The Spanish Daughter(63)

I glanced out the window. There was not a tree or anything to hold on to, and it looked so high. I couldn’t jump. I would break all my bones.

As he turned, I clenched his hand, digging my fingernails into his skin. “No, don’t leave me, please.” I was being selfish, but couldn’t help it. “I can’t jump. It’s too high.”

“You can do it. It’s not as high as you think. I’ve done it before.”

He was lying to give me courage, I could tell.

“I’ll help you.” His anger had faded in the face of our impending mortality. I, myself, had forgotten all the discomfort I usually felt at his proximity.

“Come on.” He extended his hand out to me. The flames were eating up the bedroom door and an unbearable heat filtered into the room.

I climbed on the window frame, clinging to his hand. He was trying to let go, but I wouldn’t let him. “Just jump, Catalina,” he said. Something had happened to his voice. I sensed impatience, fear. His gaze kept going toward the door. There it was, the coughing. His father.

I let go of his hand and shut my eyes. The next thing I knew, there was excruciating pain throughout my legs. The ground was hard, dry, and tiny rocks dug into my palms and knees. Too weak to get up, I looked up at the window, but Franco was gone. He’d gone back inside to save his father.





CHAPTER 31

Puri

April 1920



Last night I had a nightmare. Cristóbal was lying at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes wide open and his skin bloated and purple. When his hand reached out to me, I woke up panting and covered in sweat. I’d been trying not to think about him ever since I started spending time with Martin. Such was my guilt. Was Cristóbal denouncing my betrayal? Blaming me for his misfortune?

I had to make it up to him. I had to find his killer.

But things were so muddled. I thought about Catalina. She was tormented by what had happened to Franco. She blamed herself for his burns, for his suffering, for rejecting his love. She said that after the fire, he was never the same, but she didn’t want to tell me how he’d changed and I couldn’t see the connection between the incident on the ship and her. Not after knowing that the relationship between Franco and Catalina had cooled after the fire.

I’d often asked myself what I would do once I found out who had tried to kill me. I didn’t think I could retaliate in a similar fashion. I didn’t see myself killing either one of my sisters or my brother. It was not in my nature. I would probably just collect all the evidence and take it to the authorities. Let them deal with it. I’d thought about paying the police a visit anyway—not for the purposes Soledad was expecting—but to warn them of what had happened aboard the Andes. What stopped me was the possibility that they would take the investigation from my hands and ruin everything I’d been working toward. They would probably try to appease me, like Captain Blake had done, and then tell me the investigation had to be conducted under British jurisdiction. But if I presented proof, or better yet, a confession, things would be different. They couldn’t ignore me.

After breakfast, I went to Vinces with Laurent with the excuse that I needed to go to church and confess. I didn’t want to confess, certainly not to my brother. What I wanted was to get a confession from him.

Alberto smiled at me from across the nave. Gone were the pale face and the confused expression I’d seen the other day.

“What a pleasure to have you here, Don Cristóbal, but you’re a little late for mass.”

“That’s all right. I would like to have a word with you, if you may. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.”

“A confession?”

“You could say that.”

Nodding, he led the way to a sacristy saturated with incense. There was an enormous cross behind a desk, where vessels, candles, and other religious items sat. There was also a bench-like couch with burgundy cushions, where the two of us sat, and an open armoire where I could spot cassocks and white, purple, and green robes.

“How can I help you?” He’d acquired that solemn tone that priests often take during sermons. He hadn’t seemed so grave when he sat across the table in the bar last week.

I didn’t know how to start.

“Did you always want to be a priest, Alberto?”

He was taken aback, probably by my lack of reverence, but recovered quickly.

“No,” he said slowly. “I wanted to be an architect.”

I remained quiet, expectant.

“In my youth, I went through a period where I doubted the very existence of our Lord.” He set his gaze on his cassock, almost apologetically. “Oddly, my love for architecture is what brought me to Him. You see, my father had a book of European churches. It was a beautiful book, filled with pencil illustrations of Notre Dame, the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, St. Peter’s Basilica, Santiago de Compostela. This book was forbidden to me since it was one of the few precious things my father had brought from France and he said I would ruin it with my dirty hands. But every time I saw him climb onto his horse, I would sneak into his study and look at the pictures for hours. As I grew older and was able to read the text, I learned that throughout the centuries, theology has always been at the core of the aesthetics and construction of these Christian churches.”

He glanced at the cross on the wall with reverence. “When my mother would visit family in Guayaquil and Quito, she took me with her and we inevitably went to those impressive churches. I spent more hours than I can count in mass, but I was silently enraptured by the beauty of those cathedrals. And yet, my mother’s excessive religiosity frustrated me just like my father’s skepticism filled me with doubt.”