The black invader (12 page)

'Mama!' Her voice rose and thinned shrilly, then she looked at Kirstie with a bright glint of panic in her eyes. 'You killed her!' she accused hoarsely. 'You've killed my mother!'

Shock gave Kirstie's eyes a glazed look and she shook her head emphatically as she stared at the girl. 'No,' she whispered. 'Oh no, Margarita!'

Automatically she moved towards her without realising that she still carried the broken branch in her hand, and the girl looked at her wild-eyed with alarm as she came close, her fingers clenched tightly on the rein. More intent on reassuring the girl for the moment than on defending herself, Kirstie too gripped the rein tightly.

'Margarita, your mother isn't dead, she's hurt, that's all, just hurt.'

It wasn't easy to convince her, for the girl seemed incapable of grasping anything beyond the fact that her mother lay ominously still on the ground while Kirstie stood over her with what must look like a pretty formidable weapon in her hand.

'You never liked her,' Margarita accused, her childish voice quivering, and she climbed down off her horse at last, clinging to the animal for a moment before she dropped to her knees beside her mother. 'Mama?' She

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looked up and her brown eyes shimmered with tears. *You hit her; you hit her with that stick; you hit her!'

Kirstie was growing desperate, not least because someone had to go for help and Margarita was best equipped, being dressed for riding. 'Listen, Margarita, your mother needs help urgently and you have to ride back to the house and tell your grandfather, or one of your uncles. Get them to call a doctor and an ambulance, do you understand?'

'No!' Margarita crouched over her mother protectively. 'I won't go and leave you with her again, I won't!'

'Margarita, please!'

'No, no, no!'

She was rapidly approaching hysteria, and Kirstie' realised there was nothing for it but to go herself as she had originally planned. 'Very well,' she said with a sigh of resignation, Til go.'

But Margarita seemed not to hear. She did not even turn her head to object when Kirstie took Scheherazade instead of the swifter gelding because she felt safer on the mare, riding as she was. Her last sight of the girl was of her small figure kneeling beside her mother in an attitude that was uncomfortably reminiscent of prayer.

It was both inelegant and uncomfortable riding astride dressed in a brief cotton dress, but Kirstie had no time to worry about either as she rode like the wind towards Casa de Rodriguez. Perhaps she had been wrong to leave a young and near-hysterical girl alone with an injured woman, but as she saw it she had had httle choice, so no one could blame her.

Nevertheless she heaved a massive sigh of relief when she spotted Miguel the moment she rode into the stable yard, and she called out to him before he could disappear through the gate into the patio. 'Miguel, Miguel!'

She didn't stop to consider formalities nor her earlier opinion of him as the desecrator of her old home; he was there when she needed him and she had to admit that she would rather it was him than anyone else. He

turned the moment she called to him, and seemed to sense that something was very wrong.

Striding back across the yard, he took note of her dress and reached up to lift her bodily out of the saddle, his big hands almost spanning her waist. Then setting her down in front of him, he regarded her curiously. 'What in heaven's name is the matter?' he demanded, and for a spht second when she glanced up at him, Kirstie wondered which of the conflicting stories he was most likely to believe, hers or his young cousin's.

'It's Senora Montanes,' she told him, and her hands were flutteringly unsteady as she smoothed down her rumpled dress. 'She's had a fall from her horse and she's unconscious; she's lying in the first row of olives opposite the track.'

Miguel was already striding through the patio gate with Kirstie hurrying breathlessly after him. 'Is she alone?' he asked, and Kirstie shook her head.