The longer she listened the more she realized he truly thought he was eighteen again, and ready for scholarship. Startled at first, she decided to join in Father Cristóforo’s fluid memory because it was harmless and he seemed so happy. It touched her heart when he kissed her hand and declared undying love, in that way of callow scholars in a university town—or so Father Eusebio would have her believe, when she told him about her afternoon with the balmy old man.
“What about you, Señor Muñoz?” she murmured through teeth that chattered. “Are you a young man again, fighting savages in Valle del Sol? Could you not have picked a warmer day?”
At Toshua’s suggestion, she dismounted and walked, too, looking for footprints rapidly filling with snow. The clouds lifted briefly, flooding the valley with weird light just long enough for her to see a scrap of material snagged on a creosote bush. She handed it to Toshua. “He has a dressing gown of this fabric.”
The Comanche fingered it. “Then he is probably cold now.”
He did something next that touched her heart. Standing beside her he nudged her shoulder with his own. “I missed that scrap, but you saw it.”
She nodded, pleased all out of proportion at the compliment. Her brother Claudio had nudged her like that. Suddenly the storm didn’t seem so frightening.
Kneeling again, Toshua ran his hand carefully along a row of bent twigs. “This way,” he said with a gesture.
She followed him, stopping only long enough to snap off a fairly straight fallen branch to use as a walking stick. She walked beside him when she could, but as the snow deepened, he put her behind him so he could break the trail.
Later, when she thought about it, Paloma knew that the old cabbage man on the trail from Santa Fe would have called this an adventure. Perhaps her whole life was going to be an adventure now, and God knows she already had a glimpse of how uncomfortable that could be. I want to go home to Marco, she thought, the instant before she slipped on the icy chips coating the rocks, landed on her bottom and sailed a short distance down a dry wash like an otter at play.
She slipped and slid to the bottom, frightened at first and then embarrassed as she tugged down her dress and looked for her lost shoe. The Comanche stood above her on the path, his hands on his hips, probably irritated.
“I’m sorry! Just lean down and give me a hand.”
As she reached up, she heard lumbering footsteps and then a shout as Joaquin Muñoz pushed her sideways and threw his knife at Toshua, bending down. With a soft grunt, the Comanche toppled into the dry wash, too, the knife sticking out of his thigh.
“No! No!” Paloma shrieked, grabbing for the old man as he drew his sword, the antique she recognized hanging on the wall in his sala. With a start, she realized he was wearing the old helmet, also from the sala, and that ridiculous dressing gown.
“Santiago!” he shouted, the old war cry of the conquistadores.
With a cry of her own, Paloma struggled to her feet and thrust her walking stick between his legs. The old fellow fell into a heap, tangled with the stick and the sword. As he tried to free himself, she grabbed the blade, wincing as it cut her fingers, but hanging on until he let go. She sank into the snow beside Toshua, who lay there, his bloody hand on the knife in his leg.
“Pull it out!” he told her. “Hurry!”
Paloma did as he demanded, unprepared for the gush of blood that followed. She kept one eye on Joaquin, who reeled from side to side on his hands and knees now. She looked at Toshua, his face suddenly more expressive than usual as he grasped his bleeding leg. She slid out of her petticoat, and stuffed it against the wound.
“Look out!” Toshua said, his voice strained with desperation she had not heard before, even in the henhouse. “Duck!”
She ducked, closing her eyes as the sword whistled over her head. She gave the old man another push as the flat of the blade landed on her back. With no hesitation now, she picked up her walking stick and clouted him with it. He groaned, moved his legs and lay still.
“Dios mio, I have killed him,” she murmured, and turned her attention to the Comanche. With shaking hands, she unfastened the belt about her waist that held the keys she had forgotten to leave in the hacienda, in her rush to find Señor Muñoz. With a clatter, they disappeared in the snow. Using her belt, she tied her petticoat to Toshua’s leg, pressing down hard on the wound until he groaned.
The light was going fast, but at least the arroyo offered some protection from the snow. Or so she told herself, since there wasn’t much likelihood they were going to leave the dry wash before morning. She continued to press against the wound, wishing for the skills of Father Eusebio and just the sight of her husband, who would know what to do. She sat there in miserable silence until the Comanche touched her hand.
“I wish I knew what to do,” she whispered.
“You’re saving my life again. This is three times.”
When Toshua told her to, Paloma gradually released the pressure on his wound, until she did not feel any more blood flowing. In the gathering dark, the blood looked black and waxy. She wrinkled her nose against the strong odor of iron.
“He thought he was at war,” she whispered to the Comanche, desperate for him to talk to her so she would not feel so suddenly alone. She wanted him to open his eyes. “He shouted ‘Santiago!’ and look, he is wearing that old helmet.”
As she watched Señor Muñoz, she saw his leg move. When he groaned, she closed her eyes in gratitude that she had not killed an old fellow reliving some youthful adventure. She knew it had to be an adventure more exalted than eating cabbage and trying to find the owner of a yellow dog, on a road she had never traveled before.
“I need to look at him,” she told Toshua, who nodded, not opening his eyes.
She nodded and crawled to Joaquin Muñoz, after pushing the sword in Toshua’s direction. The old helmet had twisted around, so she carefully gentled it from his head. With a fierce expression, he reached for the sword lying by Toshua.
“I must defend you, my lady,” he gasped. “There are Comanches and Apaches everywhere! Don’t you see them?”
She pushed the sword farther away with her foot, then put her hand on his chest. “Only one Comanche, and you wounded him. I suppose you think you are my hero, mi caballero muy feroz,” she said. “We can leave it at that, if you wish. If you think I am safe, I am safe.”
Her back ached, and it took her an endless amount of time to move Toshua farther down the wash and close to a cluster of desert bushes, puny protection. Joaquin was lighter, but no less a dead weight as she struggled with him. She knew Toshua had been wearing his poncho when they started out. After a long moment debating whether to leave the two enemies, she scrambled up the wash and found the blanket and her horse. She knew Toshua’s mount was much smarter than her own. Her husband had complained about that at length one night in bed, grousing that the damned Comanche had chosen to appropriate the smartest horse in the stable, next to his own. Maybe the gelding was smart enough to head to the Double Cross. Too bad it could not speak and point the way; so much for Toshua’s smart horse.
She tied her own horse to a tree, and removed the saddle. “I need your blanket more than you do,” she whispered to her horse.
She slid back down the arroyo with the horse blanket and Toshua’s poncho. She tucked a blanket around each man and sat between them, the sword in her lap, a warrior by default.
As she sat there, wrapped tight in her cloak, her back sore and her hand paining her, Paloma felt something she had not felt in several years. It was just the slightest trickle down her inner thigh, but she blinked back sudden tears of gratitude. “My goodness, these things happen at inconvenient times,” she said out loud in wonder.
Since Toshua and Joaquin both slept, Paloma tore a small strip off the petticoat binding the Indian’s leg and put it between her legs. With a sigh, she lay down between the savage she had saved for the third time, and the old man dreaming of his youth who thought he had saved her. The snow was letting up now, falling
straight instead of sideways. They could probably keep each other warm until the sun rose. She had the sword and wasn’t going to let go. That wasn’t what warriors did.
Marco paced his house all night, chafing at the snow and cursing the tardiness of dawn. The snow had stopped after midnight. An hour later, Emilio banged on the door to tell him that Toshua’s mount had returned to the horse barn. Marco spent the next hour in the chapel, praying to el padre celestial and all the saints that the horse had left tracks they could follow, if only the wind would not blow them away.
Everyone wanted to ride with him, but he took his six best men and extra horses and blankets. He was too prudent to leave the Double Cross unprotected. As soon as the sun rose across the plains to the east, they swung into their saddles and followed the faint trail. His head ached from lack of sleep and from listening to Andrés’s babbling about all the people who had survived snowstorms. To blot out Andrés’s relentless good cheer, Marco imagined what he would say to Pepita Camargo when he visited her in Santa Maria to give her the bad news about her father. He thought about the Jew in Santa Fe who had sold him the little ring, and Father Damiano, who had sent the letter on its way that would eventually make his marriage legal. He thought of the bloody sandals in his sala that he had claimed as Paloma’s dowry. If everything was over now—that which had begun so recently—he did not know what he would do. He couldn’t help the groan that rose in his throat, turning it into a cough when Andrés looked at him with sympathy. He had endured years of sympathy. Now he just wanted Paloma.
The sun was up and even warming his face when he saw them. He rose in his stirrups, alert, then relieved beyond measure. Resting an old sword on her shoulder, his wife walked in front of a horse bearing two men—the Comanche sitting behind, his arms tight around an old man wearing a conquistador’s helmet and a dressing gown. He had never seen a stranger complement of travelers, or one more dear to his heart.
Paloma had no objection to sitting in front of him on his horse, although she refused to do so until she was certain Toshua and Señor Muñoz were taken care of, according to her liking. He watched her linger a moment at Toshua’s side, and watched the Comanche touch her head, then give it a little shake.
“Señor Muñoz has been complaining for the last hour, demanding to know why Sancha let him wander away,” she said, when she was resting comfortably against him, his cloak around them both, his lips on her tangled, dirty hair. “Ay de mi! Last night he was part of an expedition against the Comanches and Apaches. Poor old man, dreaming dreams. He is not well, but we cannot cure him.”
She sighed and burrowed closer. “I don’t mean to keep rescuing Toshua.” She closed her eyes then and slept, worn out with adventures.
Sancha cried and scolded and took away his darling Paloma to clean her up and put her in bed. She slept most of the day, while his servant with the most medical talent sewed Toshua’s leg and helped him limp to his pallet in the office, closer to the fireplace this time, because he still shivered. Marco and his riders took an irate old man to his daughter’s house in Santa Maria. Acting in the name of the crown, he told the silly woman what had happened and ordered her to look after the father who needed her now, the man sometimes old and sometimes young, and mixed up in his head.
He probably exceeded his authority when he assured Pepita that her father would not go to Santa Fe for the murder of the little Comanche slave. In exchange for that bit of dubious leniency, he demanded that Joaquin Muñoz sign over his ownership of Toshua to Marco and Paloma Mondragón.
Pepita did as he asked, expressing her regret about the petition on its way to Santa Fe. He only nodded sagely, unwilling to tell the woman that Toshua had informed him, before he drifted to sleep, that he had stolen the courier’s pouch not long after the man had left the Double Cross. The petition was probably fluttering across east Texas by now.
“I did not kill him,” Toshua had insisted, before his eyes closed. “You are strange about things like that. It is a weakness.”
Marco returned to the Double Cross late in the day, aware as he rode through the gate this time that he had not felt even a momentary panic that Paloma would not be there. Sure enough, she was awake and sitting with Toshua in his office. Sancha must have bandaged her hand. He sniffed the wintergreen that he assumed his old housekeeper had applied to the bruise on Paloma’s back. Pleasantly tired, he yawned and sat back in his chair. He rummaged in his pouch for the document from Pepita and held it out to his wife. She read it, and her eyes narrowed with something close to suspicion.
“I cannot believe this is within your powers, Marco,” she said.
“I am certain it is not, but that is how we do business here, so far away from Santa Fe, not to mention Madrid. What should we do with such a pernicious piece of paper? I don’t want a slave.”
“Nor do I. Let us free him.”
“Do it,” Marco said with a smile. “Or try to.”
His lovely wife—the one with more heft to her breasts now, and smoothness to her hips—gave him another fishy stare, quite similar to one Felicia might have given him, if provoked. I am home, he thought in gratitude.
He watched as Paloma knelt by the pallet and told Toshua what she held in her hand. “I give you your freedom,” she said.
“I won’t go. You have saved my life three times.”
Good luck, Paloma, Marco thought, amused.
Maybe she was still tired, because she did not argue with the Comanche. To Marco’s surprise, she scolded him. “You’re being wretched about this, I hope you know,” she said.
Again the Comanche tousled her hair, much as Marco’s older sister used to tousle his hair. “I think you would not leave now, even if I threw you out,” Marco said softly.
He knew he spoke too softly for an ordinary man to hear, but he already knew Toshua was no ordinary man. His hand still on Paloma’s hair, Toshua looked at him, just a small glance, but it was enough. In another moment, he slept.
Hand in hand, Marco and Paloma walked across the courtyard to their home, where business was done in the kitchen, and the sandals hung in the sala. He had reluctantly returned the sword and helmet to Pepita Camargo. They would have been fine additions to the décor, but he didn’t think Paloma would agree.
He took off his clothes and left them in a dirty pile. Handing him his nightshirt, Paloma pulled back the covers so he could crawl between them, ready for a cuddle and a long sleep. She sat on the edge of their bed, making no move to join him, shy now, her face rosy, for some reason.
“I have news for you, husband,” she said at last, her excitement almost palpable.
“Mmmm?”
“I … I started my monthly last night in that dry wash.”
Delighted, he smiled at her shyness, and the pleasure reflected in her own eyes.
“Do you … do you have the supplies you need?” he asked gently, shy himself. This was not a subject he would ever be comfortable with.
“Sancha helped me. There is a little box in the storeroom that Felicia left. I didn’t think you would mind.”
“Certainly not. Paloma, this is good news.”
She nodded, still reluctant to look at him. She turned her back to him and unbuttoned her shirtwaist, removed it, then slid off her skirt and both petticoats. He watched, interested, because he liked the shape of her and the more abundant curve of her hips. Wearing only her knee-length chemise, she was bending over to gather her clothing, when he noticed something he had never seen before. He looked closer, wondering why it had escaped his attention. Dolt, you’ve never paid much attention to the back of her knee, he thought.
“Paloma, come closer.”
She turned around, her arms full of her clothing, a question in her eyes.
“Just … just set that down, come closer and turn around again.”
He sat up in bed. She did as he said and turned away from him. He raised her shift a little and stared at the mark on her right thigh just above where her knee bent. “Dios mio,”
he whispered, running his finger over the small mark. “Closer. Lie down. Just stretch out on your stomach. Good. Dios mio.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, craning her neck to see what he stared at. “I can’t see anything.”
“Feel it.”
She knew right where to touch. “It’s just my birthmark.”
“No, it’s not. It’s a brand. A tiny star and a V.”
Paloma gasped. She turned over and sat up, reaching for him, her eyes filled with tears. He held her close, murmuring to her.
“You told me once that your mother said you were branded. All of us are, I suppose, by our parents, our successes, our failures. With you, it is more. Do you have any recollection of this happening?”
Paloma shook her head. “I must have been so young. That is my brand,” she exclaimed in wonder, and then her voice hardened. “It is not Maria Teresa’s. What have the Morenos done?”
“Cheated you, double-crossed you. Foiled you at every turn.”
She turned her face into his nightshirt. He expected her to cry, but she did not. He held her, knowing she was a woman to think things through. “I thought about their wickedness last night. It didn’t hurt as much as it used to,” she said at last. “Maria Teresa has the official brand, but I am the lucky one.”
Flattered, he held her off a little to look at her before giving her a kiss.
“Would it … do you think it would stand up in a court of law?” she asked, when she could speak.
“Hard to say. It’s so faint. A good abogado could raise all kinds of doubts, I suppose. Does it matter?”
She considered his question. “Maybe not. Besides, do I want to show my backside to complete strangers? Husband, I am tired. Let’s go to sleep.”
He settled lower in the bed again, his wife in his arms. He felt his eyes closing, too, after such a busy day and a previous night of no sleep. “Advent will be here soon, my love,” he said, drowsy. “Let’s ride into Santa Maria. You will want to meet Doña Graciela Chavez. She always sees that the Christ Child is wrapped in a warm blanket for the outdoor nativity scene. I’ll tell you how it became the business of the juez on the way to town. Do you think other brand inspectors have to deal with such trivialities as I do in Valle del Sol? My feet are cold.”
Carla Kelly - [Spanish Brand 01] Page 28