Treasure of the Sun (51 page)

Inappropriately, she laughed, teetering on the fine edge of hysteria. Whirling to escape, she said, "Don Damian, we're going to be fine."

He didn't move. He stumbled heavily, falling on his knees, and for the first time in their agitated flight, she remembered. He'd been shot. He'd been shot and beaten, and he'd run for miles.

She could appreciate the training he'd received while working with the bulls, the training he'd received from the vaqueros. She could appreciate the jolt that fear had dealt them. For those reasons only had Damian kept pace with her. "Let me help you," she urged. In the waning sunlight, she could see the agony of his one open eye, the pain that clamped his jaw. She knelt beside him, put her arm around him, and the unnatural heat of his body transferred to hers. He was ill and hurt. The mantle of leadership passed into her hands without a word spoken.

"You can do it." She encouraged him with soft sounds as he lifted himself to his feet. His whole body shook under the strain he put on it. He progressed like an old man stricken with rheumatism.

The last light of the sun left them, and Katherine monitored their path with care. The foothills rolled away from them endlessly. The scent of pine should have been a pleasure; the cooling evening breeze should have refreshed them. Instead the tree tops blocked the evening stars that shone, and the wind racked Damian with periodic spasms.

He needed rest. They needed to stop.

But inexorably, the fog followed them, always just at their heels.

The owls hooted, and she remembered the predictions of death she'd used to scare Mr. Smith. She hadn't scared him, but he was dead, anyway. She clasped Damian tighter, willing her strength into him.

They'd gone only a short distance when Damian stopped and sagged against a tree. "I can't go on."

She didn't argue with him. She'd realized for the past hour they couldn't flee from these mountains tonight. "Can you stand alone?" she asked him. "I'll build you a bed from some branches and keep you off the cold ground."

He chuckled, and it sounded more like a cough. "How will you cut them? We've got no supplies. No food, no blankets, certainly no knife." His head drooped against his chest. "Aren't you sorry I gave up my cigars? At least then I'd be carrying a lucifer to light afire."

"Please, Don Damian." Catching two of the lowest branches in her hands and swinging on them, she broke them off. "I feel guilty about this already. Don't reproach me for your cigars, too."

"Guilty?" Shaking his head, he admonished, "Don't feel guilty, no matter what happens. I'm so proud of you .... " He sighed. "I can't stand up anymore."

She rushed for him, but he'd used the last of his energy. He collapsed into a limp pile of flesh.

Her terrified breath cut the silence. Was this it, then? Had she lost another husband to the curse of the padres? More important, had she lost the man she loved? Afraid to touch him, to discover the truth, she pressed his throat. The thump of his heart beat into her fingers. "He's alive," she whispered.

Like a squirrel preparing for winter, she scurried to stack her branches beside him, tucking them beneath his body and rolling him on top of them. Using her primitive technique, she broke more branches and piled them on top of him, covering it all with the tattered remains of her riding jacket.

She sat down and stared at Damian, then at the fog that tiptoed toward her. The fog would kill him. The damp would take this man, leaving her only an empty body, and she couldn't live if Damian died. In a fury, she rose to her feet and stalked to the edge of the fog. Focusing on the wisp of flame that flickered in its midst, she shouted, "We didn't steal any of your gold, so you can't steal my husband. Leave us alone!"

Like a long, low cry of the wind, she heard, "Katherine?" She stepped back from the fog.

"Damian? Katherine?"

She glanced wildly at Damian, wondering if he would have to answer the entity in the fog. He didn't move.

"Katherine?"

It sounded nearer, and reluctantly she called back, "Yes?"

"Katherine!"

"Yes?"

"Keep calling, amiga, keep calling." The ghostly voice sounded frantic, not at all ephemeral, and rather unceremonious. "I'm almost there."

"I know," she moaned, staring into the fog. A clatter of hooves on stone made her think of a hearse, and she swayed. "You can't have him."

"Katherine? Are you ill?"

Hands grasped her shoulders and turned her around. A haggard face floated before her eyes. "Julio," she whispered, and fainted without another sound.

17 June, in the year of our Lord, 1777

I hurt my leg. One of the logs we used to prepare the cave fell from the ceiling and crushed my knee. The bone protrudes from the open wound. I cannot walk. The agony is such that I cannot be moved. God does not hear my pleas for succor or death.

Is this another punishment fur my arrogance? For all the times I cared for my fellow man in my infirmary and told them to stifle their cries and seek relief in prayer? Is this a punishment for my pride in my body's usefulness, in my labor? Will I have nothing left when this is done?

-from the diary of Fray Juan Estevan de Bautista

Chapter 23

"Until I arrived in California, I never fainted at the sight of blood."

"So you've said." Julio puffed on the twigs, kindling them with the fire he'd set.

"I was always calm and practical and-"

"Sensible?" he supplied the word with an irony lost to Katherine.

"Indeed. Sensible. In Boston, I could have handled a day like this with a modicum of dignity." She leaned close to the fire pit, catching the warmth with her outstretched hands.

A handful of branches and moss caught as he laid them around the flame. "In Boston, you would never have had a day like this."

"True," she said thoughtfully. "Today. I've been hit and dropped into a pit and shot at and almost been-almost suffered bodily harm."

His razor glance passed over her, exposing more nerve endings, but she couldn't stop making excuses. "And bandaged Don Damian."

"Most women would be hysterical." He added, "Most men. too."

"I've been tripping over gold and outrunning an avalanche."

"And talking to the fog," he said. "Let's not forget that."

"I wasn't talking to the fog." She was talking to what was inside the fog. But she didn't say that. The fog was gone, retreating up the hill as if it knew they were vanquished. There was too much of this day she didn't believe, too much she didn't want to expose to Julio's keen intelligence. Leaning over, she tucked the blankets tightly around Damian's shoulders. "How did you come when we needed you?"

"When Damian's horse arrives at my stable, saddled, demanding entrance, I worry. When I find a crumbling map beneath the saddle blanket and my vaqueros tell me of a parade of criminals across my land and up the mountain, I panic." He poked the fire, adding more wood, bringing it to a healthy flame. "Damian would never 'lose' Confite, so that means there was more trouble than he could handle. Also-" he grinned at her "-we had an unusual visitor."

She raised a puzzled brow at his jocularity. "Oh?"

"A balding Americano, dressed in a ragged outfit, staggered off the mountain."

Light dawned. "Lawrence."

"Yes, your cousin." His sympathy was palpable. "We dressed him and fed him, gave him a horse and sent him on his way."

"Thank you."

"He got lost and ended up back at the hacienda." She shut het eyes in embarrassment.

"We sent a guide with him, with orders to take him to Monterey."

Her thank you this time was heartfelt.

He grimaced ruefully. "Thank you, indeed. He took the best mount in our stable."

"What?" Katherine cried. "Why did you give him a good horse? He can hardly sit a broken-down nag."

"I owed him."

Katherine pulled a face of disbelief. "You owed him what?" Julio examined his fingernails. "Money."

"Money?" she asked incredulously.

"Quite a bit of money." He looked into her eyes. "I took his money with the understanding I would help him get you on a ship to Boston."

"You're joking." He shook his head. "You're mad."

"Not at all. He made it clear to all of Monterey that he'd gladly pay to have you back. Sooner or later, someone would have taken his money in good faith. I had hoped I was giving you time to escape and breaking his pocketbook."

"Julio, you have no morals." She chuckled in appalled amusement.

Acting as if she'd complimented him, he agreed, "No, I don't, do I? But I don't know if I helped matters any."

"Perhaps you gave us the time we needed to escape from Monterey, and it's hardly your fault that my bumbling cousin stumbled onto one of the worst villains in California." Dropping her head into her palm, she laughed again. "Poor Lawrence."

"Relatives are a burden. It warms my heart to find that others carry this burden, too." He looked thoughtful. "I guess I'd forgotten that."

"What did Dona Maria Ygnacia say when you told her you suspected foul play? Good riddance to the trollop who tried to steal her husband?"

The name of Maria Ygnacia transformed Julio, and the sweetest smile Katherine could imagine lifted his mouth. "Nacia knew the truth of our kiss."

Katherine turned cold green eyes on him, and he shifted uncomfortably. "All right," he allowed. "My kiss. Nacia always knew I was at fault, but she's a woman in love. She wanted to blame anyone but me."

"You created that scene on purpose," she accused.

"And accomplished all my goals." He caught her outstretched hand and kissed the back of her smoky fingers. "I owe you, Dona Katherina. My in-laws are gone, sent away by their daughter. Nacia and I understand each other now. That is why, when I showed her Confite, she packed my saddlebags and put me on my horse with an admonition not to return without you. One of my best vaqueros came with me, and when you fainted he went for Nacia immediately." He nodded down the hill. "She's following with the vaqueros in a wagon, and bringing a mattress, blankets, a ten-course meal and medicines for everything."

"He'll need it." She stroked Damian's sweeping eyebrows.

The fever burned her hand, and she winced. "He's getting worse. Are you sure he'll be all right?"

"
No hay que achicarse
! Keep your chin up. Damian has the constitution of a horse. One little gunshot and a brisk run down the hill isn't going to hurt him."

He didn't look at her when he spoke, and she didn't press him. Right now she needed the reassurance, halting and unsure though it was. "Dona Maria Ygnacia isn't still angry with me?"

"Nor with me, but if you call her by that name, she's likely to snap your head off."

Taking a cloth from the saddlebag, she dipped it in the bowl of water Julio had fetched her and bathed Damian's forehead. "I can't imagine Nacia snapping."

"I couldn't imagine her telling her parents that they would do well to visit elsewhere, either, but that's what she did." He wiggled like a puppy.

"What did Senora Rodriguez say to that?"

Lifting his chest, raising his chin, he converted himself into Nacia's mother. Imitating her slow, precise, aristocratic speech pattern, he said, "'Maria Ygnacia will come to her senses soon.' "

"And Nacia said?"

He became his own irritating, elated self. "That she had already come to her senses. That nothing she did would ever please them, so she would please the one who matters to her."

"Who's that?" She laughed at his crestfallen pout. "Oh, it's you, is it?"

Tapping his chest, he said, "Only me."

She combed her fingers through Damian's hair in the eternal gesture of a sweetheart. "I wish I had seen it. I can't imagine Nacia doing such a thing."

"I assure you it's true. Nacia is ... transformed." "What brought this transformation?"

"I believe you did."

Startled, she watched him in the firelight. "You tease me." "You've shown us more in the short time we've known you all the aristocracy of California ever could."

She shook her head.

"You have," he insisted. "Nacia has always been a good, obedient daughter to those people. She had her own way once in her life, when she married me. "I knew that inside her lived the stubborn, determined woman who stood up to her parents and declared she loved me. But since our wedding day, she has devoted herself to proving to her parents she loved them. I had lost her."