Chapter 247
As she measured him with a straight, appraising gaze, however he chose to read it, Cárcel—his jaw caught in her hand—gave a perplexed smile.
"…It's been so long I don't think I can restrain myself, so go easy on the torture, Ines."
"Why should I restrain it?"
"Look at your face. You're gaunt."
Who was the patient calling whom sick… She felt a retort about to spring out, when Cárcel suddenly moved. Without so much as a glance back, he simply reached the hand that wasn't carrying luggage behind him and, as if it were only natural, seized her hand.
Precisely, as if he had eyes in the back of his head.
Ines, out of habit, laced her fingers with his as he did, yet stared at the back of his head in disbelief. It felt like he was deliberately not looking at her face.
You've got something on your conscience.
"Why did you get hurt?"
She asked, almost like an ambush.
"On a mission."
He answered without letting his guard down.
"How did you get hurt?"
"By being stupid."
"That doesn't count as an answer. You know that, right?"
Ines planted herself a few steps below him as he went up the stairs. It wasn't as if she had the strength to hold him there just because she wanted to, so he must have felt the slight, paltry resistance at his back and stopped at once.
"Tell me who did this."
"If I tell you, will you avenge me?"
"If I can, I will. If some mangy bastard cracked your skull and dares to walk away unscathed."
Her tone remained refined, but her words were unrestrained. With a low breath of laughter, like a sigh, Cárcel replied,
"…He isn't even alive anymore, Ines."
"You killed him?"
"Yes."
"Good."
At the word killed, Ines lifted her skirts and went up the stairs all the lighter. She didn't want to let go of his hand to open the door, so she went up the last few steps quicker than he did and opened it with her free hand.
Raul, who had been watching them through the glass and timing himself to open at just the right moment, received them with an awkward expression.
"Senor, you've returned… huh?"
"que diablos (what the hell is this sight)!"
Short Arondra popped her head out from beside the tall Raul and shrieked. Raul obligingly shifted aside to let Arondra make a grand fuss, even as he looked over Cárcel with deliberately grave eyes.
"Lord Cárcel, what on earth is this injury?"
"It's nothing seri—"
"diablo demonio (devil demonio, a hell-spawn)…! What son of Satan laid a finger on that handsome forehead? May he fall into the flames of hell—"
Even Arondra, who was usually unbothered by the fact that Cárcel got hurt and ached, couldn't hide her shock and curses at the other party. Ines flicked a glance at Cárcel as if to say, and this is still nothing? But now that the household staff had appeared, his face was simply impassive.
"A filthy son of Satan born of hellfire and brimstone in adultery! A demonio who should go back home and burn! Do they know how precious our Senor's face is…!"
"That's the first problem?"
Bandying words as usual and smiling as if nothing were wrong… Ines thought of riding Arondra's momentum to pry again into the identity of that accursed diablo, then looked at his tired complexion and shook her head.
"Arondra. Cárcel hurt his head, so we can't have his skull ringing. Jose?"
"Yes, Senora."
"Draw warm water in the bath, quickly. Raul, first—have anyone you like run to Captain Maso's house and tell him to come to our residence before supper. And you, go to that apothecary at El Tabeo and get Pintala—the one that lets him sleep well."
"Yes, Lady Ines."
"You always sleep too little, Cárcel. Tomorrow you're going to sleep very late."
She clicked her tongue, looking at his reddened eyes. Her hand, extending almost without her knowing from a pang of pity to smooth his eye-corner—
Cárcel turned his head slightly and avoided her touch.
For an instant, the air twisted. Without showing it, she led him to the second floor. After that, silence all the way. Up the stairs, into the bedchamber.
"…Truly, there isn't anywhere else hurt besides this?"
The moment the door closed, Ines withdrew her hand and asked.
"No."
"Then take it off. In front of me."
"…"
"Here. Now."
He was not the sort of decorous husband to be at a loss at his wife ordering him to undress. Then what was it? Those modestly evasive eyes… It annoyed her for some reason—something indefinably abrasive. Like a pebble in your shoe pricking your sole without end while you can't get it out.
Ines's eyes doggedly pursued his.
"Undress."
At her renewed order, he dropped his bags with a soft thud under the table and took off his morning coat, hanging it over a chair. He, who had buttoned up to the neck so neatly, unfastened his shirt with military precision and worked his cuffs in order.
To be standing before her stripping and yet be searching for nothing but discipline, a soldier's carriage worn into his body… Even with the hard chest and abdomen plainly revealed between the open plackets, the very way he undressed being tidy displeased her.
"See? Nothing."
Holding his shed shirt in one hand, Cárcel smiled plainly, without even a grain of heat. How dare— With a bored look, Ines traced the scar at his side.
"I haven't washed yet."
He laughed softly as he said it. It could only be taken to mean don't touch me. Scowling at the scar, Ines pressed down. A pleasant olive-soap scent rose—one often used in upscale inns. No doubt, with that fastidious nature of his, he had washed in the morning and set out, and it hadn't even been many hours.
"You're covered in dust."
That sort of thing was surely just an excuse. The moment he caught the hand she was teasing at his side, tickling him, Ines's other hand drew his face in and kissed him. It was a light kiss, only the surface of lip to the surface of lip.
He went rigid. Even the lips that should have chased after hers stayed still. Ines pretended not to notice that either and drew back.
"Take off the rest too, Cárcel."
It had felt like time was stopped, and then suddenly a sound came from the direction of the bath. In truth, that was proof time hadn't stopped at all but was moving along just fine.
It was probably Jose and another servant, entering by the door outside the bedchamber that the staff used, filling their tub and the washbasin with water.
Cárcel clung to that sound, nearly in a stupor—as if he needed any other element for his senses to latch onto. He couldn't help feeling he had run into Ines too soon.
Or that he still wasn't in his right mind.
On the way back in haste from Bilbao, the untreated wound had become infected; with a high fever he'd hovered on the brink of death for nearly five days and only just survived.
Having escaped dying away from home, Cárcel, uncharacteristically, afterward urged his horse very slowly and, come evening, laid himself down at an inn each night on his way back to Calstera.
He even unpacked for the night when the sun set with only three or four hours to Calstera.
Except that his lodgings were all mere inn rooms, it was also the time in his twenty-four years that Cárcel Escalante treated himself the most preciously. Naturally so, when he had nearly met a dog's death neither here nor there.
Since he'd already set one foot on death's threshold for a moment, whether the Apostle would appear or the montage of a former life would flash by—he longed for it blindly, heedless even of pain, yet it was only pain that gave him no returns.
For the dreams that passed ceaselessly through his fevered head were, now, only of Ines Escalante.
Memories of sitting face to face and smiling in the tranquil evenings of Calstera. The moment at night on the terrace when he looked into the room where she was praying.
The habit of waking in the morning, seeing first the sight of her asleep in his arms, and kissing her forehead to offer the first prayer…
Ironically, from all those everyday scenes—from memories in which no special meaning could be found—he found the whole of meaning.
Even if the dream gave back no answer, it was Ines. With her, not a single moment could be without meaning.
Perhaps that was all there was now. That the meaning was here, with us, now.
Cárcel realized, in the rawest possible way, how much he had missed her since leaving Mendoza.
Whatever causal chain he finally fitted together in Bilbao, however cruel an answer that damnably twisted chain delivered—in the end, shamelessly, he had missed her.
Only what stood before his eyes—ultimately only the present—hauled him out again. He thought, I should head to Mendoza. As if the moment when he had wanted to stab his own throat and die were far behind him, he wanted to live. So that he could be by her side for as long as she stayed in Mendoza, he would roughly sort out the affairs of Calstera… and once the wound had healed to where it no longer looked this serious…
…So at first he had thought this was a dream. More than a real dream that felt exactly like reality…
"...Ines, it's still broad daylight."
"All the better—it's bright, so I can see you well."
Perhaps it was the same even now. From start to finish. Including those absurd eyes and demands and touches. He kept feeling he wasn't in his right mind.
Surely the damned fever in his skull was rising again, or—after seeing Ines Valeztena's saintlike ex-husband—his own depths were already, disgustingly, aroused and showing him a ridiculous delusion.
What had that damnably good man said when he handed over just that necklace cord? That he was sorry to have sold it, that he had saved for years to buy it back just to return it… That holy token lay in the luggage right by Ines. He felt like a thief standing before the owner. As if once the owner found the item, everything would change and he would lose it all…
Was that why he hadn't even dared meet her eyes? As if it were only that splendid necklace? He couldn't manage the head that was entirely consumed by large and small terrors, even at the faintly ticklish sensation of Ines tracing her fingertips along his palm.
His body, rigid like stone, was the same.
"Take it off, Cárcel."
"…"
"I want to see. Hm?"
At words that once would have made him spring like a madman in heat, his already-shot mind creaked.
Though bright as ever, Ines was talking so brazenly, yet he found her unbearably sad. From earlier, when she took sudden offense at him—eyes shining with nothing but competitive spirit and stubbornness as if she'd set her mind on riling him one way or another—that too made him sad. Even the cute habit of testing him by stripping him first rather than telling him to undress pained him.
He was still sad for her.
In dreams, in the breath of dying of fever, with his vision and head swaying on horseback, though he had grieved without a day's rest, he still couldn't bear it that she was sad.
In truth, every time he met Ines's eyes he felt, disgracefully, that tears would stream down, and from the stable onward he had been anxious, like someone barely holding a brimming glass of water.
Unable to meet her eyes, only kissing her hand and staring at the floor with bloodshot eyes, he had swallowed his sobs the whole time he repented in prayer, afraid that his resentment toward God might harm her.
It wasn't the sort of thing you could let a few drops fall and then secretly wipe away; it felt like he would cry for hours, unable even to breathe. A rapture riddled with guilt.
He couldn't explain the reason for his tears to her, and he no longer wanted to show even a little ugliness; even so, it was to the point he simply could not endure—he could not manage to suppress this sorrow, this joy at meeting her.
It felt as if God had suddenly gathered all the guilt and tenderness in the world and rammed them together into his head. As if he had fallen without warning from the bow into the sea. As if, no matter what, his limbs would not move and he could only drown…
Ah, it was a sea of feeling to drown in. Desperate affection, nauseating selfishness, dizzying jealousy. His guilt surged so high he couldn't even meet her eyes.
With what right could I—toward you. Even as he thought that, he knew his vile selfishness that, in the end, could not let go, so he couldn't bring himself to look.
Now that I've finally touched you. Now that at last you want me… perhaps it's only natural that I can't let you go.
By his own lights, it was still not very fair justification. But the rapture was laughably great; he felt like a boy again.
When Ines—Ines Escalante—had come crashing into him from behind with all her joy…
In the end, it was the joy that you were alive and had returned to my arms.
After a very long detour. Only at the end of a very long wait. As if he had become the "him" from before living several lives over,
at last, there was "us."