Ruth, and many years later a baby boy. Doyle’s brother, Mr. Leland, he also had children. A boy and a girl. The boy was engaged to Miss Ruth.”
“Kissing cousins, again,” Noemí said, disturbed by this notion. The Habsburg jaw was a more apt comparison than she’d thought, and things had not ended well for the Habsburgs.
“Not much kissing, I think. That was the problem. That is where Benito comes in. He was a nephew of Aurelio and went to work in the house. This was years after the strike, so I suppose it’s not like Doyle cared that he was related to Aurelio. Or a dead miner didn’t matter to him none, or else he didn’t know. In any case, he worked in the house, tending to the plants. By that time instead of a garden the Doyles had settled on a greenhouse.
“Benito had a lot in common with his dead uncle. He was smart, he was funny, and he didn’t know how to keep out of trouble. His uncle had organized a strike, and he did an even more horrifying thing: he fell in love with Miss Ruth and she fell in love with him.”
“I can’t imagine her father was pleased,” Noemí said.
He’d probably given his daughter the eugenics talk. Superior and inferior specimens. She pictured him by the fireplace in his room admonishing the girl, and she with her eyes fixed on the floor. Poor Benito had not stood a chance. It was funny, though, that if Doyle was truly that interested in eugenics he’d insist on all these marriages to close relations. Maybe he was imitating Darwin, who’d also married within his family.
“They say when he found out he almost killed her,” Marta muttered.
Now she pictured Howard Doyle wrapping his fingers around the girl’s slim neck. Strong fingers, digging deep, pressing hard, and the girl incapable of even uttering a protest because she couldn’t breathe. Papa, don’t. It was such a vivid image that Noemí had to close her eyes for a moment, gripping the table with one hand.
“Are you all right?” Marta asked.
“Yes,” Noemí said, opening her eyes and nodding at the woman. “I’m fine. A little tired.”
She raised the cup of coffee to her lips and drank. The warm liquid was pleasant in its bitterness. Noemí set the cup down. “Please, go on,” she said.
“There’s not much more to say. Ruth was punished, Benito vanished.”
“He was killed?”
The old woman leaned forward, her cloudy eyes fixed on Noemí. “Even worse: disappeared, from one day to the next. Folks said he’d run off because he was afraid of what Doyle would do to him, but others said Doyle had done the disappearing.
“Ruth was supposed to get married that summer to Michael, that cousin of hers, and Benito’s disappearance didn’t change that one bit. Nothing would have changed that. It was the middle of the Revolution, and the upheaval meant the mine was operating with a small crew, but it was still operating. Someone had to keep the machinery going, pumping the water out, or it would flood. It rains so much here.
“And up at the house, someone had to keep changing the linens and dusting the furniture, so in many ways I guess things hadn’t changed over a war, so why would they change over a missing man? Howard Doyle ordered trinkets for the wedding, acting as though nothing was amiss. As though Benito’s disappearance didn’t matter. Well, it must have mattered to Ruth.
“None can be sure what happened, but they said she put a sleeping draught in their food. I don’t know where she got it from. She was clever, she knew many things about plants and medicine, so it could be she mixed the draught herself. Or perhaps her lover had procured it for her. Maybe in the beginning she had thought to put them to sleep and run away, but afterward she changed her mind. Once Benito disappeared. She shot her father while he slept, because of what he’d done to her lover.”
“But not just her father,” Noemí said. “She shot her mother and the others. If she was avenging her dead lover, wouldn’t she have only shot her father? What did the others have to do with that?”
“Maybe she thought they were also guilty. Maybe she’d gone mad. We can’t know. They’re cursed, I tell you, and that house is haunted. You’re very silly or very brave living in a haunted house.”