The Turquoise Mask

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  At the other end of the room the voices rose a little, but I paid no attention.

  How had Emanuella felt about her cousin, the dwarf? Had she loved her, been kind to her? Or had she suffered because of her? How much had Paul Stewart uncovered in the research he had done in Spain? I wanted to dip into his book and read his account of these two women who had existed so far back on my family tree.

  Now the voices intruded, rising in heat, and I became aware that Eleanor was the subject of their contention. When I glanced in their direction, I saw that the two men had come around the corner of the wing and stood in full view. They had forgotten me, but Clarita had not. She remained a little apart, staring down the room in my direction as though she willed me to turn away, commanded me not to listen. I began to listen with full intent.

  “We can’t stay together any longer!” Gavin cried. “It’s impossible. Eleanor doesn’t wish it and neither do I!”

  “Eleanor doesn’t know what she wants,” Juan protested.

  “Do you think that’s true of me?”

  “I think you have a responsibility.”

  “Not any longer. Eleanor wants to be free of all restraint. She doesn’t want the trust fund you’ve set up for her. She wants the money itself in her own hands. But if you give it to her—”

  “I will not give it to her,” the old man said. “You know in your heart you cannot leave her. But if your marriage breaks up I will change my will and leave everything to my other granddaughter, Amanda.”

  His voice was strong, assured, and it carried with no effort at concealment. It carried to the open doorway where Eleanor had suddenly appeared, her face white, her eyes blazing. She had heard it all, and I thought in sudden alarm—or did I imagine it?—that there was a look of the dwarf about her, for all her golden perfection as contrasted with that dark, stunted figure.

  If she saw me, she gave no sign, but rushed past me down the long room, to stand defiantly before Juan Cordova, a tall, slender figure, with her hair falling over her shoulders.

  I was suddenly aware of Gavin, his attention not upon Eleanor, but upon me—challenging me in some way, any warmth toward me gone from his face, so there was only a waiting coldness there. But this was no time for me to probe whatever he expected. Eleanor held stage center.

  “You can’t do this, Grandfather!” she cried. “I won’t stay with Gavin. I hate him! I’m the one you should think of now—not Amanda. I’m the one you must take care of.”

  Juan moved toward her, his expression proud and unrelenting. “You will always be taken care of—modestly. But if you leave Gavin, everything will go to Amanda.”

  She flung herself upon him, pounding clenched fists against his chest so that for an instant he staggered under the impact. Then he righted himself and held her to him, stilled her beating hands, soothing her until she quieted. I was stunned by this outpouring of emotion. In the face of it any words from me would have been feeble indeed. I stayed where I was in silence.

  “Perhaps you’ve only a little while to live!” Eleanor wailed, clinging to him with a childlike appeal I could not believe was real. “And when you’re gone there will be no one to look after me. There will be only what you leave to take care of me.”

  He spoke to her in soft Spanish and there was the sound of endearment in his tone, yet I felt sure that he promised her nothing. Gavin walked past them stony-faced, and came in my direction. There was no kindness in him.

  “Why haven’t you said something to stop this?” he demanded. “I thought you were the one who wanted nothing from him. But of course if you stand by and do nothing, everything will fall into your hands, won’t it? The store, the money—everything CORDOVA stands for.”

  I felt outrage rising in me and a deep wounding as well, though this I thrust aside and would not accept. In no way had I meant to be used like this by my grandfather. Gavin was wildly unfair, and I wouldn’t be driven away or stopped in my real purpose because of his words or because of Juan Cordova’s machinations.

  “Go away, Amanda,” Gavin said in the same cold fury. “Leave Santa Fe!”

  I remembered wryly the time when I had wondered if he might not seem more human if he ever exploded. Now the explosion had come and it was deadly chill—inhuman.

  Nevertheless, I stood up to him. “I wouldn’t have come here in the first place if I’d known I’d be used like this. But now I won’t be driven away.”

  My words seemed to echo into a sudden silence. For a moment the chapel-like hush lay upon the room and Doña Emanuella looked mockingly down from her place on the wall. Then Gavin gave me a last look and went out the door. When he had gone, Juan put Eleanor from him and came quickly toward me down the room, his stick tapping on the tiles, but used very little for support. Excitement had given him strength.

  “Of course you will not go away, Amanda. You are the one I can trust. There is just a little time left for me, and you must stay with me.”

  I couldn’t answer him warmly. What he had done was unforgivable. “I’ve told you why I mean to stay,” I said. “I won’t leave until I’ve found out the truth about what happened to my mother. I think it’s beginning to come back to me, a little at a time, and for me nothing else matters.”

  He gave me a long, searching look and nodded gravely. Then he went past me out the door. There was much to be said, but this was not the time to say it.

  Eleanor came running from the back of the gallery but she didn’t follow him immediately. She paused instead to stare up at the painting behind me.

  “That one doesn’t belong to me,” she said of Emanuella. “She is all yours—and your mother’s. It’s the other one I belong to. The wild, mad one. Perhaps you’d better remember that.”

  She went past me out of the room and left an echoing silence behind her. The lighted gallery was quiet, yet the atmosphere of awe and worship which Juan Cordova so carefully cultivated was gone, and the air seemed to pulse with the unrestrained emotion that had flowed through it with Eleanor’s passing. Here, tonight, something had been unleashed that would not quickly be restrained again. Something of it had touched all of us. I felt shaken by its surging—and more than a little alarmed.

  I had forgotten Clarita, until she moved at the back of the gallery, and came toward me with her air of calm arrogance.

  “It has begun again,” she said as she came opposite me. “I have been waiting, and it has begun.”

  “What has begun?” I demanded.

  Dark eyes were strangely expressionless in her pale face. “It is the death march. If you are very still you can hear the footsteps. They are the footsteps of Inés, coming down to us over the centuries. I have heard them before.” She came close to me. “I have heard them along the hillside, when your mother died. You had better save yourself, Amanda.”

  She was a little mad too—like all of them—and I stepped abruptly away from her.

  “Go back to the house,” she directed. “Go quickly through the dark. I will lock up here.”

  I had no desire to linger in her company, and I went out the door into the cool Santa Fe night. Stars seemed very bright, and the dim patio lamp could not rival them. Ahead of me the house glowed with lights, and I walked toward them, hurrying. It was a night in which to slip swiftly past clumps of shadow and regain as quickly as possible the safety of walls and rooms, of warm color and lighted lamps.

  No one was in sight when I stepped indoors, though I could hear Eleanor’s voice sounding from our grandfather’s study. What they had to say to each other, I did not care. None of his plans concerned me, because they were not acceptable to me, no matter what Gavin believed. But as I went up to my room, the sense of wounding returned, and once more I thrust it away. I wouldn’t be caught by such a trap again. He was easy to hate, but he would also be more than easy to like. To love? The thought made me angry with myself, and I dismissed it at once. I was a stronger woman than that.

  When I was in my room, I turned on a lamp beside the shabby armchair,
picked up the book by Paul Stewart, and settled down to read. Now I wanted to know about Emanuella. And about Doña Inés.

  XII

  The story of Emanuella was a fictionized version—“as based upon …” so there was no telling which parts were fact, and which fiction. Nevertheless, I read eagerly, and some of the time I could not fling off the feeling that I was reading about my mother.

  Paul Stewart had been skillful in bringing his characters out of the past and his scene to life. Emanuella was all fire, completely alive, yet with a certain sweetness about her. Everyone seemed to adore her and she lived on adoration. How much of this was research, I wondered, and how much of it was Paul’s memory of Doroteo?

  But as the narrative continued, a note of brilliant wickedness was introduced into the depiction of the heroine. “Brilliant” in the sense of being vivid, glittering, dramatic—revealing all too clearly that the author himself, if he had been in love with Emanuella-Doroteo, saw her as provocative in her very iniquity. Had this been my mother? I couldn’t believe it, and I could see why the book had angered Juan, and why he did not want Paul to touch the subject of Doroteo again.

  I read on, trying to put the thought of my mother from my mind. The story re-created a lively picture of Philip’s court, with mystery and a sense of horror emerging as Inés stepped onto the scene.

  It had been King Philip’s whim to bring to Madrid from abroad whatever dwarfs he could find to amuse him. Often they were jugglers, tumblers, jesters—a motley, entertaining crew. And the young Velázquez, new to the court under the patronage of King Philip, found them interesting subjects for his early work. There was one dwarf, however, who was no jester, but cousin to a lady of the court, daughter of a nobleman. She was Doña Inés, feared a little, perhaps, but respected, and assigned as lady in waiting to the Infanta. Maria Teresa loved her and made her a playmate and confidante. Perhaps she was more nurse than anything else. For all her stunted size and abnormal appearance she was a woman of dignity and power. Yet Paul drew her in his story as evil, and my flesh crept as he described her fatal devotion to the cousin who was all that she was not.

  It was growing late, but I read on. The house about me was very still and from my high room I could glimpse the distant lights of Los Alamos, and on the other side I could see by starlight the Sangre de Cristos. Santa Fe was asleep, but I was not. Once I put my book aside and went to look down into the dark patio in the direction of the Stewarts’ house. There lights burned, and there was a distant sound of voices. Paul Stewart, who had written these pages, and his wife, Sylvia, who had gone with him to Spain when he was doing his research, must still be up. In the stillness the woman’s voice held a note of disquiet, as though she might be agitated, disputing something.

  I turned back to my reading. Emanuella had married well—a gentleman of Madrid, and her children were healthy and beautiful. But there was always a restlessness upon her. Her husband’s adoration no longer seemed enough. When a younger man, newly come to Philip’s court, began showing more than a little interest in her, she responded. He was handsome, rich, with a wandering eye for women. Emanuella was caught, and Inés, ever watchful, saw what the outcome would be. Her beloved cousin might well risk her marriage, injure the children, whom Inés adored, and the husband who was devoted to her. She counseled Emanuella against this young Don Juan, but of course she was not listened to.

  All through the narrative Paul pointed up the taint of wild blood in the family of the cousins. A trait inherited and perhaps exploited when it was convenient. There were storms of temper on Emanuella’s part and much excitability. Strangely enough, Inés carried this trait of character with more control and dignity than her cousin showed. Only now and then did she explode in wild anger, and then everyone was far more afraid of her than of Emanuella.

  In the face of threat, Doña Inés knew what she must do. While one of the palace guards was sleeping she stole out and took the dagger from his belt. Her hands were small, but powerful, and there was strength in her handling of the weapon. She crept into the room where the young man lay sleeping and stabbed him to death. Only then did her control shatter and she began to scream.

  When a guard rushed into the room, he found her there, screaming, bloodstained—and quite mad. It was when she was imprisoned that Velázquez painted her. Serenity had been restored because she no longer knew or cared who she was, had no knowledge of what she had done. So that calm, misshapen dwarf’s face looked out of the picture, but the eyes were entirely mad.

  I sat with the book open upon my lap, haunted by this tale of horror Paul had written so vividly. It all came too close to home. I had wanted to know what made me, what I had descended from, but I didn’t want to believe my mother was like Emanuella, or that the blood of Inés still flowed in the veins of the Cordovas—as my grandfather was determined to believe. On any family tree there were all possible combinations of traits if you went back far enough. There was madness and sanity, and good and evil. But the affairs Paul Stewart had written about had nothing to do with me.

  Yet, coming unwanted, there was a vivid picture in my mind of Doroteo with a gun in her hand as she went to that place where she would find Kirk Landers. If she had lived, would she have gone mad afterwards, as Inés had done?

  I closed the book sharply, and the slap of sound was startling in my quiet room. The story had put an unwelcome spell upon me—as though I must, after all, believe that murder had been done in the recent past. But I would not accept the murderer, as others had labeled her.

  Then in that silent room, as if it were a living presence, a gift from the past, a new thought occurred to me, and it pointed clearly to Doroteo’s innocence. A woman who went out with a gun in her hand to commit a murder did not take a loved child with her to witness violence. All the doubting fell away from me. How simple, and how clear an answer. Now my course was plainer than ever.

  Someone knew the truth. How was I to find that person and make him talk to me? Whether retribution was done at this late date or not, I didn’t care a great deal. But I wanted to know the truth as Doroteo’s daughter, and I wanted her immediate family to know.

  Paul’s book could tell me nothing more, and I put it aside, picked up my sketchbook and pencil and began to sketch idly. I was drawing the tree again, shaping it as I remembered it from recent reality—not from my dream. The branches no longer seemed grotesque, but merely ancient, and the leaves were dry and dusty from the long drought, but not like bony fingers that reached for me. I began to feel a certain reassurance as my pencil moved on the page and what came to life on paper was only a very old tree—not the embodiment of evil. It soothed me to draw the real tree instead of the one that belonged to nightmare, and I even began to feel a little sleepy. In a moment I would go back to bed, but first I would compare my new sketch with the one I’d made in the clearing.

  I flipped over the pages to the earlier drawing and knew at once that this was a mistake. I should never have looked at my drawing again tonight. In a rush that enveloped me the sense of horror was back. My eyelids felt heavy, the drawing began to swim before my eyes, and the lights in the room began to pulse. Now I was seeking some hazy, dream-laden answer, trying to see with a child’s eyes, trying to return to the terrible past the tree represented, all sense of ease vanishing. Behind my lids weaving pictures moved and there were figures to be seen as if through mist.

  Some sort of struggle was going on and I sensed again the terrifying stain of scarlet spilling across my vision. Before young, frightened eyes, forms struggled together in the mists. Not two people—but three. I could not recognize who they were. But there were shapes that seemed to writhe in some dreadful death dance. There seemed a tremendous noise inside my head—the sounds of nearby blasting, perhaps. Then another explosion. Afterwards, the hillside was quiet and the three were gone. There was only that frightful mask left on the ground beside the small child who watched, weeping, and who reached down to pick it up.

  The fog seemed to swirl
like a blown veil before my eyes. Then light flashed through bright zigzags through the mist—and I was fully awake and in the present. The room about me was bright and quiet. The drawing of the tree lay upon my knees, and now it was only a sketch I had made, a thing without life of its own.

  Yet I remembered something. Three. There had been three. Or was any of this rational? I did not know, but I was seized by the conviction that I was on the right trail. My mother and Kirk had been there—but there had been another one as well. And perhaps it was the third who had fired the gun. The third who had come secretly along the hillside, and escaped as secretly, so that none of those at the picnic above had any realization of his presence. Clarita had lied.

  I couldn’t bear to think of this any longer. I must empty my mind, think of something else—let anything that chose come to me. Absently, I added shading to the foliage of the sketch, then flipped over to another page and let my pencil move as it wished upon the paper. I hardly realized what I was drawing until the shape and look of Gavin’s face began to emerge on the paper. When I saw what I was doing, I stopped at once, but now I couldn’t stop my treacherous thoughts. The face I had drawn would have been the one he’d shown me that afternoon, when I sat beside him on the bench and he had held my hand as kindly as he’d done when I’d been a child. That, I reminded myself, was not his true face. He would fight for Eleanor with her grandfather, and he would shut me out, condemn me for being something I was not. Roughly I scratched over the lines I had drawn, and closed the book, put it aside.

  As I undressed and made ready for bed, I felt emotionally drained. I could no longer think clearly, and I didn’t know what my next move must be. There was no one to whom I could turn for counsel. If I told anyone the thing that had come to me, all of them would be against me. Perhaps even Sylvia. Only Paul would welcome eagerly anything I had to tell. He would use every crumb and give me no counsel worth having. He might even lead me in some wrong direction. What was I to do?