Valentina had no handmaid, so it was left to the scullion to help her
undress every night, to douse the candles, wipe down the windows and seal them tight, and set the chamber pots beneath the beds. Usually
Valentina was able to ignore the girl. She was a good enough worker, appropriately drab in her linen and wool, not the type to attract notice. It was one of the reasons Valentina had hired her, though truth be told, she’d not had much choice. The wages she could afford to offer were low, and with so few hands to help, the work was hard.
But this night, as the girl unhooked the back of Valentina’s gown and brushed it down to remove any dust, Valentina asked, “What’s your name?” She must have known the scullion’s name at some point, but had used it too rarely to commit it to memory.
“Luzia, señora,” the girl said without looking up from her work. “And do you have a suitor?”
Luzia shook her head. “No, señora.” “A shame.”
Valentina expected a mumbled yes, señora. Instead, Luzia, folding the dress into its trunk, said, “There are worse things for a woman than being alone.”
I was happier in my mother’s house. The thought came unbidden to Valentina, the grief sudden and overwhelming. But of course there was no greater shame than an unmarried daughter, nothing more useless than a woman without husband and children. Was this girl happy? Valentina wondered, the question forming on her tongue. She clicked her teeth, biting back the words. What did it matter if a servant was happy as long as she did her job?
“You and the cook thought you’d have a laugh at my expense today, didn’t you?”
“No, señora.”
“I know what I saw, Luzia.”
Now the girl looked up, and Valentina was startled to see her eyes were deep brown, nearly black.
“What did you see, señora?” she asked, her dark gaze like a slick river rock. Valentina had the uneasy sense of the two of them alone in this room, of the silence of the house, of her own weakness. She felt as if she’d opened up a cupboard and found a wolf.
“Nothing,” Valentina managed, embarrassed by the catch in her voice. “I saw nothing.” She stood and crossed the room, sense returning as she put
distance between herself and the scullion. “Your gaze is very bold.” “Apologies, señora,” Luzia said, eyes on the floor once again.
“Go,” said Valentina with what she hoped was a careless wave.
But when Luzia had departed, Valentina bolted the door behind her.
Luzia didn’t sleep that night and she took no chances the next day. She waited for the water to boil without singing a word to hasten it. She fetched wood for the fire without speaking a syllable to lighten it. She didn’t
breathe properly until she was hurrying down the street to San Ginés. Doña Valentina had been watching her closely since the incident with the bread. She wasn’t looking for magic; Valentina thought Luzia and the cook were out to get her with some petty prank.
But on the streets, Valentina couldn’t follow. No woman of her station could leave the house without her husband or father or priest to accompany her. Luzia had heard of rich ladies who broke bones toppling from their houses, and one who had even died when she had leaned out too far, trying to get a glimpse of something new. She sometimes played a game with herself when she was tired or her back was aching: Would she prefer to sit on a cushion and embroider all day but only see life bound by a casement?
Or would she prefer to take another walk to the well? When the buckets were empty the answer was easy. Not so much when they were full.
As she passed in front of the house, she felt Doña Valentina’s eyes on her from her high window, but Luzia refused to look up, and walked as fast as she could to San Ginés, the twists and turns of the dusty streets familiar, the mile vanishing beneath her feet.
Luzia’s aunt had told her she must be seen at church every day. But when she entered the dark nave, it was her mother who she thought of, buried
somewhere beneath her feet. Someone was always being buried at San Ginés, the stones lifted, resettled, and dislodged again, the bodies rearranged to make more space.
Blanca Cotado had died in a pauper’s hospital, her corpse paraded through the streets with the other dead so the parish clergy could collect alms to put toward masses said for the departed. Luzia had been ten years old and she’d remembered her mother’s words of instruction, of the true
prayers she was meant to recite, a secret echo in her head. It was a game she and her mother had played, saying one thing and thinking another, the bits and pieces of Hebrew handed down like chipped plates. Luzia didn’t know if God heard her when she prayed in the cool shadows of San Ginés or if He understood the language she spoke. Sometimes that worried her, but today
she had other concerns.
She strolled out through the church’s eastern door and into the neighboring garden with the statue of the Blessed Virgin nursing. She might be Ruth, her father had said, she might be Esther. But her mother came from a long line of learned men, and she whispered, These statues aren’t for us.
Luzia’s feet carried her down a winding side street that led to Plaza de Las Descalzas and then on to a brick house with a grapevine carved over the door. Luzia visited every few weeks, though she would have come every day if she could. She always carried fresh linen in her market basket so she could pretend she was bringing it to one of Hualit’s servants if for some reason she was questioned. But she never was. Luzia knew how to be invisible.
Once she had seen Hualit’s patron, Víctor de Paredes, leaving her aunt’s house. He’d worn black velvet and climbed into an even blacker coach, as if he were vanishing into a well of shadow, a piece of night that refused to
budge in the afternoon sun. To avoid questions for her aunt, she had continued walking past Hualit’s door, pretending she was on her way somewhere, but she hadn’t been able to resist a peek inside the coach. She only glimpsed De Paredes’s boots, and opposite him, bundled into the corner, a slender, sickly young man, his skin smooth and gleaming, his hair the cool white of a dove’s breast, his eyes glittering like oyster shells. When she’d met his pale gaze, she’d had the odd sensation she was lifting out of her shoes, and she’d hurried on, only looping back when she could be
certain the coach had gone. It was still winter, and she’d been surprised to see that the almond trees peeking over the walls on her aunt’s street had
burst into bloom, their branches thick with tufts of trembling white flowers.
Today there were no almond flowers, no inkblot coach sitting in front of the house, and Aunt Hualit opened the door herself, herding her inside with a smile.
Stiff lace and black velvet were the fashion now and Hualit wore them whenever she left the house, when she became Catalina de Castro de Oro, mistress to Víctor de Paredes. But at home, in the elegant courtyard with its burbling fountain, she wore robes of colored silk, her thick black hair snaking around her shoulders in waves scented with bee balm.
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.”
