Page 3 of The Familiar

Luzia knew it was all for effect. A man like Víctor de Paredes had a taste for the exotic, and Hualit was even more exciting than the melegueta pepper that arrived in the bellies of his ships. De Paredes’s ships never sank, no matter how rough the seas, and all over the capital people whispered it was a sign of God’s favor. But in this courtyard he crooned that Catalina de Castro de Oro was his good luck charm, and Luzia often wondered if Hualit had managed some enchantment over her patron, for her fortunes were so bound up with his.

“Something’s wrong,” Hualit said once the door had closed. She grabbed Luzia’s chin and stared into her face, her fingers like iron tongs.

“If you will let go of me, I can solve the mystery for you.”

Hualit snorted. “You sound like anger but it’s fear I smell.”

She gestured for Luzia to join her on the low couch in the courtyard’s corner, artfully arranged with embroidered cushions. None of it was strictly Moorish, but it was all decadent enough to give De Paredes the feeling of the forbidden. And the setting suited Hualit well. Everything about her was soft and lush, her honeyed skin, her luminous eyes. Luzia often wished she’d been born with a bare scrap of her aunt’s good looks, but Hualit would only cluck her tongue and say, “You’re not wise enough for beauty, Luzia. You’d spend it like coin.”

Hualit’s maid Ana set wine and a plate of olives and dates on the low table, and gave Luzia’s shoulder a quick pat as if she were a favored pet. She was the only servant her aunt kept, a stout woman who wore her silver hair in three looping braids down her back. She loved playing cards and chewing anise seeds, and most important, she never gossiped.

“How do you know you can trust her?” Luzia asked when the maid had gone.

“She’s had a thousand opportunities to betray me and never taken one. If she’s biding her time, she may well be dead before she seizes her chance.” Hualit poured wine into tiny jade cups and said, “Why ask after all this time? And why do you look so worried? There’s a divot between your brows like you took a spade to your forehead.”

“Let me stay,” Luzia said without meaning to. Autumn had begun and the leaves of the grapevines that twined around the courtyard’s columns had turned a luminous orange, dropping away in places to reveal the twisting gray braids of the stalks, the fruit long since harvested for drying. “I can’t bear to go back to that house.” It was bad enough to fear and resent Doña Valentina, but pitying her, witnessing her lonely vigil at her window, waiting for a husband who was barely a husband, was unbearable.

“Your father would never forgive me for corrupting your virtue.”

Luzia scowled. “I’ll leave Casa Ordoño with my back ruined and my knees knobbled and my hands rough as sand, but at least my precious virtue will be intact.”

Hualit only laughed. “Precisely.”

Luzia was tempted to smash the jade cup on the tiles. But the wine tasted too good and the half hour spent eating dates and listening to Hualit’s stories from court was too dear. When Luzia’s mother had died and the wobble in their lives had become a quake, she’d hoped Hualit might let her work in her home, but her father’s mind had still been orderly enough for him to forbid it. “If you work in a sinner’s house it will be the end of your virtue. You will never have a husband or a home of your own.”

Luzia was hard-pressed to know how she would make any kind of match when she spent all her hours toiling away at Casa Ordoño and seeing to Doña Valentina’s demands. When she ventured out to the market, she found herself looking into the face of every young man—and the old ones too. But she’d gotten too good at being unseen. She walked unnoticed past the butchers and fishmongers and farmers. At well past twenty, she had never had a suitor, never so much as kissed someone, barring a drunk who had seized her at the market and tried to grind his stubbled face against hers before she planted a kick to his shin.

She had heard and seen plenty, men and women on their knees in narrow alleys, skirts up, trousers down; veiled beauties in their coaches at the Prado, fine ladies and whores indistinguishable in the darkness; the coarse talk that floated out of the stalls in the plaza. What makes a good woman? a priest had opined to a group of performers on their way into one of the mentideros. She might have skill with a needle, said a young actor, playing to the crowd. Or a talent for conversation, he went on. Or she might be able to hold a man’s cock inside her and squeeze until he sees God, he shouted, and the crowd burst into laughter while the priest bellowed that they would all burn in hell.

When Don Marius’s father had sickened, Luzia had been brought to the old man’s house to help bathe him. They’d taken her to his bedchamber and she’d stood with her back against the closed door, clutching her basin full of water, the soap, the towel, whispering every prayer she knew, certain that they’d left her alone with a dead man. She’d watched his desiccated body until she’d seen his narrow chest rise and fall. But when she’d tried to bathe him, he’d seized her hand and clamped it to his cock. It felt like a mouse in her hand, soft-bodied and pulsing. He was strong, but she’d used her other hand to cover his nose and mouth, until he let her go. She kept her hand pressed to his face until his rheumy eyes started to bulge. “I am going to finish bathing you now, Don Esteban, and you will stay still or I will snap your sad little root off at the base.” He’d been docile after that. He’d seemed almost pleased.

That was the extent of her experience with men’s bodies.

“There must be more,” she said, setting down her wine and closing her eyes. “Why teach me to read if I’m meant to live a life without books? Why teach me Latin when a parrot would have more opportunity to speak it?”

“Only God knows what we’re meant for,” Hualit said. “Now, have another date. They’re good for sour stomachs and self-pity.”

CHAPTER 3

When the scullion girl went off to church, Doña Valentina took out her little silver fork. The gown in her lap was not her favorite. But it was one of only three she owned. The new styles were simple and austere. They were meant to emphasize a small waist—which she still had as she’d never borne children. They were also meant to be ornamented with strings of pearls and jewels—which she did not have. She used the two tines to catch at the thread and pulled, making a tear, right along the seam. Something easy to repair if she was wrong.

Valentina didn’t really know why she did it, but she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the bread, the cook’s blank face, the scullion shrinking away from the table. If it was a joke, they hadn’t seemed amused by it. The cook had looked resentful and distracted as she always did. But the kitchen girl, Luzia, she had looked frightened.

Valentina had heard rumors of illusions and miracles at court. Lucrecia de León had dreams of the future, the disgraced prophet Piedrola claimed he spoke to angels, and the Mendozas were said to have a holy sage in their employ who could move objects with his mind. Of course, Valentina had never seen any of these things. She had never received an invitation to La Casilla, let alone the Alcázar, and she never would. Unless.

But her unless stank of desperation, and as she hunched over the seam of her skirt, tearing away threads like a bird picking at worms, she felt almost sick with disgust for herself. That shame was a shambling thing behind her, chasing her onward, driving her to do her worst.

As soon as Luzia returned from church, Valentina descended to the kitchen. She shouted at the cook and claimed there were weevils in the rice, which she spilled over the floor so that the scullion had to sweep it all up, crawling on her knees to find the stray grains. She demanded water for a bath when she’d had one only the day before, and when some of it sloshed on the floor, she slapped Luzia hard enough across the face to send her stumbling.

Valentina felt breathless, frightened, as if she’d slipped her reins, as if she’d gone suddenly mad. There was nothing she might not do.

“Bring me my gown,” she snarled. “Be quick about it.” She half expected to find fangs had burst through her gums, claws at the ends of her fingertips. In the glass of the window, she studied the pale moon of her face with wonder and almost forgot to watch Luzia, pulling the black velvet from the trunk, finding the tear, hesitating. Valentina watched her glance up, making sure Valentina’s back was to her, and then she heard the faintest, softest humming noise.

Luzia shook out the skirt and brought it to her mistress. Valentina’s hands were trembling as she took it.

The tear was gone.

Luzia knew she’d made a horrible mistake as soon as she looked into Doña Valentina’s eyes. They were wild this evening, the unsteady blue of troubled waters.