Lola Montez Conquers the Spaniards (35 page)

Oh, yes.

I can't bear this, can't bear remembering. But it's part of the whole and I cannot stop now. But swift, swift and fast, it's the only way.

We rode on until the early afternoon, when the mare suddenly went lame. We'd reached a town called de Doña something, a good twenty miles or so short of Zaragoza. I cursed and swore, but there was no help for it. The horse would have to rest, have her hoof looked at by a farrier. We found one; he promised to treat it and stable her overnight, then take another look in the morning. Would I have to leave her where she was and buy another? I counted the cash that was left. How would I ever keep enough to pay my fare home? When would I escape this diabolical nightmare of fleeing?

“No!” I shouted at Matilde when she suggested another hotel was the best idea. “We haven't the money!” In a temper, I led Lindo ahead, searching for a deserted outbuilding or somewhere to shelter from the
rain that had started and seemed likely to continue. I was cold and miserable, just as she was, but I didn't know what else to do. I will
not
be stuck in some Spanish hellhole in the middle of nowhere, I told myself, seething. I will
not
run quivering at every noise and shadow. This time, I'll have my pistol in hand and I'll shoot to kill.

There was a small barn beside an abandoned tiny farmhouse. It was perfect: There was a little haymow above, with dry hay from several seasons ago. There was hay on the stone floor, enough to sleep on. A stall for Lindo.

“Tomorrow,” I told Matilde, “once we get to Zaragoza, I will be calm. It's a city; I understand cities.” I was loading black powder into the chambers of the two little pistols, to be on the safe side. One I kept with me, the other was placed back in the book and into the leather bag.

“And money? Cities cost more money.”

I waved this aside. “Tomorrow. It will seem easier in the morning.”

The sound of the rain eventually lulled me to sleep, and I must have been exhausted and more demoralized, too, than I'd realized. At one point, in the middle of the night, I woke with a start and called, “Matilde? Is that you?” There was no answer, but I reached to where she lay sleeping, two feet away, and touched her hand. Lindo snorted and shifted his weight. I relaxed again, still clutching my pistol, and fell asleep.

Dawn came. A beam of weak sunlight found its way between two boards, touching my cheek and then my eyelid. Light woke me. I turned my head and saw the most terrible thing I have ever seen.

Matilde lay shrouded in blood. There wasn't a pool of it because it had seeped away into the hay, but it was all around her—and me. A huge pucker of skin marred her throat—unnatural, hideous—which I suddenly recognized as a violent knife slash, from ear to ear, nearly taking her head off. A rush of vomit came up from my stomach and out, but turning my eyes away from the very dead woman, I saw something worse. The baby, Matilde, pale and white and equally dead. Serenely smothered. Splashed with her mother's gore.

Lindo's head came up and over the side of the stall. His eyes were wide; I could see their whites. He was frightened, could smell the blood.
“God,” I moaned and tried to stand. And then a whoosh, a black shape out of the corner of my eye, and down from the haymow flew the ungodly, the hell figure, the shadow. All in black, landing on its feet. Father Miguel de la Vega, of course.

The man was mad. This much was certain, where everything else was in flux. Before I could move or scream or anything else, he had twisted my hands behind my back and tied them painfully together. Then he scooped up my pistol, lying in the straw where I'd dropped it to vomit. Why had he saved me for the end, why had he waited for my eyes to open? Meeting his fearsome gaze, I understood: He needed a witness to sate his corruption. To my shame, I fell down again, knees shaking with terror, into the hay that was saturated with Matilde's cold and congealing blood. I prayed for a speedy death—I could foresee nothing else at the end of this minute, or hour, or day.

He was speaking, no, screaming. His thin lips quickly became coated with white spittle and saliva. I made out about two words in ten, but together they painted a portrait of diseased ambition. He raved about the praise he was sure to reap from his society, for having rid the world of two more whores—for whores they surely were, mother and child. How the society would adulate him for bringing to them a living witch, and what pleasure they would jointly take in dispatching this third whore. He yanked my hair and forced my head up, as he cried, “I am speaking, of course, as a member of the apostolic party's terrorist wing: the Society of the Exterminating Angel!” There was more, much more, but my heart had quailed; I was busy surviving and it all swept over me, then, in a wave of undifferentiated hatred.

He ordered me outside, and we left the scene of death. What would happen to their bodies—one small, and one tiny? Who would stumble upon this scene of horror? Then I was up on Lindo, shoved and poked with the barrel of my tiny pistol, my hands now tied in front and under the saddle; he had readied the horse while I was still sleeping. If I were to faint or fall, bound in such a way, I would surely be trampled;
neither Lindo nor I could get free. The Jesuit swung himself onto Conquistador, tethered to a tree nearby. He was taking me to these people, this society, he said; we would ride fast, he would not spare the horses. The stallion was acting badly, spooked and nervy; it was obvious the man had abused him in the time since the theft. As we rode, and as he raved, the priest applied the whip indiscriminately to the animal's most sensitive area, between the ears, and he could not see that it was this that was making the horse ungovernable and, in his view, needful of ever more constant beatings.

We took another road, not the main one, but one that headed off at a completely different angle, through flat plains where wheat ripened on hot summer days. Now, flat nothing. Cold, dry wind. Nobody about, no one to call to for help—if they had dared. Simple country people, seeing a frantic, bound woman in blood-soaked trousers with a man of the cloth? Who were they to intervene?

As the initial shock wore off, perhaps, and the body's instinct for preservation kicked in, I began to understand more of what the maniac was muttering, or shouting, as the spirit moved him: “A disgrace! Soon to be rectified once and for all. Church wealth was raided, given away! By that monkey of a king! Soon we will get it back, make them all pay! Return to the throne a king who properly fears God, who will reinstate the sacred Inquisition to rid the world of its rising impurities! And I will be part of that great whip of wickedness!” I desperately tried to put these words into some sort of perspective. King Ferdinand had siphoned off church monies and lands, but that was years ago and now the pretender, Don Carlos, was happily exiled in France. And terrorist wing of the apostolic party? What in God's name was he talking about? Who and what was the Jesuit following?

We rode all day, the priest whipping Conquistador continually; both horses were labouring, their breath rasping painfully. He did not stop to rest them or water them. We did not stop to eat. I had no idea where we were, but he had begun to talk about Pamplona, the society's base in the north, “near Logroño, site of Father Merino's valiant campaign.” His voice took on a silky nostalgia as he said this. Racking my brain for the name, I finally recalled Ventura speaking about his brother before
he'd found his vocation: young Miguel, following a warrior priest who'd gone north to join the Carlists, the veteran priest who so impressed his men because he neither slept nor ate. And here the former young man was, retracing those footsteps, neither eating nor sleeping. Heading for the lair of a fearsome, secret society, where I could expect a nest of others just as mad as he, perhaps only one day's ride away.

Finally he called a halt, when the night was pitch black and Conquistador had stumbled so badly onto the road that the flesh over his right knee joint was torn and bleeding. The Jesuit untied my hands (numb, raw), pulled me out of the saddle, and flung me onto the ground. With my pistol, he gestured for me to lie still where I was. He hobbled the horses—no food, no water, still sweating in their skins! Conquistador's leg was a bloody mess! They would be ill; horses can't be treated so. Then he retied my hands and threw himself onto the ground, pistol at my temple. I had no idea whether he'd found one of the spare caps, kept in the faux book; as far as I knew, the others were still on me, in their intimate place on the ends of my nipples. Did he now know there was a second pistol, and black powder, in the book? If the pistol he had in his hand was primed, with the cap ready and waiting in the barrel, any slight jiggle could fire it straight into my brain.

“The day is nearly here,” he began to mutter, like a nasty schoolboy recounting the pleasures of pulling the wings from flies, “the day for which the Society of the Exterminating Angel has been working, in secret and in perpetuity. We will close the universities. We will curb the press. No more liberal backsliding. No more Neapolitan jezebels to waggle their white asses and claim to rule us.” He clarified himself with rabid asides: “Secret marriage, to a guardsman? With the aid of a corrupt papal nuncio? Armageddon! Death to the whores!” And there was a frightening crack as he fired the pistol—at first, I thought I had been shot, that I was dying, and then I feared for the horses, but no. He'd fired into the air, apparently, in excitement and anticipation. His words were thrilling to him. And it must mean he knew about the other pistol and the powder. Sweet baby Jesus. At that moment I wished I
had
died so I wouldn't have to endure whatever it was that he was hideously planning, with me as main course, to be shared with a roomful of like-minded zealots.

Just as I'd thought he had finished his ravings for the night, he sidled his attenuated body closer and began to whisper. “When you had the temerity to ask if you should trust General de León? Do you remember this? I could smell him all over you! When you were asking if you should trust him—ha! You already had.” Oh my God, I cringed, he was going to list my faults; he had them all catalogued in his perverted mind. Another shriek: “Whore of Babylon!”

Then the priest laughed, an oily sound that a snake might make if a snake had lips. “And there you were, busy seducing our prime minister. Such a meddling little slut.” His body squirmed even closer; I could smell the putridity of his starvation breath and something else, some other scent that made alarm bells ring in my head, though I couldn't then place it. “Princess Luisa Fernanda was almost mine, you
puta,
but you made me lose her. She could have helped pay for the sins of her mother. Too pretty, too beautiful, too pampered and spoiled. The pretty one first,
because
she is pretty—slit her throat and leave her to be found in the bowels of the Oriente. Then later the fat one . . . You ruined it. But she won't escape me. I'll go back for her. Another generation of whore. Must not be allowed to breed.”

He had waited a long time for the satisfaction of these disclosures. His joy was obscene.

Oh, how could I have so grossly underestimated the fanaticism of the man? I'd despised him, found him abhorrent, and so I'd ignored him, at my peril. It all seemed so clear.
He
was the double agent, infiltrating the Cristino conspiracies; he feared beauty, he feared women. How could I not have known?

He giggled and wriggled again. “I killed Tristany. Sent his ears in the box, just as I was leaving Spain to come to Grimaldi's aid. We arrived almost at the same time, which I found very satisfying.” His voice was becoming sleepy, like a snake digesting. “You should know, too, I made good use of the earl of Malmesbury's bank draft,
puta.
Sent it to my society. They purchased many rifles, and other implements of justice. Of course I knew you had something valuable hidden—fingering your hem all the way south in the coach, such a vain and puerile female.” He gingered himself up again with a hiss and gave me a painful poke in
the throat with my little pistol. “I tried to hurl you from the top of the theatre, spawn of Satan! Showing your legs, with pride, to the audience! Lifting your skirts for anyone to see!” The scent, the stench, was in the air, and my senses suddenly placed it: the long paws of Pedro Coria, covering my mouth in the Paris street, the hand at Clotilde's throat, propelling her over the rail. I glanced down at the priest's hands, just visible in starlight: one clutching my pistol, the other clenching and unclenching. Abnormally long yellow-white fingers, like spiders at the ends of his arms. Long, strong, cruel fingers, fastened around Clotilde's neck, and then it became real: not Coria! It was the priest, all along!

“That pink dress,” he whispered then, as if following my thoughts, “the one I'd seen
you
in, the day Grimaldi introduced you to me—pink, decadent, like female flesh with all the extras adhering. I was going to stop you before you began. But you gave it to her, and so she died. I mistook her for you. But, no regret, she was a vain little bauble, perfectly dispensable. Grimaldi is a sentimental fool.”