likelier that she died of food poisoning of some sort than that she had an affair with the cook and was murdered with a praline.”

“Which are quite delicious as they make them here.” Rose picked a fragment of one from the plate of
postres
Señora Garcia offered them, darker and more strongly flavored with muscavado, and embedded with peanuts instead of New Orleans pecans. “Sor Perdita and I had a long chat about food, of which there is plenty available in some convents: the servants brought me some truly excellent camote, though Sor Perdita said—as if it were a color that was not agreeable with her complexion—that she did not indulge.”

January left a reale on the table to pay for the supper, and crossed the court hand in hand with Rose, uneasy tension winding tighter behind his breastbone. He wasn’t certain that his wife could convince Santa Anna to sign anything—certainly Don Prospero would be less willing to deal with a woman. With Santa Anna gone, would Butler and his household remain in town? He remembered the way Santa Anna had regarded Hannibal, that casual interest, as if looking at the weaker of two dogs going into a dog-fight, knowing it would be torn to pieces and not caring. Remembered, too, the smell of rabbit’s blood in the darkness, and the sinister glint of dead skulls’ crystal eyes in the shadows of Don Prospero’s study.

Santa Anna would leave for Vera Cruz in the morning. Before dawn, then—written order or no written order—he and Rose would have to depart for Mictlán. The thought of putting himself once more in the realm where that crazy white-haired despot was all-powerful made his hair prickle. He’d have to talk to Cristobál about getting the horses packed. . . .

Beneath the fast-running ice-stream of these thoughts, Rose’s voice went on, light and inconsequential. “Sor Perdita said she didn’t miss the delicacies of her former life; she complained that she is subject to devastating migraines when she drinks chocolate, which I can sympathize with—not that I can remotely imagine giving up chocolate. But my Aunt Francine on Grande Isle had migraines if she ate bread, although fortunately she could limit herself to rice and beans with no more inconvenience than the occasional stigma of eating like a peasant. Goodness knows how people manage if they have that sensitivity in France, or England, where corn and oats are fed only to horses. I suppose it’s true, that one man’s meat . . .”

January stopped in his tracks at the foot of the stairs, without warning back in his dream—back in the stinks and clamor of the night clinic of the Hôtel Dieu, binding the wounds, washing the bruises of the poorest of the Paris poor.

Feeling as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder.

A blond-haired woman weeping and sobbing with a dead child in her arms. The harsh-faced gendarme standing before him:
Of course she killed it, like she killed the one before . . .

And the woman sobbing,
I did not! I did not! Oh, my poor little child. . . . O Blessed Virgin, help me . . . !

Rose had stopped beside him, looking up at him questioningly, the cresset-flame from the courtyard reflected in her spectacles. And he said softly, “. . . is another man’s poison.”

She started to speak, then was quiet again. Running over in her mind fragments of conversation, of information about other things. . . .

Slowly, they ascended the stairs and walked along the unlit
corredor
in silence to their room.

“I know some people are . . . are
sensitive,
” Rose said as January opened the door. “To strawberries, or chocolate, or aubergines, for instance. . . .” She shut the door behind her as January lit a match from the small store he carried in his pockets—they were unobtainable in Mexico City—and illuminated half a dozen candles. “And come to think of it, everyone always says that Doña Isabella is forever throwing out a rash, or having a migraine, or the vapors.”

“And the vapors,” said January, “is a sensation of choking, isn’t it? Of not being able to get one’s breath. It’s often brought about by panic, or anxiety—usually exacerbated by tight-lacing. But in some cases it’s brought on by something one ate.”

“But could it . . . could it
kill
you?” Rose sounded incredulous. As the mistress of a girls’ school, she had encountered too many cases of the vapors that had simply been an excuse for having one’s own way.

“Oh, yes,” said January. He shook out the match. An extra can of hot water, muffled in towels to keep it warm, waited on the window-sill; Rose’s good green silk was laid out ready on the bed.

As he unlaced her, January went on. “During the six years I worked at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris, we had a woman come in twice . . . no, three times. Two of her children died—and the third almost did—from choking for no known cause, and at roughly the same age. The second time, I had to talk the police out of arresting her, and I think they would have had she not been so distraught, so clearly devastated. I feared for her sanity. Both the same, they turned blue and their faces and tongues swelled; what the poor woman went through from her neighbors whispering I don’t even like to think.

“But after the third one, barely a toddler—who hadn’t even been born when that eldest brother died, also a toddler—Madame Valory said that all three had eaten whelks just before their fits began. And in all three cases, since the children were so young, it was the first time that each child had eaten a whelk, or indeed any sort of shellfish. They lived out in Pigalle, far from the river. It was only when they grew old enough to walk down to the quais with their mother that they came into danger, and a sister who was born between the first two suffered no ill effects. The youngest child didn’t have the same degree of sensitivity as the others did, and by slipping a tube down her windpipe I was able to keep her breathing until the attack passed and the swollen tissues relaxed.”

He stood still by the end of the bed, cheek resting against the bedpost, looking at Rose, her stays loosened, her hair unpinned and lying over her shoulders. Seeing not her, but the shrieking, sobbing girl clinging to the other orderly at the clinic, and the swollen face of the terrified, convulsing child.

“I asked one of the senior doctors, Dr. Pelletier, about it later, at the clinic,” he went on. “He said that some people do have these—these
morbid sensitivities,
he called them. Galen wrote about them in the second century
A.D.
Dr. Pelletier said he’d personally encountered cases in which a child was stung by a bee, and died of it, with much the same symptoms as my poor little whelk-eaters. Pelletier thought that most people in whom such sensitivities manifest must die as children, with no one knowing the cause.”

“And Fernando didn’t . . .”

“Obviously, because his father refuses to eat any of the foods native to Mexico,” said January. “Then before he was old enough to go about on his own, he was sent to Germany—where he wouldn’t encounter such things as chilis, or cactus, or peanuts, or deep-fried ant-paste tamales—whatever that is. He didn’t know he had a sensitivity to such a morbid degree.”

“Then his death was . . . was an
accident
?”

“That’s what it sounds like.” January stripped off his shirt and trousers, poured hot water into the basin. “There was something in one of M’sieu Guillenormand’s dishes that everyone else at the table could—and did—eat with impunity, but that killed Fernando, as surely as arsenic or monkshood.”

“Good heavens.” Rose gazed for a time into the darkness beyond the candle-glow, appalled, bemused, and fascinated by the scientific puzzle. “And if poor Hannibal hadn’t chosen that moment to try to speak to him I suppose he’d have been only one suspect of many. Though how we’d go about finding out what it was. . . .”