Carla Kelly's Christmas Collection

by Carla Kelly

  Deep sobs shook her. Sotomayor sat close by in silence for only a moment before he wrapped both arms about her and pushed her head down onto his shoulder. In a pleasant baritone, he hummed a little tune that resonated in his chest and brought her surprising comfort.

  Sarah let him console her. He hummed and rubbed her back until the tears were gone, replaced by a quiet calm that she wished would never end.

  And then, suddenly, she was shy. She shifted her position and he released her immediately.

  “You’re awfully adept with weepy women,” Sarah murmured, embarrassed.

  He laughed. “I told you I have two little girls. Tempestuous creatures!” He sighed then and tugged on his moustache. “And Liria.”

  He said nothing more, and Sarah did not press him.

  After another moment he handed her a handkerchief. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and lay down to sleep, more reassured than at any time since she and James left Lisbon last summer.

  The attack came at dawn, when she was most comfortable. All she was aware of at first was that someone—the colonel most likely—had whisked a cloak off her. She mumbled something and burrowed deeper in her own cloak.

  “Get up.”

  The words were low and she might have been mistaken, but there was no mistaking the sharp slap to her backside.

  Sarah sat up, angry now, even as she was still groggy, and ready to tell him what she thought, but the colonel was already running toward the horses, which had begun to mill around and whinny to one another.

  No one else was up. The sky was dark still; it threatened snow. Sarah rose to her knees, mystified by the low rumble in the distance and the trembling of the earth under her. She looked in the direction of the horse herd, wondering that so few animals could cause such a sound.

  And then she saw the French cavalry on the rim of the hill she had crossed only yesterday, and leapt to her feet, her heart in her mouth. She picked up her skirts and ran for the horses, the sound of the charge in her ears, and another sound of men wailing in high, banshee voices that raised the hair on her neck. In one wild moment, she remembered the stories the officers had told her of that terrible noise and how grateful she had felt never to have heard that eerie, warbling cry.

  Her pitiful excuse of a horse that yesterday could scarcely put one hoof in front of the other was snorting and rearing now, its eyes rolling in terror. The colonel had managed to bridle the animal—how, she couldn’t imagine—but it would not stand still for her sidesaddle.

  Other soldiers were up now, some running for the horses, others just huddling together in the fog of sleep. Sarah couldn’t see Dink anywhere.

  Her attention was yanked back forcibly to her horse.

  With a scathing oath, the colonel threw down the sidesaddle and leapt into his saddle. He held his hand out for her, but she backed away.

  “I left my duffel bag by the fire,” she said breathlessly. “Everything I value is in there. My clothes, some food. I can’t leave it behind.”

  The French were firing now, some dismounted and taking deliberate aim at the British soldiers only beginning to wake to the chaos of early morning. Others had drawn their swords, and were slashing among the wounded.

  “Lady, please,” said the colonel. He leaned out of the saddle and tried to grab her, but she danced out of his reach, confused by the noise and the smell of gunpowder.

  Driven by the demon of panic, she turned to run, heedless of the danger, crazy to gather up her few pitiful belongings and the odds and ends of James’ scholarship in the Salamanca archives. She picked up her skirts and ran, mindful suddenly of the thunder of hooves behind her, and the horrible whooping and warbling that would not go away.

  “Dios mío,” shouted the colonel as he leaned down and grabbed the waistband of her dress, hauling her unceremoniously into the saddle in front of him.

  Children were running about like rabbits now, women screaming, the wounded raising their arms for someone to help them into a saddle. Bending low over Sarah and without a backward glance at the others, the colonel sailed his horse over the picket line and down a small embankment, where he dismounted and pulled Sarah after him.

  “We would only be followed,” he said as he tugged her after him into the hollowed-out overhang, of the dry riverbed. “Let us pray they have short memories, and other matters to occupy them.” He whistled twice to his horse, which sank suddenly to the ground and lay still.

  As Sarah watched, her eyes wide, all protest died in her throat. She offered no objection when the colonel clasped his hands over her ears as the main body of French cavalry struck the helpless troopers with an audible smack. She closed her eyes and made herself as small as she could against the dirt embankment, her fingers digging into the colonel’s hands.

  And then it was quiet. Colonel Sotomayor gradually removed his hands from Sarah’s ears and then whispered to her, his voice a mere tickle. “Now it becomes dangerous. Don’t even breathe.”

  She remained absolutely silent as the Spaniard grabbed the hem of her long riding habit and pulled it tight into their hiding place. The skirt was full and seemed to fill the space. As she watched, he dropped handfuls of dirt on her skirt until someone looking down from above would see no telltale fabric.

  The eerie silence hummed in her ears. After several minutes of intent listening that seemed like hours, she tried to rise to her knees.

  The colonel clamped his arms tighter around her waist. “Don’t move,” he whispered, and she had the wisdom to obey.

  They lay close together, sheltered by the overhang of the embankment, and then in another moment, they were not alone. A group of soldiers stood above them on the bank. One of them even sat down, dangling his legs over the embankment and practically in Sarah’s face. Her eyes wide with fear, she drew back as far as she could in the limited space and glanced at Sotomayor.

  The Spaniard’s face was devoid of all expression. He released his grip on Sarah’s waist and fingered the cross about his neck, his lips tight together and thin. With his other hand he pulled the dagger from his belt and laid it across Sarah’s lap.

  After silence that stretched out like warm taffy, the soldiers finally stirred. Sarah flinched at the sound of a sword slamming home in its scabbard.

  “Gone,” exclaimed one of the Frenchmen. “And now what will we tell the general?”

  “Mon Dieu,” said another. “We will follow, as we have been following. The border is far away in winter.”

  The others laughed.

  “I wonder if Hook Nose can find the border by himself,” said the first soldier.

  After another long moment, the men left the embankment. Sarah let out the breath she had been holding. She was being followed, she assumed. That much was certain. What possible use could General Clauzel have with the Columbus’ papers? Why had he allowed her to leave Salamanca with them in the first place? And he had seemed so kind. It made no sense to her.

  Still not moving and scarcely breathing, Sarah and the colonel remained where they were, listening as the cavalry, augmented by the remaining animals of the British retreat, moved off to the west at a walk, and then a trot.

  Colonel Sotomayor shook his head as Sarah stirred. “We will wait a little longer,” he said. He grinned. “ ‘Patience—and shuffle the cards.’ You have heard this saying?”

  She nodded. Not until another hour had passed did the colonel move. He climbed quickly up the embankment and whistled twice again to his horse, which rose immediately and scrambled up the embankment after him.

  Sarah crept from the hiding space and then looked back in amazement. What a tiny space it was. She shook the dirt from her skirt and held up her hand to the colonel, who stood, hands on his hips, staring at the sight before him.

  “Help me, sir,” she asked at last.

  He shook his head. “No, lady. Stay where you are.” Sarah sat down, suddenly cold at the thought of what lay above her. Dink! Where are you? Her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them back.<
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  Before her imagination forced her down blind alleys better left unexplored, the colonel returned. He dangled his legs over the embankment and then leapt down. He had a campaign hat in his hand, Dink’s hat. Sarah took it from him and brushed at the dirt.

  “They stole everything else.” The colonel turned away and spat. “Even his smallclothes. Dios mío, I hate the French.”

  Sarah clutched the battered hat. The colonel nodded at the look in her eyes, and she did not have to ask anything. “The wounded, the soldiers…. it is as you imagine. The women and children have fled.”

  He sighed and looked to the southwest. “The cavalry has moved down the road to Ciudad Rodrigo.” He sighed. “I suppose we must go another way.” He stood still, hands on hips again, as if working through his next strategy. He shook his head. “Happy Christmas,” he muttered in English, and held out his hand to her.

  Sarah hung back, suddenly shy and ill-at-ease with this competent man. “I am sorry…” She gulped and began again. “Sorry I gave you such trouble over the duffel bag.”

  “It is nothing,” he replied, his hand still outstretched.

  She held her own out. “You could have been long away from here, Colonel, if I had not slowed you down.”

  The colonel pulled her up the embankment. “I made a promise to get you to Ciudad Rodrigo, and I will keep it.” He looked at her the way she used to stare at the menagerie in Philip Astley’s Amphitheater. “Don’t you English keep promises?”

  “Of course we do,” she said immediately, and then had the good grace to blush. “And I am impertinent to think you would not do likewise.”

  “You are,” he agreed, his tone affable, friendly almost. “But we will overlook it.” The colonel mounted and pulled her up behind him.

  They rode quickly from the massacre, the colonel talking to his horse in the softest Spanish as the animal picked its way among the dead. Sarah buried her face in the colonel’s back and tightened her arms around his waist.

  There was nothing to say. The skies threatened snow again as Colonel Sotomayor followed the Ciudad Rodrigo road a mile and then turned south to another road, a shepherd’s track through the scrub trees that shivered without their leaves and swayed in the biting wind.

  Sarah relaxed as much as she dared, but she did not loosen her grip on the colonel. The silence stretched on, and she remembered Dink’s joke that the colonel was not given to many words. She would have to supply the conversation.

  “Sir,” she began at last, “did you say that you had two daughters?”

  He nodded, the subject covered.

  She tried again in another mile, where the trees surrendered to a windswept valley.

  “Sir, what are their names?”

  He was silent for another mile or more, and then he sighed. “Mariana and Elena.”

  “Beautiful names,” she returned.

  “Yes,” he agreed. They were now on the other side of the wide valley. “My wife named them.”

  “Your wife?” Sarah asked, determined to pursue this line of inquisition to take her mind off the cold that bore down from higher mountains about them.

  “Liria.” He paused again. “She is dead.”

  “Oh, poor man,” Sarah exclaimed involuntarily. The colonel said nothing for many miles then, and Sarah did not force her conversation on him. The cold seeped up her legs and she wished she had taken the time to pull on a pair of James’ socks before she left Salamanca. Her own hose were too thin for the Spanish wind.

  “She died a week after Elena was born, trying to stop the French from burning our home.”

  Luís Sotomayor’s words, coming as they did out of the air, startled her and she let go of him. The colonel reached around behind him and grasped her hand, and she regained her grip.

  “I was away with Wellington’s army. My sister in Barcos took my daughters into her household. I visit when I can. You see, we are all miles from home.”

  “How difficult for you,” Sarah murmured.

  The colonel nodded and directed his attention to the stony path before them.

  “Was she pretty?”

  Sarah could hardly fathom where such a rude question had come from.

  Sotomayor shifted in the saddle, as if surprised, but he did not hesitate to answer this time.

  “She was”—he hesitated—“about your size. She was…” Again he paused and then shrugged. “She was beautiful to me.”

  He said nothing more until long past noon, when Sarah’s stomach set up an insistent growl that would not be silenced. She pressed her free hand against her middle and then laughed at the thought of her famished stomach suddenly reaching out through her skin to munch down her fingers, or turning about to gnaw on her backbone.

  “Lady Sarah?”

  She laughed and leaned her forehead against the colonel’s back for a brief moment. “I laugh because I do not know how to deal with such a bit of social inelegance.”

  “Dios mío, you English,” was all he said, but Sarah detected a smile in his voice, the first she had heard.

  They rode until they were well into the trees again; then the colonel dismounted beside a trickle of a stream. He untied a tin cup from the front of his saddle, where he had lashed it tight so it would not rattle, dipped it in the stream, and handed it to her.

  The cold water cramped her stomach and she made a face. The colonel drank the rest with evident relish and dipped it in the stream for more.

  “You will forget for a while that you are hungry, if you drink some more,” he said.

  “I will not,” she declared. “My stomach is not so easily fooled.” Sarah pressed her hands to her middle. “Especially in December,” she said, her eyes merry with remembrance, “when it knows there should be pastries, and fruited pies, and plum pudding, and a roast so thick, and goose with crackling skin… Oh, don’t let me go on like this.”

  The colonel did not appear to be listening to her. His hands were on his hips again, the pose Sarah had already begun to associate with deep thought. A decision arrived at, he clapped his hands together and reached into the small canvas pouch next to the tin cup. He pulled out a small object wrapped in tissue paper and handed it to Sarah.

  She pulled back the paper. It was a pear. No, it was not a pear. It was beautifully decorated marzipan, delicate green with just a blush of red.

  “I have two of these, one for each daughter,” he said as he took the candy from her, sliced it in half, and handed one portion back to her.

  “Oh, I couldn’t take their present,” Sarah protested, even as her mouth watered and she longed to grab both pieces.

  “I can,” he said, and ate his share. “Even the one that is left, divided between them, will be such a treat.”

  Sarah ate the candy, holding the almond paste in her mouth until it melted, and remembering a time—was it only last year?—that she would have turned her nose up at Christmas marzipan and called it childish.

  The colonel wiped his hands on his uniform. “Well, it is only fitting, I suppose that we should lose a gift. That is the way of the Three Kings.”

  “Three Kings?”

  “Yes. They travel to Belén, bearing many gifts for the Child, and leaving things on the way for others who need them more.”

  To Sarah’s surprise and utter delight, he struck a pose, threw back his head and sang:

  Ya viene la vieja, con el aguinaldo,

  Le parece mucho, le viene quitando:

  Parnpanitos verdes, ojas de limón,

  La Virgen María, madre del Señor.

  Sarah clapped her hands. “I heard that one night in Salamanca! Little children were singing it and teasing me for coins.”

  He bowed and grinned at her. “Ah, then you know about the little old lady and her presents of limes and lemons, and her basket too full.”

  Sarah nodded. “And isn’t the second verse about the Three Kings that you spoke of?”

  “Yes, yes. I will not tease you for coins.” He winked at her. “May
be other things, but not money.”

  Sarah blushed suddenly for no reason she could possibly think of. “It is a funny song.”

  “Yes, lady, and we have need of laughter.” He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “Let us go.”

  They walked the horse then, the colonel careful to keep well back in the trees. Silently, he scanned the horizon, his eyes alert, a frown on his face as he squinted into the distance.

  Not pacified by marzipan, Sarah’s stomach growled again.

  “This is a hungry part of Spain, not like my part,” the colonel said. “All armies prey here, and they are pardonably suspicious.” He chuckled. “And I have no money to buy food, anyway, even if there were any.” His tone became rueful. “I left Burgos in a hurry.”

  “Burgos? But isn’t that in French hands now?” Sarah asked, and then wished she had remained silent, for the colonel said nothing more.

  Sarah fingered her earrings, gold posts with diamond drops. Her reticule with its few pitiful coins seemed like a joke as she considered the journey ahead. At least I have my ear bobs, she thought. She looked about her at the enormous emptiness of the high Spanish plain. We might as well be on the moon, she thought, and tightened her grip on the colonel’s belt even as she inched closer to him.

  Sotomayor patted her hand. “Don’t worry. It takes more than a day or two to die of hunger.”

  They reached the monastery of San Pedro entre los Montes after dark, long after Sarah had given up hope of ever seeing another building again. She had already memorized the weave in the back of the colonel’s uniform cape and the way his hair curled over his ears.

  Her entire horizon had been reduced to Colonel Sotomayor’s back. She was weary with the cold, grumpy with hunger, and too frightened to look around, for fear of what she might see.

  The colonel reined in his horse far short of the monastery’s barred entrance. He handed Sarah down and dismounted.

  “Surely you could go closer,” Sarah exclaimed, dismayed at the pain in her legs.

  The colonel shook his head. “Lady, I trust no one. Not even priests.”