Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  And Rose whistled—in an unlady-like fashion—a tune known among the Americans as “Pretty Peggy-o.”

  “If it was Valla,” argued Consuela, “where was Doña Filomena?”

  “Tied up in the wine cellar,” said Hannibal promptly. “Or locked in the stables. Or with Doña Josefa in the chapel, praying that the lovely Valentina wouldn’t accuse her of operating a house of prostitution out of the women’s courtyard and produce forged correspondence to prove it. Did you bring in tea?”

  “I did.” January stood, opened the chest, and brought out the little Sèvres pot. “According to M’sieu Guillenormand, this tea was Fernando’s special blend. No one in the household was permitted to drink it, and only Werther and Guillenormand had keys to the caddy—not that such locks can’t be easily picked, according to nearly every house-servant I’ve ever talked to. Did Fernando have tea after supper before going into his study?”

  “Not before going in,” said Hannibal. “He said he wished to put in more work on his father’s papers that night, but he may just have wanted to get away from Señora Lorcha. But when I went in, there was a tray on the desk. Meissen ware, apple-green-and-white with a gold rim: cup, saucer, pot, water-pot, milk-pitcher, sugar-bowl, slop-jar, and spirit-lamp, with a little gold strainer and a gold spoon to match.”

  “Werther took it in,” said Consuela decisively. “I remember him coming out of the study door, silent as a cat, and the look he gave Natividad as he passed her would have taken paint off a fence.”

  “That I can believe. My back was to the study door—and I’m afraid I wasn’t entirely sober myself. What life is then to a man that is without wine? He must have come into the study with his tray from the corredor. . . .”

  “Which means,” concluded Rose, “that anyone could have put anything into it while everyone else was at supper.”

  “If you can think of a way anyone could have left the supper-table,” remarked January, “without everyone noticing. Did anyone leave, Hannibal? Consuela?”

  They looked at each other blankly for a moment, then Consuela shook her head. “Except for the servants, of course. They were in and out of the sala.” She frowned a little, as if, for the first time, the thought was moving in her mind that Hannibal might not have murdered her brother after all. “And Franz was not popular among the indios of the village. He was like the Inquisition—not for God but for money. He was full of plans to reorganize the villages as they are organized in Prussia. On the day of the wedding-feast, the villagers sent a delegation to Don Anastasio, begging him to speak to my father about Fernando, or to cure my father if he could. Don Anastasio is regarded as something of a brujo in the villages, and able to do such things. But it would take a brave servant to enter the study when Fernando was sitting so close to its door.”

  “And the door into the corredor was bolted from the inside,” added Hannibal. “Franz had to get up and unbolt it, to let me in.” The muscles of his jaw twitched, and he settled back against the bedpost, his arms wrapped around his knees.

  “Hence my quest for Don Fernando’s personal cache of tea,” said January firmly. He stowed the tea-pot carefully back in the chest and closed the lid. “I wonder if one of the kitchen-boys could be bribed into stealing us one of M’sieu Guillenormand’s rabbits. Or does someone raise them in the village?”

  “Lupe does,” said Consuela. “You should hear her on the subject of French mariquitas, for whom an honest hare isn’t good enough. She’ll sell you one for a medio.”

  Footmen were still loading Doña Imelda’s luggage—an amazing quantity considering the woman had come only for an overnight stay—into the smaller of her two carriages, when January descended the courtyard stair a few minutes later. The huge quadrangle was filled with not only the mounts of the de Bujerio outriders—stoutly-built Andalusians and Hanoverian warmbloods who towered over the scrawny mustangs of the vaqueros—but with those of the guards who would accompany Don Prospero’s proposed expedition to the pyramids. Circling around beneath the ground-floor arcade to avoid being trampled—or smothered in the fog of dust—January encountered Don Anastasio, coming from the direction of the kitchen with several small bundles of dried herbs in his hands, done up with string. January touched his hat to him; the slim, silver-haired hacendado checked his stride and bowed.

  “Señor Enero,” he said. “You play a good game of cards—I’m sorry I had not the opportunity to speak to you as much as I would have liked last night, nor to your lovely bride. A most intelligent and educated woman. A pity we do not see more like her in my country.”

  January recalled some of Consuela’s remarks about Anastasio’s own wife, and replied, “A pity we do not see more like her in my country, Don Anastasio. For she is exceptional—and the view that women are too highly strung to sustain the rigors of an education is hardly limited to Mexico.”

  “One would think, in the nineteenth century . . .” The Don shook his head, his glance flickering to January’s face. “Is it true that you were appointed by the British minister to look into the matter of Señor Sefton’s innocence? For I recall when Sefton was first accused, Señora Montero spoke to Sir Henry on the subject and was told that he could—or would—do nothing. And I thought it most curious that an Englishman would appoint an American to such an investigation.”

  “It is not for me,” smiled January, “to comment upon the truth or falsehood of what a lady says. If I have anything at all to do with the matter, upon my return to the city it will be true.”

  Don Anastasio grinned, teeth very white and strong above a neatly-trimmed beard. “Whatever else may be said of your friend, it has been good beyond expression to hear music properly played. Do you truly believe him to be innocent?”

  “I don’t know. Do you truly believe him to be guilty?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “What makes you hesitate in answering?”

  The Don said nothing for a time. Then, slowly, he replied, “Truly, Señor Enero, I do not know. Werther Bremer’s grief appeared to me to be entirely genuine—the poor boy was utterly distraught at his master’s death. My common sense tells me that it must have been one of them or the other, for no one else had access to anything Franz consumed after dinner was done. I hope I am not being prejudiced by the joys of educated conversation. . . .” He gestured with the packet he held: January smelled the summery breath of chamomile and comfrey. “Perhaps I am too much a lover of music to believe that a rotten branch can produce such sweet fruit. My wife’s confessor would take me to task on that score, I’m sure. I don’t know how else murder could have been done—but I don’t believe Sefton did it. Not knowingly, anyway.”

  “Unknowingly, then?” January had watched Don Anastasio converse with Rose at dinner about botany and the behavior of barometers on the high central Mexican plateau. A brujo, Consuela had called him. January was curious what Fernando’s brother-in-law would have observed on the night of the wedding-feast.

  “I have heard of men drying the residue of certain poisons onto the sides of wineglasses,” said Don Anastasio at length. “It could be done in a slow oven, after the baking was finished. But Guillenormand is a fanatic for cleanliness, and the glasses that Hannibal carried into that room he took from the sideboard in the sala. They would not have had any residue on them, or you can be sure one of the kitchen-boys would have had a beating. Even more so would that apply to Fernando’s tea-cup, which Bremer cleaned himself. It has crossed my mind . . .”

  He stepped closer to January, and deeper into the shadows of the arcade, away from the clamor of the men and horses in the court.

  “However the poisoning was done, it has crossed my mind that perhaps the best thing to do might be simply to wait for the Days of the Dead, and then spirit your friend out of here on the night of los niños, while everyone is at the cemetery.”

  “The cemetery?”

  “Here in Mictlán, the first night of the feast—the first of November—is the feast of the Saints, the h
oly ones who dwell with God, and so by extension that of the innocent ones, the children. People bring food to the graves, to share with the spirits of the dead and with one another: tamales, candy, the sweetest of fresh fruits. The graves are decorated with red coxcomb and yellow marigolds—cempoalxochitl, the Indians call them, the flower of twenty, though why twenty I’ve never understood.”

  Beside Doña Imelda’s carriage, Don Prospero was snapping out instructions to Don Rafael. “Have those sheep to the Army by Thursday, you understand. And for the love of God, don’t just send whatever beasts you happen to round up! Sort out the healthy ones and turn them back into the pasture. Those imbeciles that buy for the Army won’t know the difference.”

  By his tone he might have been talking to the kitchen-boy, but Don Rafael inclined his head; whether a slave worked in the cane-fields or in the Big House, January reflected, he was still a slave.

  “You’re not leaving? Nonsense, your mother will get back to town all right! I’m showing Hannibal’s Moorish friend the pyramids. Vasco!” Don Prospero shouted to the tallest of the vaqueros, a startlingly handsome man with the long braids of an Indian. “Saddle a horse for Rafael here to come with us.”

  “I’ve already seen the pyramids, sir. You showed them to me yourself—”

  “I know you’ve already seen the pyramids, you blockhead!” flared the Don. His pale eyes glared from beneath the white brows. “Are you so stupid you think you’ve seen all there is?”

  “Er—of course not, sir. It’s just . . .”

  “Rafael.” Doña Imelda stood beside the carriage door, ignoring the footman who waited, hand extended, to help her in. “It is a long way back to town, and we must be going if we wish to reach there by nightfall.”

  “Do people just go to take one look at Rome, eh? Or Venice?”

  “Of . . . of course not, sir. . . .”

  “Rafael.”

  “These are the temples of gods beyond our comprehension!” shouted Don Prospero, flinging out his long arms. “Of seers and priests and warriors who were reading truths in the stars when Spaniards were still hitting one another over the head with sticks! You . . .” He jabbed a finger at Doña Imelda. “Your son will return tomorrow.”

  “They are an uncanny place,” Don Anastasio murmured to January, still at his side, “the pyramids of Mictlán.” He turned to look at them, framed by the vast arch of the kitchen-yard gate, tawny-gold cones against a bottomless sky. “Most of the villagers cannot be induced to walk among them—many, not even to speak of them. But sometimes after the Days of the Dead are over, I have found altars there, in the crypts that are bored into their hearts. Little shrines decorated with shells and bits of turquoise and glass, with coins and bunches of tobacco. Places where the idols remain, watching over the cenotes—the holy wells—in the dark. And sometimes it is clear that food is not the only thing that has been given to the spirits, for the lilies and the marigolds before the images are splashed with fresh blood.”

  He glanced sidelong up at January, and in his eyes January saw the same uneasiness he had glimpsed the previous night, when Don Prospero had sung the praises of the ancient priests and explained the techniques of cardiosection. “You say you are a physician, Señor. Have you had to do with the diseases of the mad? The diseases of the mind?”

  January shook his head. “I am only a surgeon,” he replied. “And for ten years, owing to the prejudices of the white men against my race, I have made my living as a musician and a teacher of music. I’ve seen lunatics, of course, and spoken to men who tried to study them. . . .”

  “You’re fortunate,” muttered Anastasio. “Here in this country they’re as likely to try to drive the Devil out with prayer and cayenne pepper, or call in the local tlaciuhqui with his smoke-pot and his mushrooms. There is, of course, every chance that on the second night—the night when all the Dead return, young and old alike—poor Prospero will simply decide that his son was murdered by the Jaguar-God or the ghost of Hernán Cortés, and will help Hannibal get out of the country just to spite Capitán Ylario—who is a muddle-headed young prig so enamored of his own abilities that he couldn’t catch an urchin pilfering apples. On the other hand . . .”

  Anastasio frowned, and his eyes followed the tall black figure of Don Prospero across the gilded fog of dust in the yard till it vanished beneath the shadows of the stair. “On the other hand, it might be best to get Hannibal out of here before Don Prospero comes back from the cemetery with whatever he thinks his son is going to tell him to do with his killer.”

  SEVEN

  The pyramids of Mictlán lay east of the casco, on high ground above a long extension of the lake that stretched in far too straight a line to be anything but man-made. The most easterly, the Pyramid of the Sun, lay some five miles from the last few fences of the tangle of corrals and sheep-pens that marked the farthest extension of the hacienda’s kitchen precincts. The closest lay at a distance of about three miles, and was the tallest, a hundred and fifty feet of steep-sided brush and heat-withered acacias, studded with the broken edges of stone steps, the bleached faces of stone-carved skulls that stared up startlingly from the pale earth.

  That was the Pyramid of the Dead, for which the hacienda was named.

  “Tezcatlipoca, now, he never did get on with Quetzalcoatl.” Don Prospero gestured at the broken lumps of brush-covered stone that marked where lesser buildings of the complex had stood. “Seduced three of his nieces, and Xochiquetzal, Tlaloc’s wife, into the bargain, not that it would have taken much, from all I’ve ever heard of Tlaloc. There’s a statue of him over yonder. . . .” He waved in the direction of the reed-curtained lakeshore. “Rain-God. The idiot Greeks would have equated him with Jupiter, but that shows all they know. They’re all flirts, anyhow,” he added darkly. “Women.”

  Valentina, riding straight-backed as a little black-clad soldier among the vaqueros who escorted the party, was close enough to hear—Don Prospero seldom spoke below a roar—but didn’t turn her head. Doña Filomena, her pear-shaped and depressed-looking duenna, only clung to the back of the vaquero behind whom she rode pillion and moaned; when Valentina had announced, back in the courtyard, her intention of joining the expedition to the pyramids, her chaperone had blenched and pleaded a headache, but Don Prospero had insisted on the elderly woman’s presence.

  He had insisted on Hannibal’s presence, too. January wondered, glancing sidelong at the fiddler riding beside him, whether the Don feared that Ylario was still lurking somewhere and waiting his chance to strike again, or merely wanted to have as large an audience as possible.

  “Take Tlazolteotl, now,” the Don went on. “She seduced the holy hermit Jappan for no better reason than that his virtue annoyed her. He ended up having his head cut off—and his wife’s head too, for good measure—and he turned into a scorpion. She turned into a scorpion afterwards as well, a different-colored one. And Maria-Exaltación was no better. Flirted with every man she met, which was astonishing considering she was always down with the vapors or a rash, don’t know how she did it. And Valla, of course, is nothing but a little tart, like that mother of hers, what was her name . . . ? Fernando took it all so seriously. Worst thing I could have done, sending him to Germany, but his mother insisted. . . .”

  On Don Prospero’s farther side, Don Rafael de Bujerio clung to the high pommel of his deep Mexican saddle and tried to look as if he weren’t frantic over the effect of the stirrups on the polish of his fine English boots. Having come to Mictlán with no expectation of doing any riding, he had not brought clothes for it. Sweating heavily in his London-tailored tailcoat, he kept grimly at Don Prospero’s side, exclaiming in admiration at everything the old man said.

  The other vaqueros strung out in a ragged skein around the Don, his daughter Valentina, and his guests, and observing them, January understood, with sinking heart, just how difficult it would be for Hannibal to make his escape from this place. In their leather breeches, faded shirts, short jackets, and leather botas—gaite
rs—they had a ferocious look, not far removed from the bandits who’d attacked the diligencia in the pass: young men for the most part, though there were a couple of stringy graybeards among them, thin and scrubby as the horses they rode. There was an animal quality to them, and they seemed to question Don Prospero no more than the pack-wolves question the king-wolf: those whose hearts harbored questions would simply have moved on. They patrolled the gully-slashed rangeland that lay for dozens of miles in all directions around the casco, looking for any sign of anomaly that could mean an injured cow. A man could not ride away from the house without attracting their attention: a man alone on foot would probably not make it to the city at all.

  “Xipe Toltec, now, the god of the maize—his priests would put on the flayed skins of their victims and wear them until they rotted off their bodies, to show the people how the husk rots from the corn. You’ll see, there are some astonishing bas-reliefs. . . .”

  January urged his horse—a big black gelding—over closer to Hannibal’s, and asked softly, “What became of Franz’s tea-service, by the way? I didn’t see anything like what you described when I was down in the kitchen.”

  Hannibal shook his head. “Another of the many things I haven’t liked to ask.” In the strong sunlight his eyes had a bruised look, as if he had not slept in many nights. “Werther kept it in its own chest in Franz’s room—where Werther slept on a trundle-bed in a corner—but now that you speak of it, when they cleared Franz’s things out of the room after Werther departed in haste, I didn’t see it. I can only guess it’s found its way into the Monte de Piedad—the government pawnshop in the city—or the thieves’ market in the southeast corner of the Cathedral square. Did you acquire a rabbit to sample the tea, by the way?”

  “Lupe sold me one,” said January. “She said she’d put a mark on its basket so that none of the servants would touch it. I think she suspected I was getting it to sacrifice.”