Days of the Dead (30 page)

“You have no proof. . . .”

“What more proof do you think I need?” The Capitán’s mouth twisted, and he tried to rein around January, who moved again into his path. “You
Nortes
seem to regard my country’s laws as if they were the rules of a children’s game and not binding upon you, the adults. But I tell you, protector or no protector,
Norte
or not . . .”

“And I’m not,” sighed Hannibal, as if he’d given up on convincing anyone otherwise.

“. . . he will hang for his crime, and I will see it done.” Ylario reached to the holster on the front of his saddle. “Now, get—”

Before his hand could touch the pistol, a shot cracked, as loud as a cannon in the thin, clear air. One of the constables threw up his arms with a cry and at the same time from the rocks beside the road Sancho yelled, “Señores, look out!” January saw gunflash from the rocks as riders thundered up from the gully a dozen yards away, ragged men on starved-looking horses, led by the red-clothed black figure he recognized instantly from the mountains above the Vera Cruz road.

“El Moro!” shouted Ylario’s sergeant quite unnecessarily, and January’s horse squealed and leaped as a stray bullet stung its flank. As the constables scrambled for their rifles to return the bandits’ fire, Rose spurred her horse into their midst, caught the lead-rein of Hannibal’s mount out of Ylario’s hand, and galloped away along the rim of the gully toward the more settled lands of the now-distant village of Saragosse. January plunged after them, glancing back in time to see one pursuing bandit shot off his horse by Cristobál. He’d left the spare mounts, and they mingled with the remounts led by Ylario’s men, kicking, screaming, and plunging in all directions as the bandits fired again.

At the first possible break in the gully’s lip, Rose urged her mount down into the thick of the cottonwoods and paloverde that grew along the stream, the two men following her into the concealment of that windless shimmering green-and-gold world. “The spare horses should keep them busy.” Rose drew rein and sprang down; January was already pulling his knife from his belt to cut the rawhide strips that bound Hannibal’s wrists. “Are you all right?”

“
Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.
I will be as soon as I get some feeling back into my hands.” The fiddler dropped from the saddle and stumbled to the edge of the stream, where he knelt, flexing his hands cautiously in the trickling water. “Though I am rather tired of being cursed as a
Norteamericano
when in fact I’m a subject of King William’s—not one of his favorites, to be sure, but then, I daresay Mr. Jackson wouldn’t have much use for me either.”

He bent, and shoving back his hat dashed handfuls of the bitter-cold water on his face. “You have no concept how exquisite it is simply not to be under the domination of a madman. No wonder Valla’s duenna drinks. If I didn’t drink already, it would certainly drive me to it. And speaking of drink . . .” He hunted through his pockets for his square black bottle of laudanum and sherry. His hands, wet from the stream, were shaking badly. “Did you get my letter?”

“Last night. Consuela didn’t return home until late. . . .”

“I might have expected it.
Mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua. . . .
”

“I think she was at a party celebrating the entrance of Don Rafael’s sister into a nunnery.”

“Doesn’t matter.
Her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. . . .
”

“I think you’ve been listening to Don Prospero on the subject of Helen of Troy entirely too long,” said Rose severely.

“A single evening,” sighed Hannibal, “of Don Prospero on the subject of Helen of Troy . . . Well, nevertheless. I did try to escape when the vaqueros were at supper, only they weren’t, not all of them. I was laughingly escorted back to one of the store-rooms and locked in. Vasco seemed to think it a huge joke, and it probably is, for him. Nobody’s going to hang
him
for Don Fernando’s murder. Barely had rosy-fingered dawn stolen o’er mead and meadow when Ylario and his bravos galloped in and held up the lot of them at gunpoint. If I get out of this country alive, I shall spend the remainder of my declining years in a condition of bemused astonishment. Did you speak to Sir Henry?”

For answer, January held up the letter of introduction. “And to Don Prospero’s long-suffering man of business, and to the equally long-suffering Señora Lorcha, and, more to the point, to Werther Bremer—after he turned a wild bull loose on me in the mistaken belief that I was El Moro, who apparently assaulted him on his way back from Mictlán.”

“And I spent a vastly entertaining afternoon at the Convent of the Bleeding Heart of Mary—I truly did—” Rose said, “and Benjamin has a theory about how Fernando might have been poisoned even though he ate the same supper as everyone else.”

While January slipped the heavy Spanish bits from the horses’ mouths and poured oats from one of the saddlebags onto a stream-side rock for the tired beasts to eat, he explained about poor little Madame Valory in Paris and her children who could not eat whelks. “It’s conceivable that Fernando could have lived till the age of twenty-five without his sensitivity becoming active because he lived fifteen of those years in Europe,” he said. “I’m guessing whatever he was sensitive to is a New World food, and one that isn’t eaten even now in Europe, at least not by the upper classes. Potatoes don’t count, everyone in France and Ireland eats them now.”

“It has to be one that isn’t eaten by the upper classes here either.” Hannibal leaned his back against a deadfall cottonwood. “Certainly not in Don Prospero’s household. Could it be what killed his mother?”

“Having been raised in Spain,” said Rose thoughtfully, “Doña Maria-Exaltación might not have known she had a sensitivity to whatever it is, either—if it was even the same thing. At the convent they said she was always sickly in the same way Fernando and apparently Isabella are. But at the Convent of the Bleeding Heart she wouldn’t have eaten anything other than dry bread and water, which would be enough to make
me
marry even a lunatic if it would get me out of there. Hannibal, did you see anything resembling a will on Don Prospero’s desk when you went back to search for Valentina’s letters? Capitán Ylario has them now, by the way.”

“I wondered what had happened to them. No, no will, but I wasn’t looking for one. The Declaration of Independence could have been lying on the desk and I wouldn’t have noticed it, Argand lamps notwithstanding. I guessed I wouldn’t have much time to search. Now that I think of it, the papers were much disordered, much more so than when Fernando had been at them for two days.”

He frowned. “There seem to be rather a lot of people searching that study. If Prospero mentioned the will to anyone—which he certainly didn’t to me . . .”

“Well, you inherit a hundred thousand pesos and a sugar plantation in Vera Cruz,” said Rose. “Which isn’t going to do you any good if Ylario sees it.”

“Thank you for modulating my transports of joy before they endangered my health. I wonder if he actually meant to sign the will. It sounds like exactly the sort of thing he’d do to get a rise out of Fernando. Thank you,” he added as January handed him a couple of tortillas from the other saddlebag, along with slices of white cheese from the small block that Rose had packed. “
We will eat our mullets / soused in high-country wines, sup pheasants’ eggs / and have our cockles boiled in silver shells.
One of the things I most love about you,
amicus meus,
is that you never forget the essentials of life.”

After eating, January changed his much-scuffed evening clothes for the rough trousers, shirt, and boots Rose had lashed on behind his saddle, and the three friends moved on, seeking a break in the gully wall that they could follow up to return to the city. Throughout their rest he had been straining his ears, not only for the sounds of pursuit but for any sign of Sancho and Cristobál. January hoped the Yaqui had been able to track them. If not, better perhaps that both returned to the city.

It was past noon now. Their spare horses gone, it would be well after nightfall before they returned—and then there remained the problem of how to get Hannibal safely to the coast.

“We’ve ruled out Don Prospero as a culprit,” said Rose as they moved on foot through the dense rustling heat within the gully. “Though that business with the rabbit’s heart still makes me very uneasy.”

“Makes
you
uneasy?” Hannibal’s eyebrows laddered a series of parallel wrinkles all up his forehead. “You try playing picquet with him until four in the morning, with every other blessed soul in the
casco
asleep, and those obsidian sacrificial knives grinning at you from the shelves. I asked Vasco about the rabbit, by the way—about whether Don Prospero had ever done something of the kind before—and he only shrugged.”

His boots slipped in a puddle, and he caught himself on his horse’s bridle and added, “
Do bravely, horse, for wot’st though whom thou mov’st?
The servants seem to think he’s always been this crazy. It isn’t as though he hasn’t plenty of company in the British aristocracy. I had an uncle who used to dance and sing in unknown languages—he claimed they were Hittite and Japanese, of which he was not a student—all around the upstairs gallery of the hall, and all the family ever did with him was keep a padlock and chain handy for when there was company for dinner. He was quite reasonable otherwise, and would help the servants polish the silver.”

“Rabbit or no rabbit,” Rose said, “Don Prospero seems to have had little trouble keeping the family fortune intact during eighteen years of continuous civil warfare, which is more than can be said of most of his neighbors. Do you think Don Anastasio has returned to Saragosse, by the way, now that poor little Pilar is safely entombed in her convent? He might be prevailed upon to give us fresh horses—possibly even to keep Hannibal hidden until we can make arrangements to leave for Vera Cruz. As a botanist, he might even have some idea of what could have found its way into the food to kill Fernando.”

“It might be worth scouting to see,” agreed January, pausing to scan the bank above them again. “Once we get out of this gully, that is.

“‘Non vi dispiaccia, se vi lece, dirci,
s’a la man destra giace alcuna foce
onde non amendue posseamo uscirci,
sanza costrigner de li angeli neri
che vegnan d’esto fondo a dipartirci,’

as Dante overheard Virgil say under similar circumstances.”

“You’d think after months as Don Prospero’s house-guest I’d know how to get back to the city,” sighed Hannibal. “But this is the farthest I’ve gotten from the hacienda. I’m not even sure we’re off his land yet.”

The thick yellow heat seemed to congeal in the gully with tormenting clouds of gnats before they found a watercourse that cut the bank, barely wide enough for a horse to ascend and almost too steep to climb. Now and then January would hear the dry clatter of rattlesnakes—long experience in the bayous of Louisiana had caused him to cut a snake-stick, and he’d been poking the brush and rocks with it as they’d walked.

He scrambled up the water-cut to the plain above, looked around cautiously, and saw nothing but tumbled rocks, a few clumps of cottonwoods marking the course of the smaller stream, and three or four grazing steers. Clear and hard, the mountains stood to the east and north. He would be glad, he realized as the wind dried the sweat from his face, to get out of this land and back to the world he knew.

It took him and Rose nearly a half-hour of shoving, coaxing, and care to bring his horse to the top of the bank; Rose remained on guard at the top while January went down for the others. None of the beasts wanted particularly to climb the bank; January was hot, cross, exhausted, and covered with filth by the time he and Hannibal got the third horse to the top.

There they found that Rose had been joined by Vasco and four of Don Prospero’s vaqueros, standing around, grinning, with guns in their hands.

“You’re very lucky, Señor Enero.” The handsome vaquero chief shook a reproving finger at January. “It might have been that heathen bandit El Moro and his men who happened along, and not us, when you came out of that gully. What would you have done then, eh?”

January sighed. “I can’t imagine.” He could guess where they’d been hiding, among the cottonwoods near-by. Of course, all they’d have to do once they tracked the three horses into the gully was to follow it to the next break on the Mexico City side and wait out of sight.

“Or that Ylario.” The scar-faced Quacho clicked his tongue. “He had already talked with El Moro when we met him, I think; he was on foot, and without his constables or horses. Two of the boys took him back to town.”

“He must have been so grateful to you,” enthused Rose without a trace of irony in her voice.

The men all bowed to her, and Vasco kissed her hand. “He was, beautiful Señora. He was pale with it and nearly in tears. Will you and your husband come back with your friend”—he indicated Hannibal, who was already being put on a horse by two of the men—“to Mictlán for supper? We know you are honored friends of the Padrón. Or if you wish, one of us will ride with you back to the city, to keep you safe from El Moro and his men.”

“We accept Don Prospero’s hospitality with grateful thanks.” January bowed deeply. “And our thanks to you for taking such care.”

The least he could do, he reflected wryly as he mounted once again, was get an interview with the cook. And perhaps, if he was lucky, join the queue to search Don Prospero’s study before the
hacendado
himself returned.

As things turned out, he was wrong about that, but it wasn’t until he was fleeing from these same vaqueros with bullets snarling around his head that he had time to reflect on what a bad idea returning to Mictlán actually was.

TWENTY

By the time they reached the Hacienda Mictlán, supper was being laid on the table. Don Prospero had not yet returned from the city, so Doña Josefa occupied the foot of the long table in solitary raven splendor while little Casimiro presided at its head. “Grandpapa must have stopped for
comida
with Uncle ’Stasio,” said the boy, wielding his silver fish-fork with adult adeptness over M’sieu Guillenormand’s milk-poached trout. “I wonder if Aunt Bella came out with him this time. She doesn’t often—she likes Mexico City, and seeing her friends, and riding in the Alameda.”

“It is not polite to speculate about other people in their absence, Casimiro,” stated Doña Josefa repressively. “Gossip is abominable in God’s sight.”

January did not consider it especially polite to correct a child in front of company, but said nothing. Casimiro’s thin cheeks colored and he looked at his plate. Apparently it was also considered improper for the young girls of the family to sup with company in the absence of the head of the household, for neither Valentina, Paloma, nor Doña Filomena was present. Out of consideration for Josefa’s sensibilities—and sheer exhaustion from the day’s adventures—Hannibal was also among the missing, leaving January and Rose to the undiluted company of Doña Josefa and Father Ramiro in the long, echoing, candle-lit
sala.

January said to Casimiro, “Then perhaps you can tell me about Doña Pequeña instead. Is she well and happy?”

The child brightened at once. “Yes, Señor, she enjoys excellent health. She caught a mouse yesterday and killed it, and laid it on Aunt Valla’s bed. Aunt Valla wasn’t pleased one bit. But it shows that Pequeña is a real dog. . . .”

“Did someone say she was not?” asked Rose, raising her brows. Like January, she was outfitted in borrowed garments, having expected to return to Mexico City after her excursion through the countryside. Being much the same height and thinness of Doña Josefa, she was now clothed in a borrowed gown of black silk bombazine, a color flattering to few women of African descent.

January wasn’t sure who had been the original owner of the short jacket, finely-tucked shirt, and gray Mexican trousers he wore, but they fit him no better than his footman’s livery had earlier in the week.

Casimiro’s brow clouded. “Uncle ’Stasio said that little dogs like Pequeña were bred that way by the heathen Indians long ago, to be killed for the gods so that useful dogs could live. He says he will give me real dogs—hunting dogs—as if Pequeña were no good, and should be killed just because she’s little.”

“Well, I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s what your uncle can have meant,” said January gently, though it flashed across his mind how Anastasio had looked on the ragged jailbirds in Santa Anna’s Army and had said,
If men must die, it’s better that they be scum like that.
“Because Pequeña isn’t useless, you know. She killed a mouse, didn’t she? And she keeps your Aunt Valentina from being lonely, and makes you and your sister happy. I don’t believe God frowns upon happiness when it is innocent, do you, Doña Josefa?”

The widow stiffened, black-mitted fingers touching the stem of a blue-and-yellow Venetian goblet full of water. With apparent effort she admitted, “No. But we must distrust anything, even seemingly innocent pleasures, that divides our minds from contemplation of Christ’s suffering, which He undertook for our sake.”

“Of course.” January inclined his head.

“Uncle ’Stasio’s dogs are from England. They pick up the birds after Uncle ’Stasio shoots them. Uncle ’Stasio took in Uncle Fernando’s dogs, too, when Uncle Fernando died. . . .” The child glanced uncertainly at his mother, as if unsure whether the topic was forbidden, but Doña Josefa seemed to be praying, her eyes closed and her hands folded before the untouched fragment of white bread that lay on her plate. On the other side of the table, beside Rose, Father Ramiro’s piggy black eyes shifted hungrily back and forth between January’s
poulet bonne femme
and
soufflés des volailles
and Doña Josefa’s bread. The priest was careful, January noticed, not to consume his own bread a mouthful more quickly than she.

“I drew a picture of Uncle Fernando’s hunting-dogs to lay on the
offrenda
for when he comes back. Would you like to see it?”

When the servants came to clear away the supper dishes, Casimiro took the smallest of the branches of candles from the table and led January and Rose to the far end of the
sala,
where the
offrenda
stood in a niche surrounded by more candles still. Vases of coxcombs and marigolds stood on the little table among the burning lights, and the petals of the marigolds thickly strewed the table-top in a carpet of gold and red. Instead of the rather disrespectful little images January had seen on Consuela’s altar—crudely-fashioned skeletons in the robes of priests and nuns, and one skeletal pope—the de Castellón altar was chastely decked with saints, around whose feet were arranged apples, oranges, persimmons, grapes—the brilliant colors of life.

“No bananas or chirimoya, I notice,” remarked Rose under her breath in French, and January grinned. Evidently the ban on foods eaten by the Indians held true here as well. The candies were European, too: dainty marzipan, sugared orange-peel, candied walnuts, and marrons glacées. No candied yucca or camote or cut lengths of cane dripping sweet green sap, no peanuts, and certainly no tobacco. As in Consuela’s humbler shrine, objects loved and used by the dead were mingled in these offerings: miniatures of men and women, a worn shawl smelling of aromatics and camphor, a child’s shoes. January looked for Uncle Fernando in his uniform of crimson and gold but saw no picture of him—only half a dozen lead soldiers uniformed in Prussian white. Surely Werther had not taken the only one? He did see a nun’s beautifully-painted shield—Maria-Exaltación’s? The hawk-nosed young man whose mouth and chin so resembled Doña Josefa’s must be Don Damiano in his youth; the boy beside him, in a startlingly macabre panel framed in gold, so much resembled Casimiro that it had to be Damiano’s son, Luis, laid out in his coffin in a suit of white satin, his head decorated—in bizarre reminiscence of Pilar’s—with a little jeweled crown.

What did Casimiro think when he saw that?

Casimiro’s dark eyes, so like his mother’s, were repeated over and over in the other portraits and miniatures, hanging on the sides of the flower-wreathed niche: stiff gentlemen in starched ruffs that framed their heads like dinner-plates, chilly-eyed dames in the lush somber velvets of Hapsburg Spain. Other aunts in veils and crowns pointed significantly to their shields. A smoke-and-age-blackened uncle gestured with a crucifix and raised a warning finger to three shadowy Indians, bowed in chains at his feet, and folded next to it, Casimiro’s childish drawing of two fiercely slavering hounds.

For three hundred years they had ruled here like kings, January reflected. Off-hand he could not think of one European dynasty that had held power for so long.

“Casimiro,” reproved Doña Josefa, “you must not bore your guest with
indio
superstitions. Señor Enero is an educated man. He knows that ghosts do not really come back from Purgatory to visit their families. With the joys of Heaven before them, they would not put off that blessed Union with God by so much as a moment, by taking that moment away from the rightful expiation of their sins. You must forgive my son, Señor. And my father, whose whim it is to have the altar decked in this way. Try as I will to keep my brainless sister Isabella from prattling to my children of superstitions such as these, she is as much a child as they. It is she who sends over the candies, which are no good for children and only teach them superstition in their turn.”

As Doña Josefa swept from the room with her tame priest in tow, Casimiro lingered daringly to whisper to January, “Hannibal told me . . .” He looked uncertain, and distressed at the mention of Hannibal’s name. “Before—before my uncle died, Hannibal told me a story about how the damned in Hell all get Sundays off, like peasants in the village; he said he read it in a holy book. Also in another book it said that Judas Iscariot gets to leave Hell on Easter Day, and sit weeping on a rock in the Atlantic Ocean with sea-gulls making messes on him, and that a ship full of Irish monks saw him there when they first sailed to America. . . . Is that true?”

“I’ve certainly read the same book,” smiled January. “Whether it’s true or not—who knows? It was a saint who wrote the book, St. Brendan of Ireland.”

The boy sighed, his dark eyes troubled in the light of the flickering candle-branch he held. “Hannibal . . . he didn’t really poison Uncle Fernando, did he? Everyone says he did, but . . . he
wouldn’t.
Not Hannibal.”

“As far as I can learn, he did not,” said January gently, squatting on his haunches to speak to the child, whose dark head barely came up to his elbow. “I think that your uncle ate poison by accident. But I need to find proof of that in order for Hannibal to go free. And that’s going to be very difficult. And in the meantime, everyone will go on thinking that he did it, and he’ll be in danger until he can get away.”

“That’s hard,” said the boy gravely. “Sometimes I get blamed for taking things that I didn’t take, like Aunt Valentina’s sapphire earrings. And killing someone is worse. That policeman came from the city and took Hannibal away this morning—I watched from over the wall, though Mother said I shouldn’t. My mother will not let me speak to him now, or listen to him play music. He was teaching me the violin a little, and to say funny things in Latin. I didn’t know you could be funny in Latin. Can I help you find the proof you need?”

“I don’t think so,” said January. “But I’ll tell him that you believe in his innocence, and that will help him. And with luck, I’ll find the proof I need tonight.”

When January reached the kitchen, lamplight glowing amber through the thatch and wattled walls, Sacripant Guillenormand was gently sponging and rinsing the delicate glass goblets in a bowl of warm water and shouting to Lupe and Yannamaria to be careful scouring out the pots. That the two women had scoured these same pots nightly for twenty years did not seem to cross his mind, for as January entered the firelit shelter from the dove-colored twilight of the yard, the chef was reminding them just how much it had cost to bring the vessels over from France, and how much French scouring-chalk cost per barrel.

“We are not made of money here, no matter what the Don may say! Those pots are irreplaceable, for who brings in such wares nowadays, eh? Tell me that! Get out of here, you lazy limb of Satan. . . . Not you, M’sieu Janvier . . .”

And indeed, January was crowded out of the doorway by Padre Ramiro. “The Doña has sent for coffee and cakes for her guests. . . .”

“You mean
you
want coffee and cakes, eh? To sit in your little cell after delivering a sermon on abstinence, cramming your face! Glutton!”

“Atheist!” The priest loaded up a plate with the delicate cream-filled profiteroles at which Doña Josefa had turned up her nose after supper. “Were things as they should be still in this land, the Inquisition would look after you!”

“Were things as they should be in this land,” retorted the Frenchman, “idlers like you would be turned out of their parishes and put to do honest work! Alas,” he added sadly as the priest flounced from the big ramshackle shelter, “that even Napoleon himself could not remedy the evil of the Church. What may I do for you, my friend? I trust the dinner was to your satisfaction?”

His good will, however, turned to outraged horror at the mere suggestion that young Don Fernando might have met his fate as a result of eating any morsel that originated in Guillenormand’s kitchen.

“Ridiculous! Preposterous! You women,” he added sharply, switching back to Spanish—he and January had spoken French. “Get out of here! Leave the pots—but mind you, come back for them when we’re done here! I’ll send Joaquin. . . . That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard!”

He swung back around to January, florid face blotchy in the sweltering glare of the open hearth. “A what-do-you-call-it—a sensitivity? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

“It is not unheard-of in medical circles. . . .”

“It is unheard-of in any medical circles I’ve ever encountered!” The chef slammed his washrag down onto the table. “Medical circles, pah! Like those piss-scryers Fernando and Anastasio brought in, as if Don Prospero isn’t perfectly capable of running this manor until he dies of old age as his father did! And his father, I’m told, used to paint himself blue with yellow stripes and run about naked with feathers in his hair, and what of it? Nothing in this kitchen was the slightest bit unwholesome. . . .”

“Of course not! It’s only that if young Fernando had such a sensitivity to something that grew only here in the New World—to chilis, for instance, or to chocolate—”

“There has
never
been a chili in this kitchen! Nor any other fragment of Indian fare!” Veins throbbed in the chef’s thick neck. “How
dare
you imply that I would sully the true art of cookery with . . . with peasant make-dos? With old women’s pottages of beans and corn-moulds? Next you will accuse me of putting salamanders in the
etouffé,
or of serving up tortillas! I said get out, you drunken bitch!” he added as Doña Filomena tiptoed through the door. “Get that little trollop’s cocoa when I’m finished! Every morsel, every crumb”—he swung back and stabbed a finger at January, his voice rising in hysterical rage—“that comes into this kitchen is the true stuff of real cookery, and you
cannot
suggest otherwise! That meal by which you claim that I
—I,
Sacripant Guillenormand!—poisoned my master’s son . . .”