by V. J. Banis
With a sudden cry, as if of great pain, he flung the gun aside. He turned from the bed, stumbling like a drunken man, and staggered from the room into the night.
She waited, half-expecting that he might return. The sounds from outside had dwindled to an occasional shot and a muted babble of voices.
She got up, flinging a blanket about herself like a robe, and went to the door, staring out. The soldiers had herded the Indians into a ring, like cattle. As she watched, a brave dashed toward the gates and was shot in the back, falling lifeless to the ground. The uprising had been brief. Its consequences for the Indians would, she was sure, be far worse than anything they had inflicted upon their captors. Even now, even with what she had suffered, she could understand, for she knew of their frustrations and agonies.
Two soldiers dashed by. Seeing her, they paused briefly. “Are you all right, señora?” one of them asked.
“Yes, I’m all right,” she replied. They ran on.
She turned back into the room, closing the door and leaning wearily against it.
It was true. Despite what she had suffered, she felt a lightheaded sense of relief. She knew that she had spoken the truth to Peter: it was over at last. The debt, the duty, the fear, even the need, whatever it had been. Most of all the guilt: for what she had done to Richard, for not loving Peter, for driving him from her.
Whatever happened to her, whatever happened to Friar Hidalgo, Peter was gone, as dead to her as if she had thrown dirt upon his grave.
At last—for perhaps the first time in her life—she was truly free. Not simply of others, but of the toll she had exacted of herself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“You’re sure this is the right decision?” Don Hernando asked.
Claire indicated the ship riding the waves in the bay. Nearer, at the beach, a small boat was waiting for passengers.
“There’s no telling how long I might have to wait for another ship if I miss this one,” she said.
“Would that be such a dreadful thing?”
She smiled wryly. “I’m afraid it will take the good people of Monterey a considerable period of time to forget that I came here as your mistress. And of course that unfortunate business of your wife. No matter how we try to excuse it, the major share of the blame is at our feet.”
“Still you don’t have to leave California altogether. That land grant I gave Mister Summers, he said he had no use for it. And I’m certain he’d want you to have it.”
“And I’m to live alone out there in that boundless valley?” Claire asked. “Build my own house, fence the land, and what, do you suppose? Raise cattle? By myself?”
“Spain’s grip on this land grows more feeble with each passing season,” Don Hernando said. “I suspect I’ll soon be out of a job.”
“My dear friend.” She took his hands in her own, stretching up to kiss his cheek. “I have an abiding affection in my heart for you, and for California as well. But I’ve known a great deal of pain and unhappiness here, and at the moment, I’m pretty much at loose ends. I don’t know just what I want, or what I’m seeking, or where I belong. I thought if I returned to our place in Virginia I might get a better perspective.”
She paused, looking past him toward the hills that bordered the town, and beyond to the uncharted wilderness that was California.
“Do you think I’ll see him again, ever?”
He did not answer directly, unsure of just which man she meant. Reaching inside his jacket, he brought out a folded document.
“At least I’ve made a free woman of you,” he said, handing the document to her. “This officially makes you a widow. It may serve to avoid some complications at some future date in your life.” She hesitated before taking it. “There may be another man for you someday,” he added. “There’s no reason to let the past stand in your way.”
“So far as we know, Peter is alive,” she said, still not taking the document. There had been no word of Peter since the night of the Indian uprising. He had been seen running into the hills. When it had been learned that it was he and not the Indians who had killed the young friar, the soldiers had joined a search for him, but he seemed to have vanished on the wind.
“No, you’re mistaken,” Don Hernando said. “Peter, the man you married, is dead, just as I’ve stipulated in this paper. He died somewhere out in the great desert. This man, this Friar Hidalgo, he’s not your husband, he’s someone else entirely. Even if he lives, and in this land a man alone in the wilderness has slim chances, he’s nothing to you.”
Claire was less certain of Peter’s chances. He had survived once before against incalculable odds. But then so had she, much to her own surprise. Don Hernando’s words only echoed what she herself had thought when Peter had fled. After a moment she took the paper, thrusting it into her reticule.
“I think the point is rather moot,” she said, smiling. “If I can’t marry the one man I love, and I can’t love you enough to marry you, well....” She shrugged. “What more is there to say?”
A man from the waiting boat hallooed for her. They were impatient to be on their way out to the ship. Once again Claire stretched up on her toes to kiss Don Hernando. This time their lips brushed lightly.
“Goodbye, dear friend,” she said, the tears in her own eyes rendering his invisible.
“Claire....”
She turned from him and started down the beach. There was a crowd of townspeople watching, as there always was when a ship came in or left. One or two of them called farewells to her. She waved her hand at them, not trusting her voice to answer. Don Hernando watched as one of the sailors helped her into the boat, another taking her reticule.
A moment more and the small boat had pushed off, tipping forward and back in the swell of the surf. Don Hernando watched until he could no longer make out her features. Her hair had become a speck of yellow against the blue horizon. Finally he turned and made his way back toward his own house.
* * * * * * *
He was drinking a glass of sherry when he heard the sound of a horseman approaching, riding hard. He paid little attention until he realized that the rider was reining in his horse just outside.
Don Hernando’s office was on the second story of his house. He stepped out to the balcony in time to see Camden Summers leap from his mount.
“Where is she?” Summers demanded, seeing the governor on the balcony. “I’ve been to the mission, her house. Not a sign of her. Do you know?”
For a few seconds Don Hernando experienced a churlish resentment. The woman he loved had just turned him down, and this man was the reason she could not return his love.
As quickly as it had come the jealousy faded. If Summers were here, Claire would stay as well. Perhaps not as his mistress, but his at least to see, to know, to love even. Here, and not a world away from him.
“The beach!” Don Hernando cried aloud, racing down the stairs. “Come with me, quickly.”
“Where...?” Summers started to ask, but Don Hernando waved his questions aside.
“Hurry,” was all he said.
The two men ran along the muddy street, causing passersby to stare after them curiously. Summers, running with the ease and grace of the plainsman, had a hundred questions he would like to have asked, but the governor was breathing so hard with this unaccustomed exertion that he plainly had no breath left for answering questions.
Summers had been camping in the great central valley when a chance encounter with a trapper had brought the news of the Indian uprising. Since then he had traveled day and night, tortured by his fears for Claire’s safety. He’d been a fool to go away without her. He should have taken her with him. He had waited all his life to find this woman. What right had anyone to stand in his way now?
In the long, arduous hours of his journey he had sworn that nothing would separate them again.
Beside him Don Hernando came to a sudden stop, his chest heaving with his labored breath. Summers stopped too. Before them lay the beautiful whi
te sand, the sandpipers playing catch-me with the surf. Far out upon the water, just clearing the bay on its way to the open sea, rode a sailing ship, its sails taut in the steady breeze.
“She’s gone,” Don Hernando managed to gasp.
“Gone?” Summers felt as if the world were dropping from under his feet. Something inside him seemed to burst with a sharp stab of pain.
The governor lifted a trembling hand and pointed in the direction of the sailing ship. “Gone,” he said again.
* * * * * * *
The two men came back through the town at a slower pace, walking dejectedly with their heads down. There was no conversation. The questions that each might have asked had been rendered pointless by that one glimpse of a distant ship.
They came by the trading post. Summers, thinking to ease the pain gnawing at his innards, turned away, crossing the street toward the cantina.
Don Hernando was at the door of the trading post when Claire came out. The owner’s son followed her, balancing her portmanteau and a bag of supplies as well.
Don Hernando stopped dead in his tracks, staring in astonishment. She smiled, an almost apologetic smile.
“I couldn’t leave,” she said. “I watched the town getting smaller and smaller, I saw the hills and the pines, and I thought of what I was leaving, and what I was going back to. I paid the sailors to row me back. I was just going to....”
She stopped then, looking past him. Don Hernando did not have to turn and follow her gaze to know the cause of that sudden leap of joy in her eyes.
He stepped aside, refusing to acknowledge his own fresh pain as Claire took a faltering step, then another, and another until she was running, laughing and crying all at once, toward the man standing in the middle of the street.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Victor J. Banis is the critically acclaimed author (“...a master storyteller”—Publishers Weekly) of more than 200 published novels and numerous shorter works in a career spanning nearly a half century. A longtime Californian, he lives and writes now in West Virginia’s beautiful Blue Ridge region.
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY VICTOR J. BANIS
The Astral: Till the Day I Die
Avalon
Charms, Spells, and Curses for the Millions
Color Him Gay: Being the Further Adventures of That Man from C.A.M.P.
The Curse of Bloodstone: A Gothic Novel of Terror
Darkwater
The Devil’s Dance
Drag Thing; or, The Strange Tale of Jackle and Hyde
The Earth and All It Holds
The Gay Dogs: Being the Further Adventures of That Man from C.A.M.P.
The Gay Haunt
The Glass House
The Glass Painting: A Gothic Tale of Horror
Goodbye, My Lover
The Greek Boy
The Green Rolling Hills: Writings from West Virginia (editor)
Kenny’s Back
Life and Other Passing Moments: A Collection of Short Writings
The Lion’s Gate
Moon Garden
The Pot Thickens: Recipes from the Kitchens of Writers and Editors (editor)
San Antone
The Second Tijuana Bible Reader (editor)
Spine Intact, Some Creases: Remembrances of a Paperback Writer
Stranger at the Door
The Sword and the Rose: An Historical Novel
This Splendid Earth
The Tijuana Bible Reader (editor)
The WATERCRESS File: Being the Further Adventures of That Man from C.A.M.P.
A Westward Love: An Historical Romance
The Wolves of Craywood: A Novel of Terror
The Why Not