Lady of Perdition

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘He was not a kind man.’ Valentina seemed for a time, also, to see him in the black ink-bowl of her cup. ‘But before his family came he treated me with respect.’

  Her eyes darkened, with bafflement as well as pain. ‘Then last Wednesday, when Ortega came home from taking my message to Señor Ekholm here, my husband met him before the doors of the hacienda, accused him of … of being my lover … and dismissed him, without a word to me. I did not hear of it until some hours later. When I protested, and said that Father Monastario had vouched for him, my husband – who was drunk by then – shouted at me that he could not be certain that I was not … was not lovers with the good Father as well. I was speechless!’

  Hannibal raised his brows – January had never known Valentina to be speechless – and murmured, ‘Entirely?’ and the young woman blinked aside her tears of remembered rage with the ghost of a grin.

  ‘Well, no. Indeed, far from it. We quarreled – oh, horribly!’

  January glanced again at the bruise on her cheek. It looked to him fresher than that.

  ‘On Easter morning he rode out by himself, without a word to anyone. He had ridden out so every day since our quarrel, because the men not only had their work to do, but also to guard the borders of our land and drive away Señor Pollack’s men, who would come to try to get back Señor Pollack’s cattle and sheep. In the evenings my husband would come in late, and lock himself into his library, for of course Madrecita Taggart and Aunt Alicia were incensed that he had broken with Pollack.They are supporters of Houston, Madrecita and her sister, and whenever they saw my husband they would pester him and nag about how he must return support for the man, because the United States needed Texas.’

  ‘I’d hide, no question,’ put in Shaw, folding his long arms. ‘An’ a damn sight farther off than the library.’

  Selina, on the bench at Hannibal’s side, asked, ‘Wasn’t there anyplace you could go, Valla?’

  ‘Not away from the hacienda. Not without a guard of some kind, because there is indeed danger of the Comanche. Ortega was gone, and with the men all patrolling like soldiers to keep Pollack’s men away, I kept waiting to hear that the Comanche – or the bandits, the Comancheros – would come in, to steal horses or indeed to attack the house. So my husband would leave me to dine with Madrecita, and Aunt Alicia, and they would argue with me, as if I gave a rotten fig about Texas. And because my husband was not there, Madrecita came to table half-drunk and poor Alicia fuddled on laudanum, and Francis kept to his study with his maps and his books.’

  ‘Swine,’ commented Hannibal dispassionately.

  ‘Could you ask for another bodyguard?’ suggested the girl, and Valentina shook her head.

  ‘None could be spared. And he … my husband avoided me. And when he was home, he was locked in his library, or was drunk. Or both.’

  Selina looked as if she would have asked something else, then stopped herself. Seeing this, Valentina smiled a wry, bitter smile.

  ‘There is a little boudoir next to our room. I slept there. Sometimes – when I heard him shouting at Enoch – that’s our butler – or when he would hit the serving-men – I would lock the doors. But he never tried them. Then on Easter morning, though she had barely spoken to her son – either of her sons – for a week, Madrecita Taggart chose to become enraged that my husband wouldn’t ride into town with them to go to church. She said that it was not right for a Christian not to worship on Easter Sunday, and that he would go to Hell. But when I asked, might I go into town to attend the Mass that Father Monastario holds in the back room of Eustacio Pardo’s botica, for the sake of the Catholics of the town, one would have thought I had proposed to spend the day at a tavern! I could only accompany them, she said, if I attended a “real, Christian” church.’

  ‘Personally,’ remarked Hannibal, ‘I’d sooner spend Easter having tea with the Devil in Hell than sit in a carriage for six hours with your husband’s relations, with all due respect. No wonder he drank.’

  She shook her head, a small, despairing gesture. The men came in from the yard, except for Cousin Sven, who had the first shift of guard-duty that night. Fru Ekholm went to the kitchen, and returned with more coffee. The dogs paced in circles, then curled up at the feet of the men. The smell of tobacco drifted at that other end of the long room.

  ‘Then when Madrecita, and Aunt Alicia, and Francis returned from town, very late in the afternoon, Francis told me that in town he had seen the woman who had been my husband’s mistress. She had returned, Francis said, and a man at church had told Aunt Alicia that my husband was keeping her again, and had bought her a house on Franklin Street. That was … that was the last I could stand.’ Her red lips tightened, and again tears filled her eyes. ‘I lost my temper.

  ‘After what he had said, about me, about Ortega, about Father Monastario – after he had been gone all those days, and come home to sit and get drunk and leave me to be pestered and scolded by his mother – when he finally came home, after dark, I confronted him and we quarreled again, worse this time, terribly. He struck me, and locked himself in his room, drinking, and I pounded the door and cursed him. Locked into my boudoir that night I wept, and counted the hours until I could ride out to meet with Father Monastario in the ruined jacal in Arroyo Sauceito, as we always did. I needed him. Needed to tell him, to have him pray with me. To have him advise me what to do.

  ‘I have been a good wife! I really have!’ She raised her face to January’s in the firelight, her eyes now swimming with tears. ‘When I was a little girl in my father’s house I was a dreadful pagan, as he was. I knew no better. I cared for nothing but how to fix my hair, and tales of romance, and making men fall in love with me. John – my first husband, my true husband – never asked me to change my faith. I went with him sometimes to his church in San Antonio, not as a communicant, but so that I could see what his faith was like. To see what it was that drew his heart. To understand. And he sometimes came to mine. And since his death, I have found such comfort in Father Monastario’s care and teaching. Since I have lived with Señor Taggart – since I have lived with his terrible family! – I have so needed such comfort.’

  Selina leaned across to her, and took her hands, and Valentina clung briefly to the younger girl’s strong fingers. It crossed January’s mind to wonder if the priest was young and good-looking, but he pushed the thought aside. What mattered was her need.

  ‘And did you ride out?’ January inquired gently.

  ‘At first light. I slipped down the backstairs, caught my own mare and saddled her behind the sheds, for Malojo – our stableman – had been ordered not to give me a mount. I took my pistol – two of my pistols, all I could find in my room. With our riders patrolling the bounds of Perdition land, I felt I should be safe from the Comanche, and even if this was not so, it was worth the risk to me. Anything was worth the risk.’

  ‘And was Father Monastario waiting for you there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I reached the place, dismounted and hid my horse in the deep brush of the gully. But as I was halfway to the hut someone shot at me. The jacal – or what is left of it – stands among thick brush and trees. I ran inside, and crouched between the window and the door. I shot back, but they shot twice more, whoever they were. I had to keep moving back and forth between the door and the window, trying to load and fearing every second that they’d rush the house. Fearing, too, that Father Monastario would arrive, and be killed as well. They ceased shooting but I dared not come out. I was afraid they were waiting for me to do just that. I thought they’d come up through the brush behind the jacal. It was two hours before I dared come out, and then another two, to walk back to the hacienda. And when I reached the place I found that my husband had been shot. Killed.’

  ‘Shot how?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Through the heart.’ Her voice shook a little: maybe not love, maybe not grief, but shock and exhaustion. They had been husband and wife, thought January, for three years. Had known each other as only th
ose who live together can know one another. ‘From close up, close enough that his clothing had been burned by the gunpowder.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘I don’t know. I kept asking and they kept insisting that I had done it.’

  ‘This happen indoors or out?’

  ‘Outside.’ Again, the re-telling of simple facts seemed to steady her. ‘His body was found in the orchard behind the house. My mare was found wandering near the corrals. She’d been tied by the reins, and had broken free, I suppose at the sound of the shot. The dead branch was still tangled in her rein.’

  Shaw glanced at January, expressionless but with a glint of calculation in his eyes.

  ‘Who else was in the house at the time?’ January asked.

  ‘Aunt Alicia. Madrecita. Brother Francis. Enoch, our butler. Malojo the yard-man, and TA the cook, certainly. Melly – Melanie – Madrecita’s maid. But Madrecita Taggart, and Aunt Alicia, claim that they saw me in the orchard in the middle of the morning, before they heard the shot – at the time when I was in the jacal in the arroyo, being shot at myself! And one of my pistols was found near the body, along with one of my shawls! Francis ordered Enoch, and Noah – one of the house men – to lock me in my room. Malojo, and Davy – the other houseman – had already taken my husband’s body away to Señor Firkin the undertaker in town, and sent for the sheriff.’

  ‘Sure enough sounds fishy to me,’ said Shaw. ‘They get claim to this rancho if you’s hanged?’

  ‘I think so, yes!’ The young woman flung out her hands in despair and rage. ‘My husband made no will, but if I am hanged for this thing – this thing that I did not do! – they will have the portion of the land that was mine, that had been my uncle’s, as well as that belonging to my husband! They had the servants lock me up, for Aunt Alicia was having hysterics … Madrecita – to judge by her voice – spent the rest of the afternoon drinking in the parlor, and then started to quarrel with Francis. The sheriff did not come. In the evening I heard voices down below in the yard – the bedroom is at the front of the house, you understand – and Enoch told me, when he brought me food a little later, that Sheriff Quigley had not been in Austin when the men took my husband’s body there. There was some political trouble between the Nationalists and the supporters of Houston. Enoch was not clear what it was.’

  Some frightful thing, Cousin Sven had said.

  Stanway’s murder?

  ‘Enoch said that Malojo had remained in town, to wait for Señor Quigley’s return, while Davy brought the wagon back. All last night I sat awake, waiting for the sheriff to come, and listening to them quarrelling: Madrecita, and Francis, and Jalisco, the jefe of my husband’s vaqueros. I don’t know what about.’ She passed her hand across her forehead, and shivered at the recollection. ‘Then in the morning, when the house was quiet, Juana – Enoch’s wife – brought me coffee at first light, and did not lock the door of the room when she left. When I slipped out to the guest-room at the back of the house, whose window overlooks the roof of the kitchen, I saw that someone had left a horse saddled on the far side of the orchard, just visible.

  ‘The house is mine,’ she finished simply, thin desperation in her voice. ‘The land is mine. Juana, and Malojo, and Jalisco and most of the vaqueros – they were Uncle Gael’s servants. I had told Jalisco about you, and I think he understands, that I cannot just ride away and disappear. That is what Madrecita, and Francis, want me to do, I’m sure. They may even have told Juana not to lock my door – I don’t know.

  ‘But without the land I am nothing. I will have nothing. I will … I will be one of those girls you see on the docks of Galveston, or in the saloons of Houston and Austin … I will not do that. I will not. I will have my land – I will have my name – or I will hang.’

  She made a move, as if, again, she would have taken January’s hand, but stopped herself. ‘I need your help, Señor Enero,’ she said softly. ‘Please.’

  TEN

  They rode all night by the waxen glow of the full moon, and reached Perdition with the sun well into the sky. Ekholm, when he lent them spare horses to speed their travel – as well as Lucien and Cousin Sven, to ride with them until the walls of the hacienda were sighted – suggested they wait til sun-up Wednesday to depart, but January demurred. ‘Taggart was shot on Monday morning,’ he said. ‘If we don’t arrive until dusk Wednesday, that means by the time I can get a look at the ground – in the orchard and in the arroyo where somebody obviously wanted to keep Madame Taggart pinned down so that she’d have no alibi – it’ll be Thursday. Maybe Shaw can read three-day-old signs.’ He nodded toward the tall Kentuckian, who was saddling up January’s big roan gelding by torchlight in the Ekholm corral. ‘I can’t.’

  Selina, who had followed the party out to the corral and stood leaning her chin on the top cottonwood pole of the fence, had suggested hesitantly, ‘Might it be better if Mr Shaw went with Valentina – Madame Taggart—’ she corrected herself – she and Valentina had gotten onto first-name basis almost at once during dinner.

  ‘The thing we need most to do – and most quickly,’ January replied, ‘is to get you out of Texas. Of the three of us –’ he had gestured, from Shaw, to Hannibal – carrying saddlebags from the house – and to himself once more – ‘Mr Shaw will give you the strongest protection. Any danger you run into will be greater than any danger we’ll come up against, riding back to Rancho Perdition with Mrs Taggart.’

  He was later to remember those words with eye-rolling amazement at his own naiveté.

  He would in fact rather have had Hannibal ride with the caravan to Galveston and return to New Orleans; for the fiddler, though cheerfully willing to ride all night into whatever the hell situation awaited them, was not a strong man. By morning the drawn look had returned to his face, and January several times heard him trying to stifle the rasping, consumptive cough that spoke of exhaustion.

  But he and the fiddler both knew that he dared not leave him behind. Legally, there were no free blacks in Texas. Any man of African parentage who couldn’t account for himself – or who didn’t have whites to speak for him – was likely to find himself in the Houston bayous picking somebody’s cotton in short order, if he wasn’t simply shot for being someplace he wasn’t supposed to be.

  The rolling country north of Austin was largely empty, and due to the danger of Comanche raids, for most of the night the party rode without speaking. January saw no horsemen, but that, he knew, meant nothing. The gullies lay in darkness. Across the hills he heard the wild yikking of coyotes, and now and then the ghostly screech of an owl. Movement flickered in the corner of his eye: a prairie fox? Or a man burning with the hatred of centuries of injustice and warfare, who would like nothing better than to stake him down and skin him alive?

  Sven and Lucien turned their heads. Identified and dismissed the shadows.

  But though January burned to get an exact account of the Taggart household, even when they stopped to rest or change the horses, they did so in listening silence.

  Shortly after first light riders appeared, vaqueros in leather breeches and short jackets, riding down the slope of a hill to their left. ‘Your husband’s men?’ asked January, and Valentina nodded.

  ‘That’s Jalisco on the pinto,’ she identified a wiry, medium-sized man in the lead. ‘My husband was always having to smooth things out between the Tejano vaqueros and the Nortes … and between the Yankee Nortes from the north and the Texians and the men of the South, Tennessee and Georgia and Carolina.’ She shook her head. ‘And between the Tejanos and the Nortes and the slaves …’ January had already seen that two of the vaqueros were black.

  ‘How many men did your husband employ?’

  ‘Twenty-eight. Sixteen Tejanos, two slaves, four Yankees and six other Nortes, not counting the house servants and Malojo. It became very complicated. Buenos dias!’ She nudged her horse forward, raising her hand as the men drew near; Jalisco swept his low-crowned hat from his head, bent from the saddle in a bow. Like Ortega, h
e would have been called indio by any aristocratic Mexican of Mexico City, swart and thin and amazingly ugly, with wide, mobile lips and one large, coffee-dark eye turned disturbingly sidelong.

  ‘Doña.’ His good eye flickered from January’s face to Hannibal’s, then past them to the two blonde Swedes. ‘You didn’t run into El Jerife, then? Just as well. And these two Nortes are your friends?’

  ‘Don Hannibal Sefton.’ She introduced, of course, the white man first. ‘And Benjamin Enero.’ She did not, January noticed, specify his legal status. ‘Did Señor Quigley never come to the hacienda at all, then?’

  The vaquero shook his head. ‘He had not come when we rode out this morning, and I think he has not since. Brother Francisco –’ his deep voice slid over the name with just the trace of scorn – ‘gave us orders that his brother’s command is to be upheld: no strangers are to be permitted on Perdition land.’

  Valentina said, ‘Qué demonios …’ and Hannibal’s comment, though in Homeric Greek, was considerably stronger.

  Jalisco spread his hands, and January slid from his saddle and set about helping Lucien and Cousin Sven – with the aid of two of the vaqueros – sort out the horses, unsaddling and returning the Ekholm re-mounts to their owner, saddling those that remained of Hannibal’s little stock. Behind him, he heard Jalisco say, ‘The young señor says that El Jerife Quigley is a nationalist and a traitor, and probably had something to do with the murder himself, because Señor Taggart went over to the Houston men last October. I think he thinks you have fled for good, Doña, for we received no orders concerning yourself.’

  ‘Mierda!’ Valentina flung up her hands. ‘Don’t tell me this concerns that stupid lost silver mine that Francis thinks is somewhere … Madre de Dios!’

  ‘There’s a lost silver mine on the property?’ inquired Hannibal, dismounting.

  ‘There’s a lost hole the size of a silver mine between Francis’s ears!’ retorted Valentina. ‘He is—’ She turned in her saddle, as Cousin Sven and Lucien drew near; extended her hands, and smiled a smile that left the two young men breathless. ‘Herrar—’ She pronounced the Swedish word clumsily, but by the expressions on their faces, her listeners could have been hearing angels sing. ‘Tack sa mycket.’ And, in German scarcely less awkward, she added, ‘Thank you more than I can say.’