The Star in the Meadow (The Spanish Brand Book 4)

by Carla Kelly

  The moment passed. He felt his heart grow strong again. His glance rested on his children, one a child of his body and Paloma’s, the other the daughter of a weak man and his vindictive wife, but both little ones equally loved. He watched Juanito asleep in his cradle and then his wife, who was having trouble keeping her eyes open now.

  “I think we are done for the night,” he whispered to Catalina, who was looking at Joaquim Gasca.

  Suddenly he saw them both in a new light, and it warmed his heart still more. Through Joaquim’s long winter of personal repair and presidio rehabilitation, Marco had noticed a deepening frown crease the handsome man’s face, as the weight of his own sins and his need to redeem both himself and the pathetic garrison entrusted to him bit deep. For a brief time while Catalina Ygnacio, no one’s treasure, had spun her tales effortlessly, El Teniente Gasca’s load had been lightened..

  “Isn’t there time for one more story before I must leave?” Joaquim coaxed. “Here, I will carry Soledad to bed and Marco will get Claudito.” He stood up and carefully lifted the sleepy girl to rest against his shoulder.

  Marco picked up Claudito, breathing deep of the early spring sunlight that he smelled in his son’s hair. “It would have to be a short story,” he cautioned. “You need to return to your garrison, and Paloma is tired.”

  Marco followed Joaquim down the dark hall, lit now with only a flickering candle here and there. He looked at the two old paintings of saints, work done a century and more ago before his ancestors were driven from Santa Fe in a terrible uprising that killed hundreds. There was enough of a breeze to set the linen pictures swaying. He couldn’t deny a stab of fear, as though cold fingers strummed his backbone. Maybe he should put those old things away. Suppose Soli or Claudito saw them swaying in the hall, moving like wraiths?

  He shook off the feeling, grateful Joaquim could not read his thoughts and brand him a weak man, a milk baby.

  The men decided that shoes off was enough. In a moment the children’s blankets were tucked high against the cold that came with morning, living with thin air at this high altitude.

  He stood a moment in silence, then made the sign of the cross over each sleeping body. He noticed Joaquim’s smile as he looked at the children.

  “Maybe you will have children of your own someday,” he whispered to the lieutenant.

  “I would like that above all things, but first I must find a wife.”

  “What do you think of Catalina Ygnacio?” Marco asked, wondering if he was too forward, but curious to know.

  They started back down the hall together. “Too thin. Too tall. Too bossy,” Joaquim said as they approached the sala. He stopped, knowing who waited inside the next room. “And yet, when she tells stories, her whole person changes. How does she do that?”

  “Maybe you should ask her,” Marco suggested.

  “Oh no,” Joaquim said with a laugh. “I will leave that to better men than I, the kind who won’t do something stupid and break a woman’s heart.”

  Marco thought of both his wives and the numerous times they had forgiven him for being dense and dumb, because that seemed to be a woman’s nature. “They are tougher than you think, friend, when it comes to stupid husbands.”

  Paloma was sitting up when they came into the sala. “We have decreed one short dicho only,” she said. “I must go to bed, and you, Teniente, have a dark road to travel.”

  “There is a full moon,” Joaquim said. He rubbed his hands together. “I am a Catalonian from Barcelona and then Cuba, as you know. There is a tale I have heard of here in this New World, but no one has told me—something about a weeping woman, La Llorona.”

  Paloma gasped and reached for Marco’s hand. “Not that one! Never that one!” She stood up, unsteady, and started for the door.

  Chilled to the bone by his wife’s sudden exclamation, Marco grabbed her around the waist, then picked her up. “It’s only a dicho, dearest,” he said.

  She squirmed in his arms to look at his face. “A story of a poor woman who haunts the riverbank, gouging her eyes and calling for her drowned children? No, Marco.” She put her head against his chest so he could not see her face.

  He hurried down the hall with her to their own room, where he put her to bed, then returned to the sala, where Catalina was speaking to Joaquim. They stood close together, as if she did not want her words about La Llorona to travel beyond a few inches, and certainly not anywhere else.

  “No, this is not the time or place,” the lieutenant agreed. “I should leave now. I … I’ll send my corporal in the morning to sit with Señor Ygnacio.”

  Still Joaquim remained, and Catalina rubbed her arms. “He was just curious, Señor Mondragón,” she said formally, as though he had just broken a spell.

  “I know.” He heard the sorrow in her voice, as though something—or someone—Catalina Ygnacio wanted was gone from her possession. Her disappointment chafed him.

  “I’ll save the story for another time and another place,” she assured him as she went to the door of the sala. She looked down the hall in the direction of Paloma’s room. “Such a story would bother any mother. I never thought of it like that before.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  In which Paloma agrees to a journey, because Toshua says so

  Marco left the sala for the darkened corridor, unable to shake off his unease at Paloma’s outburst. He knew she had heard the sad story of La Llorona, as had everyone in the New World. Some said it came from Indios in the Caribbean. Others traced it to early settlers in Guatemala. Everyone claimed the story was true, told by an uncle or a cousin who knew the woman involved.

  He had grown up with the New Mexican version, probably one of many, where a beautiful young woman falls in love with a ranchero, a handsome man who could ride like a Comanche. Marco leaned against the wall in the corridor, which suddenly seemed much darker, except for those slowly moving painted saints. Dios. He was taking those down in the morning.

  “And they marry,” he said softly to himself, remembering how his mother’s telling of the story used to scare him enough to keep him indoors at night when he was a boy. “They are happy, so happy, and have three little ones in quick succession.”

  He closed his eyes, mostly to avoid looking at the paintings. And then the man resumed his wild ways on the plains of eastern New Mexico, not returning for several years, or so the story went.

  And when he came back, he was accompanied by a different beautiful young woman, he thought, unable to stop his mind from recalling the sad little tale he had not thought of in years, because he knew that as much as he loved his mother, he would never frighten his children with La Llorona.

  They rode through the village in a carriage, and the cast-off wife saw them, as she walked along the riverbank with her children. After they passed, she drowned her children in the river, holding them under until they ceased their frantic struggles.

  “Ay de mi,” he said out loud, remembering how his big sister, now the widow Gutierrez, held him close as Mama told the story.

  She died of grief beside the river, when she realized what she had done. Now her fantasma walks along the bank, weeping and moaning for her little ones, as she scratches out her eyes.

  “Oof, Catalina just told me the whole story,” a voice said behind him.

  Marco jumped, then gave a shaky laugh to see Joaquim—or what he hoped and prayed was Joaquim—standing beside him. “Don’t sneak up on me! You’ve heard that beastly tale now.”

  “I have indeed.” The soldier shuddered and inclined his head toward the closed door farther down the hall. “Please tell Paloma I would never have asked for that awful story, had I had any idea what it was about.”

  “She’ll understand,” Marco said. “Mamas, especially new ones, must abhor that story.” He gave his friend a push. “Go on now. You do have a garrison to run.”

  Joaquim nodded, his head down. “I’ve been a little lax there, haven’t I? Truth to tell, I like being here, and I think maybe it
isn’t because I admire Paloma, although I do. You know what I mean. I’m making a mess of this! Somebody stop me.”

  Marco laughed and gave Joaquim another push. “Maybe you’re discovering a heretofore unknown fondness for figures and columns.”

  “I’m certain that’s it,” Joaquim replied, humor evident in his voice. “There’s really nothing wrong with skinny women, is there? I mean, that’s all we see in Valle del Sol.”

  The two men laughed together. Marco knew that while Paloma could never be called thin again—and thank God for that—she was by no means stout and never would be.

  “We all work too hard to be fat,” Marco said. “Before you go, help me take down these paintings.”

  He thought Joaquim might question such an impulse, but he didn’t. The two of them lifted the fading linen saints with dowels through the top hem off their wooden perches, each man rolling up the one he held until they were two harmless bits of cloth. Marco leaned them against the wall.

  “They should be in the chapel, anyway,” Marco said, feeling the need for explanation.

  Joaquim was a hard man to fool. “That way they won’t scare you anymore, oh brave juez de campo?”

  “Precisely!” Marco said, wondering why he even bothered to attempt subterfuge. “Ride in safety and come back in a few days. You must at least make sure that your entire garrison hasn’t deserted, since you’ve developed an interest in audits.”

  Joaquim put his middle finger to his forehead in a lazy salute, then pointed it at Marco, who laughed and opened the door.

  Marco said goodnight to Catalina as she walked down the hall to her little room, then made sure she had snuffed out the candles in the sala. The fireplace gave off only the smallest glow now, as he picked up the cradle with his sleeping son inside and continued down the hall to his bedchamber, where he hoped Paloma was sleeping.

  She was sitting up in bed, her chin tucked against her upraised knees, as he placed the cradle close to the fireplace, but not too close. Sitting down on his clothes chest, one stocking off now, he leaned against the wall.

  “Goodness, Marco, come to bed,” Paloma said.

  “I will,” he told her. “That story haunts me, too, and do you know what else haunts me?”

  “Better tell me, but I think I know,” she said in a small voice. “It’s what happens now and then, isn’t it? Maybe La Llorona reminded you. Or me.”

  He watched her, wondering if he was intruding on some female ritual he had never noticed when Soledad was an infant. Maybe it just happened with sons. How did she know what he was thinking?

  “Paloma, sometimes you wake me up at night, patting around at the end of our bed. Why do you do that?”

  “I wish I didn’t, but I can’t help myself.” She lay back against her pillow. “The dream is so real, Marco. I dream I have lost my baby and cannot find him. I pat around the bed, certain he is there somewhere. I start to panic.”

  “I know. You pat and then you stop and draw yourself into a little ball and go back to sleep. I wondered if I was dreaming, the first time you did that.”

  “No. It’s my nightmare,” she said. “Why didn’t you say anything when Claudio was born and I did that?”

  “Because I am a lump-headed husband who just goes back to sleep, happy to let his wife do the nursing and changing and everything else that smacks of midnight work,” he said frankly. “I heard a joke once about a first-time father who woke up with a black eye. When he asked what happened, his wife said it was because she hit him with a candlestick, since he was lying there so peacefully with a smile on his face while she nursed their baby.”

  “Tonto! I would never beat you. Haven’t even been tempted.” She laughed softly. “Well, it did cross my mind once.”

  He took off his other stocking and threw it at her. She threw it back.

  “You’re looking for a missing child? Why didn’t that happen with Soledad?” he asked, curious.

  “I wondered about that at first, but remember, she had a wet nurse and did not sleep in here, as our sons do, because I nurse them,” Paloma said. “It’s as though I have fed them, but they have vanished from our bed.” She managed another laugh, but he heard no humor this time. “It stops after a few months.” A sigh. “I suppose that is why La Llorona is so frightening to me—that poor ghost, crying and looking everywhere for her children. I feel sorry for her.”

  She patted the empty space beside her. She hadn’t bothered with a nightgown.

  His clothes came off slowly, and he smiled to see Paloma watching him. He sucked in his stomach, even though it didn’t need sucking in.

  “You are a handsome man, for a New Mexican,” she teased, and he sighed with relief at the change in her voice. “Please love me tonight. I’m not that tired. Really I’m not, Big Man Down There.”

  Smiling at his Comanche nickname—what man wouldn’t?—Marco did as she asked, loving her carefully. He had come to understand a woman’s pride in her body and her role as wife, and knew better than to disagree, especially when he didn’t want to, and he didn’t.

  He was quick to satisfy. His wife surprised him with the ease of her pleasure, although why she should have surprised him, he couldn’t have said. Paloma was his equal in everything, including lovemaking.

  “Heavenly days, Señora Mondragón,” he said when she was nestled at his side, her heavy breasts warm against his skin and dry because she had a towel handy. “You could pleasure me into a coma.”

  She chuckled and kissed his chest, which meant he kissed her hair and whatever else was close by. Paloma cuddled closer and he pulled the covers higher, mainly because his rump was cold.

  While he was working up the nerve to tell her she needed to visit his sister for a while, Paloma toyed with his chest hairs. She finally gave them a little yank, and he tugged back on her hair, glad to find her playful again. He also knew she wanted his attention, and that his wife was a smart woman.

  “You already know what I’m going to ask, don’t you?” he said. “Heavenly days, Señora Mondragón,” he teased again, “have we been married that long?”

  “We talked about this earlier,” she reminded him. “Besides, while you were busy in the field today, your rider returned with a message from my sister-in-law, saying that she would love to see me, her newest nephew, and meet Catalina.”

  “You’re reading my mail now?” he teased.

  “Silly! She didn’t write it. She told Pablo, and he remembered it.” Her fingers, at first gentle on his chest, moved lower to his navel. “I’ll go, because I know you’re right.” She sighed. “So is Toshua.”

  “You need even more of a rest than an hour on the porch before dawn,” he whispered in her ear. “How about in two days? Catalina can go along and then come back with the auditor’s carriage.”

  “Why not ours?” she asked.

  “My wagon master is replacing an axle in Santa Maria, and he’s too busy with his own spring planting.”

  “Very well. We can chat on the way there and then she’ll return here. You’ll come and get me in a week?”

  “Nice try, wife,” he said, and gave her head a rub. “Two weeks.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  In which the little journey becomes much longer

  They left two days after Marco begged the loan of the ramshackle little carriage the Ygnacios had arrived in, because his own conveyance was in need of repair from a wagon master also busy with planting.

  “Ride with her, Catalina,” he said, as they walked toward the office. She said yes, because the juez de campo was such a kind man to her father, and truth to tell, she liked him, too.

  “Keep Paloma company and stay a day or two yourself,” Marco urged her. “Your father is doing well and my sister is a good hostess.”

  “She needs the rest and I won’t mind it, either,” Catalina said, even as she wished sometimes that her brain was more disinclined to state aloud thoughts that others left unsaid. “Take me, for example,” she said, plowing on. “I ha
ve underestimated my father. He is doing so well and he doesn’t need my help. Did he ever? Did I render him less of a man?”

  “Women try too hard, you are saying?” he asked, giving her a shrewd look that branded him forever as a husband.

  “Perhaps we do, and we disappoint ourselves. I will watch over Paloma.”

  Truth to tell, two days away from Papa might be a good idea, Catalina decided. Lately, she had felt she was getting in the way of his audit. Only yesterday she had come into the office, ready to help, and he had looked up with something close to—but not quite—annoyance at her intrusion.

  He had put his hands together and looked at her expectantly, as though wishing she would hurry up and tell him what to do, then leave. She had observed his neat piles of records and realized there was nothing she could do to improve matters. Nodding to him, she had made some comment about Paloma needing help with the children and left him to his audit—his, not hers.

  What a day of bumbling about that had been. When Joaquim made his now usual appearance before dinner and nighttime stories, Catalina had told him about her father’s obvious efficiency that didn’t involve her this time. What did the dratted lieutenant do except smile in a most maddening fashion and kiss her cheek?

  She turned her face to utter some retort, and he had kissed her mouth. Not just once, which could have been judged an accident because he hadn’t expected her to turn her head so fast, but twice. And what had she done but kiss him back? Good God, the man was a rake and a rascal, and she had kissed him. Where had her brains gone?

  Even as he kissed her that second time—or maybe it was a third time—her own analytical mind tried to convince her this was folly. Easy to think, she decided later, when she had a moment to consider what had happened. For the first time in her life, her heart had overruled her brain. My word, the man can kiss. No, it was time for a visit to La Viuda Gutierrez so she could sort out her own feelings.