She was on her feet waiting for him, having heard his voice on the other side of the door. Furious, as he expected.
“What were you thinking, you imbecile! Do me the favor of letting me out of here this instant!”
She did not seem to look unwell despite the contrast between this modest room and her magenta gown, crowned by her magnificent black hair that reached halfway down her back.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible for a few days. Then I’ll take you to Cádiz and put you on a ship back to Havana.”
“Don’t even think it!”
“To come here from Cuba was complete madness, Señora Gorostiza. I beg you to reconsider your behavior and to stay calm for a few days. Your departure will be arranged before too long.”
“Be aware that I have no intention of leaving this city until I have recovered every last inch of land that belongs to me. So you can stop sending me Indians and quacks, and let’s settle our business once and for all.”
Mauro took a deep breath, trying to retain his composure.
“There is nothing to settle. Everything took place as your husband and I agreed. It is all aboveboard and ratified in legal deeds. Your efforts to recover what you have lost make no sense, Señora. Think it over and accept it.”
She stared straight at him with those sly black eyes of hers. From her mouth issued a sound like a rattlesnake, as though a bitter, dry cough had got stuck somewhere inside her.
“You don’t understand a thing, Larrea; not a thing.”
He raised his hands in a weary gesture.
“Truly, I understand nothing. Neither about your schemes nor what you are trying to achieve. And by now I couldn’t care less. The only thing I know is that you have no reason to be here.”
“I need to see Soledad.”
“Are you referring to Señora Claydon?”
“To my husband’s cousin, who is the cause of all this.”
What was the point of continuing with her ravings? There was no sense to them.
“I don’t believe she shares your interest; I advise you to forget her.”
Now she did laugh out loud, with a sarcastic ring to her voice.
“Or has she made a fool of you, too? Is that it?”
Stay calm, brother, Mauro told himself. Don’t play along with her; don’t let her ensnare you.
“Be aware that I intend to report you to the authorities.”
“If you need anything, let my servant know.”
“And that I will inform my brother of your behavior.”
“Try to rest and conserve your energy: as you know, crossing the Atlantic can be stormy.”
Seeing Mauro Larrea turn and head for the door with the intention of leaving her locked in, her indignation flared into anger, and she tried to fling herself on him. To stop him, slap him, show him her fury. He protected himself with an outstretched arm.
“Be careful,” he warned her sternly. “That’s enough.”
“I want to see Soledad!” she screamed.
He grasped the doorknob as if he had not heard her.
“I’ll be back when I can.”
“After being at the root of all my husband’s woes, won’t that evil woman even come to speak with me?”
He did not know what to make of this disconcerting statement; nor did he think it worthwhile bothering to outline the details that contradicted her accusation. That it was her own machinations that had robbed Sol’s daughters of their future inheritance, for example; that it was her ruses that had led her cousin Luis Montalvo, a poor, wretched, worn-out devil, to abandon the world he knew to go to die in a foreign land. Soledad had more to reproach her with than the other way around. But Mauro had no wish to go into all that, either.
“I think you are becoming delirious, Señora; you need to get more rest,” he advised her, with one foot in the corridor.
“You’re not going to get free of me.”
“Please be so good as to behave.”
Her last shriek echoed through the quickly closed door, accompanied by the sound of her fist beating furiously on the wood.
“You are a contemptible man, Larrea! The son of a whore, a . . . a . . .”
He did not even hear her final insults; his mind was already racing with other matters.
Two thousand six hundred sovereigns for a cabin, or one thousand seven hundred and fifty on board deck: that was what it was going to cost him to send the Gorostiza woman back to Havana. And with the slave alongside her, it would be twice that much. He had just been informed of this in a travel bureau on Calle Algarve, which he had left cursing his ill luck at not only having to work out how to get rid of her troublesome presence but at this unexpected bite out of his meager capital.
Five days later the mailboat Reina de los Angeles was to set sail from Cádiz. He was given a leaflet showing that the ship would call at Las Palmas, San Juan de Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Santiago de Cuba. Four or five weeks at sea, maybe six, depending as you know on the winds, they told him. He was so anxious to be rid of her that he was tempted to reserve the passages there and then, but reason prevailed. Wait, compadre, at least a day, he convinced himself. See what happens today, and tomorrow morning you can settle things, he told himself. From that point on, until the intentions of the people from Madrid became clear, what he had wanted to avoid at all costs would become inevitable: dipping into the money from his daughter’s mother-in-law, not in order to invest it in profitable schemes as she had wished, but to enable him to stay afloat.
“Mauro?”
All the apparently solid reasoning and calculations piling up in his mind came crashing down like a house of cards. All it took was the presence of Sol Montalvo behind him in Plaza de la Yerba, walking gracefully toward him under the bare trees and the leaden skies of that gloomy autumn morning, in her lavender-colored cloak and her inquiring look as she headed for Calle Francos.
“Have you seen her?”
He gave her a brief summary, leaving out some of the details, as they stood facing each other in the middle of the tiny square filled with the hustle and bustle of open stores and people going about their daily business.
“At any rate, I think I should like to talk to her. After all, she is my cousin’s wife.”
“You’d do better to avoid it.”
She shook her head.
“There’s something I need to know.”
He went straight to the point.
“What?”
“About Luisito.” She looked down at the ground, strewn with dirty, trampled leaves, then said in a low voice: “What his last days were like. What happened when he met Gustavo again.”
All around them the morning was filled with activity. Souls crossing on the way to Plaza de los Plateros or Plaza del Arenal; bodies stepping out of the way of carriages, greeting one another, and stopping for a few moments to ask after the health of a relative or to complain about the bad weather. Two distinguished-looking ladies came toward them, bursting the invisible bubble of melancholy she had momentarily become enveloped in. Soledad my dear, what a pleasure to see you. How are your daughters? How is Edward? I can’t tell you how sorry I am about the loss of Luis; you must tell us when the funeral is. We’ll see each other in the Alcázar at the Fernández de Villavicencio’s mansion, won’t we? Delighted to meet you, Señor Larrea. A pleasure. Until tonight, then, a pleasure.
“Nothing good would come of it, believe me,” said Mauro, returning to their conversation as soon as the two ladies were out of sight.
Now it was an extremely respectable-looking elderly gentleman who interrupted them. Fresh greetings, fresh condolences, a flirtatious remark. Until tonight, my dear. An honor, Señor Larrea.
Perhaps these encounters were not so much inconvenient interruptions as warning signs: Do not continue in that direction. The thought crossed the miner’s mind, and i
t seemed as though that was how Soledad saw it, too, because she immediately changed the topic of conversation and her tone.
“Manuel has told me you’ve been invited to the ball. He doesn’t know if he will be coming, as he has some medical appointments in Cádiz. How do you intend to get there?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said frankly.
“Come to my house, then we can go together in my carriage.”
Two seconds silence. Three.
“What about your husband?”
“He’s still away.”
He knew she was lying. Now that he was finally aware of the wine merchant’s age and many complications, he surmised that it would be hard for him to remain away from his wife’s side.
And she knew he was aware of this. But neither of them gave the game away.
“I shall be there, then, if you consider it convenient, dressed to the hilt as an opulent returned Indiano.”
Soledad’s expression changed at last, and he felt a kind of ridiculous, childish satisfaction at having succeeded in making her smile despite all the storm clouds. What a dolt! bellowed Andrade. Or Mauro’s conscience. Why don’t you two leave me in peace? Get out of here!
“And so that you won’t ever again reproach me for living like a savage, you should also know that I have engaged servants.”
“That’s good.”
“An elderly couple who have already worked for your family.”
“Angustias and Simón? Why, what a coincidence. And are you pleased with them? Angustias was the daughter of Paca, my grandparents’ old cook. Both of them were expert.”
“That’s what she boasts. Today in fact she was going to make me—”
She interrupted him gaily: “You don’t mean to say that Angustias is going to cook her legendary rabbit with garlic for you?”
He was on the point of asking her how the devil she knew that, when a sudden flash of intuition silenced him. Of course she knew, you idiot! Why wouldn’t she? Sol Claydon knew that the servant couple would come to his new residence because she herself had made sure of it: she was the one who had decided they should help restore her family’s dilapidated mansion so that he could live there with a modicum of comfort; she was the one who told Angustias to prepare him hot food and wash his clothes, and who made sure that the old woman would get on with Santos Huesos. Soledad Montalvo knew all this and more because, for the first time in his life, this experienced, determined miner, toughened by a thousand battles, had come up against a woman who, looking after her own interests and needs, was always three steps ahead of him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The afternoon threatened rain.
“Santos!”
His cry was still echoing around the walls when Mauro remembered there was no point calling him: his servant was still on guard outside Carola Gorostiza’s room.
He had just been searching in one of his trunks for an umbrella he could not find. Any other day he would not have minded getting wet if the skies did open, but not this particular one. His presence at the Alcázar palace accompanying Sol Claydon was going to seem strange enough as it was without him turning up soaking wet.
He thought about asking Angustias or Simón and was on the way to the kitchen, when he changed his mind. Perhaps there might be an umbrella up in one of the attics. One of Little Runt’s or someone else’s. Santos Huesos and he had already been up there to bring down the few pieces of furniture and other household objects they now lived among, from the old woolen mattresses they slept on to the clay candlesticks holding the tapers that lit their gloomy nights. Maybe he would find it; it cost nothing to try.
He rummaged through the old wardrobes and chests of drawers in rooms where the faded brown walls showed the passage of time: a lack of warmth and whitewash. Still visible amid the flaking paint were dirty handprints, stains, small holes, and hundreds of patches of damp; there were even some clumsy drawings scribbled with a piece of charcoal or a sharp instrument: the end of a key, the edge of a stone. God is salvation, read some letters in a spot that must once have been the head of a bed. “Mother,” said another inscription in a clumsy, almost illegible hand. At the end of a low passageway, behind the door to a room where a pair of cribs and a wooden horse with a moth-eaten mane were sleeping the sleep of the just, Mauro discovered another drawing. At a height somewhere between his elbow and shoulder, and about two hand spans in size. A heart.
Some instinct led him to crouch down and take a closer look: like an animal that is not pursuing any prey but intuitively stretches out its neck and pricks up its ears when its sense of smell detects a possible quarry nearby. Perhaps it was the hunch that a little maid enamored of a young, skinny laborer would never have drawn this symbol with such precision; perhaps it was the refined, incongruous substance used to paint it: ink or possibly even oil paint. For whatever reason, Mauro bent to peer as closely as possible.
The heart was pierced by an arrow, wounded by an adolescent love. At both ends of the arrow he could make out some letters. The capitals were big and firmly drawn, the smaller letters neat and concise. The name that the letters formed to the left, above the feathers of the arrow, began with a G. To the right, by the tip, the other name began with an S. G for Gustavo, S for Soledad.
He scarcely had time to take in this innocent but disturbing discovery when the sound of Angustias shouting from down below made him straighten up. She was calling out to him anxiously.
“I couldn’t find you anywhere, master! How could I possibly imagine you’d be poking around up there!” she said with relief when she saw him come running down the stairs from the least respectable part of the mansion.
She did not even give him the chance to ask why she was looking for him so urgently.
“There’s a man at the entrance for you,” she announced. “It looks as if he came in a hurry, but yours truly here can’t understand a word he’s saying, and Simón has gone off to the blacksmith’s to look for a picklock, so please could you come, Don Mauro and see what the poor fellow wants?”
Something must have happened in Calle Francos, he thought as he rushed along the gallery and leapt down the splendid marble staircase. The Gorostiza woman must have been up to mischief. Santos Huesos didn’t want to leave her on her own, and so he’s sent somebody to warn me.
But the person waiting for him came from another direction.
“Señor Larrea come Claydon house immediately please” was how Palmer the butler greeted him in execrable Spanish. “Milord and milady have problem. Doctor Ysasi not be in town. You come quick.”
Larrea frowned. Milady, the man had said. And milord as well. As he had suspected, Edward Claydon was not away on a business trip but was under the same roof as his wife.
“What is the problem, Palmer?”
“Son of milord here.”
So Alan Claydon had appeared. That made matters even more complicated.
As they walked along, the butler briefly explained the situation in a few almost incomprehensible words. “They held in bedroom of Señor Claydon. Son not allow out. Door locked inside. Friends of son wait study.”
They went in by the back entrance, through the gateway he and Soledad had ridden through after she, with the excuse of showing him La Templanza, had somehow inveigled him into her life in a way there was no going back on now. In the kitchen they came across a matronly-looking cook and two maids, all three of them more English than five o’clock tea. They all looked worried and ill at ease.
The background to the current situation needed no explanation: Soledad’s stepson had decided not to send representatives but to act on his own behalf. And not exactly in a friendly fashion. This being the case, Mauro Larrea was faced with two options. The first was to wait patiently for everything to sort itself out on its own. To wait until Alan Claydon, son of the master of the house’s first marriage, decided of his own free
will to stop harassing his father and his wife, opened the door to the room on the upper floor in which he was keeping the couple locked, and, together with the two friends he had probably arrived with from Gibraltar, climbed back into his carriage and left along the road by which he had come. And then, once all this was resolved—and as always behind the back of her husband—he could offer Sol a handkerchief to dry any tears she might have shed. Or a shoulder on which to comfort her dismay.
That was the first and probably the more sensible solution.
The second was quite different. Doubtless a far less rational one. Much riskier. This was the one he chose.
“Number 27, Calle Francos. Santos Huesos. Go and tell him to come at once.”
This order was the first of his decisions and was aimed at one of the maids. The next instruction was to the butler.
“Explain exactly where they are and in what situation.”
“Top floor. Bedroom. Son locked door inside. Two windows back courtyard. Son arrive before noon, mistress out. Came back near one clock, son not allow her leave. No food. No drink. Nothing for milord. Few word apart shout milady. Also blows.”
“Show me the windows.”
They both walked stealthily out into the backyard, while the two women stayed in the kitchen. Staying close to the walls to avoid being seen from above, they looked up at the openings on the upper floors. Almost all of them were quite small and barred, incongruous, one would have thought, with the place where the prosperous owner of this prosperous residence chose to sleep. But this was no time to wonder why Edward Claydon occupied one of these doubtless less-than-opulent back rooms. Nor to wonder whether or not his wife shared the same sheets with him each night, although this was the next question that presented itself unbidden in Larrea’s mind. Concentrate, he told himself as he continued to gaze up at the second floor of the house. Study it closely and work out how on earth you’re going to manage to get up there.
“Where does that one lead to?” he asked, pointing to a small window without bars. It was narrow but big enough for him to clamber through. If he could only climb up to it.