lactarius indigo

This can’t be what people picture when they hear of Noemí Taboada living in sin with her lover, the Englishman, and her cousin, the divorcée. Francis is kneeling at the side of a raised glass case crowded with plant life. He looks like a university librarian, in his soft brown corduroy jacket and one of the well-worn sweaters she could never dream of asking him to give up. Her old friends would say he’s too pretty to dress like he does but none of them would have imagined her coming home after a night of dinner parties and dancing to someone so sober and so serious, but the Taboada girls have had quite enough excitement for one lifetime.

He looks up at her approach and smooths the hair back from his face, bashful as a boy. He must notice her interest at the antique-looking frame of the case and the collection of matter inside it, from the tall twining plumes almost grazing the roof of it to the thick and humid pad of decaying matter lining the bottom — if it were only the brass frame it might look quaint, but the interior is like a transplanted piece of forest floor, scooped up and carried away.

“You know, the Victorians came about these things by accident. A fellow was collecting fern specimens from every corner of the globe, but one after another, as soon as he brought them to London they wilted and died because of the bad air. Only the specimens he stored in glass survived and thrived. It sparked off quite a vogue for glass cases, and this must have been one of them. Though of course, we’re not growing ferns.”

“The principle is the same, it’s only the medium that’s different. I do see some rather daring wildflowers, though.”

They’d gone to forage for specimens in the woods a ways outside El Triunfo. That was about as close as the three of them liked to get these days — to the place all three of them had been captives once, higher up in the thinner air of the mountains. Francis had collected likely-looking shards of decaying wood, and it had been the first she’d heard him talk about where he grew up in a very long while. Catalina had knelt down with her little pocketknife to carefully cut away mushroom stems, clad somewhat scandalously in a pair of dark green men’s canvas trousers, while Noemí had browsed the guidebook full of well-worn pencilled notes and searched for the hairy mats of rhizomorphs among the fallen leaves. This little room holds the profit of those outings, with fungi growing on every flat surface, carefully separated under glass.

“Look, here. I’ve got something for you.” Francis points at something in the glass case with the nub of his pencil.

Down in one shaded corner of the miniature greenhouse, a patch of luminous purple rises from the leaf mould like a curl of smoke. The gently rounded cap is as smooth as taffeta and its graceful stem is slimmer than a woman’s pinky finger. Its color is a ghostly violet from base to tip, like a watercolor illustration in a book of fairy tales, or like something seen in a dream.

“It’s beautiful. I don’t remember seeing any of these when we were out and about.”

“Laccaria amethystina.” Francis stands, tugging his shirt straighter. “The color is only this vibrant when it’s young. It’ll fade in time. I thought you should see it while it’s new.”

Out of all the specimens he’s cultivating here, secured in oversized candy jars and empty fishbowls, there’s one he’s never mentioned — one that doesn’t even have a name, no segmented Latin taxonomy to fit it into a tidy index. The people who knew it first long before the Doyles of England had ever mined for silver, taking up its luminous flesh and using it to heal the sick and mend the injured — they must have called it something, but Howard Doyle never paused to learn it.

“You didn’t mention if they were poisonous.”

“Not by itself. If the spores settle in an area with arsenic-rich soil, the arsenic is absorbed into the fruiting bodies.” Francis’ expression darkens a little from its previous enthusiasm. “So it seems that no living thing really escapes the environment in which it grows.”

“Maybe not, but some of them are more adaptable than others.”

She knows what Francis is thinking by now. These are the thoughts that preoccupy him in his work, just as they’ve pierced into her own — heredity and colonial incursion, medicines and poisons, bad soil and bad air. The air in Mexico City seems to agree with him, at any rate — the blue circles have disappeared from under his eyes, and he smiles more here, even laughs. There hadn’t been much to laugh about at High Place.

It wasn’t like there weren’t already reasons to fret over deadly things seeping into the ground, back there in El Triumfo with its faded glories and tarnished elegance. The silver business required enough poisons to furnish a Borgia’s cabinet of secrets. To process silver ore, you need a great deal of mercury, and the refining process spits back a great deal of lead and even arsenic. Even silver polish can be toxic, adulterated with cyanide. Noemí wished she’d thought of that back at High Place, polishing cups and sugar bowls for that hateful woman. It might have saved her some chapped fingertips, or expedited their flight from that place considerably.

Noemí takes him in her arms, feeling him bend against her like a reed in the wind. In her sensible tweed skirt she smells of typewriter ribbons and dusty card catalogs, not exactly Miss Dior, but Francis turns and kisses her with a lingering gentleness.

When they break away, there’s a flush of warmth in Francis’ face, bringing color to his cheeks. “Will you come down to dinner with me?”

“I’d like nothing better than that. I’ve finished typing up my bibliography.”

Her dissertation is still a patchwork, and while typing is a pleasure she’d had to sacrifice the length of her manicure for sustained sessions at her brand-new Olympia. To make up for it she’s painted her nails a deep oxblood red. Francis takes her hand .

“I’ll read for you tonight, if you like. Catalina will put a record on and the two of you can dance.”