by Paula Scott
“Say something,” she demanded.
“Read to me.”
“Read what?”
“What you were reading when I interrupted you.”
She opened the Bible, flipping through a handful of pages before settling on the verse. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”
“Read more.”
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
“My heart is not pure,” he admitted, feeling chastised by a God he couldn’t see and couldn’t feel.
She closed the Bible. “Only the blood of Christ can purify a heart. No matter how great or small our sins may be, his blood makes us clean.”
“What sins do you have?” He couldn’t help but smile thinking about her sins. What could she do to make God angry?
She bowed her head and would not answer him.
“Please tell me how you could possibly sin, pequeña.”
“You.”
She spoke so softly he wasn’t sure he heard her correctly.
“You,” she said louder. “I have sinned with you.”
How he wanted to take her in his arms, comfort her, but he didn’t dare. In his home, she was under his authority. He vowed to treat her with the utmost respect, like a guest. Guests were treated like kings and queens in California.
He noticed the shimmer of tears in her eyes. She was such a gentle spirit, another quality that reminded him of his mother. “Do I grieve you?”
“What I feel with you grieves me.” When she blinked, tears slipped down her cheeks.
“Do I repulse you then?” His heart pounded in his ears, waiting for her answer.
“You do not repulse me,” she admitted.
“Do I please you?” He put his hand on his chest, willing his heart to stop racing.
Their gazes locked and held. She broke the trance between them by looking down at the Bible in her arms. “Lust is a sin,” she said, not meeting his eyes any longer.
“Then my sin knows no bounds.”
She reached out a hand to him. “Pray with me.”
He didn’t move any closer, didn’t take the hand she offered. Now that he was certain she felt passion for him too, he didn’t know how he’d resist not pressing his affections upon her while they were alone in this house.
When he didn’t move toward her, she came to him. “Pray with me,” she beseeched again, her eyes awash with tears.
He bowed his head and closed his eyes, feeling her delicate hand nestle trustingly into his calloused palm.
“God, you know our weaknesses. You know without you we are consumed by our own desires. You know aside from your grace, we cannot resist temptation. Protect us from the evil one. Send your mighty angels to shelter us. Do not let evil overcome us, Lord, but let your perfect will be done in our lives. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.”
Roman opened his eyes. Her eyes shone brightly, and she smiled. He longed to explain to her the turmoil raging inside him. How he couldn’t control his lust or his anger or his longing for the Americans to leave his homeland. But not her. He didn’t want her to leave. Yet he dreamed of California being free. Free from Mexico. Free from the United States. Freely ruled by the gente de razón. How could she understand all this? How could she understand the anger that sometimes overcame him? How could she understand that he’d killed men and had his share of women? And he wanted her for his woman. Oh, how he wanted her.
She smiled up at him, her sweet innocence his undoing.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, swallowing something that felt very close to fear—an emotion he wasn’t accustomed to at all.
Her stomach grumbled in response. They both laughed. Neither had eaten more than a few bites of the dried meat today on the trail. He realized he was hungry too.
“Come, you have never tasted such food as Lupe cooks.” He offered his arm to her, and they left the room together.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Sarita discovered Roman gone from El Rio Lobo, along with Rachel, she fasted and prayed, but Tohic was not answering her petitions these days. Perhaps because she was still angry that he’d shown her Roman’s death through the bitter oak leaves in the creek last year, and so she had married the gringo. Then Roman returned to California very much alive. Sometimes Tohic toyed with people this way. His spirits of mischief and mayhem loved to tangle people’s lives, but never had Tohic done this with her before. She was his chosen vessel. Perhaps Tohic was jealous of her love for Roman. Certainly, Tohic knew her allegiance was sworn to him and him alone. Roman was but a man, and though she hungered for Roman more than any other man, only Tohic could satisfy her soul.
She had belonged to him since he saved her from death years ago. The fever had taken a number of lives in California that year after the sailors brought it ashore. That was the winter both her mother and Roman’s mother died, along with many others. The padre had already given Sarita, just a young girl at the time, the last rites, and everyone accepted she would die—except Chula.
In the dead of night, when everyone else was sleeping away their sorrow, her dueña had prepared the chamber for Tohic to come. Circling Sarita’s bed with candles, woodpecker feathers, and tiny woven baskets made especially in Tohic’s honor, Chula had cut herself, draining her own blood into the tiny baskets as an offering to Tohic. Life blood for a life. Then she chanted until the room grew very cold, very still, very mysterious.
Staring at the closed portal of the room, Chula had stiffened all of a sudden, her eyes rolling back in her head till only the whites showed in the flickering candlelight.
Burning with fever, watching Chula from her sickbed, Sarita had felt an intense rush of fear, followed by cold, like air from a grave. Something otherworldly and of great power had entered the room.
“He is here,” Chula whispered, and her eyes rolled back into place. “He has come to heal you, mi hija.” Chula had never had children of her own and treated Sarita like a beloved daughter.
“So I won’t die?” Sarita asked weakly. She could barely speak and felt her life ebbing away as surely as the trees were shedding their leaves with winter’s arrival.
“Pledge your allegiance to Tohic now. Offer him your soul in return for your life.” Chula’s voice sounded so strange, almost like a man’s voice, a seductive voice.
Sweat trickled down Sarita’s temples into her hair that was tangled around her on the pillow. “What will Tohic do with my soul?”
“That is Tohic’s business. Do it now before he leaves us.” Chula was trembling.
“I give my soul to Tohic,” Sarita whispered.
Chula clapped her hands. “Make her a gatherer. She has the beauty and intelligence for that,” Chula’s voice pleaded with someone Sarita couldn’t see. A moment later, Chula’s body went rigid, and her eyes rolled in her head again.
Sarita looked away from Chula’s distorted face, her fear intense, but already she could feel the fever breaking and her life returning in a rush of strangely chilling air.
After that day, Chula taught Sarita the ancient ways of Tohic. When she was well enough, they went to the oak grove on a full moon night and offered a sacrifice for the gift of Sarita’s life, a newborn lamb Chula had convinced a vaquero to bring to the grove that night long ago.
After depositing the lamb into Chula’s arms, the vaquero jumped on his horse and galloped away in a hurry. Everyone who’d grown up at the mission was frightened of Tohic. The padres caused this, convincing the Indians they must worship the God of the white man and forsake the gods they’d always known and trusted. Gods like Tohic, who could heal sickness.
But right now, Sarita didn’t care about sickness, she cared about winning Roman back. Surely, Tohic would help her. Tohic gained as much as she did from her union with a man. She was a gatherer, and when she joined herself with a man, that man became Tohic’s as well. After she’d united herself with Roman in the mayordomo’s quarters, she could sense he wanted to escape her. This had confused her.
She knew how proud Roman was and how much he hated the Americanos. Perhaps that was why he behaved so strangely with her. She’d been in the gringo’s bed. But the gringo was nothing. Tohic was everything. And Tohic would change Roman’s mind. Tohic would make Roman love her again.
She gathered her herbs and her sacrifice and the bloody cloth from Roman’s back, the blood she’d drawn when they were one flesh in the mayordomo’s quarters. She also collected the gringa’s hair from her hiding place beneath the loose tile in the floor of her room. Her foolish husband was still entertaining the Vasquezes downstairs. He would never know she’d left the hacienda to seek Tohic’s blessing this night.
She’d noticed the way Joshua lusted for her cousin, Maria. He hungered for the girl as surely as she hungered for Roman. Let them all get drunk. Dance to the music the Indian servants played in the sala. Let her husband make a fool of himself with her little red-haired cousin. She no longer cared about any of them.
The puppy whined when she picked it up. That troublesome servant, Rosa, had seen her take the whelp from the litter in the barn this afternoon. Sarita wasn’t concerned. The half-wild dogs at El Rio Lobo meant nothing to anyone. Surely, Rosa would not have the courage to tell Joshua. Sarita wasn’t stupid. She knew why her husband kept that milky-skinned servant here.
Nobody would know she journeyed to the oak grove this night. El Rio Lobo wasn’t like Rancho de los Robles in this way. The sacred groves grew very near Roman’s home. Here, she must travel a considerable distance to reach a sacred grove. She would need a horse to get there.
She stuffed the puppy in one sack and the rest of the sacrificial articles in another bag. The whelp whimpered. Before she put the bloody cloth in, she pressed it to her face, her beloved’s blood. Heat washed over her, pooling in her belly. Roman would belong to her again, but first she must convince Tohic to get rid of the gringa.
Why Roman had taken her pale, skinny stepdaughter when he left troubled Sarita to no end. Hopefully, he’d snatched the girl to rid himself of her, but she sensed something else. Roman could be violent toward men, but never had she seen him raise a hand against a woman. He wasn’t that way, though that violent seed in him slumbered somewhere in his spirit. It had been born into him. Roman’s father had been a man of pride and passion and anger so it would be easy for Tohic to awake these seeds in the son.
She’d already prayed and chanted and worshipped Tohic in the hours after rising to find the hacienda in an uproar over Roman carrying away the gringa. She felt Tohic’s acceptance of her prayers even then. Even now. Before presenting a blood sacrifice.
Tonight she would get back into Tohic’s good graces. Denying herself food had centered her body, mind, and soul on Tohic. The moon was right. Full and heavy in the sky like a woman about to give birth, just the way Tohic liked it. She smiled. Blood always pleased him. Roman’s blood on the cloth would be a promise that one day Roman would be his. And the death of the whelp would signify the death of Rachel Tyler. With the gringa’s hair, Sarita would beseech a powerful spirit of infirmity to come upon her stepdaughter, the fire of Tohic’s fever to destroy her adversary.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rachel woke in the middle of the night. The room felt unnaturally cold. Horribly cold. And dark. A darkness that went beyond just physical darkness. The urge to pray was so strong she got out of the bed and knelt on the planked wooden floor. Roman had given her a room down the hall from his. The chamber’s painting intrigued her. It was a crucified saint, his suffering eyes raised trustingly to heaven. Before going to his own room, Roman had translated the inscription for her: Dark Night of the Soul.
Kneeling there beside the bed in her nightgown, she shivered, trying to ignore the chill in the room, but the cold grew overwhelming. The air was like the breath from a grave. The sinister chill wrapped around Rachel like talons as she prayed. Soon, she could no longer continue to kneel, she shivered so fiercely. Climbing back into bed, she burrowed under the covers but could not get warm. She began to feel sick and feverish, though still so terribly cold.
And on she prayed.
A longing for her grandmother overcame her. Together, her grandparents would come into her room and lay their hands upon her and pray when she was sick. Her grandfather had even anointed her with oil in the name of the Lord when she was ill as a child.
Fever raged through her now, reminding her of the days on the ship when she thought she might die. She became so sick she could no longer even pray. She fell into fitful dozing, dreaming of a terrible man on a pale horse.
# # #
Roman found her after knocking repeatedly on her door the following morning. When she did not answer, he let himself into the room. The iciness of her bedroom shocked him. Strangely, her room was much colder than the rest of the hacienda.
In the bed, she was out of her head with fever. Scooping her up, he carried her swiftly to his quarters.
An Indian maid was straightening his bed when he opened the door. In rapid Spanish, he told her to fetch Lupe.
Lupe had raised eleven children, all of them grown now, with their own families living here on Rancho de los Robles. Not only had Lupe seen her own children safely through many fevers, she’d brought healing to countless others as well, including him and his sister. When he was a boy, Lupe had nourished him and Maria, not only with her hearty food, but with her strong-handed love. After they lost their mother it was Lupe he looked to for a mother’s guidance and affection. Through the years, Lupe had bound his wounds and comforted him when he needed comforting. Lupe would know what to do.
With the maid off to find Lupe, Roman tore the covers back from his bed and placed Rachel between the fine white sheets embroidered with colorful thread at the edges. She whimpered like a child when he placed her on the mattress.
Without really thinking, he kicked off his boots and lay down beside her. He pulled her into his arms, speaking to her in Spanish, hardly realizing that even in her right mind, she wouldn’t understand what he said.
The heat of her body appalled him.
This was not just a fever. Her murmuring and thrashing and unawareness of him convinced him this sickness could be deadly. He stared at her flushed face, willing her to open her eyes and look at him, but she didn’t. Her eyes were shut as she moaned and fought him. When Lupe hurried into the room, he jumped out of the bed.
“She was fine last night,” he told Lupe in hasty Spanish.
Lupe felt her forehead. The old Indian’s eyes widened. “She’s on fire. We must cool her.” Lupe rushed from the room and soon returned. Roman had never seen the old woman move so fast. He had no idea what age she really was; she’d come from Mission Dolores in Yerba Buena many years ago. She was the most religious person on the rancho. Lupe recited the rosary morning and night before preparing the meals for the familia with her host of helpers.
“Las ninas will bring the water.” Lupe attempted to shoo him from the room.
Roman refused to budge. “You must leave, Don Roman. Her gown will be removed so we can bathe her.”
“I have already seen her bathing.” Roman crossed his arms, unwilling to leave.
Lupe placed her hands on her hips, her eyes afire. “Do not confess your sins to me, mi hijo. Go find a priest for your confession.”
“I have not sinned with her. She bathed in the creek last night. All I did was keep an eye on her so a bear didn’t carry her away.”
“The creek is very cold. Look at how slender she is. She should not be in the water this time of year,” Lupe chastised him.
Roman felt like an eight-year-old boy again. He uncrossed his arms and joined Lupe at Rachel’s bedside. “Will she be all right?”
The old Indian’s dark eyes softened. “I do not know, Don Roman.”
A young maid rushed in with a bucket of water. The girl was Lupe’s great granddaughter. Another Indian girl followed, carrying two more buckets. A third girl arrived with an armful of towels; she was related to Lupe as well.
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bsp; “Do not worry, Don Roman. Your señorita is young and strong.” Lupe looked at Rachel and tried to sound convincing. “If we can break the fever, she will live. I will go make a tonic out of willow bark.” She attempted to push Roman from the room with her.
He wouldn’t move from Rachel’s bedside.
The servant girls looked at each other. Nobody smiled, especially Lupe.
“Don Roman,” Lupe said sternly, “you are not her husband. Dios does not approve of you being in this bedroom with your novia.”
“This is my bedroom. How does anybody know what God approves of?” he said in frustration.
“My Bible,” Rachel whispered from the bed.
Roman could see Rachel was still completely out of her head. “Get her Bible,” he told one of the girls standing there. “It’s in the crucified saint’s room.”
The rooms were referred to by their paintings. Not the inscriptions on the canvases, but what the familia had labeled each art piece years ago. Everybody knew the rooms this way. Tia Josefa called his “the devil’s room,” but he preferred to call it “St. Miguel’s room.”
Lupe’s granddaughter hurried to obey him.
Roman looked at Rachel, so ill in his magnificent bed, and his anger increased. His Catholic religion always portrayed suffering saints. Dying saints. If a person was godly, they were beheaded or burned at the stake or sawed in two or nailed to a cross. All for a God who supposedly loved them. When he was young, his mother tried to explain this strange love of God to him, but he didn’t understand then, and he didn’t understand now. His mother had loved God, and she had suffered, and died in this very bed.
After they buried his mother, Father Santiago had done something strange. The padre placed his hands on Roman’s head and prayed fiercely over him, beseeching God to save his soul. The fervent prayer, nearly as much as burying his beloved mother, had left Roman forever changed. Forever marked by God. His mother’s funeral had been the typical gathering, a grand affair, like weddings and christenings always were in California.