I glanced over my shoulder at the doorway. It yawned before me, crowned by black glyphs. Whispers twined through the shadows beyond it.
Not whispers, I corrected myself firmly. The creak of hundred-year-old wood. The wind in the drying leaves of the oaks in the side garden beyond the kitchen. Nothing more.
“Paloma,” I began.
“Yes, Do?a Beatriz?” She turned and stood at attention, chin dipped submissively, gaze fixed on the floor somewhere near my shoes. Paloma was a mirror image of her mother, but very little like Ana Luisa in how she behaved around me.
“Are you busy this morning?” When she replied no, I asked her to accompany me as I walked the rooms of the house. “I come from a busy house with a very large family,” I said. Never mind that the very large family I referenced barely treated me as a part of it, relegating me to the scalding steam of the laundry whenever it suited Tía Fernanda’s needs or temper. “I dislike how quiet the house is and wish for company while I work.”
“Very well, Do?a Beatriz,” Paloma said. There was something in her tone that hinted this was not at all an unusual request to her.
I gestured to the doorway.
“Do you know what the meaning of those marks is?”
“I couldn’t tell you, do?a.” But as she spoke, Paloma’s eyes were still on the floor. I could not tell whether she was telling the truth or not.
I took a quick trip upstairs for paper and a charcoal pencil and a shawl. The echoes of my footsteps followed me as I returned. Aside from the kitchen, the patrón’s suite, and the parlor turned dining room where Rodolfo and I generally ate, the house was utterly empty; even the smaller rooms felt at once cavernous and stifling as I stood in them, imagining how they could be filled, thinking out loud to Paloma about how they would be scrubbed. I took notes all the while.
Green parlor. Will be green again. Fresh coat of paint. Re-brick the fireplace.
Dining room. Scrub the soot from above; add a railing to the balcony for safety. Wrought iron to match the doors. Colors: gold upholstery to match the dark wood table.
Halls: rugs. For the damn echoing.
Paloma giggled softly as I wrote this. I glanced at her. She was scanning the list over my shoulder as I placed the paper on the wall to write.
“You read and write?” I asked.
Paloma met my eyes. Now that she did not turn her face away from me, I noted how expressive it was, how the slim brows that framed her face could speak volumes before she even parted her lips.
She murmured something neither affirmative nor negative.
I raised my brows. Tía Fernanda’s servants were not literate; I did not expect this of any member of the staff besides the foreman.
“Wonderful,” I said. I meant it. I handed the paper and pencil to Paloma. “Will you write down what I say, then?”
She did not meet my gaze but took the writing instruments silently and did as instructed. We worked together until an hour to midday, when Paloma said she needed to help Ana Luisa prepare lunch for the tlachiqueros and the farm workers.
I stepped out of the last room we surveyed, then slowed near the foot of the staircase. A steep dip in temperature washed over me. Though I did not know why, my eye was drawn to the boarded-up entrance to the north wing.
It was damaged, Rodolfo said. Earthquake, or perhaps water damage. If he had asked the foreman José Mendoza to look into it, clearly it had not been done.
How odd. I put the pencil and paper down on the steps, resolved to investigate the damage myself. The first board came off easily. I tossed it to the side. It struck the flagstones; the sound echoed in the foyer as I took off another, and another, until the passage was open. I collected my pencil and paper and walked forward.
Though sunlight still shone outside the house, the clamminess in this narrow hall was thick as mist. It weighed heavily on my chest, akin to physical pressure. Perhaps there was a well nearby, or an underground spring.
I reached out to brush my fingertips against the wall, expecting them to come away damp. They didn’t. The wall was cool to the touch, but dry. Dry and cold as clay that had been left out in the chill of a winter night. Temperatures had an odd way of shifting in this house when I least expected them to. Our house in the capital was built of wood, and the house in Cuernavaca was stone; I was unlearned in the ways of stucco, of thick walls and slim windows.
Perhaps I could convert this part of the house into storage. It would be perfect for storing things that needed to remain cold. Wax in the summer. Maybe even ice, if that luxury were ever to be had in Apan. I smiled, half laughing at myself in a vain attempt to alleviate the clammy pressure in my chest. I had not seen ice in a home in years. I would have to write to Rodolfo to ask if there was even ice in the capital.
I placed the paper on the hall wall next to me and began to write. North wing: naturally cold storerooms. Check temperatures again in the late aftern—
The wall shifted beneath my weight.
I lurched backward so I wouldn’t fall.
Flakes of stucco went flying as I did. I hit the solidness of the opposite wall with a thud, cracking my skull against it.
Stars speckled my vision; I hissed in pain. My headache, which had faded over the last hour or so, roared back with a vengeance.
Last night had made me overly jumpy. Well done, Beatriz, I mocked myself. As easily spooked as a colt.
There was a dent in the wall before me. Bits of stucco had indeed crumbled away, like dry icing from a stale cake.
I frowned. If the wall before me was as solid as the wall behind me, that sort of dent should only be possible with the force of a battering ram, not a girl of twenty leaning against it to write.
But if it wasn’t as solid as the wall behind me? Gritting my teeth against the pain in my head, I stepped forward to the wall to investigate. While every wall in the house appeared to be made of the solid indigenous building materials, bricks of mixed mud and agave fiber and clay that had withstood centuries of earthquakes and floods, this wall was different.
I brushed my fingers over ruined stucco. It came apart at my touch, flaking like dandruff. It couldn’t be stucco. Or even good-quality paint. I took a piece and sniffed it. It was lime whitewash, covering stacked bricks.
How odd. Had part of the house been walled up hastily? I frowned at the wall. The hall was narrower than most, and dim, but I could make out the outline of bricks. San Isidro was many things, but shoddily built was not one of them. It was solid to its heart.
I set down my paper and pencil and tested one of the bricks.
It came away from the wall in my hands. I shrank a step back, surprised and somewhat afraid that the whole thing might come crashing down.