(1/3) Go Saddle the Sea Read Free Page A

it she'd been pounding, and a platter held a pastry cake sprinkled with salt, my favorite food. Maybe she was going to sneak it up to me in my room. Now I couldn't have touched a crumb of it. I kept thinking: She's sure to come in soon. No, she isn't, she's dead. She's sure to come in soon—
    I listened for her loud, slapping footsteps, for her cheerful bawling voice. They didn't come. Instead, to my horror, I heard a slow, measured, double clack-clack: the sound of two elderly ladies in high heels. If I'd had any sense I'd have run like a hare—but I hated to leave the warm red kitchen; besides, up to the last minute, I couldn't believe they were really coming here. They hardly ever set foot in the kitchen. But they did come in, one behind the other, stepping stately and scrawny, like a couple of old molting guinea fowls with their long necks. Doña Isadora and Doña Mercedes. They were in their usual black bombazine dresses, black mantillas, gray lace shawls wrapped round their shoulders, and black mittens on their hands. Each carried a fan, and Dona Isadora gave me a rap on the ear with hers as I scrambled to my feet.
    "What
are you
doing in here, Felix?" she demanded in her high angry voice that was like a saw biting through stone. "You are supposed to be confined to your chamber. Why do we find you here?"
    I could see dislike in every line of her long, thin, sour face, with the V-shaped upper lip overhanging the one below. She was my grandfather's sister and she hated me worse than poison. And I hated her back.
    "Shall I summon Father Tomás to beat him, sister?" she suggested to my grandmother.
    "Later, Isadora. We had better go on now, to Bernardinas bedside."
    "You're too late," I gulped. "She has just died."
    I couldn't help thinking how very unwelcome they would have been at that strange deathbed on the stairs. Bernie despised both of them.
    "You have not answered my question," said Doña Isadora coldly. "Why are you here?"
    "Bernie wanted to see me before she died."
    The two old ladies looked at one another.
    "A
wholly
unsuitable friendship," complained my grandmother. "Between the cook—the household cook—and my grandson. But what can you expect? God only knows who or what his father was. Yet born to my daughter—a Cabezada, who could trace her ancestry back twenty generations to the Conquistadores!"
    "Is it to be wondered at that he prefers low company?" muttered Doña Isadora.
    "Bernie wasn't low!" said I angrily. "She was kind. She wanted to give me some things of my father's—"
    "What things, boy?" said Doña Isadora sharply.
    She was ten years younger than my grandmother,
and much more forceful. Doña Mercedes often drifted off into vague memories of her lost sons.
    "I don't
know
what things. I haven't looked yet. This bundle.
    "You had best open it directly."
    I hated to open it under Isadora's supercilious stare, but there was no way of refusing. Slowly I undid the stiffened knots of aged linen, which, I now saw, was stained with streaks of brown—bloodstains, very likely—and spotted with grease too. It smelled as if Bernie had kept it alongside her chilblain ointment.
    Inside I found another cloth, not a great deal cleaner, but softer and easier to undo. And inside that, a wad of folded paper, covered with faded writing. And inside
that,
a small brittle black plume and a few gilt buttons.
    "What have you there?" inquired my grandmother in her vague way.
    "I think it must be a plume from an officer's shako—"
    "Not that, idiot!" snapped Great-aunt Isadora. "The letter."
    I unfolded the paper. There were several pages of it. Doña Isadora twitched it out of my fingers and held it close to a candle—for a moment I feared she was going to burn it. But she peered at it with her shortsighted eyes. I noticed that her hands were shaking. In á moment, though, she said disgustedly—but as if this were no more than she had expected—
    "It's nothing but gibberish! It must have been
written by a maniac!