The Hacienda(71)

Yet in her flight, in her own fear, Beatriz had sought the capilla. Beatriz sought me. After all she had endured in my company, all she had seen, any practical mind would associate my presence with danger, and therefore cast me out of their life as fast as they could.

But she didn’t.

Even as she folded her arms across her chest in preemptive defiance of words I could not bear to speak, she stood here, barefoot and drenched in the capilla, because she trusted me. Her nightdress was so soaked that it clung to her arms, stomach, and thighs. Against my better judgment, I let myself notice this for a moment longer than I should have.

Heat climbed up my throat.

I did not deserve the trust she placed in me.

“You’ll catch your death of a cold.” Was that my own voice? It echoed far and foreign. It was mine, though the words it spoke were those of an imbecile.

“I don’t care.” She stepped into the pew and sat on the bench, dropping her weight with the heavy determination of a child. “I’m not going back.”

I could not argue with that.

I turned to walk back to my rooms.

“Where are you going?” I caught how her voice pitched toward fear and cast a glance over my shoulder. Though her hands rested on the back of the pew in front of her, her body was tensed, as if she were ready to rise and follow. This sent an arrow of compassion through my heart, further bruising what was already too tender for her.

I could rationalize this decision away. It was easy, too easy. She was a lost soul who sought help and I gave it; thus was my vocation. I could repeat that sentence like a litany, like a prayer, a meditation of pious deceit, but it still would not change the truth. I was giving in to temptation. Every decision I made that kept me close to her, that offered the opportunity to be close enough to touch her hand or smell her hair, was a sin.

I wanted it all the same.

“You’ll need blankets,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I returned with an armful, some still warm from my sleep. Beatriz was shivering when I reached her; I stepped into the pew to set most down next to her, then chose the softest and draped it over her shoulders.

“Thank you,” Beatriz murmured. Her fingertips brushed mine as she tightened it around herself.

Her eyes fell from my eyes to my mouth.

A soft dizziness settled in my chest, curling around my lungs and robbing them of air. I had to get ahold of myself. I sat on the other side of the blankets, clasping my hands before me.

“What happened?” I asked, willing my voice to be steady.

“I saw things.” Her voice was hollow; a shadow of distress flickered across her bloodless face. “I tried to do as you say and cast out the voices. I tried not to listen. But I have begun to see things. I feel things, as I never have before.”

Her hands trembled, even as they clutched the blanket around her.

I knew precisely what Titi would say. Get the family out of the house. Quickly. She would wag one gnarled finger at me. Then purge it of its rot.

I had tried. I had opened that dread prison within me and released a limb of the darkness within. I held it with a pale-knuckled grip, tightened the reins of incantations around it though it yanked and champed at its bit. I was in control. I used every prayer precisely as it was meant to be used. There was not a breath that was unplanned, not a step that was not precisely timed.

And yet I had failed so profoundly that I could have been killed.

My aunt was killed.

The rot in the house was a plague. Who would it fell next? Paloma? Beatriz?

I could risk neither. I could not fail either of them again.

But how could I proceed with Rodolfo back from the capital? If he was any bit as suspicious or intolerant as Do?a Catalina, I would have no luck convincing him that allowing me to draw his wife’s blood in the middle of the green parlor and speak to unseen spirits was for the good of his household.

Unless he, too, was as tormented by the house as Beatriz was.

“Does . . . does he feel it?” I asked softly.

“Rodolfo?” She made a disgusted face. Even that moment of animation was enough to make her seem alive again, and I was grateful for it. And for other reasons, too, reasons that I then suppressed with the force of slamming a chest shut. “No, he doesn’t. I don’t think he can feel anything at all.” She shifted uncomfortably, then took another blanket into her lap. A long moment passed before she spoke again. “Paloma told me he has done horrible things.”

I lowered my gaze to her hands, watching them methodically shred the end of a tassel. Paloma must have told her about Mariana. I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross for her. I had failed her too.

“I know,” I murmured.

“Then you know he is too evil to feel it,” Beatriz said.

“I don’t believe it works that way.” Even my father had felt what dripped from his walls. Perhaps it was one of the many reasons he turned to pulque: to dull his senses, to blind himself to the shadows that slithered from the corners of his house. “A house like that . . . he should feel it.”

“Do you know what he said?” She turned to me, tightening the blanket around her shoulders. Most of her hair was still in a long plait that fell down her back, but much had worked its way loose and fell around her face. “He complained that the house was too warm. Can you imagine?”

I could not. “Perhaps he is mad.”