What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(11)
“Please just hurry.”
Fausta Del Olmo put on her coat and slippers and ran out to fetch a priest, and the man of God arrived quickly; he was calm and had a kind face and took my hand and asked me what the trouble was. “But didn’t you tell him, Fausta, that this is a wedding?”
Fausta shrugged and looked embarrassed and I began to be frightened of her all over again. Something was wrong. I took the priest to the library, and Fausta Del Olmo followed us. Isidoro wasn’t there, but when I opened the library door, a door at the far, far end of the room slammed shut. Isidoro had seen Fausta and escaped into the rose garden. I went after him, but Fausta and the priest didn’t follow me—they were talking, and Fausta was pointing at something . . . I now realize it was the door to Isidoro’s rooms that she was pointing at.
Isidoro wasn’t in the garden; after searching for him I went back into the library, which was also empty. I could hear a lot of noise and commotion in the rest of the house, footsteps hurrying up and down the wing where Isidoro’s rooms were. I saw his rooms, the inside of them, I mean, for the first time that night. The priest Isidoro and I had sent for was praying over a waxen body that lay in the bed. When the priest finished his prayers he said that I must not be afraid to tell him the truth, that no one would punish me, that I’d done well to send for him.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“This man has been dead for at least a day. No, don’t shake your head at me, young lady. See how stiff he is. He’d been very ill, poor soul, so this is a release for him. You came here this morning and found him like this, isn’t that what happened? And your master is away, so you worried all day about who to tell and what you would say until the worry made you cook up this story in your head about a wedding. Isn’t that so?”
All the servants were listening, but I still said no, that he was wrong. I put my hand in my pocket to take out my ring and show it to him, but the ring was gone too.
“My ring,” I said, turning to Fausta Del Olmo, who replied in the deadliest, most gentle voice: “What ring, Aurelie? Be careful what you say.”
After that I stopped talking. I looked at the body in the bed and told myself it was Isidoro and no one else. This was a truth that I had to learn, things would go very badly for me if I refused to learn it, but the lesson was very hard indeed.
The priest left, promising to write to the master as soon as he got home, and all we servants went to bed. Fausta was the last to leave Isidoro’s room, closing the door behind her as quietly as if he was just sleeping. Then she took my arm and dragged me downstairs to the maids’ dormitory, where judge and jury were waiting. Was I mad or was I simply a liar? They’d already taken out the little gifts I’d received and were talking about them: Now Fausta told them where the gifts had come from. I’d taken the key to the library from the master’s laundry, she announced, and I’d been selling off a number of his valuable books. I inferred from this that this is what Fausta herself had been doing before I’d interrupted her with my library visits.
“But how stupid, to spend the money on things like this,” the cook said, flapping the green shawl in my face.
“Some people just don’t think of the future,” Fausta Del Olmo said. A couple of the other maids hadn’t joined in and looked as if they didn’t entirely believe Fausta Del Olmo. Perhaps they’d had their own problems with her. But then Fausta announced that even Isidoro Salazar had known I was a thief. She showed them some of the slips of paper Isidoro had left for me in the library, slips he must have left that time I stayed away. The words “pretty thief” persuaded them. The master is a generous man and stealing from him causes all sorts of unnecessary difficulties. Now that some of his books are gone he may well become much less generous. The servants drove me out of the dormitory. They went to the kitchen and took pots and pans and banged them together and cried: “Shame! Shame! Shame!” I stayed in my bed for as long as I could with my covers pulled over my head, but they were so loud. They surrounded my bed, shame, shame, shame, so loud I can still hear it, shame, shame, shame. I fled, and Fausta and the servants chased me through the corridors with their pots and pans and screeching—someone hit me with a spatula and then they all threw spoons, which sounds droll now that it’s over, but having silver spoons thrown at you in a dark house is a terrifying thing, you see them flashing against the walls like little swords before they hit you. It would’ve been worse if those people had actually had knives: they’d completely lost their minds.
I made it into the library by the skin of my teeth and locked the door behind me. I wrote, am writing, this letter to you, my Montserrat. The servants have given up their rough music and have gone to bed. You will be born soon, maybe later today, maybe tomorrow. I feel you close. I know where I will have to leave you. As for this letter, I will give it to the roses, and then I must get out of here for a while. How long? Until I am sure of what happened, or at least the true order of it all. Did I somehow give him more time than he would have had on his own? The entire time I have been writing this letter I have felt Isidoro’s eyes on me. He seems to be telling me that we could still have been married, that if I’d only brought the priest and not Fausta we could still have been married. Of course he cannot really be telling me anything: I have seen him as a dead man. Why am I not afraid?
Montse found that she’d walked the length of the library as she read her mother’s letter. Now she stood at the door to Isidoro’s garden, which opened with the same key. Outside, someone in the shadows took a couple of startled steps backward. Se?ora Lucy.