The Devil on Her Tongue (75 page)

Dona Beatriz got back in the early evening, dirty and tired. She greeted me with cries of happiness. “I was so, so afraid for you, Diamantina,” she said, tears in her eyes, “for you and Cristiano. And Candelária? You got her back,” she said, dropping to her knees in front of her.

I stood very still as she picked up Candelária’s hands. “Hello, Candelária,” she said. “You once played with Leandro, but you were too small to remember. Have you seen him today?”

Candelária nodded.

Both she and Leandro were tall and slender, but that was all they appeared to share. Would anyone suspect them of being brother and sister?

“Would you like to go to the nursery and play with him now?” Dona Beatriz asked.

Candelária shook her head. “I want to stay with Mama.”

“I should put her to bed,” I said. “She’s been through so much.”

“Of course,” Dona Beatriz answered.

A short time later, as Candelária was falling asleep in the big bed I would share with her, Dona Beatriz came to the doorway. “Can I speak to you for a moment, Diamantina? I know you must need sleep terribly, but …”

I went to her, and we stepped into the hall. “The stories I’ve heard coming from Lisboa, Diamantina. Is it truly as terrible as they say?”

“It is more terrible than anyone can imagine. I can’t speak of the things I saw.” I wondered how long it would be before the images of the maimed and mutilated, the dying and the dead faded, or if they ever would. If the screams would ever stop ringing in my ears.

“The people who have come to the churches here looking for help … it’s so awful. Every one of them has lost someone they love. We must never stop praying our thanks that our children were spared.” She squeezed my hand. “Tomorrow I’ll go back to the church to help. I plan to do what I can for as long as necessary.” She let go of my hand. “Now I must let you go to bed. I mustn’t keep you up with questions I have, about … about the rest of our lives. There will be time for that when the world is once again a familiar place.”

The next morning, I went with Beatriz to the church. I left Candelária with Leandro and Neves, Samuel’s wife. She was dark-skinned, like Samuel. She had blue markings on her face—a series of fine vertical stripes from under her bottom lip to the end of her chin—and I knew she had come from North Africa, like my mother.

Cristiano, limping only slightly now, came as well, and was immediately put to work building shelters and digging latrines.

Beatriz handed out food and prepared rolls of bandages. I sought out the rough canvas tent where surgeons moved between the rows of injured. I went to the nearest surgeon, his clothing soaked in blood and his face beaded in sweat.

“I can help however you need me,” I told him. “I’m a
curandeira
, and also have worked as a midwife.”

“Good, good,” he said, hardly glancing at me. “Go and see to him,” he said, pointing at a man lying on a bed of straw, moaning.

I spent the rest of the day with needle and thread and rolls of lint and linen. I also delivered two babies. By the time Beatriz and Cristiano and I returned to the house, I was so weary I fell into bed without dinner.

We worked in this way for the next four days. Many of the severely injured died, and others with limbs showing signs of rot had them cut off by the surgeons. At first they tossed the darkening feet, legs, hands and arms into piles, but it was quickly determined that the body parts must be deeply buried and covered with stones after they attracted roving bands of hungry dogs. Word came that the unidentified dead in Lisboa were being taken out to sea on barges and deposited into the water to stop the spread of disease.

After five days, the fires of Lisboa were finally out, and a few days after that, the roads cleared enough for the passage of carriages. The people who had come to Santa Maria de Belém for refuge began to make their slow journey back to the city, to move through the rubble of what they had once called home.

Dona Beatriz and I had not yet spoken of Abílio.

I thought of going home too.

“Soon I’ll have to try and get us passage back to Madeira,” I said to Cristiano in the salon that evening. I was bent over his palm with a needle, trying to dig out a long sliver of wood that had become deeply embedded under his skin as he had built the temporary shelters.

“A boat, Diamantina?” He sounded slightly incredulous. “Do you really suppose boats will be coming to or leaving Lisboa yet? Do you not remember what we saw at the harbour?”

He was right, of course, but all I could think about, now that I had Candelária, was getting away from here, and Abílio. What might he
disclose about Candelária should he have survived and come back to Santa Maria de Belém to find me here with her?

“I’ve asked a lot of people about Funchal, but nobody knows,” Cristiano said. “Do you think the earthquake destroyed it as well? Will we still have a home?”

I sat back on my heels and took a healing salve from the small medicine case I had brought with me. “I don’t know,” I said, thinking of Plácido Lajes, and the woman Abílio had pose as Dona Beatriz to sign the papers. I also thought of Bonifacio, on his way to Brazil, and of Espirito, also making his way across the sea, a month or more ahead of Bonifacio. “I don’t know.”

Cristiano had left the salon, and I was straightening the contents of my medicine case when the door slammed.

I went to Dona Beatriz, alarmed. Her face was the colour of chalk, the skin around her eyes blotchy.
Abílio
, I thought.
Abílio has died in the earthquake
.

“I’m surprised you had the nerve to come back here with her,” she said, and I reached towards her.

“Dona Beatriz,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. “What is it?”

“Remove your hand,” she said with icy calm and control. “Well? When were you going to tell me? Did you really think I would never find out?” She stepped back from me and adjusted her lace collar.

I waited, my heart thudding, because I knew what had happened. Dona Beatriz pulled on her skirt to straighten it, then lightly brushed her hands together as if they were dusty.

“When was it?” she asked. “Was it when I lay in childbed? When you comforted me when my father died? When I left you in charge of my home because I trusted you?” She crossed her arms. “I just went to say good night to Leandro. On a whim, I stopped at your room, to say good night to Candelária as well. She was asleep on top of the coverlet. As I started to pull a blanket over her, I saw her foot.” She nodded. “So? When exactly was it that you were fornicating with my husband?”

“Dona Beatriz,” I said. “You don’t understand how it happened.”

She stared at me. “I don’t care. There is no reason good enough. What kind of woman are you?”

I did know that my reason wasn’t good enough. I did know what kind of woman I was—had always been.

“Do you think I care whom he beds? He hasn’t come near me in years, and I’m glad, because his touch repulses me. He’s always made a fool of me with other women, but I long ago stopped caring. I abide him because is my husband. But
you
, Diamantina?
You
made a fool of me?”

I stayed very still.

“Well? Are you going to deny it?”

“No,” I said, without taking my eyes from hers.

“You slept with my husband, and conceived a child with him,” she stated, as if to be completely certain.

“Yes. It wasn’t … you need to understand, Dona Beatriz, it wasn’t what I wanted. I … I felt I had no choice.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You
felt
you had no choice? Do you mean you
had
no choice? Are you saying he violated you, against your will? Tell me this, and I will believe you, for I know my husband for the animal he is. I’ve seen him too many times with the servant girls, in spite of his women in Lisboa and Oporto. But you are a friend. You wouldn’t betray me. Would you?”

I could tell her Abílio had raped me, I could tell her this right now, and she would believe me.

There was a quiet knock on the door, and Dona Beatriz looked towards it, her face hard, and then went and opened it.

“Both children are asleep, Dona Beatriz,” Neves said. “May I retire for the night, or am I needed?”

“There’s nothing else, Neves. Thank you.” Dona Beatriz closed the door and came back and stood in front of me. “Well?” Her voice was harsh.

If I was to tell the truth, it must be now. I straightened my shoulders. Abílio had forced himself on me in the chapel when Candelária was conceived. That was true. As for the other times … “No,” I said quietly. “I didn’t wish it, but it was not entirely against my will.”

She reached out and slapped me, the force making me stumble backwards. As I held my stinging cheek, shocked at the blow, Dona Beatriz looked unsteady, as if she were the one who had been struck. She gripped the back of a chair. “For all these years I was happy you were at Quinta Isabella. It actually pleased me that you could enjoy that life. Well, no longer. I don’t know what has happened on Madeira now, but Quinta Isabella is no longer your home. You are not allowed on the property, and I will enforce that with the servants still there. And I want you out of here. Take whatever you brought with you, take Cristiano and your daughter,
Abílio’s
daughter, and get out. Not tomorrow. Go now, tonight, into the darkness. Go and stay in one of the shelters at the church, and tomorrow walk back into Lisboa. Or walk into the sea. I no longer care where you go, or what you do.”

A
s I passed Dona Beatriz to leave the salon, she caught my wrist.

“Just tell me one thing. The day you came here looking for your daughter, you knew about Abílio’s plan to take Kipling’s from me. You know about the deed. Are you involved in this in any way? Are you helping Abílio?”

“Helping him? Helping Abílio?” Her grip on my wrist was iron. “How could you think that? No. He sent a letter to Espirito about the sale. It was Espirito who told me.”

She dropped my wrist. “Does your husband know Abílio is her father? Is that why he took Candelária away from you?”

“No. He doesn’t suspect she’s Abílio’s.”

“And you’ve had no contact with Abílio over these last years? When he went back to Funchal two years ago—did you continue your relationship with him then?”

I shook my head. “He tried, Dona Beatriz. I threatened him. The scar on his neck?”

She nodded.

“I did that. I cut his neck with a knife and told him that if he ever tried to manipulate me again, the way he had manipulated me before, I would end his life.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “He would have overpowered you.”

“He didn’t. Can you deny the fresh injury he had when he returned from Madeira?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. “No.”

“Then believe me. Abílio is as much my enemy as he is yours. You, more than anyone, know how he uses everyone to get what he wants. How he used you,” I said, expecting she might slap me again.

A look of resignation came over her face. “I do know what he’s capable of,” she said. “Of course I know Abílio’s true nature, and …” She sat down. “I so often thought that if I hadn’t married Abílio, my father might be alive today.”