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

by Carla Kelly

  In the early hours right at dawn, Paloma was jarred out of sleep by screaming that grew louder and then faded, as if someone was running back and forth, trying to escape any number of the demons Catalina described so well in her dreadful stories. She sat up and reached for Catalina, who clutched her hand.

  “What is happening?” she whispered, knowing her friend had no more idea than she did.

  To her dismay, the skunk waddled away through the now-sizeable opening in the wall. So much for guardian creatures sent by San Francisco himself. She grabbed the blankets and stuffed them against the hole. So far, no one had come into the shed, so their secret was safe enough, but no one had screamed like that, either.

  “Señoras!”

  “Is that Gaspar?” Paloma whispered to Catalina. “Doesn’t Pedro usually get us out?”

  “Something is very wrong,” her friend replied.

  Someone fumbled with the key in the lock for what seemed like a long time, especially when the screaming continued, followed by the shouts of one of the Durán twins.

  The door swung open and Gaspar stuck his head inside. “There is a missing knife!” he whispered. “I think Señor Miguel will kill Pedro! Do you know where the knife is?”

  “Of course we do not know,” Catalina lied, speaking with just enough scorn and indignation to nearly convince Paloma, who grabbed the knife, wiped the adobe clay from the blade and concealed it in the fold of her dress.

  “Come! I was told to fetch Señora Mondragón, but you might as well come, too,” Gaspar said as he reached for them again. He put his hand over his nose. “It smells as bad in here as in my own room, and you are gentlewomen.”

  “Not lately,” Catalina muttered.

  They hurried from the shed and Gaspar locked it behind them. He prodded them down the hall toward the kitchen, where the screaming had turned into a whimper even more frightening.

  The door opened and Catalina blocked the entrance, giving Paloma a moment to set down the knife behind the bench in the hall, pushing it partly under a furry mound of something that turned to jelly when she touched it. She shuddered and straightened up in one smooth motion, hoping neither brother had noticed.

  Roque stood just beyond Catalina, staring at her, so Paloma reached down and fumbled with her shoe. He turned toward his brother, who had raised a poker over Pedro, kneeling with his head bowed and ready for the worst. Bloody drool cascaded down his shirt.

  As Catalina darted forward to stop the man, Paloma looked back at Gaspar. “Find that knife in the hall. Pretend you just discovered it. Don’t betray me,” she whispered. “We are not your enemy.”

  Forgetting her own safety, Paloma leaped into the room as old Maria grabbed the descending poker, throwing Miguel Durán off balance. He tried to strike her with his free hand, but he went down in a heap.

  “I stole the knife!” Maria said and knelt beside the bloody Pedro. “I wanted to slice off more meat. I was hungry.”

  Miguel scrambled to his feet, cursing the old woman and striking her with his hands. He had dropped the poker, which Catalina eased away with her foot before Roque could reach for it.

  Paloma took a deep breath and stepped in front of Miguel and Maria, who had drawn herself into a little ball and covered her head from further blows.

  “We are all hungry, Señor Durán,” Paloma begged. “Don’t strike someone who has been a loyal servant to you. Please don’t.”

  “Why should I listen to you?” he snarled. “You were supposed to be the old auditor. I was going to … going to …” he stopped and turned to his brother, who had Catalina on her knees now, his fingers tangled in her long hair. “What were we going to do with the auditor? I forget.”

  “Ruin his life in some way,” Roque replied, breathing heavily. “Something we sent Gaspar the Idiot to do.”

  Now would be a very good time to find that knife, Gaspar, Paloma thought, as she stood over Maria. Pedro lay still, and she wondered if he was dead.

  “Stop, stop, here is the knife!” Gaspar said as he came toward them. “I … it must have been … underneath that dead something or other behind the bench. Here.”

  He held out the reeking knife covered in jellied ooze. “Maybe I should clean the hall so this doesn’t happen again.” He looked around, eyes wide. “You know how things get away from us.”

  “I’ll help you,” Paloma said, thinking of times she had distracted Claudito or Soledad from something undesirable.

  Both brothers turned their attention to her now. She saw madness mingled with ferocity in their bloodshot eyes. I cannot reason with these men, she thought. No one can.

  “You have your knife now,” she said quietly, trying anyway because she had no choice. “Put it away. The lost is found.”

  Pedro stirred and groaned. He narrowed his eyes and glared at her. He started to point at Paloma when old Maria grabbed his hand and kissed it over and over.

  “Pedro, you have returned from the land of the dead!” the laundress wailed. “God and all the saints be praised!”

  “Put the knife away, Señor Durán,” Paloma said again to Miguel.

  He pointed the knife with its dripping, rotting juices at her. “Kneel down and bow your head, witch,” he demanded.

  Paloma did as he said. She closed her eyes and told herself how much she would miss Marco and their children. Her mind was filled with sudden peace, relief even, that this misbegotten, foolish ordeal was over.

  She waited for the knife to bite into her flesh and held her breath. To her amazement, she felt the blade against her skull as Miguel wiped the disgusting thing in her hair and laughed.

  “You are all so careless in here,” he said and rested the blade against her neck, flicking the point against her skin. “Are you so careless at your precious Double Cross? I will ask Señor Mondragón that, before they haul him away to prison in Mexico City.”

  She opened her eyes when she heard the knife clatter into the drawer and a key turn in the lock. Her heart started to beat again.

  She watched Roque try to pull his hands, wet with Pedro’s blood, from Catalina’s tangled hair. He shook her head like a terrier with a mouse, trying to free himself. With a curse, he pulled out the small knife at his belt and sawed through her hair to release his sticky fingers. He looked at Catalina, who had dragged herself upright and glared at him. He turned her head one way and then the other. “It’s not even now. What a pity,” he declared, as he hacked through the hair on the other side of her head. “That’s better,” he declared and laughed at the mess he had created.

  Miguel clapped his hand on Roque’s shoulder. The brothers laughed and left the kitchen. Roque turned back to order Catalina to bring them toasted bread and cheese, and do it quickly.

  Paloma crawled to Catalina, who held out her arms. They clung together for a moment in silence, broken by labored breathing from barely conscious Pedro. Paloma looked around the kitchen at benches overturned, crockery smashed, cornmeal ground underfoot and bloody, sticky hair everywhere.

  “Maria, do you have a tablecloth?” she asked.

  The laundress nodded. With a fearful look toward the open door leading into the hall, she crept on hands and knees to the room off the kitchen with its laundry tub and pile of filthy shirts and socks. Paloma watched her rummage through the reeking pile, gagging, until she found a sheet stained with heaven-knew-what.

  “No. I don’t dare,” she said. She dropped the sheet and shut the door. “They would be so angry.”

  Paloma untied her petticoat, slipped it off and wiped the front of Pedro’s shirt with it, where blood and mucus mingled with broken teeth.

  “You stole that knife,” he accused.

  Old Maria pushed her face in front of his, showing a spark of real anger that made goose bumps march up and down Paloma’s arms. “I told you I stole it because I wanted something to eat! You two fools abducted two harmless gentlewomen and started something terrible.”

  In silence, Pedro looked down at the tiles, his face a
study in confusion. Paloma continued to dab at his wounds, dipping her ruined petticoat in the earthenware water jar that had somehow escaped destruction in the rampage.

  Gaspar cleared his throat. “I’ll take him to lie down.”

  “That is kind of you,” Paloma told him, all the while thinking, Keep him far from the Durán brothers. He knows too much. She wrapped her petticoat around Pedro’s head. “He needs his bed.”

  “No one has a bed,” Gaspar told her. “We have piles of rags.”

  “You deserve better,” Catalina said, her voice low, but charged with a fierce anger that Paloma heard from the other side of the room. “We all deserve better.”

  “Not when you are born with no luck.”

  “Gaspar, a month ago, I might have agreed with you,” Catalina said, calmly and coldly. “We will make our own luck because we must.”

  Gaspar helped Pedro to his feet. He started for the door, then turned back to Paloma and Catalina, who was fingering her hacked off hair in disbelief. “It started as a silly idea, when the brothers were in their cups. Look what it has turned into.”

  “I know, Gaspar.”

  “One thing happens, and then another, and we dig a deeper hole.” He brightened. “Almost like the hole you are digging.”

  Pedro raised his head, and his eyes narrowed. For one shocking moment, he looked to Paloma like the men who had just beaten him. He put his hand to his head and groaned.

  Please don’t betray us, Paloma thought. Before God and all the saints, don’t. “Gaspar, you won’t say anything to …” she whispered.

  “Maybe I would have yesterday …” his voice trailed off and he looked around in disbelief, as if seeing the messy ruin of the kitchen for the first time, “not now.”

  He helped Pedro to a bench and crept closer to Paloma and Catalina. “You had pretty hair, señorita,” he told Lina. He lowered his voice. “What can I do?”

  “Make sure the horse barn is open tonight,” Catalina told him. “We want our mule.”

  His expression brightened, then turned dark again. “No one has good luck here, Señorita Ygnacio.”

  “We are overdue.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  In which Catalina hatches a puny plan that bears no scrutiny

  Catalina hated to leave Paloma in the kitchen. There had been no time to discuss plans for the evening’s terrors, no time to think how to deal with Pedro, who knew who had stolen the knife, and probably how she had been using it.

  Now the knife was locked away. All Paloma had to work with, provided she could return to the shed, was a cheap tin plate that would probably bend with the first pressure. Catalina saw their whole flimsy plan crashing down around them. If they could not squeeze out of the shed, how could they ever escape?

  While Paloma set a loaf of bread on a plate and looked for something else to serve with it, Catalina fingered her ragged hair. She thought of Joaquim Gasca, who had touched her hair and declared it a masterpiece of nature. At the time, she had called it shallow gallantry, something a man like him might say to get into a woman’s bed.

  Somewhere, sometime during those few weeks when Joaquim Gasca came more and more often to the Double Cross to sit with her father when he could have sent a corporal as official representative, she had decided her hair truly was beautiful. She knew she was still thin and sharp of tongue, but she had begun to see herself as someone else.

  It will grow back, she thought, then smiled inside, thinking what she would have said only a month or two ago, before they arrived in Valle del Sol. I would have pouted and used this as one more layer of shellac on my heart. She looked at Paloma, who silently righted the benches then spoke quiet words to Maria, still sniffing back tears and wringing her hands.

  You make order out of chaos, she thought. It’s time you were home with your babies.

  “Somehow, a bloody sheet by dusk,” she whispered to Paloma as she picked up the tray, took a deep breath, and started down the hall.

  She knew the twins would laugh at her when she came into the bookroom. They did not fail her, pointing at her shorn head and slapping their knees with laughter, as if they had never seen anything funnier.

  “Did you wander into a sheep-shearing pen, Flaca?” Roque asked, trying to appear solicitous, even as he rolled his eyes and snorted.

  She ignored them, setting the tray on the desk and seating herself behind it. Roque came closer to eye the bread and bits of dried meat, a skimpy meal by anyone’s standards.

  “Can’t the Mondragón woman do any better?” he asked. “I mean, what am I paying her for?”

  His blinding wit sent Roque into another fit of laughter. Miguel joined in. Catalina closed her eyes and told herself to ignore these fools. Easier said than done, when Roque pulled a pair of scissors out of the drawer and continued to snip at her hair, his awful breath on her neck. She couldn’t help herself, but her tears only made him cut closer and closer until clumps of auburn hair littered the desk.

  She said nothing, willing her tears to dry up, and nourishing herself on the knowledge that hair grows back. True, it was unlikely that Joaquim Gasca would favor her with any attention now, but he probably would have lost interest anyway.

  “My hair will grow back,” she said, and folded her hands together on the desk. “I need to go through this one last box, gentlemen.”

  She picked up the first box she had gone through and had wisely never labeled done with a date of completion, as she had learned from her father. To her relief, Roque put down the scissors, after snapping them open and shut a few times close to her nose and chortling like the bully he was.

  She glanced at Miguel, who eyed her with more interest than usual. He sat back and folded his arms, his smile benign but more troubling than Roque’s antics, because he seemed to know what she was doing. She kept her eyes on the pages before her, suddenly afraid to meet his glance.

  “Flaca, how many times do you intend to go through the same boxes?” he asked, his voice silky soft and full of menace.

  “Only until I am satisfied I have not missed anything,” she replied, hoping her voice did not quaver. What now? she thought in desperation. He’s wise to me. What now?

  She thought of Paloma patiently digging and welcoming a skunk into their shed, and knew that somehow, some way, even without a knife, Paloma would carve out a wide-enough space for them to escape and begin their bid for freedom. Paloma would never fail her, and she must not fail the kind woman who only wanted to return to her family.

  She calmed her mind. “Very well, sir. What you and your brother should do is compose a letter for Governor Anza. Before anything can happen, he must receive your petition to have Señor Mondragón removed from office. Do you know the governor?” That’s right, she thought, pleased to see confusion take control of Miguel Durán’s wine-muddled mind.

  “No, I don’t know the governor,” Miguel snapped. “I suppose you know the governor quite well.”

  “Better than you do,” she said cheerfully, happy to see the pendulum swing more in her favor. “I suggest you write a placating letter, because he holds Señor Mondragón in high esteem.” She indicated the cluttered desk before her. “Of course, you and I will work together to make certain that all of Señor Mondragón’s faults are laid before him.”

  “Yes, yes, all of them,” Roque muttered. “A placating letter, you say?”

  “Very humble, very placating,” she echoed. “While you do that, I will return to the kitchen and see if I can find more food.”

  Miguel gave her an impatient wave with his hand as he sat down in her place and took out a fresh sheet of paper. Catalina left the room and hurried to the kitchen, where she startled Paloma, who held old Maria in her arms, doing her own placating.

  “Maria thinks she needs to apologize to me because I was forced to produce the knife,” Paloma said. “I have been begging her forgiveness that she took the beating due to me.” She raised her eyes to Catalina’s face and gasped. “Dios mio, what more hav
e they done to you?”

  “We will all agree it could be worse,” Catalina replied, trying to make light of the ruin that used to be her lovely hair. She touched Maria’s arm, and then her face, knowing deep in her heart how it felt to spend a lifetime abused by others. “You, my dear, must somehow procure a sheet for us tonight after it is dark.”

  Maria turned terror-filled eyes on Catalina. “How can I hide from Comanches and witches if I am wandering about the estancia? How can I do this for you?”

  Paloma hugged her closer. “There are no Comanches or witches, Maria, only two foolish, evil men who have held you captive with tales of things which will not come to pass, not now, not when peace might be closer than we know.”

  “I’m afraid!” Maria wailed, and rested her head against Paloma.

  Just then, sitting in the kitchen, Catalina Ygnacio, prisoner of fools and madmen and daughter of a beaten-down accountant from Santa Fe, felt a page turn in her book of life. The turn of the page seemed so audible, she wondered why Paloma and even Maria did not hear the rustle of paper.

  “I will free us tonight,” she said softly, because there was no telling where Roque or Miguel were at the moment. “We will succeed and we will liberate ourselves from this place, Maria.”

  The old laundress looked more hopeful, but not convinced. Catalina touched her arm again, hoping that somewhere inside that empty shell of a woman a spark still existed. “In fact, you will come with us.”

  “Oh, no! They will follow us,” Maria exclaimed, and put her hands to her mouth.

  “I guarantee you they will not,” Catalina replied firmly. “In fact, I think it is time you had a last name. I will call you Maria Brava, the courageous one.”

  “Maria Brava?” the servant repeated. She looked Catalina in the eyes and Catalina saw another page turn, whether Maria knew it or not. “I will have a sheet for you after dark, no matter what.”