The Infamous Miss Rodriguez: A Ciudad Real Novella (4 page)

“Well?” she asked impatiently.

“Well what?”

“Don’t you want to escort me upstairs and bind me to my bed to make sure I won’t get out of it again? Otherwise, my aunt might not be inclined to honor your agreement, whatever it is.”

The image came to him of her bound to the bedposts by the wrists, her hair loose around her bare shoulders and her luminous dress in a puddle at her feet. With a great deal of effort, he banished it from his mind.

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” he told her, mindful of the driver’s presence just behind him. “But I would be obliged if you would carry out your schemes at a decent hour so I might be able to get a good night’s sleep. We might meet during the week to work out a schedule convenient to us both.”

It was too dark to tell for certain, but Vicente was sure the corner of her mouth was twitching with suppressed laughter. “Good night, Mr. Aguirre,” she said. “If that’s really your name.”

Someone—probably her maid—must have been standing right inside the door because it opened at that moment, and Miss Rodriguez vanished inside.

Vicente was still staring at the door when a voice come from behind him. “She’s trouble, that one.”

Vicente looked inside the shiny blue Packard. The driver was leaning back in his unenclosed seat and nodding towards the front door, the tip of his cigarette glowing in the darkness.

Picturing her inside the gambling hall, unfazed by the whores and the men in various states of undress and intoxication, Vicente couldn’t help but nod in agreement. “Don’t I know it.”

G
raciela’s attempt to
become a degenerate gambler had crashed and burned and once again, she was out of ideas and well on her way to running out of time.

There wouldn’t even be gossip as the only ones who’d seen her at the gambling hall were Alvaro’s friends and they would stay silent out of loyalty for him. She’d tried to work it into a conversation herself, during a garden party hosted by Mrs. Santiago, but Teresa Santiago had chosen that moment to fall into a dead faint, stealing all the attention for herself.

The only other person who knew was Mr. Aguirre and he was clearly not going to say a word.

The matter seemed like it had been put to rest but on the day of the garden party, Alvaro, whose nose was still swollen and blooming with bruises, had approached Graciela as the other guests clustered around the fallen Teresa. “You’ve had your little rebellion. I expect you to behave now. You know what I’m trying to accomplish and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you undermine my efforts.” He leaned closer, but refrained from touching her. “And I won’t have anyone saying I don’t know how to keep my women in hand.”

“I’m not yours, Alvaro,” she’d told him.

“Not yet. But you will be, soon. And when you are, I will not allow childish fits of temper.”

His words were still echoing inside Graciela’s head when she went down to breakfast on the following Wednesday morning.

Her aunt had scheduled a fitting with one of the more fashionable modistes in the city later that day. Under different circumstances, Graciela’s dress and trousseau would have been purchased abroad. Now, she would have to make do with Miss Polanco.

Having informed Graciela of the appointment, Aunt Elba retreated behind
El Diario Nuevo
, leaving Graciela to sulk in silence.

So busy was she glaring at the newspaper that covered her aunt’s face that she almost missed the headline that sprawled across half the page—twenty-eight suffragettes had been arrested after attempting to chain themselves to the President’s front gate in order to protest his refusal to acknowledge the question of female suffrage. At dinner the previous week, Mrs. Medina had remarked that it was a pity how these days not even the best families were spared from having suffragettes pop up among them. The Board would
hate
it if Graciela were to become one of them.

A smile spread over Graciela’s lips. She set her cup of coffee down on its saucer and, ignoring her aunt’s inquiries as to her plans for the day, marched resolutely out of the house.

The headquarters Ciudad Real’s chapter of the Woman’s Suffrage Alliance was bustling with harried-looking women.

For a long moment, no one paid any attention to Graciela as she stood just inside the door, then one of the women detached herself from the throng and came to Graciela, cradling a sheaf of paper in one arm. In the other she held a pair of spectacles, which she slid onto her nose in order to glare at Graciela over their rim. “If you’ve come to get your picture in the papers, you might as well turn right around. We’re a serious organization and we’ve no time to waste on fame hounds.”

“I’m here because I want to help,” Graciela said, raising her eyebrow as if indignant at the woman’s assumption.

A second woman, in an unbecoming shirtwaist and dowdy skirt, carrying a load of what looked to Graciela like laundry, joined the first one. “She says she wants to help, so let her help. Heaven knows we could use more hands around here.”

A heap of white cloth was deposited into Graciela’s arms and the woman groaned slightly as she massaged her arms. “Those are banners. Here is a list of slogans—” A sheet of paper was added to the top of the pile and Graciela was forced to pin it with her chin before it fluttered away. “—and over in the corner is a basket with the letters already cut out. Mind you sew them on tight so that the wind doesn’t tug them off. That happened during our last march—half the letters were gone by the time we got to the President’s gate and no one knew what we were protesting.”

She directed Graciela to an empty desk at the back, where a pincushion full of threaded needles had been placed beside the basket with cloth letters. A telephone rang and, at a shout from someone else, she vanished into the crowd.

Needlework
. Graciela dropped her heavy load on the table and glared at it. Stitching wasn’t going to make her infamous. She would have made her escape, but the suffragette in the wire-rim spectacles was blocking the door as she argued with a deliveryman.

So she sat. And she sewed. For hours and hours until one of the women took pity on her and began to help.

Bleary-eyed and covered in bits of thread, Graciela stumbled away from the WSA headquarters late that afternoon, having extracted a promise from the suffragettes that they would alert her of their next protest. She’d sooner marry Alvaro than sew banners again, and that was saying something.

She scanned the street and found Mr. Aguirre almost immediately, leaning against the lamp post in the corner. He was easy to pick out from the crowd, and not only because of the skin and hair that were paler than those around him. There was a coiled tension in his muscular body, a sense that he could spring into action at the slightest provocation. It set him apart from the other people trudging up and down street, visibly wilted by the afternoon heat.

“Don’t laugh,” she told him when he approached.

“I wouldn’t dare,” he answered gravely, falling into step beside her. “Was your, ah, mission not altogether successful?”

“Not entirely,” she muttered. “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with it.”

“Not this time,” he said. “It takes a braver man than me to tangle with suffragettes. Here. I’ve seen you stop for these whenever you pass by the cart and I thought you might be hungry.”

A fragrant bag of roasted peanuts was pushed in Graciela’s direction. She closed her hand around it and gave Aguirre a sidelong look. Though the tails he’d worn to Mrs. Gonzalez’s dinner had been cut in a dashing style and were obviously of good quality, the suit he wore now was slightly shabby, and rusty with age. In the light of day, it was obvious to Graciela that he was not the gentleman she’d assumed him to be that night.

He did, however, look even better than he had by candlelight. Against the black, his hair and skin were tawny and his eyes looked even paler. They were a curious color, a brown with flecks of green in them. A slight discoloration around one of his eyes, likely from engaging in the sort of fisticuffs Graciela had been led to believe men of his station enjoyed, made him look rakish and dangerous.

He
was
dangerous. Not because of the strength and the promise of violence that seemed to be contained in that lean and powerful body, or because of that rough, blunt way in which he’d spoken to her the night before. He was dangerous because, even though Graciela knew he was her aunt’s creature and she should be doing all she could to keep him at arm’s length, all she wanted was to press herself against his rusty suit and slide her fingers through his hair.

She’d heard it say often enough that all women wanted was to be rescued. With no time or inclination to wait for a knight in shining armor, she’d set about rescuing herself. But it was exhausting. And so far unsuccessful. So when she’d seen him strike Alvaro, she’d felt how tempting it would be to give up arms and have this man—or someone like him—take them up for her. Or at least wage battle at her side —protect her flank or whatever the term was.

But he was employed by Aunt Elba and that made him someone to wage war
against
.

For the moment, however, for the space of their walk, she could pretend like they were allies. Or friends, even, the kind that bought roasted peanuts for each other and shared them in silence as they walked down the street.

At that hour of day, the avenue was busy with motorcars and pedestrians. Graciela, closely followed by Mr. Aguirre, turned right into
Camino de las Azucenas
, a quieter and slightly darker street, shaded by the massive trees whose branches almost touched overhead.

“Pray tell, Miss Rodriguez,” Aguirre asked, and Graciela, startled by the sound of his soft voice, jumped. She looked up at him, stiffening slightly, certain that he was going to ask her about Alvaro, but all he said was, “Where will your quest take us next? Shall we find a fountain to dance in? Strip down to our drawers and paint advertisements for raunchy plays on our backs?”

“Those are all excellent suggestions,” Graciela said. Dancing in a fountain sounded refreshing, at least, in this scorching heat. But Beatriz’s house was just up ahead and she’d be waiting for Graciela to fill her in on the results of her latest scheme. “I’ll take them under advisement. But for the moment, I have a very important appointment I mustn’t be late to.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Mr. Aguirre said, and Graciela had no doubt that he would.

* * *

“
I
’m beginning
to think that there’s nothing I can do to ruin myself.”

Graciela dropped the curtain she’d twitched aside. Aguirre was leaning against the lamppost down the street, cleaning under his fingernails with a pocketknife, his face shaded by a ratty Panama hat.

“Surely a sign of these dissolute modern times,” Beatriz said from her chair.

Striding from one side of the room to the other in front of the large bank of windows, for all the world, as Beatriz put it, like a prowling tiger, Graciela fought an increasing sense of desperation.

There were only five days left until the wedding. Her fitting at the modiste was in less than an hour—no doubt Aguirre had been charged with making Graciela arrive in time. To hear Alvaro tell it, most of the preparations for the ceremony and the party were in order. Everything was marching along according to his and Aunt Elba’s plan and Graciela could just scream with the frustration of it.

“I know why my aunt is so keen on the match,” she said as she paced. “But what about him?
Why
does he want me so badly? He doesn’t love me, and there are a dozen girls far prettier and more accomplished than me who would give anything to be the future Mrs. Medina. It’s not a question of position or social standing, not when his family is just as well-connected as mine and much wealthier.”

Beatriz threaded a needle with blue. She’d moved on to another scene, this one a rocky landscape filled with blue and green devils who, if Graciela understood the markings correctly, would wield tridents to torment a twisted knot of nude figures on the center of the composition. Graciela studied the embroidery for a second, wondering if she could pass it on as her own and present it to Mrs. Ferrer as a gift.

“He wants
you
,” Beatriz said, adding, with a censorious look as she saw Graciela begin to paw through her sewing basket, “for some unfathomable reason. I don’t think he’d be satisfied with someone else, no matter how pretty or accomplished they were.”

“Well, he can’t have me,” Graciela said, lifting a pricked finger to her lips. “He won’t. Not if I have any say in the matter.”

“You’ve another plot beneath your sleeve, don’t you?”

Graciela nodded. “Tomorrow, Aunt Elba is hosting a dinner for the board of Medina Enterprises. All the members will be in attendance and it’ll be my last chance to make an impression on them.”

“Not a very favorable one, I imagine.”

“Not a particle,” Graciela assured Beatriz. “I’ll be rude and crass and vulgar and by the end of the evening, they will all be begging Alvaro to let me go.”