The Spanish Daughter(32)

Soledad’s gaze was lost in a mysterious spot behind my head.

“I found Franco in the hallway. He was trying to put the fire out with a blanket. A beam had fallen and was blocking the way to my bedroom. I could see Pedro stuck underneath the beam. He was unconscious, probably dead already.” Her voice cracked. “Franco kept calling his father, but there was nothing to do. I told him we needed to get out before the flames caught us. And that was when another beam fell on top of us. Fortunately, some workers had come to our rescue and dragged us out. But there was nothing anyone could do for Pedro.” She dried the tears from her cheeks. “The workers told me later that he’d come home early because he’d been running a fever and said he was going to take a nap.” She set her hand on her collarbone, right on her scar. In a strange way, I felt sorry for Franco. I wondered if this tragedy shaped him into a harsh man capable of killing a stranger without a second thought. Or had he always been bad?

“Do you know what caused the fire?” I asked.

“Not for sure, but I think it had to do with Don Fernando.”

“Don Fernando del Río?”

“You know him?”

“I met him briefly at La Puri. I’m a friend of the Lafont family.”

“Well, Don Fernando wanted Pedro to do something for him.” She rested her palms on the table’s surface. There was a scar on one of her hands. “But it didn’t work out.”

“What did he want him to do?”

“Oh, I’ve said too much already. It has nothing to do with Franco anyway.”

I wasn’t so sure of this. I knew that Don Fernando had nothing to do with my father’s will. But in his mind, I could’ve been one more obstacle, one more person to fight over this blessed creek. Perhaps he’d sent a woman to seduce Franco since he couldn’t persuade him just with money?

No, it was too far-fetched. I was seeing conspiracies and murderers everywhere.

“Look, I will try to help you,” I said, “but you must tell me everything you know, even if you don’t see the connection. Tell me what Don Fernando wanted done.”

She shook her head. “He paid Pedro to move some fence over so he could have that stupid piece of land the patrón and Don Fernando were always fighting about. Pedro shouldn’t have done it. It cost him his life.”

“But if he did it, why would Don Fernando try to hurt him? How do you know it wasn’t your patrón who set the house on fire?”

I really hoped that my father wasn’t involved in this fire. The last thing I needed was to learn that he’d been a murderer.

“Pedro was caught and he confessed that Don Fernando had threatened and paid him to do it, so Don Armand forgave him and let him come home, but then he sued Don Fernando. Don Fernando was so angry with my Pedro for talking. I’m certain he had one of his men burn our house.”

Did this incident have something to do with Fernando’s argument with Martin in the afternoon? Maybe Angélica was suing him for the very same thing.

“Are you staying in town, Don Cristóbal?” Soledad said, removing me from my speculations.

There was no point in lying. She would find out where I was staying anyway.

“No. At La Puri.”

“Well, then you’re lucky,” she said. “You’re staying with a saint.”

“You mean Do?a Catalina?”

“Who else? She’s such a pure soul. Everybody in town knows she’s favored by the Virgin. Ask her to intercede on your behalf and you’ll see that with prayer and my remedy your soul will heal quickly.”

I sighed. If only prayer could fix my problems.

There was a barely audible knock on the door. Do?a Soledad rose. I grabbed the package of herbs and followed her to the front through a maze of boxes and chairs.

Nothing would’ve prepared me for the face on the other side of the threshold, the face of my sister Angélica.





CHAPTER 16

Neither Angélica nor I breathed a word about our encounter at the curandera’s house. During dinner, we avoided each other and barely spoke. Catalina didn’t say much either. She was such an introvert.

The same couldn’t be said for Laurent, who did all the talking. He mentioned a list of names that held little to no meaning to me: people he was planning to invite to an upcoming gathering; friends he’d run into at the café in Vinces; courtships and engagements he’d heard about. As usual, none of his chatter seemed to have any substance. He was fond of mixing languages. He might start a sentence in Spanish and then finish it in French. Angélica understood a lot but always answered in Spanish, whereas Catalina never said a word, either for lack of knowledge or lack of concern. I could understand Laurent, but I wasn’t a confident speaker. What a shame, after having a French father. In my defense, my father had left Spain when I was tiny so I didn’t have many opportunities to practice his native tongue. My knowledge of the language mainly came from books and from my correspondence with my father throughout the years.

My mother always said my father had had a talent for languages. Apparently, he’d learned Spanish during his travels to Spain, where his job as a merchant of jerez had taken him. My parents had met at the Feria de Sevilla after my mother became a widow and my father never wanted to go back to France after that. But after meeting my grandmother, his ambition took him farther away. Mamá accused her own mother of filling his head with ideas about chocolate and cacao beans and plantations across the ocean that she’d called the business of the future.