Mexican Gothic(54)

“I assumed Francis would let me know if he felt it was hazardous.”

“Francis,” Virgil said. She glanced at him when he said the name.

He tied the robe’s belt. “It seems you spend most of your time with him rather than with Catalina.”

Was he reproaching her? No, she thought it was slightly different.

He was assessing her, the same way a jeweler might gaze at a diamond, trying to measure its clarity or an entomologist would look at a butterfly’s wings under the microscope.

“I have spent a reasonable amount of time with him.”

Virgil smiled without any pleasure. “You are so careful with your words. So poised in front of me. I picture you, in your city of cocktail parties and careful words. Do you ever lower your mask there?”

He gestured for her to sit down in one of the leather chairs. She pointedly ignored the gesture. “It’s funny, here I thought you could teach me a thing or two about masquerades,” she replied.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not the first time Catalina was ill like this. She drank the same tincture and had the same bad reaction.”

She had thought to say nothing of the matter, but she wanted to gauge his reaction. He’d assessed her. Now it was her turn.

“You have indeed been spending time with Francis,” Virgil said, distaste clear on his face. “Yes, I forgot to mention that previous episode.”

“How convenient.”

“What? The doctor explained to you that she has depressive tendencies, and you thought it was all lies. If I’d told you she was suicidal—”

“She’s not suicidal,” Noemí protested.

“Well, of course, since you seem to know everything,” Virgil muttered. He looked a little bored and waved a hand, as if shooing an invisible insect. Shooing her. The gesture made her furious.

“You took Catalina from the city and brought her here, and if she is suicidal then it’s your fault,” she replied.

She wished to be cruel. She wanted to repay him with the same coin he’d used with her before, but once she had spit her venom she regretted the words, because for once he seemed upset. He looked as if she’d physically stricken him, a pure moment of pain or perhaps shame.

“Virgil,” she began, but he shook his head, silencing her.

“No, you’re correct. It’s my fault. Catalina fell in love with me for the wrong reasons.” Virgil sat very straight in his seat, his eyes fixed on her, his hands resting on the arms of the chair. “Sit, please.”

She was not ready to concede. She did not sit. Instead she stood behind her chair, leaning forward on its back. She had a vague thought that it would also be easier to run out of the room if she was standing. She wasn’t sure why she thought this. It was a disquieting thought, that she must be ready to spring up like a gazelle and escape. It was, she concluded, that she did not like to be speaking to him alone in his room.

His terrain. His burrow.

She suspected Catalina had never set foot in this room. Or if she had, it had been a brief invitation. No trace of her remained. The furniture, the great large painting bequeathed by his father, the wooden screen, the ancient wallpaper streaked with faint traces of mold, these all belonged to Virgil Doyle. His taste, his things. Even his features seemed to complement the room. The blond hair was striking against the dark leather, his face seemed made of alabaster when framed with folds of red velvet.

“Your cousin has a wild imagination,” Virgil said. “I think she saw in me a tragic, romantic figure. A boy who lost his mother at a young age in a senseless tragedy, whose family’s fortune evaporated in the years of the Revolution, who grew up with a sick father in a crumbling mansion in the mountains.”

Yes. It must have pleased her. At first. He had a vehemence that Catalina would have found appealing and, in his home, with the mist outside and the glint of silver candelabra inside, he would have shined very brightly. How long, Noemí wondered, until the novelty wore off?

He, perhaps sensing her question, smirked. “No doubt she pictured the house as a delightful, rustic refuge which, with a little effort, could be made cheerier. Of course, it is not as if my father would allow even a single curtain to be changed. We exist at his pleasure.”

He turned his head to gaze at the painting bearing Howard Doyle’s likeness, a finger tapping gently against the chair’s armrest.

“And would you want to change a single curtain?”

“I’d change a number of things. My father hasn’t left this house in decades. To him this is the ideal vision of the world and nothing more. I’ve seen the future and understand our limitations.”

“If that is the case, if change is possible—”

“Change of a certain type,” Virgil agreed. “But not a change so grand that I’d become something I am not. You can’t change the essence of a thing. That is the problem. The point, I suppose, is that Catalina wanted someone else. She didn’t want me, flesh and blood and flawed. She was immediately unhappy, and yes, it is my fault. I could not live up to her expectations. What she saw in me, it was never there.”

Immediately. Why, then, had Catalina not returned home? But even as she asked herself the question she knew the answer. The family. Everyone would have been appalled, and the society pages would have been filled with the most poisonous ink. Exactly as her father now feared.