“Mama’s name was Estrella Moreno, sister to my horrid uncle. Their father owned much land and many cattle near El Paso del Norte. There were other brands, but I don’t remember them too well.”
“And your father? What about his brands?”
She gave a sigh that ended on a ragged note, telling him all he needed to know about his wife’s attachment to her father.
“Papa came from Spain, somewhere near Cadiz, I believe. He had been appointed capitán-general of the district. He married into land and cattle, and what do you know, he even loved my mother. It wasn’t arranged.” She gestured to the parchment. “This was her brand.”
She blew her nose again. “They used to sit close together at breakfast and laugh about this and that.” Her eyes had a faraway look. “If I had been ever so good, Papa would put me in front of him on his horse and we would go to the vegas to oversee the cattle. The V is for Vega. Our land had lovely meadows.” Her expression turned stormy. “And now my cousin has been given their brand! There are cattle somewhere, aren’t there?”
“Most likely, my love, and land doesn’t vanish,” he told her. He leaned forward. “Before I left Santa Fe, I asked the juez in that district if he might have time to check some brands that could belong to your uncle.” He kissed her. “But I have to tell you, there is only your word against your uncle’s, and which one will people believe?”
“His, of course,” she said calmly, “especially if he is spreading stories that I robbed him before I ran away.”
She settled herself against him. “Mama always told me the star and V were branded on me forever. I had a necklace with the Star and V when I came to Santa Fe. It disappeared one day, so I suppose that it no longer true.” She patted his chest, then rested her hand inside his shirt against his skin. “So who is the thief in the Moreno household?”
“It could still be you, because you have stolen my heart,” he whispered, not willing for Toshua to overhear everything, even if he did look like he slept. He kissed her, and Paloma had no objections.
Paloma seemed disinclined to leave his office and he was content to catch up on paperwork in his office while she knitted. So much red tape found its way to the poor colony of New Mexico, almost as if the place would amount to something someday. He thought of the few soldiers in Santa Maria, wondering how soon they would be withdrawn to shore up other parts of the colony. There was no mistaking the feeling that the officials in Santa Fe were trying to find ways to pull in their troops. The governor had said as much, but de Anza was an honest man and knew better than to try to fool his brand inspector closest to Comanchería.
Soon we will be on our own in this hard place, he thought, watching Paloma knit so peacefully. He hoped there would be babies with this tenacious, lovely person, but then they would be even more vulnerable with little ones to worry about, as the sun slowly set on the Spanish Empire in this distant part of the world. Still, what could a man do but live his life?
“Why the noisy sigh, my husband?” Paloma asked him, when he had thought he was keeping his worries to himself.
He could lie, but he already knew she would see right through that. “I fear the sun is setting on the colony of New Mexico, Paloma,” he told her, as he stacked more papers together.
He saw no fear in her eyes. Marco just knew that if Alonso had said those words to his new bride, he would see an eruption of hysteria. Paloma merely frowned, finished the row, and looked at him, her eyes merry.
“If this is true, we can wet down all the government paper and red tape in this office alone, add some ox-hoof glue, and make a barricade that could probably hold off the entire Comanche nation,” his observant wife told him. “I will believe you when a year or more passes without any new government documents from Santa Fe.”
“Wise of you,” he murmured, feeling surprisingly cheered. He looked at the Indian, now stretched out in front of the fireplace. “What do we do with him? I think he will be your protector, but I do not know that for certain. I must admit I have more confidence in him than I do in Alonso Castellano and his horrible bride. Did you see how she sawed on her horse’s bridle? I would not care to be a Castellano horse. They probably have sore mouths.”
Paloma nodded, her eyes on the Comanche, too. “You are right about Toshua. Let us confine him to the storeroom at nights, and let him roam free during the day. I will keep him in my sight.”
He agreed reluctantly, deciding finally that if his wife, who had good cause to dread and loathe Comanches, could be so charitable, he could, too.
After a few days, Marco had to wonder who was watching whom. He noticed that with few exceptions—himself, and Sancha and the cocinera—Toshua invariably kept himself between Paloma and all others on the Double Cross and any visitors. One virtue of that was that Pepita Camargo’s next visit was much shorter than the irritating woman probably intended.
It did not surprise him that Pepita did not recognize Toshua as the slave from her father’s hacienda. Apparently it didn’t surprise Toshua, either. After the Comanche kept himself between Pepita and all her attempts to scold and lecture Paloma for harboring a slave who did not belong on the Double Cross, Toshua said as much. As the blacksmith’s wife flounced back to her ridiculous carriage, Toshua stood there, his hands on his hips, shaking his head.
“Do we all look alike to them?” he asked Marco, after Paloma went inside the hacienda. “She doesn’t recognize me as her father’s slave.”
This is the first sentence you have addressed to me, without being addressed first, Marco thought, gratified. “No, she doesn’t,” he said.
The next week passed safely enough as Marco settled into a pleasant routine with his wife and preparations for the coming winter. Barely a night passed when they did not make love. For the first time in eight years, he found it difficult to get out of bed in the mornings. She was warm and comfortable, and he began to notice a softness to her, as the effect of sufficient nourishment made itself known.
While he was discovering what meat and bread were doing for his wife’s body, he couldn’t help noticing that Toshua was regaining his strength. The gaunt look left his face, and he no longer sat huddled close to the fireplace, shivering even when he wore rough cotton trousers and a poncho similar to those of Marco’s laborers. His servant who cobbled shoes grudgingly gave Toshua a deerskin and let him make his own moccasins.
Marco felt a lift to his heart the evening he returned with Paloma from checking a neighbor’s brands to find a smaller pair of moccasins on his desk. “Mira, Paloma, your faithful Comanche has made moccasins for you as well.” He picked them up and handed them to her. “Do they fit?”
Her hand on his arm, Paloma steadied herself, tried on the moccasins and nodded. “I never thought I would wear Comanche moccasins,” she told him. She tightened her grip. “I also never thought I would ever escape my uncle’s house.” They walked to the hacienda together, holding hands in the twilight. “After all those years, I was beginning to settle into the routine of hard work and no future, because it was my fate. This probably sounds silly to you.”
She said it quietly. Marco knew exactly what she meant, and so he told her. As he had dragged himself through the months and then years without Felicia, he had been in danger of turning into one of those statues of the saints, wooden and expressionless. Lately, though, some saint was blessing his life, since Paloma was in it now. He was too much a son of the church to credit a yellow dog.
Trece, that faithless dog, had definitely changed his allegiance to Andrés, who still appeared faintly embarrassed by so much devotion from what was, for all intents, a useless dog. Trece minced after his mayordomo, acting like a dog four times his size. Andrés had taken to carrying the ball of yellow fluff around. No one had the nerve to laugh at the hard-bitten old retainer and his worthless pet.
“It’s a relief to me,” Paloma had told Marco one night as he brushed her long brown hair in the privacy of their bedroom. “Trece would expect attention from me, and I would
rather give my attention to you.”
As time passed, Pepita Camargo tempered her approach to solving the mystery of her father’s missing boots. Because arguing with him or Paloma brought no results beyond intense scrutiny from an upstart Indian, she changed her tune. She became reasonable, for the first time Marco could remember.
She came to the Double Cross in the middle of November, respectfully asking for an audience with the brand inspector, rather than barging onto his property and making demands. Marco considered it a good start.
“Is my father’s slave still alive?” she asked, over diluted wine and biscoches, Paloma’s idea of the perfect afternoon treat. His office had never been so elegant.
Marco nodded. “Toshua has been regaining his strength. As nearly as we can understand, your father tied him in the henhouse and forgot about him.”
Pepita said nothing for a long moment. He knew she wasn’t one to apologize for her own behavior, and certainly not her father’s. Maybe the lengthy pause was all he could expect.
“He swears he did not steal your father’s boots,” Marco added.
Pepita clicked the cup decisively into the saucer. “You believe him?”
“I do, actually.”
He waited for a storm of protest from this volatile woman he had known since childhood, but she was silent. He mentally apologized to himself for not thinking long and hard about the missing boots. They seemed so unimportant, especially since he had started going through the brand book to update it, and other neighbors had visited regularly with new concerns for the juez. And if he was honest, he had been spending more time with Paloma than working in his office or on his own cattle range. As he watched Pepita’s face, he thought about the boots and Joaquin Muñoz’s other slaves and felt an unexpected ripple down his back. “Are any of his other servants missing? Perhaps someone else …”
Pepita shook her head immediately, her face a hard mask now, the face of someone unwilling to even consider such a catastrophe. Watching her expression, he felt a growing disquiet. He knew she would never tell him anything.
“Tell me, Señora, do you know if your father has accused someone else of stealing his boots?”
She started to shake her head again, but she stopped. “He did mention a kitchen worker, one of the Comanche children captured in Governor’s de Anza’s raid …” Her voice trailed off. She stood up suddenly. “I must leave. It looks like snow.”
He stood up, alarmed now. “Have you seen this kitchen worker recently?”
She did not answer him. He let her go, wondering if they had not searched hard enough after Paloma found Toshua in the henhouse. When Paloma had sent an archer to summon him to the henhouse, he had turned away from other outbuildings on the Muñoz hacienda. What if Toshua wasn’t the first one accused? Or the last?
“Dios mio,” he murmured. He grabbed his cape and ran to the horse barn, calling to Andrés.
For the first time in his cautious life, he didn’t wait for outriders. His big gelding ate up the two leagues between his hacienda and Hacienda Muñoz. He passed Pepita’s carriage, wiping snow from his face, mingled with tears of anger now at his carelessness. In his heart, he knew he should have kept looking.
“Careless man, careless man,” he muttered as he raced his horse through the wide-open gates at Hacienda Muñoz. But who was more careless? Joaquin Muñoz, to leave the gates swinging wide, or the juez de campo to not complete his search two weeks ago?
He threw himself off Buciro and pounded on the door to the ranch house, demanding entry in the name of the crown. Her eyes huge, a frightened slave opened the door. He grabbed her by the shoulders, terrifying her so badly she sank to her knees and pressed her forehead against the tiles.
“God forgive me,” he muttered. “Where is your master?”
Wordless, she pointed down the hall toward the kitchen. He ran down the hall and stared in the kitchen to see Joaquin Muñoz sitting there with a blank expression. He had a spoon in his hand, halfway to his lips. He was staring at the spoon, as though wondering what to do with it.
Marco put down the spoon and took Muñoz’s chin in his hand, shaking him. “In the name of the crown, I am going to search your outbuildings.”
Apparently he said it with enough force to rouse the old man. “Marco Mondragón!” Muñoz shouted in turn. “Where are your manners, little boy? I will tell your father!”
“He’s been dead for ten years, viejo,” Marco snapped. “Don’t hinder me.”
Marco ran out the kitchen door, looking around at the ranch outbuildings, rendered more unfamiliar by the falling snow. Where had he left off two weeks ago, when the archer summoned him? Why was it rancheros had so many outbuildings? He made a mental note to inventory his own property and burn down what he did not need.
With dread in every step he took, Marco checked an empty grain bin smelling of nothing worse than mouse turds, then another. A third outbuilding had no back wall, and the fourth one made him sink to his knees in sorrow.
She was only a little girl, tied like Toshua had been, but with the iron lock around her ankle, and fastened to a center pole in the shed. She lay face down on the dirt floor, the chain too short for her to do anything except scrabble at the dirt with her fingers. Her chained ankle was rubbed to the bone, so desperate she must have been to free herself. He looked away, his heart heavy.
He came closer, turning her slightly. She had stuffed dirt in her mouth, desperate for nourishment, and died that way, her eyes open and staring. Rather, they would have been her eyes, but small animals had been at work. He hoped she had died of the cold, because people told him it was a peaceful sort of death, like drifting to sleep.
He sat down heavily by the little body, staring at the ruin of a pretty Indian child. She was frozen solid now, which must have discouraged the mice and rats. He sat beside her and remembered de Anza’s expedition against the Comanche, and his own part in that signal victory over a people who had preyed for years on his own kin and friends. He remembered the wine he had drunk and the pleasure he had taken in watching other men more vengeful than he take their own scalps and violate little ones not much older than this slave-child beside him. He had watched, so he was no better than they.
He could leave her there, and send his own men tomorrow to bury the body somewhere on Muñoz land, except that suddenly seemed so wrong. After a long moment steeling himself—he who had seen so much in his life—Marco took off his cloak and wrapped the child securely. It was only a moment’s work to batter down the center pole and lift the chain off. He sobbed when it came away so easily, wishing the little one had possessed the presence of mind to do what he had just done. He picked up the child and carried her from the shed, facing into the storm, wanting to punish himself for being so stupid.
Eyes ahead, Marco crossed the yard and came face to face with Joaquin Muñoz, who must have roused himself from his stupor.
“Stop there! Even if you are the juez, you cannot take my property,” the old man declared.
“I can and will, in the name of Carlos, King of Spain. Move aside, old man.”
Muñoz did. As Marco passed, the old man lifted the cloak and stared at the dead girl. A curious light came into his eyes. He looked at Marco.
“I wondered where she was,” he murmured. “She usually brings me hot water for shaving in the morning.” He shook his head. “But she stole my boots.”
“For all I know, your boots are under your bed,” Marco snapped, moving away because he did not want that poor excuse for a master to touch the body. “I will see you hanged for this.”
Joaquin merely shrugged. “No, you will not. She was just a Comanche slave. Ho there, where are you taking my property?”
“I intend to bury her on better land than yours,” Marco replied, sick to his heart.
He tied the little one on his horse behind the saddle—Buciro stepping around at the whiff of death—then mounted, feeling older than the old man who watched him by the gate now. Once away from the ha
cienda, he cried. He hoped never to visit again, ever.
All he wanted to see, as he rode through the snow, was Paloma coming toward him. How had one woman become so indispensable in such a short time? God’s mystery. He stared again. It was no wish. There she was, riding toward him through the snow.
Chapter Twenty-four
In Which Marco Frets and Toshua Leaves
Paloma did not think her husband would be angry when she followed him, but Toshua exploded when she had the guards lock him in the storeroom.
“I am your protector!” he stormed, from the other side of the stout door.
“I know you are. I will take along archers. I promise.” Mostly I do not want you to see what I fear my husband will find, Paloma thought. When he rode from the Double Cross, Marco had shouted to her something about storerooms he hadn’t checked.
They were barely a league from the old man’s hacienda when Marco came toward them through the falling snow, almost an apparition. He rode slowly—not on the alert or looking to the right and left, as he had on much of their journey toward Valle del Sol. Anyone could have surprised him.
Paloma wanted to scold him for leaving by himself and being so careless, but when he raised his eyes to hers, she saw such despair that she was silent. She did nothing more than lean toward him and cover his gloved hands with hers.
Tears had frozen to his face. She looked away to collect herself, then squeezed his hand. Noticing the small bundle behind his saddle, she tightened her grip.
“Who was it, my love?” she asked finally.
“A little slave, probably from the de Anza expedition.” He sobbed out loud. “Paloma, she tried so hard to free her foot! And what does Joaquin Muñoz do but look at me and dare me to do anything about it!” His chin sank back to his chest. “He has me, because there is nothing I can do, beyond burying her on my own land.” The look he gave her was fierce and made her start. “I will not put her in his earth.”
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