Once I was seated by Mother’s bed, it seemed I had never done anything else but lean close to her, clasping the frail hands.
My head throbbed from the oppressive thickness of stale scented air, guttering candles that seemed to gasp for life. Holding the same position made my shoulders cramp. In weary bitterness that welled up before I could check it, I wondered why my mother had wanted me after all these years.
It was too late for us to know each other, too late to laugh, to share. She had called me only to mourn, watch her dying. Why hadn’t she let me learn of her death through the same muffled distance that had separated us in life?
Then her eyes opened, saw me, shone with a joy that spread over her tired face. “Miranda,” she whispered, lifting her hand to my hair with obvious effort.
And then I was glad of the long journey, the vigil in this room, welcomed the pain, for at least it gave me my mother. She loved me, whyever I had not been with her. She loved me, I knew it, and now I could never be without that certainty.
“I love you,” I said, and wet her hand with my tears.
Two days later Reina and I stood on either side of the bed as the priest murmured and signed and anointed our mother. When he stepped back, she took Reina’s hand and mine, tried to bring them together, but lost all strength. She arched her head and there was a sound in her throat, her fingers spasmed, then relaxed, and her life was over.
My knees would not support me. I leaned on the bed, pressing the thin hand to my face, craving some word, some glance—any of the slight gestures of life that had seemed so weak and futile to me before but now seemed miracles. Beside this utter quiet, this loss of spirit and breath, all of life seemed a wonder.
“Leave her!” Gripping my shoulder, Reina shook me hard. As I stared in confusion, she stormed on. “You wait till Mother is dying and then come to perch by her bed like a vulture!”
The vicious injustice struck me dumb for a moment.
“I wanted to come home!” I managed at last. “Do you think I enjoyed feeling like an orphan?”
Reina’s eyes blazed. “You call this home? Not for you, Inglesa! The sooner you go back to England the better for all.”
“I’ve nothing to go back to,” I said, stunned at the violence of her onslaught. And then before she could attack further, there by our mother’s still-warm body, I raised a silencing hand. “Let’s not talk about it now, Reina.”
“Good sense.” We both whirled toward the voice from the door.
2
A lean tall man with eyes like the turquoise in my crucifix and skin the color of his leather vest and trousers moved into the room with a surprisingly light tread for a man of his size. He dropped his dusty gray hat on a chest and went to stand by the bed, dark head lowered. The muscles in his gaunt cheeks ridged like cords.
“Madonna,” he said under his breath and bent to her hand, pressing it to his face.
He stayed like that a long time while the priest hovered over him like a bat, all but squeaking, as if protesting the decorum of this man’s grief. Reina watched him with an eager, hungry look and I realized it was the first time I had seen her beautiful face reveal anything besides anger or pride.
“Trace,” she said.
He turned slowly, face impassive as a mask, those curious eyes startling as a glimpse of sea beyond the desert. They brushed me swiftly—but even that cursory glance brought blood to my face—and fastened on Reina, who wore a dark-green dress that accentuated her waist, slender without corsets, her high full breasts, and the creamy richness of her skin. Her lips were parted, and even though she had called this man—for he must be the Trace Winslade who had written to me—a pistolero, there was no hauteur in the way she looked at him—a beseeching, rather.
“So,” he said to her in Spanish, which I followed fairly well. “You and your sister are fighting before Doña Luisa is even buried. She deserved better.”
Reina flushed, hitched a shoulder toward me. “This one has no right here.”
“She has the right that her mother wanted her to have.” His tone cut like a thin blade.
“Mother is dead.” Reina’s voice didn’t waver.
“But she left a will,” Trace said.
“I am the eldest! I have lived here, always, taken over much of the running of Las Coronas. You know that, Trace, better than anyone.”
“There is a will,” he said again.
Without another word he left the room. The priest closed Mother’s eyes. Reina cast her what I could have sworn was a glance of fury, then flung from the room, her heels clicking on the tiles, as she hurried after the man she had scornfully called a Texan gunman. The priest gave me a distracted frown and followed her.
I moved back to my mother. We were alone. Now I could weep.
Doña Luisa lay in state that day while servants came to pray and mourn. I caught snatches of what they murmured about her—how she had nursed the sick, been godmother to babies, eased the last hours of the dying, been generous with food and drink at fiestas. Along with their sorrow, I heard undertones of fear.
“It will be different with La Peliroja,” said Catalina, the majestically fat head cook.
“La Inglesa seems kind, like her mother,” whispered her companion, a golden-skinned middle-aged woman named María whom I often saw patting out endless tortillas.
The older woman shook her head. “Too young,” she said dolefully. “Too gentle. La Peliroja will wither her.”
Would she? For the first time I really wondered what would happen to me now.
As I entered, the women fell silent, crossed themselves, and went out, hard bare feet scuffling. I knelt to pray by my mother’s bed, but in spite of perfumes, a sickening odor permeated the room. In this hot climate a body needed swift burial. Nausea compelled me to retreat to the courtyard, around which all the rooms were ranged. Trees cast welcome shade and blossoming vines trailed along the adobe walls and arches. The earth was covered with pebble mosaics leading to a great octagonal fountain, tiled in bright blue and yellow, where goldfish swam.
Flowers were everywhere, in beds and pottery jars and big stone troughs. The far end of the court was shaded by giant grapevines twining over a trellis that now seemed more supported by them than the opposite. There were benches under this shade, and in niches of the adjoining arches were statues of the Virgin and some starved-looking saint.
There had been no time to loiter here before. Now I watched the gleaming fish, the tumbling splash of the fountain from a curious bronze tangle of cherubs and dolphins.
One of my earliest memories was being pushed into it by Reina. I still remembered flailing about till I realized I could touch the bottom and had been found by one of the gardeners as I tried to scramble out. Reina had run off after shoving me and I hadn’t told on her. Even then I’d been ashamed that my big sister, whom I worshiped, had found me so unsatisfactory that she’d tried to drown me. And even now I felt as if there was something wrong with me that provoked her fierce rejection. Just as I had secretly believed my parents sent me to England because of some secret shortcoming of mine, something that kept me from belonging at Las Coronas.
And now with my mother dead and my schooldays finished, where did I belong? The plain, terrible truth was … nowhere. I knew I should be grateful that at least there should be no money problems, but I had not one real friend in all the world. The only people who had loved me were dead. Devastating loneliness weighted my heart, seemed to crush air from my lungs.
“When are you going back to England?”
I turned guiltily to meet Trace Winslade’s eyes. Where had he got that scar? It ran like a knitted seam from his cheekbone to his jaw. He was leaning against an arch and now came forward with a gliding muscularity that reminded me of a large cat. I didn’t want him too close. He had an aura that was physically overwhelming; those strange blue-green eyes exerted power that made me unable to move. Foreign, he seemed—and dangerous.
“I’m not going back,” I said def
iantly. Did I look so milksoppish and timid that everyone assumed I couldn’t live in my parents’ country, the place of my birth if not of my rearing?
Though the pupils of his eyes didn’t move, he was seeing me from toe to crown. He gave a slight, regretful shake of his head. “You don’t fit, Miss Greenleaf. It was always a hard country and times are getting worse. If you don’t want to live in England, you should try the United States. Won’t take you long to get a husband, especially if you stay in the West.”
“Mr. Winslade!” I said in a voice that shook with anger—fortunately, anger that warned my numb senses, brought me more alive than I had been since my mother’s death. “You think me incapable of living without a husband? Just as you say that I can’t manage in Sonora? You must hold me in contempt.”
“Contempt?” he asked roughly.
His eyes traveled from my face to my throat, lingered on my breasts in a way that sent a tingling all through me, a sweet dizzying sensation that was far from being all shame. My blood felt charged, powerful, ready for something. Something Trace knew. I stepped back, involuntarily making a shield of my hands against him though that could not defend me from the tumult in my body.
Somehow he knew what I was feeling. “You see?” His tone was soft. “I didn’t even touch you.”
“No gentleman would stare like that.”
The hard edge of a smile curved his long mouth. “But men will. If you don’t have one to protect you, others will do a hell of a lot more than look. You’re too sweet and soft and tempting not to be picked, Miss Miranda.”
I felt my throat and face grow hot. “I won’t marry just to keep men from watching me. That’s ridiculous.”
“You’re in Mexico. A manless woman is fair prey. You must understand that here a woman’s men guard her jealously.”
“For their own honor.”
He shrugged. “I’m saying what is, not what should be. If you stay here, you need a man.”
“Who’ll regard me as property, a chattel? I may never marry at all.”
“Did I scare you that much?” He cocked his head, amused.
How dare he act so superior? He wasn’t that old. If he’d spent most of his recent life with horses and vaqueros, how could he know much about women?
“Let’s not fall out about it, Miss Miranda. I reckon you won’t be single long.”
I scowled at him. “However long it takes, I mean to stay single till I know where I belong and who I am.”
“And how about what you are?” He didn’t put out his hands, yet I felt as if he touched me, reached to hidden secret parts where rapture might be stored but fear certainly was. “You’re a woman. Will you learn about that before you marry?”
I retreated from the blue fire in his eyes.
“Why go to the grief of establishing all this independence?” His laughter was rich with masculine indulgence. “When you marry, you’ll be your husband’s.”
“Then I won’t marry.”
His dark brows shot up. “I thought marriage was the dearest aim of all young ladies.”
“It seems to me more like a—a death, an end of what I could be.”
He gave a shocked whistle, then crossed his arms and chuckled, the moment during which he had seen me as a person, taken me seriously, shoved away. “That English girls’ school couldn’t have given you much idea of life and men. Let’s hope your mother had something planned for you. Her lawyer’s coming tomorrow to read her will.”
I asked something I’d wondered about ever since I knew he had written the letter telling me to come home. “Why did you write to me instead of the lawyer?”
“She asked it,” he said, face setting in those lines that made him seem truly a pistolero, a man of desperate habits.
“My father hired you, I believe?”
He laughed briefly. “You might say so. He broke up a little party some bandits were having with me and brought me to his house. I would have died except for your mother. When I was healed up, your dad gave me charge of the horses. Sometimes I couldn’t figger his accent, but he was a real man.”
I listened hungrily. It was good to hear about my father. But how ironic it was that this employee knew him far better than I—had seen him oftener, talked with him more.
“A man, yes,” said Reina, appearing in the door behind Trace. “But Señor Greenleaf never became a Mexican. Which leaves us with problems now. Trace, please come with me. I need to consult with you.”
He nodded to me and followed her readily through the arch, the worn leather of his garments contrasting with her silky gabardine. She took his arm, swaying against him as they moved off. She wanted him, that was certain, though her pride of place and name might prevent marriage.
How did he feel about her? That question depressed me. Could there be a doubt? Reina was an uncommonly beautiful woman and an heiress. She was plagued by none of the doubts that gnawed me. She was Reina Anza y Dubois.
I feared she was also a spiteful bitch, which did not promise much for our future. I drew some comfort from Trace’s suggestion that Mother might have arranged something for me, though with one part of my being I wanted to stay at Las Coronas, at least till I regained the sense of home I had lacked for so long.
Mother was buried that night beside my father’s memorial in the old chapel set among orange, fig, and pomegranate trees. There was no reality in the priest’s words for me. I was glad that the wasted body was under the stones instead of where I would vainly try to get from it vanished love and sweetness.
That night I slept a deep, heavy slumber that held no dreams and woke unrefreshed. The will would be read before the noon meal. That seemed some kind of goal, some important thing to reach through my numb misery. I had coffee and a crisp roll and went out into the patio. My silent room was unendurable just then and I feared to seek out Reina, dreading a rebuff.
Wandering near the grape arbor, I saw something hunched behind the stone bench at the end just as the cook, Catalina, burst out of the kitchen, scolding viciously. The small figure by the bench pressed even flatter to the pebbles.
“Ah, señorita,” breathed the cook gustily as she stopped short. “A thousand pardons. That little hell-imp ran out here—”
“Imp?” I echoed the Spanish, which was returning, though with many gaps and distortions.
“The little Yaqui slut.”
From my childhood, memories stirred—tales of the fierce unbelievably brave Indians who had stopped the Christian faith from the white man but never his rule or his ways. The Spanish, who really never subjugated them, gave them the name of the “brown race that knows how to die” and the Mexican government had intermittently waged war against them, war that never ended because the Yaquis believed God had given them their lands.
“An Indian child?” I asked.
“Indian devil!” rasped the fat woman. She held out a wrist that showed small bloody toothmarks. “Bit me like rabid coyote. When I find her, I’ll beat some respect into her.”
“Hatred, more likely,” I said.
Just then the cook’s gaze flickered past me to the arbor. She lunged toward the skulking figure, dragged the girl to her feet, and gave her a savage slap that sent the child reeling into the bench.
The girl did not cry, did not make a sound. There was absolutely no expression in her black eyes as she watched the cook advancing, heavy arm lifted.
“Stop!” I said, grasping the woman’s shoulder.
“But, señorita, she must learn. She is wild, a savage.”
“It is savage to beat children.”
The woman stared at me as if I were mad. “It is Yaqui,” she protested. “The soldiers left her here a week ago. A week. And she will not obey.”
“Where is her family?”
The cook moved her shoulders sullenly. “Dead. The soldiers killed the adults and babies. This brat was too young for the soldiers to keep with them.”
“Dead?” I felt sick, unbelieving. “You mean there is war?”
“She will stay with me,” I said. “You asked if I wanted a maid. I will have her.”
Reina stared. Then her long throat arched back and she burst into laughter. “That creature? As well expect the serpent to brush your hair or the lion cub to mend your dresses.”
“Then why try to make her into a kitchen servant?”
Reina shrugged. “One always tries. It is a duty to care for orphans and at least attempt to civilize these wretches.”
“If that is accomplished by beatings, mules should be wonderfully civilized, Reina.”
She turned her back on me and gestured to the cook, who reached for the girl. I put the child behind me.
“She must learn,” Reina said in exasperation. “And so must you, sister mine. You do not comprehend this country.”
Foreboding ran through me. I felt alone, abandoned, almost as vulnerable as this little slave, this small captive of war who watched us with proud stoicism though her parents were slaughtered and she was in the power of enemies. If she could be that brave, surely I could find some courage within myself.
“I will keep the child,” I said. Taking her limp hand, I started for where my room opened into the court.
“You are a fool,” mocked Reina. “She will kill you for your trouble if she gets a chance. Better fondle a scorpion.”
I got her to my room, closed the barred door on Reina, the cook, and public opinion, and didn’t know what to do with her. It didn’t help to imagine that she was a younger girl fresh come to Miss Mattison’s school. I couldn’t even visualize how one of them would react to what this child had endured. She stood in the center of the room, silently waiting for whatever came.
A Lady Bought with Rifles Page 2