Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  She turned and walked along the churchyard wall, north toward the last houses of the village, humble jacals where candle-light shone luminous through the cracks in the crude thatch of the roofs. No doors were closed, and through them January saw the families who remained to celebrate at home: gaggles of sisters in bright skirts, men in the white clothes of the field workers, laughing together, feasting with one another and with those they had loved and had missed with such daily pain for who knew how many years.

  It is so good to see you again, my friends, even though we cannot actually see you. My beloved, I have never forgotten you—We’re all so glad you haven’t forgotten us, you who are happy now forever. . . .

  Beyond, the dark trees loomed, and the chuckle of water could be heard over the playing of the now-distant band. The women of the village had done their laundry here, he thought, for five hundred years at least. In the clear silver light of the gibbous moon, the girl strode out to the rocks along the stream, and January heard a man’s soft whistle:

  What will your mother say, Pretty Peggy-o,

  What will your mother say, Pretty Peggy-o?

  What will your mother say when she finds you’ve gone away . . . ?

  Valentina stood still. “John . . .”

  John Dillard stepped from the shadows of the trees and caught Valentina in his arms.

  TWENTY-THREE

  January unslung the rifle from his back and said, “Hands up! Don’t touch your gun.” He stepped into the moonlight, where they could see him, rifle pointed, and added, “I won’t do you harm.” He repeated that last in Spanish for Valentina’s benefit, for she reached down for the carpetbag in a way that made January guess she had a weapon in it.

  “There are horses in the trees.” Rose emerged beneath the cottonwoods, leading a string of five animals: two horses under saddle, two haltered spares, and a laden mule.

  With a strangled cry Valentina sprang at her, and Dillard caught the girl around the waist and dragged her back, for Rose was armed, her pistol in her hand. Valentina thrashed against the Tennessean’s grip, kicking and biting. “I won’t go back! You can’t make me go back!”

  “No one’s asking you to go back,” said January in Spanish, stepping forward and lowering his rifle but keeping a wary eye on Dillard.

  “He is a beast!” Valentina turned on January, panting, her fair hair tumbled over her shoulders and her eyes grim and wild. “I will kill myself before I return to his house! He is the Devil, and living with him—with him and with my sister!—is like being in Hell!”

  Dillard, who quite clearly didn’t understand a word of what was being said, looked warily from Valentina to January and said, “It’s all right, corazón. It’s gonna be all right. . . .” His hand was bleeding from where she’d bitten him. To January he said, “I got the idea you was no friend to Prospero de Castellón—nor to Santa Anna neither. I swear to you my first order of business, once we get over the border into Texas, will be for me to make Miss Valentina my wife—and a braver and more intelligent girl you’ve never crossed paths with, exceptin’ maybe your own lady Rose. And I swear to you on the Testament that before she’s my wife I’ll not lay a hand on her. I may have little in the way of worldly goods, but I do have my honor, and she has hers. Just because I’m not some Mexican grandee . . .”

  “I believe you.” January held up his free hand to stem what he guessed would be everything Dillard would have said to Don Prospero, could Dillard ever have come into that gentleman’s presence. He suspected the Tennessean would take serious offense if he had said simply, It isn’t any of my business whether you seduce Valentina de Castellón or not—which it wasn’t, and if he’d made it his business, Dillard would have been the first to tell him that as a black man his opinion didn’t matter.

  Whites were strange that way.

  Men were strange that way.

  And he had a good idea that Valentina de Castellón was more than able to take care of herself. Her virginity, he was willing to bet, would not survive the night, no matter how much Dillard struggled to spare it.

  He went on. “And I would not have stopped you tonight, except that for a friend’s sake I must speak to Señorita de Castellón, and ask something of her that she may be unwilling to give.”

  He turned to Valentina, who had locked her arm tight around Dillard’s waist and was following the conversation between the two men with the watchfulness of an animal. “Señorita, I will not stay you from leaving your father’s house—”

  “You cannot, and I would like to see you try!”

  “Corazón . . .”

  The glare she gave Dillard at this mollifying interjection promised a lifetime of half-apologetic, timid corazóns.

  “I will not stay you,” January repeated, “but nor will I let you leave without a written explanation—to your family and to the authorities in Mexico City—that you were never Hannibal Sefton’s lover, and that the letters to you in his hand were in fact translations of clandestine correspondence from a Norteamericano. And your letters to Dillard would help.”

  Her chin went up. “It isn’t anyone’s business what I do.” In the shadowy floods of her hair the sapphire earrings she’d inherited from her erring mother sparkled darkly. “I won’t go back to be offered like a piece of camote to any man my father wants to ally himself with! To live under the threat that if I’m not a good girl he’ll repudiate my mother and have me declared an adulterina, whom no man will marry! To have my room searched, to have my things taken away—even my mother’s jewelry!—and given to his whores. What is it to anyone where I go or what I do or where I choose to seek my happiness?”

  “It is something to Hannibal,” answered January, a little surprised that he felt no impulse to box this defiant child’s ears. “Because of those letters he will be hanged for your brother’s murder.”

  Valentina blinked at him in astonishment. “The letters have nothing to do with it,” she retorted in the tone of one who has never connected her own actions with other people’s unhappiness in her life. “He poisoned my brother, and I don’t care that he did. Fernando was a beast—more of a beast than my father, for at least Father you can talk to sometimes, when he’s not thinking he’s the God of the Night. Fernando was like a marble building, cold and locked up. Like a bank that will never lend you a copper medio if you are starving because it is not in the interests of the bank.”

  She stooped to pick up her reboso and pulled it over her shoulders, shivering in the chill by the water. “Bad enough that Father would have married me off to that old nanny-goat Rafael to get me off his hands . . . and whose fault is it that no one who was not forced to do so would take a girl who could be turned out of her inheritance at the next twist of her father’s madness? But all Rafael is interested in is keeping Fructosa hacienda, and having his mother live in the town house, and making everything look as if they were still rich and not as poor as the beggars on the Cathedral steps. And even so, Fernando was going to turn them out and put those lands into the hands of a ‘good administrator’ to make them produce more money for him!”

  Her voice shook with passion, and Dillard, who’d been pursuing this back-and-forth with furrowed brow, ventured, “Dearest heart, if this man . . .” He stumbled over the subjunctive clause and retrieved himself with “Does this man trouble you?”

  Valentina made a gesture at him to shut up, as if she were shooing flies. “Fernando said he would give Rafael enough money to start a ‘respectable business’—as if that clown wouldn’t go through whatever Fernando gave him at the gambling tables in a week!—and he was terrified that if Don Rafael learned I’d written love-letters to another man, he wouldn’t marry me. Then I’d be on Fernando’s hands, like a carriage-horse that kicks, and would end my days like silly old Doña Filomena, having to be someone’s duenna because no one would have me. Hannibal poisoned my brother because he deserved to be poisoned—”

  “Hannibal did not poison your brother,” cut in January.

 
“Oh, and you did not cut the throat of poor Señor Guillenormand, either, eh?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “After practically accusing the poor man of murdering Fernando himself . . .”

  “And where,” asked January, “did you hear that?”

  She shrugged. “I heard him ranting on about it to Uncle ’Stasio in the kitchen last night.”

  “Considering that Don Anastasio did not arrive at Mictlán until nearly midnight,” pointed out Rose, “that was awfully late for a proper young lady to be in the kitchen.”

  “I was getting food,” returned Valentina sulkily. “Food for this journey. Josefa told me how you had said there was a great quarrel between the President and the Nortes. I knew my John”—she pronounced it “Joan”—“would leave word for me in our secret place, and that I would have to go to him quickly.”

  “Which I take it you did,” said January, “while everyone was out looking for me?”

  “I knew he could not come close to the casco,” said the girl. “I had meant to go while Josefa was at Mass.”

  “You’re lucky,” remarked Rose, “that none of your father’s vaqueros—or El Moro’s men—encountered you on your way to the pyramids. I take it you chose the pyramids as your post-box because few will venture there?”

  “They’re all cowards,” sniffed Valentina. “Cowards and poltroons. I do not fear Father’s moldy old gods.”

  “I swear to you, January,” Dillard launched in again in English, “that I’ve loved this girl since first I laid eyes on her. If we’ve gone about this thing clandestinely, it’s because that crazy father of hers wouldn’t hear of a match between her and a poor man, a true American. But my intentions toward her have been of the most honorable from the first. After that hoo-rah at the British minister’s, Butler advised the lot of us to head straight for the town gates and not even stop at our digs; most of the boys took off straight for Vera Cruz. But once Valentina’s family knows she’s gone, that’s where they’ll look for us. We aim to go straight up overland, across the Rio Grande to San Antonio Béxar—”

  “And warn Sam Houston,” asked January softly, “that Santa Anna’s on his way? And exactly how many men he has with him, and in what state his artillery is? And join the militia he’s raising as well?”

  “Something like that.” The young man’s arm tightened protectively around Valentina’s waist. And Valla, her head high, closed her hand over his, where it lay on her hip, as if she guessed what January was truly asking.

  “If Mexico was the land it should be—that it was before Santa Anna took it over—we wouldn’t have to be doin’ this,” the Tennessean added. “We could have dealt with a fair government here fairly.”

  January kept himself from remarking that the Americans—who’d just finished running the Louisiana Chickasaws off their land—would probably have rebelled against whatever government Mexico had, fair or unfair.

  He merely turned to Valentina and asked in Spanish, “And that was what you were doing the night Fernando was killed? Stealing food and passing it over the wall?”

  “Food, and some of my jewels,” she replied. “Such of them as my father hadn’t already stolen from me for his whore.”

  She turned to Dillard and said in halting English, “Joan, give him what he ask. All my letter. We come not back here again.”

  “You’re sure, corazón?”

  She nodded, and Dillard stepped away from her, and picked his way over to the pack-mule. While he opened one of the saddlebags, January heard again the drift of music on the night air: how long would it be before Isabella and Anastasio realized Valentina wasn’t somewhere in the churchyard throng?

  Certainly not until after Mass. Given the comings and goings among the tombs, the amount of wine and food and conversation, it might be two or three in the morning before anyone realized she wasn’t around—but it could easily be noon before they realized she hadn’t returned to the casco and gone to bed.

  Rose, January noticed, kept her distance from Dillard, her pistol trained and ready. He didn’t think she needed this. The Tennessean—soon-to-be Texian—was at the moment engaged in trying to light a small bull’s-eye lantern. But Rose was not one to take chances.

  To Valentina, January said, “If you had the food ready to pass over the wall as soon as it grew dark on the night of Fernando’s death, you must have taken it from the kitchen earlier in the day. Did you see who else came and went from the kitchen while Guillenormand was preparing supper?”

  “Did I!” The girl threw up her hands. “I must have waited and watched for an hour behind the door of one of the corn-stores, waiting until the kitchen-yard was clear! Poor Señor Guillenormand was like a madman when he cooked! I thought he would drive that weaselly valet of Fernando’s out with a frying-pan; and then Padre Ramiro kept hanging about, hoping to steal enough camote to last him through the night. Uncle ’Stasio was in and out a dozen times, with pears and apples and bottles of wine and bunches of grapes, and Father ordering him about like a slave. . . .”

  “Don Anastasio is Doña Gertrudis’s brother, isn’t he?” asked January, and Valentina nodded.

  “They do not speak of it, since Father made her go live with Consuela. Their father was the younger brother of the Marquis de Merced. The whole family was on the verge of bankruptcy when ’Stasio supported the Emperor Iturbide, seven years ago, and Santa Anna turned against him. Father kept ’Stasio from being put into prison, but ’Stasio lost everything—lands, house, cattle, even his books. Father bought up his lands the way he did old Don Alejandro de Bujerio’s, and he lets Isabella go on living in their old town house. But they’re as much his peons as any of the indios in the village.”

  Above the trees, fireworks exploded with a loud crack, crimson rain and golden lightning showering down through the darkness. Mellow as butterscotch, the notes of trumpets soared into the sky.

  “’Stasio’s another one, like Rafael, who smiles and bows and pretends not to be insulted, only so that he may continue to have a roof over his head. For Rafael it is his mother and his aunts and his sisters, and making sure everyone has jewels and coaches and good food and can put my cousins in the most fashionable convents. For ’Stasio it is his precious orchards and his precious library. And it all comes down to the same thing: they let themselves be ruled by the whim of a madman because they’re afraid.”

  Scorn flickered in her voice—the scorn of one who has never felt hunger or cold or the despair of responsibilities that she is unable to uphold. “I am not afraid.”

  January studied her, that slim, beautiful girl in her gaudy skirt and borrowed reboso, and tried to picture her alone in a foreign land with a child or children to feed. When Santa Anna’s Army reached Texas, Dillard would be in the forefront of the battle. And even with the amount of sand and sawdust in the Mexican Army’s gunpowder, some of those bullets would find flesh.

  Would she be afraid then?

  Or would she stay on anyway, to become a Texas woman, the founder of a new state?

  Another explosion, and the sky was filled with blue and green sparkles. “Sulphate of potassa,” remarked Rose.

  “Uncle ’Stasio makes them,” agreed Valentina, sitting on a rock as Dillard came back carrying the lantern and a slim sheaf of papers. “He can make nearly anything.” She took from him a lead-pencil, and tore off the bottom of one of the sheets. “‘I, Maria-Valentina de Castellón, daughter of Don Prospero de Castellón and of Melosia Valenzuela, do here attest and swear that the letters written to me in the hand of’—by the hand of?—‘Mr. Hannibal Sefton were in fact only translations of letters received by me from my affianced husband, Mr. John Dillard of Smith County, Tennessee, and Nashville-on-the-Brazos, Texas; and in keeping silent concerning this fact Mr. Sefton was obeying my earnest pleas, and defending my honor.’ There!”

  She signed with a flourish and thrust the papers at January. Gravely, she added, “It will do you no good, but I do owe it to Hannibal that at least he not be ac
cused of trying to seduce me. He did us all the greatest of services, poisoning my brother. Tell him I thank him for that. We all should, Josefa and Natividad and even Father, because it was Fernando who really wanted Father locked up. I mean, if Father had been locked up, Fernando would have taken over Saragosse as well, and put in a ‘good administrator’—” Her voice twisted over the words, as if she said slave-driver or whoremaster. “But ’Stasio was afraid if he didn’t help Fernando, Fernando would have his way anyway and then would throw him—and Isabella—out into the road.”

  She put her arm through Dillard’s. “And if we are taken,” she added to January, “I will tell them that you forced me to write that letter—and all of these as well—and that you dishonored me afterwards. Let us go, amor mio.” She smiled up at Dillard. “We can be in Jalapa by morning.”

  “And God help him,” murmured Rose as the Texian and Don Prospero’s younger daughter mounted their horses and splashed away up the course of the trickling stream, “the day he runs afoul of that little cactus-blossom. Curious how it didn’t seem to occur to any of them—not Rafael or Don Anastasio or Valentina—that being thrown out to make one’s own living is not the end of the world.”

  “God forbid that the nephew of the Marquis de Merced should have to enter trade.” January slung his rifle back over his shoulder and crossed the moonlit rocks back to where the overgrown path led up to the curing-shed. “Or learn how to deal with life that doesn’t include being treated with respect by everyone he meets.”

  “For a woman it’s different, of course.” Rose uncocked her pistol and slipped it into her sash. “There isn’t much else Doña Gertrudis can do except be passed along as a duenna to whoever in the family wants one—including the bastard daughter of a family friend who’s no better than she should be. Whatever papers Don Prospero may have had regarding the status of his friend’s lands and property must have been kept fairly secret—it doesn’t seem to be something Ylario knows, for instance. But Fernando would certainly have come across them in sorting out Don Prospero’s effects.”