Paula Reed - [Caribbean]

by Nobodys Saint

Mary Kate’s eyes widened and she whispered, “Me? Is that why you keep asking about my dreams? Did she make you dream of me?”

  “Not precisely. You see, you are the very image of my dreams of her.”

  She pulled her hand from his and sank back into her chair. “You’re saying I look like Mary Magdalene? That you thought I was her when first you saw me?”

  “I did. And then, I thought you were the woman she had promised me.”

  “You thought I was. I suppose you’ve thought better of it since then. No saint would send a man someone like me in answer to his prayers.”

  “No! I did not mean it like that!”

  Mary Kate managed a laugh despite the bizarre nature of the conversation and her uneasiness with it. “Don’t go making a habit out of lying to me now, Diego.”

  He, too, sat back down. “You are not Spanish, and you are betrothed to an Englishman.”

  “And I lie and swear, and I’m a lusty lass besides. I know I’m not the sort of girl a decent, honorable Spaniard such as yourself dreams of. Not for a wife anyway.”

  “If I had known you sooner, I would have dreamed of a woman who was brave and bold, loyal and irreverent. If I had been thinking, I would have wanted a lusty wife, for then I would never have need of a mistress.”

  “So that’s why the sudden push to marry me when we hardly knew one another.”

  “Sí.”

  She started to smile, but a new thought intruded. “No wait! Not because I’m the woman of your dreams! You wanted to marry to me to prove that Magdalene was right! You were starting to doubt her, but if we got married, then yet another of your visions would come true!”

  “That is true, but—”

  “And then you’d not have to worry if you were crazy!”

  “Well—”

  Mary Kate popped back out of her chair and glared down at Diego. “So tell me this, are you so anxious to prove her true that you’ll come with me to Ireland? Will you give up your fine ship for a modest fishing boat and learn my language?”

  “That was never a part of my visions.”

  “I don’t suppose it was. Well, they’re your visions, Diego, not mine! I never saw you in my dreams! I never thought you were Saint John or Saint James! Why should I give up my home and turn my back on my family to prove your saint true?”

  “Because I want you. I want you more than I have ever wanted another woman.”

  “You want me because you think I’ve been promised to you. You’re no different from that English bastard in Port Royal. You want me because Mary Magdalene said you could have me. The other wants me because my grandfather said I was his. Well, I don’t belong to anyone save myself, and I’ll be deciding who I want! I’m not your saint, Diego, and I never will be.”

  “María Catalina…”

  “Mary Katherine! I am Mary Katherine O’Reilly. I’m not a snobbish, arrogant English aristocrat nor a chaste and submissive Spanish maiden. I’m an Irishwoman with all the fire of my da’s whiskey and a life of my own to lead! I’ll go to your bishop and tell him you’re a good man. I’ll say all I can to keep you safe, but then I’m going home, and that’s that! Your saint can find you somebody else.”

  Don Juan and his wife threw open the drawing room doors, obviously worried about the shouting, and Mary Kate brushed past them, running toward the room they had given her.

  “Now that your conversation with Señorita O’Reilly is finished,” Don Juan observed, “perhaps you would be good enough to tell me what is going on.”

  Diego buried his face in his hands. He had always been told that saints could answer his prayers and intercede on his behalf. No one had ever told him they could make things worse!

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mary Kate stood on the wooden balcony outside of her room in the Gallegos house. It was located in a part of the city called El Centro, which was made up of residences for the aristocracy and higher members of the government. Surrounded by stately homes and lush trees, she couldn’t see the sea, and she found she missed it—the flawless blue, the steady rocking.

  She had pulled a chair from her room out onto the balcony, and she sat down and breathed deeply of the heavy air scented sweetly by tropical flowers. If only she could dismiss Diego’s words as the rantings of a madman, but she didn’t for a moment believe he was insane. She knew him too well to believe that.

  “Why, Mary Magdalene, why would you do such a thing?”

  The night was hot, and no breeze found its way through the buildings and trees. Mary Kate felt overly warm and suddenly very dizzy and overwhelmed. She leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair and her cheek upon her palm, then closed her eyes.

  She was in her grandfather’s house in England. It was small, but Sir Calder had spared no expense in its furnishings, and Mary Kate stood before one of the tapestries that hung in the drawing room. It depicted three medieval knights on horseback bidding farewell to the women they must leave behind. Sir Calder had purchased it from an impoverished nobleman. Just as she had often done during her stay in England, Mary Kate scrutinized it, awed by its intricate detail.

  But she spotted a slight irregularity in the leg one of the knights’ horses. Closer inspection revealed that the seamstress had made several mistakes in her stitches. She scanned the area around it and discovered similar flaws throughout the work, but when she stepped back, the flaws faded, and the tapestry was as beautiful as ever. Still, her eyes were continually drawn back to the tiny defect in the horse.

  “Perhaps,” she said aloud, although she was alone, “I could fix that.” She looked down at her feet and discovered a sewing basket, and from it she drew a pair of tiny, silver scissors. Carefully, she clipped away the misstitched threads, intending to use the thread in her basket to set it to rights, but almost immediately the hole she had made grew. Stitches began to unravel, and she feared she would not be able to repair the damage she had caused, much less the small flaw she probably should have left alone.

  Suddenly Bridget stood beside her. She wore the plain style of gown both of them had always worn at home, and it contrasted sharply with Mary Kate’s fine English clothes. “When you look at the tapestry as a whole, it is a work of art, despite its flaws.”

  “And yet,” Mary Kate replied, “when a imperfection calls to you, and you have at your feet the means to repair it, ‘tis tempting to try.”

  In the blink of an eye, the two women stood in the solar of a stone-walled keep. Several women in medieval veils and gowns sat side by side at a long frame, each plying her needle to create the lovely scene that had been finished and on the wall only a moment before. Several younger girls chatted by the fire. Mary Kate looked over the shoulder of one of the seamstresses and realized she was busy on the soldier and his horse.

  “Careful, now,” Mary Kate chided her. “That leg is very delicate, and ‘twould be easy to make a mistake.”

  The woman didn’t look over her shoulder or in any way acknowledge that she had heard Mary Kate, but she seemed distracted and pricked her finger deeply.

  “Ouch!” she cried.

  “Are you all right?” a young girl asked, rising from her seat beside the fire. “I can take your place, Aunt Edith, until it stops bleeding.”

  The older woman rose, nodding, and the girl took her seat. She was nowhere near the accomplished needlewoman her aunt was, and soon she was making a far bigger mess of the pattern than the minor error Mary Kate had first discovered.

  Mary Kate gave a disgusted sigh. “All right then, I should have left well enough alone.”

  And then they were in the middle of a green field surrounded by grazing sheep. Mary Kate knelt and ran her hand over the soft, wooly back of one of the animals. She dug her fingers deeply into the beast’s coat, sorting through it until she found one fine strand that she somehow knew would be carded and spun and twisted into the thread that would become the leg of a horse on an elaborate tapestry.

  “You can know each individual step in the existence of that st
rand,” Bridget explained to her, “but you cannot truly understand what place it will hold until you step back from the tapestry.”

  They were seated at a tea table across the room from where the tapestry hung in Sir Calder’s house. From here, the design was perfect. Not a single mistake could be seen in the work.

  “Well, I know that,” Mary Kate said, “but you can’t blame a person for wanting to take a closer look. Especially when some little thread begs your help. When it’s so worried about not being perfect, and being inside the design, it can’t see that very little about the work is truly perfect.”

  “But you can see that,” Bridget said. “You can see the big picture, so long as you don’t get too caught up in that one little place. You’re too involved, Mary.”

  And that was strange, for no one ever called her just Mary. It gave Mary Kate the weird feeling these two women were not her sister and herself at all, but two others entirely.

  “But I like that soldier and his horse. He named the horse after me, y’know. And look at this maid over here…” She rose and moved to another section of the tapestry.

  Bridget followed Mary Kate back to the hanging. “If she’s the one for him, then the thread already exists that binds them together.”

  “Fate? You know better than that,” Mary Kate chided.

  “Not fate,” Bridget countered. “At the point of creation, anything can happen. You saw that with Edith and her niece. You and I are better off here, long after the seamstresses are dead and buried. From time to time we might smooth their work.” She found a place where a thread had pulled loose in the embroidered maiden’s jet-black hair and gently worked it back into place with her fingertips. “But it is not ours to change. Not now, not even at the point of creation.”

  Mary Kate ran her hand over the surface. “If I look closely enough, I’m sure I can find the thread that binds them. I tell you, this is the maid for my brave soldier.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether or not you can find it. If it’s there, she must find it for herself or it means nothing. She’s made up of countless stitches that are connected to countless others. Only she can decide which of those threads to follow.”

  Mary Kate hugged her sister close. “Thank you for coming here with me. You’re right, of course, sometimes I get to looking too closely at the patterns and I lose track of the whole picture.”

  The sewing basket still sat on the floor, and Mary Kate threaded a needle with white thread. She stitched up the horse where she had made her cut, then did the same to the background in darker filament. It had definitely looked better before. She looked back over to her sister.

  “I hope I haven’t cut the one that runs between them.”

  “Come, Mary. Let’s go home.”

  She opened her eyes and stared into the now dark streets of Cartagena. Dinner would be soon, and since she was to fast beginning tomorrow, she wasn’t about to miss the meal. But all the time she dressed for dinner, she could not shake the dream. It meant something, something important, but for the life of her, she didn’t know what.

  *

  The next day, sitting in the little wooden chair across the broad desk from Bishop Álvarez, like an errant schoolboy before his tutor, made Diego nervous, but there was an odd comfort in knowing Mary Kate sat behind him. She had not spoken a word to him all morning, so he knew she was angry with him still, but she had also stubbornly insisted that she be allowed to stay for his interview with the bishop. Father Tomás had explained to both her and Diego earlier about the bishop’s hope that he might be on the verge of revealing a miracle, and Mary Kate had picked right up on the strategy.

  “Your Excellency,” she said in the mild and sweet manner she had first used with Diego, “Father Tomás is sure this will be a most auspicious occasion. Surely you’d not deny me the chance to say I was present when God saw fit to reveal a true miracle to Bishop Álvarez of Cartagena. I shall so want to tell the tale to every English Protestant I come across in my future travels.”

  Father Tomás translated, and the bishop decided that, since Mary Kate did not speak Spanish, her own testimony could not be tainted by what she heard. She was allowed to stay after all. Father Tomás shook his head and hid a grin behind his hand.

  Diego began by telling the tale much as he had with Father Tomás, only in greater detail, explaining how he had first come to pray to María Magdalena. “I was afraid I was not worthy of the responsibility of being Magdalena’s captain. After all, I had come by the post through the death of my commander, rather than being hired in that position.” He told him about falling in love with a Protestant and Magdalena’s promise of another if he gave her up, which left him explaining his role in the Geoffrey Hampton affair.

  “You helped to free an English privateer?” the bishop asked, frowning. He turned to Father Tomás. “Was this part of Magdalena’s plan for Captain Montoya to rid the sea of pirates?”

  “I knew the man,” Father Tomás explained. “He was an atheist, but Diego’s selfless act softened his heart. Diego may well have started the man on the path back to God.” Not very likely, he added silently, but not impossible.

  “By giving him over to a Protestant lover?”

  Father Tomás shrugged. “It is a start. I am but a humble priest. Who am I to question the will of God?”

  Bishop Álvarez bent his head to make a few notes on a piece of parchment, and Father Tomás and Diego exchanged worried glances. His Excellency did not look convinced.

  Diego’s eyes wandered the walls of the bishop’s office, and next to the door he noticed the likeness of Pedro Claver, the Jesuit who had devoted his life to the slaves of Cartagena.

  “I think I can explain this, if I may,” Diego said. When the bishop looked back up from his notes, he continued. “That was not the end of my dealings with Captain Hampton.” Father Tomás shot him a warning look, but Diego plowed on. “A year ago, I chanced to rescue the bride of his first mate. She was of mixed blood, mulatto, and she had been kidnapped and sold to a procurer.”

  The bishop gave him a sharp look. “And how did you discover a woman who had been sold to a procurer?”

  “I saw her being auctioned in the marketplace in La Habana. Magdalena, she did not speak to me or appear in my dreams at that time, but I knew she wished me to save this woman. I used a good bit of my life savings to do so, though her husband has since repaid me. Now, she lives in Jamaica on a plantation that runs without slaves. I cannot help but think this, too, is part of my lady’s plan.”

  The bishop’s own gaze fell upon the portrait by the door. “It is true that slavery is one of the scourges of the New World.”

  Father Tomás smiled, and Mary Kate began to realize how frustrating the morning was going to become. A flurry of Spanish followed by a disapproving frown from the bishop, more Spanish, then looks of relief on the faces of Diego and Father Tomás. She caught bits and pieces, the name Magdalena and words like “sickness,” “pirates,” and “slaves.” It was like having tantalizing bits and pieces of a puzzle, but not nearly enough to make out the picture.

  The talk of pirates became more extensive, and finally she heard her own name brought into the conversation. The bishop jerked his head up from his notes in shock and gave her a dubious look. Mary Kate rather imagined Diego had just told the bishop whom she looked like, and she gave him her sweetest smile. Here I am, Saint Me. Never mind all the shouting I did yesterday when Enrique and his followers showed up in the church.

  Bishop Álvarez seemed to be speaking to her, and finally Father Tomás was allowed to translate.

  “He wishes you to tell him how you came to be captured by pirates and of Diego’s rescue,” the priest said.

  Mary Kate regaled the bishop with a graphic tale of the battle that had occurred on the deck of Fortune. She told of pirates screaming blasphemies as they cut down helpless men in cold blood. His Excellency was aghast when she told of her fear of rape and murder, and she unshriven after four years away from the One
True Church! Why, it had been a near miracle that she had convinced the pirate captain, who had leered at her in open lust throughout the battle, to leave her untouched for the ransom she would bring. Alas! She had known each dreadful night she had spent in the vile commander’s cabin, tied to his bed, that he might well change his mind and throw her to his merciless crew!

  What but the hand of God could have saved her? And then the hand of God had swept across the sea in the form of a ship named for the saint who had washed the feet of the Lamb! At the sight of the brave Diego Montoya, Mary Kate, a poor country girl who had been so ill treated by her heretical grandfather and these heathen pirates and had lost all hope, actually found within herself the strength to fight! It was the sight of Diego, a son of Spain and thereby surely good Catholic, that had moved her to take up a sword and slay her evil captor.

  Diego stared at her in open disbelief, and she offered him a nearly imperceptible shrug. It wasn’t a lie. She may have embellished some, but many of these events had happened very quickly, and there were gaps in her memory. She was merely trying to fill the gaps as best she could.

  “Since I’ve been in Captain Montoya’s company, Your Excellency, I fear that I’ve conducted myself shamefully. I have felt a powerful attraction to him, which I have fully confessed, and even now I’m fasting as my penance. I have tempted him in every way that I could think of.” She held her breath and forced a blush, ducking her head. “I am truly ashamed. I could not bring myself to speak of it but that you must know he resisted me at every turn.”

  “As I mentioned,” Father Tomás added, when he had completed his translation, “I have heard both of their confessions. I believe what she says is true.”

  “She has lived beyond the reach of the Church for four years.”

  “And each day of those years she kept a ledger book of her every sin for the day she would finally return and be allowed to make her confession.”

  “A ledger book?”

  “With every single sin duly recorded and confessed.”