Days of the Dead (34 page)

“We aren’t,” said January grimly. “We can’t. All we
can
do—all we
need
to do—is . . .”

“Doña Isabella!” called out a voice, and January drew Rose aside, into the shadows of the gorgeously-decorated tombs. Three women in black made their way among the crowds, stopping to embrace this woman or that, their dark silks somber against the gay skirts, the embroidered blouses and aprons of the
poblanas,
the flower-stitched Indian
huipils
.

It was the closest he’d seen Doña Isabella, who bore a strong resemblance to the several portraits of her deceased brother that January had seen. But her narrow face, with its close-set hazel eyes, was pleasant and good-natured within the frame of her black point-lace veils. She bent to hug this child or that, laughing and kissing their mothers, almost like a sister. . . .

Or like the lady from the Big House, thought January, going down to visit the quarters at Christmas.

Santa Anna had boasted on a number of occasions that there was no slavery in Mexico. But January had seen in the city—and saw here now more clearly—the subtler enslavement of a land in chaos, where the weak must become slaves of the strong in order to feed their children. And unless that was secured, he thought, the legal right not to be bought and sold meant very little.

Valentina walked behind her half-sister, clothed like her in a black silk dress of European cut, kissing and greeting and clasping hands as Isabella did. Her mother’s sapphire earrings glinted under the smoke of her mantilla. But the girl was clearly distracted, scanning the darkness beyond the light of the cressets and candles, her whole body stiff, as if beneath her corsets she could barely breathe from excitement.

Waiting for her moment,
thought January.
Watching for the instant when everyone’s back is turned, to casually wander away into the shadows . . .

“Doña Gertrudis!” called out one of the village women, surging forward in a tinkle of silver ornaments, and the third black-clothed woman embraced her, and another, and another. . . . “So good to see you home, eh? So good to see you back!”

January’s eyes met Rose’s, startled. The third woman, with Isabella and Valentina, was definitely Consuela’s duenna, the disapproving Doña Gertrudis, her lined, sour face now wreathed in smiles: “Auntie ’Stanza!” she greeted an old Indian woman who came up to them from the crowd. And to another, “Yolie, I’ve missed you! How are the little ones now, eh?”

“Oh, my dearest child,” effused a stout, white-haired woman who looked old enough to have been Doña Gertrudis’s nurse, “how I think about you, there in the city, in such a place! Whenever ’Stasio comes here, I ask after you—what kind of man doesn’t go to see his own sister? I pray you are well.” And they embraced.

It all depends on family, Consuela had said. It all depends on whom you’re related to.

Now my brother is a penniless bankrupt: our lands are gone. . . .

And Doña Isabella:
Your sister has been prosing on about how dreadful her lot in life is. . . .

January blinked, shocked, wondering why he hadn’t seen it before. In the way Don Prospero treated Anastasio, exactly as he treated Rafael and his family:
He’ll do as he’s bid.

Cultivate pears for me, bring me spinach or cattle or horses as I order. . . .

Of course Don Prospero would buy up the debts of his daughter’s husband—or would seal their purchase with such a marriage. He would have let them keep their town house, keep the management of the hacienda that had once been theirs.

He drew a deep breath, and let it out.

“Don Anastasio,” said the young priest, rigidly correct, advancing from the church door to greet the
hacendado,
dapper-looking in his suit of embroidered black velvet. The next moment the Don turned and embraced Doña Gertrudis in a way that left January without the slightest doubt that they were, in fact, brother and sister, both ruined alike by the misfortunes of the past twenty-five years. Both pensioners, in whatever positions Don Prospero had chosen to put them.

We keep better count of money in Germany—in Germany we hire business managers. . . .

Managers who didn’t spend their money and efforts on a hopeless campaign to get the
criollo
grandees of the town to eat
indio
foods, anyway.

A flicker of black among the firelight and marigolds.

Valentina, slipping away.

At the touch of January’s hand, Rose followed him deeper into the shadows. Around the north side of the church the darkness was thicker, the few graves to be found there unkempt and nameless: strangers passing through the land like the poor old valet Da Ponte, vaqueros who had no family, dead from bandit skirmishes and the government armies that had suppressed them. Pepper-trees overhung the graves, forcing apart the bricks of some of the tombs, and from the shadows January watched Valentina making for the heavily-sheltered north door of the church.

From a thick clump of laurel, Rose and January watched as the girl went straight to the statue of St. Paul that stood among the hoary trees, and took something from behind its crumbling pedestal. Then she crossed to the deep embrasure of the church door, disappearing into its dense shadows as if she’d dived into the lightless cenote in Mictlantecuhtli’s pyramid. Beneath the soaring brassy notes of a Mozart contradanse, January heard the silvery rustle of taffeta in the darkness, caught a glimpse of white emerging from the mourning black like a moth from a chrysalis, then heard the clink of steel buttons brushing the tile that framed the door.

When Valentina reemerged, she was dressed in the
china poblana,
the bright-hued costume of the women of the people, complete down to her white satin shoes. A striped silk reboso covered her fair hair. She stopped to tie her long silk sash with its tinkling ornaments, and while she was thus occupied, January led Rose to the north churchyard gate. He pressed his ear to it for a moment to make sure the street beyond was empty; everyone was in the churchyard, laughing with family and friends. Slipping the latch, he stepped out into a dark street splashed with squares of lamplight in windows left unshuttered, the marigold petals seeming to glow where they crossed the golden beams of open doors. The night was redolent with cooking, with incense, with the beneficent whispers of the returning dead.

Miles away at the churchyard in Mictlán, it seemed to him he could hear the echoes as Hannibal played the violin for the spirits, like Compair Lapin, summoning the dead to dance.

Leaving Rose to follow on the other side of the street, he slipped across to where an alley gave shadow as dense as that in the churchyard door that had concealed Valentina’s change of costume. In a few moments the gate opened again and a small figure in a bright pink skirt, a yellow apron, a white blouse trimmed with lace emerged, a carpetbag in her hand.
Dress and petticoats,
thought January.
She can’t let those be found too soon.

She turned and walked along the churchyard wall, north toward the last houses of the village, humble
jacals
where candle-light shone luminous through the cracks in the crude thatch of the roofs. No doors were closed, and through them January saw the families who remained to celebrate at home: gaggles of sisters in bright skirts, men in the white clothes of the field workers, laughing together, feasting with one another and with those they had loved and had missed with such daily pain for who knew how many years.

It is so good to see you again, my friends, even though we cannot actually see you. My beloved, I have never forgotten you—We’re all so glad you haven’t forgotten us, you who are happy now forever. . . .

Beyond, the dark trees loomed, and the chuckle of water could be heard over the playing of the now-distant band. The women of the village had done their laundry here, he thought, for five hundred years at least. In the clear silver light of the gibbous moon, the girl strode out to the rocks along the stream, and January heard a man’s soft whistle:

What will your mother say, Pretty Peggy-o,
What will your mother say, Pretty Peggy-o?
What will your mother say when she finds you’ve gone away . . . ?

Valentina stood still. “John . . .”

John Dillard stepped from the shadows of the trees and caught Valentina in his arms.

TWENTY-THREE

January unslung the rifle from his back and said, “Hands up! Don’t touch your gun.” He stepped into the moonlight, where they could see him, rifle pointed, and added, “I won’t do you harm.” He repeated that last in Spanish for Valentina’s benefit, for she reached down for the carpetbag in a way that made January guess she had a weapon in it.

“There are horses in the trees.” Rose emerged beneath the cottonwoods, leading a string of five animals: two horses under saddle, two haltered spares, and a laden mule.

With a strangled cry Valentina sprang at her, and Dillard caught the girl around the waist and dragged her back, for Rose was armed, her pistol in her hand. Valentina thrashed against the Tennessean’s grip, kicking and biting. “I won’t go back! You can’t make me go back!”

“No one’s asking you to go back,” said January in Spanish, stepping forward and lowering his rifle but keeping a wary eye on Dillard.

“He is a beast!” Valentina turned on January, panting, her fair hair tumbled over her shoulders and her eyes grim and wild. “I will kill myself before I return to his house! He is the Devil, and living with him—with him and with my sister!—is like being in Hell!”

Dillard, who quite clearly didn’t understand a word of what was being said, looked warily from Valentina to January and said, “It’s all right,
corazón.
It’s gonna be all right. . . .” His hand was bleeding from where she’d bitten him. To January he said, “I got the idea you was no friend to Prospero de Castellón—nor to Santa Anna neither. I swear to you my first order of business, once we get over the border into Texas, will be for me to make Miss Valentina my wife—and a braver and more intelligent girl you’ve never crossed paths with, exceptin’ maybe your own lady Rose. And I swear to you on the Testament that before she’s my wife I’ll not lay a hand on her. I may have little in the way of worldly goods, but I do have my honor, and she has hers. Just because I’m not some Mexican grandee . . .”

“I believe you.” January held up his free hand to stem what he guessed would be everything Dillard would have said to Don Prospero, could Dillard ever have come into that gentleman’s presence. He suspected the Tennessean would take serious offense if he had said simply,
It isn’t any of my business whether you seduce Valentina de Castellón or not—
which it wasn’t, and if he’d made it his business, Dillard would have been the first to tell him that as a black man his opinion didn’t matter.

Whites were strange that way.

Men were strange that way.

And he had a good idea that Valentina de Castellón was more than able to take care of herself. Her virginity, he was willing to bet, would not survive the night, no matter how much Dillard struggled to spare it.

He went on. “And I would not have stopped you tonight, except that for a friend’s sake I must speak to Señorita de Castellón, and ask something of her that she may be unwilling to give.”

He turned to Valentina, who had locked her arm tight around Dillard’s waist and was following the conversation between the two men with the watchfulness of an animal. “Señorita, I will not stay you from leaving your father’s house—”

“You cannot, and I would like to see you try!”

“Corazón . . .”

The glare she gave Dillard at this mollifying interjection promised a lifetime of half-apologetic, timid
corazóns.

“I will not stay you,” January repeated, “but nor will I let you leave without a written explanation—to your family and to the authorities in Mexico City—that you were never Hannibal Sefton’s lover, and that the letters to you in his hand were in fact translations of clandestine correspondence from a
Norteamericano.
And your letters to Dillard would help.”

Her chin went up. “It isn’t anyone’s business what I do.” In the shadowy floods of her hair the sapphire earrings she’d inherited from her erring mother sparkled darkly. “I won’t go back to be offered like a piece of camote to any man my father wants to ally himself with! To live under the threat that if I’m not a good girl he’ll repudiate my mother and have me declared an
adulterina,
whom no man will marry! To have my room searched, to have my things taken away—even my mother’s jewelry!—and given to his whores. What is it to anyone where I go or what I do or where I choose to seek my happiness?”

“It is something to Hannibal,” answered January, a little surprised that he felt no impulse to box this defiant child’s ears. “Because of those letters he will be hanged for your brother’s murder.”

Valentina blinked at him in astonishment. “The letters have nothing to do with it,” she retorted in the tone of one who has never connected her own actions with other people’s unhappiness in her life. “He poisoned my brother, and I don’t care that he did. Fernando was a beast—more of a beast than my father, for at least Father you can talk to sometimes, when he’s not thinking he’s the God of the Night. Fernando was like a marble building, cold and locked up. Like a bank that will never lend you a copper medio if you are starving because it is not in the interests of the bank.”

She stooped to pick up her reboso and pulled it over her shoulders, shivering in the chill by the water. “Bad enough that Father would have married me off to that old nanny-goat Rafael to get me off his hands . . . and whose fault is it that no one who was not forced to do so would take a girl who could be turned out of her inheritance at the next twist of her father’s madness? But all Rafael is interested in is keeping Fructosa hacienda, and having his mother live in the town house, and making everything look as if they were still rich and not as poor as the beggars on the Cathedral steps. And even so, Fernando was going to turn them out and put those lands into the hands of a ‘good administrator’ to make them produce more money for him!”

Her voice shook with passion, and Dillard, who’d been pursuing this back-and-forth with furrowed brow, ventured, “Dearest heart, if this man . . .” He stumbled over the subjunctive clause and retrieved himself with “Does this man trouble you?”

Valentina made a gesture at him to shut up, as if she were shooing flies. “Fernando said he would give Rafael enough money to start a ‘respectable business’—as if that clown wouldn’t go through whatever Fernando gave him at the gambling tables in a week!—and he was terrified that if Don Rafael learned I’d written love-letters to another man, he wouldn’t marry me. Then I’d be on Fernando’s hands, like a carriage-horse that kicks, and would end my days like silly old Doña Filomena, having to be someone’s duenna because no one would have me. Hannibal poisoned my brother because he deserved to be poisoned—”

“Hannibal did not poison your brother,” cut in January.

“Oh, and you did not cut the throat of poor Señor Guillenormand, either, eh?”

“No, I did not.”

“After practically accusing the poor man of murdering Fernando himself . . .”

“And where,” asked January, “did you hear that?”

She shrugged. “I heard him ranting on about it to Uncle ’Stasio in the kitchen last night.”

“Considering that Don Anastasio did not arrive at Mictlán until nearly midnight,” pointed out Rose, “that was awfully late for a proper young lady to be in the kitchen.”

“I was getting food,” returned Valentina sulkily. “Food for this journey. Josefa told me how you had said there was a great quarrel between the President and the
Nortes.
I knew my John”—she pronounced it “Joan”—“would leave word for me in our secret place, and that I would have to go to him quickly.”

“Which I take it you did,” said January, “while everyone was out looking for me?”

“I knew he could not come close to the
casco,
” said the girl. “I had meant to go while Josefa was at Mass.”

“You’re lucky,” remarked Rose, “that none of your father’s vaqueros—or El Moro’s men—encountered you on your way to the pyramids. I take it you chose the pyramids as your post-box because few will venture there?”

“They’re all cowards,” sniffed Valentina. “Cowards and poltroons. I do not fear Father’s moldy old gods.”

“I swear to you, January,” Dillard launched in again in English, “that I’ve loved this girl since first I laid eyes on her. If we’ve gone about this thing clandestinely, it’s because that crazy father of hers wouldn’t hear of a match between her and a poor man, a true American. But my intentions toward her have been of the most honorable from the first. After that hoo-rah at the British minister’s, Butler advised the lot of us to head straight for the town gates and not even stop at our digs; most of the boys took off straight for Vera Cruz. But once Valentina’s family knows she’s gone, that’s where they’ll look for us. We aim to go straight up overland, across the Rio Grande to San Antonio Béxar—”

“And warn Sam Houston,” asked January softly, “that Santa Anna’s on his way? And exactly how many men he has with him, and in what state his artillery is? And join the militia he’s raising as well?”

“Something like that.” The young man’s arm tightened protectively around Valentina’s waist. And Valla, her head high, closed her hand over his, where it lay on her hip, as if she guessed what January was truly asking.

“If Mexico was the land it should be—that it
was
before Santa Anna took it over—we wouldn’t have to be doin’ this,” the Tennessean added. “We could have dealt with a fair government here fairly.”

January kept himself from remarking that the Americans—who’d just finished running the Louisiana Chickasaws off their land—would probably have rebelled against whatever government Mexico had, fair or unfair.

He merely turned to Valentina and asked in Spanish, “And that was what you were doing the night Fernando was killed? Stealing food and passing it over the wall?”

“Food, and some of my jewels,” she replied. “Such of them as my father hadn’t already stolen from me for his whore.”

She turned to Dillard and said in halting English, “Joan, give him what he ask. All my letter. We come not back here again.”

“You’re sure,
corazón
?”

She nodded, and Dillard stepped away from her, and picked his way over to the pack-mule. While he opened one of the saddlebags, January heard again the drift of music on the night air: how long would it be before Isabella and Anastasio realized Valentina wasn’t somewhere in the churchyard throng?

Certainly not until after Mass. Given the comings and goings among the tombs, the amount of wine and food and conversation, it might be two or three in the morning before anyone realized she wasn’t around—but it could easily be noon before they realized she hadn’t returned to the
casco
and gone to bed.

Rose, January noticed, kept her distance from Dillard, her pistol trained and ready. He didn’t think she needed this. The Tennessean—soon-to-be Texian—was at the moment engaged in trying to light a small bull’s-eye lantern. But Rose was not one to take chances.

To Valentina, January said, “If you had the food ready to pass over the wall as soon as it grew dark on the night of Fernando’s death, you must have taken it from the kitchen earlier in the day. Did you see who else came and went from the kitchen while Guillenormand was preparing supper?”

“Did I!” The girl threw up her hands. “I must have waited and watched for an hour behind the door of one of the corn-stores, waiting until the kitchen-yard was clear! Poor Señor Guillenormand was like a madman when he cooked! I thought he would drive that weaselly valet of Fernando’s out with a frying-pan; and then Padre Ramiro kept hanging about, hoping to steal enough camote to last him through the night. Uncle ’Stasio was in and out a dozen times, with pears and apples and bottles of wine and bunches of grapes, and Father ordering him about like a slave. . . .”

“Don Anastasio is Doña Gertrudis’s brother, isn’t he?” asked January, and Valentina nodded.

“They do not speak of it, since Father made her go live with Consuela. Their father was the younger brother of the Marquis de Merced. The whole family was on the verge of bankruptcy when ’Stasio supported the Emperor Iturbide, seven years ago, and Santa Anna turned against him. Father kept ’Stasio from being put into prison, but ’Stasio lost everything—lands, house, cattle, even his books. Father bought up his lands the way he did old Don Alejandro de Bujerio’s, and he lets Isabella go on living in their old town house. But they’re as much his peons as any of the
indios
in the village.”

Above the trees, fireworks exploded with a loud crack, crimson rain and golden lightning showering down through the darkness. Mellow as butterscotch, the notes of trumpets soared into the sky.

“’Stasio’s another one, like Rafael, who smiles and bows and pretends not to be insulted, only so that he may continue to have a roof over his head. For Rafael it is his mother and his aunts and his sisters, and making sure everyone has jewels and coaches and good food and can put my cousins in the most fashionable convents. For ’Stasio it is his precious orchards and his precious library. And it all comes down to the same thing: they let themselves be ruled by the whim of a madman because they’re afraid.”

Scorn flickered in her voice—the scorn of one who has never felt hunger or cold or the despair of responsibilities that she is unable to uphold. “I am not afraid.”