by V. J. Banis
He suddenly grinned at Claire. “She will be very beautiful,” he said, “like her mother.”
Content with that, Claire closed her eyes and slept. The child had come early, far too early, and not until she had heard the first plaintive cries had she believed it would live. Too eager, she thought dreamily, too eager to enter so harsh a world.
The white men came less than a month later, soldiers directed by the brown-robed friars of the mission. They came in the first veiled light of the dawn, catching the sleeping Indians unaware.
There was little fighting. The tribe had no weapons but clubs and rocks, and when he saw the guns and swords of the soldiers, the headman ordered his people not to resist.
Lone Feather, who had resisted bitterly until the command from his father, was among those chosen to be taken. Claire had come from their tipi with her month-old daughter in her arms. Seeing her, one of the soldiers snatched her arm and turned her about for a better look in the uncertain light.
“You don’t look like no Indian to me,” he said, peering closely. “You human, gal, or are you one of them?”
She glowered angrily back at him and said in the language of the tribe, “Let us alone.”
For a second or two longer he stared into her face. Then with a grunt he shoved her over with the others to be taken. “Must be a half-breed,” he said. “Lots of them sailors jump on squaws when they can’t find a woman.”
“You should have told the truth,” Lone Feather said, taking her in an embrace.
“I’d rather be an Indian slave,” she said angrily, “than one of them.”
Besides herself, twelve of them were taken, seven strapping young braves and five squaws, of whom one was little more than a child. The mother of the girl and the wife of one of the braves followed them for some distance, sobbing and pleading to be taken as well, but they were finally driven off by the soldiers.
They traveled on foot, following much the same route that Lone Feather and Claire had followed previously. At night they camped at the bottom of a hill by the banks of a small stream. Though Lone Feather had carried Shining Star most of the way, Claire was exhausted from the strenuous pace and would have dropped off to sleep at once. Before she could do so, however, the soldier who had questioned her in camp came for her.
“You, come with me for a spell,” he said, gesturing to make his meaning clear.
Lone Feather attempted to intervene. Other soldiers came running and he was beaten to the ground. The soldier who had come for her raised his gun as if he meant to shoot him, but Claire threw herself in his path.
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
In his anger the man did not even notice that she had spoken in English. Spitting on the ground by Lone Feather, he took Claire’s arm roughly and led her to a spot a little distant from the camp. Stumbling over the rough ground beside him, she saw two other soldiers carrying the youngest girl to another location.
She was assaulted twice before she was allowed to gather up the clothes he had torn from her and return to the other Indians. Lone Feather, shamed by his inability to defend her, lay unspeaking with his back to her, his head buried in his arms. She lay behind him, resting against the broad expanse of his back, unable to give him the comfort she knew he needed.
After months in the wilderness with only savages for company, she had at last returned to her own people.
* * * * * * *
“Father?”
The padre, his brow wet with perspiration, turned from the book from which he had been lecturing the Indians, stories of the lives of the Saints.
“The Alcalde is just arriving.”
Padre Barragán nodded and closed the book. To the rear of the hot, airless room a child had begun to bawl lustily. He saw the yellow-haired woman open her blouse and offer the child a breast. She saw the padre’s disapproving scowl and gave her head a defiant toss.
He sighed, not for the first time. He thought they had made a mistake letting that woman keep the baby with her. It might have been better if they’d left the woman behind as well. This last band of savages had been exceedingly difficult to convert to the faith, and he placed a great part of the blame on her and the child’s father. Both of them remained defiant and unbroken, despite the scoldings and the whippings.
The woman was a mystery. He would have sworn she was no Indian. Twice he had questioned her himself, but she had insisted that she was one of these people. He might have thought her demented or suffering from some loss of memory, but there was little doubt that her faculties were intact. Often when he had been lecturing the new converts he would glance up to find her eyes on him, something in their expression seeming to mock him. She was intelligent, that much he was certain of, intelligent and stubborn.
For the moment, though, he must dismiss the problem from his thoughts and deal instead with the Alcalde’s arrival. He wondered what the King’s representative from the pueblo of Los Angeles wanted this time. Probably only all their food and their wine as well, to be paid for with another of those worthless royal drafts. While the mission fathers and the Spanish government fought separately to conquer this wilderness, they fought another war with one another, to see whose power would reign. In that war Padre Barragán was a seasoned veteran.
“Remain here,” he told the Indians, looking directly at the woman for a few seconds. “I shall be back soon. In the meantime, you shall pray for God’s mercy on your heathen souls.”
He went out, his long robe swishing on the dirt floor. When he had gone the Indians sat in sullen silence. In the two weeks since they had been brought to the mission, an incredible change had been wrought. Before, their temescal and frequent bathing in the ocean had kept them clean. Now they sat in a stink of their own filth and perspiration, hair matted and uncombed. Once proud and carefree, they were now dull and dispirited.
They had been forced to kneel at gunpoint while the padre had prayed over them, claiming them as the property of the Church and their souls for the Almighty. Thus “converted,” they had become a part of the great network of laborers that toiled day and night to support the mission and increase its wealth. Those who resisted were whipped and subjected to lectures such as this one, on the virtues of obedience to the Church. Those who attempted escape were pursued and brought back by the soldiers to be publicly flayed as a lesson to the others. Some, the most obstinate and unbending, found freedom in death.
The presence of her child had been a source of some protection for Claire. The cruelty of the mission fathers did not extend to whipping infant children, and as there was no one else in the compound to feed the child, the fathers had been faced with a choice of letting the child die or letting the mother live.
They had tried a number of remedies for her defiance, including whippings and isolation from the others, to no avail. She remained a problem and an enigma.
The baby nursed energetically for a few minutes, then drifted into sleep, her lips still curled about the nipple. Claire waited until she felt the sucking cease. Then she gently handed her to the Indian woman seated beside her and went to the tiny window overlooking the yard. An elegant carriage, preceded by two soldiers on horseback, was just rolling through the mission’s main gates. She watched the padre welcome the carriage’s sole occupant, a tall, distinguished gentleman with gray hair and the most stylish suit she had seen since leaving England.
The thought gave her a pang. Little more than a year ago she too had dressed in elegant fashions instead of rags and rode in fine carriages. Once she had thought that her former friends would no longer recognize her. Now she scarcely recognized herself.
The two men outside had finished greeting one another. The Alcalde was obviously to be given a brief tour of the mission buildings.
Well, Claire thought, watching the gentleman nod his head in reply to some remark of the padre’s, she had come west for one purpose, though it had long since dimmed in her eyes. She had been searching for her husband. If Peter had managed to survive t
he overland crossing and reach California, he might have gone to the pueblo of Los Angeles. She had learned from Lone Feather that it was the only town for hundreds of miles.
She was not unmindful that the same generality applied to Camden Summers. She knew that he was probably dead. After all, she had been in that river too and knew firsthand its dangers.
Still, she had survived, along with Morton. And Summers was a strong, resourceful man who had lived through many a harrowing experience. Looking back from the comfort of the tribe’s camp, it had seemed to her at least possible that Summers might also have survived. If so, Los Angeles would have been a logical destination for him, too.
Though the mission fathers had decried her refusal to learn since she’d been their “guest,” she had in fact learned a great deal just by listening. Next under the provincial governor, who ruled from someplace far north called Monterey, the Alcalde was the chief governmental agent of each settlement, a combination of mayor, judge, and lawmaker. This Alcalde, whom she’d heard referred to as Don Hernando, governed not only the pueblo of Los Angeles, but this entire region.
If anyone was likely to have word of Peter—or Summers—in this area it was the man just now stooping slightly to enter the low door of the chapel.
Claire had no illusions regarding the life that lay before her if she remained at the mission. Anger, and loyalty to Lone Feather and the tribe, had made her deny that she was white, but in so doing she had condemned herself to life as a slave. It was one thing to be sold to Lone Feather, he had treated her more as an honored wife than as his property; but it was another to be used, and misused, by the mission fathers and their soldiers for the rest of her life.
With a grim smile she slipped from the door of the shed used for a classroom. By now the padre and his guest had disappeared inside the chapel. Glancing around to be certain she was unobserved, Claire darted into the sunlight and ran to the wood-framed doorway of the chapel, her bare feet making whispering sounds on the dusty ground.
She was nearly there when the little party reemerged from the chapel, the Alcalde once again bending his head to clear the doorframe. Seeing her, the men stopped, startled. Padre Barragán gestured for one of the friars following him.
“Catch her,” he snapped. “Take her....”
Claire had intended to throw herself to the ground at the Alcalde’s feet, but at the last moment she caught herself. Instead she came to an abrupt halt, and, after a slight pause, dropped to a curtsy before him for all the world as if she were still properly gowned, and they were meeting in some London parlor.
“Don Hernando,” she said, “please may I have a word with you?”
The fluent speech, after her weeks of silence and Indian guttural, electrified the padre and his friars into silence. Don Hernando, appropriately startled, demanded of no one in particular, “Who is this girl?”
Recovering, the padre took a step forward. “Just one of the Indians, sire,” he said. “My apologies for this disruption.”
He would have grabbed Claire’s arm and dragged her away himself, but even as he was reaching to do so, Don Hernando cried, “Wait!”
He came forward himself, placing a bold finger under Claire’s chin to tilt it upward. His eyes, dark and shrewd, raked her face.
“This is no Indian,” he said angrily, and to Claire, “Who the devil are you?”
“Claire Denon, sir,” she answered, “formerly of London and lately of the Malibu.”
“But this is incredible. How did you come to be here, in the guise of an Indian?” the Alcalde demanded.
For the first time in weeks, she smiled. “I’m afraid it’s rather a lengthy story,” she said.
“Then we shall hear it at length.” He turned to the padre, who had stood silently glowering at the source of his irritation. “Find us a place where the young lady and I can talk in comfort,” he ordered. He turned back to Claire, but not before he had added to the padre’s further discomfort, “And in private.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“This is the most remarkable story I’ve ever heard.”
There was a tap at the door. “Come in,” Don Hernando called gruffly. One of the friars slipped quietly into the room, lingering just long enough to refill their glasses from an earthen wine jug and steal a couple of curious glances at Claire, who at the moment was the source of rampant gossip throughout the mission.
When he had gone, hastened on his way by a dark scowl from the Alcalde, Don Hernando again took up the story. “And this other man, this Morton, he died in the mine collapse?”
“Yes,” Claire answered. “After that I came to the coast with the Indians. I’m afraid there’s not much else to tell. We were captured and brought here.”
“But I don’t understand. You’ve lived for the better part of a year an easy two days’ journey from the village. A mere lark after what you’d already traveled. You could have made it on your own.”
“I was exhausted from the ordeal,” she said. “I needed time to recover, not only my strength, but my spirits, if you understand what I mean. And the Indians were very kind.”
“So might the villagers have been, had you but given them the opportunity,” he said with a certain asperity. “You make us Californios sound barbaric indeed.”
“I have not fared very well at the hands of Californians,” she said, fingering the tattered fabric of her dress.
“For which you must surely share the blame. When the soldiers came—or even when you arrived here at the mission—why didn’t you let them know who you were?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend,” she said. “Your question is not an easy one to answer. I was angry, for one thing, at seeing people who had befriended me rounded up like so many cattle. Some of them were friends. There was one man in particular—and I had a child.”
“By this ‘one man in particular’?”
“Yes.” She looked away from his sharp gaze. “When Morton died—that is, before he died—he sold me to this Indian.”
“¡Dios mio!,” Don Hernando muttered, emptying his tankard in a gulp. “A pretty state of affairs. And what do you propose I do now?”
“I had thought, if my husband did reach California, you might have some news of him. Or even the Summers I spoke of,” Claire said.
“Not a word,” Don Hernando said, shaking his head. “But I only arrived in the territory three months ago. I suppose the best thing is for you to return to the pueblo with me. It’s possible someone there may know something that they’ve simply not thought to mention to me.”
“Then you have the authority to free us?” she asked hopefully.
“I have the power to free you, certainly.”
Her smile faded. “And the others?”
“My dear girl,” he said, as if speaking to a difficult child, “my government grants me the right to claim whatever I need of anything the mission produces, be it wine or grain or hides, but as to the souls they deliver to the Church, the mission fathers alone have authority over those.”
“I should have thought there was an authority higher than theirs,” she replied angrily.
“Perhaps,” he said with a cynical smile. “But not one likely to answer to my petition. At any rate, what would you have me do? You could hardly bring an Indian lover and your child into the pueblo. Now it’s no use looking daggers at me, I speak for your own well-being. I know those people; they’d never accept that. You’d be very likely stoned, or your house burned down. You know what people are like. And even assuming the best, what sort of life could this present your child? I’ve been here long enough to know that the lot of the half-breed is not an enviable one.”
“Then I shall return to the Malibu,” she stated flatly. “Surely that could cause no complaints.”
“You must be joking,” he said. “While it’s true that the missions and the Spanish government are partners of sorts in the colonization of this territory, you are intelligent enough to see for yourself that the enterprise is
not without its political intrigues. There is a great deal of jealousy and bitterness both ways. If it were generally publicized that I had permitted a white woman, an Englishwoman at that, to live with a miserable band of Indians—indeed, the purchased property of one of them—they’d have my head on a platter. And never mind that it was you who’d made the suggestion. If none of this had come up it would be one thing, but I’m afraid there are too many people curious about you already, including the good padre. I’m afraid it’s out of the question.”
“Am I to understand, then,” she said, “that I am to be your prisoner rather than the mission’s?”
He sighed and said, “I’d rather hoped you might see it a bit differently.”
“I don’t see how I can.”
“This—this friend of yours—suppose I could procure his release, his and the baby’s. Mind you, I don’t say that I can, but just suppose they were free to return to their village, would you then come with me to the pueblo, where you belong?”
Claire hesitated for a moment. The offer was tempting. Freedom for Lone Feather and Shining Star, instead of a lifetime of slavery. And for herself a return to civilized life, all the comforts and amenities she had been without for so long. Even the wine they were drinking now had evoked all but forgotten memories of the past.
“You’re asking me to abandon my child,” she said.
“A bastard child, born through no wish of yours. And, I might add, one whose life will surely be better this way. She will be free to grow in the ways of her people. The alternatives, madam, are not attractive.”
For a moment more Claire sat in thoughtful silence. Then at length she gave a toss of her head. “I’m sorry.” She met his gaze evenly. “What you suggest goes against the grain of every mother’s instincts. I cannot do it.”
He came around the table at which they were seated, and, offering his hand, helped her to her feet.
“My dear,” he said, giving her hand a fatherly pat, “I’ve had a long and dusty journey, which I must retrace tomorrow. I had looked forward to an evening’s rest, and I think you might well benefit from the same. I will ask the padre to make a room available to you, and perhaps you’ll be good enough to dine with me this evening. Tomorrow, well, we’ll talk again.”