Marco and the Devil's Bargain Read online

  Marco and the Devil’s Bargain

  The Spanish Brand Series

  by

  Carla Kelly

  Camel Press

  PO Box 70515

  Seattle, WA 98127

  For more information go to: www.Camelpress.com

  www.carlakellyauthor.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Photograph by Charles Dobbs, www.charlesdobbs.com

  Cover design by Sabrina Sun

  Map and brand by Nina Grover

  Marco and the Devil’s Bargain

  Copyright © 2014 by Carla Kelly

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-229-0 (Trade Paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-230-6 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935357

  Produced in the United States of America

  * * *

  To Nina Grover, 21st century friend and 18th century mapmaker.

  * * *

  Juez de campo

  An official of the Spanish crown who inspects and registers all brands of cattle and sheep in his district, settles disputes, and keeps a watchful eye for livestock rustlers. In the absence of sufficient law enforcement on the frontier of 18th century New Mexico, a royal colony, he also investigates petty crimes.

  * * *

  Te deum laudamus: te Dominum confitemur

  Te aeturnum Patrem omnis terra venerator

  O God, we praise Thee, and acknowledge Thee to be the supreme lord,

  Everlasting Father, all the earth worships thee.

  —A portion of a prayer of joy and thanksgiving,

  circa 400 A.D.

  * * *

  Prologue

  In which Anthony Gill is a rare man who would like to ask directions

  Could he trust a dying man? Reason told Anthony yes. Why would a dying man lie? On the other hand, the man was a trader, and traders seldom told the whole truth about anything. Besides, even though Anthony had performed the most menial of tasks during their months of association, this particular trader had never been satisfied with his work. You’d have thought he wanted me to bury his offal with formal ceremony, Anthony thought, still angry with the man who lay dying in the eerie emptiness of the Staked Plains. The others were already dead. Now it was just the two of them.

  As near death as he was, the trader had refused to lead Anthony Gill toward that hidden canyon in Comanchería that every trader wanted to exploit, providing it actually existed. Even a dying trader, covered with pox, oozing and rotting from the inside out, wouldn’t be so small-minded as to send a fellow white man to his certain death among the Kwahadi, the Antelope Eaters.

  On the other hand, who was to say the Kwahadi weren’t all dead, too? Smallpox, always around, had struck with stunning ferocity. Praise God—if there was a god—he had been inoculated years ago.

  Anthony sat beside this impromptu deathbed of Texas earth, staring ahead into the distance that looked exactly like every league they had traveled for weeks, and decided to trust the dying man’s directions toward the colony of New Mexico. Anthony knew he was only with the traders on sufferance, never mind that he did have one useful skill.

  “You there, attend to me,” the man croaked. Even in his ultimate extremity, the trader was no more polite than he had ever been. With unexpected strength, he tugged at Anthony, forcing him to breathe deeply of the reek that constituted a man about to succumb to smallpox, la viruela, as the Spaniards called it. Viruela sounded more melodious than smallpox. Call it what you will, in this killing season of 1782 it devoured nearly everyone—young, old, poor, rich, good, bad, Comanche, trader, this trader.

  “But not Anthony Gill,” Anthony said in English to the wind that blew ceaselessly from the west and north.

  When Anthony’s ear almost touched the trader’s mouth, the man had described the one landmark that would get him to Santa Maria, a garrison town perched on the edge of Comanchería. “Look for the tree,” he whispered. Anthony shuddered as pus flew out of the man’s ruined mouth.

  “A tree?”

  Wearily, the man nodded. “One tree, fool. Line up on it. You will see the slightest cut in the rocks ahead. Go that way. Go straight.”

  He coughed again. I hate this trader, Anthony thought, but by God, I have a duty. He dipped his filthy handkerchief into his canteen. He wiped the man’s ruined face, reminding himself that there wasn’t anything he couldn’t wash off his hands, providing there was enough water. He had almost no water left. He sighed.

  Anthony poured a little more water on the disgusting scrap, the final handkerchief remaining to him that belonged to Mrs. Gill. He dribbled the water in the trader’s open mouth, where it pooled and ran out the corners. Ten minutes, no more, Anthony thought.

  “In a day, you will find the river. Follow it north.”

  “I would rather you gave me directions to that secret canyon where the Kwahadi hole up in winter,” Anthony said. “You’ve been bragging that you know the way.”

  “Estúpido,” the man muttered. “I want to save your worthless hide.”

  The trader was right; Anthony’s hide was worthless. He couldn’t even remember his last sensible plan. “Tree. Gap in the rock,” he said. “Supposing I actually get that far without being skewered, peeled, and probably unmanned by the Kwahadi, what then?”

  “Find Marco Mondragón,” the trader gasped, his time almost up.

  “Very well. Anything else, you stinking lump?” Anthony said in Spanish, not caring now if a man staring at death heard another’s opinion of his faulty character.

  “Bury me deep, you fool,” the trader whispered, then died, kindly putting Anthony out of his personal misery, too.

  Anthony didn’t bury him; too much bother. He did scrape some of the trader’s pox into a screw-on tin. Maybe this Marco Mondragón, if he found such a man, would be interested in inoculation. It was the one gift he could give, dubious at best, because some died from the cure, too. That was what had gotten Anthony Gill in trouble in the colony of Georgia.

  He considered the matter. Perhaps his gift could also be a bargaining tool. He had lived too long on the hindquarters of ill fortune not to consider all the angles.

  Anthony pocketed the disgusting sample, kicked the dead man for good measure, then stared down with a frown. “Why in God’s name did I kick him?” he asked the wind. “What have I become?”

  He expected no answer, no burning bush, no thundering from on high, and he was not disappointed. Anthony Gill mounted his horse that staggered under even so light a burden as he had become. He hoped he could spot that tree and line himself up with the stone gap in distant rocks. Finding little Pia Maria Gill might have to wait for a season; he needed Marco Mondragón more.

  Chapter One

  In which the Mondragóns go their separate ways with some reluctance

  “Husband, if I didn’t know you to be a dedicated and resourceful officer of the crown, I might think that you are putting off your visit to the garrison,” Paloma Vega said into her husband’s bare shoulder. She softened her criticism, if such it was, with a delicate nip on that shoulder.

  The dedicated and resourceful officer of the crown tightened his grip on his wife when she tried to ease to one side. Paloma stayed where she was, both arms around Marco Mondragón’s neck and her fingers massaging his head. She knew how much he liked that. Amazing what
a woman learned in fifteen months of marriage.

  She kissed him, one of many similar kisses she had distributed here and there last night and just now, when the late dawn of early January lightened their room. “You’re not stalling because you’ll miss me, are you?” she asked into his neck. “You’re coming to get me in three days.”

  “I will count the hours, Paloma,” he replied, his voice drowsy now. And no wonder—neither of them had slept much last night. It was going to be embarrassing enough to troop into the kitchen at the Double Cross so long after the hour of breakfast, and know that Sancha and Perla, la cocinera, would chuckle about them later in the morning. How was it going to look when she arrived at her sister-in-law’s hacienda this afternoon and yawned through dinner? It wouldn’t hurt to mention the matter to him now, since he was obviously mellow. “My love,” she started, then laughed. “Never mind. If I start to yawn, your sister will understand why.”

  Marco kissed her shoulder again, and then her neck, and then she didn’t really care how much she was going to yawn that afternoon, or what the servants or her sister-in-law thought.

  A little later, she said, “Husband, explain to me again just what this is I have gotten myself into?”

  Traitorous man, his eyes were starting to close again. January it might be, but a summons from the visiting lieutenant at the garrison in Santa Maria couldn’t be ignored. “Marco, you have to go to Santa Maria and I have to leave, too.”

  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 th
e 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.”