Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  The girl was raised, still fighting to keep a good face on the matter, but in her eyes January saw that she was beginning to realize just what her life would be, forever, until she died. She knelt to the bishop and kissed his ring, then moved from one dark-clad phantom to the next, embraced by each like a sister, as if with each embrace she was being drawn further into the world of the shades. The fatter of the two attendant priests elbowed his way through the nuns to the grating and delivered a sermon about how Pilar had “chosen the good part, which could not be taken away from them.”

  “Ass,” whispered Don Anastasio savagely. Doña Imelda clasped her hands before her breast and cast her gaze ceilingward in an expression of joyous martyrdom, not even looking at her daughter. Doña Josefa’s face was like iron, cheated bitterness in her eyes.

  The girl came forward to the curtain, looking out into the church. The last people she would ever see who were not nuns, thought January.

  Tears were running down her face.

  The black curtain came down.

  “Honestly!” Doña Josefa nearly spat the word as her sister and Don Rafael helped her to her feet. “That girl’s ingratitude sickens me, Imelda! What I would do—what I have done already—to stand where she now stands. . . .”

  The men were lighting their cigars the moment they got into the sacristy, where trestle tables were spread with pandolce and punch. “What’s this I hear,” January said as he and Anastasio edged through the press, “about Don Prospero leaving money to the Convent of the Bleeding Heart in his will?”

  “What?” Anastasio stared, cigar forgotten in his hand. “What will? Where did you hear that?”

  “From Ylario. He asked the other day if I knew anything about it.”

  “Where did he hear it? It’s absurd.” But the hacendado looked deeply shocked, and glanced around them at the crowd that pressed toward the refreshments. Liveried servants dippered flavored pulque into cups.

  “Ylario told you? Surely it wasn’t in the papers on the study desk? I looked, to make certain there was nothing there that harridan La Lorcha could use. . . .”

  “He wouldn’t say where he’d heard it. It didn’t sound as if he’d seen it for himself.”

  “Good Lord, I should hope not!” Don Anastasio stepped to the nearest candle to light his cigar. “If it exists, it’ll play hell with the will he wrote a year ago, after Damiano died. Though, of course, now that Fernando is dead . . . But leave money to the convent? That’s insane. . . .” Then he seemed to hear his own words, and laughed ruefully. “So in fact it may be true after all. But if that’s the case, why . . . ?”

  “’Stasio, mi corazón.” Doña Isabella appeared, fanning herself with what looked like a half-acre of stiffened black lace and extending a fragile mitted hand. “You simply must find me a chair in all this! I’m quite faint, and feel absolutely unable to breathe. Your sister has been prosing on about how dreadful her lot in life is until I promise you I see spots before my eyes!”

  “Mi corazón, if you’re seeing spots before your eyes, it’s from the candy you’ve doubtless been eating. . . .”

  January slipped away from the sacristy with a sense of relief. He circled the convent church, observing as he did so the stones low down in the walls where the broken stucco showed carvings of Tlaloc with his huge ringed eyes and protruding tusks. The old Indian woman who minded the convent gate went inside at January’s knock—through the iron-barred judas in the gate January could see a patio beyond, riotous with late roses, and the heavy doors of the convent itself.

  A few moments later Rose appeared, dusting powdered sugar off her fingers. She handed a coin to the Indian woman—a servant, not a nun to judge by her dress, and the woman slipped it into her bosom—and stepped through the outer gate, which closed behind her with a clang. The church’s bells were ringing as January walked her back along the narrow lane to the square. Fireworks cracked, showering glittering blossoms through the twilight sky.

  “Did you ask Don Anastasio about the will?” she inquired as Juan brought the carriage up.

  January nodded. “He’d never heard of it. There’s evidently a will already in existence, written after Damiano died. Goodness knows what its terms are, but Anastasio made no comment about its sanity or insanity, so it must be fairly normal. I could think of no polite way to ask him further questions, but I will.” He gazed worriedly up at the darkening sky, stitched with the brilliant red and white of fireworks.

  “I talked to Sancho—he knows of no robbers here in town who are black. So Werther must have seen either Butler’s men or El Moro, though God knows what El Moro would be doing playing sneak-thief in an alley. As I recall, Santa Anna asked Don Prospero to be at the reception tonight, and if he is there, we have to somehow convince Santa Anna to issue an order in writing officially remanding Hannibal to Don Prospero’s custody. It’s the only way I can think of to buy us more time.”

  “It may be,” said Rose worriedly, “if it works. But aside from the issue of whether Ylario will respect such an order, it will infinitely complicate any effort of ours to get him away. Was Josefa at the church?”

  “In the front row. With an expression on her face of the most devouring fury that Pilar was where she, Josefa, longed to be.”

  “Mmmn.” Rose did not look surprised. “Sor Perdita spoke of the hatred in Josefa’s letters, envy so deep that she expressed not even gladness for the girl’s sake. She wrote to Sor Perdita nearly every day, you know—including a most condescending description of my morning in the chapel with her: I feel that worldly and frivolous as she is, my example helped show this woman some glimmering of God’s light. . . .”

  “Worldly and frivolous? Are you sure she spoke of you and not your evil twin sister, Elena?”

  “One wonders indeed.” Rose’s eyebrows drew together as the carriage jolted over the rutted pavement of the Calle Tacuba. “I don’t understand religious people very well,” she said after a time. “And I’ve never comprehended the concept that God wants some people to tell other people how they ought to live. Having read history, I know very well that some people are quite willing to kill others over what they think God has told them is their right: to appoint priests and bishops, for instance, or whether to hang a cross or a crescent in certain old buildings in Palestine, or whether they should pray in Latin or German. But what Josefa herself would actually do . . . I don’t know.”

  “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 festivitie
s 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 informat
ion 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.