Daughter of Fortune (7 page)

“But we are foreigners, Jeremy, we speak scarcely a word of Spanish. What do Chilean social classes matter to us? This will never be our country.”

“We must set a good example. If we British are incapable of keeping our own house in order, what can we expect of others?”

“Eliza has grown up in this family. I don't think that Miss Rose would agree to deprive her simply because she is growing up.”

And she did not. Rose defied her brother, calling upon a full repertory of ills. First it was stomach upset and then an alarming headache that struck her blind overnight. For several days the entire house was cloaked in silence: drapes were closed, people walked on tiptoe and talked in whispers. Nothing was cooked because the smell of food exacerbated the symptoms. Jeremy Sommers ate at the club and returned home with the worried and timid attitude of someone visiting a hospital. Rose's peculiar blindness and many ailments, added to the stubborn silence of the household servants, quickly undermined Jeremy's resolve. As the last straw, Mama Fresia, mysteriously acquainted with the private discussions between brother and sister, became a formidable ally of her
patrona
. Jeremy Sommers thought of himself as a civilized and pragmatic man, invulnerable to intimidation by a superstitious witch like Mama Fresia, but when the Indian lighted black candles and fanned smoke from burning sage everywhere, under the pretext of driving off mosquitoes, he closed himself in the library, wavering between fear and fury. At night he could hear the swish of her bare feet outside his door, her low voice quietly singing psalms and curses. The Wednesday he found a dead lizard in his bottle of brandy he decided to act once and for all. For the first time ever, he knocked at his sister's door and was admitted into that sanctuary of feminine mysteries he preferred to know nothing of, just as alien to him as the sewing room, the kitchen, the laundry, and the dark corners of the attic where the maidservants lived, to say nothing of Mama Fresia's dark domain at the rear of the patio: he lived his world in the drawing rooms, the library with its waxed mahogany shelves and his collection of engravings of the hunt, the billiards room with its ornately carved table, his bedroom furnished in Spartan simplicity, and a small dressing room with Italian tile where someday he planned to install a modern toilet like those he had seen in catalogues from New York, because he had read that the system of chamber pots and of collecting human excrement in buckets to use as fertilizer was a breeding ground for epidemics. He had to wait for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, as he uneasily breathed in the combined scents of medicines and a persistent tone of vanilla. Rose was barely visible, wan and suffering, flat on her back in the bed, with no pillow, her arms folded across her breast as if practicing for her death. Beside her, Eliza was wringing a cloth dipped in a brew of green tea to place over Rose's eyes.

“Leave us, child,” said Jeremy Sommers, taking a chair beside the bed.

Eliza bobbed her head and left, but she knew every last crack and chink of the house, and with her ear pressed to the thin dividing wall she could hear the conversation that later she repeated to Mama Fresia and wrote down in her diary.

“Very well, Rose. We cannot continue this warfare. Let us reach an accord. What is it you want?” asked Jeremy, conquered before he began.

“Nothing, Jeremy,” Rose sighed in a barely audible voice.

“They will never accept Eliza in Madame Colbert's academy. Only proper girls go there, girls from well-to-do families. Everyone knows that Eliza is adopted.”

“I shall make it my business to see that she is accepted!” Rose exclaimed with a passion unexpected in a dying woman.

“Listen to me, Rose, Eliza has no need for further education. She needs to learn a skill that will enable her to earn her living. What will become of her when you and I are not here to protect her?”

“If she has an education, she will make a good marriage,” said Rose, tossing aside the compress of green tea and sitting up in the bed.

“Eliza is not exactly a beauty, Rose.”

“You haven't truly looked, Jeremy. She is improving day by day, she will be winsome, I promise you. She will have more suitors than she can count!”

“An orphan, and without a dowry?”

“She shall have a dowry,” Miss Rose exclaimed, stumbling from her bed, hair uncombed, barefoot, and feeling her way like a blind woman.

“How so? We have never spoken of that subject.”

“Because it was not the moment, Jeremy. A marriageable girl must have jewels, a trousseau with enough clothing to last her several years, and everything she needs for her home, as well as a tidy nest egg that will help establish her and her husband in the world.”

“And may I know what the groom's contribution is to be?”

“The house . . . and besides, he will have to support the woman for the rest of her life. In any case, it is still a number of years until Eliza is old enough to marry, and by then she will have a dowry. John and I will take charge of providing that, we shall not ask you for a penny . . . but it is pointless to waste time speaking of this now. You must think of Eliza as your daughter.”

“She is not my daughter, Rose.”

“Then treat her as if she were mine. Can you agree to do at least that?”

“Yes, I will do that,” Jeremy Sommers conceded.

The tea-soaked cloths seemed to work miracles. The ailing Miss Rose recovered completely and within forty-eight hours had regained her sight and was radiant. She devoted herself to her brother's care with endearing solicitude: she had never been sweeter and sunnier. The house returned to its normal rhythm, and from kitchen to dining room flowed Mama Fresia's delicious Chilean dishes and Eliza's mouthwatering breads and fine pastries, which had contributed so greatly to the Sommers' reputation as good hosts. From that moment, Miss Rose drastically modified her erratic tutelage of Eliza and outdid herself in a never before demonstrated maternal dedication, preparing her for school while at the same time mounting a relentless offensive aimed at Madame Colbert. Miss Rose had decided that Eliza would have learning, dowry, and fame as a beauty even if she was not one, because it was her view that beauty is a question of style. Any woman who conducts herself with the queenly assurance of a belle, she maintained, will convince everyone that she is beautiful. The first step toward emancipating Eliza would be a good marriage, seeing that the girl could not count on an older brother to shield her as her own had done. She herself could not see the advantages of marriage; a wife was the husband's property, with fewer rights than those of a servant or a child; on the other hand, a woman alone and without a fortune was at the mercy of the worst abuses. A married woman, if she was clever, could at least manage her husband, and with a bit of luck could even be widowed young.

“I would happily give half my life to have the freedom a man has, Eliza. But we are women, and that is our cross. All we can do is try to get the best from the little we have.”

Miss Rose did not tell Eliza that the one time she had tried to fly on her own she had crashed head-on into reality; she did not want to plant any subversive ideas in the girl's mind. She was determined that Eliza would have a better fate than her own; she would school the child in the arts of dissembling, manipulation, and cunning, which, she had no doubt, were more useful than candor. She spent three hours in the morning with Eliza and another three in the afternoon, studying schoolbooks imported from England. She entrusted the French lessons to a professor because no well-educated girl could be ignorant of that language. The rest of the time she personally supervised every stitch Eliza made for her trousseau: sheets, towels, table linens, and profusely embroidered undergarments, which Rose then wrapped in linen, perfumed with lavender, and stored in trunks. Every three months she took everything from the trunks and laid them in the sun to prevent the ravages of humidity and moths during the years leading up to a marriage. She bought a coffer for the jewels of Eliza's dowry and charged her brother John with filling it with gifts from his travels. Sapphires from India were added to emeralds and amethysts from Brazil, necklaces and bracelets of Venetian gold, and even a small diamond brooch. Jeremy Sommers knew nothing of these details, and was completely innocent of how his brother and sister financed such extravagances.

The piano lessons—now with a professor newly arrived from Belgium who used a ferule to rap the clumsy fingers of his students—became a daily martyrdom for Eliza. She also attended an academy of ballroom dancing, and at the master's suggestion Miss Rose obliged her to walk for hours balancing a book on her head, the purpose of which was to teach her to stand up straight. Eliza did all her assignments, practiced her piano lessons, and walked straight as a candle, even without a book on her head, but at night she slipped barefoot down to the servants' patio and often the dawn found her sleeping on a pallet with her arms around Mama Fresia.

Two years after the floods, things took a turn for the better and the country basked in good weather, political tranquility, and an economic boom. Chileans treaded warily; they were accustomed to natural disasters and such a bonanza could be the preparation for a major cataclysm. To top it off, rich veins of silver and gold were discovered in the north. During the Conquest, when the Spaniards wandered America seeking those ores and bearing off everything they found, Chile had been considered the backside of the world because, compared with the riches of the rest of the continent, it had very little to offer. The forced march across its towering mountains and the lunar desert of the north dried up the greed in the hearts of those conquistadors, and if any remained, unconquerable Indians made them rue it. The captains, exhausted and impoverished, cursed the land that gave them no choice but to plant their flags and lie down to die because to return without glory was worse. Three hundred years later those mines, hidden from the eyes of the ambitious soldiers of Spain and now suddenly, magically, exposed, were an unexpected prize for their descendants. New fortunes were formed, augmented by others from industry and commerce. The ancient landed aristocracy, which had always had the upper hand in the country, felt its privileges threatened, and new wealth became a social stigma.

One of those filthy-rich upstarts fell in love with Paulina del Valle. His name was Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, and in a few years' time he had made a fortune in a gold mine he had developed with his brother. Little was known of their origins, except that it was suspected that their ancestors were converted Jews and had adopted that sonorous Christian family name to save their skins during the Inquisition, more than enough reason to be flatly rejected by the proud del Valles. Of Agustín's five daughters, Jacob Todd liked Paulina best because her dashing, happy nature reminded him of Miss Rose. The girl had an open way of laughing that contrasted with her sisters' simpers hidden behind fans and mantillas. When Jacob Todd learned of her father's plan to banish Paulina to a convent to foil her love affair, he decided, against his better judgment, to help her. Before she was taken away, he managed to steal a few words with her in a moment when her chaperone's attention was wandering. Aware that there was no time for explanations, Paulina pulled from her bodice a letter so folded and wadded up it looked like a weathered rock and begged Todd to take it to her beloved. The next day the girl, closely guarded by her father, was taken on a journey of several days over nearly impassable roads to Concepción, a city in the south near Indian reservations, where nuns would undertake the chore of bringing her to her senses with prayers and fasting. To rid her of the foolhardy notion that she might rebel or escape, del Valle had ordered her head to be shaved. Her mother collected Paulina's cut-off locks, wrapped them in an embroidered batiste cloth, and took them as a gift to the charitable women of the Iglesia de la Matriz to make wigs for the saints. Meanwhile, Todd not only succeeded in delivering Paulina's missive, he also learned the exact location of the convent from her brothers and passed on that information to a greatly distressed Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz. In gratitude, the suitor took out his pocket watch and pure-gold chain and insisted on giving them to his love's sainted spy, who refused them, offended.

“I have no way to repay you for what you have done,” Feliciano murmured, nonplussed.

“You have no reason to do so.”

For some time Jacob Todd heard nothing about the beleaguered pair, but after a couple of months the delicious tale of the girl's flight was the tidbit of every social gathering and there was nothing the haughty Agustín del Valle could do to prevent the addition of colorful details that made him the butt of ridicule. The version Paulina told Jacob Todd months later was that one June evening, one of those wintry twilights with a fine rain and early nightfall, she had managed to escape her keepers' vigilance and flee the convent dressed in a novice's habit, taking with her two silver candelabra from the main altar. Thanks to Jacob Todd's information, Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz had journeyed south, where he had been in secret contact with Paulina from the beginning, prepared to meet her at the first opportunity. That evening he was waiting a short distance from the convent, although when he saw her it was several seconds before he recognized the half-bald novice who melted into his arms, still clutching the candelabras.

“Don't look at me like that, Feliciano, hair grows,” she said, kissing him smack on the lips.

Feliciano took Paulina back to Valparaíso in a closed carriage and temporarily installed her in his widowed mother's home, the most respectable hiding place he could think of, doing his best to protect her honor although aware that there was no way to keep her reputation from being tarred by the scandal. Agustin's first thought was to challenge his daughter's seducer to a duel, but when he acted on that impulse he learned that Feliciano was on a business trip in Santiago. He turned his attention instead to finding Paulina, assisted by armed sons and nephews preoccupied with avenging the honor of the family, while the mother and a chorus of sisters prayed a rosary for their misguided Paulina. The ecclesiastical uncle who had recommended sending Paulina to the nuns tried to instill a little sanity in the male del Valles, but those chauvinists were in no mood for that good Christian's sermonizing. Feliciano's trip was part of the strategy he had planned with his brother and Jacob Todd. He left without fanfare for the capital while the other two men set into action the Valparaíso portion of the plan, publishing in a liberal newspaper news of the disappearance of Señorita Paulina del Valle, word that the family had tried very hard to suppress. That saved the lovers' lives.