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off to his hacienda in Vera Cruz and pretending to be a philosopher for months at a time—Hannibal would be dead at the end of a rope.”
    “What kind of evidence do they have against him?” asked Rose, and Consuela blinked at her in surprise.
    “The evidence against him is that he did it, Señora. My brother deserved to be poisoned, and I don’t think there was a tear shed for him by anyone in the house except that
mariposa
valet of his who found the body, but . . .”
    “What happened?”
    The singer shrugged impatiently, and picked apart the hull of a peanut with small, deft fingers, as if the matter of Hannibal’s guilt or innocence were secondary to the importance of his escape. “We had all just sat through the most dreadful dinner to celebrate my brother Fernando’s wedding on the following day. At the end of it Fernando went into my father’s study and locked the door. Everyone still at the dinner-table saw Hannibal take brandy and glasses from the sideboard and go outside—the study has three doors, one from the
sala,
one from the
corredor
outside, and one from my father’s room, which was padlocked because my father had gone mad just then and was locked up in his room. But from the window of his room my father saw Hannibal take a bottle from his pocket and pour something into one of the glasses of brandy, just before he went into the study.”
    Rose said, “I can see how there would be a misunderstanding.”
    Consuela shook her head. “There can be no misunderstanding about it, Señora Rose. I came out into the
corredor
only moments later, with my half-sister Valentina and my father’s mistress Natividad, who was going to marry Fernando, and with Natividad’s mother and Doña Gertrudis, of course. . . . A woman in this country does not neglect her duenna’s company any more than she neglects to cast a shadow upon the wall. So we were all there when Hannibal came out of the study, without the brandy or the glasses. The rest of the men all stayed in the
sala
drinking while Hannibal played the violin for us in the
corredor;
then when the men came out the servants were in the
sala,
clearing away the dinner and setting up tables for cards. So you can see there was no way in which anyone else could have entered the study. My father is quite mad, you understand, but when he sees actual things—not talking skulls or feathered snakes floating in the air or the Jaguar-God materializing in his bedroom—he is
most
observant. He didn’t like my brother. . . .”
    “I don’t imagine he did,” murmured January, “if Fernando had pilfered his mistress.”
    “
Dios,
no! That had nothing to do with the matter. It was my father’s idea that Franz marry Natividad. . . .”
    “Franz?”
    “Fernando. My brother. From the age of ten he had lived in Prussia, where he went to military school—he was twenty-five when he died. He was a major in the Tenth Berlin Guards, and loved the army of the Prussians. It was clean, he always said, as if less exalted beings lived in filth and fed upon garbage. He did not want to come back to Mexico. He only did so this year, after the deaths of our older brother Don Damiano and Damiano’s son Luis from the
vomito negro.
”
    “So up until this year,” said Rose, “this Don Damiano was your father’s heir?”
    “Just so,” agreed Consuela, dusting dark crystals of sugar from her fingers. “My father was married three times, you understand—in many ways that is the reason for his command that Fernando marry Natividad, which Fernando did not want to do at all. Father’s first wife was Doña Marcellina de Medellín, by whom he had Damiano and our eldest sister Josefa, who is now a widow with two children. After Doña Marcellina’s death my father married Doña Maria-Exaltación de Borregos, a Spanish girl sent here to a convent during all the fighting in Spain, and she bore him Isabella and Fernando. Later still he wed Melosia Valenzuela, who became the mother of