Chapter 2 - The Salt on the Glass
The silence that followed was not the respectful quiet of the servants’ hall; it was the suffocating dead zone that precedes a boiler explosion.
Luciana blinked once. The skin around her nostrils pinched white. “What did you say to me?”
“You heard the sentence,” Diego said. He did not raise his voice. He did not look angry. He looked like a surveyor who had just driven a steel pin into a survey line and found a pocket of marsh gas beneath the foundation. “Take your luggage. Take your brother’s legal clerks who have been squatting in my north salon since Tuesday. Take the de la Torre drafts. If your car is still inside the iron gates when the harbor bell strikes eleven, I will have the harbor tugs impound your father’s coal barges at the outer mole.”
“You are out of your mind,” Luciana hissed, the cold marble facade finally splitting down the center. Her voice dropped into a sharp, ugly rasp. “We have an agreement filed with the civil registry in Madrid! My father holds thirty percent of your debt bonds on the drydock facilities in Gijón! You cannot dismiss me like a scullery girl who burned the mutton!”
Diego turned his head.
Standing fifty feet away, half-concealed behind the arched colonnade leading to the billiard room, stood Mateo—sixty-two years old, twenty years at Diego’s right hand, a man who had steered coastal freighters through three general strikes and two civil inquiries without ever blinking his rheumy, salt-bitten eyes.
“Mateo,” Diego called out.
“Boss,” the old man answered, stepping into the light, his wool cardigan pulled tight over a barrel chest.
“The green Daimler in the gravel turn.”
“Aye.”
“Have the boys push it past the main gates. If the chauffeur won't turn the ignition, cut the fuel line and tow it down the hill to the municipal tram depot.”
“Understood.”
“Diego!” Luciana shouted, her hands balling into fists at her sides, her diamonds catching the morning light with a frantic, jittery sparkle. “This is madness! Over what? Over an old button from a naval coat? Over a servant girl’s bastard who crawled through a floor grate?”
Diego did not answer her. He reached down, his massive hand closing around Valentina’s small, cold wrist—not roughly, but with the steady, immovable grip of an iron bollard. He pulled the child gently behind his right heel, placing his own heavy leg between the girl and the woman in the white dress.
“Mercedes,” Diego said, his back still turned to the maid. “Go to the third floor. The master suite. The corner room with the terrace overlooking the breakwater.”
Mercedes stayed on her knees, her hands shaking so violently that her blue calico apron rustled against the marble floor like dry reeds. “Don Diego... please. Don't do this. Let us take the third-class coach to Santander. We can be across the provincial border before dark. I never wanted the button found. She found it in the floorboards near the laundry flues. I swear to you on the bones of my mother, she didn't know what it meant.”
“I know she didn't,” Diego said. “Go upstairs.”
“Diego, if you let that woman take one step onto the private stairs, the deal is dead,” Luciana said, her voice trembling with an exquisite, venomous rage. “The de la Torre name will crush your credit from here to Lisbon. You will be hauling scrap metal in wooden ketches before the winter frost sets in.”
Diego finally looked at her.
His pale gray eyes were entirely empty. There was no hatred in them; there was only the flat, terrifying indifference of the deep shelf where the ocean floor drops into black water.
“My father hauled scrap metal in wooden ketches,” Diego said softly. “He died with thirty-two thousand pesetas in his pocket and six dry docks in his name. Your father sits in a velvet chair in Bilbao and sells paper to men who don't know the difference between ballast and bilge water. Get off my floor, Luciana. While you still have shoes to walk on.”
He didn't wait for her reply. He didn't watch her turn, though she did, her silk skirt whipping with a vicious, tearing sound as she strode toward the main entrance, her heels striking the marble like pistol shots until the heavy oak doors slammed behind her with a sound that rattled the crystal pendants in the chandeliers.
The rotunda fell silent again.
The only sound left was the distant, muffled thud of the surf hitting the concrete seawall three hundred feet below the cliff, and the irregular, wet sniffle of the four-year-old child holding onto the cuff of Diego’s trousers.
Diego looked down.
Valentina was looking up at him. She didn't look frightened anymore. She was studying the rope scar on his forearm, tracing the white, puckered line with one small, inquisitive finger.
“It has a bird on it,” she said, pointing to the button in his other palm.
“Two birds,” Diego corrected, his voice catching slightly on the second syllable. “One looking east. One looking west.”
“Why do they look different ways?”
“Because,” Diego said, crouching down once more until his knee clicked against the marble, “they were looking for someone who was supposed to be dead.”
He looked up at Mercedes, who was slowly rising from the floor, her back hunched, her face pale as parchment beneath the gray streaks of her hair.
“Nine years, Mercedes,” Diego whispered. The words sounded like dry gravel being dragged through a sieve. “Nine years you carried my bread up from the scullery. Nine years you washed the salt off my oilskins. And every single day, you knew Sofia didn't jump from the rocks.”
Mercedes closed her eyes. Two fat tears spilled over her lashes, cutting clean, dark lines through the gray dust on her cheeks.
“She didn't jump, Don Diego,” Mercedes said, her voice dropping into a register so low it was almost lost beneath the sound of the sea. “She was carried down the cliff path in a laundry basket while the doctor was still sewing up your shoulder in the emergency clinic.”
Diego’s hand closed around the golden button until the sharp edges of the shank bit into his palm, drawing a thin, bright line of dark red blood across his lifeline.
“Who carried her?”
May you like
Mercedes looked toward the ceiling—not toward God, but toward the third floor, toward the high, cold rafters of the house that had stood above the harbor for two centuries.
“Your mother,” Mercedes said. “And the men with the black armbands from the Bilbao rail yard.”
