Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  The armoire was unlocked, and contained only a small satchel that held two white linen shirts, some clean stockings, a volume of Hegel, and von Ranke’s History of the Latin and Teutonic People. The fly-leaves of both were inscribed, in a rather unformed hand, with the name Werther Bremer. There was no sign of the green-and-white Meissen tea-service or its chest.

  “What now?” whispered Rose when they regained the sanctuary of their room. “If I thought there was a single servant awake in the kitchen—except for M’sieu Guillenormand, who sits up reading Parisian liberal newspapers as a protest against local laziness—I’d suggest calling for bath-water, but I think you’re going to have to wait for that. Perhaps,” she added meditatively, putting her arms around January’s waist from behind, “if we both thought very hard about it, we might find something to do of which Josefa would completely disapprove, in revenge for the day we’ve both had . . . ?”

  January grinned and covered her hands with his big ones. “It’s an idea, my nightingale, and one we’ll have to pursue . . . and God knows I need a bath.” He released one hand to brush at the thick yellow dust on his sleeve. “But before it gets dark I want to ride back to the pyramids and see what it was Mademoiselle Valentina cached under the roots of that oak-tree.”

  Within minutes Rose had changed into riding-clothes, and the two were slipping stealthily across the kitchen yard toward the corrals. “If I thought we could do so without drawing the attention of every vaquero in the place,” added January softly, “I’d suggest we steal three horses, leave a note for Consuela, and make a break with Hannibal for Mexico City now. This place is dangerous.” He looked back across the silent quadrangle, the bare, dusty ground and the high yellow walls, each archway of the two arcades, upper and lower, a choir of silently singing mouths of shadow, and was reminded of the ranks of carved skulls in the crypt of the Lord of the Dead.

  “You feel that, too?” asked Rose, and January looked down at her, hearing the uneasiness in her voice. “It’s a completely illogical feeling,” she admitted in the tone of one apologizing for error, and he shook his head.

  “No: it’s a deduction that your mind has made from clues you haven’t yet realized are clues.” He led the way past the radiant heat of the round comal ovens, and out through the wide stable gates. “Don Prospero is unstable—and dangerous. Just because he’s protecting Hannibal now doesn’t mean he won’t turn against him after November second—or even sooner, if he has some dream of the Jaguar-God. And if Werther Bremer turns out not to have done the murder, that means that the real killer is still here on the hacienda. Since we don’t know why the murder was committed, that means we have no guarantee that he—or she—won’t kill again.”

  As January had expected, the moment he and Rose emerged from the small postern at the back of the kitchen yard into the tangle of corrals and sheds that constituted the hacienda’s stables, a shaggy-haired, scar-faced vaquero materialized from the shade of a paloverde tree and asked, “Can we be of help?” Since it would be foolish to ride through this bandit-haunted land alone, January explained—in his most educated Spanish—that la Señora Enero had a desire to see some of the statues and ruins that surrounded the pyramids, though of course neither of them had any desire to wake Don Prospero for another expedition. . . .

  The vaquero grinned his understanding, and whistled for a couple of companions, who emerged, yawning and scratching themselves, from where they’d been sleeping on the ground in the shade. While they were saddling horses, January’s Indian servant, Cristobál, joined them, silent as ever, apparently from out of nowhere. As they rode out, January and Rose continued their conversation in French—many of the vaqueros barely spoke Spanish.

  “According to Josefa,” said Rose, “Don Prospero had been slipping toward mania for several days before his attack on the fourth of September. Generally, she says, his spells last about twenty-four hours. Then he’ll sleep for another day, and then he’s well, or as well as he ever is. On the fourth he was definitely disoriented, shouting that voices were speaking to him from the air, and unable to recognize his family. Nobody worried much until the seventh, when Don Anastasio sent for Franz; by the morning of the eighth, as Hannibal said, Prospero had to be forcibly restrained.”

  January shivered at the thought of the four preceding days, of living with Don Prospero roving at large. “No wonder Valentina was making plans to get out of there. I only wonder that Paloma didn’t try to bolt, too.”

  “Josefa wouldn’t hear of it,” said Rose drily. “Josefa seems to have had the same idea that Señora Lorcha did, and tried to get her father to sign over the ten thousand dollars it would cost for her and Paloma to enter a convent—leaving poor little Casimiro alone in his grandfather’s care, though no one seems to have thought of that. Josefa was livid when Señora Lorcha’s priest showed up for the clandestine marriage of Prospero and Natividad, because, of course, then Fernando arrived hot-foot with his two mad-doctors in tow and took over everything. Santa Anna and his aides arrived on the eighth as well.”

  “And Fernando intended to go through with marrying Natividad?”

  “After that he had to.” Rose drew rein a little, following January as he led the little cortege down into the thickly-wooded depression in the ground that flanked the pyramids to the north. “I think he guessed it would only be a matter of time before Señora Lorcha forged proof that Natividad had married Don Prospero on the eighth, and as his wife was entitled to a third of his property in the event of his death.”

  Here among the trees, the air stifled in the lungs, and the gnats and mosquitoes swarmed. Undergrowth tangled in thickets like thorned wire, and among the close-crowding gray boles of oak and juniper, January seemed to feel the watching eyes of those who had held this land before the Spanish, those proud, secretive faces cut into the stone of the crumbling temple walls.

  He nodded at his wife, his mind still filled with the picture of that poisoned and chaotic house in which Fernando died. “Natividad probably reasoned that if she couldn’t marry a man who’d be safely locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life, at least she could marry one who might be killed in Texas before she would ever be required to live with him. Given Fernando’s proclivities, there was a good chance she’d never be asked to live with him at all.”

  “It’s generous of you to attribute to her the powers of reasoning.” Rose ducked a low-hanging oak-branch, the tiny, stiff gray-green leaves snagging at her riding-hat brim. “She may have been doing only what her mother ordered. Josefa says Franz invariably referred to Natividad as ‘that cow,’ not so much from his contempt for women in general—an attitude he seems to share with his father—as because of the money she cost the estate. But Werther had no such financial admixture to his motives. He never let a day pass without some slight or mischief: pebbles in shoes, ink-spots on silk, sometimes worse. Of course, since Josefa never exchanged a word with Natividad or her mother, she didn’t know much, and it seems to have entirely escaped her that all that enmity from Werther had any other root than righteous indignation against a harlot. What Natividad thought, I have no idea.”

  “But it would pay us to find out.” January raised his hand to signal a halt, and instructed Quacho, the scar-faced vaquero, to deploy his two companions and Cristobál in a perimeter around the outer edge of the wooded depression. “And quickly. Don Prospero’s instability aside, God knows at what point young Ylario is going to abandon the Principles of Universal Law and feel himself justified in simply shooting Hannibal from the shelter of the nearest arroyo the next time he steps out the gate. There’s no way we could protect against that.”

  “Do you think he would?” asked Rose as January helped her from the saddle—Valla’s side-saddle, borrowed along with one of Valla’s highly-bred Irish mares. Her riding-boots crunched in the mats of brown oak-leaves underfoot. “He seems most wedded to the Principles of Universal Law.”

  “So wedded to them that he might feel justified in bypassing the frustr
ating letter of the law in favor of what he considers its spirit.” January took his knife from his belt and cut a sapling for a snake-stick, having grown up in the Louisiana countryside with a healthy wariness about long grass and deep underbrush. It was good even to be able to carry a knife, one of the many things he was forbidden to do in the United States. Bandits, léperos, and General Santa Anna aside, there were things to be said for Mexico.

  Sighting on the flattened crown of the Pyramid of the Sun—visible as a burning amber trapezoid through the ragged treetops—he made his way in what he hoped was the direction of the clearing at its foot, where the broken jaguar statue lay at the roots of the oak.

  “So far it doesn’t look like anyone could have poisoned Fernando after dinner but his valet or Hannibal. Werther certainly had reason to—not the logical reason of a police case, but the illogic of a lover. I am very curious as to where Werther Bremer is now, and what he has been doing in the weeks since his flight from Mictlán.”

  The trees above them thinned where stone pavement broke through the hard-packed earth. Fragments of carving showed among the twisted roots of soapberry and creosote, and at the foot of a hoary-barked oak-tree, a stone jaguar glared with furious eyes. The depression, Don Prospero had said, had in all probability been a sunken ball-court, where teams of Indians had once vied for the privilege of stripping all the spectators of their feathered clothing and gold ornaments, with the added fillip of knowing that the members of the losing team would end up having their hearts torn out on the altars of the gods. He didn’t imagine anyone ever wore their best to the game.

  “Consuela says that she must leave first thing tomorrow,” Rose told him. “She’s singing in L’Italiana in Algeri Saturday night, and the rehearsal is Friday. . . .”

  “Good,” said January. “Don Prospero seems to have a habit of hanging on to his guests, and much as I hate to leave Hannibal alone, God knows how long it’s going to take us to find out what really happened on the eighth. Hannibal says he should be safe until the second, but if Santa Anna leaves before that for Vera Cruz, I wouldn’t lay two medios on his life lasting another twenty-four hours.”

  He did not add, glancing over his shoulder at the silent woods, already beginning to fill with silvery twilight, that he would feel safer back in the city. Safer to know that Rose was away from this place. The sun was beginning to sink, trailing the glassy sliver of the new moon in its wake. Night, when it came, would be like the inside of a cow. He prodded at the dark hollow beneath the roots of the oak and, when no snake emerged or rattled in protest, knelt to reach gingerly inside.

  There was quite a little cache there, tucked deep into the crannies of the stone. Two leather bags, double-wrapped in sacking, proved to contain cornmeal; a third held parched corn. Four empty water-bottles, and a fifth containing brandy: January poured a little of it into one of the empties, to take home and test on poor Compair Lapin, though he couldn’t imagine a poisoned decanter going unsampled for nearly two months with such souls as Hannibal and Doña Filomena in the house. Three tiny parcels proved to contain money: small amounts, such as would not be missed from drawers or reticules. The most recent, lying on top, January was amused and exasperated to note, consisted of American coins, clearly abstracted from his own luggage. With them was a pearl bracelet he did not recognize, and the sapphire girandole earrings Valentina had worn the night before at supper.

  I search my daughter’s room as a matter of course, Doña Imelda had said, and Josefa had enthusiastically agreed. The possession of baubles and trinkets is only a temptation to sin. It is good training to be reminded that the soul possesses nothing.

  There was no note.

  “She’s getting ready to run for it, all right.” He looked back up at Rose, who stood behind him, holding the horses. “I wonder if Fernando stumbled upon something else, some other evidence of her plans to meet her lover or to flee?”

  “If he did, I still can’t see how she could have entered the study.” Rose swung lightly to the Irish mare’s saddle, hooked her right knee around the bar. “She was with others all the way through dinner, and afterwards in the corredor. The same goes for Señora Lorcha and Natividad.”

  “And Doña Imelda,” said January thoughtfully. “And Consuela, for that matter.”

  “Why on earth would Consuela wish to murder her brother?” exclaimed Rose, startled.

  January shrugged. “We don’t know that,” he said. “But the fact that we don’t know a reason why Consuela, or Don Anastasio, or Hinojo the butler, or Santa Anna himself for that matter, would have wanted to murder Fernando doesn’t mean that they didn’t have one, maybe as strong a reason as passion or hatred or fear. All we have to go on was what was actually done, and who could actually, physically, have committed the crime. And at the moment,” he concluded regretfully, mounting his heavy-boned gelding, “the only ones who had any contact with anything Don Fernando ate or drank after he left the dinner were Hannibal and Werther.”

  “And Don Prospero,” mused Rose. “Bolts or no bolts on the doors to his room, he had the best of all reasons to want his son dead. And his movements in the hour or so after dinner when Franz must have died are unaccounted for.”

  The sun had set by the time they returned to the casco. The women who worked at spindle and loom were streaming out the front gates of the great court, chattering and laughing and wrapping their long rebosos around their shoulders against the evening chill, as Rose and January, dusty and exhausted, came through the kitchen gates. The long ground-floor workrooms, sheltered by their surrounding arcade, would be deep in gloom now, and the women had to return to their own huts in the village to make tortillas for their husbands and children and parents. The flat cornbread upon which all of Indian and mestizo cuisine was based staled and lost its suppleness very quickly; the women had to bake it anew at every meal.

  “I trust and pray there’ll be time for a bath before dinner,” Rose was saying as they climbed the stair to the upper arcade. Light shone through the cracks in the shutters of Consuela’s room; Hannibal’s, as far as January could see, was dark. He wondered if the fiddler was recovered from the exhaustion of the day’s clamber over the pyramids, and if Don Prospero would insist on his playing after dinner that night. “And I’ll speak to Zama about having our things packed at first light.”

  “Good,” said January. “I’d like to be able to at least take the diligencia back to Vera Cruz without worrying about the police waiting for us on the dock. But how we’re to learn if Don Prospero—”

  He stopped, his hand on the latch of their door, every alarm-bell in his mind suddenly clamoring at the smell of blood.

  He held up his hand and Rose halted behind him. . . .

  Servants had already kindled the cressets along the corredor, the smoke thin and pungent against the whining mosquitoes. He took candles from his pocket—experience had taught him to carry them—and he lit one from the nearest flame, then cautiously pushed open the door.

  The smell was stronger in the dark. From the wall the massacred Christ gazed sorrowfully at him: January recalled the dead bandit in the pass, the dismembered limbs carved on the temple walls, and thought, No wonder they show Christ covered with gore and horrors—how else in this land would He get anyone’s attention?

  Nothing moved in the room, so he stepped inside, swiftly touched the flame to the wicks of other candles in their heavy iron holder. Golden light broadened. For the first moment he thought that nothing had been changed, nothing touched: the bed still made, the chest still closed, the small travel-trunk in its corner unmolested . . .

  Then he saw the little bamboo cage that had held Compair Lapin stood open and empty.

  And on top of the chest at the bed’s foot, one of M’sieu Guillenormand’s red-and-white French dishes, half-filled with congealing blood, in which swam what could only be the rabbit’s heart.

  NINE

  January had hoped to consult Don Anastasio about the heart—to ask whether this was a cust
omary form of local juju or a repetition of some common act of Don Prospero’s madness—but the gentle, scholarly hacendado had departed already for his own hacienda of Saragosse. “He’ll be back,” replied Don Prospero carelessly when January inquired after him at supper. “I told him to fetch pears for tomorrow night’s dessert—he has a most astonishing way with them. True French jagonelles, here. . . . The Indians are right, he is a brujo. And grapes. My father was very partial to grapes, so I want to make sure there are some here when he comes back.” It took January a moment to remember that the father referred to was dead. “Where is that lazy fiddler?” The Don glared around the torchlit corredor, where the household had assembled before dinner. “Fetch him,” he ordered the butler.

  “I’ll get him,” offered January, and the sharp blue eyes flared like lightning in the flickering yellow light.

  “Stay right here—Hinojo will get him. I want to talk to you about the ancient Indians. Little enough decent conversation I get around this place, between the likes of Josefa and Rafael.” He jerked his head at Valentina’s suitor. “An amazing sight, the pyramids, no? Their priests had calculated the cycles of the stars and planets for thousands of years in the past, and centuries into the future, with greater accuracy than the Babylonians did. They were able to predict retrogrades in the orbits of Mars and Venus. . . .”