The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(36)

She wasn’t sure why he’d press this point. Didn’t he have time to find a groom for her? Was it impossible for Carlota to meet a proper suitor in the capital or another city? Yet it was a daughter’s duty to please her father. She nodded feebly.

“And you like Eduardo, don’t you?” he asked.

“I like him fine, papa,” she said, and she did. At least, she liked what she’d seen of him. The way he danced, the polite way he kissed her hand, his voice, and his beautiful eyes. She didn’t like how he’d spoken to Montgomery; she couldn’t understand the splinter of animosity between them, but she thought perhaps it was like that with men. They were like roosters, eager to peck at each other.

What did she know of men, after all, that she hadn’t learned from the papers or from books or from hearsay? Nothing at all. But she liked the feeling Eduardo made bloom inside her chest and that odd eagerness that made her skin tingle.

The next morning, after a simple breakfast, her father asked Carlota to give their guests a tour of the property. She put on one of her newer summer dresses and bid them follow her. First she took them to their chapel and proudly showed them the mural that had caught her attention many times before.

Both men looked at it with care, but Isidro seemed put off.

“It doesn’t please you?” she asked.

“The strokes of the brush themselves are fine, and yet there’s something wrong about it,” the young man said.

“Wrong?”

She looked at the black-haired Eve standing by a flowering tree and the vividly rendered birds on the branches. By her feet there was a deer and in the background one could spy lions, horses, a fox, a peacock. A stream flowed next to her, filled with fish.

“If this is Eve at the moment of her fall, then why isn’t the snake on the ground? Nor is that an apple tree. Therefore this must be Eden before humanity sinned and yet Adam is nowhere to be found. It is Eve alone. Why, it reminds me of something pagan.”

Eve held a crimson flower in her hand and had crimson flowers in her hair, and her skin was bronzed, and she stood below a round, round sun. Carlota could not understand why it would be pagan. She looked at Isidro in confusion, wondering if, like the steps to a dance, this was something she should have been taught but which her father neglected to instruct her on. But she’d read from their Bible and listened to her father speak about many of the passages contained within it.

“You must forgive my cousin; he was a seminarist and had his heart set on becoming a priest before the family thought better of it,” Eduardo said. “He reckons almost everything is pagan.”

“I do not,” Isidro protested. “Besides, you can’t deny these days the way the people twist the teachings of the priest, especially around this part of the country—”

“Don’t start with that,” Eduardo said dismissively.

Isidro frowned, but was silent. They exited the chapel, and she pointed to the wall and the main entrance that led to the hybrids’ dwellings. That door was tightly closed, as it should be.

“My father’s patients reside there, in the old workers’ huts. My father doesn’t want you to head there. There are many sickly people and they mustn’t be disturbed,” she said.

“We wouldn’t dream of bothering them,” Eduardo said. “They’re charity cases, the lot of them, correct?”

“My father tends to them.”

“It must be a pretty penny my uncle spends on Yaxaktun and all for charity,” Isidro mused.

“Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously,” she said.

She thought Isidro would be pleased to see she knew her Bible verses. But the young man merely stared at her and did not look amused. Carlota lowered her eyes and kept on walking, pointing to the stables, then taking them through the house.

To Carlota, Yaxaktun was more wonderful than the greatest museum in the world, but quickly she noticed that her guests were bored. By the time they reached the courtyard she half-expected them to begin yawning.

She stood there, listening to the birds chirp in their cages, not knowing what else to show them. They’d seen the lustrous hand-painted tiles, the stencils on the walls, the bougainvillea. She realized Vista Hermosa must be grander than Yaxaktun, that their house in Mérida might also be magnificent. And as her father had said, they owned all this. Each glass and cup and even the bougainvillea blooming in the courtyard.

“It’s going to be a blazingly hot day,” Eduardo said. “I can’t get used to it yet. It never gets this warm in Mexico City.”

“We might go to the cenote. You could take a dip there,” Carlota said. “The water is of the most wonderful shade of blue-green, and it’s cool and lovely.”

“That sounds like an excellent idea.”

“We could have a picnic,” Isidro added. “In the English style.”

“I’ve heard about picnics at night. That might be better,” Eduardo said.

“Perhaps, but I’m hungry now.”

“I’ll be a minute. I’ll arrange it,” she said and hurried to the kitchen.

Ramona was deveining chiles when Carlota rushed in. “Ramona, could you put together an English-style picnic for us?” she asked.

“What is that?”