Lady of Perdition

by Barbara Hambly

  That would, he hoped, discharge his debt to an extraordinary young lady, and make her sale of those lands – if she chose to sell – that much easier.

  And with any luck, he would never have to see her again.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  His mind had barely framed this thought when feet thumped on the boards of the porch outside. He heard Valentina say, ‘But surely at this hour—’

  ‘I behold light within, domina. That orbed continent the fire/ That severs day from night …’

  Quigley rose, and went to open the door.

  ‘I’d heard a rumor,’ Hannibal began, and then, looking past him, ‘Benjamin! Amicus meus! Or, as Homer would say –’ he switched to classical Greek: you never could tell who might have gone to a boys’ academy and remembered some of the Latin he’d been taught – ‘is everything all right?’

  January’s command of that language wasn’t extensive (‘More a suggestion than a command,’ his wife Rose would say), but he replied, in Greek, as he got to his feet, ‘All seems to be well, unless this warrior is lying,’ and added in deprecating English, ‘as your old grandpa used to say, sir.’

  ‘My old grandpa,’ returned Hannibal in Greek, ‘would have thrashed the lot of us with a riding-whip for interrupting his drinking,’ and turned back to Quigley with a punctilious handshake and a little bow. ‘I trust all is well here, sir? I encountered Jalisco and his men outside Eberly’s, and they said something about the Texas National Archives?’

  Valentina, startled, said, ‘What?’

  ‘It seems, sir – m’am,’ said January, bowing, ‘that that’s what this has all been about from the start. Which I should have realized,’ he added, ‘when I heard that your husband dismissed your bodyguard – on a fairly flimsy excuse – on the afternoon after Mr Pollack’s hired men raided the Records Office, and then turned three wagonloads of archives over to Mr Taggart. Your husband wanted to keep you from riding out,’ he added, seeing her baffled expression. ‘To keep you from seeing some clue, some sign, that might lead you to where they were hidden. A tribute to your intelligence, in fact. And to his respect for you.’

  She said softly, ‘Oh.’

  ‘I think when he came in on Sunday,’ went on January, as he fetched the office’s third chair for the young widow, ‘he had just – as I was only this moment telling Sheriff Quigley – murdered Mr Hookwire. Mr Hookwire was the forger he’d hired to make substitute documents to put into the land office records, so there wouldn’t be any question about the portion of Rancho Perdition that he’d acquired from the successors to the old San Saba land grant.’

  ‘He did worry about that.’ Valentina took the chair, and Hannibal would have perched himself on the corner of the desk had not January motioned him, with his eyes, to take the old ladderback in which he’d been sitting. ‘He spoke to me of it, just after we wed. My uncle Gael …’

  January caught her eye, shook his head slightly, praying Quigley wouldn’t see this. Fortunately, the sheriff was fetching a cup of coffee from the stove.

  He didn’t underestimate her. She finished quickly, ‘… said that all over Texas there are quarrels and questions about land grants.’

  His eyes on hers, January said, willing her to accept this and be quiet, ‘My understanding is that there is no question about the Valenzuela lands that your uncle gave you –’ she looked extremely surprised at this but – thank goodness! – kept her mouth shut – ‘but yes, you’re right. But your husband wanted to make sure of his own lands. And for that, he needed access to the archives – and he needed to close his tame forger’s mouth and keep it closed. When he came in on that Sunday night – Easter Sunday – I’m pretty sure he’d just killed Hookwire. Killed him, carried his body to another cave, staked it out as if the Comanche had killed and mutilated him. The last thing he needed was for his wife to greet him with accusations of infidelity.’

  ‘Oh.’ Valentina turned her face aside. ‘I was … I was angry …’

  ‘Of course you were,’ said January. ‘Don’t you see, m’am? You were meant to be.’ He turned to Quigley. ‘Did Mr Francis Taggart say where he heard about his brother’s mistress? If he never went into town himself …?’

  ‘He said he’d heard it just that day from Miss Marryat. That she’d heard it at church.’ He paused, putting together the pieces – the timing – in his mind. ‘So she wanted them to fight.’

  ‘I think so, yes, sir.’

  ‘Francis was shook up bad over her death,’ the sheriff went on after a moment. ‘Shook up bad over the whole thing, for all he tried to turn it to his own advantage, accusin’ Mr Sefton of the deed. He’s a cold-blooded little polecat, but he did love his aunt. He carried on – the way most folks will – about whether somethin’ he’d said or done would have saved her, or could have caused what happened. He said his aunt went on about how M’am Valentina – begging your pardon, m’am – was a hypocrite, when Mr Taggart – who was a hypocrite too, she said, an’ a traitor an’ a monster – was carryin’ on with this woman in town. Knowin’ the three of them, she guessed he’d go straight to you with that story, m’am.’

  ‘You’ve said yourself, Mrs Taggart,’ said January slowly, ‘that it wasn’t the first quarrel you’d had …’

  ‘No.’ Color flushed up into her cheeks. ‘We fought – oh, horribly! – when he told me he’d sent Ortega away. And for such a … such a stupid accusation …’

  ‘So Miss Marryat knew she could count on there being another quarrel. And it being Sunday – and Ortega being gone – she could count on you being gone, and without any good account of your whereabouts, the following morning.’

  ‘An’ there’s no tellin’,’ said the sheriff quietly, and riffled his thumb again over Gideon Pollack’s letters, ‘what Pollack said, or implied, to poor Miss Marryat when they met. Or what went on in her head, from what he said.’

  ‘Another thing I can’t prove in court.’ January nodded towards the letters. ‘After Pollack ordered his brother to kill me last night, he said to me, Damn if I thought she’d do what she did. But I can think of no other reason that he’d have one of his men kill her.’

  Quigley was silent for a time. Then: ‘He say which man?’

  January shook his head. ‘By that last note in there, I’d guess it was Creed.’

  ‘If she was keepin’ these letters for some other purpose,’ murmured the sheriff after a time, ‘some more legal purpose, shall we say, it crosses my mind that the result would have been the same.’

  January thought about it. About the phrases of the letters, the repeated admonitions to burn them.

  About Pollack’s flash of rage when he’d spoken of that possibility. ‘If that was what was in her mind,’ he said slowly, ‘I’m guessing Pollack’s defense would have been to tell her, publish and be damned. Disown her and claim that it was entirely her idea – which is probably what he’s going to do,’ he added after a moment, ‘when those letters show up in court. And I’m thinking that she’d have shot him, rather than let him go.’

  ‘Which would make two of ’em,’ added Quigley, ‘countin’ his wife. Or Mrs Pollack would have shot her. You ever met Mrs Pollack? Most beautiful woman in Travis County – like what an angel would look like who was goin’ to boardin’ school. But she’d never have let him go. The pair of ’em make the Macbeths look like Mary an’ Joseph in the Bible. An’ I tell you, I do not look forward to ridin’ down to Los Lobos tomorrow an’ tryin’ to charge Gideon with conspiracy to do murder. I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t have the place guarded like Taggart did Perdition. Or shoot me.’

  And he stared for a time, morosely, into his coffee, turning the letters over in his hands. Then, turning a wry glance back to January, he added, ‘I appreciate you findin’ all this – not to speak of returnin’ the archives. But I will say, Ben, you sure have handed me a pip.’

  ‘Alicia could ride,’ said Valentina slowly. She had set down her cup, sat looking down at her hands, turning on her finger the wide gold c
ircle of her wedding-ring. ‘And she could shoot. And I think Enero was right, when he said he didn’t think whoever attacked me at the jacal meant to kill me. She may even have known, that an accusation against me would not hold up, but would serve to have me taken away from the house for a few days.’

  ‘It would be easy enough,’ said January, ‘for her to ride out to Sauceito Creek early, and wait for you, Madame Taggart. To frighten you badly enough to keep you in hiding for an hour or two in the ruined jacal, to take your horse, and be back in the orchard in time to keep the rendezvous she’d arranged with your husband. Again –’ he spread his hands – ‘I have no proof. But Pollack speaks of the absolute necessity of getting the house and the property cleared out, unguarded and unobserved, as soon as possible.’

  ‘You know,’ pointed out Hannibal thoughtfully, ‘Taggart well may have had some hand in putting Pollack in touch with Mr Fleam in the first place. His – um – friend Mrs Passmore certainly knew the man. And Pollack put two and two together pretty quickly, when Rance came back and told him that Fleam and the three wagonloads of records had disappeared. Personally,’ he added, ‘I’m surprised Fleam and his men didn’t kill Rance.’

  ‘I’m surprised Pollack didn’t kill Rance.’ Quigley glanced up from the love letters with a wry face. ‘Wouldn’t take a college professor to get Rance to turn his back or ride off in another direction – the man’s an idiot. I’ll bet you ten US dollars to a Texas redback, Pollack meant to head up the raid himself, ’fore he was shot in that damn fool duel with Stanway. He musta been spittin’ blood when he learned Rance had gone an’ lost the archives within a few hours of stealin’ ’em.’

  ‘And Pollack may already have heard of Taggart collecting up gold,’ said January. ‘He knows he has to act fast. He writes to Miss Marryat of how her nephew’s a traitor to the United States – arranges a meeting – whispers to her that he, Pollack, will be ruined if Miss Marryat can’t somehow get the hacienda Perdition cleared out …’ He extended a finger, touched the corner of the thickets of the love-notes. ‘For my life, and for our future, he says …’

  ‘An’ doesn’t much care,’ murmured Quigley, ‘what means she’ll use. He wouldn’t.’

  ‘But if she killed us both,’ concluded Valentina softly, ‘someone would ask, who would benefit by our deaths? And that would be Francis. And that, she could not permit.’

  There was silence for a little time in that cramped, dim-lit office. Through the thin board walls came the sounds of horses jangling past in the street, of a piano played in some building nearby, faint and muffled. Of someone shouting about how all Injuns should be shot, and all Mexicans too …

  The sheriff said softly, ‘Nor did she feel she had a grievance against you, m’am. You may be a Catholic, but I doubt she ever thought that you deserved death.’ As the lawman opened his notebook once again, and began listing all the things he’d need to check, arrange, and do with the evidence January had brought him, January recalled his dream in Witch Cave Cavern. The young woman on the bed, the big youth bending over her, sandy hair falling into his eyes. The three-quarters-grown boy standing in the doorway … Go ahead Vin. What’s the matter? Can’t get it up?

  Was that, he wondered suddenly, why Vin Taggart had fled from Elysium in the first place? Shamed and horrified at a wrong which could not be put right?

  Or had he, like Pollack, believed in his heart that a woman didn’t really mind being raped? Had that just been one more element that convinced him that he must flee that poisoned mess of drunken violence that was his family? Get away from it, as far as he could …

  I thought he was gonna choke, when they came drivin’ up from town with all their trunks an’ plunder, Noah had said, as he dug Gervase Hookwire’s grave. It’d be funny, if they hadn’t moved in.

  And, You’d never see a place less like Heaven if you walked til your toenails bled.

  ‘Looks like he met with her at least twice after the archives was stolen,’ remarked Quigley, pausing in his note-making to check the letters again. ‘So we can at least get him on conspiracy. He’s lucky it didn’t kill him right then. But she must have been in a state to do anything, after that.’

  ‘And it certainly looked to me,’ added Hannibal thoughtfully, ‘that she thought her accusation would have the effect of driving you away, Valla, rather than getting you actually hanged.’

  Valentina made no reply for some minutes, but rather sat looking at her folded hands. Then she said, ‘I saw my mother-in-law at the hotel tonight, señor. Having dinner, alone. Alone, and so … so still. And I pitied her. Even for all that she had said, had done. I went and spoke to her – thanked her for what she said at the arraignment this afternoon. That she had not seen me, that Aunt Alicia claimed that she had, but neither Madre Taggart nor Francis did. And she–she wept, señor. She asked my forgiveness.’

  She looked aside again, as if she saw once more that tall, stern-faced figure in black, humbled suddenly by the death not only of the son she had scorned, but of the little girl she had raised.

  ‘This is why I made Señor Sefton bring me here tonight, señor. She said that she suspected in her heart that Aunt Alicia had killed my husband. Not at first, you understand, but the more she thought about it. She could have, she said. She had not seen her sister all the morning, until the alarm went up when the body was found. This was not unusual. But the more she observed her afterwards, the more she thought. Like Hannibal –’ her eye flickered to the fiddler, and a half-smile touched her lips – ‘it occurred to her that a shawl was a very silly thing to leave at the place of the murder. And maybe Señor Enero is right, and Aunt Alicia had no intention for me to actually do more than spend a few nights in jail.

  ‘Alicia …’ Usually straightforward, she struggled suddenly, how to say rape without actually saying it, the way, January had observed, so many well-bred women were taught to do. ‘There had been … wrong-doing. Back in Virginia, when Alicia was sixteen, and my husband’s brother Jack much the same age. But a man, she said, and … and a drunkard already, and … base.’

  Very softly, Quigley said, ‘That is what I heard from your husband, m’am.’

  She raised her eyes to the sheriff’s. ‘My mother-in-law swore that my husband would never have done more than keep silent about what he saw his brother do – the brother whom he worshipped, at that time, anyway. But she said – my mother-in-law – that Alicia sometimes said there were both of them, and sometimes only Jack. That she only spoke of it when she’d taken too much laudanum, and then her story would change. Myself, I do not know. I don’t want to think of him doing such a thing – or even helping, or keeping quiet …’

  Again she turned her face aside, from the memory of the man whose bed she had shared rather than risk the helplessness of poverty. The man she had barely known.

  ‘But in truth, señor, I don’t know. He was a boy then, a different person, and almost certainly drunk. Yet it explains things about Aunt Alicia, and the way she would look sometimes at my husband, and sometimes leave the room.’

  She brushed quickly at her eyes with her black-gloved fingers. It was the first time January had seen her weep, since her husband’s death. She managed to say, ‘It is not a very good story,’ and Hannibal rose, and stood behind her chair, to put his hands on her trembling shoulders.

  Quigley went to a shelf and took down another cup, which he filled with coffee. This he handed to her, and fetched a clean handkerchief from his desk drawer. ‘My daddy was a preacher, m’am,’ he said gruffly as he handed it to her. ‘And I been a sheriff, one place an’ another, for fourteen years. It ain’t nuthin’ I ain’t heard before. But I am sorry you had to speak of this.’

  Valentina shook her head. ‘You had to know,’ she said simply. ‘I feel terrible – horrible! – for poor Madame Taggart, keeping this silent, all these years. Loving Alicia as I know she did – yes, in spite of the way she acted when she was drunk. Knowing what she thought had happened and not knowing if it was the truth, th
at her son – or maybe two of her sons – would do such a thing. But it was true that her husband, and Jack, and my husband when he was a youth, fought and fought, and came to hate one another – and to hate Francis, who did nothing but hide behind his mother and Alicia – and that the house was a lake of poison, a house of Hell in which one could believe anything.’

  She wiped her eyes again. ‘My father is insane, Señor Quigley,’ she added in a calmer voice, and glanced ruefully over her shoulder at Hannibal. ‘He talks to statues and sees visions of ancient gods. But it was not like that.’

  ‘Someday,’ said Hannibal to Quigley, in an effort to lighten the darkness, ‘I’ll tell you stories about her father.’

  But not, January guessed, about the skeletons he’d found, one of which had worn the sapphires that had belonged to Valentina’s long-vanished mother.

  Quigley was silent again, tapping the little bundle of love letters against the side of his hand.

  ‘You say you looked through the house, Ben. You find the thousand dollars you say Mr Taggart put together to pay off Silver Joe an’ his boys?’

  ‘No, sir,’ lied January.

  His glance crossed Hannibal’s, and the fiddler said – again in Ancient Greek – ‘I daresay I saw some of it tonight, when Cornelia paid for my dinner.’

  January went on, ‘I came across nearly two hundred dollars with those love letters, sir. Some of the household servants had told me, that Miss Marryat would–would pick up any spare money she could find.’ It wouldn’t do, he knew, for a black man to out-and-out accuse a white woman of theft, even one acknowledged to be mentally unstable and almost certainly a murderess. ‘I understand that before she met Pollack she was saving up to get out of there. Away from her older sister – and away from her nephew. I think that’s what it must have been. Pollack took it from me, when they caught me last night.’