8

The cornfields were scattered in clearings hacked and burned from the wilderness, the stalks growing wherever a seed found enough soil to root in the thin, shallow, rocky earth. A plow would never work here.

“After the proper prayers and offerings,” Zane said, “a man takes pointed stick and makes holes wherever he can. A field uses up its fertility in three years, so the work of cutting a new field is done in one’s spare time and the burning of the dried wood takes place in the spring. Tricky business. If the wood’s too green, the burn won’t be thorough enough to let sunlight reach the planted crop, but if a man waits too long, the rains may start and the wood can’t be burned. Generally, the H-men predicts the weather and people follow his advice.”

“H-men?”

“It means ‘he who knows.’ He can do some curing and foretell the future with grains of corn or sacred stones, but mainly he’s supposed to help obtain a good harvest. He may study his Count of Days, which shows cycles of weather and events, but I’m sure he relies more on when flying ants swarm or the frogs croak.”

“Do you think that lore came down from the old Mayas?”

“I’m sure it did. Mayan religion is almost totally aimed at producing plentiful crops of corn, and these homespun rites are what linger after the complicated astronomy and theology of the priest kings is forgotten.”

“But how did people plant and harvest during the war?”

“As best they could. There was no time to clear and burn fertile new fields, so they had to sow their seed hastily in worn-out soil and hope enough would come up to keep them from starving. Often they had to choose between eating seed corn and starving when there was no crop or going hungry, even starving, while waiting for the corn to grow. And many Cruzob starved, though the fortunate got by on what corn they could salvage, roots, and berries. During the worst times, there was only a little game because it had been hunted close to extinction.”

Mercy admired the ripened ears of the stalks, which were higher than her head. “Then a crop like this must make everyone happy.”

“Yes, especially since we feel fairly sure the Cruzob won’t attack and steal it. After the harvest is in, each man will put up an altar in his field and offer food and drink to the spirits in thanks for the crop. The gods take the vital, spiritual part of the sacrifice, but after the proper prayers, people can feast on the material remains of the offerings.”

“That sounds like a system that ought to benefit both gods and worshippers,” said Mercy, smiling.

“It’s all a part of tamen, harmony with heaven, which is the Maya’s state of grace. Corn is sacred. Growing it is a religious, as well as practical, act. Grain was sacred, of course, in that without it life on land would cease. The soil that nourished plants was holy, too, then, a first altar. Civilized man got a long way from those simple facts, but he was as ultimately dependent on crops and the animals living off of them as were the Mayas, whose life revolved around the cycles of the buried or resurrected corn.”

They walked now along a path worn through weeds and thick growth that was higher than Zane’s head. He said it was an old cornfield. No breeze could reach them, and the afternoon sun blazed down almost like summer. Mercy was glad to come out of the dense, airless field into a vast clearing.

Rows of blue-green agave with broad-bladed leaves tapering to dagger points grew as far as Mercy could see. Machetes flashed as barefooted men with rolled-up white trousers and shirts worked up and down the field, cutting off leaves, trimming the edges, and piling them into bundles that were carried to the ends of rows to be hauled off by mules that pulled carts along a movable track.

“This is henequén,” Zane told her. “Each plant has forty-two leaves, and each plant is worked every four months, at which time the twelve largest leaves are cut. A worker must count to be sure he cuts that dozen. Henequén requires year-round attention. Besides collecting leaves, weeds have to be kept out, and there’s still the work to be done at the drying yards and factory.”

“Is it a profitable crop?”

“Perhaps the best for Yucatán’s stony soil. I think it’ll eventually be the most important product of the region, but many owners won’t try it because it’s seven years before the plants can be harvested. That ties up capital for a long time with no return, whereas sugarcane’s second year’s harvest generally pays all the costs of getting started, and after that it may return annual profits of up to seven hundred percent.”

Mercy stared. “Then why doesn’t everyone plant sugarcane?”

“Because, sweet Mercy, comparatively little soil is good enough to nourish it.” Zane touched a henequén leaf with his boot toe. “This can grow almost anywhere, and as trade expands, so will the need for rope and twine.”

A wave of premonition swept over Mercy. She thought of what she had heard about some Southern plantations, and she remembered Mayel being whipped.

“You pay your workers,” she said. “But if debt-slavery’s so common here, won’t it increase, and won’t the debt-slaves be driven mercilessly, to increase the owner’s profit?”

“Once initial costs are recovered, it’s easily possible to pay a decent wage,” said Zane.

“Possible, but will men who live in Mérida all year care what goes on as long as they have sufficient money to indulge their cultured whims?”

Zane’s mouth thinned angrily. “Do you expect me to change human nature? In time, debt servitude will be forbidden, but I find it strange to hear someone from the South so troubled about slaves.”

That stung, flicking the raw, proud flesh of Mercy’s mingled guilt and defensiveness about her homeland, which she loved, while knowing it had planted the wind of bondage and reaped the whirlwind of defeat and ruin. She turned away, staring blindly.

“I beg your pardon, Mercy.” The touch on her hair was so light that she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it, except that a sort of healing warmth spread through her. “Any person has plenty to account for without being held responsible for the sins of his group or race.”

“As long as people are enslaved or killed or despised because of race or group, the other thing follows,” Mercy said. “But I won’t wear sackcloth and flagellate myself for Simon Legree.”

Zane laughed. This time, unmistakably, he did ruffle her hair. “You’re expiating your crimes by being Jolie’s teacher.”

Jarred into the realization that she was indeed a bondservant, totally dependent on this man’s decisions, Mercy moved away from him. That he had so far refrained from physically subjugating her made the way she felt about him all the more dangerous. One could hate and scorn a ravisher. But how to resist a captor whose cage was so spacious and beautiful one never glimpsed the bars, who made her hunger for him till yielding would be even more a giving in to her own desires?

She must fight herself, as well as him. It was easy to think it didn’t matter, that such indulgence would harm only herself, and Elkanah was no longer on this earth to care. But to be Zane’s plaything, to choose an existence in the tower only to serve his sensual desires and her own—that would be the death of her as a whole person, living and working in the world.

Jolie needed a teacher for many reasons, the least of which was academic. May el should know someone cared about her. La Quinta was a small world where Mercy could work and learn. She wanted life, rather than the self-centered, confined enchantment of being a man’s isolated mistress.

But if he loved me … if he loved me and let me stay at the house and be part of La Quinta …

“What a long face!” teased Zane. “This is hard work, true enough, but nothing like plantations using debt laborers. The stint on those is from two to three thousand leaves a day, and workers are flogged for failing to cut that many, for improper trimming, for being late—for almost anything. That big Chinese coming up the row is Wei, one of the elected foremen. He doesn’t beat men, but he checks to see that the trimming is done properly and that the right number of leaves are being cut.”

“If workers are treated so badly, you’d expect them to revolt, especially after the War of the Castes.”

“The plantation workers are mostly tamed by three generations of servitude. As I told you before, not many of them rebelled. It was the wild backwoods Indians or those who had just recently been forced to serve the ladinos who hoped to drive the whites out.”

Wei, who towered over the Mayas, came forward, removed his straw hat, and bowed to Zane and Mercy. Zane spoke to him genially, evidently explaining Mercy’s presence, for the big man with the braid bowed again before he went back to his inspections.

“Wei is the son of my father’s old cabin boy,” Zane said. “He has a pretty young Indian wife and two beautiful children. In a few generations, his bloodline should be indistinguishable. Whether whites care to admit it or not, there’s a good deal of Indian blood in some of the best families, and everyone knows how generously white men have passed on their characteristics to their unacknowledged offspring.”

“You sound exactly like my father,” Mercy, said. “He used to make people furious by asking why, if white blood was superior, that a small proportion of black classified a person as a Negro.”

Zane looked genuinely shocked. “That’s not exactly what I meant. And I’m surprised he’d talk about such things in front of you.”

“He talked of whatever was on his mind.” Mercy felt a stab of longing. “He thought that even a child could understand a lot. I can’t remember his ever telling me that I was too young to ask something or that it was bad to wonder.”

“Then he must have spent an unconscionable amount of time answering questions!”

“He never seemed to mind.”

Zane had stiffened, gazing across the field. “Jolie!” he shouted.

A small figure some distance down the row stepped out from behind one of the big plants, and there was a telltale gleam of metal as she passed a machete to the boy beside her. Her sandaled feet scuffing reluctantly, she came toward her father, head down, lips pouting.

“I want to be able to do whatever Salvador does,” she said, attacking first. “You always say, Papa, that the owner of a plantation should know about and be able to do every kind of work needed to run it!”

“You don’t yet own La Quinta, little slippery tongue, and you never will if you hack open an artery with a machete.”

“But …”

“You’re not fair to Salvador,” Zane said sternly. “If you got hurt, he’d feel he was to blame, though Lord knows I’d never hold him to account for your foolishness. You’re getting too old now to follow him around as you did when you were little.”

“You want him to just be another worker,” Jolie accused. “But you know he’s different! He wants to be an H-men and learn how to produce good crops. That’s why he’s working even though he’s so young!”

“He’s eleven,” countered Zane. “Some boys of twelve support widowed mothers and younger children. But I admire his energy.” He called the boy, who came forward quickly.

No taller than Jolie, this child Zane had saved from crucifixion had warm, brown skin, shining black eyes and hair, and the happiest smile Mercy had ever seen, though he seemed worried about his friend and stood defensively in front of her.

Zane spoke pleasantly but firmly. Jolie opened her mouth to protest, but Salvador silenced her with a look and answered Zane quietly. Zane nodded as if content and asked a few questions. Salvador replied in a respectful but decided way, shaking his hair back from his eyes. His face lit up with delight at Zane’s next words. Jolie gave a glad cry and hurled herself upon her father, giving him a rather sweaty, dusty hug.

He commanded her to change into clean clothes and stay away from the henequén harvesting, then ordered her off with a kiss. Salvador ducked and seized Zane’s hand, and he would have kissed it, but Zane warded him off and, in a gruffly kind voice, told him to go back to his task.

“Amusing, isn’t it?” Zane asked as they turned toward huge yards where yellow-white fiber was spread over long rails. “Jolie obeys Salvador and, indirectly, I obey her. So that makes a barefoot eleven-year-old Indian the real power at La Quinta.”

“Hardly that. But what did you say to make them so happy?”

“I said our H-men, Victoriano Zuc, has no sons and might be glad to have an apprentice. The ironic thing is that the boy’s own mother could teach him more than anyone else. It must be from her that he inherits the tendency.”

“And perhaps the incense he breathed along with prayers when people thought he was dying. Does he know about that? Does he remember at all?”

“I don’t know. He had nightmares when I first brought him here and curled up by Macedonio’s wife like a whimpering, scared puppy. But Chepa gave him some potions and told him a lot of stories, and I think what he remembered became for him part of a dream or witch tale. He’s never seen his mother since then, though, when she took refuge in the tower, she asked me to bring him by so she could look down at him.’

“He’s such a handsome, sparkling child. She must wish she could have him with her.”

“They resemble each other. If she tried to pretend he was some orphan she’d found, some jealous or suspicious person might start raising doubts. Then this time neither she nor Salvador would likely get away.”

“Couldn’t she take him a long way off, to Mérida or Campeche?”

Zane’s eyebrow twitched. “And give up her authority? No. Xia loves her son, but she’ll never again willingly be in a position where she’ll be at the mercy of others. Men took her son and gave her power—a bitter, loveless compensation, but one she’s come to consider her due.”

Prefer influence to her child? Mercy hoped she’d never encounter the woman. She sounded like a beautiful, soul-deadened husk, yet Zane seemed to admire her.

As they passed the drying yards, Zane explained that the thick, long leaves were fed into a rasping machine that shredded them. This rasper, developed after the government had offered a reward to someone inventing a mechanical stripper that could replace the slow, laborious hand-rasping process, separated a powdery, green waste from the stringy fiber, which was hung to dry till it changed from pale green to golden and then was sorted according to quality, bound into bales, and sent by mule cart to Sisal for shipment to Europe and the United States.

A glance inside the factory at chutes, turning wheels, and sharp-toothed machinery was enough to intimidate Mercy. To her, the noisy machine seemed possessed by some malevolent giant insect mind of its own, and the farther away she could stay, the better. They peered into the warehouse, which smelled like rope, and into the store, where several women were buying clothing, blankets, or food.

“Most haciendas charge such high prices that a worker’s wages never are enough, and he goes deeper and deeper into debt. The owner gives him credit enough to eat so he can go on working, but never enough to pay his debt and leave.”

“My father used to say that to pay a man only enough to eat and barely survive was almost worse than slavery, since no one felt obligated to take care of such a laborer if he got sick or too old to work.”

They were under the ceiba at the front approach to the house. Zane stopped abruptly. “Damn it! Must you always be quoting your father?”

Recoiling as if she’d been slapped, choked by hurt and anger, Mercy couldn’t speak for a moment. When she could, her words came out in a rush in spite of her effort to speak calmly. “I’ll never mention him again—to you!”

Hurrying toward the house, she heard his footsteps crunching deliberately behind her, closer with each long stride. She couldn’t run. He caught up with her before she reached the steps.

“Forgive me,” he said.

Mercy couldn’t reply and inwardly reviled her trembling lips.

“I’m sure your father was a wise and estimable man,” Zane said in a conciliatory tone. “But it’s exasperating to have him quoted so often.”

“I doubt you’ll ever be the source of such annoyance,” Mercy snapped.

Zane chuckled. “That’s probably what irritates me—along with the feeling that you’re trying to make me feel as if your father were at my back, with dueling pistol leveled, to make sure I treat his daughter with more propriety than I really want to!”

Mercy had to laugh at that and forget her anger, but after Zane went into his office and she continued through the courtyard, she had to wonder if much of his comparative forbearance didn’t stem from having a cherished daughter of his own. For whatever reason, Mercy was grateful.

Chepa called to her from the kitchen. “I make cochinita pibil,” she said. “You see?”

A door on the opposite side of the kitchen led into a side yard where a boy was tending a pit of glowing embers a little more than a yard long and about half as wide and deep. On a high table, Mayel was stirring onions, mint leaves, pork rind, and salt into what was obviously the blood of the small pig lying on the bed of banana leaves while Chepa finished drenching it with a mixture of things she pointed out to Mercy: oregano, tabasco peppers, black pepper, the juice of bitter oranges, and a red-orange pulp whose name Mercy knew she could never pronounce.

Mayel held a rinsed membranous bag, which Chepa stuffed expertly with the onion mixture, touching her own ample stomach and pointing to the membrane so that Mercy knew that one was the pig’s. Chepa called to the boy by the pit, and he began lifting out smoldering wood, ashes, and stones with a small shovel. He put damp henequén fiber on the remaining stones, and on this Chepa arranged banana leaves, the stuffed stomach, and the little pig, then covered them with more leaves and damp fiber. Smoking branches, ashes, and stones went over this. A last layer of the soaked hemp was tamped down by earth.

“Ready tonight,” Chepa said. “Muy buena.”

Feeling somewhat queasy, Mercy praised the seasonings. She had never liked to prepare meat from a recognizable animal and hadn’t eaten flesh at all when living alone. Philip had jeered at her for her squeamishness. She had scolded herself for failing either to avoid meat altogether or else to have the hardihood to face up to its origins.

Back in the kitchen, already tidied up by one of the pretty young women who was now making tortillas, patting the corn dough into round, thin cakes to be baked on the large, flat stone occupying the rear of the grate above the cooking fire made on a conveniently raised stone foundation, Chepa urged Mercy to have a cup of hot chocolate, When water, chocolate, and spices in a saucepan came to a boil, Chepa selected an elaborately carved molinillo from the rack and twirled it in the boiling liquid till it began to foam. She took it from the fire, let the foaming stop, then put it over the heat again and spun it till the foam threatened to overflow. One more time she did this before taking the beverage to the table, twirling till the chocolate pleased her critical eye.

Chepa poured the hot chocolate into two blue-and-white mugs and handed one to Mercy, taking the other herself as she sank into a cushioned leather chair with the manner of one who’s earned a rest. That chair, in a corner where she could watch the whole kitchen, the cooking court, and the inside courtyard, was clearly her throne, from whence she regulated the preparation of meals and the running of the household. Everyone moved briskly when she spoke, but she exuded goodness and said nothing when the tortilla-maker divided the remaining hot chocolate with Mayel.

Mayel, not used to a kitchen in which such largesse was routine, shot a nervous glance at Chepa, who smiled and nodded. The girl’s face gleamed. She drank in a neat, concentrated fashion that reminded Mercy of a blissful kitten’s innate fastidiousness. Already she seemed less scrawny, and she didn’t always flinch when someone came near her. When she grew out of her coltish boniness, she’d be unusually beautiful.

She hadn’t wanted to marry the man selected for her by the mayordomo of the hacienda near Uxmal. Would she find someone here who wouldn’t disgrace the blood of Jacinto Canek? Mercy shrugged the thought away. She was by no means sure that marriage was the happiest thing for women, though economics and custom forced them into it. Zane had given her guardianship of Mayel. She’d see that the girl wasn’t compelled to take a husband.

It was ironic to have control over another person’s fate while she had so little over her own. Of course, it had been better to come to La Quinta by choice. Zane had been mightily impressed that Eric Kensington had offered his bond-slave marriage. It must put him more on his honor to keep his promise not to take her forcibly.

The great trouble was that it wouldn’t take that much force.

Wrenching her wayward thoughts from the hard curve of his mouth, which could soften when he looked at Jolie, from the long, steel-muscled hands that weakened her the most when they were gentle, and, most of all, trying not to remember that dark granite of his eyes that was sometimes almost black, other times smoky, Mercy smiled at Chepa.

“Delicious!” she complimented, savoring a last taste of hot chocolate.

“Deliciosa!” Chepa laughed. “Close to same. Many such words.”

Mercy thanked Chepa, then said, with reservations, that she looked forward to the cochinita pibil that night. She was just leaving when a young woman appeared in the doorway, holding a choking, gasping child in her arms.

Chepa at once opened a cabinet and got a hunk of what looked like resin from a jar. Putting this in a chipped pottery bowl, she lit it and held it for the youngster, a handsome but pitifully thin four- or five-year-old, to breathe.

A number of times after she tried to take over her father’s duties, Mercy had asthma patients inhale steam. Sometimes it helped, but often she was helpless to do more than brew soothing teas, try to rub some of the spasmed tightness from the sufferers’ backs, and pray they would catch their breath. It was an illness that terrified her.

Therefore, she watched in fascination as the boy gradually stopped choking. In a few minutes he coughed up phlegm, which Chepa caught in a bit of hemp fiber. Zane had explained that fiber too sunburned to be of commercial use was saved for pit-baking, cleaning machinery, scouring, and other odd jobs. A basket of the hemp was under the high table, and now Chepa used up several balls as the boy alternately drew in the aromatic smoke and brought up mucus.

Perhaps twenty minutes later, the child was breathing without the frightening wheeze that had wracked him at first.

Chepa patted his thin cheek, took an elixir from the cabinet, and gave it to the mother, along with some instructions. Murmuring thankful-sounding words, the woman left with the child.

Sadly, Chepa shook her head.

“But you helped him so much!” Mercy said.

“Till next time.” Chepa sighed and then brightened. “Salvador was bad sick, same thing, when El Señor bring him. Last few years not much.” She showed Mercy the remnants of the fragrant resin. “Copal help.”

“Copal?” Mercy echoed.

Wasn’t that the incense burned at Salvador’s near-martyrdom? “What was the medicine you sent home with them?”

“Sarsaparilla with chia and tlatlacizpatli. Also, if copal no work, toloache smoke good, but it make one see monsters, colors, things not really there. Better copal—if it work.”

“Don’t sick people go to the H-men?”

Chepa gave her majestic shoulders a tiny shrug. “He make cure for witch sickness, find lost things, and knows about corn. But snakebite, machete cut, fever, bad cough, baby borning—people ask me.” She looked sad. “Old secrets. Father taught me. I was teaching daughter. Maybe now teach Mayel.”

Diffidently, because she didn’t want to ask for knowledge forbidden to outsiders, Mercy said, “My father was a doctor, a healer of the sick. He taught me some things. Could you tell me the ways of your medicine?”

Chepa turned so that Mercy couldn’t see her face. When Mercy had almost decided the woman hadn’t understood, she turned and gazed for a long time into Mercy’s eyes.

“I teach,” Chepa said.

For the next hour she showed Mercy and Mayel leaves, seeds, roots, and dried flowers, conveying their uses with signs when her English failed, correcting Mercy’s pronunciation of each name till it was recognizable.

“I show plants growing,” Chepa promised. “Then you tell apart better.”

“I’ll have to write it all down,” Mercy said. “What a lot there is to learn!”

“Much more,” Chepa said, an expansive motion of her arms embracing all directions. “The good God made a cure for all hurts.”

Possibly, if one knew what. Mercy was dazzled at the contents of the little cupboard, especially by the painkillers and anesthetics.

Besides toloache, there were various morning-glory seeds, cacti, leaves of the white sapote, and the roots and seeds of several impossibly unpronounceable plants. Epazote, or wormweed, would purge worms, as well as season food; mint-like salvia, borage, and steeped willow leaves were used for fever. The flowers and bark of the Mexican magnolia, yoloxochitl, helped heart ailments, and for the garrapatas, or chiggers, that had so plagued the journey, a dressing of agave gave relief.

There were treatments for gout, colds, pneumonia, diarrhea, constipation, and to increase the flow of mother’s milk. “I can even,” announced Chepa, “pull tooth, no hurt.”

Mercy stared at this. Having a tooth pulled out was such a wretched and bloody experience that no one did it until infection or pain drove them to it. “You mean you give toloache or copal so the person doesn’t feel the pain?”

Chepa shook her head. “No hurt. I show someday.” She giggled, a strange, girlish sound from her regality. “H-men wants to know. Never tell him. He has his things, and I have mine.”

So there was a little professional jealousy there. How Elkanah would have reveled by talking to Chepal Mercy thought a bit ruefully of the medicaments she’d brought with her, naturally assuming she might have to nurse the ignorant peasants. Even so, there might be a few things Chepa would like to add to her pharmacopoeia.

Mercy complimented Chepa’s skill and supplies, thanked her for the instruction, and crossed the court to her room, eager to review her father’s notes and go through her medicinal packets.

She thought she heard a door close as she entered. No one was there, but the cushions on the window ledge looked as if they’d been nestled against. Mercy paused, then got out the small carved animals she’d bought at Tekax. The deer and pheasant she placed close together on the window ledge, then positioned the jaguar in the corner far enough away not to be a suggested threat.

Surely Jolie would like them, and if they weren’t a direct present …

Mercy had still not fully unpacked. She put her few remaining pieces of jewelry in a lacquer box on the chest, except for the black coral necklace Zane had given her. This she fastened around her neck. The sewing materials went on a shelf in the top of the armoire, where her dresses hung with a drooping shabbiness accentuated by the somber beauty of the quetzal dress.

Doña Elena’s dance seemed an eternity ago, yet was less than a week had passed. Had Eric been drunk, to offer her marriages, especially knowing that she’d been wagered by her own husband on the turn of a card? The Viking had seemed sober enough. Perhaps he’d just wanted to annoy Zane.

A sort of chill fire shot through her as she remembered Eric’s searing mouth and his cruelly inescapable embrace. In her heart she knew that his wish to have her was more than an accident, more than a perverse whim to anger Zane. But surely he was in Belize by now, or soon would be, and there was no reason why she’d ever see him again unless they met by chance in Mérida next year.

Mérida. Next year. Both seemed worlds away.

This is the fifth direction, she told herself. This is where you start.

And already she was starting. She had at least a sketchy idea of henequén production, the workings of a village, cochinita pibil, and a treatment for asthma, as well as a glimpse of Chepa’s other remedies. The schoolroom was arranged and some books were selected. Now all she had to do was capture her recalcitrant pupil, who’d rather help her friend cut henequén than behave like the master’s daughter.

At least Jolie was capable of loyalty and affection. How delighted she’d been when Zane hinted that Victoriano, the H-men, might take an apprentice!

Mercy caught her breath in sudden inspiration. If Salvador thought the white man’s learning might be useful, and if Zane would let him study with Jolie, that might be a way of making the studies palatable. Mercy had no wish to sit opposite a glowering, spoiled girl and try to penetrate a locked mind. Even less did she want to have to appeal to Zane to compel a semblance of compliance.

Cheered by hope that Salvador would welcome all the knowledge he could get, Mercy reached the bottom of her pack and took out her father’s letters, books, and a small bundle. The bundle contained her medical remedies: sassafras’ pungent bark; mint, which she knew could be found here; mountain pinks and the bark of dogwood root, for fever; horehound and mullein leaves for croup; garlic for influenza and bronchitis; dried pomegranate rind for diarrhea and dysentery; dandelion roots and yarrow for upset stomachs.

They were like old friends, remembrances of home, of her father explaining their use, and her efforts to ease his patients with them after he was gone. She held up another packet.

Rue.

The next, was rosemary. “… that’s for remembrance.”

And in the last packet were dried violets, sweet-smelling, having many uses. But her mind flew back to Ophelia’s grief for her father. “I would give, you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.”

Mercy put down her head and wept, but it was more purge than grief. These violets might be withered, but beautiful flowers grew here. Though her abilities were slight compared with Chepa’s, and possibly even with Victoriano’s, she would use them and improve, for her father’s sake, if not her own. She would use her life in a way that would make less bitter the waste of the years he could not have, and in spite of his agnosticism and her own doubts, she prayed that he might somehow know. And she wouldn’t be Zane’s mistress unless he loved her and let her do her part at La Quinta. She wouldn’t live shut up in a tower, sealed away from life, for any man, and one who would ask that couldn’t truly care about her, anyhow.

She remembered her father’s favorite words, from Marcus Aurelius: “And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and why, then, do you not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?”

Feeling a closeness, a sense of communication, as if Elkanah were watching her and smiling, Mercy opened his letters and began to read them.