sneak in to look at the sign with the departure times.”
Noemí adjusted her rebozo, trying to find warmth in its folds, but the cemetery was terribly damp and chilly; she could almost swear the temperature had dropped a couple of degrees the more they’d pressed into it. She shivered, and he noticed.
“I’m so stupid,” Francis said, removing his sweater. “Here, have this.”
“It’s fine. Really, I couldn’t let you freeze for my sake. Maybe if we start walking back I’ll be better.”
“Well, fine, but please, wear it. I swear I won’t be cold.”
She put on the sweater and wrapped the rebozo around her head. She thought he might pick up the pace since she was now walking in his sweater, but he didn’t rush back home. He was probably used to the mist, the shady chill of the trees.
“Yesterday you asked about the silver items in the house. You were right, they came from our mine,” he told her.
“It’s been closed for a long time, hasn’t it?”
Catalina had said something about that; it was why Noemí’s father had not been keen on the match. Virgil seemed to him a stranger, maybe a fortune hunter. Noemí suspected he’d let Catalina marry him because he felt guilty about driving away her previous suitor: Catalina had loved him truly.
“It happened during the Revolution. That’s when a host of things happened, one thing led to another and operations ceased. The year Virgil was born, 1915, that was the absolute end of it. The mines were flooded.”
“Then he is thirty-five,” she said. “And you are much younger.”
“Ten years younger,” Francis said with a nod. “A bit of an age gap, but he was the one friend I had growing up.”
“But you must have gone to school eventually.”
“We were schooled at High Place.”
Noemí tried to think of the house filled with the noise of children’s laughter, children playing hide and seek, children with a spinning top or a ball between their hands. But she couldn’t. The house would have not allowed such a thing. The house would have demanded they spring from it fully grown.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said, when they were rounding the coach house and High Place was visible, the curtain of mist having parted. “Why the insistence on silence at the dining table?”
“My great uncle Howard, he’s very old, very delicate, and very sensitive to noises. And the sound travels easily in the house.”
“Is his room upstairs? He can’t possibly hear people talking in the dining room.”
“Noises carry,” Francis said, his face serious, his eyes fixed on the old house. “Anyway, it’s his house and he sets the rules.”
“And you never bend them.”
He glanced down at her, looking a little perplexed, as if it had not occurred to him until now that this was a possibility. She was certain he’d never drunk too much, stayed out far too late, nor blurted the wrong opinion in his family’s company.
“No,” he said, once again with that resigned note in his voice.
When they walked into the kitchen, she took off the sweater and handed it back to him. There was one maid now, the slightly younger maid, sitting by the stove. She did not look at them, too occupied with her chores to spare them a single glance.
“No, you should keep it,” Francis said, ever polite. “It’s rather warm.”
“I can’t be stealing your clothes.”
“I have other sweaters,” he said.
“Thanks.”
He smiled at her. Florence walked into the room, again decked in a dark navy dress, her face severe, glancing at Francis and then at Noemí, as if they were small children and she was trying to determine whether they had scarfed down a forbidden box of sweets. “If you’ll come with me for your lunch,” she said.
This time it was the three of them at the table; the old man did not materialize and neither did Virgil. The lunch was conducted quickly, and after the dishes were cleared Noemí went back to her room. They brought up a tray with her dinner, so she supposed the dining room had been just for the first night and the lunch was also an anomaly. With her tray they also brought her an oil lamp, which she set by the bedside. She tried to read the copy of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, which she’d brought with her, but kept getting distracted. Noises did carry, she thought, as she focused on the creaking of floorboards.