“I don’t think you can buy these here,” Noemí said. “Your saint has expensive tastes. Where’s the parrot, by the way?”
Noemí took out her pack of Gauloises and handed one to Marta, who placed it next to the statuette of the saint. “Still in his cage under his blanket. I’ll tell you about Benito. Do you want coffee? It’s no good telling tales without a drink.”
“Sure,” Noemí said. She still wasn’t hungry, but she supposed coffee might restore her appetite. It was funny. Her brother said she always breakfasted as if food was going to go out of fashion, and yet for the past two days she’d hardly touched a morsel in the mornings. Not that she’d had much in the evenings, either. She felt slightly ill. Or rather, it was the preface of an illness, like when she could predict she was about to get a cold. She hoped that was not the case.
Marta Duval set a kettle to boil and rummaged among her drawers until she produced a small tin can. When the water boiled, she poured it into two pewter mugs, added the proper amount of coffee, and placed both cups on the table. Marta’s house smelled strongly of rosemary, and the scent mixed with the scent of the coffee.
“I take mine black, but do you want sugar in yours?”
“I’m fine,” Noemí said.
The woman sat down and settled her hands around her mug.
“Do you want the short version or the long one? Because the long means going back quite a bit. If you want to know about Benito, then you need to know about Aurelio. That is, if you want to tell the tale properly.”
“Well, I am running out of cigarettes but not out of time.”
The woman smiled and sipped her coffee. Noemí did the same.
“When the mine reopened, it was big news. Mr. Doyle had his workers from England, but those weren’t enough to run a mine. They could oversee the work and others could work in the house he was building, but you can’t open a mine and build a house like High Place with sixty Englishmen.”
“Who used to run the mine before him?”
“Spaniards. But that had been ages ago. People were happy when the mine reopened. It meant work for the locals, and folks came from other parts of Hidalgo for the chance at a job too. You know how it is. Where there’s a mine, there’s money, the town grows. But right away folks complained. The work was tough, but Mr. Doyle was tougher.”
“He treated the workers poorly?”
“Like animals, they said. He was better with the ones building the house. At least they were not in a hole beneath the earth. The Mexican mining crews, he had no mercy on those. Him, Mr. Doyle, and his brother, both of them bellowing at the workers.”
Francis had pointed Leland, Howard’s brother, out in the photos, but she could not recall what he looked like, and anyway, all the people in the family seemed to have that similar physiognomy, which she was dubbing in her head “the Doyle look.” Like the Habsburg jaw of Charles II, only not quite as concerning. Now that had been a case of severe mandibular prognathism.
“He wanted the house built quickly and he wanted a great garden, in the English style, with rose beds. He even brought boxes filled with earth from Europe to make sure the flowers would take. So there they were, working on the house and trying to mine the silver, when there came a sickness. It hit the workers at the house first and then the miners, but soon enough they were all heaving and feverish. Doyle had a doctor, who he’d brought along, just like his soil, but his precious doctor didn’t help much. They died. Lots of the miners. Some of the people working at the house, and even Howard Doyle’s wife, but mostly a great deal of miners dropped dead.”
“That’s when they built the English cemetery,” Noemí said.
“Yes. That’s right.” Marta nodded. “Well, the sickness passed. New folks were hired. People from Hidalgo, yes, but having heard there was an Englishman with a mine here, there also came more Englishmen who were working around other mines, or were simply trying to make their fortune, lured by silver and a good profit. They say Zacatecas is for silver? Well, Hidalgo does well enough too.