The whitewashed buildings came into view and Damian broke the silence to point with his whip. “There’s the mission.”
“I see,” she said. “It looks well kept.”
“One of the best,” he agreed. “It’s not what it once was, but the buildings were returned to the padres three years ago, along with a portion of the land. See?” As they rode closer, he indicated a long building. Wide arches graced its whole length, and the red tile of the roof swept above like the bold brushstroke of an artist. “There’s the chapel and the library. There we’ll find our clue.”
“We hope,” she reminded him.
“We hope.” At the tall entrance to the church, Damian rang the bell. “Some of you vaqueros stay close, some of you patrol the area. Keep an eye out for—” He hesitated.
“For more Americanos?” one asked.
“For anyone who shouldn’t be here.”
The vaqueros nodded, separating to do their duty.
A tiny old man dressed in a rough brown cowl shuffled out of the darkness behind the open doors of the tall foyer.
Damian bent with a smile. “Fray Pedro de Jesus, do you remember me?”
“Of course I do, my son.” The Franciscan brother adjusted his spectacles on his nose and squinted at the mounted man. “I haven’t heard your confession since I had you weed the mission garden, saying an Ave with each weed you pulled as penance for your sins. Little Damian, isn’t it?”
Katherine covered her mouth to keep in her laughter as her husband turned a dull red. The vaqueros nearby snorted and coughed.
“I should have known you would never forget me,” Damian grumbled as he slipped from the saddle and reached for Katherine. “I brought you my wife.”
“Your wife?” Again the glasses were adjusted, again the faded eyes squinted. “I hadn’t heard you were married.”
“Only a few days ago, by the alcaide in Monterey,” Damian answered.
The bald head turned his way. “Not a Catholic wedding?”
Gently, Katherine said, “I’m not a member of your faith, Padre.”
Taking her hand in his veined, spotted one, Fray Pedro told her, “That we must remedy at once. Come with me, my dear.” He led her into the dim entry. “To cohabit without the blessing of God is a sin. I’ve worked too hard to keep Damian in a state of grace to concede defeat now.”
She threw a helpless glance over her shoulder. Damian leaned against the hitching post, satisfaction on his face as he watched her disappear into the cool gloom.
Leading her down the quiet corridor, Fray Pedro gestured her into a tiny room lit by the sunlight shining through a small, high window and by the flicker of a candle. The silence of the mission made her whisper, “Is there anyone else here?”
“A few Franciscan brothers. We are few and old. You’ll disturb no one with your talk, though. It’s a joy to hear young voices.” He smiled as the shouts of the vaqueros drifted through the open window, adjusted his glasses, and looked her over carefully. “You’ve married Damian in a civil ceremony. That surprises me, for young Damian’s faith was deep and sure. He must love you very much to accept you in such a temporal union.” He paused, but she had nothing to say to that. “Did you understand when you married him that you’d have to convert?”
“Yes, I know that,” she admitted.
“Do you have any objections to the Catholic faith, my daughter?”
“Not at all. I’m not a very devout Protestant.” She nervously played with her watch chain. “I mean, I’ve never believed my religion to be the only one.”
“Just what the Americano men say when I tutor them before their weddings.” Shaking his head, the old man held the candle up to the crowded bookshelf, then ran his nose along the spines of the books until he found the one he wanted. He slid it toward her. “Here. You’ll need to read this as soon as possible, and I’ll help you find the right way. You can read?”
“Yes, of course!”
“There is no ‘of course.’ Except for the boys I taught, there are few in California who can read, and read well.” He scrutinized her. “Have you had bodily commerce with Damian?”
Mortified, she nodded, wondering where her dignity had fled. Before this elderly man’s kind questions, she couldn’t summon the nerve to tell him to mind his own business. Where was Damian during this interrogation?
“Well, well, I’ll have to give you the quick course of religion. A sort of instant state of grace.” He cackled as he shuffled over to her. “Don’t repeat that, of course. The Mother Church in Rome would never sanction such a thing, but here in the wilds of California, we’ve had to seek conversion through devious routes. Sit down, sit down.”
A lack of reality, a perception of isolation tangled her emotions as she sat on the straight-backed chair he indicated.
“We’ll start with—”
A tap on the door interrupted them. “Padre?” Damian stuck his head in. “Has Katherine told you why we came?”
“To sanctify your union, I would hope,” Fray Pedro answered tartly.
“Not exactly.”
Katherine could almost hear Damian squirm and she relaxed. It would seem this Franciscan had the same effect on everyone that he had on her.
“Why have you come, then?” Fray Pedro conveyed disappointment and displeasure in his sharp question.
“We have a problem.” Damian stepped into the room, a saddlebag flung over his shoulder.
“More than just living in sin?”
“Even more than that,” Damian agreed. With care, he shut the door and leaned against it. “Do you recall the old tale about the padres and the gold?”
The shrewd eyes of Fray Pedro studied him. “The padres and the gold?” he repeated. “I’m not sure. . . .”
“Try to remember.”
Something about the way Damian urged made Katherine think Damian didn’t believe the friar, but Fray Pedro didn’t seem insulted. “Ah, yes.” Fray Pedro folded his arms across his skinny chest. “That’s nothing but an old legend. Nonsense.” He dismissed it with a wave.
Looking irritated, Damian tossed the saddlebag off his shoulder.
Katherine stepped in with an explanation. “We don’t think it’s a legend. We think it’s based, at least in part, on fact. Please think about it. It’s very important. There’s someone who will kill to find this gold, and this person seems to think I know where it is.”
Fray Pedro turned on her with a swiftness that belied his age. “Someone who would kill? You? Why you?”
“Because I’m the widow of a man who sought the gold.”
“That man’s name was? . . .”
“Tobias Maxwell.”
Before her eyes, the friar seemed to wither. His hands disappeared into his cassock, his shoulders sank. His head drooped; he muttered unintelligible words. Alarmed, Katherine slipped her arm around his waist. “Come and sit,” she urged. “You’re ill.”
She assisted him to her abandoned chair.
Fray Pedro asked faintly, “What happened to that nice young man? What happened to Tobias?”
“He was murdered,” Damian answered, coming to squat by the old Franciscan’s knees. “Murdered by this same monster who seeks to kill my wife. Please, Padre, tell us what you know.”
Fray Pedro adjusted his spectacles and peered at Damian irritably. “What could I know? San Juan Bautista wasn’t even built when that senile Fray Lucio came out of the mountains with his wild story.” He seemed unaware of the contradiction in his denial.
“When did he come out of the hills?” Damian asked eagerly.
“In the summer of 1777, it was. I’ll never understand how he made it alone, for he was ill and tired. He died within the month.” Fray Pedro dropped his head as if he, too, were ill and tired. Katherine met Damian’s eye.
“How old are you, Fray?” she asked, soft with his age and his sadness.
“Eighty-eight.” He sighed. “I came all the way from Spain to work under Fray Junípero Serra, did you know tha
t?”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Si. I came from Majorca, as he did. It was an honor to be touched by Fray Serra’s shadow. The man was a saint.”
She humored him, giving him the moments he needed to pull himself together. “Was he?”
“There’s never been another like him.” He shivered, drawing in on himself. “Although others have tried.”
There it was. There was the thing he would prefer never to reveal. The thing, she suspected, frightened him. “Who?” she whispered.
His chuckle sounded like the rustle of old paper. “Damian, you know, don’t you?”
“Fray Pedro, I don’t—” Stricken by the thought, Damian said, “Fray Juan Estévan?”
“Si. Fray Juan Estévan. The big man with the gleaming eyes. He, too, came from Majorca and was younger and healthier than Fray Serra, with a great skill for healing. Almost a godlike skill for healing. He had a charisma that blinded many to his ambition. Yet in his vanity, the man never knew about himself.” Lifting one finger, he shook it in admonition of a man long dead. “Fray Juan Estévan thought that God worked through him, that his determination to convert the interior was a sign it was God’s will. He would never tame his restlessness long enough to go to the chapel and ask God what His will was. I tried to speak to him about it, to explain that when God directs your actions, you feel a peace and a sureness within yourself. But Fray Juan Estévan was my elder in both years and experience.”
Katherine stroked his fingers as they trembled in his lap. “What did he say when you chided him?”
“He laughed. Only—” Fray Pedro closed his eyes as if in pain. “Only when Fray Lucio came out of the mountains, he had been instructed to ask for me. I received the burden of the secret, at Fray Juan Estévan’s request.”
Damian poured a glass of wine. Pressing it into Fray Pedro’s hand, he asked, “What did you receive?”
Fray Pedro sipped the spicy red liquid, and sighed.” A good wine. A new wine. I like new wines, don’t you?”
“Fray Pedro, please.” Damian knelt beside him. “We must know.”
Fray Pedro studied Damian, reading his soul. “I never wanted to tell you about this. Of all the boys I taught, you were the most dependable, except when this tale was trotted around. Then your eyes glowed and you listened too intently. I feared for you.” He sipped again. “Do your eyes still glow at the mention of gold?”
Damian opened one side of his saddlebag. “Let me show you.” From the midst of Katherine’s ruffled underwear, he drew a well-wrapped package. Unfolding it, he held the rock to the western light from the window. The gold of the setting sun brought the gold in the rock to blazing life; Fray Pedro knew what it was.
Crossing himself, blessing the gold, he murmured, “It exists. It truly exists.” A smile broke across his weathered face, eroding every wrinkle to its deepest canyon. “All these years, I had wondered if I were mad, but it exists and I am not.”
Caught in this topsy-turvy world of egocentric friars and hidden treasure, Katherine could only say anxiously, “Then you’ll help us?”
He lifted his hand and blessed them both. “I’ll seek the answer in the chapel. God is always there for anyone who seeks Him.”
A little prickle ran up Katherine’s spine. Fray Pedro discussed God as if He were an important friend who could be contacted and spoken to at will. It fed her sense of strangeness.
She slid her gaze to Damian, but he seemed to find nothing amiss. He leaned against the table, watching Fray Pedro as if such spirituality were ordinary, expected.
Fray Pedro, too, seemed impervious to her discomfort. “Find Fray Manuel, Doña Katherina. He’ll show you to your room, where you can study the book I gave you. Damian, you can bunk with your vaqueros tonight.”
Rewrapping the stone and hiding it once more in the saddlebag, Damian shrugged in resignation.
“Early in the morning, I expect to see you so we can discuss this matter.” Fray Pedro looked over his glasses with a droll expression. “Our little Damian can pay attention to the sacrament of marriage. Then confession for you both, first communion for you, Doña Katherina, next the wedding ceremony. Prepare yourself.”
Without a word, Damian took Katherine’s elbow and directed her out into the passage. As they left the little office, they heard Fray Pedro call, “Don’t eat any breakfast.”
“Wonderful man, isn’t he?” Damian chuckled, and she stared at him as if he were mad. “Come, I’ll find Fray Manuel for you.”
In the rooms ranged along the arched corridor they caught flashes of the fading sun that gleamed directly through the windows. It flashed through the open doors as they walked, catching the wood trim and transforming it to polished topaz. It faded to a glow as they left that brilliance behind, then flashed forth at another door. Katherine stared about, her eyes wearied by the rapid transitions, confused by her sense of isolation.
As Damian strode beside her, alternately sculpted in brilliance and dusted in shade, the light transformed him, too. Here, today, in this place that was so essentially Spanish and Californian, he looked different to her. Not at all like the man she’d married. Or perhaps, like the genuine man she’d married. The darkness of the corridor accentuated the austere gravity that placed him apart. The illumination revealed his somber beauty, underscored by splashes of black and accents of gold. Like a painting created with an eye for drama, he flaunted a beauty unmatched in her discreet background.
In this world of crucifix and conquistador, she was the alien.
Damian found Fray Manuel, and she heard their murmured conversation through the cushion of shock.
She was the alien. She didn’t belong here.
Fray Manuel came out to escort her to her room. He blessed her before leaving. Damian set her bag beside the bed, and she turned to him, eager for friendship, for words of reassurance. Surely Damian realized how estranged she felt. Yet he said nothing. He smiled without warmth, bowed with the formality of a Spaniard, watched her with great, dark eyes as he shut the door behind him, and left her alone with one candle to lighten the gathering gloom.
She looked around the room, bare and sparse as any cell, as if she’d find an answer to the questions that overwhelmed her. What was she doing here? Why did she ever believe she could fit into this society? What madness had made her marry a man marked by history and culture?
Sightless, she stared down at the book in her hand until she focused on it in dismay. This was the book she must learn overnight. This was her anchor to reality.
She pulled the stool up to the table, sat, and opened the book to the first page. The silence of the mission filled her ears; a silence of old prayers and new devotions. Her breathing slowed, her heart beat with a steady rhythm, and she listened intently, seeking evidence of companionship. All she heard was the deep, sweet sound of sanctity, and it touched an unacknowledged part of her.
The candle flickered, the words wavered before her eyes, and a splash of water fell on the page before she realized it. She wiped it away; wiped, too, the tears from her cheeks.
Homesick.
For the first time since she’d left Boston, she was homesick. For the first time, she wondered if she’d ever see snow again. She wondered if she’d ever wear a fur wrap again, or roast chestnuts for Christmas dressing. She wondered if her ear would ever hear the clipped, nasal speech of Massachusetts again, if she’d ever see a dockside bustling with Yankee traders or hear a cannon boom for a Fourth of July celebration. Would she ever see the men stand with heads bared as the mayor read the Declaration of Independence?
It was foolish to remember little things, to long for a muff to tuck her hands in when she lived in a land of eternal spring, but she did. It was foolish to remember only the snow, and not the slush and subzero cold, but she did. Foolish or not, nostalgia grew in the loneliness, watered by these silly tears.
In Boston, she was ordinary. When she walked down the street, no one looked at her or whispered about her ancestry an
d place of origin. Here she stood out. Her appearance, her speech, her habits set her apart, and she didn’t know if she wanted to adjust to fit Damian’s notion of a proper Spanish wife.
Changing her religion, she had assured Fray Pedro, meant little to her. There had been no succor in stern Congregationalism, and she’d seen no demonstration of kindness in the Chamberlain family’s brand of Christianity.
Still, she cringed when she thought of their reaction to her conversion. They’d be horrified by her fall into “superstition,” as they had discounted the comfort she’d found in the occasional Catholic mass she’d attended.
Damian’s reaction, too, gave her pause. If she accepted her first communion with a compliance akin to stoicism, Damian did not. Her religion didn’t matter to her; his did to him. There dwelt in him an exultation, a pleasure that made her uneasy. To him, she didn’t do this as a compliance to the laws of California, nor as a nod to his beliefs. It was a gift she presented him, a jewel finer than any other: a vow of devotion to him and his way of life.
Did she dare do this? Since the death of her father, she’d sought control of her emotions, her actions, her self. She’d succeeded, too. She’d freed herself to travel, to do as she liked. She’d learned control of her reactions.
Sometimes, perhaps, that particular control had slipped. Sometimes her temper had blazed through; sometimes she slipped into the belligerence she’d learned in the Chamberlain household. But on the whole, her belief in control had been rewarded. She’d been determined to gain her independence through control, and she’d done it.
Inch by inch, Damian had undermined that determination. First she’d granted him her body, and he created a passion she couldn’t control. Then she’d agreed to marriage, and he gained legal control of her person. Now she’d offered to become one with him in the only ceremony he truly recognized. What control would he take from her this time? Would she lose Miss Katherine Anne Chamberlain Maxwell and become a stranger called Doña Katherina de la Sola?
In a flash of revelation, she realized that the Californio culture would triumph over her own, at least in the de la Sola home. The self-satisfied woman who had landed in Monterey Harbor was being transformed by forces within and without. She didn’t know if she wanted to change. She knew that she could say no. If she wanted to, she could remain the person who’d set sail out of Boston.
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