by Anya Seton
Still, in time, with the padre’s help Andrew made his limping adjustment to reality, and a more complete adjustment to his baby—Fey. Not long after he had taken over the care of her, he yielded one night to an impulse. He wrote a brief, unemotional letter to his father, telling of his whereabouts, his marriage to Conchita, her death, and the birth of the baby. He did not refer to the circumstances of his exile; he made no mention of the stepmother; he kept to a dry recital of fact. But he hoped—and all through the following summer, while the wagon trains brought in regular mail, he haunted the little post-office on the plaza. There was never any answer.
Chapter Two
FEY WAS SEVEN when her father first discovered the child’s strange gift. They were still living in the little house on San Francisco Street, all alone together, except that Fey’s former nurse Ramona came in sometimes to help dean and cook.
On this May afternoon, Andrew came back from seeing a patient, one of the Saldivars who had a large house near the plaza and were of the rico class which he was never invited to visit. He had been called as a last resort at the suggestion of one of the house servants whom he had cured of the flux. The lady of the house, Doña Dolores Saldivar, lay very ill of a persistent and unexplainable vomiting, and, besides this, there were other unpleasant gastric symptoms. Andrew had considered and rejected a dozen diagnoses which did not fit the picture, and he walked home with dragging steps, let himself heavily into the house, and sat down at his table to stare into the small fire.
Fey, who had been playing with a corn-husk doll she had made, ran to greet her father as usual, but she saw at once that he was troubled, and without speaking the child settled on the colchón near him—the rolled-up mattress which served as seat by day and as her bed by night.
'I dinna ken what ails the woman,’ said Andrew aloud. Failure again. She was going to die, this first influential patient. And the old fear and doubt of his own worth sprang at him. He pulled from his pocket a tom linen doth and unfolded it carefully. It was caked with bloody vomitus from the poor woman’s retchings. He had brought it for another examination which he knew would be futile. If he only had a microscope! There was no money for a microscope. Though living was fairly cheap in Santa Fe, and he had hoarded the remaining gold pieces with Scottish thriftiness, they had had to be spent for rent and clothes. There were none left now. His few patients mostly paid him in produce: an olla of goat’s milk, a chicken, or firewood cut from the near-by forests. When they paid at all.
Andrew’s friend, the little padre, had left Santa Fe four years ago in 1853 after the arrival of Bishop Lamy and his energetic vicar, Joseph Macheboeuf. These cultured French priests had taken over the neglected New Mexican see under direct orders from Rome, and they had been scandalized at the laxness of the native clergy. The Reverends Juan Ortiz in Santa Fe and Antonio Martínez in Taos constantly behaved in most unclerical fashion, fomenting revolts against the Americans, including the ’47, which had resulted in the massacre of Governor Charles Bent, and Martínez at least kept a shameless harem of concubines. The new bishop and his vicar met violent hostility to their attempts at discipline, and it had been necessary to make a clean sweep. The good had necessarily gone with the bad, and Padre Miguel had found himself transferred to a distant mountain parish eighty miles away. He had philosophically accepted his orders like a true soldier of the Cross, but his grief at leaving home under an undeserved cloud had included disappointment at never having accomplished Andrew’s conversion.
With the departure of Padre Miguel, Andrew’s tenuous contact with Catholicism ceased. Nor was there at that time any Presbyterian Church for him to attend. He seldom thought of the Kirk at all, but he did send to Missouri for a Bible and from this he taught Fey to read. She had learned very quickly, for she was intelligent and wanted to please her father, who was sometimes harsh, though she knew that he loved her. When he was cross, it was because he was unhappy. She had always known this, just as she had always known how to woo him out of his black moods until he gave her the reward of his rare difficult smile.
She watched him now from her colchón while he frowned at the soiled cloth on the table. She saw and intuitively understood the droop of his big shoulders, the bitter way his mouth curved in. Something was very wrong this time, and she ached to help him.
She watched his face and the ache grew until it was almost pain. Suddenly the pain quivered and stopped. There was an instant of suspension and then it seemed as though her mind were bathed in a soft golden light. This was a delicious feeling, but she could not wait to enjoy it. The light tunneled, focusing into a scene. A vague picture without meaning which yet conveyed to her an essence of compulsion. There was something she must do.
Fey slid off the colchón and walked to the table. She reached out her hand and picked up a corner of the stained linen. At once the picture grew vivid.
‘Don’t! ’ cried Andrew sharply. ‘ What ails ye, bairn! ’
Fey shook her head, still holding the linen. ‘Dada,’ she said in a slow, clear voice, ‘I see a lady in bed, dreadful sick. She has long brown hair and a gold chain at her neck. There’s four candles by the bed and an old woman praying. There’s pink calico around the walls and a silver looking-glass. I see a brown and green colcha on the bed and a great picture of a bird stitched in the middle.’
Andrew stared at the little figure beside him. ‘Ye’re daft, Fey! What new game is this?’ He spoke with sharpened authority, but his voice wavered. Had the bairn ever been in the Saldivar bedroom which she was describing so exactly? But he knew she had not.
‘The lady was sick on this cloth,’ said the child, paying no attention to the interruption. ‘She threw up something bad.’ Fey hesitated, compelled now to find words for impression as well as scene. ‘I think somebody gives the bad stuff to her—to make her die.’
‘What!’ cried Andrew, starting up. Poison! Of course not, fantastic nonsense. He settled back. ‘Whisht, lassie. Stop this havering!’
‘In a wee, white cup with water,’ continued Fey, unheeding. ‘A woman gives it to her, a young bonnie-looking woman with a red mouth that smiles and smiles.’
‘What’s the woman’s name?’ said Andrew, in spite of himself.
Fey heard him for the first time. She drew her eyebrows together.
‘It’s going,’ she said uncertainly. ‘The light’s going, Dada.
I dinna ken the woman’s name. It feels like M-’ She thought a moment. ‘ María—Marta—I canna get it. Nor see the fine room any more.’
She sighed, and, staring at her hand in a puzzled way, she let the linen corner drop from her fingers.
Andrew swallowed. ‘Wash your hands,’ he commanded.
The child obediently went to the back room and poured water into a bowl, then she returned to her father, who was still sitting by the table.
‘You’re not fashed, are you?’ she asked nervously, when he did not speak. ‘I wanted to help you, and of a sudden I felt a bonnie warm light, and I saw pictures’—she hesitated, searching through her meager experience for a simile—‘a bit like looking into that black box you showed me with the candle behind it and the colored picture in back. You’re not vexed, are you, Dada?’ she persisted piteously.
Andrew looked at his daughter. She was not a pretty child. She was small for her age and skinny, and her head seemed overweighted by the quantities of long curly black hair. She had a wide mouth too big for her face, and the translucent Castilian skin she had inherited from her mother seemed startlingly pale for a healthy child. Her one beauty was her eyes, large and smoky-gray between the black lashes. Sometimes they sparkled with dancing lights; often they were grave and shadowed; but always they reminded Andrew of the misty Northern waters half the world away.
‘I’m not fashed, bairn,’ he said at last, ‘but I’m thinking you’ve a tre-e-mendous imagination.’
‘I didna help you, after all, did I?’ she said, her mouth drooping.
Andrew pulled her to him and kissed
her on the forehead. ‘I doot it, lassie, but the things you said are unco’ strange. Mind you forget it all now. Put the pot on to boil for our supper, and do your page of writing ’til I come back. I’m going out for a bit.’
While Andrew walked back to the Saldivars, one half of his brain chided him for being a credulous, superstitious coof. The child lived too much alone. She was getting fanciful—or worse—she was play-acting. It was folly she had talked, and if he acted on it he would make a fool of himself before the Saldivars, who already had no faith in him.
Still he continued to walk toward the plaza, for an impulse sprung from his Gaelic heritage vanquished reasoning.
‘It canna be,’ murmured Andrew out loud as he approached the Saldivar pórtale. ‘I’m a man of science, and I weel know the bairn canna see through walls.’ But he knocked on the carved pine door, and when a sulky servant had admitted him, and while he walked hesitantly through the patio, he saw a face peer quickly at him through a half-shut door. The face of a handsome girl with a red, smiling mouth. ‘Who’s that?’ he cried to the servant in so sharp a tone that the startled woman answered him at once. ‘That is Doña Marcheta, doctor, our poor Señora’s cousin.’
Andrew went up to the sick-room, and on a table beside the bed he saw a small white cup with clear liquid in it. He sniffed and tasted it. Then he asked to see Don José Saldivar. The young man came immediately, his face drawn with worry, for he loved his wife. Andrew motioned him into an adjoining room and said, with grim courage, ‘I think at last, Señor, that I know what is wrong with Doña Dolores, and I think we can save her.’
Andrew did save her. Marcheta, upon being questioned, broke into hysterical confession. Her motive in trying to poison her cousin was very simple. She had fallen in love with Don José, who ignored her and obstinately preferred his wife. There was, of course, no scandal. Doña Marcheta was packed back to El Paso from whence she had come four months ago, and in the course of some weeks Dona Dolores got well. Andrew received a hundred pesos for his services and formal expressions of gratitude. But that was the end of it, and after that the Saldivars politely ignored him, moved by the human desire to obliterate all connection with so unsavory an event.
Andrew had one talk with Fey about her strange part in the Saldivar case and before doing so he had thought long and earnestly. It had startled him out of the unemotional world in which he preferred to live and focused a new awareness on his child. He loved her; he had conscientiously tried to rear her as well as a lonely embittered man can raise a child, but he fought entanglement with anything, ever again. Now he was jarred from his absorption.
‘Lassie,’ he said one evening after supper, ‘put your writing away, I want to talk to ye.’
Fey looked up. She had, at his direction, been laboriously copying the sixty-ninth Psalm. ‘Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me...’ Its meaning did not touch her except for a vague distaste for so much muddiness. It was simply an exercise in which Andrew later would correct punctuation and each carelessly formed letter, as he did every evening. She wiped her pen on a scrap of goat leather, closed the little tin inkwell and waited.
Andrew nodded and said, ‘ Did ye ever before that other night have visions of things ye canna really see?’
‘No, Dada.’ She was surprised by the question and the gentleness of its tone. Over a week had passed since that night and she had almost forgotten it. ‘I dream sometimes,’ she added, ‘strange, true-feeling dreams, but not like that.’
Andrew leaned back on the hard chair and crossed his legs. ‘It may be that ye never will again; and there’s few would believe it did they know. There isna doot, however, that ye saw the truth that time.’
‘Did I?’ she asked, her eyes widening. ‘I dinna rightly remember what I said.’
‘Nor do I want ye to try,’ he said decidedly. ‘But your vision or whatever it was did good. Great good.’
Andrew frowned, searching for words where words came hard. ‘I’m not a re-legious man, Fey. Since——’ The two grooves between his sandy eyebrows deepened. He went on in a voice edged with anger that the child knew was not for her. ‘Some years back I ceased to believe in Deity, except perhaps as a personification of evil—— Auld Clootie, the deil, who lies in wait to snatch all comfort and all joy and blast it with his stinking breath. Ay, the deil is easy enough to believe in-’
He clamped his mouth shut, seeing Fey’s eyes soften to a curiously mature pity. ‘Forgive me, bairn. It wasna that I meant to say. I’m wrong to haver at ye like that, because, though there may not be God, there is goodness. I’ve not met it often, but I believe it. That’s what I want ye to remember about your vision, if ye ever have the like again. ’Tis a rare gift and must be used for good. To help others, not yourself. As ye wanted to help me that night. Will ye remember, lassie? ’
Fey got up and went to her father; she slipped her hand into his, impressed by his earnestness, wanting to comfort-him. ‘I’ll remember, Faither,’ she said. He patted her cheek and pulled her onto his knee. She curled up against him, and began to smooth very quietly one of the leather buttons on his buckskin vest. Enjoying the cool smoothness of the button, playing a little game with it in her mind.
‘My mother had the sight,’ continued Andrew, half to himself. ‘And many others in the Highlands. ’Tis an uncanny thing—and science wilna admit it exists.’ He paused, thinking. The pineal gland, perhaps, was the site of this extra sense, the rudimentary extra eye for which there seemed no purpose. He remembered a lesson on the anatomy of the brain, and the scornful voice of the old professor while he dissected out a tiny gray blob, saying, ‘And for this, gentlemen, we can find no function at all, unless indeed it be the gateway to the land of fairies and bogles as I’ve heard tell the heathen Hindu believes.’ The students had all laughed dutifully. But we didna know then the functions and site of the soul, and we don’t know now. thought Andrew. He sighed, and Fey, who had been waiting for his attention to return to her, said eagerly, ‘Please, Dada, tell some more about Granny and when you were a little boy in Scotland. Tell about the time you and Granny took the boat to the Isle of Skye and you saw where Flora MacDonald hid Bonnie Prince Charlie.’
These stories, on the rare occasions when she could persuade her father to tell them, were her greatest entertainment. She listened with parted lips and shining eyes to any tale of his Scottish boyhood. It was not until she was grown-up that she realized how abruptly these stories always stopped at his mother’s death, when Andrew was eighteen. Of his later years, his trip to America, or Conchita, he seldom spoke at all.
‘Have ye no heard enough about Prince Charlie, bairn?’ said Andrew, smiling. ‘But ’tis in your blood as in mine, for our ancestor the Great Lochiel Cameron near got him back on his rightful throne, and would have except for the slaughter at Culloden.’
‘Tell about the battle,’ Fey pleaded.
Andrew looked at the excited little face and his conscience awoke further. The child should not have to beg for tales of long past battles, or of a country she could not possibly imagine. She should have friends her own age; she should have games and running and playing like other children, and she should go to school. But where? The Sisters of Loretto had recently opened an academy for well-to-do Catholic children, but its religious auspices made that out of the question for Andrew. The only alternative was a tiny school run by Mrs. Howe, wife of a United States Army officer. There were objections to this too—its probable cost and his own strong disinclination to meeting new people or explaining himself in any way. Still, it would have to do.
‘I think I must send ye to school in the fall, lass,’ he said abruptly.
Fey was used to his long silences and arbitrary changes of subject, but this one floored her. ‘ School? ’ she repeated blankly. ‘What school, Dada?’
‘The small American one over by Fort Marcy.’
‘American!’ she cried. ‘Oh, please not—-with all those noisy rough soldiers!’
Andrew laughed. ‘Not with the soldiers, with their bairns. Come to that—Fey,’ he added soberly, ‘ you’re an American yourself.’
The child stared up at him, trying to adjust to this new idea. ‘But you’re Scottish, Dada, and’—she hesitated—‘and my mother was Spanish.’
Andrew winced; even from this child he could not bear mention of Conchita.
‘Yes,’ he said briefly. ‘A Spanish dona. But ye were born under the American flag. Most Americans come from mixed parentage. It makes no difference. And I’ve decided that ye shall go to school in the fall.’
Unless, he added to himself, we move from here altogether before that. For there was nothing but memories to keep him in Santa Fe, and his sense of duty to his little girl brought realization that they could go back East to a city where he might establish a flourishing practice at last and she have many advantages. In September, perhaps, he thought, I might have enough money to buy our way in an eastbound wagon to Independence, and then across to St. Louis. They needed doctors there nine years ago, very like they still do.
Fey never knew this plan. When September came, Andrew was buried four feet beneath the sage in the town of San Miguel where he had ridden to meet and consult with Doctor Kane from Mora.
On that August morning, when she saw her father for the last time, Fey had no premonition. Nothing warned her that he would not be back in three days as he had promised. He had showed her how to bolt their door at night, and Ramona was to come in every day so that Fey would be quite safe and cared for. The child walked a little way along the Pecos road beside her father’s horse, and though she felt a trifle disconsolate at the thought of the separation, the prospect was much lightened by the promise of a gift which Andrew meant to bring back to her. He leaned from his horse to kiss her good-bye and she trotted home quite happily. She was used to being alone, and both her nature and her upbringing had made her self-reliant. She cleaned the house with Ramona’s help, played with her corn-husk doll, did the lessons Andrew had assigned to her, and told herself long stories, for like all solitary children she had an active imaginative life.
