Treasure of the Sun (8 page)

"Dear heavens. Peace would run rampant, education would be open to all, and the poor would be gainfully employed! Whatever-" she jerked her hands out of his and wiped them, one by one, on his coat "-would America do if all her social problems were solved by a bunch of pea-brained women?" She stepped back and smiled at his dumbfounded face. "You've convinced me, Mr. Smith. Someday women will have the vote. We can't continue to let the country be run solely by males, ignorant of law and literature."

"Why, you-" He snatched at her and grabbed her by the sleeves. "You're a shrew."

The sound of tearing, the release as worn material gave way and the touch of cool air on her shoulder wiped the smile from her face. "Perhaps not a shrew, but I know I'll get the vote, and I know I'll own this land someday." Her fist flashed up and smacked him in the Adam's apple. She put the full force of her arm behind the blow, as she hadn't with Damian, and Mr. Smith's painful gag resounded across the now-quiet yard. His hands fell away and she stepped back.

The man striding across the yard halted in his tracks. Leaning over Mr. Smith, whose head bent over his knees and whose fingers clutched his throat, Katherine said, "I know all these things. You see ... it's manifest destiny."

Chapter 4

She laughed, although it wavered, and stalked away. As Mr. Smith cast an embarrassed glance at his audience and staggered towards the creek where the beer barrel cooled, Don Lucian loosened his restraining grip on Damian's arm. "You haven't the right to interfere, Damian," Don Lucian reproved. "I wonder where she learned such an effective blow."

His son shook his head, rubbing his own Adam's apple in remembrance.

"She'll make you a fine wife," Don Lucian said. "Better than Vietta."

"There was never a question of Vietta." "Her family hoped-"

Damian never took his eyes from Katherine as she strode toward the house. "Her family hoped I'd rescue them from their own stupidity."

"Luis Gregorio is a poor excuse for a rancher," Don Lucian acknowledged, "and an even poorer excuse for a neighbor."

"He lost their lands because of his laziness, but Vietta never expected me to marry her as an obligation."

Don Lucian's voice revealed his distaste for the woman. "No, she expected you to marry her because she loved you."

Damian glanced at his father and spread his hands helplessly.

"A youthful fancy. I did nothing to encourage her, I assure you. I didn't even know until 1 heard the rumors of our impending nuptials."

"Of course you didn't know. It's not as if she were an innocent child you led astray."

"Come, admit it. You don't like Vietta."

"I don't like her, but what's worse, I didn't even like her as a child." Don Lucian's mouth puckered as if he'd bitten into a green persimmon. "She was a sly thing who clung to you like a parasite. I was glad when the Gregorios moved to Monterey to live in genteel poverty."

"She's my friend," Damian answered.

"You are too loyal. What of her renewed affection for you?"

"You have noticed? Her devotion seems to have returned in the past year. I'd hoped it was my imagination." Damian shrugged. "She's a spinster and prone to strange fantasies. I thought for a few months she loved Tobias. Her eyes burned when she watched him, but he detested her."

"Tobias called her a vampire," Don Lucian said without emotion.

"The only quarrel Tobias and I ever had, we had about Vietta. She clung to me as if Tobias were a rival. When Tobias suggested he and I travel the countryside seeking out the old Indian and Spanish legends, we returned to find her sitting on the step of the townhouse, demanding an accounting of our trip."

"She's an odd young woman," Don Lucian stated with emphasis.

"Then Katherine stepped off the ship. Vietta refused to meet Katherine. When I gave the reception for their wedding, Vietta refused to come."

"Jealous of every bit of your attention that isn't hers."

"Surely this, too, will pass."

"Perhaps you're right." If Don Lucian had his doubts, he disguised them beneath a paternal smile. "Vietta has time before your wedding to accustom herself to the thought. Before you can announce your engagement, a month remains in Dona Katherina's mourning."

The smile disguised concern, and Damian wondered if his father knew in some omniscient, parental fashion, about the scene in the study the previous day. "I can't wait any longer."

Don Lucian frowned. "To urge a woman to abandon the rightful grieving for her husband is the act of a scoundrel"

"I can't wait any longer," Damian repeated.

"Tobias was your friend."

"Tobias was more than my friend. He was the brother I never had. I never met a man I liked more than Tobias. I never met a man I understood better than Tobias, or who understood me."

"Everyone could see how you two spoke without words."

Don Lucian shook his head. “A landowner from California and a watchmaker from Switzerland. How could you have more in common with him than with the people you knew from your birth?"

Damian shrugged.

"So why do you now begrudge Tobias the mourning she owes him?"

With unconscious fingers, Damian stroked his mustache. "I begrudge him nothing. I rejoiced with Tobias when he sent for Katherine. I rejoiced when her ship docked in Monterey harbor. But when I saw her, Papa-she's beautiful, is she not?"

"Very attractive."

"So stately, with an inbred dignity that makes me long to shake it loose."

"If you destroy the dignity, my boy, you'll destroy the woman."

"No, you misunderstand me. I don't want to destroy her dignity, nor rein it in. I want her to realize that with me, she can abandon her dignity, and I'll still recognize her as the finest of women."

Don Lucian chuckled, an echo reminiscent of his son. "So your mother was with me."

"Madre?" Damian remembered the kind, generous, formal woman who had been his mother. "Madre lost her dignity with you?"

"Not lost. Never lost." Now he laughed out loud. "She always found it again ... eventually. I remember when we first moved here, and we'd had a drought ... " He noticed how his son's mouth hung open. "I don't know if you're old enough to hear this story."

"Papa, I'm thirty-one."

"Probably not old enough to hear this story." He shook his head at his son. "After all, she was your mother. But I'll tell you anyway. During the first year we were married, a drought parched the land. Lord, it was awful. So hot. No water for the cattle. Only well water for us to drink, and that warm and full of sludge. Finally, it was too much. Teresa and I fought. Shouted at each other, raged at each other. She went tearing out to her horse, I went after her. I chased her for miles."

"You couldn't catch her?"

"She was a hell of a horsewoman." Don Lucian lifted his glass in remembered tribute. "Perhaps I didn't want to catch her. Perhaps I knew it was best not to. We rode out to the middle of nothing, out over the plain and to the foot of the Sierra de Gavilan. There we stopped. We dismounted and raged at each other until, boom! The heavens opened up to douse our anger. It was the grandfather of storms. Your mother and I, we stripped to the skin and danced in the rain."

"Naked? Outdoors?"

"Si. And do you know what your mother's saddlebags contained? Soap. Dry blankets. Food. Leocadia was your mother's maid, and that woman listens to the earth. We found a cave that mountain is riddled with them-and we didn't go home for two days."

"Madre de Dios."

"You were conceived on that mountain."

Unwillingly amused, Damian asked, "So you found the treasure of the padres?"

"Si we found it. It was not gold."

Surprising a blush on Don Lucian's face, Damian refrained from laughing.

"I'm sure you and Dona Katherina will be more sedate than that."

"God forbid. The first time I saw Katherine, I realized Tobias and I had too much in common. I recognized her with my heart, my soul."

Don Lucian nodded. "Just so I recognized your mother."

"Yes, but I suffered. She barely glanced at me. All her attention centered on Tobias. It gave me time to collect myself, and when my friend introduced me to my love I was cold, distant."

"The best response," his father approved.

"Yes, but she would have none of it. She was so happy. She threw her arms around me and I . . . suffered. My heart didn't know whether to leap for joy or die for the pain."

Don Lucian winced in sympathy.

"I've kept her safe, never let her know how I feel. The time of grief is coming to an end, and I was willing to wake her slowly."

"What changed your mind?"

With a suppressed fury, Damian said, "She's saving the money I pay her to return. Return to Boston, to the family who despises her. Young Cabeza told me and assured me he heard the words himself."

Staggering back as if he were stunned, Don Lucian asked, "Why?"

"I've thought about it. I believe she has decided it's her duty. I know my Catriona. Her will of iron was tempered by the fires of duty, and she'll go unless she's bound hand and foot by a greater duty here."

Don Lucian thought, too. Clapping his son on the shoulder, he urged, "Vaya con tu corazon. Go with your heart."

With a vicious jerk, Katherine pulled her sleeve loose from its stitching, and clutched it in her fist. She had made a scene. She hated scenes. She hated that defiant demon inside that never let her back down. She hated the sick feeling that roiled in her stomach afterwards.

She didn't handle men well. She never had. She loved an argument, and her father had taught her to think, to debate, to succeed. He hadn't taught her that men took losing an argument poorly, that their response was violence. When she thought of Emerson Smith's twisted face towering over hers, she wanted to crumple up and cry, but the control her mother had taught her was too rigid for that. She'd turn her attention to other matters and gradually, she knew, the distress would fade.

Until the next argument.

She stepped in front of the full-length mirror and glared at her own reflection. She owned two dresses in plain serviceable black muslin, both of them torn. She could baste this sleeve back into the bodice, but the other dress required major repairs.

How she would love to astonish the guests with a flattering costume!

The woman in the mirror looked startled, then disapproving. Where had that errant thought come from?

Removing her mourning clothes would be her final good-bye to Tobias. She didn't wish to discard the memory of her marriage, or the safety it represented. She smoothed the black cotton of her skirt.

Still, seeing the pretty senoritas in their gay outfits had whetted her appetite for something new. Something befitting her station as housekeeper and widow, perhaps in mauve. Never in her life had she been allowed to wear anything attractive. Even Uncle Rutherford had complained about her depressing attire, but Aunt Narcissa had been adamant. With two girls of her own to outfit, she'd seen fit to clothe her niece by marriage in cast-offs. Katherine smoothed her skirt again and turned away from the mirror.

She fetched her sewing box to the table that stood close to the straight-back chair. Undoing the buttons that held her bodice, she stripped it down and stepped out. She took her seat near the dormer window, where the sun could light her work, yet she wasn't visible to the crowd below. She should sew, dress again, and go down to work. For a moment, though, she sat with her hands at rest in her lap and studied her bedroom with affectionate eyes.

It was one-third of the huge attic that ran atop the U-shaped house. When Don Lucian first led her up the tiny stairs to the room under the roof, she'd wondered, for a brief, despairing moment, whether this was his way of saying he didn't want her here. It had been dull and dusty; it echoed the pain in her soul But Don Lucian knew what he was about. The servants cleaned and when next she saw the room it sparkled. The wooden floors had been polished until they gleamed, the walls had been whitewashed. The room was too big for one person, yet she'd felt an immediate sense of belonging, a sense of spaciousness and light that appealed to her.

Behind a door in the other part of the attic was all the furniture discarded from the hacienda. She'd been given carte blanche, and she had furnished her room as she wished. A frayed rug covered part of the floor. A large carved wooden table held her quilting. Chairs of wood and leather were scattered about. Another small table beside the bed held a mismatched porcelain pitcher and bowl and a candlestick. Behind a folding screen that divided the room into living space and sleeping space, wooden dowels had been fixed in the wall for her clothing.