Marco and the Devil's Bargain (2 page)

He sat up. “What have you gotten yourself into? Fifteen months of marriage and you ask me that?”

She thumped him in a tender spot. “Did you give Felicia this much trouble?” she asked, citing his first wife, one so beloved.

“
This and more. Well, maybe not more,” he amended. “
Oye
, you are referring to your visit to my sister, and not my nearly supernatural powers in bed?” He tickled her. “If you roll your eyes like that, they'll get stuck.”

“
Seriously now. I go to your sister's hacienda and we knit socks?”

“
Claro
. Luisa has been doing this for years because she gets bored in January. She summons her friends to join her for several days of knitting, and what I suspect is non-stop gossip.”

“
Oh, never,” Paloma teased, feeling more than mellow now herself and wishing for a long nap before breakfast—or was it lunchtime now? “Did Felicia go?”

“
Every year until … well, you know.”

“
I know,” she said softly, treading delicately around his feelings about Felicia, who had died nine years ago along with their twins in a cholera epidemic while he was away.

He was silent a moment, tightening his grip on her shoulder. “You and Sancha have spun my best mohair into yarn,” he said, businesslike. “Knit socks for me, for you, for servants.” He lay back against his pillow and grabbed her, blowing into her neck until she shrieked. “You're so much fun. The outriders who go along get together in the stable to drink and gamble. I get a year's worth of socks.”

“
Supposing I just want to stay here with you?” she asked, happily tucked into that spot that she liked so well between his chest and his arm. “She didn't invite me last year.”

“
We were newly married and—”

“
Be honest now. Luisa didn't think too much of me. I know some called me your sudden wife.”

“
They don't now,” he reminded her. “She's learned a lot in a year, too.”

Paloma kissed his chest. She knew he was right, although she was still shy around women from Santa Maria and other ranchos she had met at church but seldom saw. “I'd rather stay here.”

“
You need to meet your neighbors, my heart,” he told her. “They already know how brave you are—finding old Joaquin Muñoz in the snow storm and saving the Comanche.” His expression grew more tender. “Are you worried about your cousin?”

She nodded, thinking of the abominable Maria Teresa Moreno, who had married Alonso Castellano, one of Marco's neighbors. Maria had already paraded her growing belly in front of Paloma during Christmas Mass, her self-satisfied smile a constant reproach to Paloma, who mourned her own childless state.

“
She will taunt me about … you know,” Paloma whispered.

“
I know,” he said, and hugged her closer.

“
Marco, why me?” She stopped. They had suffered through this conversation before.

“
I wish I knew, my heart.” Marco sat up, and pulled her with him. “Up! Up!” He tugged her from the bed. Suddenly shy, she turned away when he appraised her from hair to heels. “Ah, yes. You're not the skinny girl I married last year.”

He wrapped her in his generous embrace. “Luisa only invites those she likes, so I doubt Maria Teresa will be there. You should know this—word is getting around about her. You yourself told me that would happen.”

“
Maria Teresa always muddies her nest,” Paloma said.

Sancha made no comment when they finally strolled into the kitchen. Paloma thought the housekeeper rolled her eyes at Perla. She couldn't be sure, since it was only the tiniest glimpse; better just to brazen it through.

“
Sancha, you're better at this than I am. How much yarn do you think I should take with me to the hacienda of the widow Gutierrez? What did Felicia do?”

She knew Sancha liked to be reminded of her late mistress, and was rewarded with a smile.

“
I can gather what you need, señora,” Sancha said, “if you will get breakfast for this lazy ranchero and officer of the crown.”

Perfect
, Paloma thought, as she nodded to the housekeeper.
He is not lazy in bed, but no one will hear that from me
. “Thank you, Sancha. I can scrape some mush from the bottom of an old pot for this lazy man.”

After Sancha and Perla left the kitchen, the lazy man patted her rump. “I could pick you up after two days.”

She filled his bowl with mush and chilis. “Oh, no, my love. Three days! I have so much to knit, in addition to stockings. Remember please, that I tried to measure you for a
chaleco
before bed. It took me all night because you were not helpful.”

They both laughed, then ate in companionable silence, Paloma still relishing every bite. She wondered if it would take months, or even years, to lose the fear every morning when she woke that today there would be no food. The thought made her sigh and look down at her already empty bowl.

“
I know that sigh,” Marco said, pushing back his partly finished bowl.

She couldn't help it; her eyes followed his bowl. When he saw that, he pushed it in her direction, then picked up her hand, spoon and all, and kissed it.

“
My heart, just remind yourself that those days are over. Anytime you want more to eat, you just take it. I'm full.”

“
No, you're not,” she said just as gently, and pushed his bowl in front of him again.

He pushed it between the two of them. “Everything I have I will share. Don't ever forget that.” He clicked her spoon with his, dipped it full and held it out to her.

They alternated bites until his bowl was empty, too. When they finished, he went to the cupboard and took out some
carne seca
. “Let's take this with us. I get hungry between here and Santa Maria.”

“
You do not!” she scolded, so pleased with her man.

“
But
you
do, and it matters to me. Get on your riding clothes, Paloma. I have to visit the garrison”—he made a face—“and you have to knit stockings.”

Marco knew he wanted Paloma beside him in Santa Maria's garrison. They had been married long enough for him to appreciate her calm assessment of problems. Before Christmas that first year, Paloma had watched Señora Chávez arrange the nativity scene, the
belén
, outside the church. She saw how the widow tucked in the Christ Child with the swaddling bands she had knitted from Marco Mondragón's wool. Marco had told Paloma how the Holy Babe had disappeared some years back. On a hunch that the widow grieved for her recently dead son, he found the Cristo in Señora Chávez's house. She had wanted to keep the Babe warm, because her only child was cold in the earth.

“
It's her job now to keep the
belén
tidy,” Marco told Paloma. “Shouldn't that be enough?”

His wife had asked him gently, “Tell me why, then, does she stand in the cold and rock back and forth?”

“
I don't know, except that I don't question how people mourn,” Marco told her finally with a certain amount of painful understanding. “What more can we do?”

“
I'll think about it.”

Paloma had thought about it for a week, going about her usual tasks in her quiet way. She denied him nothing, but he knew her mind and heart were on the widow Chávez. He had almost hated to mention over supper one evening that a barn cat had been snatched by a coyote, leaving four kittens not even old enough to have their eyes open.

“
I suppose Emilio will have to drown the little things,” he told her. “Seems a shame.”

Paloma had put down her spoon and looked at him in triumph. “That's it,” she said, as she left the table, pulled her shawl around her and ran out the kitchen door.

He followed, curious, and then not terribly surprised to find her on her knees in the horse barn, her hands full of mewing kittens that groped about blindly, their mouths open, hungry. In another minute they were arranged carefully in her shawl and carried through the snow into the kitchen.

As Marco watched, she warmed some goat's milk and sat on the floor with a rag, which she dipped in the milk then dribbled into each kitten's mouth. After a long time, their bellies were full and they slept in a heap. “This is how I kept Trece alive, that expensive and rare yellow dog of yours,” she told him. “Tomorrow we will take these orphans to the Widow Chávez.”

“
Paloma, she's old and forgetful,” he reminded her. “Four kittens! She'll be up all hours.”

“
She's a mother,” was his wife's simple reply.

So it had proved. The Widow Chávez had been only too happy to take the babies into her house and nourish them. That was the last time that Christmas season anyone saw the Widow Chávez mourning her own son in the snow beside the
belén
.

Considering all that, if Paloma came with him to the garrison, Marco knew he would have an ally when the sergeant started to blather and apologize and blame the king of Spain for every wrong his pitiful cadre of soldiers suffered. And there would be the visiting lieutenant.
Ay caray!
Marco said as much to Toshua—their Comanche who would not leave—as he saddled his horse and then Paloma's.

Toshua shook his head. “You're growing soft, señor. What did you do before Paloma came?”

“
I complained and went by myself.”

“
Well then.” Toshua folded his arms. “She said she would knit me a pair of socks, too. Me, I have never worn socks, but you do not hear me complaining. I want socks.”

“
You could be a little sympathetic, Toshua.”

“
I doubt it.”

They left for Santa Maria, Paloma riding beside Marco and followed by a mule carrying a sack of yarn and other gifts for Luisa, as proud-stepping as if his wife had promised him socks for each of his four feet, too.

Toshua came next, riding behind, and then beside them, then ahead, always looking to the right and left, even as Marco did. His four guards looked as pleased as men could look. They knew they were escorting their master's admirable wife to the hacienda of the Widow Gutierrez, where, while the ladies knitted, there would be wine and card games and gambling.

As much as he liked to ride with Paloma on the same mount, Marco had quickly discovered how pleasant it was to watch her control her own horse. She had a sure hand, even when the mare sidestepped a few times, shying from winter birds hunkered down in the brush along the trail.

“
Did you ride with your father?” he asked her.

“
Whenever he let me. He gave me my first horse when I was six.”

Marco knew the look in her eyes was the same one in his, when she had assured him she did not mind if he mentioned Felicia.
Why is it that no one thinks we want to speak of our beloved dead?
he asked himself, not for the first time.

His mentioning her father had given Paloma permission to ask a question of her own. “Marco, how did your sister's husband die?” She glanced at Toshua, who rode farther ahead of them now, his lance across his lap.

“
A sad story. It was a summer seventeen years ago when the Comanche moon never set. We were all forted up throughout Valle del Sol. One of Manuel's best milk cows wandered away, and he went to find it, even though Luisa pleaded with him. He could see the cow tethered to a bush, just a stone's throw from their walls, with no one in sight.”

“
That means nothing,” Paloma said.

“
Manuel knew that, too, but all he could see was the cow. When he was too close to the cow to back away, he saw the feet of the Comanche clinging to the cow on the other side. Then, Luisa said, there seemed to be
indios
everywhere.”

“
She watched the whole thing?” Paloma asked, her voice low so Toshua could not hear.

“
From the wall. They stripped Manuel, ripped off his privates, staked him over a low fire and cooked him for two days. They made him eat his own flesh.” He glanced at his wife's pale face and leaned over to touch her hands. “He pleaded with Luisa to shoot him, and she did. She was carrying their younger son and went into labor that night.”

“
We have all suffered,” Paloma said. She looked in Toshua's direction. “But so has he. When will it end?”

He had no answer.

Santa Maria came in sight too soon to suit him, and maybe Paloma, too, if he correctly interpreted her little sigh as they came to the garrison, around which the village had been constructed.
Neither of us wants to do what we have to
, he thought.
I could assure my lovely woman that she will have a good time at Luisa's, but she will not believe me
.

While his guards busied themselves and Toshua, too, looked away, Marco leaned over in the saddle and kissed Paloma. “We'll ride for you in two days, Toshua and I.”

She kissed him back, her eyes merry. “It's
three
days, my dearest. You can
say
that, but I will wager you another evening measuring you for a sweater that Toshua heads for Hacienda Gutierrez once you two ride home.”