by V. J. Banis
For the first time in his life Summers had a sensation of falling, of drowning, as if he had stepped into something too deep and it was pulling him down.
“You’ve got no ties back east, isn’t that right?” Don Hernando was asking. “Nothing in the States?”
“Ties?”
“Family. Wife. Children. Business investments?”
“I’ve got nothing like that anywhere.”
Don Hernando came to the desk and picked up an official-looking document from its surface. He handed the paper to Summers, who looked at it curiously.
“That’s the title to a land grant,” Don Hernando explained. “It was originally given by the King to someone here he owed a favor to, but the man died before the gift was given. It’s within my power to give it to anyone I choose.”
“Why tell me?”
“It’s good land, more than two thousand acres in the great central valley. Out there,” he added, pointing inland. “It would make a great ranch. A fine home for the right people.”
“Me?” Summers asked, surprised. “Me and Claire?”
“This is a land of promise.”
Summers tossed the title onto the desk again. “I’m a plainsman,” he said. “I come and I go, like the dust on the plains.”
“She’ll let you go,” Don Hernando said. “And you’ll make yourself come back.”
With a quick, angry movement, Summers snatched up the document again, peering at it. “What’s all this about, anyway?” he demanded. “What’s in it for you?”
“All men aren’t like you,” Don Hernando said. “I’m not ashamed to admit that I love her.”
“Then you go. Start your goddamn ranch yourself. Leave me out of it.”
Don Hernando made no answer to that. The answer was too painful for him to dwell on and already known to both of them.
As if reading his thoughts, Summers asked, “What makes you so sure she’d go with me, anyway?”
“Her husband....”
Summers interrupted him. “Her husband’s dead,” he said. “Her and me traveled a thousand, maybe two or three thousand miles. Her husband could have been buried anywhere along that trail. Or anywhere else in that damned emptiness out there. What are you looking at me funny for?”
Don Hernando was indeed staring at him strangely. It hadn’t occurred to him. The man had been with her three days. Hadn’t she told him yet?
“Her husband...,” he started again and again paused.
Summers swore and crossed the room to him in two quick strides, seizing the front of Don Hernando’s lace-trimmed shirt in a fierce grip.
“Spit it out,” he said, his eyes flashing like sparks off an anvil. “What are you trying to say?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
She was pumping water at the rust-reddened pump. He took the handle from her and pumped with a vengeance, filling the bucket and splashing water over their feet.
He stopped all of a sudden. The pump handle stood out horizontally then descended slowly earthward, unnoticed by either of them.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked in the voice a little boy used when hurt and bewildered. It was like the stab of an arrow in her breast.
“I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what, for Christ’s sake? Afraid of me?”
She nodded, tears brimming in her eyes as the water had filled and overflowed the forgotten bucket at their feet.
“Afraid you’d leave me again,” she said.
“You’re goddamn right I’m leaving.” He turned from her and strode into the house. She followed him into the bedroom, where he seized his saddlebag and began cramming his things into it. Unable to speak, she stood in the doorway, watching him and crying noiselessly.
“Two things I never took before,” he said without looking at her. “Another man’s horse and another man’s woman. Those are my rules.”
“I was married before!” she cried, wanting to run to him, to fling her arms around him, and afraid to move, afraid he might drive her from him with blows. “I was married all the time.”
“I thought he was dead!” Summers fairly shouted at her. “I figured the worms had eaten him. How the hell was I to know he’d turned into some sort of mission saint? Lady, that’s too rich for my blood, me and a saint’s wife. You got any idea how that one’s gonna look in the good book when they start tallying things up?”
He buckled the saddlebag and threw it over his shoulder. “I’m going and that’s that,” he said.
“I’ll come with you!” she cried, clinging to his arm as he pushed past her.
“Not with me,” he said, shrugging off her hand. He turned to face her. His voice was angry but his expression was one of pain.
“Not with me. You married him. As long as he’s alive, that makes you his woman. The law says so. The Lord says so. And I say so.”
She began to sob, unable to hold back.
“Damn,” he said. “Double damn.” He whirled about and left, vanishing through the open front door.
She tried to cry his name but it wouldn’t come. She ran after him. Summers had paused going down the path. Peter was standing by the street. The two men regarded one another silently for a long moment. Then wordlessly Summers went past him and along the street. Peter looked after him for a few seconds before starting toward the front door.
Claire fled into the kitchen. Sinking into one of the wooden chairs, she buried her face in her hands and wept with a fierce anguish.
There was a footstep nearby and she glanced up to see Peter standing a few feet away, watching her.
“Go away,” she said, covering her face again. “Go away and leave me alone.”
For an answer he came closer, pausing for a moment to stare down at the trembling of her shoulders. From where he stood over her he could look clearly down the front of her dress between the ripe fullness of her breasts. His hand reached out, seemingly of its own accord. His fingers brushed lightly over her upper arm.
She jerked away from the touch and jumped up so abruptly that the chair fell crashing to the floor. She snatched up a deadly looking kitchen knife and held it menacingly before her.
“Leave me alone or I’ll kill you!” she shrieked.
Fear flickered briefly in his eyes then vanished. He smiled, an almost beatific smile.
“Like a snake molting its skin,” he said. “You shed one lover and put on the next. A born whore.”
He started for the door but paused to turn back. “It’s no use, you know,” he said, still smiling. “The Church will be your lover. You will come to see that I am right.”
He went out. She stood sobbing for several minutes, still holding the knife before her. Finally it slipped from her fingers and fell with a clatter. She dropped to her knees in an attitude of supplication, but no prayer came to her. Slowly she sank forward until she lay sprawled upon the cool floor.
* * * * * * *
Doña María Isabella Marina Hernando woke with a start. It was night. The light seeping through the closed curtains at her windows was silver and pale.
Her head throbbed, as it often did when she woke, and her mouth felt dry as cotton. She sat up, feeling across the bedside table. The decanter was always there, and her glass, for when the thirst woke her. She drank, grimacing at the first sour taste, sighing as the wine seemed to wash the cotton from her mouth.
There was a gentle sound of snoring from the adjoining alcove, where the maid, Teresa, slept nights, ostensibly to be close to her mistress. Though once asleep, Teresa was not easily wakened.
Doña María got up from the bed and went to one of the windows, pushing the curtains aside and staring out at the moonlit garden. As she watched an owl, returning from some hunting flight, swept down straight as a dagger into the heart of the olive tree behind the house. It vanished with a rustling sound among the leaves and branches.
Doña María waited, holding her breath, half-expecting to see the tree begin to bleed. After a long moment she began to think of hers
elf, of the pain that pierced her own heart. Like the tree, it did not bleed, though the wound went deep.
Finally she turned from the window and, without turning on a light, she began to dress. From a drawer of her dresser she took a sheathed dagger. It was old, hundreds of years old. An ancestor had brought it back from one of the First Crusades. Its handle was encrusted with precious stones. She drew it, tossing the sheath aside. Its blade was long and slender, the sort of blade that could glide almost unfelt between a person’s ribs, plunging without pause into a heart.
She flung a cloak about her shoulders and, clutching the dagger close to her bosom, stole from her room. In the alcove Teresa snored on.
In his own room Don Hernando turned on his bed, the latching of a door adding a bizarre twist to his dreams: Did someone go out? It was the King. Let us all dance.
In the parlor, which she had scarcely visited since their arrival in Monterey, Doña María grew confused. She bumped into a table, nearly toppling it, and was then unable to remember the way to the front door. For an uncertain moment she stood in the center of the room, turning slowly about.
She spied it at last, the door, and in another moment she was gone, the heavy folds of her cloak whispering a ghostly encouragement.
* * * * * * *
Claire, too, slept fitfully. The parting with Summers earlier in the day was like a scene from a play. She saw it enacted again and again. Each time she tried to bring it to a different end, and each time she was foiled by her own fear and guilt, by Peter’s arrival, by Summers’ anger.
She got up and made her way to the water pail in the kitchen, drinking thirstily. It seemed for a moment as if something moved outside the window and she stepped closer to see, but everything appeared still. In the distance a mockingbird unleashed a torrent of silvery notes, rushing so quickly that they spilled and tumbled over one another in their progress down the scale. It was warm; the night air was thick with dampness and the heady smells of ocean and flowers and pine, the scent of California.
She went back to her bed, but sleep, like a reluctant lover, held himself away from her just out of reach. This way and that she tossed and turned, and when the noises came finally, they were lost in the creak and groan of her bed as she moved upon it.
Only pale moonlight illuminated the room, but it was a shadow that warned her, some deepening of the darkness that was sensed more than seen. Someone had crossed the threshold of her room.
Her first thought was that it was Summers, come back to her. A deep weight within her seemed to take wing and soar.
She moved to toss aside the bedclothes and sit up, and as she did she saw a shadow move toward her, gliding soundlessly, and the joy died within her, impaled on fear.
“Who...,” she started to say, but at that instant the moonlight glinted off something different, and she recognized it for the blade of an upraised dagger. At almost the same moment Doña María threw back the hood of her cloak, revealing her face.
For a moment Doña María hesitated, head cocked as if she were listening. With a whimper of fear, Claire tried to scramble from the bed. Her feet caught in the twisted bedclothes and with a cry she tumbled head first onto the floor. She had a glimpse of Doña María’s feet as the woman rushed toward her and the gleam of the dagger, lifting, lifting, coming down at last.
Someone else was in the room. Claire had a dizzying view of feet, two people who crazily seemed to be dancing, bodies writhing, twisting together. The dagger fell to the floor, so close that it almost slashed her cheek. From the corner of her eye she could see the steel vibrating ominously.
There was a crash as someone was thrown across the bed. Then someone was kneeling, hands were gripping her shoulders, freeing her from the hindering tangle of bedclothes.
“Are you all right?”
“Don Hernando?” Claire blinked, unsure if she recognized the familiar face.
“I’m sorry,” he was saying, helping her to her feet. “She must have woke me going out, but it was a few minutes before I thought to go along to her room. When I saw the sheath to that old knife, I knew where she must have gone. I was afraid of being too late.”
He was out of breath and she realized he must have been running. After a second details began to fall into place. Doña María had attacked her with a dagger, had meant to kill her. Don Hernando had saved her life. Not for the first time.
She freed herself from his embrace and stepped back from him to glance toward the bed. Doña María lay in shadows, a motionless heap of garments, with one hand lying free as if reaching for her in supplication.
“Is she—?”
“She must have fainted,” Don Hernando said. “I had no idea the woman was so strong.”
Despite her recent terror, and her gratitude that he had saved her life, his remark grated. “...the woman,” he had called her. But the woman was his wife, a pathetic creature gone mad on jealousy, frustration, unhappiness.
Don Hernando tried to put his arm about her again; again Claire moved away from him, frightened of the security his embrace had inspired in her, a security to which she was less entitled than the unconscious woman on the bed.
“Please,” she said, wiping her brow, “a light....”
He struck a match, lighting a candle from it. In its flickering glow Doña María looked as if she were sleeping. Her lips had formed into a half-smile, and the deeply etched lines that made her look so shrewish when she was conscious had faded. She might have been a young girl, dreaming of some swain.
And perhaps, Claire thought, glancing at Don Hernando, perhaps she is.
“I’m sick about his,” Don Hernando said. “It won’t happen again, I promise you.”
“But it will,” she said. “It will all happen again. Over and over. Your wife, the people here, my husband. I’ll have to leave here. I can’t stay in this house.”
“Leave? But you can’t. A woman alone, there’s no place you could go.”
“There is one place,” she said. “The mission. Perhaps Peter is right after all.”
“You’re hysterical,” Don Hernando said, making a dismissing gesture with his hand.
“Perhaps.” She leaned toward the mirror over her dressing table. She did indeed look a trifle hysterical, with her hair falling about her face in an uncombed tangle and her eyes gleaming feverishly. It would have been easy to assume that she was mad and Doña María a sleeping innocent.
“I forbid this,” Don Hernando said.
She turned to face him. “Neither the decision nor the responsibility are yours,” she told him.
His face turned red, but he stood his ground. “I love you,” he said.
“And she loves you,” Claire said, indicating his wife.
The statement startled him. “Doña María? Ours was an arranged marriage,” he said.
To his surprise, Claire laughed. “Men are such fools,” she said. She saw in his eyes that he too had begun to wonder if she were a little mad. He took a step toward her, but she put up a hand as if to ward him off. “Please, leave me alone,” she said, adding spitefully, “you’ve been willing enough to do that till now.”
“Claire....”
“Please.”
“There’s so much still to be said.”
“And all of it ugly,” she replied. “Or painful.”
She saw him make the effort to regain his aristocratic aloofness. He pulled his shoulders back, his chin tilted ever so slightly upward. He went to the bed and gathered his wife up in his arms.
“I’ll take her home,” he said.
“Don Hernando,” she said and hesitated briefly. “Please—if you do love me—for my sake—be kind to her.”
He shook his head wonderingly. “She just tried to kill you,” he said.
“Yes, I know. Any woman who’s been in love knows that feeling,” she said.
He studied her as if unable to decipher her meaning.
“If you could send someone in the morning, early,” she said. “To help me.�
�
“I’ll see to it,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
She was awake soon after dawn, having slept badly, and began the work of packing up the belongings she had acquired since arriving in California, surprised at how they had accumulated.
She heard someone outside and called, “Come in,” thinking it was someone sent by Don Hernando to help her move. When she looked up, she found Summers standing just inside the door.
“I couldn’t leave without coming to say goodbye,” he said, remaining where he was.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
“Los Angeles pueblo, for now,” he replied.
“There are boats stopping there from time to time,” she said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to get back east.”
He grinned briefly. “Never fancied myself a sailor,” he said. “You saw what happened last time I tried to handle a boat.”
She managed the ghost of a smile herself.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I’m moving to the mission.” His smile faded, and she went on quickly, feeling the need to justify her actions to him, “It’s only temporary. I’ve got to live someplace, and it isn’t really safe for me in this house. Or very comfortable, as long as I’m facing the truth. I’ve become something of an outcast.”
He did not reply. “Anyway, I may follow my own advice, and look for a ship to take me back east,” she added.
“If that’s your plan,” he began and hesitated.
“Yes?” She was sure he meant to suggest they travel together; and she would go in a minute, forget Peter, forget Monterey and California, forget everything else.
“Nothing. I’d better go.”
“Will I see you again?”
He stared at her for a long minute, as if memorizing her features. “It’s a big place,” he said.
She had been kneeling by her trunk. She got up, unsure whether or not she should go to him. He seemed to sense her confusion because he moved toward her. It was foolish and yet somehow she felt if he only held her again, kissed her once more, all of this would vanish and it would be simply the two of them together, never again to be parted.
