Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  As things turned out, he was wrong about that, but it wasn’t until he was fleeing from these same vaqueros with bullets snarling around his head that he had time to reflect on what a bad idea returning to Mictlán actually was.

  TWENTY

  By the time they reached the Hacienda Mictlán, supper was being laid on the table. Don Prospero had not yet returned from the city, so Doña Josefa occupied the foot of the long table in solitary raven splendor while little Casimiro presided at its head. “Grandpapa must have stopped for comida with Uncle ’Stasio,” said the boy, wielding his silver fish-fork with adult adeptness over M’sieu Guillenormand’s milk-poached trout. “I wonder if Aunt Bella came out with him this time. She doesn’t often—she likes Mexico City, and seeing her friends, and riding in the Alameda.”

  “It is not polite to speculate about other people in their absence, Casimiro,” stated Doña Josefa repressively. “Gossip is abominable in God’s sight.”

  January did not consider it especially polite to correct a child in front of company, but said nothing. Casimiro’s thin cheeks colored and he looked at his plate. Apparently it was also considered improper for the young girls of the family to sup with company in the absence of the head of the household, for neither Valentina, Paloma, nor Doña Filomena was present. Out of consideration for Josefa’s sensibilities—and sheer exhaustion from the day’s adventures—Hannibal was also among the missing, leaving January and Rose to the undiluted company of Doña Josefa and Father Ramiro in the long, echoing, candle-lit sala.

  January said to Casimiro, “Then perhaps you can tell me about Doña Pequeña instead. Is she well and happy?”

  The child brightened at once. “Yes, Señor, she enjoys excellent health. She caught a mouse yesterday and killed it, and laid it on Aunt Valla’s bed. Aunt Valla wasn’t pleased one bit. But it shows that Pequeña is a real dog. . . .”

  “Did someone say she was not?” asked Rose, raising her brows. Like January, she was outfitted in borrowed garments, having expected to return to Mexico City after her excursion through the countryside. Being much the same height and thinness of Doña Josefa, she was now clothed in a borrowed gown of black silk bombazine, a color flattering to few women of African descent.

  January wasn’t sure who had been the original owner of the short jacket, finely-tucked shirt, and gray Mexican trousers he wore, but they fit him no better than his footman’s livery had earlier in the week.

  Casimiro’s brow clouded. “Uncle ’Stasio said that little dogs like Pequeña were bred that way by the heathen Indians long ago, to be killed for the gods so that useful dogs could live. He says he will give me real dogs—hunting dogs—as if Pequeña were no good, and should be killed just because she’s little.”

  “Well, I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s what your uncle can have meant,” said January gently, though it flashed across his mind how Anastasio had looked on the ragged jailbirds in Santa Anna’s Army and had said, If men must die, it’s better that they be scum like that. “Because Pequeña isn’t useless, you know. She killed a mouse, didn’t she? And she keeps your Aunt Valentina from being lonely, and makes you and your sister happy. I don’t believe God frowns upon happiness when it is innocent, do you, Doña Josefa?”

  The widow stiffened, black-mitted fingers touching the stem of a blue-and-yellow Venetian goblet full of water. With apparent effort she admitted, “No. But we must distrust anything, even seemingly innocent pleasures, that divides our minds from contemplation of Christ’s suffering, which He undertook for our sake.”

  “Of course.” January inclined his head.

  “Uncle ’Stasio’s dogs are from England. They pick up the birds after Uncle ’Stasio shoots them. Uncle ’Stasio took in Uncle Fernando’s dogs, too, when Uncle Fernando died. . . .” The child glanced uncertainly at his mother, as if unsure whether the topic was forbidden, but Doña Josefa seemed to be praying, her eyes closed and her hands folded before the untouched fragment of white bread that lay on her plate. On the other side of the table, beside Rose, Father Ramiro’s piggy black eyes shifted hungrily back and forth between January’s poulet bonne femme and soufflés des volailles and Doña Josefa’s bread. The priest was careful, January noticed, not to consume his own bread a mouthful more quickly than she.

  “I drew a picture of Uncle Fernando’s hunting-dogs to lay on the offrenda for when he comes back. Would you like to see it?”

  When the servants came to clear away the supper dishes, Casimiro took the smallest of the branches of candles from the table and led January and Rose to the far end of the sala, where the offrenda stood in a niche surrounded by more candles still. Vases of coxcombs and marigolds stood on the little table among the burning lights, and the petals of the marigolds thickly strewed the table-top in a carpet of gold and red. Instead of the rather disrespectful little images January had seen on Consuela’s altar—crudely-fashioned skeletons in the robes of priests and nuns, and one skeletal pope—the de Castellón altar was chastely decked with saints, around whose feet were arranged apples, oranges, persimmons, grapes—the brilliant colors of life.

  “No bananas or chirimoya, I notice,” remarked Rose under her breath in French, and January grinned. Evidently the ban on foods eaten by the Indians held true here as well. The candies were European, too: dainty marzipan, sugared orange-peel, candied walnuts, and marrons glacées. No candied yucca or camote or cut lengths of cane dripping sweet green sap, no peanuts, and certainly no tobacco. As in Consuela’s humbler shrine, objects loved and used by the dead were mingled in these offerings: miniatures of men and women, a worn shawl smelling of aromatics and camphor, a child’s shoes. January looked for Uncle Fernando in his uniform of crimson and gold but saw no picture of him—only half a dozen lead soldiers uniformed in Prussian white. Surely Werther had not taken the only one? He did see a nun’s beautifully-painted shield—Maria-Exaltación’s? The hawk-nosed young man whose mouth and chin so resembled Doña Josefa’s must be Don Damiano in his youth; the boy beside him, in a startlingly macabre panel framed in gold, so much resembled Casimiro that it had to be Damiano’s son, Luis, laid out in his coffin in a suit of white satin, his head decorated—in bizarre reminiscence of Pilar’s—with a little jeweled crown.

  What did Casimiro think when he saw that?

  Casimiro’s dark eyes, so like his mother’s, were repeated over and over in the other portraits and miniatures, hanging on the sides of the flower-wreathed niche: stiff gentlemen in starched ruffs that framed their heads like dinner-plates, chilly-eyed dames in the lush somber velvets of Hapsburg Spain. Other aunts in veils and crowns pointed significantly to their shields. A smoke-and-age-blackened uncle gestured with a crucifix and raised a warning finger to three shadowy Indians, bowed in chains at his feet, and folded next to it, Casimiro’s childish drawing of two fiercely slavering hounds.

  For three hundred years they had ruled here like kings, January reflected. Off-hand he could not think of one European dynasty that had held power for so long.

  “Casimiro,” reproved Doña Josefa, “you must not bore your guest with indio superstitions. Señor Enero is an educated man. He knows that ghosts do not really come back from Purgatory to visit their families. With the joys of Heaven before them, they would not put off that blessed Union with God by so much as a moment, by taking that moment away from the rightful expiation of their sins. You must forgive my son, Señor. And my father, whose whim it is to have the altar decked in this way. Try as I will to keep my brainless sister Isabella from prattling to my children of superstitions such as these, she is as much a child as they. It is she who sends over the candies, which are no good for children and only teach them superstition in their turn.”

  As Doña Josefa swept from the room with her tame priest in tow, Casimiro lingered daringly to whisper to January, “Hannibal told me . . .” He looked uncertain, and distressed at the mention of Hannibal’s name. “Before—before my uncle died, Hannibal told me a story about how the damned in Hell all g
et Sundays off, like peasants in the village; he said he read it in a holy book. Also in another book it said that Judas Iscariot gets to leave Hell on Easter Day, and sit weeping on a rock in the Atlantic Ocean with sea-gulls making messes on him, and that a ship full of Irish monks saw him there when they first sailed to America. . . . Is that true?”

  “I’ve certainly read the same book,” smiled January. “Whether it’s true or not—who knows? It was a saint who wrote the book, St. Brendan of Ireland.”

  The boy sighed, his dark eyes troubled in the light of the flickering candle-branch he held. “Hannibal . . . he didn’t really poison Uncle Fernando, did he? Everyone says he did, but . . . he wouldn’t. Not Hannibal.”

  “As far as I can learn, he did not,” said January gently, squatting on his haunches to speak to the child, whose dark head barely came up to his elbow. “I think that your uncle ate poison by accident. But I need to find proof of that in order for Hannibal to go free. And that’s going to be very difficult. And in the meantime, everyone will go on thinking that he did it, and he’ll be in danger until he can get away.”

  “That’s hard,” said the boy gravely. “Sometimes I get blamed for taking things that I didn’t take, like Aunt Valentina’s sapphire earrings. And killing someone is worse. That policeman came from the city and took Hannibal away this morning—I watched from over the wall, though Mother said I shouldn’t. My mother will not let me speak to him now, or listen to him play music. He was teaching me the violin a little, and to say funny things in Latin. I didn’t know you could be funny in Latin. Can I help you find the proof you need?”

  “I don’t think so,” said January. “But I’ll tell him that you believe in his innocence, and that will help him. And with luck, I’ll find the proof I need tonight.”

  When January reached the kitchen, lamplight glowing amber through the thatch and wattled walls, Sacripant Guillenormand was gently sponging and rinsing the delicate glass goblets in a bowl of warm water and shouting to Lupe and Yannamaria to be careful scouring out the pots. That the two women had scoured these same pots nightly for twenty years did not seem to cross his mind, for as January entered the firelit shelter from the dove-colored twilight of the yard, the chef was reminding them just how much it had cost to bring the vessels over from France, and how much French scouring-chalk cost per barrel.

  “We are not made of money here, no matter what the Don may say! Those pots are irreplaceable, for who brings in such wares nowadays, eh? Tell me that! Get out of here, you lazy limb of Satan. . . . Not you, M’sieu Janvier . . .”

  And indeed, January was crowded out of the doorway by Padre Ramiro. “The Doña has sent for coffee and cakes for her guests. . . .”

  “You mean you want coffee and cakes, eh? To sit in your little cell after delivering a sermon on abstinence, cramming your face! Glutton!”

  “Atheist!” The priest loaded up a plate with the delicate cream-filled profiteroles at which Doña Josefa had turned up her nose after supper. “Were things as they should be still in this land, the Inquisition would look after you!”

  “Were things as they should be in this land,” retorted the Frenchman, “idlers like you would be turned out of their parishes and put to do honest work! Alas,” he added sadly as the priest flounced from the big ramshackle shelter, “that even Napoleon himself could not remedy the evil of the Church. What may I do for you, my friend? I trust the dinner was to your satisfaction?”

  His good will, however, turned to outraged horror at the mere suggestion that young Don Fernando might have met his fate as a result of eating any morsel that originated in Guillenormand’s kitchen.

  “Ridiculous! Preposterous! You women,” he added sharply, switching back to Spanish—he and January had spoken French. “Get out of here! Leave the pots—but mind you, come back for them when we’re done here! I’ll send Joaquin. . . . That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard!”

  He swung back around to January, florid face blotchy in the sweltering glare of the open hearth. “A what-do-you-call-it—a sensitivity? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

  “It is not unheard-of in medical circles. . . .”

  “It is unheard-of in any medical circles I’ve ever encountered!” The chef slammed his washrag down onto the table. “Medical circles, pah! Like those piss-scryers Fernando and Anastasio brought in, as if Don Prospero isn’t perfectly capable of running this manor until he dies of old age as his father did! And his father, I’m told, used to paint himself blue with yellow stripes and run about naked with feathers in his hair, and what of it? Nothing in this kitchen was the slightest bit unwholesome. . . .”

  “Of course not! It’s only that if young Fernando had such a sensitivity to something that grew only here in the New World—to chilis, for instance, or to chocolate—”

  “There has never been a chili in this kitchen! Nor any other fragment of Indian fare!” Veins throbbed in the chef’s thick neck. “How dare you imply that I would sully the true art of cookery with . . . with peasant make-dos? With old women’s pottages of beans and corn-moulds? Next you will accuse me of putting salamanders in the etouffé, or of serving up tortillas! I said get out, you drunken bitch!” he added as Doña Filomena tiptoed through the door. “Get that little trollop’s cocoa when I’m finished! Every morsel, every crumb”—he swung back and stabbed a finger at January, his voice rising in hysterical rage—“that comes into this kitchen is the true stuff of real cookery, and you cannot suggest otherwise! That meal by which you claim that I—I, Sacripant Guillenormand!—poisoned my master’s son . . .”

  “M’sieu Guillenormand, I never claimed anything of the kind!”

  “That is exactly what it amounts to, with this couillonnade of ‘morbid sensitivities’! ‘Morbid sensitivities’ forsooth! Poisoning is what you speak of! That supper contained not one bay-leaf, not one drop, not one marrow-bone of substance that could not have passed at the finest tables in France! Certainly nothing that the boy had not been eating all his life in Prussia! A ratatouille jardinière with garlic, eh? Quel horreur! Beef à la Maréchale and veal à la broche, removed with a rice casserole and poulard à la crème . . . Deadly, no doubt! I wonder the whole company did not turn purple and expire in their chairs! Côtelettes de mouton and an etouffé of quail raised on this very hacienda, with leeks, onions, and truffles from Don Anastasio’s beds . . . Ah, I strangle just thinking of such a thing!”

  He flung out his arms, causing Father Ramiro, who had stolen silently in and was refilling a plate with slabs of cold pigeon pie, to nearly drop his spoils as he bolted out the door.

  “When a man dies of poisoning, or a child for that matter, it is because someone who wished to profit from their death gave them poison, not because of any ‘morbid sensitivity’! You are deceived, M’sieu! Deceived by your worthless opium-eating friend as you were deceived all those years ago by some murdering heartless mother’s false tears! Yes, what is it?”

  “Señor Guillenormand,” panted Bonifacio the footman, framed in the cobalt darkness of the doorway, “it is Don Prospero! He has come, he and Don Anastasio, and Don Rafael is with them, and Don Rafael’s mother! He is demanding supper. . . .”

  “A thousand curses! Take that tray—and the dishes—where is that lout Joaquin? Build up the fire again. . . . I pity you, M’sieu,” he said, turning back to January and leveling a ladle at him as if it were a sword. “But I tell you, you shall not accuse Sacripant Guillenormand of bringing harm to any man, and you shall not accuse Sacripant Guillenormand of allowing the smallest fragment of Indian food to find its filthy way into his kitchen! Now, get out, all of you!” he bellowed at the scurrying servants. “Bring wood! Fetch the Brie from the cooling-well! Bring the cream, and you—!” He stabbed the ladle again at January. “You get away from me with your insane ravings and never come into my kitchen again!”

  “Did you expect anything different?” Hannibal turned his head on his pillow and regarded January with philosophical weariness in the si
ngle candle’s light. He still wore the dust-covered riding-clothes he’d had on during the rescue that morning—and presumably for his escape attempt twenty-four hours earlier—being too exhausted even to take them off; his untouched supper-tray still sat on the windowsill, where a servant had left it some hours ago. In the corredor outside, the voices of servants brushed past the open door like fluffs of evening breeze, candles flickering as they hurried to make up a room for Don Anastasio. Horses stamped, saddles creaked in the courtyard below, and Don Prospero’s harsh voice could be heard querulously demanding why supper was not ready to be laid upon the table—what did servants do here all day?

  A passing glance through the door of January’s own room had showed him Rose still absent, presumably in the women’s court, trading convent reminiscences with Doña Josefa. The dust-smeared and muddy garments he’d worn, both to Sir Henry’s party the previous night and later during the excursion through the gully, had been taken away to be cleaned. He thought he heard Sancho’s voice, but glancing through the door at those dim, hurrying shapes, it was hard to determine: the footman and Cristobál might easily have made their way to the hacienda and be bedding down among the vaqueros by the corrals.

  The morning would be soon enough to know.

  Hannibal sighed and made a move to get up, then sank back again. The red welts left on his wrists by the rawhide ropes had turned to bruises. Deep lines had settled into the corners of his eyes: he’d once told January he remembered, at the age of twelve, everyone talking about the Peace of Amiens and the hope that Napoleon would be content with the Consulship of France. This would make him a few years older than January’s forty-two; tonight he looked a decade beyond that.

  “Whether or not chilis or chirimoya or deep-fried ant-larvae found their way into the ratatouille, Guillenormand will be the last to admit the possibility, especially if the will is ever discovered. Which is what he was seeking in the study, if that was him Tuesday night . . . I don’t think Josefa has the strength to throw me against the wall like that, not to mention that a work so indelicate as L’École des Filles would undoubtedly have left tell-tale scorch-marks on her sanctified fingertips. And in any case, far better to put the blame on a worthless opium-eater whom no one will ever miss and whose life for the past twenty years has been to all intents and purposes a waste of air and water. Like poor little Mademoiselle Pequeña, I am not of the useful breed of dog.”