hands resting on the arms of the chair. “Sit, please.”
She was not ready to concede. She did not sit. Instead she stood behind her chair, leaning forward on its back. She had a vague thought that it would also be easier to run out of the room if she was standing. She wasn’t sure why she thought this. It was a disquieting thought, that she must be ready to spring up like a gazelle and escape. It was, she concluded, that she did not like to be speaking to him alone in his room.
His terrain. His burrow.
She suspected Catalina had never set foot in this room. Or if she had, it had been a brief invitation. No trace of her remained. The furniture, the great large painting bequeathed by his father, the wooden screen, the ancient wallpaper streaked with faint traces of mold, these all belonged to Virgil Doyle. His taste, his things. Even his features seemed to complement the room. The blond hair was striking against the dark leather, his face seemed made of alabaster when framed with folds of red velvet.
“Your cousin has a wild imagination,” Virgil said. “I think she saw in me a tragic, romantic figure. A boy who lost his mother at a young age in a senseless tragedy, whose family’s fortune evaporated in the years of the Revolution, who grew up with a sick father in a crumbling mansion in the mountains.”
Yes. It must have pleased her. At first. He had a vehemence that Catalina would have found appealing and, in his home, with the mist outside and the glint of silver candelabra inside, he would have shined very brightly. How long, Noemí wondered, until the novelty wore off?
He, perhaps sensing her question, smirked. “No doubt she pictured the house as a delightful, rustic refuge which, with a little effort, could be made cheerier. Of course, it is not as if my father would allow even a single curtain to be changed. We exist at his pleasure.”
He turned his head to gaze at the painting bearing Howard Doyle’s likeness, a finger tapping gently against the chair’s armrest.
“And would you want to change a single curtain?”
“I’d change a number of things. My father hasn’t left this house in decades. To him this is the ideal vision of the world and nothing more. I’ve seen the future and understand our limitations.”
“If that is the case, if change is possible—”
“Change of a certain type,” Virgil agreed. “But not a change so grand that I’d become something I am not. You can’t change the essence of a thing. That is the problem. The point, I suppose, is that Catalina wanted someone else. She didn’t want me, flesh and blood and flawed. She was immediately unhappy, and yes, it is my fault. I could not live up to her expectations. What she saw in me, it was never there.”
Immediately. Why, then, had Catalina not returned home? But even as she asked herself the question she knew the answer. The family. Everyone would have been appalled, and the society pages would have been filled with the most poisonous ink. Exactly as her father now feared.
“What did you see in her?”
Noemí’s father had been sure it was money. She didn’t think Virgil would admit it, but she felt confident that she might be able to discern the truth, to read between the lines. To approach the answer, even if it remained veiled.
“My father is ill. He is, in fact, dying. Before passing away, he wanted to see me married. He wanted to know I would have a wife and children; that the family line would not die out. It was not the first time he asked this of me, and it was not the first time I complied. I was married once before.”
“I did not know that,” Noemí said. It quite surprised her. “What happened?”
“She was everything my father thought an ideal wife should be, except that he forgot to consult me on the matter,” Virgil said with a chuckle. “She was, in fact, Arthur’s daughter. My father had gotten it in his head since we were children that we would marry. ‘One day, when you’re married,’ they’d tell us. Such repetition didn’t help. It had the opposite effect. When I turned twenty-three we were wed. She disliked me. I found her dull.
“Nevertheless, I suppose we might have managed to build something of value between us if it hadn’t been for the miscarriages. She had four of them, and