Treasure of the Sun

by Christina Dodd

  The man striding across the yard halted in his tracks.

  Leaning over Mr. Smith, whose head bent over his knees and whose fingers clutched his throat, Katherine said, “I know all these things. You see . . . it’s manifest destiny.”

  Chapter 4

  She laughed, although it wavered, and stalked away. As Mr. Smith cast an embarrassed glance at his audience and staggered towards the creek where the beer barrel cooled, Don Lucian loosened his restraining grip on Damian’s arm. “You haven’t the right to interfere, Damian,” Don Lucian reproved. “I wonder where she learned such an effective blow.”

  His son shook his head, rubbing his own Adam’s apple in remembrance.

  “She’ll make you a fine wife,” Don Lucian said. “Better than Vietta.”

  “There was never a question of Vietta.”

  “Her family hoped—”

  Damian never took his eyes from Katherine as she strode toward the house. “Her family hoped I’d rescue them from their own stupidity.”

  “Luis Gregorio is a poor excuse for a rancher,” Don Lucian acknowledged, “and an even poorer excuse for a neighbor.”

  “He lost their lands because of his laziness, but Vietta never expected me to marry her as an obligation.”

  Don Lucian’s voice revealed his distaste for the woman. “No, she expected you to marry her because she loved you.”

  Damian glanced at his father and spread his hands helplessly.” A youthful fancy. I did nothing to encourage her, I assure you. I didn’t even know until I heard the rumors of our impending nuptials.”

  “Of course you didn’t know. It’s not as if she were an innocent child you led astray.”

  “Come, admit it. You don’t like Vietta.”

  “I don’t like her, but what’s worse, I didn’t even like her as a child.” Don Lucian’s mouth puckered as if he’d bitten into a green persimmon. “She was a sly thing who clung to you like a parasite. I was glad when the Gregorios moved to Monterey to live in genteel poverty.”

  “She’s my friend,” Damian answered.

  “You are too loyal. What of her renewed affection for you?”

  “You have noticed? Her devotion seems to have returned in the past year. I’d hoped it was my imagination.” Damian shrugged. “She’s a spinster and prone to strange fantasies. I thought for a few months she loved Tobias. Her eyes burned when she watched him, but he detested her.”

  “Tobias called her a vampire,” Don Lucian said without emotion.

  “The only quarrel Tobias and I ever had, we had about Vietta. She clung to me as if Tobias were a rival. When Tobias suggested he and I travel the countryside seeking out the old Indian and Spanish legends, we returned to find her sitting on the step of the townhouse, demanding an accounting of our trip.”

  “She’s an odd young woman,” Don Lucian stated with emphasis.

  “Then Katherine stepped off the ship. Vietta refused to meet Katherine. When I gave the reception for their wedding, Vietta refused to come.”

  “Jealous of every bit of your attention that isn’t hers.”

  “Surely this, too, will pass.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.” If Don Lucian had his doubts, he disguised them beneath a paternal smile. “Vietta has time before your wedding to accustom herself to the thought. Before you can announce your engagement, a month remains in Doña Katherina’s mourning.”

  The smile disguised concern, and Damian wondered if his father knew in some omniscient, parental fashion, about the scene in the study the previous day. “I can’t wait any longer.”

  Don Lucian frowned. “To urge a woman to abandon the rightful grieving for her husband is the act of a scoundrel.”

  “I can’t wait any longer,” Damian repeated.

  “Tobias was your friend.”

  “Tobias was more than my friend. He was the brother I never had. I never met a man I liked more than Tobias. I never met a man I understood better than Tobias, or who understood me.”

  “Everyone could see how you two spoke without words.” Don Lucian shook his head.” A landowner from California and a watchmaker from Switzerland. How could you have more in common with him than with the people you knew from your birth?”

  Damian shrugged.

  “So why do you now begrudge Tobias the mourning she owes him?”

  With unconscious fingers, Damian stroked his mustache. “I begrudge him nothing. I rejoiced with Tobias when he sent for Katherine. I rejoiced when her ship docked in Monterey harbor. But when I saw her, Papa—she’s beautiful, is she not?”

  “Very attractive.”

  “So stately, with an inbred dignity that makes me long to shake it loose.”

  “If you destroy the dignity, my boy, you’ll destroy the woman.”

  “No, you misunderstand me. I don’t want to destroy her dignity, nor rein it in. I want her to realize that with me, she can abandon her dignity, and I’ll still recognize her as the finest of women.”

  Don Lucian chuckled, an echo reminiscent of his son. “So your mother was with me.”

  “Madre?” Damian remembered the kind, generous, formal woman who had been his mother. “Madre lost her dignity with you?”

  “Not lost. Never lost.” Now he laughed out loud. “She always found it again . . . eventually. I remember when we first moved here, and we’d had a drought. . . .” He noticed how his son’s mouth hung open. “I don’t know if you’re old enough to hear this story.”

  “Papa, I’m thirty-one.”

  “Probably not old enough to hear this story.” He shook his head at his son. “After all, she was your mother. But I’ll tell you anyway. During the first year we were married, a drought parched the land. Lord, it was awful. So hot. No water for the cattle. Only well water for us to drink, and that warm and full of sludge. Finally, it was too much. Teresa and I fought. Shouted at each other, raged at each other. She went tearing out to her horse, I went after her. I chased her for miles.”

  “You couldn’t catch her?”

  “She was a hell of a horsewoman.” Don Lucian lifted his glass in remembered tribute. “Perhaps I didn’t want to catch her. Perhaps I knew it was best not to. We rode out to the middle of nothing, out over the plain and to the foot of the Sierra de Gavilán. There we stopped. We dismounted and raged at each other until, boom! The heavens opened up to douse our anger. It was the grandfather of storms. Your mother and I, we stripped to the skin and danced in the rain.”

  “Naked? Outdoors?”

  “Si. And do you know what your mother’s saddlebags contained? Soap. Dry blankets. Food. Leocadia was your mother’s maid, and that woman listens to the earth. We found a cave—that mountain is riddled with them—and we didn’t go home for two days.”

  “Madre de Dios.”

  “You were conceived on that mountain.”

  Unwillingly amused, Damian asked, “So you found the treasure of the padres?”

  “Si, we found it. It was not gold.”

  Surprising a blush on Don Lucian’s face, Damian refrained from laughing.

  “I’m sure you and Doña Katherina will be more sedate than that.”

  “God forbid. The first time I saw Katherine, I realized Tobias and I had too much in common. I recognized her with my heart, my soul.”

  Don Lucian nodded. “Just so I recognized your mother.”

  “Yes, but I suffered. She barely glanced at me. All her attention centered on Tobias. It gave me time to collect myself, and when my friend introduced me to my love I was cold, distant.”

  “The best response,” his father approved.

  “Yes, but she would have none of it. She was so happy. She threw her arms around me and I . . . suffered. My heart didn’t know whether to leap for joy or die for the pain.”

  Don Lucian winced in sympathy.

  “I’ve kept her safe, never let her know how I feel. The time of grief is coming to an end, and I was willing to wake her slowly.”

  “What changed your mind?”

/>   With a suppressed fury, Damian said, “She’s saving the money I pay her to return. Return to Boston, to the family who despises her. Young Cabeza told me and assured me he heard the words himself.”

  Staggering back as if he were stunned, Don Lucian asked, “Why?”

  “I’ve thought about it. I believe she has decided it’s her duty. I know my Catriona. Her will of iron was tempered by the fires of duty, and she’ll go unless she’s bound hand and foot by a greater duty here.”

  Don Lucian thought, too. Clapping his son on the shoulder, he urged, “Vaya con tu corazon. Go with your heart.”

  With a vicious jerk, Katherine pulled her sleeve loose from its stitching, and clutched it in her fist. She had made a scene. She hated scenes. She hated that defiant demon inside that never let her back down. She hated the sick feeling that roiled in her stomach afterwards.

  She didn’t handle men well. She never had. She loved an argument, and her father had taught her to think, to debate, to succeed. He hadn’t taught her that men took losing an argument poorly, that their response was violence. When she thought of Emerson Smith’s twisted face towering over hers, she wanted to crumple up and cry, but the control her mother had taught her was too rigid for that. She’d turn her attention to other matters and gradually, she knew, the distress would fade.

  Until the next argument.

  She stepped in front of the full-length mirror and glared at her own reflection. She owned two dresses in plain serviceable black muslin, both of them torn. She could baste this sleeve back into the bodice, but the other dress required major repairs.

  How she would love to astonish the guests with a flattering costume!

  The woman in the mirror looked startled, then disapproving. Where had that errant thought come from?

  Removing her mourning clothes would be her final good-bye to Tobias. She didn’t wish to discard the memory of her marriage, or the safety it represented. She smoothed the black cotton of her skirt.

  Still, seeing the pretty señoritas in their gay outfits had whetted her appetite for something new. Something befitting her station as housekeeper and widow, perhaps in mauve. Never in her life had she been allowed to wear anything attractive. Even Uncle Rutherford had complained about her depressing attire, but Aunt Narcissa had been adamant. With two girls of her own to outfit, she’d seen fit to clothe her niece by marriage in cast-offs. Katherine smoothed her skirt again and turned away from the mirror.

  She fetched her sewing box to the table that stood close to the straight-back chair. Undoing the buttons that held her bodice, she stripped it down and stepped out. She took her seat near the dormer window, where the sun could light her work, yet she wasn’t visible to the crowd below. She should sew, dress again, and go down to work. For a moment, though, she sat with her hands at rest in her lap and studied her bedroom with affectionate eyes.

  It was one-third of the huge attic that ran atop the U-shaped house. When Don Lucian first led her up the tiny stairs to the room under the roof, she’d wondered, for a brief, despairing moment, whether this was his way of saying he didn’t want her here. It had been dull and dusty; it echoed the pain in her soul. But Don Lucian knew what he was about. The servants cleaned and when next she saw the room it sparkled. The wooden floors had been polished until they gleamed, the walls had been whitewashed. The room was too big for one person, yet she’d felt an immediate sense of belonging, a sense of spaciousness and light that appealed to her.

  Behind a door in the other part of the attic was all the furniture discarded from the hacienda. She’d been given carte blanche, and she had furnished her room as she wished. A frayed rug covered part of the floor. A large carved wooden table held her quilting. Chairs of wood and leather were scattered about. Another small table beside the bed held a mismatched porcelain pitcher and bowl and a candlestick. Behind a folding screen that divided the room into living space and sleeping space, wooden dowels had been fixed in the wall for her clothing.

  An immense bed with carved headboard and footboard dominated one corner of the room. She had sewn the quilt in Boston and transported it in her marriage trunk. A free-standing mirror stood beside it, and a comfortable chair sat against the opposite wall in the shadows. In the beginning of her sojourn here, she’d spent many hours curled in that chair, wrapped in a blanket and staring at the wall. Her need for solitude and security had faded, and now the chair stood alone.

  She’d never found a place where she felt more at home. With a sigh for passing time, she threaded her needle with sturdy black thread and plunged it into the sleeve.

  Laughter below attracted her attention, and she twisted in her seat. From up here she could see them all. The Berretos, the Rios, the Alavarados sang the bawdy kind of song that brought forth those bursts of laughter. The Garcias swayed together in a circle, their arms wrapped around each others’ shoulders. Mariano Vallejo of Sonoma was here, passing through on his way home from Monterey. He formed the center of a serious group of men who discussed California politics and tried to decide California’s fate.

  The Valverdes weren’t laughing. They were there en masse, glaring across the room at the del Reals, and Katherine wondered when the fight would erupt. They’d been snarling since the day they arrived, and no one seemed to think it out of the ordinary. The guests seemed to think it more extraordinary that they hadn’t been fighting. What had Don Damian said? He’d been keeping them so entertained they hadn’t done battle.

  Weakly she heard the call, “Don Damian!” and an irresistible curiosity pushed her forward to peer below.

  “Don Damian! Don Damian!”

  Damian cursed to himself. He didn’t want to speak to anyone right now. Anger still raced through his veins and coiled in his belly. He wanted, very badly, to take Mr. Smith out and beat him bloody. To restrain himself—and as host, restrain himself he must—he wanted to leave this fiesta and all of his nosy, wellmeaning friends. He wanted to saddle his wildest, most badtempered stallion and ride until both of them were exhausted.

  “Don Damian!”

  He ignored her, hoping to gain refuge in the stables. At least in the stables, his friends confined their comments on his love life to a few whinnies and neighs.

  “Don Damian!”

  What a fool he was to think Vietta would ever give up. She was like a bulldog with jaws that clamped tight and never released. Whatever she set her mind to, she would attain. Schooling himself to patience, he turned. Seeing Vietta’s eager face as she hurried, her painful limp as she struggled towards him, he reproached himself. What manner of beast could be so cruel as to ignore Vietta? After her accident last year, she’d been reduced to waiting for life to come to her. How could he forget their friendship in the pain of love?

  The thought of his new love sent his mind veering back into fury. How dare Katherine try to leave him? How dare she suggest she’d be better off in Boston than in his arms? Didn’t she know, even yet, that he would move heaven and earth to keep her at his side?

  Vietta’s hand shyly touched his sleeve, then tugged at it, and he started when he realized she had caught up with him. “Aren’t you glad to see me?” she asked in pouting bewilderment. “You’re frowning.”

  He rearranged his lips into a smile. “Vietta.” He patted her hand. “I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else. How’s my dear friend?”

  She giggled like a silly girl, which she wasn’t. She was his elder by six months, past the thirty-second birthday that loomed before him.

  “Damian, I’ve hardly had a chance to speak to you this whole fiesta.” One of her hazel eyes winked in a parody of flirtation, and his pained gaze roamed over the milling crowd. How could she tease him? Didn’t she know what was obvious to everyone else?

  Vietta wasn’t pretty, he supposed, but she wasn’t as ill-favored as some of the women who were her age, and married. She spoke in a deep, rich voice. One of his friends said she sounded as if she were the madam of a bordello and knew every trick in the book. Everyone
had laughed, but it was true. Her voice, by itself, inspired fantasies of lust. Unfortunately, the voice was only an extension of her height.

  She had grown too tall, looking many of his friends in the eye.

  Her lips were every man’s dream. Lush, moist and pouting, they made a man think of long, slow kisses on a hot, summer night. But her black hair made a man think of a hot summer day. It clung to her head when she perspired, and she seemed to perspire all the time.

  Her complexion was the most marvelous alabaster, pure and transparent as a baby’s skin. But she sunburned whenever she set foot out of the house, and so she stayed within. To read, she said, but the horse-worshiping Californios didn’t understand that. She’d acquired a stoop from the books she devoured, and the books had given her knowledge and a vast conceit to go with it.

  So she’d never had a real suitor.

  Vietta’s tug at his arm was stronger this time, a sharp pinch, and he brought his attention once more to her. “I’m sorry, I . . . thought I heard one of the servants call to me.”

  “Your housekeeper?” she asked tartly.

  Ah. She did know. Life hadn’t been easy for Vietta. She was a poor, landless spinster. If bitterness tinged her attitude from time to time, he was man enough to ignore it.

  “Your leg is better?”

  “So much better. I have little pain, except when I try to run.” She winced, and guilt ripped through him. He put his arm around her waist and led her towards the laughing group of men and women who congregated around the benches under the trees. “I don’t want to go there,” she objected, tweaking his arm. “I only want to be with you.”

  He gently insisted. “You can sit and rest your leg, and we can talk to our friends.”

  “Your friends,” she murmured.

  The truth of it struck him; why didn’t any of his friends like her? He pretended he hadn’t heard, knowing they would welcome her for his sake.

  The women made a place for Vietta on the bench, voicing their concern for her injury but with no regard for her replies. All their attention strained to hear the men as they closed on Damian.