Free The Devil on Her Tongue by Linda Holeman Page B

day tomorrow. I’ll come and help you.”
    I felt a surge of something, perhaps just happiness. “All right,” I said, smiling, and we nodded at each other and then there was a moment of awkwardness. “I have to get to the church,” I added, as if he was preventing me from going.

    The next afternoon, Abílio arrived with his ladder and a big wooden bucket. As he had predicted, the day was warmer, and at times a bright sun shone through the light clouds. I took our bucket and we went together up into the hills and collected clay. We hauled our buckets back to the beach and mixed the clay with sea water to make slurry. Abílio climbed up to the roof with one of the buckets and slathered the mixture over the cracks with his hands. When he needed the next bucket, I carried it up, taking the empty one back down. The sun came out brightly as we finished, guaranteeing the new clay would dry to permanence in a few hours.
    We went into the sea and washed our hands and arms. He splashed me and I laughed, splashing him back. “We don’t have much, but I can offer you some fish broth and cheese,” I said.
    “I have a honey cake at my place. Come and have some,” he said. I nodded as we waded out of the water. He carried the ladder and I grabbed his bucket.
    We sat across from each other at his table and he cut thick slices of the
bolo de mel
. “I’ll be going back to Madeira again,” he said, handing me a slice. “I only came home to act as pallbearer for Gustavo Lopez’s brother’s funeral.”
    A sudden darkness filled me. “Back to Funchal?”
    “For just a while,” he said, but before I could feel relieved he added, “Like your father, I plan to go to Brazil to make my fortune.”
    “Any day my father will be sending money, enough for me to buy passage. How much does it cost to go all the way to Brazil?”
    “The cheapest passage is one hundred and sixty réis,” Abílio said, and I made a low sound, trying to imagine that amount of money. “So Arie reached Brazil?” he asked me.
    “He lives in São Paulo,” I said with confidence, for what else could I think?
    “How long has he been gone now?”
    “Over a year.” Sixteen months. There had been sixteen round, fat moons hanging low over the water since he left. I had been almost fourteen, but not yet a woman when he walked away. Now I was well past fifteen. I told myself he was waiting to earn enough money to send with his first letter from Brazil. Maybe he was trying to earn enough for two passages, one for my mother and one for me, although even a single passage, at one hundred and sixty réis, sounded like an impossible amount to ever save.
    “I liked Arie,” Abílio said, and I smiled warmly at him, thinking of the illustrations of compasses and spyglasses, of sextants and astrolabes in the books on navigation my father had left for me. I had often traced the sea routes he had told me about sailing with the Dutch East India Company. I thought of his decision to first explore the world when he was even younger than Abílio Perez.
    Looking at him now, I thought that Abílio was like my father: curious, brave, wanting more than a safe and settled life. It was why my father had to leave me. And now Abílio would leave as well. “When will you go back to Funchal?”
    He smiled back at me, a smile that carried the heat of today’s sun. “Tomorrow, Diamantina.”
    My name, coming from his lips, sounded beautiful. Even though the cake was finished, I could smell it wafting from Abílio. I had long ago stopped leaning close to people, sniffing at them as I had when a child, but at this moment I wanted to be closer to Abílio, with his tantalizing scent of warm, sticky honey.
    He ran his finger along the edge of the knife he’d used to cut the cake.
    “My father told me many stories of life aboard ship: the cramped quarters, the ever-present threat of shipwreck, of disease and piracy,” I said. “But he also spoke of the glories of the water stretching