Raised By Wolves 3 - Treasure (91 page)

Why?”

I told Gaston what he had said, and my matelot told me what I already knew they should be told; but it was best if the boy thought I translated the physician’s words and not the other way around.

“You must boil the water from the old well before drinking it,” I said.

Gaston fetched more of the tea leaves and gave it to him.

“Put that in it: you can sweeten it with sugar or honey,” I said.

“Will you be here if more is needed?” the boy asked.

I sighed. “No, we are living at a house…” I described the location and look of our current dwelling as best I could; and told him that he should lurk about outside until he saw one of us, to make sure it was the correct house before speaking to anyone; and that those living there with us would not harm him, either, but he should trust none of our fellow pirates. He seemed confused by this, but he agreed to abide by it before I shooed him back out the door.

After he was gone, we doused our lamp and slipped out the front door, and returned to our house. We were quiet as we went, but Gaston pulled me to sit with him on a cot in the parlor once we were safely home.

“I truly wish to practice medicine,” he said.

“Oui,” I said.

“Non, not… like here. I wish to have an office and a hospital, like Doucette had, and serve some town or village.”

“Truly? You want to tend fat men with gout?”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I might be able to heal people with gout – if they would listen to me, which they might if I had an office and I wore fine clothes.”

“All right,” I said, though I was appalled at the thought of having to cater to people’s expectations as much as I imagined such an existence would require.

“What do you find wrong with it?” he asked with concern.

“Town physicians are expected to be respectable, and have a wife and children – which you will have – and not have a matelot.”

“Oui, I suppose it would be much as we would have to live in France,” he said sadly. Then he nodded and took my hand. “Maybe I will have to become an unrespectable physician.”

“But then they would not listen to you as you would want them to,” I said. I shook my head. “I am sorry, my love, we will find some way to…”

His fingers were on my lips. “Oui. We will find some way. And you are more important.”

I gently pulled his hand away and kissed the back of it. “We do face the same problem as Striker and Pete, do we not?”

“Non,” he said quickly. “We talk. It makes ours smaller.”

We talked no more of it, choosing instead to curl together on the cot and sleep. I was still troubled, though; and I dreamed of chasing him down the road, but he was always just out of reach.

We woke to light streaming through the front shutters and yelling from the back room. It was a girl’s voice, or perhaps a child’s, and it was all invocations to saints and the Mother Mary in Castilian. Gaston and I hurried in and found Farley trying in vain to quiet the small girl who knelt in prayer upon the floor.

“Child, child!” I called as I knelt before her. “Who are you?”

She opened her tear-filled eyes and peered at me for but a moment before gasping and looking about wildly until she spotted Gaston. “You are the green-eyed physician and the blue-eyed servant. I have found you! Miguel said to come here. He said to run here because they have found us and you might help us.”

“Miguel? Your younger brother? You have a sister with the flux?” I asked quickly.

“Si, si.”

“And one of the pirates has found your hiding place?”

“Si, si. I saw him following Miguel when he returned with the medicine. I was fetching water from the well, and it was dark, but Miguel came, and then I saw the white face in the trees. Then he was gone. I told Miguel, and he said he must stay because he is the man of the house, but he told me how to come here. He said to beg you.” She held up her prayer-locked hands plaintively, her eyes pleading. “Please, please, señor. Please…”

“No need for that,” I assured her. “We will do what we can. You will need to lead us to your family’s hiding place.”

“Si, si.”

I turned and explained to Gaston and Farley, and now Pete and Alonso, and Cramer and Dudley, a trusted pair of matelots and musketeers from the Queen who had been sleeping in the house.

“TheyTake ’Em To TheChurch,” Pete said as if there were little to be done.

“I am more concerned with what will occur before they reach the church,” I said. “It is a mother and three adolescent girls.”

Alonso swore, and Pete grimaced. Gaston was gathering our weapons and his medical bag.

“ItCould Be ATrap,” Pete said.

“Aye,” I said. “That is why we will be careful.” It was more bravado than I cared to admit. But he had not seen the boy earlier. Yet, perhaps we were being naïve. “Are the Spanish known for sending their daughters as bait?”

“Nay,” Pete said and glared at me. “But Whoever Found ’Em Knows The BoyTalked Ta You.”

I cursed. “So you are not worried about the Spanish, but Brethren bounty hunters.”

“Aye,” he snapped.

Gaston leaned against the door, obviously torn. The girl looked from one of us to the other, and proffered her clasped hands and more invocations to the saints that we should hurry.

“You should not go,” I told Gaston in French. “I will go: they do not want me.”

“They might not care,” he said. “You die, I die.”

I looked from him to the pleading girl.

Gaston opened the door and glared back at Pete. “You are correct. It probably is a trap. But I will not sit here if I can save… someone.”

“But we are here to rob them, and…” Farley said with a frown.

“Aye, rob, not rape,” I said, and hefted my musket. “Even Morgan has said he does not wish for that to happen. If they are brought directly to the church, then there is no problem.”

“I will come with you,” Alonso said.

“Us, too,” the men from the Queen said.

Pete stood resolute with his arms crossed and disapproval on his face. We left him there with Farley. The five of us followed the little girl, whose name was Consuelo, out of town and along a small rutted road into the swamp for at least a league. Gaston, Cramer, and Dudley urged us to stop often while they checked about for signs of an ambush, and it was left to me to quiet and calm the girl at these intervals.

While sitting in the bushes waiting, she whispered to me that she had seen angels and devils coming to her family in a dream, and that according to Miguel and her mother, we were angels. Her family seemed to possess the fatalism and abiding trust in God of the truly faithful. I found it disturbing.

At last we reached their hiding place in the stone-walled cellar of a house that had burned on some long-overgrown plantation. We saw no one else, and the men checked about quite thoroughly. We heard nothing, either. There was a stillness to the air that raised the hair on my neck. It was judged that Gaston or I should not enter first, so Dudley and Cramer crept to the slanted door and opened it from the side before peering in, each with two pistols cocked and aimed. Cramer stood very still, but Dudley stepped back and dropped a pistol to place his hand over his mouth.

“Keep the girl away!” Dudley gasped when he had apparently controlled his urge to retch.

Alonso was in the doorway next, and he too turned away for a moment before squaring his shoulders and stepping inside with his pistols drawn. He returned a moment later.

“Whoever did this is gone,” he said quietly in English.

“Did what?” I asked. The girl crouched beside me with big concerned eyes.

“They be dead, all dead,” Cramer said from the doorway. “It ain’t pretty.”

Gaston ran to the door and collapsed to his knees with a hoarse cry.

I pulled the girl to Dudley by her wrist and crammed her hand into his, and then pushed him back the way I had come. Then I was in the doorway with Gaston.

They were indeed all dead. The boy, Miguel, had been shot in the doorway, his body left to lie where it fell. The mother had likewise been simply shot: her heavy body was crumpled in the corner. But Consuelo and Miguel’s three sisters had been bound and raped before being repeatedly stabbed. Their bodies were lined up along the mattresses at the wall.

“Why would any o’ ours do this?” Cramer asked. “What were they thinkin’?”

“To make us angry,” I said.

I knelt beside Gaston and pulled his gaze from the carnage. His eyes were so vastly sad that they tore at my heart, but I saw no madness in them.

“Either the boy was simply followed, and it has nothing to do with us, and some of our company is capable of doing this for a night’s amusement, or… Someone has done this to make us mad with anger so we will trip and fall,” I said.

“I am not mad,” Gaston said with an understanding nod. “I am… It beckons. I feel the urge to… set them to rest. But I will not.”

I nodded with relief. I did not wish for him to rearrange these bodies to honor them, any more than I wished for him to go on a ramapage to avenge them.

He pulled himself up and led me to little Consuelo, who was pleading with Dudley to tell her what was wrong even though he spoke no Castilian.

“I must know.” Gaston looked to me. “Ask her if she can describe the man she saw in the trees.”

I translated his question, and she nodded distractedly and asked,

“Where is my mother?”

“She is gone,” I said simply. “She is not here.”

She regarded me as if she knew I lied, and glanced at the other men around us for confirmation of her belief.

“I told her her mother is gone, that she is no longer here,” I told them in English. There were nods all around.

I turned back to her. “Now, we are going back to town and to the church, where the nuns will help you find your mother. But first, we need to know about the man you saw.”

She described a man that could have been nearly any of us: a white face, a dark kerchief, big pale eyes, and a canvas tunic.

“If you saw him, would you recognize him?” I asked.

She nodded solemnly. I took her hand and started walking back the way we had come. The others followed. I supposed we should bury the dead, or perhaps burn the remains of the structure around them, but I felt a small glimmer of hope that perhaps those bodies would anger others into punishing the guilty party appropriately. Merely saying someone had raped and murdered three girls and shot two others was a trivial thing when they were torturing men in the town square; but showing what someone did here – that it was not for money, but rather for sport – might incite them in the name of human decency.

Then I wondered who had done it. She had not described Hastings, at least not unless he had removed his eye patch altogether. And then I wondered how someone had done it so quickly. I supposed I did not know how long we slept, after last seeing her brother and returning to the hospital. It might have taken the girl hours to find our house; or perhaps she waited until dawn before approaching it. Still, whoever had done this thing had done it quickly, or there had been several of them.

But why bind them and shoot the mother and boy, if there had been several men about to manage prisoners? Nay, it had been one man, and he had worked with great speed to insure all had been raped and killed and he had departed, prior to our arrival. I tried to wonder at that, to consider other options; but unless the perpetrator knew the girl was going to us, there was no reason for him to hurry at all. Thus my first conclusion seemed correct: this had been done to anger us and us alone.

He must have watched the boy send his sister to us. He must have seen the boy come and go from the physician’s house. I felt very cold.

I shared my suppositions with the others. All agreed with my assessment. Gaston came and took my hand. I was pleased he appeared so calm when he met my gaze, as I was unsure of my footing. I felt someone had thrown blood before us to make the road slick.

And so we arrived in Maracaibo, me with a small dark-haired girl clutching one hand, my matelot clutching the other, and three sad men in our wake. I instructed Consuelo to look upon the men we passed as we entered the square, but then I realized that whoever had done it was likely asleep now: as it was now only mid-morning and they had not slept during the night.

And then she stopped and pointed at a man emerging from the courthouse. With her hair disheveled in a black cloud about her shoulders, her small face in an expression of sternness beyond her years, and her finger extended like an arrow, she looked like an angel of judgment as depicted in the windows of a cathedral.

I stopped with her and stared at the accused. I did not know him.

He was a large and very pale man with slightly stooped shoulders and a moon of a face. He was standing next to Morgan, Bradley, and Norman. I began to lead her toward them, but she held back, suddenly afraid.

Gaston and the others had seen who she accused. My matelot was in motion before I could even shout. He reached the man, and in a flurry of movement, pounded him into the wall and down to the ground, all the while shouting curses in French. Then he was borne under by a mob of men attempting to restrain him. I howled and tried to reach him, but I too was restrained. Thankfully Morgan began some yelling of his own, and Gaston and I were carried inside the courthouse.

My matelot had ceased to struggle, and now stood stiff and livid with rage in the hands of those holding him. I met his gaze and found him angry, but not mad.

The moon-faced man, now very bloody, was howling that Gaston was a madman.

Morgan was casting about frantically.

“That bastard murdered the little girl’s family,” I roared. “Her mother and little brother were shot in cold blood, and her sisters were raped and stabbed more times than was necessary to kill them.”

“I never!” the man yelled with horror.

Morgan yelled at the men holding me. “Release him!” Then he roared the same to those holding Gaston. Then his eyes were boring into mine.

“What the Devil is going on? That man!” He pointed at the accused.

“Came here this morning and accused you and your matelot of allowing Spaniards to escape and possibly even offering them succor.”