She Walks in Shadows by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Paula R. Stiles Page B

were never knowingly forced to contemplate what their negres called the bone-field, a wet clay sump where slaves’ corpses were buried at night and without ceremony, once their squeamish masters were safely asleep. Landscaping as maquillage, a false face over rot, the skull skin-hid. But then, we all look the same underneath, no matter our outward shade, ne c’est pas?
    In 1912, I took Denis’s hand at a Paris soiree and knew him immediately for my own blood, from the way the very touch of him made my skin crawl — that oh-so-desirable peau si-blanche, olive-inflected like old ivory, light enough to shine under candle-flame. I had my Tanit-wig on that night, coils of it hung down in tiers far as my hips, my thighs, far enough to brush the very backs of my bare knees; I’d been rehearsing most of the day, preparing to chant the old rites in Shona while doing what my posters called a “Roodmas dance” for fools with deep pockets. Frank Marsh was there, too, of course, his fishy eyes hung out on strings — he introduced Denis to me, then pulled me aside and begged me once again to allow him to paint me “as the gods intended,” with only my ancestors’ hair for modesty. But I laughed in his face and turned back to Denis instead, for here was the touch of true fate at last, culmination of my mother’s many prayers and sacrifices. Mine to bend myself to him and bind him fast, make him bring me back to Riverside to do what must be done, just as it’d been Frank’s unwitting destiny to make that introduction all along and suffer the consequences.
    Antoine De Russy liked to boast he kept Denis unworldly and I must suppose it to be so, for he never saw me with my wig off, my Tanit-locks set by and the not-so-soft fuzz of black which anchored it on display. As he was raised to think himself a gentleman, it would never have occurred to Denis to demand such intimacies. By the time his father pressed him to do so, I had him well-trained: Something odd about that woman, boy, I heard him whisper more than once, before they fell out. Makes my blood run cold to see it. For all she’s foreign-born, I’d almost swear I know her face ....
    Ha! As though the man had no memory, or no mirrors. Yet, I was far too fair for the one, I suspect, and far too ... different, though in “deceitfully slight proportion”— to quote that Northerner who wrote your vaunted testimony — for the other. It being difficult to acknowledge your own features in so alien a mirror, not even when they come echoing back to you over generations of mixed blood, let alone on your only son’s arm.

    You got in touch with Tully last Tuesday, little seeker, securing his services via Bell’s machine — its latest version, any rate — and by yesterday, meanwhile, you’d flown here from Paris already, through the air. Things move so fast these days and I don’t understand the half of it; it’s magic to me, more so than magic itself, that dark, mechanical force I hold so close to my dead heart. But then, this is a problem with where I am now, how I am; things come to me unasked-for, under the earth, out of the river. Knowledge just reveals itself to me, simple and secret, the same way soil is disturbed by footfalls or silt rises to meet the ripple: no questions and no answers, likewise. Nothing explained outright, ever.
    That’s why I don’t know your name, or anything else about you, aside from the fact you think in a language I’ve long discarded and hold an image of me in your mind, forever searching after its twin: that portrait poor Frank did eventually conjure out of me during our last long, hot, wet summer at Riverside, when I led my husband’s father to believe I was unfaithful expressly in order to tempt Denis back early from his New York trip ... so he might discover me in Frank’s rooms, naked but for my wig, and kill us both.
    Workings have a price, you see, and the single best currency for such transactions is blood, always — my blood,