Page 52 of The Familiar

“I didn’t choose it for myself. It was given to me. A little joke by a De Paredes, a warning to others of my true nature.” He held the jar up to the candle on her dressing table, and through the murky glass, Luzia saw the shape of the scorpion dance back from the heat of the flame. “But I have come to like it. Scorpions live long lives. And choose when to use their sting. They pick their moment.”

Luzia was still thinking of how close she’d come to death. “They meant you to be blamed. If the scorpion was found.”

“Yes.” He headed for the door.

“You’re … you’re leaving?”

“I need to speak to Don Víctor. We’ll arrange for guards and inform Pérez. He’ll want to know someone is plotting murder beneath his roof. Besides himself.” He turned once more as he slipped past the door, framed by darkness, the jar gleaming in his hand. “Now we know each other. Let’s see what we may accomplish with fewer lies between us.”

CHAPTER 26

Morning brought a strange kind of silence to the house. The previous night, Luzia and Concha had looked through every drawer, shaken out every bit of linen, beaten every gown and knocked shoes and slippers and boxes and bottles against the floor. They’d found no other monsters lying in wait and they’d pulled the trundle out from beneath the high bed so Concha could sleep beside her. In the morning, Concha went to empty the chamber pots and heat fresh water, and Luzia sat for a long while by the window, watching clouds of mist move over the hedges and paths like ghostly party guests. She saw gardeners at their work and horses led by their grooms to some distant stable.

Luzia didn’t know what to do with herself, if she was meant to go find Valentina or Hualit or Santángel. Or if she was meant to wait in her room until someone came to get her. La Casilla was its own country with its own customs and language and no one had bothered to educate her in this.

It was strange to just sit. She’d been working since she was a child, cleaning the house with her mother, tending to her father’s pots and pans and bits of tin, walking the streets by his side, or helping to fix the cart. She had loved that time with him as much as she’d loved quiet hours with her mother spent studying letters and maps, or learning to add and subtract over the household accounts. She had never known a minute or an hour when there wasn’t some task to be done. A dress to be mended, coal to be gathered, bread to be made. Her hands, her feet, her back, always put to use. Not her mind, though. Not for a long time. Her mother’s texts and lessons had vanished, as if they’d passed into death with her.

When she’d gone to work for the Ordoños, she’d trained her thoughts to be in two places, to walk the streets and see to her chores while living in distraction. She had let herself dream of foreign places, soft beds, and yes, if she was honest, of beautiful men. As a child they had been slender and smooth-cheeked heroes on horseback, princes and poets. But she was not a child anymore, and her hopes had been tempered by time and desire that came upon her suddenly, shamefully. The muscles of the butcher’s forearm as he lifted a cleaver, a fine profile, a long-fingered hand coaxing a scorpion into a jar. She wanted and longed to be wanted in return. And now it was as if her working self and her dreaming self were meeting in the quiet of this place, and they had absolutely nothing to talk about.

So Luzia sat, waiting for interruption, for command. She sat at her window and watched the sun rise fully over the rose trees pruned into round tufts, the long rows of hedges. She sought the old dreams of pirate kings and princely courtiers, of unexpected vistas and foreign towns. But she was writing a new adventure now. If she won the torneo, she would become a soldier in a war she didn’t understand. And she had no illusion that victory would mean an end to competition or the danger it presented. Joining the king’s service meant entering a world of politics and rivalries, of endless scheming and status-seeking. She would never be safe.

Good. Her mind would be challenged, her wits sharpened. She might not survive, but at last she would be put to the test. Where is your own fear, Luzia? Hualit had asked her. Luzia didn’t know. Maybe she’d eaten it along with the pomegranate.

She let the rosary move through her hands. She’d examined the beads last night, carved on one side with placid human faces, on the other with skulls, reminders of the inevitability of death. Real garnets. Real ivory. The beads cool against her skin. The woman she was pretending to be should pray, but Luzia knew she was destined for hell because all she could think was that each bead strung together might make a tiny fortune.

Down the hall Don Marius had woken early to take a stroll to the stables and had returned to find chocolate being prepared. He had never had the drink, but his doctor had warned him that it could produce melancholy. He watched it being made with sugar and black pepper and cinnamon and accepted a cup for the sake of appearing cosmopolitan, but then found himself unsure of whether to drink it.

He walked with it untouched back to the rooms that he and Valentina had been given, grand rooms from which he could just see the roofs of the stables if he craned his neck. Valentina was awake but still in bed when he entered, her brownish hair around her shoulders.

“How were the stables?” she asked.

“Remarkable. Pérez’s horses live better than we do.” He looked down at the cup in his hands. “I have brought chocolate.”

To his surprise, she sat up straighter. “Really? What is it like?”

“I … I haven’t tried it yet,” he admitted. “Would you like the first sip?”

He wasn’t prepared for the smile that broke across her face. “Yes!”

Marius perched at the edge of the bed and placed the cup in her reaching hands. He waited as she lifted it to her lips and sipped.

A small laugh escaped her. “It’s strange,” she said, closing her eyes. “Bitter. But … I think I like it.”

She offered it to him and he took a sip. It was strange. He could taste the cinnamon and pepper, and maybe anise too. But he couldn’t name what the chocolate itself tasted of and he wasn’t certain it was to his liking.

“Would you care for some more?” he offered.

“I don’t want to be greedy.”

“I brought it for you,” he lied.

“You did?” There was something in her disbelief he found shaming.

“I thought my wife might enjoy it.”

She smiled again and Marius caught himself preening. It had never occurred to him that his wife could be happy, or that he might be the one to make her happy, or that in doing so he might be made happy in return. Perhaps his doctor was wrong and there was something to this drink of chocolate after all.

In another wing of the house, Quiteria Escárcega was sipping her own cup of chocolate, brought to her by her young lover, Luis Lopez Venegas, and both the drink and the man had begun to bore her. She had hoped the torneo would spark some inspiration, but despite the miraculous feats and feasts, she was struggling, writing a single line, then half a page, then realizing she’d wasted her morning on nothing she could properly use. She glanced at Luis, half-dressed and hoping for attention, and sighed. When she couldn’t write, it was almost always a sign that an affair was at an end, and that meant crying and recriminations and many ballads badly sung. She would wait until they left La Casilla to end this romance, and make what use she could of Luis until then. She had begun to imagine a play set in a kitchen, a cook and a scullion at its center, a satire of the empty life their rich employers led.