The Turquoise

by Anya Seton

  After that, the bitterness and the restlessness had had full dominion over Andrew. He took down the shingle, which had brought him no patients anyway, and turned his face like many another toward the West. He locked his remaining gold into the cowhide trunk and worked his way on foot and on barges, taking morose satisfaction in physical labor that left over no strength for thought. It was easy enough to find work. He was big and powerful, with the rawboned ruggedness of the Highlands, and his taciturnity increased his value. The farther West he got, the more people there were who neither asked nor welcomed questions. Many times he passed through communities where the settlers would have been fervently grateful for a physician amongst them, but he concealed his knowledge. There had grown in him a carking doubt of his own skill, and the restlessness drove him on. He had reached Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1848, when the frontier was beginning to seethe over the rumors of Sutter’s gold strike back in January. Andrew was unaffected by the gold fever. It seemed to him that he shared few emotions with the rest of mankind and that his brain and body had no urge but a ceaseless yearning for change.

  On August the tenth, Alexander Majors’s first organized freight outfit set out over the Santa Fe Trail from Independence, and Andrew went with them as driver of one of the ox-teams for a dollar a day and keep. He was not popular with the other men, for he would not join in their songs or bawdy reminiscences around the campfire at night, nor would he use the rich profanity with which the bull-whackers belabored their stupid animals. He was, however, an expert shot, and his trained surgeon’s fingers could splice a rope or mend a broken spoke far faster than theirs could. By the time they reached Council Grove, a hundred and forty-five miles along the way, they had accepted him. And a month later, when the exhausted teams plodded into Pecos Village, only a day and a half from Santa Fe, he had earned a grudging admiration. Mosquitoes, mud, thirst, and Indian scares had not feazed the silent Scot. The other bull-whackers thought him a queer stick, and promptly forgot him after they reached Santa Fe, but they respected him.

  Andrew, like many another, was disappointed by his first view of the ancient royal city. The huddle of adobe houses in a treeless valley reminded him only of a large brickyard with scattered kilns ready for the firing. Nor after he had goaded his team across the little Santa Fe River and entered the town was he attracted by a closer view. There was too much dust and dryness, too much monotony of smooth mud walls, and at the joyous cries, ‘La Entrada de la Caravana! Los Americanos! Los carros!’ too much hysterical excitement. The Mexican populace mobbed the new arrivals; children begged for pennies; the old market women, shrilly quoting prices, brandished ristras of chile or sizzling hot tortillas. And the dark-eyed girls clustered a dozen strong around each Americano, cooing, ‘Fandango tonight! You come wiz me, Senor, I Frasquita,’ or Dolores, or Josefa. ‘I your sweetheart, I fine sweetheart, por Dios!’

  Andrew escaped from the barrage of languishing eyes into La Fonda’s barroom, where to his surprise he found whiskey excellent even to his Scottish palate. After three drinks he was able to view Santa Fe with greater tolerance. He strolled quickly through the hotel’s sala, a huge room filled with faro and monte players. He wandered out into the great patio and seeing that food was being served sat down at a small table. He intensely disliked this food when it came; unknown messes of beans and chopped meat and com meal all raised to the same blistering level of red chile heat; still, as he sat on in the flower-filled patio, there came to him a certain relaxation and pleasure. Mockingbirds, in cages hung from the beams of the portale, trilled melodious imitation of lazy strumming from a guitar in the hotel corral. The air was exquisitely perfumed with the fragrance of burning cedar from a log fire in the sala, and this rare, clear air, seven thousand feet above sea level, exhilarated the blood.

  Here, at last in this foreign place, thought Andrew, there was nothing to remind him of home, not even the language. The few Americans might easily be avoided. Here, he thought with a rare spurt of optimism and confidence, he might be able to establish himself and start life again. He sent back to the bar, ordered another whiskey, and decided to winter in Santa Fe.

  But the winter passed by and he had made no niche for himself in the town. He had not the gift for making friends, and the unreasonable buried fear that the Argyllshire scandal would track him down constantly inhibited him. He was exceedingly lonely without quite knowing it, and by April the restlessness had come on him again. He bought a horse and set out through snowdrifts and spring mud on the road to the north. By the fifth of April, he had ridden through Taos and pushed on fifteen miles farther to the little Spanish village of Arroyo Hondo. Andrew hitched his exhausted horse to a post in the village’s tiny plaza, and was heading for the only posada and a drink when he saw Conchita.

  She was sitting on the back seat of a covered spring wagon waiting for her mother, who was shopping, and the girl was alone except for the coachman, who snored lustily from beneath a forward-tilted sombrero.

  Andrew stopped short with an unconscious exclamation. Conchita was beautiful, and her huge dark eyes were staring at him in naive astonishment, beneath the black lace of her mantilla which romantically shadowed her little face and glossy hair. But it was not her beauty, it was a mystical feeling of completion, as though he had been an empty vessel into which pure water had at last been allowed to flow. Between one second and the next, as he looked at Conchita, the vessel filled and the aching emptiness was gone.

  She gave a faint, embarrassed smile and gently pulled her mantilla across her face. She had never seen a man anything like this one before, so big and ruddy, with his sunburned skin and hair the color of the red earth cliff behind the hacienda. Estranjero, she thought, Americano, perhaps, and this dismayed her, for her family and all the other Spaniards who lived up here in the Colorado country hated the Americans, who had conquered them three years ago after the shameful, inexplicable defeats in Old Mexico.

  Then Conchita grew frightened, for the stranger kept on staring as though she were a miraculous vision, and if la madre came back and caught them like this, she would be very angry. But Conchita, too, found it impossible to look away, and her heart began to beat in slow, shaking thuds. For there at high noon in the sun-drenched plaza they began to say deep things to each other without sound, while the Gaelic and Spanish temperaments mingled in one trait, the capacity for swift, passionate love.

  Suddenly he walked to the wagon and put his hand on the seat beside her with an imploring gesture. ‘Tell me your name and where you live.’

  He spoke in such queer rough Spanish that it was her heart and not her brain that understood him. She glanced nervously at the driver, who still snored, then at the house across the plaza where her mother was buying silk just arrived from Chihuahua.

  She leaned toward him, and as her mantilla brushed across his hand, he trembled. ‘ María de la Concepción Valdez y Peña,’ she whispered, ‘Hacienda Alamosa, two miles down the arroyo.’

  She saw that he had not followed her quick Spanish and a look of straining disappointment came to his eyes so that she smiled and simplified it. ‘I am Conchita Valdez,’ she said, touching her breast with a white ringless hand. ‘I live at Hacienda Alamosa.’

  He nodded and started to tell her some of the crowding, impulsive things he must say to her, but she gave a little gasp, ‘Mi madre!’ and turning her back on him shrank to the farthest part of the seat.

  Andrew respected her fear because he loved her, though he had no interest in or respect for Spanish conventions, and he drew back into the shadow of the pórtale. Doña Eloisa Valdez had not noticed him. She was flushed with the heat of battle over the purchase of the silk, and pleased because she had bullied the shopkeeper into adding a length of gerga which would do very well on the floor of the small sala. She climbed heavily into the wagon beside her daughter, poked the coachman into wakefulness, and the mules trotted off, not, however, before Conchita, blushing, but unable to stop herself, had managed to look back
once.

  That look settled things for both of them.

  Andrew, with a subtlety he had not known he possessed, checked his blunt, impatient nature and descended to subterfuge. That night he knocked at the great door of the Hacienda Alamosa, representing himself as an exhausted traveler from the wild Ute country up north, and in need of shelter. The Valdez, courteous and hospitable as were all the Spaniards, took him in and treated him with great kindness, especially after Don Diego had by tactful questions discovered that his guest was not one of the detested Americanos, but instead some peculiar variety of Anglo from across the sea with which the Spaniards had no special quarrel. Moreover, their mild interest in his medical knowledge turned to gratitude when he treated three of the Valdez peons for minor ailments. Don Diego urged him to stay with them as long as he could. ‘My house and all I have is yours, amigo,’ said the fiery Don enthusiastically, and Andrew, unaccustomed to polite extravagances, was misled. He chafed because he was never alone with Conchita. Always her mother or a wizened old aunt materialized beside the girl when he tried to speak to her, but their love blazed in spite of the handicaps. After a week, Andrew could stand it no longer. He and Conchita had stolen one unchaperoned meeting in the shadow of a huge cottonwood beside the arroyo; he had held her at last in his arms and kissed her, and he saw no reason for waiting to ask her father for her. Conchita knew what the outcome would be, but she could not dissuade him.

  Andrew was dumbfounded by the fury with which Don Diego received the proposal. ‘ You have insulted my hospitality, gringo! Were you not in my house I would shoot you like a jacal!’ shouted the Don, his face glistening...

  ‘Why should it be insulting to have me love your daughter?’ said Andrew, cursing his slow Spanish, and still too much bewildered by the courteous host’s transformation to be angry.

  ‘Jesús!’ cried the Don, casting his eyes to heaven, ‘he asks me why! Because, gringo, we Valdez are of the Spanish sangre azul, and you are nothing but an Anglo adventurer, without money or land, and a heretic as well.’

  ‘My Scottish blood is as blue as yours,’ said Andrew sharply, ‘and I can earn money by my profession to support Conchita.’

  ‘Bah—’ said Don Diego, ‘what is “Scottish”! what is a “profession”! I don’t know and I don’t wish to know. You will leave my house in an hour, Señor, and Conchita will marry Don Enriquez Mora from Rio Colorado next month as I have arranged.’

  It never occurred to the old don that his daughter was involved or indeed knew anything of the big red gringo’s monstrous proposal. It never occurred to him that she or any aristocratic Spanish girl might defy a father, so after Andrew had ridden off toward the village of Arroyo Hondo, no special watch was kept over her now that there was no longer a strange man in the house.

  The lovers had made their plan in a desperate second of whispers, and two nights later, Conchita slipped from her home with only a shawl and the little figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe for luggage. She ran along the dark road to the village, the tears flowing down her face for the wrong she was doing her parents and conscience, but she had no doubts of her destiny. Andrew met her behind the ruined chapel on the hill, pulled her up before him on the horse, and they started on the long, hard road back to Santa Fe, pausing only at dawn the next day to be married by a sleepy priest at Ranchos de Taos.

  There was no pursuit. Doña Eloisa filled the days with tears and lamentations, but Don Diego announced that his daughter was henceforth dead to him, and that no one might ever again mention her name in the hacienda.

  The servants placed the black strips of mourning cloth above all the doors and windows, the pictures and mirrors were turned to the wall, and the Valdez held a solemn velorio as for a funeral.

  The news of this reached Santa Fe a month later.

  ‘And so, my bonnie lassie,’ said Andrew in his broadest Scots and the gentle rueful humor he had never shown to another human being, ‘ the twain of us’re cut off from our pasts for aye, and we maunna greet about it, but gae staunchly forward into the future taegether-r.’

  She kissed him and smiled, understanding the sense, as she always understood him. They were living in the little house on San Francisco Street, and for eight months they were happy, an ecstatic unreasoning happiness granted to few lovers. Then, on that January night of Fey’s birth, the vessel which Conchita had filled for him emptied and shattered. Nor would it ever again be whole.

  Padre Miguel had been making a parish call at a house on the Marcy Road and had seen the young doctor pass on his headlong rush to the Taos trail. The priest watched with troubled eyes. Now, he thought, comes a new stage, maybe good, maybe bad, but the sight of the baby has had some effect, and the man at least looks alive again. The padre was a simple man from the peon class; the type of priest common to New Mexico before the coming of Bishop Lamy and the reform; he had had no education beyond two years at the Seminary in Durango, but he was wise in the management of souls. While he chatted with his parishioners he watched through the open door to see Andrew come back; when after an hour he had not, the little padre got up sighing. He was hungry and thirsty; he thought of his own cool room where there awaited him a pot of chile con came and a tall bottle of El Paso wine. Outside, the afternoon sun was pitiless. But he sighed again, put on his cape, and going to the street mounted his plump gray burro, Pancha, and turned her to the north.

  A mile out of town he found Andrew sitting on the piñón stump and staring at a clump of sagebrush.

  ‘Well, my friend,’ called the padre cheerfully, pulling up his donkey, ‘it’s good to see you out in the open. You’ve been shut up too long. Come home with me and we’ll have a little talk over a bottle of good wine.’

  Andrew looked up slowly, his gaze unfocused.

  The padre frowned, but he went on patiently, ‘Come, come, Señor—one must not go on forever biting the edge of a grief; this is the behavior of’—he deliberately raised his voice—‘of a coward.’

  Andrew flushed; he got up from the piñón stump. ‘ No Cameron was ever called a coward!’

  ‘Well,’ answered the padre, smiling, ‘I have not called you one, my son. I but point out a possible basis for misunderstanding. Come home with me out of this dust and heat, and let’s have a talk.’

  ‘So ye can have another whack at trying to conver-rt me, nae doot,’ said Andrew sourly in his own language, but the priest understood him.

  He shrugged his shoulders under the black cape. ‘I cannot see that you’ve had much comfort from your own creed, but we’ll not speak of that just now.’ Padre Miguel paused and dexterously flicked a fly from Pancha’s ear. He was considering the best method of dealing with this big truculent Scot. It was true, of course, that he hoped eventually to usher Andrew into the welcoming arms of the Faith, but his concern with this embittered soul had always sprung from pity as much as duty. As Conchita’s confessor, he alone, in the whole of Santa Fe, had known the tragic romance, and his sympathies had been moved by its outcome and the fate of the baby. The padre had a sentimental streak through his practical Latin soul, and he was human enough to enjoy the game of solving a psychological problem. Too, he knew that Andrew had been some kind of don in his own country, just as Conchita came from one of the best ‘rico’ Spanish families in New Mexico, and to the son of illiterate peons this aristocratic tinge added luster.

  ‘You must get back into life, Señor,’ said the priest at last. ‘You have a good trade, you are a médico.’

  Andrew laughed. ‘A doctor nobody wants. A doctor whose patients die.’

  The priest’s eyes widened at the tone of the laugh and answer. Aha—he thought, now I begin to see.

  ‘Look, amigo,’ he said softly. ‘Not the best midwife in the whole of Mexico could have saved Doña Conchita. I know. I have seen those hemorrhages happen before. It was the Will of God, and you must not torture yourself.’

  Andrew said nothing. He picked up his hat and, turning his back, began to walk down the road. The priest dug
his heels into Pancha and trotted along beside his quarry. After a while he cleared his dry throat.

  ‘You know,’ he said to the side of Andrew’s head, ‘over by the Rosario Chapel, there lives an old woman, Maria Ruiz, who has the strangest lump on her neck that I have ever seen. This lump is big as your fist and red as a chile—a most remarkable malady.’

  Andrew’s pace slackened a trifle, but he gave no sign of hearing.

  ‘Like all priests I have had to learn something of medicine,’ continued the padre; ‘still, I have never seen anything at all like this lump. The poor Maria suffers much pain.’

  ‘Get the army surgeon to look at it, then,’ said Andrew, without turning.

  ‘An American soldier!’ snorted the priest in real astonishment. ‘Maybe he’s a good hombre, but Maria would rather keep her pain and her remarkable lump.’

  In silence Andrew continued to stride, and the padre continued to bounce along on Pancha until they passed the first adobe house on the outskirts of town.

  Then Andrew spoke. ‘Does the lump move beneath the skit? when you touch it, or is it rigid?’

  Padre Miguel permitted himself a small secret smile. ‘I don’t remember, amigo; my fingers are not trained. But there is an easy way to find out, after we sit in the cool for a while and drink our wine,’ he added hastily.

  So it was through the kind heart of a little New Mexican priest that Andrew was persuaded back into a semblance of normal living. Some weeks later he successfully cut the tumor out of María Ruiz’s neck, and this feat gradually brought him a few patients. Not many, for Andrew’s brusque manner repelled the courteous Mexicans. Anyway, they saw little need for doctors. When one is sick, one lights a candle to Our Lady, one brews perhaps a few herbs, one goes to bed, and after a while one gets well. Or if not—then it is the Will of God.

  As for the Americans, what few families there were outside the garrison were all of military connection and they had Doctor Simpson, their army surgeon. They knew nothing of Andrew.