And Creed, he judged, has his orders to see us off Taggart land the minute we’re out of sight of the house …
Leaving Valentina here alone.
His glance crossed that of Jalisco. In Spanish, the vaquero agreed quietly, ‘Yes, it would be as well not to ride alone.’
Turning, the man swung up onto his pinto mare, and he and his two bravos left the corrals in a scattering of pebbles and dirt.
TWELVE
‘You all right?’ January glanced behind him as he stepped through the door from the upstairs back gallery into the guest-room, where Hannibal lay stretched out on the bed like a dead man, his face chalky with fatigue.
‘I stand ready to imitate the action of the tiger,’ whispered the fiddler, struggling up onto one elbow. ‘My sinews stiffened, my blood summoned … it’s on its way, and will be here in a moment, never fear … my fair nature disguised with hard-favored rage …’
January waved aside this parody of Henry V and came to his side. ‘Brother Francis informs me that horses will be ready in half an hour, for us to ride out to Sauceito Creek.’
‘That was his idea.’ Hannibal sat up, and coughed. ‘And I can’t well quarrel with the notion. I estimate that we have about forty-eight hours before Sheriff Quigley returns from San Antonio – which, according to the beautiful Valentina, is the closest place where a nationalist judge can be found – with a warrant to arrest Valentina and search the house and grounds. Evidently the Honorable Justice Long in Austin was a Houston appointee – the president, not the town – and can be recalcitrant. Why would Francis seek to keep Valentina from being arrested, if in the same breath he and his mother are accusing her of murder? What was all that business about, “Come back with a proper warrant—”?’
‘Because he wants me to run away.’ A key rattled in the lock of the door which Enoch had taken such care to fasten, and it opened to admit Valentina, still in her riding-dress. ‘After you went up the stairs, Señor Sefton, Francis stopped me in the hall, and told me – not very convincingly, I must say! – that with the case against me, my only chance is flight. He even offered to give me horses, and money. My own horses! And my money, money from my lands—!’ Her blue eyes were sparkling with rage.
‘He knows the case against you won’t stand in court,’ said January.
‘No wonder Madrecita looked so shocked when we rode up,’ Hannibal remarked, and began to straighten the elaborate folds of his voluminous linen neckcloth.
January added quietly, ‘They were counting on you fleeing, as an admission of your guilt.’
‘And this is an admission of his!’
‘Not necessarily,’ he pointed out. ‘Your husband could have been shot by a total stranger – or one of his own men, for that matter – and if Francis, or his mother, found the body, the best thing they could do was run back to the house for your shawl and your pistol. Particularly if they knew there was no will.’
‘Bastards!’ gasped the widow. ‘Lizards! And like as not they will set the sheriff on my trail as soon as I—’
‘I doubt it,’ said January. ‘Whoever actually killed him – whether the evidence against you was planned or opportunistic – Francis has to know that his claim on both his brother’s land and what you got from your uncle will be a great deal safer if you’re not around to dispute it. You said you have no kin nearer here than Mexico.’
Hannibal glanced up from the unraveling Gordian knot of his recalcitrant neckcloth. ‘And here I thought he was just trying to keep the sheriff from finding his maps to the Lost Mine.’
‘It could be.’ Valentina sketched a gesture of vexation with one hand. ‘With Francis, one doesn’t know. He lives in terror that someone will find the mine before he does – or that one of the servants – Noah or Davy or even poor Enoch – will steal the map and sell it, as if such things aren’t being peddled to fools all over the county! He trusts no one, except maybe Aunt Alicia.’
She sank down, rather suddenly, on the chair that January brought up for her, and passed her hand across her forehead. Like most white women in Texas she’d worn veils around the wide brim of her riding hat, and her face, always delicate of complexion, seemed suddenly pallid with exhaustion. She had, January recalled, been in the saddle for almost twenty-four hours with only the briefest of rest.
‘She would defend him, you know,’ she said after a moment, ‘against his father, and his horrible brother Jack. And from my husband, too. My husband told me once that Jack was always pushing him to join him in his acts of violence and mischief. He said—’
She broke the thought off quickly, and shook her head. Hannibal got creakily to his feet, defeated by the neckcloth, and went to finish the process with the assistance of the room’s small shaving-mirror. ‘And is she one of the reasons he locks his doors?’ he inquired, keeping his scratchy voice light. ‘I had an aunt like that. She loved all her nephews and nieces, but when she came to visit she’d drive all of us insane, knocking on our doors or coming into our rooms to “see if we need anything”.’
‘Dios!’ She sighed. ‘Yes, that … And the laudanum makes it worse, because she forgets that he’s told her to go away. And some days – after spending the whole of the day in the library, reading novels or political newspapers – she’ll wander around the house at night. “Checking” on him. “Checking” on us. More than once I’ve wakened to see her standing in the doorway of our room – mine and my husband’s – staring at us as we sleep.’
And she shuddered, though the morning was balmy with springtime. ‘And she’ll search the house – search our room, even—’
‘Like living in a Gothic novel,’ remarked the fiddler. ‘All one needs is a bricked-up vault in the cellar—’
‘Don’t laugh,’ said January. ‘Can Francis ride?’
‘Yes, quite well, though I don’t expect he could saddle his own horse. He rides into town every few weeks, to look at the State Archives, for records that might lead him to his Lost Mine.’ She made a wry mouth. ‘Only he won’t tell anyone that’s what he’s looking for, so he just pokes around. He and Aunt Alicia came up with a scheme of searching for it themselves – they got Jalisco to teach them how to tell directions by the stars, and how to read animal tracks, and shoot. But they quarreled about who was going to saddle the horses and look after the pack animals, and how they were going to divide up the silver from the mine—’
‘Francis obviously has no idea how much it costs to operate a silver mine.’ Hannibal turned from the mirror. ‘Are you enceinte, by the way, my dear?’
‘Dios, no!’ She looked shocked at the very suggestion. ‘But I had to say something, you see. And it makes my position stronger if Madrecita and Aunt Alicia should believe me to be.’
‘If worst does come to worst,’ said January thoughtfully, ‘it might keep you from being hanged. But it was a dangerous thing to say. My personal opinion is that Francis wants to keep everyone away from the house until he has time to forge a will, which he will conveniently “find” before Sheriff Quigley reappears. He’s assigned Creed and two other men to “guard” Mr Sefton and myself when we ride out to look at the jacal.’
Valentina’s eyes flared with alarm. ‘Creed? Creed is his minion, his arrastrado. He will have given orders, to throw you off this place—’
‘If he hasn’t given orders to shoot us, as soon as we’re far enough away from the house that it won’t be heard. Or shoot Hannibal, anyway,’ he added dryly, ‘and take me to Galveston to sell.’
‘What profit is it if we slay our brother,’ quoted Hannibal, ‘and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites.’
‘Bastardo! I will come with you—’
‘You will stay here quietly,’ said January, ‘and rest. Jalisco and a couple of his men are going to double back and intercept us. Can’t be too careful,’ he added gravely, ‘in Comanche country. But until we return, watch yourself. Don’t eat or drink anything that doesn’t come out of a dish you can see others eat from.’
She stared at him in alarm.
‘I don’t know who’s behind this,’ said January. ‘Though I have my suspicions.’
‘It’s obvious—’
‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘But I don’t want to take the chance of you being hurt while we’re all chasing the obvious suspect in the wrong direction. Don’t get yourself into a room that doesn’t have two exits. And while we’re gone,’ he finished, as he bowed over her hand, ‘you might put together a list of who in the household we can trust.’
Jalisco, Lope, and a very young vaquero named Ajo were, in fact, waiting for the little party in the first of the heavily wooded gullies that led up toward the hills. ‘Madame Valentina considered three men too slender a guard, in such country as this,’ explained Jalisco, as he turned his scrubby pinto mare to follow Creed’s horse, and the sandy-haired bodyguard grumbled, but couldn’t really argue the point.
‘They must indeed have intended to murder us,’ murmured Hannibal in Latin. ‘Look at the disappointment in their faces.’
‘I hate Texas.’
‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, amicus meus. In Louisiana it would be the same.’
January sighed. ‘Can’t argue with you there … Master.’
Before they had gone down to the horses, Valentina had quickly sketched a map of Arroyo Sauceito, marking the ruined jacal – the thatched peasant hut common to Mexican and formerly Mexican territory. Once there, January had little trouble finding the tree where she’d tied her mare, and, close by it, a pale scar where a pistol-ball had glanced off a boulder. Though not nearly up to Shaw’s skill as a tracker, January knew enough about pistols to follow the trajectory of the shot. It had come from the thickest tangles of mesquite and rabbitbush where the creek-bed bent west, a snarled wall of grayish-green not twenty feet from the tree and thirty, at most, from the doorway of the hut.
As January suspected – and had feared – after two days there was no trace of tracks on or around the stony creek-bed itself, though some distance down the rain-swelled watercourse he found horse-droppings that didn’t look more than two days old. Someone else had poked them apart with a stick – the crotted twig lay where it had been carelessly tossed about three feet away – but having never made a study of what half-digested oats looked like, as opposed to half-digested grass and seeds, January could draw no inferences of his own.
‘It does tell us that someone checked out her story, though,’ Hannibal remarked, as they picked their way back up toward the jacal.
‘Someone who didn’t think his evidence would be believed or accepted.’ January put a hand out, stopping his friend when they drew near the thicket where, he guessed, the attacker had hidden. ‘That would probably be Jalisco.’ The cowhand bodyguards were grouped around the hut, the Tejanos smoking corn-husk cigarettos, the Nortes muttering together and spitting tobacco.
There had been, January had noted, no tobacco-spit on the rocks by the creek-bed.
‘Could you hit someone between that tree and the hut?’
‘Drunk or sober?’
‘Sober, I hope, that early in the morning.’
‘You clearly,’ reproved the fiddler, ‘have a very limited notion of how to spend a night on the tiles. I’ve never tried to ambush anyone,’ he went on modestly, ‘but I can’t imagine even I could miss at this distance.’
January nodded, and led the way into the jacal itself.
The adobe walls were crumbling from neglect and a decade of spring rains, rafters long ago vanished to looters in quest of solid timber. Tangled mats of brown, decaying foliage that had once served as thatch hung like an ogre’s filthy laundry over the walls. Rabbitbush and bullweed grew thick in the corners. On what had been a wall-bench – an adobe shelf or step, rather like a high divan, which January had seen only in the poorest jacals in Mexico – a space had been recently cleared and dusted, and he guessed that this was where Father Monastario set up a portable altar, to give Valentina what spiritual comfort he could.
He turned to the front wall of the jacal, with its two apertures – window and doorway. Both had, at one time, been framed in with wood, to hold shutters, hinges, and a door. That wood, too, had been cannibalized long enough ago to leave the exposed adobe darkened, damaged, and beginning to disintegrate.
From his pocket he took Valentina’s account of her miniature siege in the jacal. Crouched between window and door – had to keep moving back and forth between window and door because I was afraid they’d rush the house …
The brush certainly grew thick enough on both sides of the jacal to make that a possibility. The dark green tangle started a dozen feet from that wall of the hut, and formed a semi-circle in front of the little building itself. ‘Go stand in that brush opposite the door, if you would,’ he said. ‘Tell me if it’s as heavy as it looks.’
As Hannibal moved toward the doorway, January disengaged a half-decayed wooden slat from among the leafy debris in one corner. ‘Better take this.’
‘If I get bitten by a tarantula I shall come back and haunt you.’
‘You’ll have trouble doing that, since a tarantula’s bite isn’t poisonous.’
‘Volenti via est.’ The fiddler crossed the open patch and waded into the brush, vanishing almost instantly from sight.
‘Raise your staff,’ called January, and the stick poked out of the glossy snarl of green brier.
When Hannibal returned to the jacal, January said thoughtfully, ‘Well, it wasn’t Comanche who attacked her, anyway. I’m not sure we can even call that an attack.’
The fiddler raised his brows, and poked a finger in the bullet-hole in the thick adobe of the window’s side. ‘I am at a loss as to what else to call it. Enlighten my darkness.’
January took a twig from the debris, and very gently inserted it into the hole. What remained above the surface of the wall pointed at an oblique angle out the window. ‘That’s barely more than someone yelling “Boo!” to make you hide behind a chair. Whoever was shooting could have circled easily around to the front of the house and fired straight in through the window. Or, as Valentina observed, come all the way around to that side of the house and rushed the door. Look where the other bullet-hole is.’ He crossed the room in a stride, pointed to the other fresh pock in the back wall and, using the same twig, measured again the angle of its penetration.
Hannibal pressed his back to the wall between window and doorway, and looked out, as Valentina must have done Monday morning. ‘Well, you certainly can’t see where she tied her horse, from here. It doesn’t look like a very serious attempt at murder, does it?’ he added thoughtfully. ‘Particularly when everyone in the county knows that it would have to be someone in the household, given the cordon sanitaire Taggart put around his land.’
‘It makes sense if it was in fact Francis and Madrecita Taggart who did the murder, yes.’ January walked carefully all around the jacal, poking in the matted leaves and mud on the floor, though he didn’t really expect to find anything.
‘You don’t think it was?’
‘I don’t know. But it does relieve my mind of the fear that I – and you, through the kind office of your friendship – are being made a dupe of by Valentina herself. If she’d fired those shots in an effort to corroborate her own story, she’d have fired straight through the windows, not obliquely like this. And I’m guessing she’d have fired more of them.’
Hannibal sighed. ‘I wouldn’t put it past her, at that.’ He coughed as a drift of harsh tobacco-smoke wafted through the window, and tried to wave it away with his hand. ‘Although honestly, I think if the lovely Valentina were going to murder her husband in such a way as to prove herself elsewhere, I think she’d have done a much better job of it than this.’
‘I think you’re right.’ January passed his hand again across the crumbling adobe of the wall, the sharply-angled twig where it emerged from the bullet-pock. ‘Someone could have come in from the outside – either down from the northwest through Comanche country—�
��
‘I don’t know about you, amicus meus, but I’d need some tremendous incentive to get within stone-throwing distance of even the possibility of meeting Comanche.’
‘We don’t know what incentive the killer might have had. It might have been tremendous. Or tremendous in his opinion, anyway. Or, he could have come up through the bottomlands. They’re heavily wooded, where they aren’t planted in cotton, and there isn’t much chance an intruder would be seen. But on the other hand, an outsider would be less likely to have known that Ortega had been sent away the previous Wednesday. Whereas someone in the household could have engineered the dismissal with a couple of well-placed lies.’
‘Myself,’ remarked Hannibal, following January to the door of the jacal, ‘I’d be hard-pressed to believe any of the three of them if they told me Rome had fallen. And by the sound of it, Vin Taggart shared my opinion.’
‘Men can be talked into nearly anything,’ murmured January, ‘if it concerns a woman they consider their property.’ He stopped, to let the fiddler precede him through the doorway, as was proper for a slave. ‘And anyone in the household would know Valentina comes here on Monday mornings, to meet with the priest. Any one of them could have arrived here early, before her.’
‘And someone in the household would be able to set up a rendezvous with Taggart in the orchard.’ The fiddler dusted the dirt of the window-sill from his hands. ‘I’d say someone he knew and trusted, given the fact that he’d recently insulted his most powerful neighbor.’
On the way back down the arroyo they rode stirrup-to-stirrup, Hannibal waving Creed and the Nortes to ride ahead. Quietly – and in French, because the vaqueros were close behind them – January continued, ‘Whoever it was fired a few shots, enough to keep Valentina inside and afraid for her life, took the horse, and rode back to the hacienda to murder Taggart.’
‘Or had a confederate do the actual shooting.’
January nodded, squinting against the sun that hovered over the rolling wonder of the Texas hills. The most beautiful land God made, John Dillard – the young Tennessean who had been Valentina’s first husband – had told Rose once …
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