by Clare Clark
When they bid one another goodbye Charlotte held her close for a moment, the silk sling like a wing across her back. Then she smiled and turned away.
In the square, though it was not yet four o’clock, darkness had already begun to gather behind the iron railings and there was a night chill to the air. Maribel walked slowly, her arms tucked inside her muff. It had always pained her to keep secrets from Charlotte, who loved her and whose constancy was unquestioned and unquestioning. It had never occurred to her that Charlotte might have secrets of her own.
31
CHRISTMAS HAD COME AND gone by the time their small expedition arrived in the Val de Verriz. The road, such as it was, brought them to the north end of the oxbow lake and to Ferrixao, the first of the clusters of houses that clung to its shore.
The inn was small and spartan but by then they were accustomed to discomfort. Two days later, Maribel rose before dawn and, with the men, made the uphill trek from the village. It was very cold. The laden mules plodded slowly through the damp mist, their heads down. Wizened leaves clung to their hooves. Maribel held onto the saddle and tried not to hope. Behind her the men walked in silence.
Some hours later the guide stopped to set up camp and brew tea. They were high up by now and, far below them, the pale lake steamed with mist. In the distance Maribel could just make out the roofs of the tiny houses at the southernmost end of the lake, the rough stone jetty with its fishing boats. Meiriz. The convent had been a mile from the village, hidden in a stand of trees. She squinted her eyes, gazing at a dark patch on the hill. Then, shivering, she turned back towards the fire.
She drank her tea quickly, a little distance from the men. They would complete the last two miles of the journey by foot. After half a mile, Maribel wasn’t sure she could go on. The route was steep, leading up through a thick forest of chestnut trees. If there was a path Maribel could not see it. The ground was sodden and spongy with moss, sucking at her feet and leaching water into her boots. The roots of the trees snaked beneath the moss, tripping her up. She longed to stop, to smoke a cigarette, but she had left her pack at the camp and, like a fool, her cigarettes with it.
The guide skirted a thorn bush. Ahead of him the trees opened up to a flat grey sky.
‘Careful,’ he said, raising his hand, and as Maribel caught up with him, she stopped, her damp feet suddenly forgotten, and the breath caught in her throat.
‘There it is,’ he said. They stood together at the lip of the chasm as she gazed in wonder at the vast bowl dug out from the flesh of the mountain, perhaps one-third of a mile across and just as deep. It was as though the landscape had been broken open. Beyond the vertiginous drop a cliff rose like a great wave, its crest frothed with tangled undergrowth. As Maribel stared the low winter sun pierced the clouds, bleaching white stripes on the dingy sheet of the sky. In the sudden light the dark earth of the cliff glowed red, and the pebbles embedded in its surface winked and sparkled.
‘A placer working, as I live and breathe!’ Muñoz, the engineer, cried, the spittle spraying from his mouth, and for the first time in days Maribel did not think to flinch. ‘What engineers the Romans were!’
It had been agreed that Maribel would spend a single night at the camp, before returning to the village the following day. As the guide and Muñoz looked for the easiest way down into the gorge, she stayed at the edge of the chasm, gazing into the vast red mouth of the mine. The ground was cool and muddy and she sat alone, a rug around her shoulders and another spread beneath her, tracing the faint trail of goats up the dizzying cliff, the sun-sharp patterns of quartz like constellations of stars. Later that afternoon Muñoz returned from his investigations and, spittle flying, eagerly pointed out for her the evidence of ancient endeavour, the cuttings and sluices and seams where the Romans would have had their waterways. They would have washed the hillside for gold, he said, using for the most part the same techniques employed by miners nearly two millennia later. Maribel nodded and waited for him to go away. She observed how small trees had contrived to take hold in the narrow steps and fissures of the wall, the roots gripping the red earth like fingers.
The very existence of the mine seemed to her a miracle. In London, as she had busied herself with plans and packing, she had endeavoured not to dwell on the folly of her quest. The frantic flurry of organisation brought with it a kind of euphoria. Standing in the lobby of Cadogan Mansions as Alice supervised the loading of their boxes, she had been filled with a rush of hopefulness, and when Lady Wingate emerged from her flat to complain about the racket, she had seized the old lady by the hands and kissed her firmly on the cheek. The shock on Lady Wingate’s face had made her laugh out loud.
But as she and Alice made their slow way by sea to the port of Vigo and then by train into the interior of Galicia, and the discomforts of their journey eroded her spirits, her confidence had begun, little by little, to seep away. Again and again she had taken her notebook from her pocket so that she might read to herself the words she had copied from Pliny and, with every rereading, the absurdity of their enterprise had struck her more forcefully. Why, when she could have gone anywhere, had she come to this godforsaken place in the middle of winter? Surely only a lunatic would take as the foundation of his business enterprise the musings of a naturalist penned two thousand years before and travel hundreds of miles in pursuit of what even a generous observer would have to concede was little more than a hunch. Try as she might, she could not recover the soaring sensation she had experienced at Inverallich when she had first read the descriptions of Pliny’s Lusitanian gold and known, beyond all doubt, that he wrote of the Val de Verriz.
For the first time in years, she had thought of the old woman sent by Victor to take care of her during the two months she spent at the convent on the lake. With his habitual disregard for accuracy, Victor had described the old woman as a lady’s maid, but though she had never before seen a lady, she was kind. She had lived in Meiriz all her life and had never travelled beyond the Val de Verriz. She told Maribel all the stories her grandmother had told to her: the girl lost in the mountains who had returned to the village as a white bird, the mule that had warned the farmers of an earthquake, the monster with the head of a dragon that lived in the black depths of the lake and who, one night, had crept onto the land and stolen a baby girl from Meiriz to be his wife. The gold mine that had caused kings to weep.
‘I have come in pursuit of a fairy tale,’ Maribel wrote to Edward but she tore the letter up and wrote instead of small things that she knew would amuse him, the daily successes and setbacks of the journey, descriptions of the places they passed through, droll pen-portraits of their fellow passengers. She liked to think of him reading her letters and smiling.
She missed Edward horribly. Every evening after supper, wherever they were, she wrote to him, her own spirits rising a little in her attempt to raise his. Night after night, as Alice sighed in the bed beside hers, she fell asleep thinking of him, of his body against hers, the warmth of his hands on her belly, his breath on her neck, but she did not dream of him. She dreamed of her son. In London it had been easy to pretend that she had forgotten him. There was nothing there of his, nothing to remind her of the curl of his fingers, the downy curve of his tiny skull. In London she had not felt the weight of him in her arms, or, if she had, it had been late at night, when she was alone, or at Charlotte’s where, amid the clamour and jostle of the nursery, no one noticed if she was quiet, holding herself tightly until the steadiness returned.
Spain was different. In Spain the wood in the grates smelled of him. The whitewash on the walls, the iron bedsteads, the crucifixes and the portraits of the Virgin painted on ovals of tin, all of these were his. In the market squares, along the busy quays, in the alleys behind their lodgings, she heard the gull shriek of children’s voices and they were all his. When the boys crowded around them at the staging inns, their dirty hands held out for coins, she could not bear the closeness of them. She had to give money to Alice to make them go awa
y.
Had it not been for Alice she might have abandoned the endeavour altogether. Alice, whose Yorkshire temperament had in London tended to a plain kind of pragmatism, refused from the outset to take to what she balefully referred to as Foreign Parts. Her inability to make herself understood incensed her but, though Maribel attempted to teach her the rudiments of Spanish, she would not learn. She said she had no memory for nonsense. Instead she shouted in English, stubbornly determined that if she only spoke loudly enough, the Spaniards would be shamed into comprehension. Though she remained servant enough to complain only when asked, she wore the perpetual expression of a woman taken to the limits of endurance.
At first Maribel found her attitude disconcerting, even distressing. She had not expected Alice to enjoy the uncomfortable journey any more than she had expected to enjoy it herself, but she realised, long before the ship docked at Vigo, that she had expected to find solace in Alice’s placid imperturbability. On Spanish soil at last and required to kill time before the train to Orense the following morning, she tried to persuade the maid to walk with her in the public garden, to climb the Monte de la Guia to the hermitage at its summit, to sample the little boat-shaped wafers known as barquillas, anything to pass the hours. Alice refused all invitations. Instead she remained closeted in her room on the pretext that the luggage required her attention. At dinner she poked like a child with a stick at the food on her plate.
‘What is that?’ she asked Maribel, the corners of her mouth turned down.
‘Polbo à feira. Octopus. It is a speciality of the region.’
‘I can’t eat that.’
‘Of course you can. It’s delicious.’
Alice poked again at her plate and shuddered.
‘But it – it has suckers,’ she whispered and Maribel had to bury her face in her wine glass so that the maid would not see her laughing.
The next day they travelled to Orense to meet Sr Muñoz. They left word at his hotel but he did not come. Nor did he send a message. Maribel passed the day in low spirits, the conviction that they were set on a fool’s errand stronger in her with every slow hour.
‘He won’t show his face, most likely,’ Alice said, triumphantly glum. ‘Thought better of it, or got a better offer. You can’t take a foreigner’s word for anything.’
At supper that evening, the landlord proposed a stew of pork. Instead Maribel asked for percebes, the goose-necked barnacles considered a great delicacy by Galicians. Alice stared in dismay as the plate of shells was set in front of her.
‘What in the name of heaven is that?’
Maribel did not answer. Instead she picked up one of the shells and extracted from it a leathery tube from which she proceeded to squeeze the flesh of the barnacle. It slithered out in a squirt of salty juices. Maribel picked up the morsel with her fingers and popped it in her mouth.
‘Delicious,’ she said, though the truth was that she had never understood Victor’s passion for percebes. ‘Try one.’
‘I shan’t.’
‘Don’t be such a baby.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Alice said, pushing her plate away.
‘Suit yourself.’
The next day there was still no sign of Sr Muñoz. Alice sucked her cheeks and said nothing. She did not need to, Maribel thought bitterly. She could not have expressed herself more eloquently if she had painted ‘I told you so’ across her forehead. That night Maribel ordered clams. The maid’s pitiful expression when they were brought to the table was not as consoling as Maribel had hoped. While Maribel bent her head to her plate, sucking the flesh from the shells, Alice sat up very straight and ate some of the rough Galician bread. They did not speak.
‘My father raised sheep,’ Alice said at last. ‘In the Dales.’
‘Yes. I believe you told me.’
‘Every spring there’d be lambs rejected by the ewes and it would be our job to feed them with a bottle. The first time my brother Davy was old enough he gave his lamb a name and petted it like a lapdog. He went soft in the head over that creature. At night he’d sneak down and let it in the kitchen so it could sleep in the warm. My sisters and me, we told him not to be foolish, that it was just a lamb like all the others, but he didn’t listen. The day it was slaughtered he took out the box that had our hair ribbons in it and cut them up with a pair of scissors. Scraps of coloured silk all over the floor, there were.’
‘Poor child.’
‘Poor us. It wasn’t our fault we was right.’
They sat for a while in silence. When Alice asked if she might be excused from the table Maribel did not object. She sat alone, doggedly eating her clams. It was not a good dish. The sauce was too salty, the onions bitter and undercooked. When she had finished the landlord brought a greasy custard tart and a tiny cup of strong black coffee. She drank a little wine. When at last she went upstairs she found to her astonishment that Alice had contrived for bathwater to be heated and a bathtub brought to their room. As Maribel soaked, she listened to Alice humming to herself as she put away her clothes.
When yet another day had passed without word from Sr Muñoz, Maribel was almost in despair. They would wait three more days, she decided. If by then he still had not come they would go home. She said nothing to Alice. They took their places at the supper table in silence. As the dish of baked chicken was placed in front of her, Alice’s expression was unreadable. Her hands closed together as though she were about to pray, she looked at the plate. Then, without a word, she took up her fork and began to eat. When the plate was empty she wiped her oily lips on her napkin and remarked with a shake of her head upon the stringiness of the meat. It was the first time that day that Maribel had smiled.
By then she was certain that Sr Muñoz had no intention of coming to Orense. It was a surprise, therefore, the very next morning, to hear that he had indeed arrived in town, and even more of a surprise to discover that he positively brimmed over with enthusiasm. Sr Muñoz was not a young man by any reckoning but the notable modesty of his achievements had served only to amplify his certainty that great things lay ahead. He had a head too large for his body. His hair was astonishingly abund ant and, when he spoke, his tongue fell over his mossy teeth, disbursing sprays of spittle. He had been delayed, he explained, by the process of submitting claims which must be done properly if the profits were to be fairly allocated. As he went on to outline the other preparations he had made for the journey to the Val de Verriz, it was as if not only the existence of the mine was firmly established but the capital needed for its operation were already safely in the bank. Maribel returned to her lodgings more cheerful than she had been since leaving England.
They stayed in Orense only as long as was necessary for Sr Muñoz to complete his preparations. The remainder of the journey to the Val de Verriz was completed by diligence, a rickety, creak-wheeled conveyance pulled by four ill-tempered mules whom, in the absence of a whip, the driver encouraged to greater effort by throwing handfuls of pebbles at their heads. The passengers were a motley lot, for the most part travelling salesmen or priests, which as Maribel wrote to Edward amounted to much the same thing. Crammed into the small wagon like puppies in a sack, they eyed Maribel and Alice with undisguised curiosity and made what space they could around them, as though the women’s sex was something that might be caught.
The two women were obliged to press close together. Maribel grew familiar with the warmth of Alice’s thigh, the dense pad of flesh that cushioned her hip, the faintly musty smell of her shawl. Sometimes when the wind came up and cut through the seams of the wagon, Alice spread the shawl so that it covered both of their laps. Sometimes, exhausted, they slept, their heads on each other’s shoulders. On the last day of their journey, when they were almost at Ferrixao, the diligence hit a rock, dislodging a wheel from its axis. The passengers were hurled sideways, their limbs flailing, striking their heads against the sides of the carriage. When at last the damage was repaired and the journey resumed, Maribel reached beneath the shawl and took Ali
ce’s hand. Alice held it tightly. They travelled in this manner, hand in hand, until the diligence drew to a stop outside the inn that would be their final destination.
Maribel spent a single night with the men at their camp near the mine. Then she returned to Ferrixao. It was another dull day, the damp chill of the Galician winter undercut by a sharp breeze, but, when she reached the village, she could see Alice seated on a rough bench outside the inn. The maid rose as soon as she saw her mistress approaching, gathering her shawl about her shoulders as she hurried towards her.
‘Well?’ she said. She eyed the mules suspiciously, keeping a safe distance. She had refused to ride a mule herself. She said that foreign animals bit. ‘Are we rich?’
Maribel laughed. The mule guide gestured at the inn and she nodded. She watched as he had the boy tether the beasts outside the inn and unload the luggage from the panniers. The innkeeper came out, yawning and rubbing his head. His hair was rumpled, the buttons of his shirt wrongly fastened so that it gaped over his paunch, revealing a strip of thickly furred belly. Beneath his stomach, like a sling, he wore a sash of black fabric, rather stained.
‘I am not sure about rich,’ she said. ‘But we found the mine.’
‘That is good news.’
‘It’s better than good. Muñoz was so overcome I feared he might drown in his own spittle.’
Alice made a face but, beneath the twist of her mouth, Maribel thought she was smiling.
‘They think it will take perhaps a week to collect sufficient samples of the earth. Then we shall take them to the Mining College in Madrid for the assay.’
‘We are stuck in this godforsaken place a week?’
Maribel rolled her eyes good-humouredly. ‘We are and we may as well make the best of it. Don’t tell me you would rather be digging sheep out of the snow in North Yorkshire?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Yorkshire.’
