The Flesh and the Devil (50 page)

         
Luis shook his head, his furrowed face grave. 'No, nothing
but that he is dead — and the gypsies say they were stopped when they were
leaving, and asked not to talk even of that! But they are outside now — I told
the leader that you knew the Duque and would want to speak with them.‘ He
hesitated. 'I should not, of course-I forgot that you-'

         
'No matter.' The flesh surrounding Tristan's scar had
whitened, but his voice remained calm. ‗I still wish to hear what they
know. Juana –‗

         
She spoke rapidly, her eyes on her own hand as it clasped
Elisabeta's. 'I must say a prayer for the repose of his soul. Could one of the
boys be spared to go with me to San Pedro's and stay until I come out? I shall
not be long.'

         
'Of course,' Elisabeta agreed. 'Luis, call Carlos.' Tristan
said nothing until Juana had draped her shawl over her hair and was moving
towards the door, clutching the fringed ends tightly between her fingers. Luis
and Elisabeta had gone into the street, and he checked her when she would have
followed them. At his touch she was very still.

         
‗Taking sanctuary?‘ he asked softly. 'They do not
shelter murderesses, even in your precious church.'

         
‗I am no such thing,' she returned in a shaken voice,
'but now, I only want to be somewhere where I know you will not come - devils
do not commonly go to church, they?'

         
.

         
Without waiting for an answer she evaded his out stretched
hand and went hurriedly outside, to where Elisabeta was extracting a reluctant
Carlos from a gang of his friends and telling him not to wander away from the
portico of San Pedro until Juana came out, no matter what diversions caught his
eye. Tristan interrupted from the doorway, his voice cool.

         
'Let him come back when he will, Elisabeta. I shall go and fetch
Juana back when I have done here. Wait for me.‘

         
She nodded without reply and a moment later she was
hurrying down the street in Carlos's wake, listening to his garbled account of
the arrival of the
guanos
and of his father's excitement when he had
spoken with them; the breathless speech ended only with their arrival at the
nearby San Pedro's.

         
'You will be safe here,' Carlos concluded with
satisfaction, 'and Tio Felipe will come for you. Ah, I am glad I am not a
woman, to need a man to go with me everywhere!‘

         
'I am glad, too.' Juana forced a smile. 'Thank you,
Carlos.‘

         
‗A pleasure.‘ The boy bowed with much extravagant
arm-waving, aping some courtier that he had seen in the streets.
'Adios,
 
senorita!'

         
The boys had never absorbed the fact that she was the wife
of
 
their admired Tio Felipe - any more
than she herself, Juana thought wryly - and still addressed her as
senortta
 
for most of the time. Even Elisabeta had given
up trying to correct them. With a quick, hunted movement she turned her back on
the street and hurried into the candlelit church. She did not see that the
cloaked figure with which she had almost collided on the threshold hesitated,
and then turned abruptly and followed her back into the church.

         
It did not take long for Tristan to find out what the
gitanos
 
I knew of Bartolomé's death. The
little group had been travelling hard, and the wine with which they had
refreshed themselves had relaxed their normal suspicious attitude towards
gaujos’

         
questions; moreover, the tale was a good one and reflected
badly on the aristocracy, which made them doubly eager to tell it. Tristan
heard them out intently, hardly prompting, listening while they told it in
their own way.

         
'It is always the same,' the leader asserted volubly. 'They
blame the gitanos, the vagrants, because everyone knows we are thieves and
murderers. Why should we want to kidnap a Duque, I ask you? He would be nothing
to us but another mouth to feed. But no, we were taken to the castillo by that
Italian —‗ he added an uncomplimentary epithet in his native tongue - 'as
though we had been proved guilty already. If they had not found the corpse
while we were there under guard, I daresay he would have hanged us anyway.‘

         
'Where was the corpse found? Who found it?‘

         
'How should I know? The questioning was getting nasty is
all I cared about. We must have been there above an hour when all of a sudden
this soldier bursts in, looking very green, and says, "They have found him—
downstairs _ dead," and the Italian gets up and goes over to him, and they
talk very fast and then the Italian turns green, too.‘

         
Tristan nodded silently. He had a fairly clear picture of
what a dead man would look like who had been steeped in red wine for nearly a
week.

         
'Anyway, after that he comes back and tells us that the
Duque has been found dead inside the castillo, and so we can go. No apologies,
no explanations - We may be innocent, but we should be glad to come off with
our lives, is what his face says. Then, just as we're leaving, this old man
stops us and says what have we heard, so I tell him.‘ The gipsy grinned. 'And,
ohé! He does not like it. He says something about fools with long tongues, and
then says he will pay us if we will keep silent about it - kidnapping, dead
Duque and all. There is sickness in the house, he says, and the family cannot
be troubled with scotching rumors. So I say to him, "Sir, our tongues are
our own to use as we please. Your money cannot buy them.‖ And we go.‘

         
He had obviously taken great pride in his speech, and
Tristan nodded dryly.

         
'Well spoken.'

         
'After that he does not try to persuade any more, but he
sends a man after us with more money; so I guess perhaps it is more important to
him than he says, and perhaps everyone should know soon that this Duque is
dead. Why should free men do what the rich ones ask?‘

         
Tristan thanked him and turned away, and as he shouldered
his way through the small crowd a telltale muscle was moving in his hollowed
cheek. Torres had meddled too far, it seemed, in trying to buy the
guanos’
 
silence —

         
unless, now that he had had time to reconsider he had
regretted his impulse to condone Bartolomé's death. He bad known, in the
instant they faced each other across de Casianeda's body, that Torres knew the
truth about Bartolomé-not all, but enough-and would keep silent. And for his
own part, he had known that Torres had wanted the young Duque dead. But now he
might easily have decided that it would be more convenient to have Bartolomé
legally dead, and a perfect scapegoat for his murder. This rash exposure might
have been policy, or it might have been mere clumsiness, a townsman's ignorance
of the ways of the gitanos. If it were the latter, he might never find out. If
it were the former, he would have proof when a contingent of Andalusian
soldiers arrived round his ears.

         
He turned the street corner and went towards the church of
San Pedro with his long light stride, ignoring the little dark people who
scurried hastily out of his path as soon as they saw him.

         
Juana could not pray. Her mind and heart were too full of a
confusion of anger, guilt and contrition even to remember the words she had
known all her life, and time and again she found herself halted in the pattern
of prayer, her hands clenched on her ebony beads. She felt herself distracted
by the shuffling of feet all round her, by the ceaseless arrival and departure
of worshippers, by scents and shapes and sounds - all those things to which she
could normally close her mind, however crowded the church.

         
It was the scent that first made her aware of the cloaked
woman's presence; it crept into her nostrils as she knelt, too sweet for musk,
too heavy and opulent for the perfume, of any flower that she could recognize.
By turning her head slightly she could see the nearby figure, cloaked and
hooded, wearing a darkcolored farthingale. She was aware of surprise that such
a fashionable woman should visit San Pedro's; the Villenos aristocracy, Tristan
had told her with a sort of expressionless contempt in his slanting eyes,
favored the newer church of San Juan. Yesterday Juan would have risen and left,
for fear that her presence had been noted; today she remained where she was in
silent rebellion, fighting the instinct that told her she was being watched.
When she rose to her feet at last it was with a feeling of utter despair, and
she turned and hurried down the aisle as if she tried to outstrip her own
thoughts. She had almost reached the church door when someone touched her
shoulder; at the same moment the curious scent filled her nostrils again, and
she spun round to see the cloaked woman smiling at her.

         
‗I am sorry if I alarmed you -' Her voice was like
the scent, smooth but with an underlying bite that was intriguing. 'It is just
that you seemed so troubled in there.' A thin, bejeweled hand fluttered
dismissively behind her. 'I wondered if I might be of help - I have known
trouble in my life, and I know that it is sometimes easier to tell your sorrows
to human ears than to God's.

         
'Juana backed a step. 'You are too kind, senora, but I have
newly learned not to be too trusting.' Her voice was bitter. 'Pardon me.'