Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  Fear stabbed her again, and she quickly suppressed it. Let Navarro ask Lorenzo for Angela’s hand. Luisa wasn’t worried. She would readily agree to the betrothal— on the condition that the wedding take place after their return from Spain.

  Leaving the solarium, Luisa made her way through the house where women were polishing furniture and scrubbing tile floors, and delivered herself into her private chambers, where trunks stood packed and ready for the journey. This was Luisa’s private sanctum, where Lorenzo had not set foot since the house was built. He kept to his own quarters at night, seeing his wife and daughter only at the evening meal. Luisa knew he would not miss her for long. Perhaps at first he would feel outrage when he realized she was never coming back, but then his fellows would come over for a game of dice, the wine would flow, and the two females who had once taken up space in this house would eventually be forgotten. Lorenzo would not be without consolation. Luisa not only knew about his Indian mistresses, she knew about his Indian bastards as well.

  Sitting at her dressing table, Luisa raised the lid of a small wooden box and lifted up the velvet lining. Under it was a brass key. As she held the key in her palm, curling her fingers around it, she felt fresh hope flow from the metal into her flesh. The key was to a small casket which was currently in the safekeeping of Father Xavier.

  The secret cache had begun by accident, ten years ago, when Antonio Castillo, the blacksmith, had ridden frantically from the Pueblo to tell Luisa that his child was ill with fever and they needed the señora’s help. With special herbs Luisa had brought the child back from the brink of death and Señora Castillo had been so overjoyed she had insisted upon giving Luisa a gold ring as a token of the family’s gratitude. Luisa had tried to refuse but the ring was pressed upon her, and her acceptance of it sent the señora away a happier person. And then when Luisa had helped a young wife through a perilous childbirth with potions she had learned from an old Indian woman, the grateful husband had humbly offered Luisa the gift of a small silver brooch. After a while, Luisa stopped refusing. She didn’t see why one could not do good works in the name of the Blessed Mother and receive payment as well. Did not the Mission Fathers pass the collection plate during Mass?

  Lorenzo did not know about Luisa’s secret cache. When she had collected the first few valuable items, she had feared he would find them and gamble them away. With the colonists and soldiers Lorenzo played cards and dice, and with the Indians, the wager could be on the number of fingers a player was holding up behind his back. Lorenzo would even lounge with his fellow rancheros under a tree, watching El Camino Viejo, and they would wager on the color of the next horse that would come trotting by. So Luisa had taken her little casket of treasures to Father Xavier at the Mission and entrusted it to his care. Over the months and years, whenever Lorenzo was away gambling or hunting, Luisa would pay a visit to the Mission and deposit the latest with Father Xavier, as if he were a banker. There was coinage in the casket, too: silver pieces of eight, Mexican pesos, Spanish reales and even some gold doubloons. A king’s ransom.

  It was all to go to her daughter. Angela was to be independent even should she marry. If Luisa had had the money when their daughter died in the Sonoran desert, she would have turned around and gone back to Mexico. But she had been dependent on Lorenzo. This was not to be so for Angela. She was going to give it all to Angela in Madrid, where she planned to have legal documents drawn up stating that Angela’s husband, whoever he might someday be, could not touch the money.

  When she heard a knock at her door, she quickly restored the key to its hiding place, returned the box to its drawer, then bid the person to enter.

  To her astonishment, it was Lorenzo. And she could tell, even though he stood across the room, that he had been drinking. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap. With less than a day to go, she dared not risk ruining their plans now. But when she saw his eyes roving over the trunks filled with clothes and gifts for family back home, her heart leapt. He had changed his mind!

  She kept her back ramrod straight. It didn’t matter if he had found out about her plan to stay in Spain. Lorenzo never woke before noon. She and Angela would slip out before dawn and make their way to the coast….

  “Perhaps things have not been right between us,” he said in a thick voice, as if unused to speaking to her, “certainly not the way of husband and wife, but I have loved you, Luisa. Dios mio, I have loved you.”

  Although there was gray in his hair and his skin was sun-weathered, Lorenzo was still a handsome man with military bearing. But he did not move her as he once had, back in Mexico when they were young and in love. The day they buried their daughter, Luisa had closed her body to him. And when, eleven years ago, she had prayed to the Virgin for another child, she had been praying for a miracle, for even then, even for the sake of having another baby, Luisa would not allow Lorenzo into her bed. Instead, the Virgin had delivered a grown child to Luisa, sparing her the indignity of having to suffer a man’s intimate embrace and the pains of childbirth.

  She remained silent. He was speaking like a man about to make a confession. She braced herself for it.

  “You cannot go to Spain.”

  She remained calm. “The Estrella is not sailing?”

  “The Estrella will sail, you will not.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “We haven’t the money for the passage.”

  “But I have already paid Captain Rodriguez.”

  “I took it back.”

  She blinked at him. “You took it back?”

  “The money was owed to other men. As well as a great deal more.” Lorenzo shifted uncomfortably, feeling out of place in this room filled with flowers and colorful rugs and small portraits of saints. “I’ve had a run of bad luck. Debts I owed. And there was a ship I heavily invested in. Loaded with furs, bound to China to trade for spice, but it sank off the Philippines.” He paused, looking everywhere but at his wife.

  “All of our money is gone?” she asked, trying to keep the fury out of her voice. The fool! What right had he to squander their fortune? But Luisa kept her head. She must not get angry. Humor him. Stall him. Anything, until she and Angela could get to the Estrella. “Then we shall sell something.”

  He hung his head. “We have nothing to sell.”

  “But we own much, Lorenzo,” she said softly, spreading her hands to encompass the beautiful furniture, the bedding, the silver and hangings.

  “Wife, you don’t even own the buttons on that dress.” There was no rancor or impatience or anger in his voice. He was merely stating a fact, as if commenting on the weather.

  She looked down at the pearl buttons on her bodice. She lifted a perplexed look to him. “How can you have lost everything?”

  “I did and that is all there is to it. I’ve tried my best.”

  She saw defeat in his eyes, bewilderment and disillusionment. Where was her brave military captain who had promised her so much? Had he also gambled away his pride? “We have lost… even the rancho?” she whispered.

  He brightened. “That is the beauty of it, Luisa! I have arranged with a man of means to erase my debt. In return, he will hold title to the rancho and everything in it, but we shall continue to live here!”

  She frowned. “But how? He pays your debts and you give him our home. Why should he allow us to live here?”

  “Because… I have given him Angela as well. As a bride.”

  Luisa sat stock-still.

  “You will both thank me for it later,” he added quickly. “Times are dangerous in Europe what with revolution fever burning like a brushfire. Peasants lopping off the heads of kings. Best you and the girl stay here where it is safe.”

  “Who,” she began, but already knowing in her heart and with terrible dread the name of the man, for there was only one man in the Angeles Pueblo who had that much money. “Who is to marry my daughter?”

  “Navarro.”

  She closed her eyes and crossed herself. “Santa Maria,” she
whispered. The man who robbed the dead.

  “I am sorry, but this is how it is to be.”

  She thought about this, then slowly nodded. “So be it. Angela will marry Navarro. After we return from Spain.”

  “But I have already explained that you cannot go. We haven’t the money for your passage.”

  “I have money of my own,” she said, prepared for his look of surprise, feeling also a moment of triumph. But then the moment stretched on, and there was something in Lorenzo’s eyes, and suddenly a jolt of panic shot through her. “What is it?” she demanded.

  He sighed raggedly. Lorenzo suddenly felt every single day of his fifty years. “That money is gone, too.”

  She tipped her chin. “You do not know what money I speak of.”

  “By God, I do,” he said, some of his pride returning, a flush of indignation in his cheeks. “The day you sought to enlist Father Xavier into your secret scheme he came to me and told me. I have known these eleven years.”

  She stared at him in shock. The casket! “He had no right to tell you!”

  “He had every right!” he boomed. “You are my wife, by God, and everything you own belongs to me. It is all gone,” he added more quietly, suddenly uncomfortable beneath her gaze. “I took the gold from you long ago, wife, and that is the end of it. We shall speak no more of this.”

  Luisa shot to her feet. “I will not let you have Angela!”

  “Woman, have you forgotten?” he bellowed. “Angela is mine! I found her! Therefore, I can do with her as I please!”

  As he stormed out, slamming the door behind him, Luisa’s mind raged with panic as she tried to think of solutions. She and Angela must escape. But they had no money! No ship captain would aid them. If they tried to run to another town, they would be found and brought back.

  Suddenly she was thinking of Angela’s newly harvested jicama and how extremely poisonous its seeds were. It would be so simple. Steep the seeds in water to extract the toxin, and then add it to Lorenzo’s evening wine. By morning she would be free.

  Just as quickly, the nefarious thought fled. She could never murder Lorenzo.

  Her shoulders slumped as she saw how utterly without power she was. And then she realized in the next instant the horrible mistake she had made in rejecting Lorenzo, years ago, punishing him for bringing her to this remote place. She saw the past eleven years in the snap of two fingers and she knew that if she could somehow go back she would forgive him, she would take him into her arms and give him more children, making him a doting husband and father who would think first of his family instead of his precious games of chance and investments in ships that sank.

  But Luisa knew there was no going back. No escape. No prayers to the Virgin that were going to save her now. And she had no one to blame but herself.

  Moving woodenly, Luisa once again brought the small box out of its drawer, but this time she wasn’t interested in the lining and the useless key hidden there. Now she lifted out the object she had placed in the box eleven years ago.

  It had been around Angela’s neck when Lorenzo found her in the mountains, a small black stone wrapped in soft deerskin. Luisa had not been able to bring herself to throw it away. Perhaps she had known that someday it would remind her of the truth— that Angela wasn’t her daughter, that she belonged to another woman.

  All these years Luisa had somehow managed to put it from her mind that Angela was a Mission Indio. But this stone reminded her now. And this stone must have had some value or importance for the mother to place it around her daughter’s neck. For the first time, in the sharp noon of this land that Luisa had never come to love or feel part of, she wondered about the mother of that child. Why had they been in the mountains? Why did the mother never go back to the Mission to look for her daughter? Was the mother dead or had she been mourning these past eleven years, the way Luisa had mourned for the child buried in a small grave in the desert?

  Luisa tried to picture the woman who gave birth to Angela. Although many Indian women worked at Rancho Paloma, Luisa never really looked at them. And whenever she went riding and sometimes encountered a small village of unbaptized Indios, walking about naked and smoking their peculiar pipes, she had thought they were creatures barely a step above dumb animals.

  But animals do not hang protective talismans around their daughters’ necks.

  Blessed Mother of God, her heart cried out. Did I commit a wrong in taking another woman’s child? Lorenzo brought the girl to me when I was out of my mind with grief, and my knees were raw from hours of kneeling in prayer, and I saw the child as a gift from You. But was she really? Was she in fact a test of my strength and my honesty and I failed?

  God forgive me for what I have done! I forsook my marriage vows and turned my husband from me. I stole another woman’s child. This is my punishment. Angela must marry Navarro and I shall never see Spain again.

  * * *

  Captain Lorenzo galloped away down El Camino Viejo, anxious to put distance between him and the look in Luisa’s eyes. Did she think it was so easy, turning a wasteland into a profitable ranch? It was a lot of damned hard work. Never mind the searing summers and the rains that flooded the basin, and fires that raged out of control, and diseases that swept through his cattle, and crops that died, there were the wild Indios to contend with! First there was their tradition of gathering annually at the tar pits that Lorenzo had had to contend with. They had set up a massive encampment right where Lorenzo had planted corn. The destruction to his crop that first year had made him mad enough to want to wipe out the whole savage lot of them. He put up fences and the Indios would tear them down. They would come tramping for miles along the Old Road, which ran along the north border of his property, build their shelters out of branches ripped from his trees, and help themselves to lambs and goats from his herds. The Indios couldn’t be made to understand that this was his land now and that the animals they killed and ate weren’t wild but belonged to him.

  Then there were their nightly raids on the cattle, not for food but out of rebellion. The padres weren’t converting and absorbing the native population fast enough; there were still pockets of resistance among the unbaptized Indios, strong leaders who tried now and then to organize a major revolt against the colonists. One had even been led by a woman! A young one at that, of the Gabrielino tribe, inciting the chiefs and warriors of six villages to revolt against the soldiers and the Mission Fathers. So Lorenzo and other rancheros were forced to hire guards to ride the borders of their land, and he was tired of it.

  Luisa just couldn’t see this. Sheltered in her house, waited on by servants, living a life of ease. And hiding money away for a frivolous journey to Spain! She had no right to make him feel guilty for having tried to make himself rich. Was it his fault he was unlucky? She should be thankful Navarro wanted their rancho and their daughter. Now life could go on as it had been, they would not be reduced to poverty.

  Women! Lorenzo thought in exasperation. But then, as he slowed his horse to a relaxed canter and headed in the direction of the village of Los Angeles with its population of two hundred souls, as he felt the warm dry sun bake his bones, and as he smelled the dust of the road and heard the drone of insects, he felt his mood begin to mellow. He was glad Navarro was going to take over the rancho. The problems would all be on Navarro’s shoulders from now on.

  Cheerfully anticipating the coming afternoon spent in the good company of Francisco Reyes, the alcalde of the Pueblo, rolling dice and drinking fine Madeira wine and leaving the worry of the rancho to Juan Navarro, Captain Lorenzo decided that, sometimes, going bankrupt could be a blessing.

  * * *

  “The marriage duty is not pleasant,” Luisa explained solemnly to her daughter, “but thankfully it is brief. Your husband will go quickly about his business and then he will fall asleep.” Luisa thought she was describing all men, not stopping to consider that she had been a virgin when she married Lorenzo and had never been intimate with another man.

 
They were in the bedchamber that had been prepared for the newlywed couple. The vows had been exchanged before the priest, the marriage recorded in the official register, and when a respectable time had passed, Luisa had taken her daughter by the hand and led her from the wedding feast. Now Luisa and an Indian woman were helping Angela out of her wedding dress while outside, in the warm summer evening, the festivities continued.

  Angela wasn’t thinking of the marriage bed, where bougainvillea petals had been sprinkled on the pillows. Her mind was filled with visions of the lemon and orange orchards she was going to plant. “I have told Señor Navarro my ideas and he likes them. He even thinks a vineyard would be nice.”

  On the day the Estrella sailed without its two female passengers, three months ago, Navarro began courting Angela under the watchful eye of a female chaperone. He came every day to sit with her beneath the bottle-brush tree that Lorenzo had imported from Australia at great expense. They would comment on the weather, on Father Xavier’s latest sermon, on a new breed of horse, politely addressing each other as Señor and Señorita. Sometimes they sat in silence. After three months, they remained courteous strangers.

  Luisa sighed wistfully as she laid Angela’s petticoats aside. “You are lucky. Navarro is a very generous man.” She tried not to think of the long gold earrings she was wearing, a gift from Navarro to his new mother-in-law. He had taken them, he said, off the mummy of an Aztec princess. The man has brought ghosts into this house, Luisa thought. For surely the spirits of the Mexican Indians would come back for the treasure stolen from them.

  She glanced at the brass-studded box on the dressing table. It contained Navarro’s wedding gift to Angela. Neither she nor Angela knew what was in it; it was to be opened later, when the newlywed couple were alone.