Getting up to the bed, I whispered, “Mercedes.”
The form under the blankets stirred, and I gently whispered her name again.
As she sat up, the moonlight caught her face, and I gasped and stepped back. The stern countenance and braided hair made her a Medusa with a head of snakes.
Tía Beatriz.
The first scream came before I had taken a single step for the balcony doors.
By the time I reached the railing, I was certain her long, bloodcurdling howl had awoken the entire city.
I leaped over the balcony, realizing as I was falling that I didn’t know exactly what was on the ground at that spot. My feet came down in a thorny bush, and I hit hard, pitching forward, going facedown and slamming into the ground.
My breath was knocked out of me, but I reared up until I was on my knees, then on my feet and running, up and over the wall, still hearing her screams as if she was being ravaged by demons from the underworld.
That she had awoken every constable in the city was readily apparent to me, but as I rode Rojo at full gallop with a pack of wild dogs yapping at his heels, it was not only obvious that every mongrel in the area was chasing me but also that every guard dog for miles was howling.
If I had any sense, I would have just kept going, across a causeway and onto the road north. But I would have left with empty pockets.
Like those retreating Spanish, I was doomed to go down with treasure on my back.
SIXTY-SIX
HIDING MY HEAD in the house for the next two days, I worked in the stable grooming Rojo, mending tack, and concocting a salve for a sore that a carriage horse had developed.
Not wanting the stableman around to wonder about me, I sent him on frequent errands to pick up supplies for the horses.
I was sewing a harness, reinforcing it with stronger thread, when the gardener came in. He stared at the big needle and thread I was repairing a harness with.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“My apology, señor, but a man wishes to speak to you.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know, señor, a gachupin in a carriage.”
Ah, the viceroy’s aide, no doubt with news about the release of my inheritance. After my performance at the ball, the viceroy must have decided to give me what I had coming.
I hurried out the gate and came to a sudden stop. It wasn’t Don Riego’s carriage, but a black enclosed one. The same black carriage that had pulled up beside me and paused on the bridge—with the curtains drawn.
I stared at the carriage, undecided about whether I should get my pistola—and my horse.
The carriage door opened and a man showed himself.
“Come aboard, Juan,” El Mestizo said.
SIXTY-SEVEN
“HOW?”
The question of how he had found me hung between us—unanswered—as the black carriage rolled down the street.
Taking his time, El Mestizo lit a tobacco twist and blew out a steam of smoke. He offered me a leaf, but I shook my head. And I didn’t repeat the question. He had heard it.
“Not so much how,” he said, “but more importantly, what? Once I knew, I had to decide what I was to do.”
I kept my tongue. The “whats” were obvious—turn me over to the constables or let me make a run for it.
He had already made up his mind, and the only clue I had that I wasn’t going to be immediately turned over to the constables was that he had come to get me rather than them. That meant he was probably going to give me a chance to run. Without my—his—horse. And with my pockets empty.
“But as to how, I believed I recognized you on the bridge, but I was far from certain. You have changed from the street child and stable boy I had seen. You are a gachupin, for sure. When I learned of your strange behavior at home, I became more suspicious.”
“What strange behavior? You spied on me in my house?”
“Your house?” He leaned forward. “Is that something like … your horse?”
I shrugged. “I earned it in battle, señor. The house, at least.”
“That you did—both of them. As for knowing your habits, my servants reported marketplace gossip about a wealthy young peninsulare who knew more about horseshoes than most blacksmiths.”
“Aah, doomed not by the gossip of servants, but by my own stupidity in showing off my skills.”
“You were doomed when you were conceived by a Spaniard lying with an india,” he said, looking out the window. “Often it was by force.”
He was talking about both of us, though I had never heard that his mother Marina had been forced to bed the conqueror.
Turning back to me, he said, “When my sister-in-law, Doña Bernaldina, told me about the lépero act you put on at the ball, I realized it might be a performance inspired by real life.”
“A notion of hiding in plain sight that didn’t work.”
“Actually, you did well with it. The guests found it highly entertaining and accepted you without question as Antonio de los Rios.” He blew smoke in my direction and peered at me with half-closed eyes. “Did Antonio suffer greatly when you murdered him?”
I realized we were pulling up to the building that housed the chief constable. My first thought was for escape, but his veiled stare kept me pinned to my seat.
“I didn’t touch him. Had I gotten there a moment sooner, he would still be alive—less his purse, of course. He went over the cliff before I could bring down the killers.”
He tapped the roof of the carriage, and I lurched back as it picked up speed. We rode in silence, each of us staring out a window, and I could tell he was fighting his own demons, ones no doubt I had inadvertently created.
“I believe you,” he said. “When you accidentally killed that stable owner, I saw compassion on your face even though I’d heard that the man was a swine who’d cheated you out of an inheritance. Tell me about the fight on the Vera Cruz road…” He suddenly grinned. “And how you became a gachupin.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
EL MESTIZO DROPPED me off back at the house an hour later, after we talked about many things. I told him about my suspicions of Carlos, the brother of his late sister, and was told Carlos was barely tolerated by the Cortés brothers’ family because of his inattention to their sister during her last days.
“He struck her once. Unforgivable. Had they not been married, I would have met him on the field of honor—not that he would have accepted a challenge from a mestizo.”
El Mestizo was a man of mystery, something I had not realized. His coach was part of the mystique. It was enclosed to conceal the occupants, had no coat of arms, and was a color not commonly used, features that gave some anonymity to the owner—yet, by its very nature, the fact that it was unusual made it all the more distinct.
Why would he ride concealed but let the world know that it was him in the coach?
My guess was that he felt the world rejected him because of his mixed blood, and he wanted both to hide his head and strike back. The unique coach offered a refuge from their stares but told any Spaniard who saw it that this was a mestizo who bore the name and blood of the conqueror.
As I was stepping out of the coach, he made a puzzling statement about my presence in the city. “It’s God’s will,” he said. “Your destiny is intertwined with the people here. You did not come here by your own choice—you were guided here to avenge a wrong.”
My first thought was that he was referring to avenging Antonio’s death, but something about the grave way he looked at me when I stepped down gave me a shiver and sealed my lips from inquiring.
I started to walk away and he said, “Do not forget that you are invited to the ball at my brother’s.”
After the carriage rolled away, I stood for a long moment and watched it. Strange, but now I had encountered two people who could recognize me, one did, perhaps even the other, and I still was not in the hands of the constables.
A subject that had not been discussed was my future. I didn’t volunteer that I w
as planning to run with as much as I could stuff into my pockets as soon as I had the opportunity—and he didn’t ask. Nor had he demanded back his fine stallion.
I’m sure he knew it was not possible for me to keep up the Antonio pretense forever. Not only was there an uncle from Guadalajara who might unmask me at any time, but eventually someone who knew Antonio would step off ship at Vera Cruz and arrive in the capital. A constant influx of people came to the colony from Spain, and, no matter what their final destination, they all passed through Mexico City before moving on.
Besides getting the viceroy to release my gold, I had one other urgent need: to meet with Mercedes again before I left the city.
For what purpose? I didn’t know—at least there was no purpose that I could define clearly. She was a gachupin; I was a bandido: it was hardly a heavenly match, nor was it one with a future. My own lifeline was most likely to be the end of a rope strung from a gallows—and it was just a matter of time and place.
El Mestizo had told me something that made a meeting with Mercedes urgent. In talking about Carlos, he mentioned that the man was pursuing a merchant’s daughter for a large dowry—and I hid my surprise when he told me it was Mercedes.
She had to be warned about the man’s evil nature. It might take some convincing if I was the source.
In the meantime, just like the avenger’s destiny that El Mestizo said had propelled me to the city, fate appears to have given my heart to a redheaded gachupin, and I couldn’t leave the city without it.
As I demonstrated climbing into the balcony at the Cruz house, knowing the madness of my acts had never kept me from doing them. My next move with Mercedes was going to be no exception.
In the morning I saddled up a carriage horse using the plainest tack, puzzling the groom at my choice, of course, and left the house. En route to my destination, I pulled a poncho over my upper body, put a scarf around the top of my head that came down over my forehead, donned a vaquero’s well-worn hat, and darkened my face with the dye from tree roots I used on Rojo.
Looking very much like any other of the hundreds of wranglers who had brought horses or cattle into the city each day, I was waiting down the street when Mercedes came out of the Cruz compound in her carriage, on her way to pick up her women friends for their paseo socializing.
I went up the street as the carriage was coming down it. As it passed me, I dropped the locket bearing her mother’s image into her lap.
I heard her exclamation and then a shout of “stop,” but I kept going at an even pace, quickening the horse into a slow gallop after I went around a corner in case she ordered her carriage driver to turn and give chase.
What did I intend to prove by this act of utter foolishness?
Was there any doubt that she would know whom the locket came from? Any doubt that she would have the constables at my door as soon as she got her wits about her? Or talked to her father? Or her betrothed, Carlo the Murderous Bastardo, about the bandido that has come back into her life?
I resisted the strong temptation to load up mules and leave the city.
Only time would tell whether my next performance would be as a screaming lépero on a torture rack in the viceroy’s dungeon.
* * *
A surprise came for me late in the afternoon.
An india servant girl came with a note she held on to tightly and refused to give to my servants, insisting that she had to hand it to me.
When I asked who sent her, she shook her head and stared at me, wide-eyed. She probably had never refused to answer a gachupin’s demand in her life. I could have frightened the answer out of her, but I let her go because the note was plain enough and I was able to read it:
Our Lady of Assumption, Chapultepec mañana
Chapultepec was a hill outside the city where the Aztec emperors once had a palace and now there was a nunnery.
Mercedes wouldn’t be planning to turn me over to the constables if she was arranging to have me meet her at a convent in the morning.
The message was unsigned. Perhaps it was a trap—a test to see if I would know it was she who sent it, thus confirming that I was the horseman who dropped the locket in her lap.
By going to the rendezvous, I would be revealing myself as a bandido. She could have told Carlos about the locket and her suspicions about me, and he could set a trap for me.
Regardless of the insanity of my act, the die had been cast when I gave her back the locket. Now I was in the hands of the fates, who had not handled my life gently in the past. And a señorita with a red-hot temper.
SIXTY-NINE
STILL UNSURE WHETHER I was running into a trap set by Carlos or the viceroy, I was grim in the morning when I set out for Chapultepec.
What had she said at the ball about what she would do to the bandido who attacked her? Gouge out his eyes out so that he didn’t see the rope that went around his neck on the gallows? After wrestling with the woman, I was certain she was capable of it, so it may be that my fear of her handing me over to Carlos or the viceroy was misplaced—I should be worrying about what she personally planned to do to me.
I was making my way toward the causeway and coming up to the best inn in the city when I spotted someone from my past getting out of a carriage in front of the place of lodging.
The woman from Vera Cruz.
What did that picaro bitch of el diablo call herself? Countess Isabella del Castilla y Aragon. The name pounded in my head. Like a sledgehammer striking an anvil. Fire blew out of my ears, and I reached for my pistola—mentally.
I did sit upright in the saddle and glare, sorely tempted to run her down with Rojo, trampling her under his big hooves, then to head for the causeway and just keep on going. But I simply watched with no recourse as she went from the carriage to the inn with a man fawning over her.
The man was rich, of course, his clothing revealed that, and the carriage was of the ostentatious style of excessive silver trim preferred by the city’s wealthier citizens.
He was flushed with excitement. No doubt the “countess” had stroked more than his ego during the ride, eh.
Obviously, the man was a dupe like me who thought more with his cojones than his brains when it came to women. He’d soon get his purse emptied.
It ate at me that I couldn’t confront her and demand my money back—better yet, murder the slut of el diablo, getting my hands around her neck and squeezing till her eyes popped and her tongue hung out as she tried to beg me for mercy … or maybe I’d put a rope around her neck and drag her behind Rojo over a bed of cactus.
The mere thought of throttling the bitch roused my blood and gave my spirits a lift.
The money she stole was no longer important to me. I could throw enough gold candleholders in a bag from Ramos’s house to buy a ranchero. But her making a fool out of me and stealing my hard-earned money deserved to be avenged.
Perhaps with an anonymous note written by a hired scribe, I would let the viceroy’s aide know that a female picaro had come to town. And maybe a note to the Inquisition bishop, letting him know about the witchcraft she practiced, no?
SEVENTY
THE CONVENT AT Chapultepec, with its whitewashed walls and red tiled roof, was nestled in a copse of trees with a sparkling stream gurgling nearby.
I saw her open carriage near the entrance, with her driver taking a siesta in the shade beneath it. Another carriage was also nearby, a closed coach much like El Mestizo’s, but this one was red and the trim had an overly generous amount of gold.
When I got close enough I recognized the viceroy’s coat of arms on the side of the red coach.
What I didn’t see right away were the four constables sitting under a tree, their mules tied nearby as they played a dice game and ate the traditional midmorning light meal.
My heart leaped into my throat and I was ready to bolt, but the fact that they just glanced my way before turning back to the gaming kept my feet going straight ahead.
A nun greeted me at the gate with a
stern look that appeared to be permanently carved onto her features as opposed to disapproval of just me.
“Señorita Cruz?” I asked.
She nodded at a collection box set on the wall beside the gate. I dropped in a piece of eight and she remained frozen in place. Another silver piece in the box and she turned and I followed her.
Ayyo … I had spent my life as a thief in the wrong business.
The nun led me into a small garden area, where Mercedes was on her knees trimming a rosebush. She stood when we approached and thanked the nun for looking after me. As soon as the nun was gone, Mercedes gave me a look that could have shriveled the thorny bush she had been working on.
“You disgusting bandido, did you think you won my favor by first putting me into danger and then saving me after you threw me to those creatures? I will have the viceroy drag you back to the city behind his carriage with a rope around your neck.”
Had she read my thoughts about the countess?
“I’m happy to see you, too.”
She stepped up to me and put the sharp tip of her cutting tool under my throat.
“Tell me how you murdered Antonio de los Rios.”
I gently pulled her hand to get the sharp point away from my throat.
“You don’t believe that or you would have sicced the constables on me already.” I nodded at the locket she was wearing. “I kept it safe for you.”
“And I should thank you for stealing it in the first place?” She hefted the cutting tool in her hand as if she was making up her mind to use it again. “You should be on your knees begging forgiveness.”
I dropped to my knees. “I beg pardon, señorita, for forcing you to scar my face, making me even uglier than I already was, and for risking my freedom and life to return the locket that I kept close to my heart.”
“I—I—”
Ayyo. Her face was red and she appeared to be wavering between shoveling the cutting tool in my gullet or giving a good scream.
I motioned her with a padding motion with my hands to cool down. “Stab me if you like, but don’t scream,” I said. “The viceroy’s men will hear you.”