Page 16

I

León, Spain

The roof is full of odd angles.

Stretches of harsh light, and crevices of shade in which to hide—if one is reckless enough to climb through the open window and brave the slanted pitch.

María has always been reckless.

It is late morning, and she is lounging in the shadowed crux, the tiles warm beneath her bare feet. If she were to lean forward and peer over the side, she would see the street, two floors below.

Sometimes, when she is bored, she lets her bare toes skim the roof’s edge, simply to feel the thrill of it, the chance, however small, of falling.

“María!” calls the countess shrilly. A sound so high and flat it could be mistaken for a bird’s, and so she pretends it is, and makes no move to answer.

Instead, she pulls at a loose thread on her sleeve, winding it slowly around her finger as she imagines the old hag sitting in the rooms below her own, head flung back as she caws upward at the ceiling, her impatience turning more to ire with every moment no one answers.

María has learned to find joy where she can.

It has been nearly two years since she was forced to leave her estate for the crowded quarters of León, and entombed inside her in-laws’ house.

Two years, in which Andrés has come and gone a dozen times.

Two years in which María has only grown more striking, her looks sharpening like a blade against a whetstone, while every time Andrés leaves, he seems to come back rounder, softer, cheeks ruddier with drink.

And where once she was . . . if not truly attracted to her husband, then at least ambivalent—now she finds herself repelled.

By his breath, stale and hot against her neck.

By the clumsy pawing of his hands, and the scrape of his beard.

By the way he still insists on wrapping her hair around his fist as if it is a rope, a rein. More and more she thinks of cutting it off. Her hair. His hand. Depending on the day.

But what disgusts her most of all is the way his gaze goes first and last and always to her stomach.

So far, she has been lucky.

So far—but then, luck has a way of running out. Her breath still catches with relief every time she feels that telltale ache inside her, every time she starts to bleed. The household mourns, and privately, she celebrates.

“María!” shrieks the countess, and this time the sound is closer, accompanied by the tapping of a cane on stone. The countess has clearly left the comfort of her chair and is making her way upstairs.

María sighs, abandoning her hiding place. She climbs back into her rooms, and takes up a bit of sewing right before the countess enters.

“María,” snaps the woman in the doorway. “Did you not hear me calling?”

She looks up from the patch of cloth (she has made ten stitches in as many months, not that the countess knows it). “When? Just now?” She sets the ruse aside and rises. “Apologies, senora mía,” she coos as she goes to the wretched woman. “You must call louder next time.”

The countess scowls. Her vision has continued to grow worse, her eyes reduced to small dark pits from constant squinting.

But just when she thinks the countess truly in the dark, the old woman’s head will swivel, and she’ll comment on the cut or color of María’s dress, her shawl, her posture, her hair.

This last is her obsession.

She finds the color by turns offensive, ugly, and unchaste.

María supposes she’ll know when the woman is truly blind when she fails to comment on it. In the meantime, the countess sucks her teeth whenever María leaves the copper mass uncovered.

“ Modesty, ” she warns, gripping the word as if it were a riding crop.

And so, despite the scorching heat, María reaches for a veil. She takes her time to wrap it round, while the countess shifts impatiently, tapping her cane against the rug.

“You could have sent a maid,” María says, as if she did not hear the pad of footsteps searching every room.

“I did,” answers the countess curtly. “They could not find you.”

“How strange,” she muses, recalling the footsteps, the servants’ frantic searching, as she offers the woman her arm. The brittle fingers wrap like a manacle around her wrist. Andrés may be away for weeks, but his parents have gladly taken up the role of jailers. They keep her shut up in the house.

María is angry. She is annoyed. But most of all, she is achingly bored.

None of the servants know how to play cards, and they are kept too busy to be taught, rushing about as they do to serve the count and countess.

She is visited, now and then, by friends—if one can call them that—young wives and daughters of good standing, chosen for her by her husband’s family.

They come, and circle round her in the courtyard, these dull girls who talk and talk and talk of nothing, or worse, talk only of children, half of them rubbing their rounded bellies as they prattle on.

María suspects the countess chose them for their fertility, as if the condition might prove catching.

The only time she is allowed to venture out is in the company of the countess, escorting the old crone to the only place she truly loves: the weekly market.

“Pick up your feet,” snaps the countess as they reach the stairs. “At this rate, we’ll be left with scraps.”

María thinks, briefly, of letting go, perhaps giving the hag a push, but it is a short flight, only eight steps. Hardly enough to break a neck.

Outside, the city is full and foul, too many people in too little space.

The street beneath her feet is slick with muck and grime, and the air smells of shit and bricks. It makes her long for the swept stone halls of the casona, the olive groves and spacious courtyards.

There are surely nice corners somewhere, tucked like secrets in the massive sprawl, but María has never been given leave to find them. And so, she’s left with this—the crowded, cart-filled road, and the gnarled fingers clutching birdlike at her sleeve, talons leaving dents on her fair skin.

At first, she could not fathom her mother-in-law’s love for such a place, but she soon learned: the Countess Olivares trades in two things, misery and gossip, and the market brings her both.

There is so much she can complain about—the smell, the people, the weather, to name a few—and she attends the market less for the vendors and more for the stories they collect for her.

Have you heard? Did you know? Yes, a second boy. No, a stable hand!

The countess is a crow, collecting shiny bits of talk, and the other birds in town flock to her like magpies with their offerings.

They reach the market, and María leads her husband’s mother between the stalls, describing details the woman can no longer see.

It is a servant’s job, but apparently the servants never do it right, and María craves the air, fetid though it is, so she submits to the role of well-dressed walking stick.

Hardly the life she dreamed of for herself when she scanned the men on horses and tried to choose which one would carry her away.

She slows before a stand of candied fruit, mouth watering at the sight of plums dusted with sugar, but the countess drags her on, insisting that such indulgence will pollute her humors.

And, invariably, the subject turns to her lack of children, and why she is not trying hard enough to please her husband.

“Our seed is strong,” insists the brutal bitch, and so the fault must be with her, and not with Andrés, who is often too drunk to know when he is between María’s legs and not inside her. Three pumps, maybe four, before he spills his seed, strong as it may be, into the sheets.

And she feels nothing but relief.

María feels no maternal urge, no envy when she sees a babe swept up into a mother’s arms. Everyone insists it is her purpose, and it drives her mad, the idea that the shape of her body determines the shape her life must take.

That her beauty is something she is expected to pass on instead of keep.

That anything she makes will thrive while she is left to wither.

And while she cannot stop her husband from coming to her bed, it is one thing to be stormed, and another to be conquered—the difference between a brief invasion and a long-term siege.

“I told you not to marry her.”

The words draw her back. Sometimes the countess, trapped in her fog, mistakes María for her son, and the rantings take on a bolder note.

“A woman like that is the kind you bed, not wed, Andrés. She’s not good stock, and here is your proof. Two years, and her womb is bare. I did warn you, didn’t I? There is something rotten . . .”

María lets the countess ramble on, does nothing to remind the hag that it’s not Andrés’s arm she clings to. No, instead, she imagines sharing her own thoughts.

“Did you know,” she would say brightly, “that sometimes I think of the cemetery plot where you will lie, beneath all that dirt and stone, and it brings me joy. And if by some unlucky spot I ever get with child, I will take them there, and let them frolic on your bones.”

She smiles to herself and leads her mother-in-law down another row.

And that is when María sees the widow.

It is not the same one she met ten years before. It cannot be.

And yet.

María feels her balance tipping forward. A graceless step. She tries to counter it; her body halts so suddenly that the countess hisses at her side. “What has gotten into you?”

María says nothing, only stares.

The widow stands out like a spot of ink before the stall, bundled as she is in the same heavy shades of gray, covered head to toe despite the heat, her face shrouded by a gauzy veil, her hands hidden beneath gloves.

María has not thought of the widow much over the years, and yet, the sight of this uncanny echo here, in the markets of León, leaves her with a strange light-headedness.

For an instant, she is ten again, standing in the copse of trees, the widow’s blue eyes blazing, a gloved hand curled around her wrist. Run home.

Ahead of them, the widow buys nothing. Only passes a parcel to the merchant and withdraws, slipping back into the crowd.

María wants to go after her, but the countess is a weighted chain. She scans the rows.

“Oh,” she says, feigning interest, “these are lovely.” She leads the countess to a table across from the stall, explaining that she’d like to find another scarf. “Something more modest, ” she adds, leaving the woman to pick over the fabric as she turns to face the merchant, bidding him good day.

“There was a woman here just now,” she ventures, once the niceties are done. “Dressed all in gray.”

For a fleeting second, she fears that the figure was not a woman at all, but a ghost, that he will shake his head, and she will be left haunted by the sight.

But thankfully the merchant nods. “The widow, yes.”

“You know her, then?” María brightens, something flaring hot in her for the first time in years. Hope. “I saw her drop a glove and would like to give it back. Do you know where she lives?”

The merchant shakes his head, and the fragile flame gutters, until he adds, “But I know where you can find her.” He points to a narrow road just off the square, explains that the widow owns an apothecary down the lane.

“María?” calls the countess.

“How sad,” the merchant muses, “to be widowed so young, and so devout, to be shrouded still, with her husband gone more than a year.” There is a hungry gleam in his eye. “Surely God is satisfied by now . . .”

“ María, ” snaps the countess, flapping her hand like a pennant in the wind. She excuses herself, returning to the woman’s side.

“I’m right here,” she hisses, forgetting herself a moment as the talons sink into her sleeve. Her heart races as she scans the market for an alley. An escape. The countess begins to talk of going home when María spies a familiar neck of pearls.

“Oh look,” she says, turning the old woman round. “It is Baroness Artiz!”

She steers the countess toward the noblewoman, who has sought refuge in the shade, fanning herself while her maid shops.

“Countess!” says the baroness, rallying. “It has been too long.”

They are just pleasantries. Artiz is a frequent visitor at the Olivares house, and her taste for gossip rivals the countess’s own.

Sure enough, the next words out her mouth are: “Have you heard about senor Riva’s son?”

María lets the baroness take the countess from her, as if she is a parcel.

“No, not his eldest, the middle son. He was to be wed this month, to the Perezes’s first, Sofia—yes, the lovely one, and sweet as well—but he absconded with her sister!”

The countess gasps, and María chooses that moment to interrupt.

“Senora mía,” she says gently. “If you don’t mind, there is a shop nearby I’d like to visit.”

The countess bristles at the interruption. “A shop?”

“An apothecary.”

“Oh dear, are you unwell?” asks the Baroness Artiz, nose twitching as she tries to sniff out news.

“Not at all,” says María quickly. “Only, I have not yet been blessed. ” She touches her stomach when she says it, hopes the countess wants a grandson more than she wants to spite her. The countess purses her lips, and María can see her weighing the two, but it’s Baroness Artiz who tips the scale.

“Come,” she says, hooking the countess’s arm through hers. “I haven’t gotten to the best part. Walk with me, and I will tell you everything. ”

As they stroll away, María feels lighter than she has in years.

Then the countess twists her head and calls out, “Don’t be long!”

The words echo and die without reaching their target.

María is already gone.