Spanish Serenade (2 page)

The house where Pilar's mother had been kept a prisoner and where she had died had been in Pilar's father's family for more than five hundred years, since Ferdinand the Saint had driven the Moors from Seville. Pilar hardly recognized it when she returned. Where once the Sandoval family arms had been emblazoned above the door, there was a great, ugly Iturbide crest. Supercilious servants had taken the places of the retainers who had been with the Sandovals for countless years; Pilar could find not a single familiar face. The rooms and halls had been stripped of their fine old furnishings, their carved furniture, tapestries, and gold and silver plate. Her mother's clothing, her icons, her few pieces of fine gold jewelry were gone.

Everything had been looted to fill Don Esteban's purse, or else to further his ambitions at court. He had apparently achieved the success he wanted, for he had been given a position as
pena de camara
, or keeper of fines, one of the regidores of the Cabildo, the governing body of the city of New Orleans in the Spanish colony of Louisiana. Since he would wield considerable power, as well as retaining ten percent of the fines collected, the post promised to return to him far more in bribes than he had expended in gaining it. There were some who whispered that the position itself was a bribe meant to rid the king of Don Esteban and his ceaseless conniving for favor. If Don Esteban saw it in that light, he hid it well; he preened himself as if he had gained the highest of honors.

Pilar's mother, ill for many months, had died the day after Don Esteban had returned from Madrid with the news of his appointment. It had seemed a convenient coincidence, for a sickly wife could neither be taken to Louisiana nor left behind without it appearing that she had been deserted. Then Pilar had learned from her duenna, Don Esteban's sister, that Don Esteban had, some months before, brought a special tonic from Madrid for his wife. He had ordered her to take it, and issued strict rules that it be brought to her every day. On the morning of her death he had administered it to her with his own hands. Immediately after the death rites, he had returned to the house and commenced his packing for the voyage to Louisiana.

The night air of the patio garden swirled around Pilar as she came to a halt in mid-stride with her fists clenched in the cloth of her shawl. Had that shadow moved, there where the giant ceramic olla caught the water from the rooftop? She could not tell; it might have been the wind swaying the oleander shrub which grew behind it. Or it could be only her imagination and the waiting. She had waited the night before and the night before that, and El Leon had not come. If he did not come soon, tonight or the night after, it would be too late.

Deliberately, in defiance of the fear she would not acknowledge, Pilar turned her back on the shadowed corner and began to walk again. Somewhere a cat yowled, and from the street beyond the garden wall came the sound of low voices as two men carried on a murmured conversation while walking homeward. The sounds ceased and all was quiet once more. Too quiet.

Pilar shivered. In an assumption of self-control, she directed her thoughts to other things.

She had kept her suspicions about her mother's death to herself during the funeral rituals. It had been such a strain to hold her bitter grief and anger inside, however, that afterward she allowed herself to be drawn into a quarrel with Don Esteban over the looting of her father's house. It was his right to sell what he pleased, he said; the house had come to her mother on the death of her husband, Pilar's father, since there were no male heirs, and these same belongings became Don Esteban's on their wedding day by the wedding contract. But what did it matter? he inquired. Pilar would have no use for furnishings and jewels in the convent.

Pilar, retreating into caution, had questioned why she must return. She was told that she could not stay in the house alone while Don Esteban was in Louisiana, and there was nowhere else for her to go, no one to see to her welfare. She had no prospects for marriage, and was indeed an old maid at two-and-twenty. The convent would be a refuge for her, and Don Esteban would himself provide an endowment for the church in her name, a chest of gold worth several thousand pesos. This gold, to be sent with her on her return, would assure her comfort and gain for her the position within the convent hierarchy to which she was entitled by breeding and birth.

Pilar was not impressed by either the spurious concern for her welfare or the possible endowment that was less than a fraction of the estate that should have been hers on her mother's death. She declared firmly that she had no intention of returning to the convent, and that, moreover, she had a place to go and someone to look after her. She would take refuge with her aunt in Cordoba. A shouting match had followed. At the end of it, Don Esteban had shouted for his majordomo, and the two men had picked Pilar up bodily and carried her to her room. She had been thrust inside and the door locked behind her.

Two nights later she had awakened at the sound of a key in the lock. The door had swung open and a man had crept inside. She had sat up in bed, calling out, but he had not answered. He moved to the side of the bed and grasped her leg. She wrenched from his hold and slid from the bed. He caught her and they grappled in the darkness. It was then that her stepfather had burst into the room. He was holding a candlestick, and with him were several men and women, as if he had been having guests for dinner. The candlelight had revealed the man who had attacked her to be a lackey of her stepfather's, a loose-lipped and pimpled young man named Carlos.

The wrath of her stepfather had not fallen on Carlos, however, but on Pilar. She had lured the lackey to her bedchamber, he shouted in outrage. She was depraved, a disgrace to his house. She must marry Carlos or he, Don Esteban Iturbide, would send her back to the convent that very night, before she brought further shame upon both him and herself.

It was a trick and Pilar knew it; still, she was compromised beyond hope of recovery. Her stepfather's guests, standing behind him and staring with avid eyes, did not appear likely to believe her side of the story. If she married Carlos, she would gain nothing except a fumbling, lasciviously grinning nonentity for a husband, one who would have legal right to her body as well as everything she might own. Carlos was so much under Don Esteban's thumb that any portion of her mother's estate that might come to her legally on her marriage would be turned over to her stepfather at once. On the other hand, she might at least buy a little time with an agreement to return to the convent. With the last in mind, she had made herself appear crushed and contrite. She pretended to sob as she begged tearfully to return to her little cell with its single bed, where she would be surrounded by the gentle sisters and everything she had come to know and love. So appealing had she made it sound that for an instant Don Esteban had appeared reluctant to give his permission.

It had not been easy to maintain that air of drooping defeat while her heart corroded inside her with bitter rage, but Pilar had managed it. Her reward had been permission to go to Father Domingo's church for morning mass each day until her departure. There she had accosted the priest, pouring out her tale. The good father had only sighed and shook his head, counseling obedience and submission to her fate. Don Esteban could not be so black as she painted him; hadn't the grieving husband pledged himself to erect a stained-glass window in the church in memory of his wife? The ways of God were mysterious. Perhaps Pilar was meant to be a bride of Christ and this was His way of telling her so?

Pilar had no vocation, and she knew it well. She was much too fond of the pleasures and luxuries of the world, had missed them too intensely during her incarceration to ever give them up willingly. There was no thought of submission in her mind, but rather a teeming multitude of plans for vengeance and wild possibilities for escape.

One of the last had been triggered by the sight of a young man named Vicente de Carranza y Leon. He was a theology student at the university who in better days had lived in the neighborhood and still returned there every morning for mass. Vicente was a stalwart young man with a kind and attractive face, but one who seldom smiled. He had little to smile about. His family had been ruined by Don Esteban Iturbide some years before, shortly after the don's marriage to Pilar's mother.

The Carranzas and the Iturbides were hereditary enemies in a feud that had been going on for four generations. Don Esteban, it was said, had hired assassins to kill Vicente's father. More, Don Esteban's son, the young man who was to have wed Pilar, had abducted and violated Vicente's sister, after which the girl had committed suicide. When Vicente's older brother, Refugio, had challenged Don Esteban's son to a duel for the crime against their sister, then spitted him on his sword during the fight, Don Esteban had used his recently gained court connections to have Refugio charged with murder. Refugio's refusal to surrender to the men sent with the guardia civil by Don Esteban for his arrest had resulted in a fight: in which three of Don Esteban's hirelings were killed. Refugio had become an outcast, a brigand with a stronghold in the mountains who was called El Leon, the lion, after the big and deadly wildcats that roamed the hills, and also for his mother's surname, which meant the same. The hatred of Refugio de Carranza y Leon for Don Esteban at least equaled Pilar's own.

The next time Pilar saw Vicente standing outside the church, she walked quickly toward him. She outdistanced the duenna who hurried after her through the early morning crowds. As Pilar neared Vicente de Carranza, she looked into his thin, earnest face then let her shawl slip from her shoulders and slide to the ground. Vicente knelt to pick it up. She did the same. She murmured a few words as she took the shawl he offered. He gave her a sharp look from dark, expressive eyes before he inclined his head in a bow, but the young man made no answer. Pilar turned away as her duenna joined her, and walked into the church.

Had Vicente understood her? There had been so little time and no chance to be certain. Did he know who she was, know anything about her? Or if he did not know, would he trouble to find out? If he found out, would he do as she asked, or would he shrug off the incident as being of no importance? So much depended on that one short encounter.

Of course, even supposing Vicente passed on her plea to his brother to meet her in the garden of Don Esteban's house in the midnight hours, there was no guarantee that El Leon would come. It would take a rare combination of hatred, curiosity, and daring to bring him.

The hours of darkness were slipping past. Pilar's footsteps dragged. She was weary from her three-night vigil, yes, but it was the waning of hope that pressed hardest upon her shoulders. She had been so sure she could evade Don Esteban's plans for her, so positive she could best him. She would do it yet, with or without El Leon; still, she had placed so much dependence on the aid of Refugio de Carranza that it was disheartening to think she must find another way.

How she wished that she were a man! She would defy her stepfather with sword in hand, then demand an accounting for her mother's death and the looting of her heritage. What a pleasure it would be to run Don Esteban through with a steel blade and watch the sneer on his features give way to shocked surprise. Odious, strutting, vicious little man! To be forced to bow to his dictates would be beyond endurance. She would do anything, anything at all, to escape it.

A soft sound came from behind her, like the rustle of cloth. She started to turn. There was a single, swift movement, and she was caught from behind in a firm grasp, with an arm clamped like a band of Toledo steel around her ribs and a hand sealing her mouth. She drew in her breath, instinctively thrusting backward with an elbow. She connected with the folds of a cloak and, under it, a belly like a wall of stone. The hold upon her tightened abruptly, driving the air from her lungs. Her back was pressed tight against a hard male form while the warmth of his body and the soft wool of his cloak enveloped her.

“Be still,” came a voice quiet and deep against her hair. “As much satisfaction as it might give me to defile a woman of Don Esteban's house on his own patio tiles, I'm not at present in the mood. Provoke me, and that may well change.”

It was El Leon; it could be no one else. Anger for his distrust and his close, hard hold burgeoned inside Pilar, banishing fear. She shook her head, trying to dislodge his hand from her mouth.

“You want to speak, do you? Now that's encouraging, for I want nothing more than to hear you. But I would advise that the words be as soft and dulcet as the dove.”

The hand on her mouth was lifted by degrees. She waited until it had been completely removed before she spoke, and the words were low and scathing. “Let me go. You're breaking my ribs.”

“And shall I also lay my life at your feet all tied up with ribbons and faded roses? Thank you, no. Besides, I'm still entertaining the idea of reprisal. Intimate, of course.”

“You wouldn't!”

“Tell me why I should not,” he said, his voice suddenly losing its soft tone, becoming harsh. “The last rape was by an Iturbide upon a Carranza. It must be our turn.”

“I'm not an Iturbide, nor do I have anything to do with your quarrel!”

“You are in the house of Iturbide, and therefore of it.” The words were uncompromising.

“Not of my own will. Besides, it was once my father's house.” Pilar could feel the firm beat of El Leon's heart against her back. His implacable strength, his scent compounded of wool and horse, of fresh night air and his own maleness, crept in upon her senses. She wanted to turn to look at him, but could not move.