Romance

Tomas Castro

Castro serves the Riego family with a loyalty that survives every scrape his masters won't own up to, and he carries their errands — and their secrets — with a face no one forgets. Carlos calls him 'as faithful as he is ugly' and shrugs off the watch Castro supposedly bought from a bad man, leaving the reader to wonder how much of the villainy is Castro's and how much belongs to the family he serves. His presence turns the voyage to Cuba into something more dangerous than a homecoming.

Carlos Riego

Carlos Riego arrives aboard ship in threadbare finery, bound for an uncle he has never seen — a dying Grand d'Espagne who owns the whole town of Rio Medio and an only daughter named Seraphina. He laughs off the police, the watch, and his own ruin with Byronic ease, insisting he is in no scrape while his companion Castro clearly is. His romantic story — the inheritance, the promised marriage, the family name — is the engine that pulls the narrator and the reader toward Cuba, even as his careless charm hints at what it will cost.

Seraphina Riego

Seraphina moves through the Casa Riego under the shadow of O'Brien's casual, terrifying power, watching her maids flee and her father's authority dissolve into a doting sleep. When she murmurs to the narrator that 'they are all like this — all, all,' she names the isolation and fear that define her world. Her steadiness under O'Brien's courteous menace — the shawl slipping, the candle trembling, her voice never breaking — makes her the emotional center the narrator will risk everything to reach.

Manuel del Popolo Isturiz

Manuel del Popolo Isturiz — El Demonio — haunts the novel as a name whispered in courtrooms and on decks, a legend of violence attached to ships looted and men murdered. When O'Brien and the Juez need a villain to pin their catalogue of crimes on, it is Nikola el Escoces, otherwise El Demonio, whose identity they try to fasten onto the narrator. Whether he is a real man, a myth, or a convenient fiction, his reputation is the dark mirror against which the narrator's own innocence must be measured.

Mr. Sebright

Sebright moves through the ship's cuddy with the quiet competence of a man who has all the soiled duties and chipped men to attend to, listening to the narrator's account of the Casa Riego with thoughtful fingers at his moustache. He gives up his own berth without fuss and mentions, almost as an afterthought, that there are warrants out in Jamaica — then begins a sentence about Havana that the narrator is too drowsy to hear. His half-finished warning hangs over the voyage home, a small kindness with an edge of foreboding.

O'Brien

O'Brien enters rooms like an official who owns them, his eternal smile fixed over lips that tremble and eyes ringed with dark marks, and his slightest gesture — a forefinger shaken at two frightened maids — empties a gallery. He manages the dying Don Balthasar's affairs, controls the old judge with a whisper, and quietly assembles an Act of Accusation against the narrator under the name of Nikola el Escoces. His power is the kind that never raises its voice, and it is the true obstacle between the narrator and Seraphina.