Page 8 of The Familiar

“Águeda—” Valentina began.

“I go to mass at San Sebastián,” said the cook.

“But—”

She was stopped short by Águeda’s cleaver, cutting through the necks of each bird on the table in a series of decisive thuds that made her point clear: I am a cook and not a chaperone.

“Very well,” Valentina said. “But no dawdling. I expect you back within the hour. I don’t know how you can spend so much time confessing when you have nothing to confess.”

I have many murderous thoughts, Luzia considered saying, but managed to restrain herself. She would never make it to Hualit’s and back in the space of an hour, but she would go to church anyway. If she was kneeling in prayer, she would at least be off her feet.

Luzia was still puzzling over Valentina’s determination to keep her housebound when she rounded the corner that led to San Ginés and a man dressed in velvet and fur appeared.

“Señorita?”

“Keep your coins, señor. I’m a woman of virtue,” she shot back with as much force as she could, grateful for the people coming and going. When a rich man approached a servant, he could want only one thing.

“Señorita Cotado, I am employed at Casa Olmeda and my mistress bade me inquire if you might consider a change in position. She can offer you a far better wage and situation.”

Luzia’s steps slowed. “You’re offering me a job?”

“My mistress is.”

“It is a respectable house?”

“Most respectable.”

“I will consider it,” Luzia said, the words strange in her mouth when all she wanted to do was shout yes.

On the next street, she saw a wagon being loaded up with goods and furniture. Other pieces had been tossed into the street. Luzia wondered if someone had died and then saw the men emptying the house belonged to the Inquisition’s alguacil. As they broke through the lid of a locked trunk with an axe, people hurried past, heads down, eager to be away from the tribunal’s business.

“Books and papers,” one of them said, and they lifted the trunk into the wagon, potential evidence for the trial.

Be thankful, she told herself as she sat and stood and knelt in the narrow pew at San Ginés. Think of Casa Olmeda. A new position with a wealthier family, better wages. Her hand curled around the pearl in her pocket. Maybe God had opened this path for her.

She thought of the books the alguacil’s men had placed in the wagon. What would become of them? And what would become of the person who had collected them, who had laid them carefully in that chest, who might never return home? Torture, exile, a sentence of service on a galley or in a prison, banishment to a convent, death. All frightening. All possible. But there were plenty of bleak fates to be met in Madrid that had nothing to do with the Inquisition.

Blanca Cotado had taken a fall and died in a pauper’s hospital before Luzia and her father could find or claim her. She didn’t want to think of her mother now, to wonder who had washed her body, or if her spirit had rebelled at the prayers spoken over her corpse. Leveyat hamet, her father had whispered as he’d stumbled behind his beloved, as she was carried with the other paupers from the hospital to the church, wrapped in her linen mortaja, like a fly made ready by a spider.

Leveyat hamet. A mitzvah. A mitzvah. He had torn at his shirt, his voice growing louder, until in terror, Luzia had dragged him away. Be silent, she had begged him, berated him, unable to stop her tears. Be silent or they’ll take you too. She’d been too young to really understand what was happening. She only knew that the priests had her mother’s body and that if her father kept speaking someone would hear; the words would travel, a spreading stain, until they reached the ears of the inquisitors.

Luzia shook away the memory. The grief wasn’t nearly as bad as the shame she felt remembering her father cowering against the wall, his eyes shining, his lips still muttering forbidden phrases. I will not end that way. Not like her mother, shoved beneath the stones of this church; not like her father, tossed into an unmarked grave. She reached for the thread of hope she’d had within reach only moments ago.

“Casa Olmeda,” she whispered to herself as she made her way back toward the church door.

A hand slipped around her wrist, the grip hard enough to bruise. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself, milagrera.”

“Hualit?”

Her aunt hissed a warning and yanked her into one of the chapels that was usually locked behind an iron gate. A massive crucifix towered over the altar, the Virgin to the left, John the Baptist to the right, both of them surrounded by a gathering of saints and martyrs. Hualit was in her Catalina de Castro de Oro clothes, cocooned in a long black velvet cloak. A white ruff brushed her pointed chin, her face emerging like a luminous pearl above it, and her thick curly hair had somehow been bound up in a tidy pile.

“You’re the talk of all the hidalgos and caballeros in Madrid,” Hualit whispered furiously. “What madness has entered your body that you would play such a game?”

Luzia yanked her arm free of her aunt’s grip. “I’m trying to make a little money, secure a better position for myself. That’s all. The mistress of Casa Olmeda is offering me employment in her household.”

Hualit snorted a laugh. “That humorless hag? You can do better for yourself than Vitoria Olmeda.”

“Not sleeping on a dirt floor every night would be better, no?”