The Star in the Meadow (The Spanish Brand Book 4)

by Carla Kelly

  She had no answers to her questions, only a burning urge now to get the blankets and knife back to the adobe hut. She couldn’t be easy until the key turned in the lock.

  “Pedro, isn’t it time for me and Catalina to return to the hut?” she asked, regretting her question the moment she spoke it. Who in her right mind wanted to be in such a place?

  He gave her the skeptical look she knew such a question deserved. Pedro was slow, yes, but not as slow as bumbling, well-meaning Gaspar.

  “Why would you want to go back there one minute before los señores decree it?” he asked, then shrugged. “Papa told me I would never understand women. Come on.”

  Paloma let out a slow sigh of relief. She held her breath when he looked around the kitchen and frowned, as if wondering what he had forgotten to do.

  “If you are wondering where the keys are, we will have to stop at the bookroom,” Paloma suggested.

  “That must be it,” he replied, then shuddered. “I do not like to spend much time with my masters.”

  “That is probably true of every servant,” she said, making light of the matter, hoping to prompt him to move from the kitchen.

  Still, he wouldn’t budge, but lounged against the door. “To hear stupid Gaspar tell it, the Double Cross is a palace!”

  “I like it there,” she said simply, and moved closer to him with the blankets, hoping he would get the hint.

  He looked around the kitchen one more time, muttering, “I know there was something ….” To her relief, he swore and started down the hall.

  She followed him to the bookroom door and waited outside, hoping he could just get the keys to the gate and the shed with no difficulty. To her surprise, he came out holding both keys, his expression triumphant, and if the truth were before her eyes, as surprised as she was.

  “Los señores want to see you a moment,” he said. “I will go ahead to the garden.”

  Setting down the blankets in the hall, Paloma went into the bookroom, standing still, making herself as small and unimportant as she could. I am a servant in my uncle’s house again, she thought with dismay. I am willing myself invisible.

  “Well, Flaca,” Roque said, making no effort to disguise his own triumph, “show Señora High-and-Mighty how her husband and late father-in-law have cheated us.”

  Her own expression guarded, Catalina held out many years of livestock assessment. “You’ll see that these figures—the ones your husband and his father assigned arbitrarily—don’t match any of the actual count of cattle and sheep on this … place.”

  Paloma looked, remembering the evenings in the office with Marco when he puzzled over what to assess stubborn rancheros like the Duráns, who never admitted to anything. I can only guess, he had said on several occasions.

  “You must tell the governor about this information I have uncovered,” Catalina said suddenly. “March right into his office in Santa Fe and demand justice.”

  It was surprisingly easy to look wounded and pretend tears this time. “Dios mio, I suppose you can! We will all suffer, but what can we do, if you visit the governor?” Paloma squeezed her hands tightly together and looked away, wondering how much drama she could get away with and not rouse suspicion. “Please be merciful,” she said.

  “Go now,” Miguel said, and pushed her toward the door. “Women and their tears! Catalina stays here because after we eat again, she had promised us a story. Poor you.”

  She glanced at Catalina, who crossed her eyes and waggled her finger in a circle by her ear, since the twins were looking toward the door. Paloma put her fist to her mouth, as though to stop her sobs, then shook her head and hurried down the hall with the blankets. She couldn’t help smiling, and put her face into the blankets to hide her mirth from Pedro, who waited for her by the gate.

  The gate. She looked up and up and knew there was no way she could ever get over a barrier so tall, even if she did manage to dig a fair-sized escape hole in their adobe prison. I’ll worry about that later, she thought, as Pedro shouldered open the heavy gate.

  He shoved her toward the shed, but she pushed back. “First I must be allowed to empty that … that little bucket the Duráns think will answer our needs.”

  She took the reeking bucket and dumped it in a far corner of the garden, looking around for a ladder, another gate, or anything that would free them from the estancia, once they liberated themselves from the shed. Nothing.

  Pedro offered to hand her the blankets, once she had stooped through the low door, but she assured him she could manage. Inside, she set down the bucket and put the blankets beside the opposite wall, which she knew from her brief look outside was overgrown with a sheltering tangle of bushes.

  Luckily, the Durán brothers trusted their bumbling servants to lock and unlock the shed, or they might have noticed that Catalina—how rude they were to call her “Skinny”—had cleared away some of the crumbling adobe near the roof to allow in more light. Paloma stared up at the blue sky, as blue as only a sky in the colony could be, and wondered what Marco was thinking as he searched for her.

  She knelt on the floor, prayed to Santa Luisa, that gentle martyr who loved the desperate, and began to slice away at the adobe.

  Sweating and dirty, Paloma stopped when she heard the key rasp in the lock.

  After the door closed and the key turned again, Catalina hurried to her side. “Oh my dear, I wish I could help,” her friend said as she smoothed back Paloma’s damp hair.

  “I’m fine. What do you think?”

  Only the final glow of the setting sun cast any light through the small openings near the roof, but Catalina came closer, feeling the opening Paloma had scraped away. “Good work,” she said. “We can spread this dirt around in here, and keep the blankets piled in front of the hole.”

  Catalina sank down and rested her forehead against her upraised knees. “Those odious men made me search and search until I found something that might cause trouble to Marco and Antonio … Marco’s father?”

  “Yes, and a good man, from all I have heard from others,” Paloma said. “Don’t worry about what you find. Marco told me a few years ago that Governor Anza knows what he is doing regarding stubborn, stupid men like the Duráns.”

  “We have to get out of here as fast as we can,” Catalina said, and pounded the earth with her fist. “I know I am thin, but why must they call me Flaca? And they stare at me while I work. It’s more unnerving than anything my father and I have suffered anywhere else.”

  She stopped talking and took several deep breaths, then chuckled. “Tell me, Paloma, how was your day in the kitchen? Filled with joy and laughter?”

  “Silly!” Paloma told Catalina about Maria, the laundress, terrified for years by the prospect of Comanche raiders, and a woman never called by her only name. “And Pedro … he is a sad one, with never a kind word tossed in his direction, either. Catalina, everyone here is starving, and not just from lack of food. But I think we knew that.”

  Silence for a few minutes, and then Catalina cleared her throat. “I think I know how we can get out of here. I started tonight.”

  “Your stories?”

  Catalina took Paloma’s face in her hands and pressed their foreheads together. “I think I can terrify those men to death, God willing … and Paloma, I intend to.”

  “When will you start?”

  Catalina held up one finger. “I have begun. This was day one. Give me just a little time, and I will scare those monsters to death.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  In which Joaquim and Eckapeta are out of good ideas

  “Terrify them into releasing us? I think it will take more than a few stories,” Paloma replied. “Although you are vastly talented,” she hastened to add.

  “Don’t underestimate the power of a good ghost story,” Catalina said, her expression almost gleeful. “Tonight, after they ate, they started drinking, which they do every night.”

  “Gaspar says they drink every night and half the day.”

 
“Tonight, I told them a story about an avenging angel sent to spy on two masters who have been abusing their servants.”

  “Who could those masters possibly be?” Paloma joked. Her arms ached from digging, but even Catalina’s second-hand retelling of a story piqued her interest. The woman had a knack. “Don’t stop there. You know I like your tales.”

  Chuckling, Catalina lowered her voice in that conspiratorial way that made Soledad shriek in terror and burrow closer to Marco when she told other, less-frightening tales in the sala at home. “The angel turns the bad masters into mushrooms. Then a woman and her daughter go into the bosque along the river to pick mushrooms, which they throw into a pot and boil. ‘Help me, help me,’ the masters shriek in tiny voices, while the angel laughs from his perch on a beam in the kitchen.”

  Paloma couldn’t help the ripple of horror that darted down her spine. She moved away a little from Catalina, which made her friend laugh. “You’re convincing,” Paloma said in her own defense. “That was an angel? I would hate to hear a story about your devils!”

  “Angels? Devils? Does it matter? Believe me, I’m just getting warmed up.”

  “I wonder why they didn’t recognize themselves as the evil masters,” Paloma mused.

  “Funny, isn’t it? People never seem to see themselves as the one at fault.”

  She tried never to think of her uncle, but Catalina’s words yanked Paloma back to those bleak days in Santa Fe. No, some people never see themselves as the problem, she thought, then felt another wave of remorse for her dark mood that had worried Marco enough to send her to visit his sister. She looked down at her hands, ashamed of herself.

  “What’s wrong, Paloma?” Catalina asked gently.

  “If I hadn’t been so insistent on having some time all my own, we would still be on the Double Cross, and not here in this hut,” Paloma replied. “Please forgive me, Lina.”

  “Nothing to forgive,” her friend said. “We’re in a bad spot, yes, but you didn’t create it.” She shrugged, then clasped Paloma’s hands between her own. “Sometimes things just happen. I am already planning the story for tomorrow night.” She held up a second finger. “Day Two. Want to hear it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I think they are ready for the tale of two brothers in Taos who keep their servants in line by threatening them with Comanches. Imagine who?” Her voice hardened. “They will be found the next morning, gutted from gullet to privates, with their intestines roped around a tree like a garland, a Comanche lance through their ears.”

  “You’re frightening me,” Paloma protested, rubbing her arms. “What will be the final terror?” She held up a third finger. “Day Three?”

  “Ah, yes, you’re catching on. Our favorite story in all the colony,” Catalina told her and lowered her voice even more, down into that range where the best storytellers lurk. “ ‘La Llorona.’ I will scare them good.”

  “Is that enough?” Paloma asked. “I can’t see Roque handing over his keys to you, even if you are screaming and wailing the loss of your children.”

  Catalina poked Paloma’s middle. “Hunger is making you skeptical! Let’s see what happens when La Llorona herself returns long after dark, shrieking and moaning and dressed in bloody rags,” Lina said with some satisfaction. “If I can squeeze out of that hole.”

  “I’ll dig faster,” Paloma promised. She sighed, remembering the garden wall.

  “Lina, I know just a few more days of digging will get us out, but the garden wall is so high. I doubt either of us can climb it.”

  “You’re right,” Catalina said, “but I believe I can get over the wall if I stand on your shoulders. I will snatch the keys from the bunch tied about Roque’s waist and open the garden gate, so I can free you.”

  Paloma nodded. If, if, if, she thought, then chastised herself. Catalina is doing her best. I must try harder. She thought of poor Maria, and the half-promise she had made to the laundress only that afternoon, pledging her something better if …. There was that word again. Better to forget it. She applied her mind and heart to the matter at hand, thinking through several ideas, discarding them, and thinking again.

  “If … no, when I see Maria tomorrow, I will ask her if she can procure a sheet, or a tablecloth, or something,” Paloma said, speaking slowly, trying to convince herself first. “I think La Llorona needs a costume, don’t you?”

  “We’ll need blood for such a sheet,” Catalina said.

  “We’ll find it,” Paloma assured her. “Two days, my friend.”

  * * *

  Their fruitless hunt for the missing ones had turned Joaquim Gasca into the kind of man he thought not to see again: a man unhappy to look himself in the eye in his shaving mirror.

  He looked at himself now—eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, mouth set in a grim line, the frown between his eyebrows more pronounced than usual. Sunburned, too.

  Two days in the saddle had rendered him sore beyond belief, and quite willing to acknowledge that Comanche women were considerably tougher than a Spanish fellow who commanded a garrison. At the end of each long day, Eckapeta dismounted with the ease and grace of a soldier half her age. At least she was kind enough not to further humiliate him with muttered comments in Spanish or Comanche.

  “It chafes me, Eckapeta,” he said, when they sat by the acequia that evening as Soledad and Claudito played. Or tried to play. After only a few minutes, the water, usually so enchanting, lost its appeal to the little ones. They both ended up in Eckapeta’s orbit, Soli leaning against the Comanche woman and Claudito on her lap.

  If the children of Paloma and Marco were slowly, bit by bit, perishing from the unexplained disappearance of their mother and their father’s lengthening absence, little Juan Luis was thriving, nursed to repletion by his Double Cross mothers. Even as Sancha dabbed her eyes over the continued absence of both Master and Mistress, she pointed out that Juanito was a far cry from the wan and listless infant placed in her charge. “We can be grateful for this small favor,” the housekeeper had said only that morning before the soldier and the Comanche rode out again, throwing their net wider and wider.

  “What chafes you, Joaquim?” Eckapeta said, as they sat by the acequia.

  “That we know no more than we did the first day we began our search.”

  Eckapeta pointed her lips toward the children, who had taken refuge with them—a silent warning to watch his words.

  Joaquim looked away. He should have known better. Sancha had told him only yesterday that little Soli, usually so forthright and occasionally brash, had taken to sitting on the bench outside her parents’ empty bedchamber, staring at the door as if willing them to appear. And more than once, Eckapeta had found Claudito curled up in a little ball of misery in his own room, trying to stifle his tears.

  “You taught us not to cry, Kaku,” he managed to say.

  “I told him that maybe his kaku was wrong, and he could cry if he wanted to,” Eckapeta told Joaquim as they began another day’s ride in the morning. “Joaquim, what are we going to do?”

  He stifled his amazement at the normally taciturn woman’s unanswerable question; in fact, it shook him to his heart’s core. When a Comanche doesn’t know what to do, the world only waits for the seventh seal to be opened and the last angel to blow his horn.

  “Do? Keep riding. Keep searching.”

  Joaquim looked up when Perla la cocinera came to the door of the kitchen and called the children to dinner. “We have your favorite churros tonight, hijos,” she said.

  Joaquim winced inside to see how slowly Claudito got off Eckapeta’s lap. Before his mama’s disappearance, the slightest whiff of a churro would have propelled him into a dead run through the kitchen garden to the door. Now he trudged toward the house, head down.

  Joaquim looked down at his hands, no more able to raise his eyes than little Claudio. Everywhere they wandered in their increasingly impotent search, they were asked about Paloma. No one mentioned Catalina Ygnacio, so tall and slender (he h
ad thought her skinny at first, but no, she was slender), forthright where she had formerly been shrewish and sharp of tongue, possessing a rare sort of beauty that a certain type of beholder could relish—him, for instance.

  “You care a great deal for the auditor’s daughter,” Eckapeta said.

  Joaquim heard no question in her words or voice, only a statement. He might have changed over the winter; it was equally obvious to him that the stern and generally forbidding Eckapeta of first acquaintance had mellowed into a real grandmama, and even more, a mother to Paloma. He knew her heart was breaking for her children and grandchildren on the Double Cross. That she took the time to suspect his own sorrow left him humbled.

  “I love her,” he said quietly.

  He didn’t look at her, afraid he would see only skepticism. Joaquim knew his own colorful, destructive past had been the subject of gossipmongers for as long as he had lived in Santa Maria’s presidio. Even now, he had no idea how many women he had bedded through the years. To insist that Catalina was different would only have heaped coals of scorn on his head from those who thought they knew him.

  “I love her,” he said again. He stood up. “Dinner is getting cold.”

  Eckapeta started for the door, but Joaquim walked toward the office, ready to arouse an equally listless auditor to come to dinner and at least pretend some interest in food.

  He found Señor Ygnacio slumped in Marco’s chair at the desk, staring into the fireplace. He looked up when Joaquim tapped on the frame of the open door, eyes brightening for a small moment as though he thought perhaps his daughter would come bounding in behind him. The expectation vanished now almost before it appeared, although he did indicate the neat stack of papers on the juez de campo’s desk.

  “You see before you a completed audit, or near enough,” he said. “I have found almost everything in order. Whatever questions I have, Señor Mondragón can certainly answer when he returns. It awaits his signature, and yours, and I will be free to leave.”