The Hacienda(22)

Juana scanned the list: notes about china dealers in the capital, fresh talavera tiles from Puebla, a note to ask my mother about imported rugs.

Her face hardened. Then she turned to Paloma, her face transformed into a mask of sympathy.

“Do?a Beatriz had a bit of a shock yesterday,” she said in a soft, maternal voice, as if she were explaining away the woes of a weeping child. “I think perhaps this must have been a misunderstanding.”

I stared at Juana, mortified.

“No.” The word came out strangled. “There is no misunderstanding. There is something—someone—in this wall.”

“You are dismissed, Paloma,” Juana said softly. “I will take care of this.”

Paloma’s eyes skipped to me. I couldn’t read her expression; if I had had longer to parse it, if I had known her better, perhaps I could have, but she turned and left. Her footsteps echoed down the hall.

Juana took me by the upper arm. “Let’s go.”

I dug in my heels. “You oughtn’t humiliate me in front of the servants,” I snapped, perhaps more harshly than I should have. Not only was I shaken, embarrassment burned in my cheeks as I faced Juana. “You heard Rodolfo. My word is his when he’s gone. They won’t respect me if you treat me like this.”

Perhaps that was what she intended all along. But she gave no indication if this was the case; her face did not shift from its mask of sympathy. She clucked.

“Did you not sleep well last night?” she wondered sweetly. “Perhaps you dreamed it. I used to have terrible nightmares as a child.”

A wave of hatred filled my chest. How dare she? I shrugged violently, trying to release my arm from her hold. Her grip tightened.

“Let me go, Juana.”

“Why don’t you come—”

“No.”

And, to my surprise, she released me. I nearly fell backward, the absence of pressure was so sudden.

“As you wish, Do?a Beatriz,” she said silkily, her voice woven through with threads of venom, so spiderweb thin I barely caught them. “Your word is the patrón’s.”

She smiled, pale lipped and joyless, and turned. Her long stride took her around the corner and out of sight before I could say another word.

Distantly, I heard the enormous door of the main entryway thunder shut. For a long moment I stood, my pulse hammering in my ears.

Then, from the direction of my bedroom, there came the faint sound of a girl calling a name in a singsong voice.

Juana, Juana . . .

The hairs on my forearms stood on end.

A handful of cold truths unfurled before me as I stood in that hall, paralyzed by fear:

Someone had died in this house.

I needed help.

And no one at Hacienda San Isidro was going to give it to me.





9





TWO DAYS LATER, PALOMA delivered Rodolfo’s response to my latest letter. I was weeding the garden around the front door, my broad-brimmed hat protecting my skin from the sun as usual. I could have kissed Paloma when she handed me the letter, but my spirits sank when I noticed how wary she was of me. I did not know which was worse—the disdain with which Ana Luisa regarded me, or Paloma’s clear unease?

She left as I ripped open the seal, dirt from my fingertips smearing the fine paper.

I had asked for more than furniture this time.

Querida Beatriz, Rodolfo began. He wrote that he understood my desire for a priest to bless the house, to bury a statue of such and such saint in the garden, to sprinkle holy water on the threshold and throughout the rooms. Give the enclosed letter to Padre Guillermo in town—he and his assistant will be more than obliging.

My lips curled into a grim smile. I was not a devout woman. My views on the clergy were informed by Papá, who often repeated the words of revolutionary leader Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. Of his enemies in the Church, the insurgent priest said they were Catholic “only to benefit themselves: their God is money. Under the veil of religion and of friendship they want to make you the victims of their insatiable greed.”

I did not trust the clergy, not so long as men like my husband could buy them and their services. Still, I had to help myself somehow. Despite my distrust of priests, part of me suspected—an irrational hope, perhaps, born of sleeplessness and desperation—that they had the power to do something I couldn’t.

I didn’t care about a sprinkle of holy water here and there, a murmured prayer over my threshold.

I wanted an exorcism.

And Rodolfo’s letter was going to get the priests into my house so I could show them how desperately it needed it.



* * *




*

THE NEXT MORNING WAS Sunday. I dressed in my finest as Mamá and I always did, pinching my cheeks in the mirror to bring color to my wan complexion. My nights were restless, my dreams populated by dark shadows that caused me to wake with a cry in the night, my heart racing as I fumbled for matches to relight the double-thick tallow candles I had asked Ana Luisa to bring me. I had ransacked the beds where Ana Luisa grew her weeds and, given no other weapon to assuage my paranoia, cut fragrant, sappy bunches of herbs to scatter around my bedroom’s threshold.

I wondered about the soot markings in the kitchen and nearly laughed at myself as I imagined asking a priest about them. That was almost as ludicrous as asking cold Ana Luisa herself.