Spanish Serenade

by Jennifer Blake

  “Take care!” Pilar said.

  They looked at her again, but made no comment.

  In that instant the priest, emerging from below, moved to join them. In quiet helpfulness he aligned himself beside the other three men. Sliding their hands under Refugio, they formed a support with their linked arms. Moving as carefully as a young mother with a new babe, they started toward the hatchway.

  There was no physician aboard the ship. The ship's officers and seamen took their illnesses and injuries to one of their number who had some experience with such things, or else treated themselves. Passengers were expected to do the same.

  At the convent Pilar had attended there had been a nun who, in an attempt to ensure that Pilar had some degree of usefulness, and perhaps out of an impulse of kindliness, had taught her to tend wounds, and also the recognition and cultivation of healing herbs. Pilar was by no means sure that her sketchy knowledge was adequate for the situation confronting her, but could not think it greatly inferior to what was otherwise available.

  She directed that Refugio be placed on the berth in the cabin they shared. Enrique she sent in search of brandy or rum, while she set Charro to tearing the single linen sheet into strips. She herself made a pad of Enrique's sash, holding it firmly in place. She had turned to ask Baltasar to go for a basin of seawater when from the door there came a thin and despairing scream.

  It was Isabel. Her eyes were desolate and her mouth a circle of woe as she stared at Refugio on the berth. Starting forward with a throat-wrenching sob, she flung herself at the red-stained and still form.

  Baltasar caught her before she reached the berth, dragging her up short so that her hair swung in a wild tangle around her red-splotched face. He gave her a hard shake. “Stop it, stop that noise! He isn't dead yet!”

  Isabel gulped and tears streamed from her eyes. “Oh,” she said, shivering. “Oh,” she whispered again, then threw herself upon Baltasar's chest, crying in noisy sobs. He held her, soothing her with awkward pats on the back. In his eyes was a look of baffled and angry anguish.

  For an instant Pilar felt the rise of tears, but she forced them back. There was no time to cry, no time to inspect the distress that poured like an endless stream through the recesses of her mind. Refugio was bleeding, the red tide soaking into the cloth she held, wetting her fingers with its warm flow. Something had to be done. She would do it.

  Charro was the member of the band who was most useful to her. His father's hacienda, he said, was far from a town or other people. Everyone there, including his family, saw to their own injuries. He had helped his mother in her makeshift infirmary from the time he was small. Later he had performed rough and ready surgery on animals, and also on the men who rode for his father, the charros who had been gored by the longhorn cattle or torn by the wiry shrub growth known as mesquite, or who sometimes settled their differences with knives or musket fire.

  Together, Charro and Pilar exposed the wound, examining the damage. They found the ball where it had come to rest, nestling against a lung after tearing a furrow from left to right across the chest and shattering two ribs. They extracted the piece of misshapen iron and cleaned the wound with brandy. Hoping that the welling blood had cleansed where they could not reach, they pressed a thick pad to Refugio's chest, strapped it tightly to him with strips of sheet, and let him be.

  He had not regained consciousness. He lay with his chest rising and falling in so gentle a rhythm that it was necessary to stare hard to see it. His hands were lax upon the blanket that covered him, and his lashes made thick shadows on his cheeks. His lips were bloodless, their firm molding edged with blue.

  No one wanted to leave the room. They sat watching, waiting. Isabel's tears had diminished to a few dismal sniffs. Now and then someone coughed or shifted in his seat with a rustle of clothing. Otherwise they made not a sound.

  The impending storm swept over them with thunder and high seas and driving rain, A lantern was lighted against the gathering darkness and Refugio was wedged in the berth with rolled bedding to keep him still against the pitching and tossing. His wound, which had nearly stopped bleeding, opened again under the onslaught. There was a desperate hour while they wrapped him with thicker and thicker bandaging. Then the storm slowly eased off. The movement of the ship grew less violent. The bleeding finally stopped.

  The day, marked by gray drizzle and rough seas, passed. Now and then intimation of a frown twitched Refugio's flaccid eyelids, or else his fingers cramped as if at the remembered heft of a sword. That was all.

  The bright subtropical sun came out just at sunset, burning away the last of the clouds and mist. Its rose-red glow flooded the cabin, rousing them all. The men slipped out one at a time for food and drink and fresh air. Invariably they came back within a short time.

  Those returning brought bits of news, of the mounting death toll among the injured seamen, the minor damage done to the ship, the hysterical demand of the merchant's young wife to be returned to Spain — and her virulent language and violent tantrum when denied.

  Doña Luisa came to the cabin as the evening waned toward night. Her eyes were soft with pity and she held a handkerchief of lace in her hand as she stood staring down at Refugio. “I can't believe it,” she said, her voice tremulous. “One would think he had had misfortune enough for one man. If he had not been so bold — but then he would not have been the lion, would he? Still, it's such a waste, such a terrible waste.”

  There was something in the woman's tone that disturbed Pilar, as if the widow counted Refugio already dead. Still, she was polite as she spoke. “Perhaps you would like to sit with him for a time? Since you and he knew each other well, it could be he will respond to you.”

  Alarm crossed the other woman's face. “Oh, no! I'm no good at all in sickrooms, really I am not. I never know what to do, and the sight of blood sends me swooning, while the odors—” She raised her handkerchief to her nose.

  Isabel, sitting quietly in a corner, spoke up. “Never mind. We don't need you. Refugio doesn't need you.”

  “I'm sure that's perfectly true,” Doña Luisa said with undisguised relief. “Perhaps later, when — when he is better, there will be something I can do. Perhaps I can amuse him then.”

  “Yes, later,” Pilar agreed, and this time her voice was cool.

  Isabel, for all her protectiveness and good intentions, was useless. She could not control her tendency to drip tears on their patient, and her hands as she touched him were so unsteady that once she nearly drenched his bandaging with a basin of dirty water. She would have choked him as she tried to make him drink, too, if Pilar had not whisked the glass out of the other girl's hand.

  The presence of so many in the tiny cubicle made movement difficult if not impossible. Their recommendations, though meant to be helpful, were merely worrisome, since they made Pilar doubt her own instincts. The air, heavy with the smell of dried blood and brandy, grew hard to breathe in the cramped quarters. Finally, when she had tripped over Baltasar's long legs for the twentieth time, Pilar had had enough. Promising them each their allotted turn at watch, she begged them all to leave. They went away, but reluctantly.

  It was just after midnight when the fever began. She wiped Refugio's dry lips with a cool cloth and bathed his face and arms; still, the heat of his body dried the cloth in her hand and his face grew flushed. She was brushing back his hair, laying her fingers along his hot cheek for the hundredth time to test its heat, when his lashes tightened, shivered, then lifted.

  His gaze was bright and liquid with fever, but lucid and searching. Pilar saw him gathering himself, as if to speak. To forestall the necessity, she said quickly, “You've been shot, and you're in the cabin, our cabin.”

  “I know,” he whispered, and closed his eyes again.

  “Is there anything I can do? Would you like water, or more cover?”

  He shook his head in slow negation.

  Pilar bit her bottom lip as she tried to think what else to say to hold him with her. I
t would be stupid to ask if he was in pain; of course he was, but there was nothing she could do. If she ran to bring some of the others, he might slip away again while she was gone.

  He opened his eyes with infinite effort. “You saw—”

  She knew precisely what he was asking. How had he known? She had not realized he was even aware she was there on the deck during the fighting. “It was not a pirate who fired at you, that much I know. But I didn't see his face.”

  He sighed and his eyelids dropped as if weighted. Long moments later he whispered so softly that it might have been no more than a breath, “Stay. Don't leave. Don't leave the cabin.”

  “No,” she said, “I won't.”

  There was nothing more. She thought that, after a time, he slept.

  She sat watching in a chair beside the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her neck ached, her back hurt and her eyes burned, but she was not sleepy. She sat bolt upright, staring at the wall, while fear ran through her veins like some pervasive poison. Over and over in her mind she saw the moment when from the knot of musketeers firing into the mob of retreating pirates there had come the shot that had felled Refugio. She had not seen who the man was, but Refugio had. He had seen, and he knew as he lay injured that the man who shot him had been neither pirate nor known enemy.

  Somehow Don Esteban had hired a man to kill El Leon. Yet how could that be when her stepfather had gone on ahead? How was it possible when he could have no idea that they had sailed on the Celestina?

  There were several potential explanations. The first was that Don Esteban's hirelings had followed after them, one or more of them picking up their trail in Cordoba at her aunt's house, then tracking them to Cadiz and taking passage on the ship to complete the task assigned. The second was that some hireling of the don, following after them as far as Cadiz, had paid one of the ship's seamen to do the deed. It was also possible that the hireling was a renegade from El Leon's band, perhaps a man who had provided horses on the ride to Cordoba, then contacted Don Esteban to offer himself for the job. Another alternative was that someone traveling on the ship was, by unfortunate coincidence, in the pay of the don, and had either taken up a musket himself when the opportunity arose or else hired a seaman to do it. A final possibility was that it was one of their party, Enrique, Charro, Baltasar, or Isabel, who had arranged to have the shot fired. Of the last two ideas, she did not know which was most unlikely.

  She had felt so safe. The ship had seemed an oasis in a time where the fear of stealthy death need not trouble her mind. It was a shock to find it was not so.

  Stay, Refugio had said, as if even in his extremity he was concerned for her safety. It was he, however, who had nearly died. Why should that be, if it was her stepfather who had sent the killer? She was the one he wanted dead.

  Vengeance was the obvious answer, vengeance for the humiliation Refugio had heaped upon him, vengeance for thwarting his plans for Pilar. What else could it be? What other enemies could Refugio have who would go to such lengths to remove him?

  But why had the killer not shot her also? Pilar asked herself. Why had he not knifed her in the passageway during the confusion, or even thrown her overboard in the dark of night as she walked the decks?

  There was nothing to keep him from it, not now. There was an illusion of safety there in the cabin with Refugio, but nothing more than that. He could not protect her, nor could she protect him, though she stayed, as he had asked, for that purpose as much as any other.

  She should go for one of the others. They could keep Refugio safe.

  Or could they?

  Soon one of them would come to relieve her, to sit beside Refugio in the dark hours toward the dawn when spirit and body were weakest and easiest to snuff out. How could she allow it when she had promised? Was there any way to stop it?

  It was Charro who came, ducking his head as he entered, giving her a quiet grin. His hair was tousled and his eyes heavy with sleep. He seemed so normal and unthreatening as be smothered a yawn and shook himself that she felt the brush of guilt for the tenor of her thoughts.

  He refused the chair she offered, waving her back into it. Placing his back to the wall beside the door, he lowered his lanky form to his heels, hunkering there with his hands dangling between his knees. His balance was rock steady in that position, one that seemed perfectly natural for him. His gaze on Refugio, he asked, “How's he been?”

  “As you see. His fever is running high.”

  “There would be something wrong if he had no fever; it's nature's way.”

  “But still worrisome. He spoke a few words.” She did not elaborate.

  “A good sign.” Charro surveyed her with the ghost of concern in his eyes. “You look tired. Why don't you sleep?”

  “I'm not sure I could.”

  “You could try.”

  “Perhaps in a moment.” To refuse would make her look overly concerned, as if she didn't trust Charro. It might also make it look as if she was forming an attachment to Refugio, and that would not do. If she only postponed her rest, there should be no cause for suspicion.

  “Refugio is lucky to have you with him.”

  She sent him a swift look, but there was only approval in his face. The corner of her mouth tugged in a wry grimace. “I'm not sure he would agree with you. If it were not for me, his brother would not be a prisoner, he would undoubtedly not have been shot, and he would still be in Spain at the head of his band.”

  “It's all your fault, in fact. He had no choice about what happened, no will or reasons of his own.”

  “As to that, I don't know; I suppose he did. But you'll have to admit—”

  “You did something that I've been trying to do for months, and that's persuade Refugio to leave Spain. There was no future for him there, no hope except that when death came it would be swift. Oh, he had his band and his troubadour to sing of his victories against injustice. But the man is a genius at organization, a fiend for work, and a wonder at bringing out the best in men. He is capable of so much more. He deserves so much more.”

  “There are laws and authority in Louisiana, and news from Spain comes often. What makes you think his past won't arrive with him, and be counted against him?”

  “Who's talking about Louisiana? I speak of New Spain, the Tejas country. And yes, there are laws there, and authorities. But the road between there and Spain is long and slow. Letters and messages must travel overland to Mexico City and then to Vera Cruz on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico before being put on a ship for Spain. Answers and orders must make the journey in reverse. It can take a year, sometimes two, for a request to be sent from the town of San Antonio de Bexar near my home to Madrid, and an answer received. There is danger from Indians, wild animals, disease, accidents, storms, and pirates along every step of the way. The route across the land from Louisiana to San Antonio is even longer and more treacherous, mainly because of the Indian tribes known as the Apache. Much communication is lost, and even if it's not, it's possible for the answers that finally come to be ignored or forgotten.”

  “Ignored?”

  “Why not? Spain cares little for her most distant outpost; she hardly feeds and clothes the handful of soldiers who guard its open spaces, and ignores the missions begun with such labor to convert the Indians, since they have, for the most part, failed. The men and women sent by the crown to settle and civilize the country have been as good as abandoned for a hundred years. They have all, soldiers and priests and colonizers alike, learned to make their own rules based on what people are and how they live, not who they are. The others who have come on their own are not grandees and not, truth to tell, without a stain or two on their own pasts. What matters is living well enough to make God frown, but not so well as to make the devil smile; the rest is nothing.”

  “And yet,” she said, “you were sent all that long way to acquire the polish of Spain.”

  “My father still loves the idea of Seville and the life there. He believes in the benefits of a classical ed
ucation and of rubbing shoulders with the sons of noblemen. It was a matter of pride to him to be able to send his son, though he himself would never leave New Spain. There are many, however, who even after three generations and more still plan and scheme and talk about returning. For most, it's only a dream. For me, it was a mistake.”

  “You weren't impressed?”

  “Oh, yes, Seville is beautiful, and I have an affection for her. And my head is stuffed with knowledge that I'll be digesting for years. Still, I had never learned the knack of bowing my head to every passing hidalgo who felt the need for homage, nor of playing at love.”

  “Isabel mentioned your duchess. It seems she had taste, at least.”

  He stared at her, his eyes shadowed though the flickering lantern hung just above him. “You're very kind, señorita.”

  “Not at all. I suppose you will be traveling on to your home from Louisiana soon after we land, then?”

  “As soon as I can persuade Refugio to go with me.”

  “He . . . will have other things on his mind.”

  Charro lifted his shoulders. “I'm in no great hurry.”

  They talked of other matters, of the flat country around his homeland with its mild, dry weather and waving grass watered by the San Antonio River; of the grapevines shading the walls of his home, which was built like a fortress against the raids of the Apaches; of the horses raised on the hacienda and the cattle herded by the charros which sometimes stood taller than a man at the shoulder and had great spreading horns that were sharp as spears; of the mission fathers and their irrigation ditches which had changed the land; and of the mission Indians who were docile and God-fearing and nothing like the Apaches of the wide open plains. Pilar listened and asked questions with bemused interest. To her the Tejas country was somehow unreal, like a place in a legend, one that was beautiful and magical yet troubled by demons.

  They were still talking when the gray light of morning, seeping in at the porthole, made the lantern light unnecessary. Charro, in the midst of a tale of how his aunt, his father's sister, had been captured by the Indians as a child, and how his grandfather had been killed trying to get her back, stood and snuffed the light. He stretched, raising his arms above his head so that his fists brushed the ceiling. Clasping his hands behind his neck, he glanced at the berth. He stiffened.