Nobody's Saint (11 page)

*

There were myriad tasks to perform in La Habana. Enrique stood ready at the ship to unload cargo, but there would be no one there to take it if Diego did not inform the buyers that it had arrived. Also, with each visit to the Cuban city, he had been carefully laying the groundwork for his own company, one that he intended to open after one more trip to Europe for his employer, Don Luis. There were potential customers to court and petty government clerks’ palms to grease.

Still, the bold, fortress-like façade of the Cathedral called to him. In hopes that it was Magdalena who beckoned, he turned abruptly and strode through the doors. He genuflected, crossed himself, and slipped into a small alcove. Votive candles burned before a screen elaborately depicting the torture of some martyr, but Diego did not study it closely enough to determine who it was. In an instant, he was on his knees on the stone floor, desperately willing his saint to appear.

But come to think of it, he thought, she had never appeared to him in a church. The first time he had seen her was over a dead man’s shroud, and he dreamed of her in his sleep. Perhaps she could not come to him in a church. Perhaps she dared not enter sacred ground! Who was this woman who had once seemed such a godsend and now seemed such an anathema?

“Mother of God, help me!” he whispered fiercely. Immediately, a sense of calm settled over him. He would hold fast to his honor, he thought, and all would be well. He had only to keep his resolve. Perhaps the visions had stopped because he had begun to suspect their source, and so whatever force had brought them to him had moved on. With a sigh of relief and a reverent sign of the cross, he rose. Business could wait. He would confess to lustful dreams and being tempted by María Catalina, and he would be absolved. Then he would face all his confusions and temptations with a clean soul and a fresh perspective. With that thought, he slipped into a dark confessional and set his plan into motion.

Behind him, Magdalene waved her hand over the tops of the votive candles in the deserted alcove, but none of them danced, for there was no breeze. “You scold me for toying with him, but heaven forbid I should just step in and give him a straight answer.”

Mother Mary was still seated on the little pew, next to where Diego had been kneeling. “And what would he learn from that? He would defy his country and marry her because a saint had told him to, not because he had struggled with his own conscience and learned that rules are sometimes made to be broken. They must find their own paths, Mary Magdalene.”

“What about Catherine, Margaret, and Michael and that little French girl?”

“That was different. Nothing short of a direct order could convince a sixteen-year-old, fifteenth-century girl to raise up an army and be its general. Besides, everything that happened after that was her choice. No one can accuse her of taking the easy way out.”

Magdalene fell silent. Mary had her there. Finally she shook her head. “He’s too honorable for his own good. Besides, he thinks I’ve deserted him. He thinks I’m evil!”

Mary stood and walked over to Magdalene. “It is a double edged sword, is it not? They pray to us because we were human once, and we understand, but heaven forbid we should seem
too
human. We are, after all, saints.”

Magdalene laughed. “They wait too long to canonize people. It should be done when those who actually knew them are still around to testify.”

Mary chuckled along with her. “If they did that, there would be considerably fewer of us!” She draped her arm over the other woman’s shoulder, and they were engulfed in light that rapidly disappeared.

*

Mary Kate’s eyes were as wide as saucers when she opened the large sea chest with the broken lock. She had never seen so many jewels and so much gold in all her life. This wasn’t her dowry, that was sure!

“Is that your
baúl
?” Galeno asked, picking his way through crates in the dim lamplight that flickered through the hold.

She slammed the lid down before he could see the contents. “Nay. I thought it was, but ‘tis not. Could you check that other trunk, over there?” She pointed to the far side of the hold, and Galeno dutifully went to open it.

She opened the chest again and grabbed a large, gem-encrusted brooch. Even her entire dowry would probably not cover the cost of the ornament, but it had been stolen to begin with. It wasn’t as though it actually belonged to Diego, or even Spain. She slipped it neatly down her bodice, cradling it between her ample breasts.

“This is your
baúl
?” Galeno asked, pulling one of her winter gowns out of another trunk.

“Aye!
¡Sí!
Thank you, Galeno. That is my trunk. I’ll just get that necklace I was wanting and let you get back to your duties.” His unwavering smile and wide stare suggested that hadn’t understood much, but at least she had been able to communicate enough to get him to bring her down here. She patted his cheek affectionately and was rewarded with a shy grin and a blush. “You’re a good lad, Galeno,” she added.

Once he had escorted her back to her cabin, she fastened the little gold cross that had been her excuse for searching the hold around her neck. It was her only piece of good jewelry, but it wasn’t worth enough to exchange for passage home. The brooch should do the trick. She pulled it from her bodice and fastened it to her petticoat, underneath her skirt. She had already tried to get Galeno to take her into the city, but he didn’t understand enough English to be persuaded by her confession argument, and he knew his captain would not approve of him letting her leave the ship. The boy would not budge where his captain’s wishes were concerned.

Diego returned with a half-dozen men, and soon the ladders, hatches, and decks were swarming with men hauling crates from the bowels of the ship. She might have gotten lost amid them and escaped unnoticed, but she couldn’t even get from her cabin to the hatch without being scolded in Spanish by someone hefting his load and pointing back to her quarters.

Scowling furiously and stomping around the room in frustration, she pulled three cotton gowns from her trunk. They were utterly impractical for the wet weather in Ireland, but she had little choice. She wouldn’t be able carry several heavy dresses with their voluminous skirts and still move quickly and nimbly, as she would need to. She tucked her ledger and rosary amid the folds and wrapped them in the light wool cloak that had been packed with her summer clothes. Next to the bundle, she set the glass bottle with the last of her precious rosewater. She didn’t have anything else heavy enough to throw and distract the night watch, so it would be a worthwhile sacrifice.

Finally, Mary Kate lay down on the bunk and looked up at the ceiling. She was full of nervous energy, but she resisted the urge to pace. She would need to get her rest so she could do what must be done come nightfall. Havana was filled with ships from every corner of the world, and she was bloody well going to be on another one of them before dawn tomorrow.

Diego’s back and shoulders throbbed with the sort of satisfying ache that comes of a hard day’s work done well. Once
Magdalena
belonged to him, he could never purposely pursue
Don
Luis’s customers. That would be dishonorable. But more than a few of them would seek out Diego, and then he would be a fool to turn away their business.

He only wished that his troubled conscience regarding his unanticipated passenger was as easy to resolve. The good father at the church had advised him to leave her in La Habana with the governor and let him arrange for her ransom. Diego had tried to explain why he needed to take her to Don Juan in Cartagena, but the priest was unmoved. He simply could not understand why her family in Ireland needed to be contacted when she was as good as married to a man in Jamaica, a veritable stone’s throw from Cuba.

Diego was not entirely sure why that was, either, but he could not bring himself to leave her among strangers to be delivered into the hands of a stranger—an English stranger. He did not see how any decent Spaniard could fail to understand Mary Kate’s loathing for her circumstances. So in the end, he was disregarding the advice of the priest—quite possibly a sin in itself—and leaving himself vulnerable to continued temptation.

So much for a clean soul and a fresh perspective.

He had Mary Kate’s dinner sent to her room, along with the message that he was too busy to eat with her. One less opportunity to be tempted. They would sail tomorrow afternoon, as soon as he had cleared up his last few business tasks. Then they would head straight for Cartagena, and that would be the last he saw of María Catalina. As for Magdalena, before he had left the church that day, he issued a direct command to her to stay out of his life. He felt a chill go through him, but nothing more ominous than that. If she came to him again, she would not find him so compliant!

He shared his supper table with Galeno, who told him about Mary Kate’s trip into the hold.

“I watched her very closely, Captain, because you warned me that she was deceitful. I kept her far away from the cask with her dowry in it, and she took only a small cross from the other.”

“How small?” Diego demanded. Galeno held up his fingers to indicate an inch or so. “Any jewels on it?”

“No, only gold.”

Diego pondered that a moment. “Not enough for passage to Europe. Why did she have such a sudden need for it, I wonder?”

Galeno shrugged, and Diego let the matter drop. With only one night in La Habana, and a crew of men who had been many weeks at sea, he could hardly justify keeping too many aboard. He chose two to keep watch, with the promise of a generous bonus, and released all but a skeleton crew for security. Those who had stayed behind to guard the ship would be first off in Cartagena. As Diego retired for the night, the men who were not specifically on watch were in the crews’ quarters, playing cards and making plans for their next stop.

*

Mary Kate had had her ear pressed to the door for so long it ached, but at last, she heard what she’d been listening for. Diego’s door opened, he bid Galeno goodnight, and the door closed again. She was a nervous wreck, but she waited at least twenty minutes before she cautiously opened her own door a crack and peered into the passageway by the light of a single candle held aloft. From deeper within the ship, she could hear the crew laughing and talking among themselves, but there was no sign of anyone nearby.

Ducking back into her room, she grabbed her bundle and bottle of rosewater, then left and tiptoed softly to the bottom of the ladder that led to the deck above. The quarter moon above it lent a little light, but not too much, and she blew out her candle and slipped it into her bundle. In an instant, she discovered the difficulty of climbing a ladder in a long skirt while holding an armload, and after three attempts at a ladylike ascension, she finally piled her skirts on top of her parcel and climbed the thing bare-legged. God help her if someone sneaked up from behind, for he’d get a fair eyeful!

The worst was having to pause at the top, peering over the edge at the night watch, all the while acutely aware of what she looked like from the waist, down. Thankfully, one man kept his eyes fixed on the dock, the other out at sea, and she could quickly pull herself through and set her skirts to rights. Then she pulled herself tightly against the mast and threw her bottle of rosewater as hard as she could onto the bridge. It shattered loudly, and while the crewmen bolted up the stairs to investigate, she hurtled across the deck and down the gangplank, melting quickly into the collection of people who still wandered the docks of Havana after dark.

And fascinating people they were. They spoke in myriad languages and came in skin shades she had only heard of in tales told by well-traveled sailors. Among this foreign crowd, she encountered the next obstacle. For all their variety, really there were primarily two kinds of people who populated the docks at this time of night—prostitutes and men looking for prostitutes. She didn’t understand a word of anything said to her by the men she passed and didn’t want to understand any of it. She just clutched her bundle tightly to her chest and plowed through them, spewing venomous
Gaeilge
at any who dared to touch her.

Mary Kate spun hard when a man grabbed her arm tightly and pulled her toward him. “
Cá mhéad?
” he demanded. How much?

She opened her mouth to give him a sound cursing when she realized what he had just said. “You speak Irish!” she cried, her own language sweet on her tongue.

“I do,” he replied, “and so do you, by the proper cursing you gave these poor bastards!”

From the general direction of
Magdalena
, Mary Kate could hear shouts of alarm. She gave the fellow before her a cursory inspection. Reasonably good-looking, fairly clean, clothes not overly-mended. And he was Irish! “Please, you have to help me,” she pleaded. “I was abducted by a Spaniard, and I’ve only just escaped. Please! They are coming after me!”

He looked over his shoulder at the commotion building behind them. “Come with me. I’ll take you to my ship.” Grabbing her bundle in one hand, and taking her by the hand with the other, he led her quickly away, down to the end of a far pier where a rather battered looking ship rocked in the water.

“Is this ship yours?” she asked. “Are you the captain?”

“Not I,” he answered, “but the captain will have no objections to your presence.”

She started to assure him that she could pay for her passage, but then thought better of it. She stopped at the bottom of the gangplank, looking up at the vessel. There was no flag anywhere in sight.

“Under what flag do you sail?”

“Does it matter? To a woman in trouble, I should think that to be the least of your worries.”

“Does it matter? It is a simple enough question to answer.”

“Pádraig!” a man shouted from above. The rest of what he said was so much gibberish. It wasn’t Irish, English, or Spanish. The two men laughed, and Pádraig’s grip tightened on her hand, crushing her fingers.