Carla Kelly Page 11

  As soon as he handed her the baby, Jesse moved Sonia’s foot a little and rested his head on the mattress. “Just a little rest, that’s all,” he murmured. Before Elinore walked around the bed to relinquish the baby, she leaned forward and kissed Jesse’s forehead. “My goodness” was all she could think of to say.

  She held the baby tight to her and looked down at her husband. He was breathing deeply and evenly; she had never seen anyone fall asleep as fast as that. She bent forward again to kiss him, but hesitated, her lips right next to his cheek. I’d hate to wake someone who deserves a rest, she thought and raised herself up.

  To her complete gratification, he opened the only eye available to him. “Don’t waste them, Elinore,” he said. “Some Scot you will be.”

  Without a word she kissed him again, then carried the baby to Sonia, who tried to hold out her arms, but was too spent to do more than open her hands and gesture. Carefully, Elinore placed the baby close to Sonia’s side and draped her arm around the infant. She watched in deep appreciation as Sonia’s arm tightened.

  Someone tugged at her skirt. She looked back, a smile on her face, to see Jesse’s wonderfully dexterous fingers wrapped around the fabric of her dress. She smiled and watched him sleep, resting her hand on his head.

  Chapter Eight

  When he woke a few minutes later, he wouldn’t leave the room. He did allow Elinore to lead him over to a low bench at the wall, where he leaned back and closed his eyes. “I’m going to stay right here and watch for a while,” he told her before he bowed his head forward and slept. She sat beside him and pulled his head onto her shoulder. “I’ll watch for you,” she whispered.

  She watched—hard put to keep her own eyes open—and listened to the low murmurs of the women around the bed as they tended to the new mother in timeless fashion. Sonia slept, too, even as one of the older women helped the infant find her mother’s breast. Sonia’s eyes flickered open as her child tugged at her, then closed again with a sigh of contentment. How resilient women are, Elinore thought with admiration. Sonia may fool my husband by surviving, but I am not so sure she will surprise me.

  She looked at her husband, wishing he could sleep for hours and hours, but knowing that any sound of distress from Sonia or her small daughter would bring him wide awake. Maybe they will both live, she thought. Perhaps our luck has turned. That only led to the view in her mind of the Chief lying facedown in the plaza, dead for no good reason.

  She was starting to breathe evenly again when she noticed the priest standing in the doorway. He was so quiet, and the room so dim that she wondered briefly if he was real or the imagination of her tired brain. But no, Harper stood behind him, his eyes on Jesse with such a proprietary look that Elinore knew her husband had a bodyguard now, whether he wanted one or not.

  She nodded toward the priest, so he would know she was awake. He came into the room then, and made the sign of the cross over mother and baby, who both slept. He listened to Sonia’s mother, who spoke too rapidly for Elinore to follow and then gestured in Jesse’s direction. Just let him sleep, please, she thought. Surely whatever more bad news you have can wait until morning.

  No luck. The priest sat down beside her, but he kept his voice low. To her relief, he spoke in English. “Your husband has worked a miracle here, no?”

  “Yes, I rather think he has, too,” she replied softly. If I say nothing else, perhaps he will go away, Elinore thought, even as she remembered the determination in her husband’s face as he struggled to save the mother and the baby, and knew without question what he would expect of her. “Do you need him now?”

  “Yes. Will you wake him? The alcalde’s family…” his voice trailed off. “It is a difficult thing.”

  “Well, then.” She gently touched her husband’s face. “Captain, there is a priest here who says you are needed.”

  They had not far to go, luckily, because he was not steady on his feet, whether from exhaustion or pain, she could not tell. She walked beside him, ready to put out her hand, but aware of Harper hovering even closer, ready, she knew, to pick him up and carry him if he should falter. I am amazed, she thought, wondering how only yesterday she had thought the private a malingerer and a cheat, hopeless of remedy. Well, he is still a thief, she reminded herself, thinking of the money he filched from the quartermaster. I wish you had stolen more, she thought. We could probably use it.

  The alcalde’s house looked like the others in the village, with a nearly blank wall coming right down to the street, and a door massive but plain. A climbing plant, long through its growing season and limp now in autumn’s rain, still clung to the plaster and brick, looking as bedraggled as she felt. The door opened before the priest knocked, and Elinore stepped back involuntarily at the wailing that spilled out into the dark street.

  “The alcalde was killed by a British soldier this afternoon,” he told her, and she could tell he was striving to keep his voice neutral. “He accused him of holding back the village’s food from the commissary requisition and shot him when he denied it.”

  “British?” She wished she could block out the anguish that seemed to spread across the narrow street like a plague of Egypt.

  “Yes, senora, our allies.” The priest turned to help her husband cross the threshold, but his words were for her. “Now can you understand your reception?”

  I never can understand why good men die, she thought, but nodded anyway, because she knew the priest expected it.

  “I can do nothing for the alcalde, then?” Jesse asked.

  “Not unless you can raise the dead,” said the priest.

  “Then why…”

  “This way, senor.”

  With Elinore on one side of her husband and Harper on the other, they followed the priest past the room where she could see a man laid out on a table and surrounded by wailing women. The priest paused outside a closed door and knocked. The door opened on more tears to Elinor’s dismay. She looked at her husband. His face was calm. I would be such a disappointment to you if you only knew what a coward I am, she thought.

  The priest indicated that Harper wait in the hall. She would gladly have hung back, too, except he ushered her forward along with her husband.

  “The British have brought such shame to our village,” the priest whispered. “This is the alcalde’s daughter. After the officer shot our alcalde, he committed a terrible act upon her.”

  “My God!” Jesse exclaimed. “What was the matter with that man?”

  “Perhaps you can tell us,” the priest replied, and Elinore knew that the bitterness in his voice was not a trick of her hearing. “Perhaps she will talk to you, although I doubt it. I do think you should try to tend to her wounds.”

  A girl who looked scarcely fifteen huddled on the bed, then gasped and tried to burrow under the bedcovers as Jesse came closer. Elinore hurried to her side. “Please, my dear, my husband is a surgeon,” she said in Spanish. “Will you let him help you?”

  The girl shook her head vigorously, her hands trembling and her teeth practically clacking in her mouth. Her face was swollen and bruised, as though someone had struck her. She looked at the woman in black standing beside the bed, who also shook her head. The woman came closer, and in a voice low with anger, began speaking so fast that Elinore could only look to the priest for help.

  “She says that you British have done enough and you should all be killed by the French.”

  Jesse nodded. “You can assure her, Father, that she will probably have her wish fulfilled before too many more days.” He looked around, and gestured for Elinore to bring him a stool, which she placed beside the bed, despite a low-voiced objection from the older woman. With a sigh, he sat down. “Tell her that I am too tired to move because I have just delivered Sonia Ramos’ baby. Sit down there on the bed, Elinore. Father, tell this child that if she wants to tell my wife what happened, she will listen. I am going to close my eyes. I hope she does not think me rude, but I have had my own share of troubles in Santos.”

>   The priest spoke, and the heavy weight in the room seemed to lift. The girl lay curled on her side in a tight ball, her eyes dull and puffy from crying. Elinore kept her hands tight in her lap and then she asked herself, what would I want someone to do for me? Careful not to startle the girl, she went to the basin near the door. She dipped in a cloth hanging by the basin, wrung it out, and returned to the girl. Ignoring the woman in black who glared at her, she sat by the girl and wiped her face. Elinore felt useless and foolish at the same time, but she gently dabbed the cloth under her eyes and across her forehead, and then even more gently by the bruise near her mouth.

  “There now, my dear,” she murmured in English. “I always feel better when someone does that for me. Tea would help, but I do not have any. Here, let me wipe under your neck. It’s so easy to perspire there, especially when your hair is long.” She touched the girl’s hair, then smoothed it back from her face. “You have such beautiful hair,” she said in Spanish.

  To her surprise, the girl raised her chin slightly, then straightened out her legs a little. Encouraged, Elinore began to rub her back, moving closer until she knew the girl must feel the warmth from her own body. She stopped and moved to pull the blanket higher on her shoulder, wanting nothing more than to crawl in beside her and sleep a week or more. “Oh, my dear, please tell me what happened.”

  Elinore looked at the priest when the girl began to speak. As the words gushed out, the priest waited—his face a study in pain and humiliation—then translated. “She thought it would be like always, when you British retreat, always taking more food and leaving chits that are so hard to redeem.” He listened intently. “A regiment had come through earlier, and there was little more to spare. Her father explained that quite carefully, then turned to go into his store. The tall man shot him in the back.”

  “My God,” Jesse said. He sat up quickly, winced, then leaned against Elinore. The girl began to cry again. Elinore wiped her face.

  “The same man pushed her into the store, struck her when she struggled, threw her down on the floor and raped her,” the priest continued, his voice toneless now, shocked, as though Spain had not been at war for ten years and such atrocities only happened over the next mountain, or beyond the river.

  “I’m so sorry,” Elinore murmured. She took hold of the girl’s hand. “Maybe you will feel a little better, now that you have told me.”

  “There is one thing more,” the girl whispered.

  The priest frowned. “What else can there be, my dear?” he asked, his voice gentle.

  Her breath coming in gasps, the girl reached up the sleeve of her dress and pulled out a small sheet of paper before she burst into tears again.

  “Oh, my dear, please! It is a commissary chit,” Elinore said as she glanced at the paper. “I…I don’t understand.” She handed it to Jesse, who took it, and struggled to sit up again in the face of the girl’s increasing distress.

  The girl grasped the front of Elinore’s dress, her eyes frightful. “He told me it was a chit for my services,” she said in Spanish. “I could redeem it for only one peso because I wasn’t very good. He stuffed it in my mouth. Ay de mi!”

  Elinore felt her face drain of all color. “Only a monster would do such a thing,” she replied, when she could speak. She looked at the commissary requisition in Jesse’s hand. “Surely he did not sign his name?”

  He stared at the paper in his lap as though he could not believe it, then dropped it on the floor. “Major Bones,” he said when he could speak. “Major Bones.”

  While the girl sobbed in Elinore’s arms now, the priest told the part of the story he knew. “When we found her and her father, she told us that the man who…who…did this awful deed said that stragglers were following behind him, and that we should shoot them on sight.” He could not look at Elinore. “We thought he meant you.” He threw up his hands. “What did you do to him to make him so angry?”

  I am the cause of this misery, Elinore thought in horror. As her stomach plummeted into her shoes, she looked at Jesse and saw her expression mirrored in his. And you know I am, don’t you? There could be no other conclusion, not with such a look on his face. I doubt a man will ever repent of marriage as fast as you will, she told herself. And the devil of it is—considering your kind nature—I hardly blame you.

  “We did have a disagreement,” Jesse said, his voice shocked and hollow to her ears. “We thought he had already taken out his revenge on us. Didn’t we, Elinore?”

  She cringed inside at his carefully chosen words, and nodded. Looking at him was out of the question. She clung to the girl, who was sobbing in deeper earnest now. If I cry, too, Elinore thought, no one will know. The tears slid down her own face. “Pobrecita, pobrecita,” she murmured, hardly sure whether she crooned to the dead man’s daughter, or to her own bruised spirit.

  Finally, the girl lay limp and exhausted in Elinore’s arms, and made no demure when Elinore gently laid her back down and covered her with the blanket. She drew into a ball again, but did not open her eyes.

  “I doubt she will be inclined to let me examine her,” Jesse said.

  “Perhaps not tonight,” she said timidly, not sure what to say in the face of her enormous guilt.

  “Even if she did, I do not know what I could do for her,” he replied, his voice low, but intense. “Should I tell her that maybe in nine months she might have a fond remembrance of Major Bones, eh? Or that every time a man looks at her just a moment too long, she will get chills and a sick feeling?”

  “Oh, please, don’t!” Elinore begged.

  He was silent for a long moment. “Welcome to the war, Elinore. This is a side of it I would prefer to deny,” he said at last. “Help me up, please. I’m sorry to be a burden to you, but I doubt I can stand by myself.”

  You are not half the burden to me that I must be to you, she told herself. She helped him to his feet, held him there until he nodded, then walked with him to the door. In the hall, Harper leaped up from the bench where he was dozing and took hold of Jesse.

  “Do you know where Dan and our patients are?” he asked.

  “In the church with…with Major Sheffield.”

  “Take me there.”

  Elinore winced. Not us, but me, was all she heard. She stood where she was as the two men left the house. “Where do I go?” she said aloud to the painting of Christ looking sorrowfully at her and pointing to his bleeding heart. She looked away.

  There was nothing for her to do but follow. She stood a moment by the open door that led into the room where the women were keening over the body of the alcalde. One of the women noticed her, got up quickly, and closed the door in her face.

  “There is no love for the British in this house. Come with me.”

  She looked around to see the priest by the door that opened to the outside. “I told them I would wait for you,” he said.

  I doubt they missed me, she thought. “Thank you.”

  She walked with him in silence back to the plaza, feeling her own weariness right down to her muddy shoes. Her dress and petticoats had dried, but now they were stiff with mud. She looked down at the bloodstains on her dress. Poor Major Sheffield, she thought.

  The church was not large; nothing about Santos indicated much wealth. As they walked inside and she waited for the priest to dip his fingers in the holy water, she thought of the cathedral in Salamanca, and earlier the one in Madrid that she and her mother had visited after the battles, ornate affairs bearing the weight of centuries of gold and silver from the Indies, with massive Stations of the Cross. Here the Stations were merely numbered on the walls, the few statues modest.

  “We are not a town with any distinction,” he said, interpreting her gaze correctly. He laughed softly. “Not a single conquistador ever returned to Santos with a huge purse and a guilty conscience.” His face grew serious again. He touched her arm, pointed down the side aisle, and led her to a much smaller chapel niched in the wall.

  She stopped in the doorway, then
willed herself to enter. Two bodies lay on rude tables, nearly filling the small space. Chief Surgeon David Sheffield’s face was clean, and his hands folded carefully together. His eyes were closed, but by some quirk of nature or biology, his brows still seemed arched in surprise at the unexpectedness of his destruction. The hole in his forehead where the ball had entered looked like a third eye. She was compelled to stare at it, and then at the white cloth behind his head where blood was already turning to rust. “Such a small hole,” she murmured. “Ay de mi.”

  A young priest stood against the wall. The sleeves of his cassock were still rolled up, and he held a cloth. “Thank you for caring for him,” she said in Spanish.

  He nodded and came closer to stand beside the body on the other side of the table. He touched Sheffield’s fingers with the cloth. “He has such fine hands, senora.”

  She looked down at the elegant length of his fingers, so still now, and thought of all care he had administered in the eight years she had known him. “He was a very good surgeon,” she said, and hesitated only a moment before she touched Sheffield’s hands, cold as marble now. As she did so, she noticed the little ring she wore, the one he had given Jesse to put on her finger in the dead tent. Without a qualm she removed it and placed it on Sheffield’s little finger. She could only slide it past the first knuckle, but she knew that nothing would jostle it from his hand now, not where he was going. “Better you should have it back,” she told him, then leaned close to kiss his cheek.

  I cannot linger here, she thought, then turned her attention to the other table where Private Jenks lay. She almost dreaded to look at his expression, but as she gazed at him in the half light, she felt her heart stop its racing. “You’re so peaceful now,” she said out loud in English. “What a relief you must have now to be free of that dreadful breathing bellows. Did we do you more harm than good?”

  “I wonder that, too.”

  She closed her eyes in shame. “Oh, Captain, I didn’t mean it like that,” she said without even turning around, cursing herself for compounding her felony, and wishing he made more noise when coming into a room.