Chapter 9 - The House of Two Beds
The north bedroom of Villa Bellisima—the room where Sofia had slept during her first winter on the coast—no longer smelled of mothballs and damp horsehair.
It smelled of clean pine shavings, beeswax, and the sharp, clean vinegar of fresh whitewash that Mercedes had spent forty-eight hours applying to the stone walls with a broad horsehair brush.
Two small iron beds, salvaged from the junior officers’ quarters at the naval depot, stood three feet apart on the wide oak floorboards. Between them sat a single low chest made of camphor-wood, its brass hasps polished until they shone like new sovereigns in the pale afternoon sun that had finally broken through the Biscay clouds.
Beatriz sat on the edge of her mattress, her wooden clogs lined up neatly beneath the iron frame, her small fingers working through a tangled hank of blue mending wool.
Valentina lay on her belly on the sea-grass runner between the beds, a small piece of slate propped against her elbows, drawing an enormous two-masted ketch with a piece of soft chalk she had stolen from the harbor-master’s office.
“You drew the rudder wrong,” Beatriz said without looking up from her wool.
“The rudder is fine,” Valentina muttered, her tongue poking out from the left corner of her mouth as she ground the chalk into the slate. “It’s a balanced rudder. Like the ones on the steam launches.”
“A ketch doesn't have a balanced rudder,” Beatriz stated, her crisp, convent-bred French softening slightly around the edges into the harder vowels of the coast. “The water catches the deadwood if the shaft is too far forward. It will kick the tiller out of your hand when the sea gets up behind the stern.”
Valentina stopped drawing.
She looked at her sister.
Then, with an unhurried, deliberate movement, she rubbed her thumb across the chalk lines, smearing the stern of the boat into a gray cloud, and redrew the rudder three inches farther back, right against the skeg.
“Like that?”
“Yes,” Beatriz said, nodding once with the grave, terrifying authority of a nine-year-old surveyor. “Like that it will steer.”
Downstairs, the heavy front doors of the villa stood wide open to the salt breeze.
Diego sat on the low stone parapet of the terrace, his legs dangling over the three-hundred-foot drop to the rocks below. He had a small carborundum stone in his hand, slowly, rhythmically whetting the blade of his rigging knife, the steel producing a clean, chirping whistle that rose and fell with the sound of the breakers.
Mateo came out through the French doors, carrying two stoneware mugs of dark cider that smelled of apples and oak barrels.
He handed one to Diego and sat down on an overturned wicker hamper three paces away, his old joints cracking with the dry report of pine twigs.
“Luciana took the morning train to Paris,” Mateo said, staring out toward the horizon where three gray steamers were trailing long banners of black coal smoke toward the north.
“Did she pay the hotel bill in Bilbao?” Diego asked.
“Her father paid it,” the old man said, chuckling into his cider. “With a draft on a bank in Zurich. They say Don Alberto is selling the town house on the Gran Vía to an insurance company from Madrid. He told the notary he couldn't stand the smell of coal smoke in the mornings.”
Diego tested the edge of the blade against his thumb. A thin line of pale white skin shaved away without a sound.
“And the mother?” Diego asked.
“She died at midnight,” Mateo said, his voice dropping into that flat, respectful silence the sea requires of old men. “The sisters said she didn't call for the priest. She just sat in the chair with her tartan shawl over her knees, looking at the boxwood hedges until her chin fell forward on her chest.”
Diego closed the knife with a sharp, greasy click.
He took a slow drink of the cider, feeling the cold, tart liquor burn the back of his throat. He did not look back at the room on the second floor. He looked down at the rocks where the black dolerite met the white froth of the bar.
Nine years before, he had thought his life had ended on those stones when the winch dog slipped and the lead box was lowered into the sod at Bermeo. He had spent nine years believing that power was a wall you built against the water, that an empire of drydocks and coal registers could keep a man’s heart from freezing when the winter gales came out of the northwest.
He had been wrong.
Power wasn't the wall. Power was the ability to stand in the wash when the wall fell down and not drop the line.
A soft, scuffling sound came from the terrace steps.
Diego didn't turn around.
Valentina and Beatriz appeared side by side at the parapet. They were wearing their matching blue jerseys, their hair blowing wild and dark across their foreheads in the Atlantic breeze.
Valentina held out her hand.
In her small, dirty palm lay a single round pebble of dark basalt, worn completely smooth by three thousand years of surf, its surface speckled with tiny flecks of golden mica that caught the afternoon sun like sparks from a chimney.
“Look,” she said, holding it toward Diego’s knee. “A button.”
Diego looked at the stone.
Then he looked at his daughters.
Two faces. One blood. The gray eyes of the deep water that would outlast the Navarre fleet, outlast the de la Torre banks, and outlast the names carved into the granite crypts on the hill.
Diego reached out his massive, scarred hand and closed his fingers over the pebble.
“It’s not a button, little sparrow,” Diego said softly, pulling both of them toward his knees until their woolen jerseys pressed against his canvas coat.
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“What is it, then?” Beatriz asked, leaning her chin against his forearm.
“It’s ballast,” Diego told them, his voice rising above the roar of the surf as the great tide began to turn toward the shore. “And as long as we have ballast in the hold, the ship doesn't go over.”
