Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil — Chapter no 10

V

A fortnight passes in this pleasant way.

By night, María subjects herself to the viscount’s attention, but by day, she’s left largely to her own devices. Andrés is always busy, though she is never sure with what. Something to do with his lands, and the direction coin is meant to flow, upstream. Honestly, whenever he speaks of work, her mind begins to wander, already planning how she will spend her day once he has gone.

She does, technically, obey her husband. She resists the urge to venture out unchaperoned, instead finding ways to amuse herself within the walls.

She takes her meals in different rooms each day, and learns the details of the house by how the light moves across the walls. Has the furniture rearranged in odd ways to suit her whims, the pieces all returned again by the time Andrés gets home.

And restless as María is, at least she is not alone.

She claims Ysabel for company.

At first, she finds excuses to commandeer her maid’s time, but soon that proves unnecessary. Ysabel is more than happy to pass the day however her mistress sees fit. And so they do.

Sometimes they walk the whole house, arm in arm, as if preening for suitors instead of statues. Other times, they sprawl across sofas and play cards, or dance barefoot on stone floors, taking turns who leads and who follows. The other servants look on, their mouths set in disapproving lines, but María does not care.

One day she dresses Ysabel in her clothes, ignoring the maid’s protests as she fastens the clasp at the collar and binds up her brown hair, pausing only to study the strands that curl along her nape.

When she is done, Ysabel stands, stiff as a doll, in the ornate dress. And then, at last, she gives a careful twirl. “How do I look?”

María stares, because she can, taking in the crimson fabric cinched around

the other girl, revealing the curve of her bosom, the divot of her narrow waist. She is not striking, like María. Her looks are much softer, the edges filed smooth. When María grabs her arm she can feel the skin dimple beneath her fingers, as if the girl is made of down.

Ysabel looks lovely, she looks gentle, but above all, she looks like what

she is.

The illegitimate daughter of a count.

They have not spoken of it—they do not need to. It is clear enough, in the shape of Ysabel’s face, the slope of her cheek, the roundness of her eye.

After all, María is confronted by these features every day; their like stares back from every painting, and even if she weren’t surrounded by members of the Olivares clan, she has looked into Andrés’s face enough times to see the resemblance. To understand that not every one of the count’s children earns a portrait on the family walls.

“Well?” presses Ysabel, her voice a nervous flutter.

“You look lovely,” says María, “and uncomfortable.” And Ysabel smiles and admits that it is far too hot for all these layers, holds out her buttoned wrists, and waits to be set free.

Andrés sags on top of her when he is done.

He rolls over, but makes no move to rise, and María clutches the ruby pendant and waits, thinking, with dread, that he means to spend the night there, in her bed. His body is a quickly cooling thing, plunging toward sleep, while María lies, wide awake, beside him, a sore pulse between her legs, and decides that if she must be kept awake, then he will too. So she rolls toward him.

“What does it feel like?” she wonders aloud.

Andrés mutters something into the pillow, but it hardly constitutes an answer.

“What does it feel like?” she asks again. “When you reach your peak?”

Andrés twists his head on the pillow, brow furrowing at the question.

“Why do you ask such things?” And perhaps the scolding in his voice is meant to cow her. But it doesn’t.

María props herself on an elbow. “I am by nature curious. Besides,” she adds, “I want to know my husband better.”

He sighs, looks around the room as if for refuge. Finding none, at last he says, “It is a building pressure. And then, a release.”

María hums in thought. “And it seems to bring you pleasure. Yes?”

“Of course.”

“Well then,” she says, sitting up. “What of mine?”

Andrés looks at her as if she’s grown a second head. “Your pleasure?” he asks, dismayed.

“Perhaps, if you touched me in other ways,” she ventures, fingers drifting almost absently to the nape of her neck.

The viscount’s dismay hardens then into something like contempt. “This is a sacred act,” he says. “Your pleasure is of no consequence.”

He rises as he speaks, putting distance between them, as if the very conversation is indecent. As if he did not spend the last half hour buried inside her.

“My body was made to expel,” he says. “Yours to receive. And God willing, to grow heirs.”

God willing, thinks María when Andrés is gone, and she is straddling a basin, doing her best to wash away his work.

The next day, María declares that they will have a picnic.

They creep into the kitchen stores, like thieves, Ysabel filling a basket with food and María liberating a tankard of wine from the cellar. Together they flee to the far reaches of the western hall—the days are quickly growing hotter, and the stones there are the last to warm, holding fast to the coolness of the night before.

They take refuge in an alcove, lay a blanket on the floor, and gorge themselves on bread and wine and candied figs. When the bowls are empty and the bounty gone, María lies with her head in the other girl’s lap, loose hair pooling like a molten pillow in the maid’s plain skirts.

A drowsiness rolls over her, her limbs as loose as honey in the heat, as Ysabel runs her fingertips along María’s brow and tells her stories of miracles and saints, the stones around them warming as the sun gets high.

Ysabel has a soft and breathy way of speaking, which gives the impression that she is always on the verge of sharing a secret. It is . . .

intimate. She smiles easily but never quite laughs, never exhales anything above an airy chuckle, and María decides to make it her mission.

To coax a real sound from Ysabel.

At some point, the maid runs out of words.

At some point, a silence settles over them.

At some point, María looks up into Ysabel’s face, studying the freckles in her eyes, the bow of her lips, her gaze lingering so long the maid asks what she is thinking.

And María wants to say that Andrés’s hands have never stirred such heat in her.

Wants to say she is still hungry, though her stomach is full.

That she could stay here for a hundred years. So long as Ysabel stayed, too.

“It is so quiet in the house, during the day.” Her gaze grazes Ysabel’s throat, traces the lines of her collar, the swell of her breasts. “It feels as if the world is empty, except for us.”

She reaches up, as if to cup Ysabel’s face, draw her closer. The maid catches her hand, folds her own fingers over it, and a brief, beautiful heat flares through María, until Ysabel smiles.

“Just wait,” she says, “until you are with child.”

The words are cold water.

The heat inside María dies.

Ysabel continues, unaware. “It will not feel so lonely then,” she says, but all María can feel is the ghostly weight of her husband’s hand on her belly.

Let it be a son.

She swallows hard. She knows, of course, what is expected. She watched Elana’s belly began to round, month over month, her body swelling as her face grew thin.

But María has no wish to be a mother. Not yet.

She has just become a wife.

Surely, she should be allowed to enjoy one station before she’s forced to occupy another.

Ysabel’s fingers are still clasped over hers, but the moment has turned, the alcove too warm, and María tugs free, her hand dropping like a piece of ripened fruit back into her lap.

And then, one day, María wakes to find the house in tumult.

Andrés stands in the courtyard, giving orders as horses clamber through the gates, pulling carts piled high with furniture and finery.

That is how she learns there is to be a feast.

“In your honor, esposa mía,” he says, and María wonders why, if that is true, this is the first she’s hearing of it. But he kisses her hand when he says it, good humor bathing him like sunlight, and as she surveys the mountain of deliveries, her mood improves.

It is to be a grand affair—he has invited nobles, yes, but also subjects, vassals from across his lands, a celebration meant to introduce each and every one to his new wife. María asks what she can do, to help prepare the house, but he insists it is all being handled. She has only to be ready, to welcome their guests. And of course, to receive his parents, when they come from León. He says this last as if it’s no great feat. She will soon discover otherwise.

The Count and Countess Olivares arrive just after noon.

Andrés leads them in, his father at his sleeve and his mother on his arm, the former flushed and the latter looking faint from heat.

María stands at the doors, ready to greet her new in-laws with a practiced smile, if not modest then at least beneficent, but they brush past her as if she is a ghost, take no notice until Andrés steers them back in her direction.

“Mother, Father, allow me to present . . . my wife.”

María hates them instantly.

They speak of her as if she isn’t there, or worse, as if she is, and her presence doesn’t matter.

“Let’s see this commoner you had to have,” declares the count as he takes her in, his gaze like a hand pawing at her dress. She is reminded of the men who passed through Santo Domingo over the years, the way their heads turned as she grew into her looks, but the count’s is brazen, in a way that makes her chafe. “I will admit,” he says, wetting his bottom lip, “there is something to her.”

“Looks fade,” says the countess, who was clearly no great beauty. Her vision is failing now, giving her a permanent squint. “And that hair.”

María looks to her husband, but he does not come to her defense.

“You must be weary, from the ride,” he says, guiding his parents to the stairs. “You should rest before the feast.”

By dusk, the house is full to bursting.

The whole estate has come alive, the rooms all lit by torches, a constant procession of horses pouring through the open gate.

Upstairs, Ysabel brushes María’s hair until it shines, spends the better part of an hour piling and pinning the copper mass above her head, before trapping it beneath a net of pearls. More than once, María tries to make idle chat, but it is clear her maid’s mind is somewhere else. Between the way her fingers tremble as she sets the pins, and the way she hardly answers, María might as well be talking to a pane of glass.

Not even the dress can lift her sinking mood. It is extravagant, expensive, even laid out on the bed, a heap of lush green velvet beside a dozen lengths of white silk ribbon and a variety of jewels. She is bound into it, layer by layer, weighed down with cloth and gem, despite the stifling summer heat.

Ysabel steadies her as she steps into her slippers, studies her from every angle and declares that she looks beautiful in a breathy tone that makes María flush.

And yet, when her husband meets her on the stairs, and says the same, the words stir nothing in her.

Andrés himself is dressed in the crest of his Order, the crimson cross trimmed in white fur, and she is reminded of the day she first saw him, mounted with the caravan, and thought, Yes, thought, That will do.

He takes María’s arm and guides her down, into the crowded hall, and as he leads her through the house, the heads all turn. They stare, outright, the many guests, expressions ranging from the curious to the appraising, the approving to the greedy.

And yet, she thinks darkly, I could not ride my horse.

But of course, she knows, this is different—he is there, her husband, his arm linked with hers as if they are two lengths of chain. She is beautiful, and bound to him, an object on display.

Andrés introduces her, but every time María tries to say hello, or thank you, or simply to make pleasant conversation, his grip tightens on her arm or waist, his meaning clear. She is not there to speak. Only to be seen. He does not even name her in the introductions, calls her only the viscountess, or my wife.

And María quickly comes to understand—the feast has not been thrown in

her honor, but in his.

A tour of victory. A celebration of his conquest.

After that, she lets the names and faces roll over her like water. There is no point in catching hold.

Andrés leads her into the great hall, where tables have been set edge to edge to edge, so that they run like rivers down the length of the room, heaped with serving trays and carafes of wine. At their head a single table waits, raised upon a makeshift step.

There María takes her seat, and Andrés stands, his voice booming through the hall as he welcomes friends and subjects both into his home, invites them all to share this marriage feast.

The chairs scrape back, the guests all sit, and somewhere, musicians begin to play, the cheerful tune tangling with the sound of so many people in one place.

María finds her husband on one side, and his mother on the other.

Andrés takes her hand and lifts his glass, and she thinks he means to toast her, but he is only pausing to admire the color of the wine before he drinks.

The countess, meanwhile, picks at her food, and finds nothing to her liking.

She declares the pheasant overcooked, the sauce too rich. She complains about the music, which is by turns too soft and then too loud, insists the instruments are out of tune.

María spears a piece of meat, and scans the hall.

The servants of the house have been given leave to stay and celebrate, so long as they sit with the vassals, not the lords. It takes her a moment to spot Ysabel, at the far end of the hall. She has changed into a finer dress, and María wonders who helped her close the clasps she couldn’t reach.

They share a look.

And then a bony hand clutches at María’s sleeve.

The countess has run out of other things to hate, and now those beady eyes narrow to slits as she squints not at María’s face, but at the copper hair piled so carefully atop her head, beneath its net of pearls.

“There was a cat that lived in the stable,” says the countess, “when Andrés was young.” She leans in close, too close, till María can see the flecks of food between the woman’s teeth. “It was a decent-looking creature, white and brown, and my youngest son has always had a fondness for such things.

So we left it be. Until one day, when it had ginger kittens. Such an awful shade.”

The countess pauses, and María thinks of leaning in, of lowering her voice, of telling the countess how her son cannot take his eyes off her hair, how he likes to wrap whole lengths around his hand every time he fucks

her.

Instead she asks, “What did you do?”

“What must be done with wretched things. I put them in a sack, and drowned them.”

María knows the words are meant to make her feel small, knows that she should go ahead, pretend to shrink beneath them. But she doesn’t.

“Well then,” she says brightly, “good thing I am not with child yet.” She reaches for her wine. “And when I’m blessed with heirs, I’ll not ask you to bathe them.”

The countess recoils a little, and for the first time all night, María smiles down into her cup.

The next day, she rises late.

The room is dark, the curtains still drawn. How strange, that Ysabel has not come to fling them back and drag her mistress out of bed.

María rubs away the veil of sleep, and dresses in a simple shift and robe, her body sore from hours bound within the heavy dress.

Outside, the only sound is the tread of horses, the rattle of departing carts, and she marvels, as she moves through the house, that all evidence of the feast has been so quickly swept away. The floors have been washed, the windows and doors thrown wide, the house returned to its usual state.

She finds Andrés dining alone, last night’s good humor replaced by a hungover scowl, a tonic at his elbow and a parchment in his hand.

María takes her seat and looks around, relieved that the count and countess are not there. She asks after them, adding, “I do hope they have not fallen ill.”

“Not at all,” he assures her. His father has gone for a walk. His mother prefers to take meals in her room. But he has mistaken her question for concern.

“Rest assured,” he says, “you will see plenty more of them.”

María’s hand tightens on her cup. “Really?”

Andrés sets aside the paper. On it, she sees the red wax seal, the indented

cross. “I have been called to action.”

“How long will you be gone?” she asks, her mood instantly improving.

Andrés tells her that he is not sure, and María nods, already dreaming of her independence, how she will command the house in his absence, how she will pass the days when there is no one to obey.

“Well, do not worry,” she assures him. “I will look after the estate.”

A sound tears through the room, as bright and vicious as a slap. It takes María a moment to understand that it is coming from Andrés himself.

He is laughing.

“You? Stay here?” His amusement bounces off the walls, even once he’s stopped. “Impossible.” He laces his hands in his lap. “You are a woman. A wife. You cannot live alone.”

María feels her hopes go leaden. Her visions turn to stone.

“Where am I to go?” she asks.

He waves his hand, as if the question is a gnat. “To León, of course.”

To León. With the count and countess.

“If I must stay with your parents,” she says, annoyance spreading like cracks, “why can they not stay here?”

Here, where there is space to breathe. Where there are quiet corners to be found. Where there are cherries growing hidden in the grove.

Andrés only shakes his head. “My mother has always enjoyed the city more.”

Having met the countess, it’s hard to imagine her enjoying anything.

María’s mind is still fighting to catch up as he rattles off the details, and it’s obvious he’s had time to think this through, though it’s the first she’s hearing of it.

She is to leave with his parents the next day.

She is to live with them.

To provide them company when he’s away, and be his prize again when he returns.

They will share her, he says happily, as if she is a cup to be passed around.

“Do not make that face, querida. It is the best outcome for everyone.”

Everyone? she thinks, fighting the sudden urge to break something.

She takes a long, slow breath. All is not lost.

“At least I will have Ysabel.”

But her husband shakes his head. “That would be . . . inappropriate.”

María’s stomach lurches.

“The countess doesn’t care for her,” he adds, but there’s more beneath the words. Andrés knows, she is sure, about his father and her maid, the matter of her lineage. “Besides,” he brushes on, “there is no need. My parents have servants of their own. You will have one of them.”

“I don’t want one of them,” she snaps. “I want my own.”

He shrugs and says, “She is already gone.”

María stills, remembering her darkened room. The curtains never drawn.

“One of my vassals took an interest in her at the feast,” he continues absently. “He asked for her hand, and I gave it to him.”

Gave. As if she were a pretty vase. A well-upholstered chair.

“It will be an improvement in her station.”

The room feels like it’s tipping. María presses her hands into the table to steady herself. There is a serving fork balanced on a nearby tray. She wonders how much force it would take to drive the tines into his head.

Instead, she forces her hand to her throat, grasps the ruby pendant there.

“Don’t worry,” he says, as the edges of the jewel cut into her palm, “this will be our home again, once you have given me an heir.”

A bead of blood runs down María’s wrist.

Her husband does not even notice.

OceanofPDF.com