‘Jalisco knows this territory?’ On Valentina’s list, Jalisco’s name had been marked, Confianza. Trustworthy.
‘Jalisco worked for my uncle, and for Grandfather Valenzuela when he first got this land from the king. Well, the land had originally been part of the San Saba mission grant, but the Comanche destroyed the mission back, oh, I don’t know how long ago. In any case, Jalisco has about six blood-brothers in the Comanche and three among the Comancheros. He would know if there’s actually a mine up there or not.’
Valentina called out across the dusty mazes of corral to Malojo, to saddle fresh horses for Don Hannibal, Enero, and herself. ‘He’ll be down on the road in the bottomlands today,’ she said, as they walked back to the house for her to change into riding clothes. ‘It drives him mad – Señor Creed, too, the first time I’ve ever seen those two agree to anything between them – that they and their men are patrolling the property lines against imaginary intruders, when the cattle are wandering about getting themselves tangled up in the canyons, or for all they know Comanche are sneaking down from the north and helping themselves to the mules and the horses. And Francis, of course, is no help, and swears he will fire the first man who doesn’t do as he is ordered.’
She stopped in the hall at the foot of the stairs, her face suddenly hard. ‘He, to be giving orders! I have not even been convicted of this stupidness! Yet the men – even Jalisco and his Tejanos! – they think I will be hanged for it, and Francis come into the whole of the rancho. Or maybe,’ she went on, still more softly, ‘they think that I will flee. Men!’
She turned with a swirl of dark skirts, and hurried up the stair.
But when she came down, less than ten minutes later, clothed for riding, Madame Amelia stepped into the hall from the parlor, tall and strangely jagged-looking in her mourning black and smelling of bourbon whiskey over the heavy reek of perfume. ‘And where do you think you’re going?’
‘Riding.’ Valentina’s chin came up. She seldom spoke English – all her conversation with January and Hannibal was in Spanish – but her command of the language, though heavily accented, was crisp and pure. ‘And why should you have objection to that, madame?’
‘You know perfectly well why, girl. You walk around here, as if you think it doesn’t matter that you murdered my son! As if you consider yourself free to come and go as you please! Well, let me tell you, when that spineless traitor Quigley comes back, you’ll be lucky if you aren’t strung up from the nearest tree instead of arrested and made to stand your trial!’
The young widow’s eyes blazed. ‘I want to stand my trial!’ she snapped back. ‘I want my husband’s true murderer – or murderers – to come to justice, the person – or people – who seek to slander my name and steal my property!’
Behind Madame Taggart, Aunt Alicia emerged from the library, which was – January craned his head to look past her – a sort of back-parlor containing about a dozen books and many boxes and shelves of newspapers. Behind their spectacles, Alicia’s eyes were bruised from weeping and hazy with opium, but she stared at Hannibal, and then at January, with her usual unwinking intentness.
‘They’re going to hang you,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you just ride away, like Amelia says? Amelia will have them give you a horse.’
Valentina turned and made for the front door, but her mother-in-law strode to intercept her, caught her by the arm, and jerked her around to face her. The two women stood, furious, face to face, the younger shaking with rage, the older with the look of a dog about to bite. Then Valentina pulled her arm to free herself. Madame’s hand tightened – big hands, January noted, strong as a man’s – and without a word Amelia slapped her.
‘Ladies—’ began Hannibal, and Aunt Alicia scuttled forward into the hall, flapping her hands at her sister.
January – with instinctive tact (and the self-preservative instincts of a slave-child who’d be beaten for overhearing what he wasn’t meant to overhear) – stepped back into the library.
‘Riding,’ Alicia giggled, tugging at Amelia’s sleeve and rolling her blue eyes at Hannibal. ‘She’s going riding with a man.’
Amelia turned and slapped her across the face. ‘Shut up! You have a mind like a sewer, Alicia; I’m sick of the sight of you.’ And to Valentina, as Aunt Alicia cowered away and began to weep again, ‘Don’t make me call Enoch and have you put off this place like the hussy you are, girl.’
‘This is my house—’
‘Don’t tell me it’s your house, I’m purely sick of hearing that puke about it being your house. Enoch!’ yelled Amelia. And, raising her voice to a bellow that could be heard in the kitchens, ‘Enoch!’
January heard the swift clip-clip of Valentina’s boot-heels ascending the stair, Hannibal’s diffident, ‘Please excuse me for intruding—’
‘There’s no excuse for your intruding and don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,’ snapped Amelia. ‘All that bush-wa about being a friend of her father’s and how you just happened to meet up with her on the street – tcha! Just happened to meet with her, and now her husband is conveniently dead and you’re here with your hand-kissing and your French poetry—’
‘He tried to kiss me, too,’ babbled Alicia desperately. ‘He’s tried a dozen times, to get me alone! Just like—’
‘Mesdames, I assure you—’
‘Enoch!’ Amelia had a voice like the crack of doom.
January heard the swift, light tap of boots on floor-tiles, and the creak of the outer door.
‘He did,’ persisted Alicia. ‘He’s tried to get me alone. Last night he tried my door …’
‘Don’t be a dunce,’ said Amelia shortly. ‘If the man was out to ravage someone in the night he’d have raped Valentina, not you—’
‘He’s violated her already,’ whispered Alicia. ‘Watch the way he looks at her. I daresay, he and that great black savage of his, both. I saw them. I saw them last night. And she reveled in it. For men like him …’
January backed from the door, disgusted and thoroughly alarmed.
He wasn’t sure how seriously anyone would take the accusation, or even if the woman would remember making it, an hour from now. But he knew also that if Brother Francis, and Madrecita Taggart, wanted to get rid of himself and Hannibal, they could certainly find someone to believe it.
The library windows were curtained, and the chamber dim. There was a square bottle on the library table which January recognized as Kendal Black Drop, a notoriously potent ‘elixir’ good for the cure of everything from headaches to typhus and recommended highly for female complaints. By the sweet, slightly vinegar smell of the glass beside it, she was mixing it with very little water.
Books and newspapers strewed the table. A volume of the letters of John C. Calhoun, that great proponent of slavery and states’ rights. A book on the cranial capacities of various human groups explaining why white men should have control of all resources and social power. The Federalist Papers. A collection of what appeared to be treatises on United States trade. Copies of the Richmond Enquirer, the New Orleans True American, the Southern Patriot. Southern newspapers going back at least four years. The few shelves contained little beyond the statutes of the Republic of Texas and of the State of Virginia, plus several volumes of American and Mexican law, and a Spanish lexicon.
Outside in the hall, Madame Amelia’s voice rose in fury, shouting names at her sister. Bitch. Whore. You asked for what you got …
In moments, January guessed, the younger woman would flee back to the library for a refill of her Black Drop cocktail. Not the moment for a great black savage to be discovered waiting for her.
He beat a quick retreat across the back gallery, and down to the corrals. Hannibal was already there, gossiping with Juana and Malojo. Completely apart from forged wills and murdered forgers, January had a former slave’s instinctive dread of drunkards in power, knowing how swiftly things could get out of control. Whatever violence had been done to Alicia in her girlhood, she seemed ready now
to confuse memory with fears – and that, January knew, would be easily enough to get him hanged.
The sooner we figure out what the hell is going on here, and get the hell out, the better.
SEVENTEEN
‘Ah.’ Jalisco’s good eye slid momentarily to January, seated stirrup-to-stirrup with him in the warm shade above the roadway. ‘The San Diablo Mine.’ Beyond the tangle of woodland, the noon sun glared hot on the cotton fields. The air was filled with the sharp, monotonous chink of hoes, and the smell of turned dirt.
Everyone in Galveston, Houston, Austin and all points between had spoken of how perfect Texas soil was for cotton; how long the growing season, how valuable the land was and would be soon. As soon as the Comanche were completely extirpated, as soon as the threat of Mexican re-invasion was settled. (‘And how they’re going to do that,’ Hannibal had remarked, ‘if every landowner refuses to pay the taxes that the government hasn’t the money to enforce, in order to maintain an army, I am most curious to see.’) But what it came down to, for the men, women, children obliged to actually participate in the cultivation of cotton-plants, was endless chopping of the weeds that flourished in the semi-tropical climate.
‘Is there such a thing?’
‘Of course.’ The sardonic smile widened one corner of the vaquero’s ugly mouth. ‘I’ve even visited it – or a mine that one map claimed was it.’ Below them on the road the dust was settling. A small chain of mules had passed, drovers and outriders glancing nervously up at the half-seen shapes of Jalisco and another vaquero named Yanez – and now January and Hannibal – among the trees.
And no wonder …
‘Don Gael sent four of us to see if stories of the mine were the truth. And there was, in truth, a hole in the ground round about where the rumors said there was a hole in the ground: fifteen miles from here, up the west fork of the Pedernales and into the hills a ways. One man had his shoulder shot to pieces by a Comanche bullet and never regained the use of his arm.’ Jalisco took a cigaretto from his shirt-pocket without taking his good eye from the road, offered it to January – who shook his head – then lit it himself.
‘We were fortunate we weren’t all killed. The mine was on Don Gael’s land, yes – if you believe that the king actually gave that part of the hills to Don Gael and not to the Franciscans who were going to establish a mission at San Diablo. There’s some question about that. But it didn’t look to me like the mine had been worked for more than a few weeks. God only knows how the Spanish got a few weeks out of it, the Comanche must have been off fighting the Apache that month. Certainly not enough to produce the thousands of silver ingots the stories all talk about. So maybe it wasn’t the San Diablo Mine after all.’
‘Has Francis sent anyone out to investigate?’
The vaquero chuckled. ‘Señor Francis has maps to eight different mines – or maybe the same mine in eight different places. He keeps them locked up and won’t show them to anyone, yet he fears to ride out himself and see what’s there. It’s why he quit asking me to teach Señorita Alicia to ride and shoot: she spoke of wanting a share of the “treasure” so that she could hire a companion and go back to live in the United States.’
January remembered the raised, shrill voices in the hall. The strew of American newspapers across the library table.
‘White people always say,’ he murmured, ‘that it’s hard to get good help.’
‘Did he suggest that he blindfold her, when they went treasure-seeking?’ inquired Hannibal, and Jalisco’s grin widened.
‘Who do you think killed Taggart?’ January asked suddenly.
‘I think it was the Pollacks.’
‘Any idea how? Or why?’
The ugly man shrugged. ‘That I don’t know. And in truth it could have been anyone. This is the stupidity of what we do here, sitting watching the road, as if Pollack is going to send in his men to invade us. Riding the hills along the Arroyo Ciervo to the west of here, or Sauceito to the east. Perdition land is huge, señor. It isn’t just that anyone could ride northwest along Chato Creek and come down here through the lands where they might meet the Comanche – because I promise you, none of us patrol more than ten miles in that direction. But all anyone needs to do is slip between us—’
He nodded westward along the road, where a flicker of sunlight through the trees caught the red coat of Brawny’s horse, a hundred yards further on.
‘Once they’re inside this silly line, with all of us riding the boundaries, you could march the Mexican army up to the hacienda and nobody would see it. Austin – this whole countryside – is filled with men who come and go. Nortes who come for the cheap land, who seek work – as overseers in the cotton lands, or cattle-hands here in the hills, or muleteers, or smugglers – because nobody in their right mind will hire them in lands where law is enforced. Men who have fled from Mississippi or Louisiana or Alabama – or indeed Mexico – because they have broken the law.’
He turned his head sharply, at the distant tuff of hooves from the direction of Austin. The banks of the road were steep here – the main trace that led to Hacienda Perdition lay just past the cowhand Brawny and his party – but anyone sufficiently determined, January judged, could push their mount up the slope. Thin stands of woodland surrounded the cotton fields, enough to cover a single rider heading for the higher ground.
With what aim? he reflected. To secretly pasture Gideon Pollack’s sheep?
Hide in a cave? Meet Brother Francis – or Madrecita Taggart – for instructions about forging Vin Taggart’s will? Wait beside Sauceito Creek to shoot at Valentina? Ride to the orchard where Taggart would arrive in response to a note from someone he knew – someone he trusted (or more or less trusted) – saying: ‘There’s a plot against you and I don’t know who’s in on it …’?
Two riders came into sight, a man and a woman. The woman’s clothing was the sort that January had seen on the poorer sort of Mexican women, in Austin and Houston and Galveston, and even up in the high country, far beyond the frontier. A wide, brightly-colored skirt, a satin bodice over a white chemise, a short red jacket heavily laced with embroidery. A shawl rather than an American bonnet covered her thick gray hair. The man wore a wide-brimmed, flat-crowned Mexican-style hat, and the short jacket often seen on Tejanos, but his boots were American, and January had seldom seen Mexicans or Tejanos wearing checked trousers. The man signed to the woman to wait where she was, out of sight of the road that curved northward into Perdition lands, then nudged his horse to a quick trot.
January heard young Mr Brawny hail him in his Alabama drawl. A moment later, the bark of gunfire. Jalisco and Yanez spurred away through the trees, January and Hannibal behind them. On the Perdition road, Brawny and young Ajo had closed in on the rider. Brawny shouted to him that if he tried that again they’d plug him before he got ten feet. The horses were jittering, Ajo trying to circle the other two. Jalisco rode out of the trees, calling out, ‘What’s your hurry, then, amigo?’
‘I got to see Mr Taggart’s next of kin,’ returned the man, and entered into a protracted argument with the guards, protesting that he was damned if he’d tell them his business or who sent him, and quoting the US Constitution about why he had the right to ride anywhere he damn well pleased.
‘Does he know we’re not in the United States?’ asked Hannibal softly, and January shrugged.
‘Few of them seem to.’ Sitting in the shadows of the trees, January studied the rider’s face, wondering where he’d seen him before. Medium-sized, slim, with a handsome mane of coal-black hair, but it was the mustache that caught January’s attention. Long and waxed and curling up slightly at the ends, like a villain’s in a melodrama. Yet there was nothing of melodrama in the way he watched behind him, and around him, even while declaiming a rambling analogy about a man not being obliged to explain himself to the dogs chained up outside a man’s house, even though the dogs themselves were admirable creatures who did their work surpassingly well.
Watched in all directions, as
if marking out a course of flight. That, too, touched a chord in January’s memories of the past two exceedingly crowded weeks.
In the midst of his discourse the stranger referred to Ajo as a greaser, which drew the young man into furious argument. The stranger apologized – at length, and with a long explanation about how ‘greaser’ wasn’t a term of opprobrium, but rather a comment on the differences of Mexican culture and cuisine.
‘He’s stalling,’ said Hannibal softly.
Jalisco told Ajo to be quiet and the stranger used the opportunity to get into another extensive diatribe.
January reined his horse around, and he and Hannibal trotted back over the slight rise of ground and around the curve of the road, to the place where the Mexican woman had been left.
She was gone.
It was almost an hour’s ride back to the hacienda. The oaks along the road screened the good black bottomlands soil where the true wealth of Perdition was generated. Further on lay a belt of cornfields, green ears showing in the tall plants and small black children standing guard against the birds. Beyond the cornfields the land rose, to the rolling prairie-lands, the deep grass and scattered stands of trees. Now and then to their left the white trace of the road appeared and disappeared like a chalk-mark, but January saw how right Jalisco had been.
Anyone could have slipped past Taggart’s guards. And, once past, could have ridden with impunity – or driven a line of elephants, for that matter – unseen.
He glimpsed no sign of the Mexican woman, but knew she had to be riding from grove to grove, or following the wooded course of Bruja Creek.
‘Think she’s going up to the caves where we found our friend?’
‘That’s my guess.’ January frowned, and squinted at the hills. It would be another hour’s ride to the head of Witch Cave Canyon, and in the thick woodland of the canyon bottom it would be easy to lose even an inexperienced quarry. He was, moreover, tired and very hungry – his earlier plans to get sustenance from TA having been interrupted by Valentina’s appearance, and his shoulders still smarted from a night of grave-digging. ‘Shall we see if we can get some of the men from the house? We may be hunting her all afternoon.’
Lady of Perdition Page 19