Carla Kelly - [Spanish Brand 01]

by The Double Cross

  “Ride with me. I’ll keep the old man outside, and you can search his hacienda,” he said as she hurried into the kitchen with him. He stopped long enough for Perla to slap together a bread and cheese sandwich for his wife. Breakfast in hand, she ran after him to the stable and they were in the saddle before she finished the last bite.

  As they rode, he told her what Toshua had done. She merely nodded, not any more surprised than he had been.

  Smoke rolled into the sky, providing more interest than usual to a bitter cold Valle del Sol dawn. “He really did it,” Paloma murmured, “and on a horse stolen from the Double Cross?”

  Marco reined in beside her, and they sat, knee to knee. “I’d rather not spread that about, but yes. And here I think I am so clever and careful.”

  “You are,” his kind wife reassured him. “It’s just that Toshua is unusual. Do you think he is following us now?”

  They both swiveled around, and Marco laughed, even as he shook his head to see a distant figure on horseback. “Paloma, I am embarrassed to think how many times he could have killed us.”

  She reached over to touch his arm. “No, husband. He is protecting us.”

  “You, anyway,” he said, willing to have her assuage him further, because it felt so good.

  “Both of us, my love,” she said, so kindly. “I do not know how much I trust him, though. It is a hard thing he is asking of me. And you.”

  It was. As she watched her husband ride toward the small, hunched figure who stood, hands on hips, with his back to them and watched his property burn, Paloma dismounted by the hacienda. She stood in the shadow of the portal, thinking of Toshua. She asked herself how long she had nourished her ill-use by the Moreno family in the rich soil of her distrust of Comanches, after the shocking deaths of her parents and brothers. There was never one without the other.

  She knew it would be easy to continue her distrust. The raid on her father’s hacienda had set in motion all the abuse she had suffered since that morning the Comanche rode their masked and painted horses into their courtyard. She did not want Toshua to protect her; she had a husband for that now. She wanted the Indian to melt away into the mountains, or east across the plains, and never trouble her again.

  You are under no obligation to me, Indian, she thought, as she entered the Muñoz hacienda. Anyone would have saved you from further torture in that henhouse. Pray do not single me out for protection. I wish you gone.

  Paloma forced her mind back to the business at hand—finding a pair of old boots. Marco had described the boots in question, made of fine-grained Spanish leather and passed down from the old man’s father and his father’s father. They were thigh-high boots in the style of the last century, with a diamond design embossed down the side.

  Marco had told her not to worry about any servants she might encounter. “They are a cowed lot,” he had said. She knew what that felt like, and could assure them in all sincerity that she meant them no harm.

  The three female servants she did see—wispy creatures, almost ghost-like in their thin frames—backed away and scurried down the dim and foul-smelling corridor. Their wails and moans sent prickles down her back. She did not have to wonder how Señor Muñoz had abused them.

  Hurrying quickly, she searched the rooms. The skin prickled on the back of her neck when she whirled around as the dismal creatures eyed her from the open doors then ran away screaming when she looked at them. “Marco, Marco, I need you here,” she murmured, hoping she would not see the hollow-eyed servants in nightmares.

  Most of the rooms had nothing in them except mouse nests and trash that pack rats must have tucked away. She started shivering halfway down the hall, either from cold or fear or both.

  The chapel unnerved her. She was used to crosses with the dying Christ on them, suffering for the sins of the world in general and the sins of New Mexico Colony in particular. Or so it seemed to her, who knew something of suffering. But the Christ in Señor Muñoz’s chapel seemed to bear the special burden of misery peculiar to Hacienda Muñoz. His staring eyes had the stark pain she remembered too well from her first glimpse of Toshua, barely alive in the henhouse. Señor Muñoz’s Christ was as angular and thin as the Comanche chained by his neck, looking at her, pleading for something she could never supply.

  She went through the chapel quickly and left it with a huge sigh of relief, gasping as the terrified women continued to run away from her. She thought of Pepita Camargo, the daughter and only child of this hidalgo, who had stooped to marry a blacksmith, dead now. Marco had told her how the people of Santa Maria gossiped about Pepita’s descent into a lower class with that marriage. Standing in the Muñoz hacienda, Paloma understood completely why a woman would be so desperate to leave this ghastly place that she would take any respectable offer, no matter how far below her own sphere.

  The kitchen yielded nothing except a woefully ill-stocked pantry and storeroom, which contrasted bizarrely with a cupboard of tarnished silver plates, cups and bowls—a testament to better times. She left the kitchen, after bracing herself to see the flighty servants, bolder now and darting close to her like swallows swooping and diving around their nests.

  “Go away,” she said crossly. “I mean you no harm, but go away!” Goose bumps marched down her back in ranks.

  There was only one room left—Joaquin Muñoz’s chamber. Indecisive, she stood outside the door, her hand on the latch. She opened the door and stepped back at the stench within, covering her nose with the hem of her skirt.

  She doubted anyone had made the bed in years; certainly no one had changed the sheets, which were stained and brown. A mound of clothes filled one corner. Her heart nearly stopped when the pile rustled and mice ran out, bumping into each other in their fright. The source of the dreadful stench was all around. Señor Muñoz much have eaten all his meals in here and then left bits of food to rot. She stared in disgust at all the filth, wondering what the impeccable Sancha would make of this.

  Breathing as shallowly as she could, Paloma opened the massive wardrobe, the handsomest piece of furniture in the entire hacienda. Several dresses hung there, clothes from an earlier era, evidence that a woman lived here at one time. Marco said Dolores Muñoz had died years ago.

  She lifted clothes and opened drawers but found no boots. She turned next to the carved chest at the foot of the bed, ignoring the three women who stood in the doorway, eyes wide, pointing at her and jabbering to each other in an unfamiliar dialect. She shivered to see them, wishing Marco were next to her. Cautious, she opened the chest, glimpsed a grinning face, shrieked and slammed it shut. The women in the hall screamed, too, and fled, bumping into each other like the mice.

  “Oh, dear God,” she murmured, wishing herself anywhere but there.

  She stood there, suddenly remembering the vegetable man and the cart of cabbages, and Trece and the adventure she had begun on the other side of the mountains. “You wanted adventure, Paloma,” she said grimly, and opened the chest again.

  The face still stared up at her, but it was a kachina mask, white and leering at her through empty eye holes. Paloma let out the breath she had been holding, ashamed of her foolishness. With hands that shook, she lifted out the mask. Underneath were neatly folded small shirts and breeches, carefully layered with sage and other sweet herbs.

  “And what is this, Señor?” she asked. Marco had told her that Pepita was the only fruit of the old man’s stingy loins. Maybe he was wrong. Someone had preserved these childhood treasures—a sinew-wrapped ball, a handful of glass marbles, a wooden cart and carved oxen to pull it.

  How little we know of other’s lives, she thought, staring down at the chest’s contents until her heart began to beat in regular rhythm. Hard to imagine the old man had once had a wife and children, but the evidence was all around her. Now there was no one to care for him, or about him, except the silly Pepita Camargo. How close are any of us from this kind of sad ruin? she asked herself. She fingered the child’s clothing, wondering how many more mont
hs or years confined in her uncle’s home it would have taken to render her bitter or demented.

  Staring at someone’s sad treasures was getting her no closer to the boots. Paloma looked around the room. It took all her courage to yank clothes away from the stinking mound in the corner, but she did it, shrieking every time a mouse darted out. Nothing. She looked around and decided on the last place.

  She knelt beside the rancid bed, pulling back the drooping bedcovers to peer into the gloom and dust. Her eyes filled with tears as she saw two lumps far back near the wall. She couldn’t reach them, so she took a Comanche lance beside the fireplace and poked about, pushing the objects forward.

  Green leather boots with an embossed diamond pattern—the kind of boots Marco’s grandfather probably wore as he came into Valle del Sol many years ago. Thigh-high boots of a conquistador, boots that had cost a young child her life and nearly killed a Comanche warrior. Boots carelessly shoved under a bed, forgotten. Hadn’t Marco predicted in jest that they would find the boots there?

  Still carrying the lance to ward off the three harpies, she picked up the boots so distasteful to her and ran out of the hacienda, never wanting to enter it again. Lightheaded, she stalked to the two men who stared at the now-smoldering ruins. She called Señor Muñoz’s name and threw the boots at his feet when he turned around, first to glare at her, then to look down, dumbfounded.

  “They were under your bed, old man,” she snapped, then skewered Marco with a glance, daring him to say something about her rudeness to a ranchero.

  “For this, a child has died, and a Comanche slave nearly starved to death,” Marco said. As he spoke, he seemed to turn into a brand inspector and not her lovely husband. “In the name of the crown of Spain, I declare you should be arrested and confined.”

  Señor Muñoz looked him up and down as though trying to reduce him to the child who probably used to ride with his father to visit Hacienda Muñoz, the second-best land grant in Valle del Sol. “Should be? Should be? Where will you confine me? And who, in all of this colony, will care that I killed a Comanche slave, even if it is against the law?”

  “Toshua cares very much,” Paloma muttered under her breath, and her husband said, much louder, “I care.”

  “There is no jail. You cannot confine me,” Joaquin began.

  Marco stopped him with one upraised hand, command written all over his face. “I cannot confine you, this is true. But by God and all the saints, if you and I are still alive in the coming spring, I will take you to the governor himself in Santa Fe.”

  Joaquin regarded him silently and turned away. He picked up the boots and started for the hacienda, then stopped, turning around to shoot his last arrow. “You will return Toshua to me. He is my slave.”

  “He is my witness,” Marco replied, his voice matching the old landowner’s for menacing calm. “He will ride with us to Santa Fe in the spring. Until then, he is mine.”

  The two men stared at each other. “What’s more, Paloma and I are riding to Santa Maria to insist that your daughter take you into her household,” Marco said, firing his last arrow.

  The arrow struck home. Joaquin dropped the boots, bowed his head and cried, “Señor Mondragón, how will I call myself a man then?”

  Paloma could not help her sharp intake of breath. That was it. Señor Muñoz was well aware of what was happening to him. Until this ugly business with the missing boots, he must have been staving off his daughter, who wanted to do precisely that. He was an old, fuddled man in a country that did not see many old men. His daughter was ready to manage his life, and he was not prepared for that step, beyond which was the grave.

  I think I understand you, Paloma thought.

  The two men stared at each other like two roosters at a cock fight. She came between them and took her husband’s hand, which was knotted into a fist. “I have an idea. Let us go into Señor Muñoz’s house and I will fix breakfast.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  In Which Paloma Finds a Solution and Marco Measures Her Waist

  “I would rather breakfast with Attila the Hun,” Marco whispered to his wife as they walked together across the courtyard.

  “So would I, husband,” she said, tugging him along. “Don’t you see what is the matter?”

  “He’s a man going mad. He must be with his daughter!”

  “That is what Pepita wants, but he is a proud man,” she whispered to him. “I can see it now: She goes to his hacienda and badgers him and he feels so much less than a man. Should he stay with her? Of course. He is a menace. But I feel sorry for him.”

  I thought I understood women, Marco said to himself as he let her lead him toward the hacienda. “Don’t feel sorry for him. This is a horrible man, Paloma.”

  “I know all about horrible men, my love,” she said, surprisingly serene, for someone who had stomped outside with a pair of green boots only minutes ago. She took his hand. “When I went in his room—so smelly, so dreadful—I opened a chest, and there were clothes that must have belonged to a little boy once.”

  “I never knew he had a son.”

  “Joaquin Muñoz has suffered, as we all have.”

  “He has still done terrible things, my love,” Marco told her, but he knew his argument sounded weaker.

  “I suspect that none of us is wholly bad or wholly good.” Paloma kissed his cheek. “Maybe even my juez has his moments. Deny that you just outran all your official powers to say he could not have his slave back.”

  “I do not have that power,” he admitted, but softly, and only into her ear. “I am trusting he does not know.”

  “It is this way: You already suspect that the Castellanos are spreading lies about me around the valley. All of you are proud men, I suspect.”

  “Well, I …”

  She stopped him with a look. “I am as Spanish as you are, Señor Mondragón. Maybe even more, because I have no Indio blood and I think you do.”

  “Guilty as charged,” he said, trying not to smile now. He knew where this was going. “Yes, I am proud.”

  “If you come down hard on Señor Muñoz, even though he richly deserves it, my wretched cousin will have even more ammunition to level against me. She will say I am influencing you. I can tell you my cousin does not care about slaves. She will only see this as your weakness, especially since you married me. Her husband is probably spineless enough to go along with whatever she dreams up.”

  “Most certainly.”

  They were at the door to the hacienda now. Joaquin was already inside, shouting for his servants.

  “We clean up these Augean stables and keep an eye on the man, so he does no more damage?” Again he saw the ruin of that little girl, her mouth full of dirt, trying to eat something, trying to free herself, trying to stay alive for one more day, because that was what people did.

  She seemed to know what he was thinking. “We cannot bring her back,” she whispered and kissed his ear. “If Señor Muñoz is still alive in the spring, you can take him to Santa Fe—”

  “Where the governor—a good man, but a realist—will do nothing. All we will have bought from this is time.”

  “Perhaps good will, too,” his wife said.

  “What about Toshua?”

  “I am counting on him to melt away into the Staked Plains, where others of his band live.”

  Marco shook his head. “I told you he has sworn to protect you.”

  “So did you, when you married me. I don’t need two protectors,” she replied quietly. “Help me now. El Viejo’s servants are frightful and I need a firm housekeeper here. I need Sancha.”

  “I will lay you a fire, and when Señor Muñoz is eating, you and I will try to think of some way to convince Sancha that she is needed here. Can we do it?”

  “I expect we can,” his wife said, still serene in the face of such an obstacle.

  He laid a quick-burning fire that would settle into day-long warmth, with proper attention, and kept his eye on the three miserable servants, who looked
almost as demented as their master. Joaquin sat silent at the table, shaking his head now and then, as though to clear it.

  Paloma found cornmeal and chilies, and soon posole bubbled like lava in the iron pot. Somehow, his wife convinced one woman to make tortillas. The soft slap slap of the maize between her hands seemed to relax the old man. On more instructions, another servant found honeycomb. The third woman lugged in a kettle of water to swing over the fireplace. The servants seemed calmer now. Trust Paloma to find something for everyone to do.

  It took all Marco’s discipline to eat a meal with the old reprobate, the child killer. Paloma knew how hard it was. She sat close to him, their thighs touching. She kept up a calming conversation with Joaquin, who stared at his spoon for a long time, then fed himself.

  “There was an old priest like this at San Miguel,” Paloma whispered to Marco. “He seemed not to know where he was. Father Eusebio was so kind. I think this is a special kind of madness, husband.”

  “If you had seen that little girl …” he started, then put down his spoon and left the table, unable to eat another bite. He stood outside in the cold for a long moment, wishing that he was the man his wife thought he was.

  He looked around the courtyard and decided that the walls were still strong, even though so few men patrolled them. True, it was winter, and he knew—hoped—the Comanche were far away. Perhaps if he augmented the guard, Sancha would be safe enough, provided Paloma could convince her to tend this old fool. But hadn’t Sancha taken care of him for years after Felicia died, when he was worthless and maybe a fool himself?

  He walked to the open gate and down the road, with its little rise toward his own property. There sat Toshua on his Double Cross horse. Trust a Comanche to steal a good one! He gestured and Toshua rode closer.

  “My wife thinks that now you have a horse and a bit of freedom, you will bolt to the Llano Estacado.”