At last, he released a slow exhale. “It is a long story. And the sun is rising.”
I took my hand back, my throat tightening with dread. No. I wanted to stay here forever. Couldn’t he speak to still the sun and preserve this peace, this silence? Keep the softness of the gray light from melting away?
But instead I nodded. My thoughts strayed to Rodolfo, asleep in bed, as I rose. Pinpricks stabbed my lower legs; my shoulder was stiff from being pressed against wood for hours. I shook myself out. I had to return before he woke. For if I returned, looking like this, I would have to explain myself.
And that was the last thing I wanted to do. To anyone. Much less my husband.
I stepped out of the pew, the tiles of the chapel aisle cold against my bare soles. Andrés stood and followed, genuflecting and making the sign of the cross as he did so.
Then he turned to me. “I’ll walk with you,” he said, voice even. “I don’t trust her.” The house. “You must tell me when your husband plans to be away in the fields, or with José Mendoza. I will try again to cleanse the house.”
“He’s meant to see Don Teodosio Cervantes of San Cristóbal. He wants to buy land from us.” But that was in three days, maybe more—I could not remember. The conversation of the night before blurred in my mind, punctuated only by the appearance of the woman in gray. Of María Catalina. I shuddered as we stepped through the door of the chapel.
A low mist hung over the courtyard, veiling the house in silken gray. No birds sang; far away, the baying of dogs echoed from elsewhere on the property.
“How will I survive until then?” My words died on the cold cloud of my breath. I still clutched the blanket around me like a shawl, but it was not enough to keep the morning from seeping into my bones.
A warm hand against my upper back. A voice, its rasp soft now, and tender: “I am here.”
I knew he was worried. I knew he was frightened—but if he felt these emotions as powerfully as I did, he did not allow them to show. An aura of calm radiated from him; I basked in it as I would before a roaring fire on a damp night.
Priest and witch, a source of curses and comfort.
Truly, I could not understand him. Truly, I was more grateful for him than I had ever been for a man in my life.
His hand stayed on my back as we retraced my flight from the night before. The walls of San Isidro emerged through the mist, white and impenetrable. He stayed with me as we passed through the arch and crossed the courtyard. We did not speak. A reverent sort of silence hung around the house like shadows. Its attention was elsewhere, and—or so I thought—did not note our arrival. The front door was open. Tendrils of mist curled away from the sound of Andrés’s shoes as he and I walked up the low stone steps.
The darkness inside was gray and quiet. More still than I had ever seen it. But I had long ago learned not to trust appearances as far as Hacienda San Isidro was concerned. I inhaled deeply and squared my shoulders. Andrés’s hand dropped away.
Our eyes met. Wordlessly, I knew this was where he left me. That he could not pass farther, however much I wished him by my side.
I stepped into the house. He did not close the door behind me, but lingered, watching me cross the flagstones solemnly to the stairs. I did not look back. I did not know how long he waited there, nor when he closed the door. He must have stood there for a long moment, listening to the strange, gaping silence of the house. Wondering at it. He must have lingered far longer than anyone else would have, only stepping away from the threshold after heavy minutes. He must have walked slowly through the mist, lost in thought, wondering at the path we had set ourselves on.
For he was still close enough to the house to hear me scream.
25
ANDRéS
Febrero 1821
Two years earlier
WHEN I RETURNED TO Apan from San Isidro, I stole hours away from my duties in the church to walk far from the town, beyond the fields where townspeople grazed their goats and few sheep, into lands that belonged to no hacendado. Far enough that the earth became rockier and the ayacahuite pines grew thick.
I combed the forest floor for herbs Titi used to collect, following a path she and I had trod many times to a stream that flowed down the craggy faces of the hills. Shadows had grown long by the time I found my quarry; complete night draped over the church when at last I returned to the rectory. I mumbled my apologies to Padre Vicente, as I knew there was no need to apologize to Padre Guillermo. The latter shook his head when he saw how soaked I was from the rain, how I smelled of the pines far from town.
“I’m surprised you even made it back,” he said, casting me a knowing look over his crooked reading spectacles. While the leaping firelight made Padre Vicente look like a vision from Judgment Day, it softened the lines of Guillermo’s aging face. We had both grown and changed since the days he would find me asleep beneath the pews of the church, but much had remained the same. He often joked that I was like a green horse, one that couldn’t stop moving and paced deep grooves into its paddock.
“Let him stretch his legs,” he told Vicente. “He was born in the country. He needs the air or he’ll go mad.”
Unlike Padre Vicente, Guillermo saw no problem in turning me loose to celebrate Mass or perform baptisms and other sacraments in the various capillas of the haciendas. Nor did he care about stamping out what he euphemistically called the traditions of the villages, so long as these did not interfere with the people paying the correct levy to be baptized and married as the Church required.
Vicente was different.
I had overheard him confiding in Guillermo that he doubted that a priest with mixed heritage could serve as a civilizing influence on the villagers.
“He is too naive. He simply isn’t capable of being as rational as he needs to be,” he argued. “It’s in his blood.”
Bitterly though I admitted it, in one respect, Vicente was perfectly right about me: I had no gift for civilizing, not as criollos like him defined it. Nor had I ever wished for it.
I slipped away from the other priests; once in the safety of my room, I lit a candle and emptied my small cloth bag of treasures. If brewed correctly, this was the medicine Paloma requested.