by Carla Kelly
“You worry me,” was all Toshua said.
Marco knew where Alonso’s office was located. He thought of better times when he had sat there with his weak friend from childhood, drinking and laughing. The hacienda was filling with the stench of burning bodies as he grabbed the land grant parchments and brand records, thrusting some to Toshua and carrying the rest close to his chest. He threw his torch into the room and they staggered from the building. Coughing and gagging, they collapsed in the dust of the courtyard and lay there until they could breathe again.
“You know, you could have picked up that cask of jewels and carried it from the room,” Toshua said. “You came away with nothing.”
“Oh, no, my friend.” He fumbled in his doublet and pulled out Paloma’s necklace, handing it to Toshua.
“Ah. Tatzinupi, our star.” Toshua handed it back. “Let’s ride.”
“We watch first.”
“The spirits, little brother,” Toshua warned.
“No spirits here, pabi,” Marco said. At the top of his lungs, drowning out the roar of the flames, he sang “Te Deum Laudamus,” the chant of a war chief this time.
Feeling older than the oldest man in Santa Maria, Marco sat on Buciro by the Castellano gates, until the hacienda burned to the ground. They rode home slowly.
He wanted Toshua to ride in with him. Marco told him about his new daughter, which made Toshua laugh. “After what Eckapeta told me, this too? You will be busy,” he said.
They looked at each other in complete understanding.
“Don’t leave us,” Marco said at the place where the road continued straight to the Double Cross, and branched east to Santa Maria and the plains of Texas.
“I will think about this,” was all Toshua would say.
Toshua turned his horse toward the Santa Maria road, and Marco swallowed his disappointment. He knew Toshua would ride all night and rejoin the other warriors and his wife. Maybe he would come back some day, or maybe this was their last meeting. Silent, they touched fingers and then palms. Marco let Buciro pick up the pace and get him home, because he hadn’t the heart to pay attention. He stopped once or twice, certain he could hear another horse. Nothing.
Sancha must have told Emiliano what he had done. When Marco was safely through his gates, the old retainer led Buciro into the horse barn. Marco washed his hands and face in the acequia and went into his kitchen.
It was too much to hope that Paloma would be up still and waiting for him, but she was. She put her finger to her lips and pointed to the cradle by the banked fire. She wore a clean dress and she smelled heavenly of roses and talcum powder.
“There is a bath for you in our room and,” she chuckled, “I know better than to bother with a nightshirt for you. Are you hungry?”
He shook his head, certain he would never eat again. He put the official documents on the table. “We burned it to the ground, just like the Kwahadi and their tipis of dead.”
“ ‘We’? I rather thought Toshua would help you. You couldn’t get him to stay?”
“I tried. We will see them both again.” He looked at her. “How did you know?”
“You’re not the only smart one.”
He knew how vile he smelled, but he also knew Paloma would take his hand anyway. He stopped at the doorway. “The baby?”
“The wet nurse is in the next room. She will take the cradle when we leave the kitchen.”
They moved as one down the corridor. He stopped outside the door he had not opened in years. He opened it now.
“Why … why did you not put our little one in here?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.
“I wanted you to open the door,” she said simply.
They walked inside. He went to the window, removed the bar and opened the shutters, letting in the moonlight. He breathed in the fragrance of newly turned earth. He would be busy in the fields tomorrow, catching up.
“I’ll wash the bedding tomorrow and we’ll move her in.” She took his hand. “May I call her Soledad Estrella, after our mothers?”
“You know you may,” he told her, touched. “I can put the second crib in the lumber room tomorrow.”
“I think not.”
He smiled. She knew. Why not? It was her body, after all. “All right, Paloma, what are you telling me?” He could feign surprise, but for how long, he wasn’t sure.
He didn’t think she would be shy, not after a year and a half of yearning, but she was. “At first I was not so certain. You know I missed so many monthlies when I went all those years without much food in my uncle’s house, and here we were, starving again. Goodness knows, we did not eat well in the canyon until the bears in the cave.”
“True. Those deer Toshua and I shot were puny to feed thirty people, and I knew you were giving your portions to Kahúu for the babies.”
She didn’t deny it. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again, giving him that down-the-nose look. “Why are you not surprised?”
“It was the cedar smoke and Eckapeta.”
The look became more pronounced. “This milagro of ours happened weeks before the smoke. I think it was the night I worked up my courage to ask Toshua and Eckapeta for some tipi time without an audience.”
He grinned as she took his hand and hauled him next door into their room, where the light was better. “Get in the tub and I will scrub your back.”
Marco stripped and sank into the tub with a sigh that went on and on. Paloma sat on the floor beside him, her arms resting on the wooden rim. “Eckapeta? The smoke?”
He lathered up his own cloth and wiped death, grime, and five hundred years from his tired face. “She told me on the Llano, when you were starting to droop and flag.” He washed some more, until she grabbed the cloth.
“Told you what?”
“She noticed as you sat there naked in the smoke, that the area around your nipples had turned brown. I hadn’t noticed because tipis are so dark, or I might have said something. I do remember that from Felicia. Eckapeta also said the veins in your breasts were so large.” He touched her cheek. “When did you decide that maybe our luck had changed?”
“Probably on the Llano. All I wanted to do was sleep and throw up. I still do. And ay! Those breasts you like so well are sore to touch.” She leaned her forehead against the tub. “Thank you both for slowing the pace. I know the warriors were upset and Toshua, too.”
“Not after she told them why.”
Paloma laughed. “We all could have said something! My goodness.”
He finished washing, as she changed into her nightgown and sat cross-legged on the end of their bed. “You realize, Marco, that we are going to be busy here in eight months or so, when Soledad is nine months old and we have a newborn.”
Saying the word aloud, maybe for the first time, made her gasp and lean her head forward until she touched her toes. “A newborn,” she repeated, her voice muffled. She laughed again. “Soon I will not bend this well.”
“Is Soledad too much?” he had to ask, even though he was nearly desperate for his turn to hold the little one.
“She is already ours,” Paloma said, her voice firm. “We will give her a good life, the best.” He saw sudden fear on her face. “My aunt and uncle. Oh, no, please no!”
Marco reached for her. After assessing what he thought his wife could bear, he amended the account of the dreadful business at Hacienda Castellano. “Alonso had no living relatives. Your aunt and uncle will get my official report of the death of their daughter and son-in-law, and our condolences. It is over. Lieutenant Roybal will have no report but mine, so he will know nothing of a child.”
“People here will know.”
It warmed Marco’s heart to know that a mother’s heart for Soledad already beat in her breast, so determined was she to consider every angle to protect the sleeping baby.
He leaned over enough to touch the frown between her eyes. “Certainly our friends will know, and they will rejoice with us. The people of Valle del Sol are like that. Soon no one will remem
ber anything different about the children of Marco Mondragón and Paloma Vega. Santa Fe is far away.”
“Are you bending the law again?”
“It is my choice, as juez,” he said simply.
She tossed him a towel when he stood up. “I’m going to miss that breechcloth,” he joked, looking down.
“That reminds me, husband. I remember how you groused to me one night that I had a name from The People and you did not.”
“Well, it would have been nice.”
She yanked the towel away and pointed south of his stomach. “I can’t say it in Comanche, but the women named you Big Man Down There. Now don’t let it go to your head!” she said when he started to laugh.
“At least it’s more flattering than Buffalo Rut,” he joked, pleased.
He crawled into bed and lay there in complete comfort as his wife pulled the sheets and blankets over him. “I have missed this, Paloma.”
“I, too.” Her voice turned wistful. “Call me Tatzinupi now and then.”
Tatzinupi. Marco sat up. “You’re closest. Hand me my doublet.”
She did as he asked, a question in her eyes. Watching her expressive face, he reached in the pocket and pulled out her little necklace, handing it to her.
“You went to that death house for this,” she murmured, when she could talk.
“That and the land grant papers. I will keep the star and meadow brand record here. I will send the land grant papers to Governor de Anza. He will abrogate the grant and throw the land open for other settlers. Eventually—you know how slowly things move in our colony—Tatzinupi and Big Man Down There will have new neighbors.”
She gave him such a look, sitting there so lovely in the moonlight—this mother of their new daughter Soledad and their baby growing inside her. Ay caray, they would be busy! She sat in profile to him, so he traced the outline of her face. When his finger reached her lips, she kissed it.
“Te deum laudamus,” she sang so softly. “O God, we praise thee.”
Marco thought he would go to sleep at once, but he lay awake for an hour or more, listening to his wife’s peaceful deep breathing. It touched his heart to see how her hand already curved protectively around her belly. Tomorrow there would be Soledad to hold and admire. Has ever a man been as blessed as I am? he asked himself.
He lay there, calm, thinking of all there was to do tomorrow. Suddenly, he knew why he could not sleep. Paloma was so deep in slumber that she made no sound when he slowly moved his arm from under her shoulders.
In case some of the servants were still up, Marco knotted the bath towel around his middle and padded down the corridor. The kitchen was dark and silent, so he crossed to the door and opened it onto the garden.
Te deum laudamus, he thought in utter gratitude. Two horses were cropping grass by the acequia and he could just see a flicker of light from the fireplace in his office by the horse barn. He leaned against the doorframe, content, relieved and grateful all at once. Since Paloma was going to need his help more and more, maybe he could move his office into one of the empty rooms in the hacienda itself. He didn’t think for a moment that Toshua and Eckapeta would stay with them permanently, but they might like a place of their own when they visited their children.
In the morning first thing, he would ask Paloma what she thought, even though he was already pretty sure of her answer. No. He was certain.
* * *
Author’s Note
From the time of the Spanish Conquest, smallpox or la viruela was always present in the Americas, cycling in severity, but never entirely absent. Notable epidemics in 1780, 1820, and 1836 stand out as particularly terrible smallpox seasons, affecting white and native alike. In the East, the 1780 epidemic added to the complications of the American Revolution.
Until Edward Jenner’s world-changing introduction of vaccination in the late 18th century, that same world had relied on inoculation, which involved inserting live smallpox into a healthy body. The result, fatal in a small percentage of cases, usually produced much milder smallpox, which left much less scarring and the sought-after blessing of future immunity. Because it could be so risky and fickle, inoculation was a last resort for many.
Inoculation had been practiced in Africa and Asia for hundreds of years, with the method arriving on Europe’s shores in the early 1700s. The method was refined in England and rendered slightly less risky, but it still involved the use of live matter taken from smallpox victims.
Records of the 1780 epidemic in New Mexico indicate a great worsening in 1781 and later, among settlers and indigenous people alike. Death tolls among the Comanche and Kiowa are understandably harder to quantify. Some say the Comanche suffered as greatly as any tribe, while other accounts suggest that the more remote Kwahadi (Antelope Eaters) of the high west Texas Plains escaped. If this is true—and the records are inconclusive—was it because of their isolation, or were other factors at work? For the sake of this story of Marco Mondragón and his wife Paloma Vega, I have offered just such a factor. Frontiers were fluid places and it is not unthinkable that help could come from an unexpected person, no matter how dubious and unwilling such a person might be.
A well-known veteran of the romance writing field, Carla Kelly is the author of twenty-six novels and three non-fiction works, as well as numerous short stories and articles for various publications. She is the recipient of two RITA Awards from Romance Writers of America for Best Regency of the Year; two Spur Awards from Western Writers of America; a Whitney Award for Best Romance Fiction, 2011; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Romantic Times.
Carla’s interest in historical fiction is a byproduct of her lifelong interest in history. She has a BA in Latin American History from Brigham Young University and an MA in Indian Wars History from University of Louisiana-Monroe. She’s held a variety of jobs, including public relations work for major hospitals and hospices, feature writer and columnist for a North Dakota daily newspaper, and ranger in the National Park Service (her favorite job) at Fort Laramie National Historic Site and Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site. She has worked for the North Dakota Historical Society as a contract researcher. Interest in the Napoleonic Wars at sea led to a recent series of novels about the British Channel Fleet during that conflict.
Of late, Carla has written two novels set in southeast Wyoming in 1910 that focus on her Mormon background and her interest in ranching.
You can find Carla on the Web at: www.CarlaKellyAuthor.com.