After that I stopped talking. I looked at the body in the bed and told myself it was Isidoro and no one else. This was a truth that I had to learn, things would go very badly for me if I refused to learn it, but the lesson was very hard indeed.
The priest left, promising to write to the master as soon as he got home, and all we servants went to bed. Fausta was the last to leave Isidoro’s room, closing the door behind her as quietly as if he was just sleeping. Then she took my arm and dragged me downstairs to the maids’ dormitory, where judge and jury were waiting. Was I mad or was I simply a liar? They’d already taken out the little gifts I’d received and were talking about them: Now Fausta told them where the gifts had come from. I’d taken the key to the library from the master’s laundry, she announced, and I’d been selling off a number of his valuable books. I inferred from this that this is what Fausta herself had been doing before I’d interrupted her with my library visits.
“But how stupid, to spend the money on things like this,” the cook said, flapping the green shawl in my face.
“Some people just don’t think of the future,” Fausta Del Olmo said. A couple of the other maids hadn’t joined in and looked as if they didn’t entirely believe Fausta Del Olmo. Perhaps they’d had their own problems with her. But then Fausta announced that even Isidoro Salazar had known I was a thief. She showed them some of the slips of paper Isidoro had left for me in the library, slips he must have left that time I stayed away. The words “pretty thief” persuaded them. The master is a generous man and stealing from him causes all sorts of unnecessary difficulties. Now that some of his books are gone he may well become much less generous. The servants drove me out of the dormitory. They went to the kitchen and took pots and pans and banged them together and cried: “Shame! Shame! Shame!” I stayed in my bed for as long as I could with my covers pulled over my head, but they were so loud. They surrounded my bed, shame, shame, shame, so loud I can still hear it, shame, shame, shame. I fled, and Fausta and the servants chased me through the corridors with their pots and pans and screeching — someone hit me with a spatula and then they all threw spoons, which sounds droll now that it’s over, but having silver spoons thrown at you in a dark house is a terrifying thing, you see them flashing against the walls like little swords before they hit you. It would’ve been worse if those people had actually had knives: they’d completely lost their minds.
I made it into the library by the skin of my teeth and locked the door behind me. I wrote, am writing, this letter to you, my Montserrat. The servants have given up their rough music and have gone to bed. You will be born soon, maybe later today, maybe tomorrow. I feel you close. I know where I will have to leave you. As for this letter, I will give it to the roses, and then I must get out of here for a while. How long? Until I am sure of what happened, or at least the true order of it all. Did I somehow give him more time than he would have had on his own? The entire time I have been writing this letter I have felt Isidoro’s eyes on me. He seems to be telling me that we could still have been married, that if I’d only brought the priest and not Fausta we could still have been married. Of course he cannot really be telling me anything: I have seen him as a dead man. Why am I not afraid?
Montse found that she’d walked the length of the library as she read her mother’s letter. Now she stood at the door to Isidoro’s garden, which opened with the same key. Outside, someone in the shadows took a couple of startled steps backward. Señora Lucy.
“I saw all this light coming out from under that door,” Lucy said. “That was new.” She peered over Montse’s shoulder. “Swap you a rose for a book,” she said.
“sorry” doesn’t sweeten her tea
/ 
To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely
To you who sleep a lot because you are bored
To you who cry a lot because you are sad
I write this down.
Chew on your feelings that are cornered
Like you would chew on rice.
Anyway life is something that you need to digest.
— CHUN YANG HEE
Be good to Boudicca and Boudicca will be good to you,” Chedorlaomer said. Boudicca and I eyed each other through the blue-tinted glass of Ched’s fish tank, and I said: “Tell me what she is again?”
To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill. But Ched’s got this certificate that states Boudicca’s species is Betta splendens, colloquially known as Siamese fighting fish because fish of this kind have a way of instigating all-out brawls with their tank mates. It’s almost admirable. Boudicca doesn’t care how big or pretty her fellow fish are; if they come to her manor she will obliterate them, whether that means waiting until the other fish is asleep before she launches her attack or, in the case of a fish that simply refused to engage with her, eating the eggs that the other fish had spawned and then dancing around in the water while the bereaved mother was slain by grief.
So now Boudicca lives alone, which is exactly what she wanted all along.
I get this vibe that Ched the eternal bachelor sees Boudicca as a fish version of himself, but he’s never said that out loud, at least not to me. We don’t have those kinds of talks. Even if Ched and Boudicca are on some level the same person, the fact remains that the man is able to feed himself and the fish needs someone to see to her nutrition a couple of times a week.
Ched called me over to tell me he was going away for two years and he expected me to take care of Boudicca. Twice a week for two years! Plus Ched’s house is spooky. The House of Locks, it’s called. That’s the actual address: House of Locks, Ipswich, Suffolk. He travels a lot and I have his spare set of keys for use while on best friend duty, watering his house plants when he used to have house plants, collecting post, etc., but when I’m in there I don’t linger. Nothing has actually happened to me in there. Not yet, anyway. But every time I go into that bloody house there’s the risk of coming out crazy. Because of the doors. They don’t stay closed unless they’re locked. Once you’ve done that you hear sounds behind them; sounds that convince you you’ve locked someone in. But when you leave these doors unlocked they swing halfway out of the doorframe so that you can’t see all the way into the next room and it’s just as if somebody’s standing behind the door and holding it like that on purpose. The windows behave similarly — they won’t fully open unless you push them up slowly, with more firm intent than actual pressure. Only Ched really has the knack of it. Apparently the house’s first owner took a particular pleasure in fastening and releasing locks — the feel and the sound of the key turning until it finds the point at which the lock must yield. So for her the house was a lifetime’s worth of erotic titillation.