Spanish Serenade (16 page)

Pilar, finding it possible to retreat without feeling that she had been rebuffed, turned and walked away. As she went, the melody that followed her was the same that he had been playing minutes before. It was a haunting tune, mellow and yearning. It raised an image in her mind of a garden and darkness, and the close presence of a man.

She stopped, standing still with her skirts blowing around her. That was it. The song was the serenade she had heard on the night Refugio had come to her, one sung in the street outside while she waited. How like him it was, she knew now, to deliberately draw attention to himself in that way. At the same time, remembering that rich, warm voice filling the night with yearning and pathos, she was oddly disconcerted by the message it seemed to hold now.

She walked on again more slowly.

There were a great many things that she had heard and seen in the past few days without comprehending. She had been so immersed in her own problems and worries that there had been little time to consider what might be taking place with the rest of the band. In addition, she had assumed that the time she would spend with them was limited, that they would soon part company and never see each other again. Under such circumstances, people seldom become personally involved.

Matters had changed. Long weeks of close association stretched before them all. They were, in their present quest, dependent on each other for support and companionship and, most of all, for safety. A slip of the tongue made by any one of them could mean death for some, imprisonment for the rest. In this Pilar had no illusion; she would, after this escapade into false identities, be considered one of the band and treated accordingly.

She realized that she was traveling with a group of people of whom she knew next to nothing. More than that, what little she did know had been told to her by a woman who appeared to be at best unreliable, and at worst unbalanced. Or was she? Either way, it made her own position extremely precarious. There must be something that could be done about it, some way to learn more. The knowledge of who and what each one of them were had suddenly become vital.

Of them all, Baltasar seemed closest to Refugio. He was not a man given to talking, however, and it was probable that his tight-lipped manner and close-held loyalties would make it difficult to learn much of value from him. He was also shut away with Isabel for the time being, or had been the last time she saw him. That left Enrique and Charro. Neither of them was likely to tell her anything of real import; still, they were far easier to approach than Refugio. From him she could expect nothing except what he wanted her to know.

She found the two men playing at cards, a respectable game of Reversi with the Havana merchant and one of the ship's officers in a corner of the salon. Doña Luisa was still there also, and was holding the merchant's childish wife and his mother-in-law enthralled with the gossip concerning the dissolute behavior of Maria Luisa, the Neapolitan princess who was married to the heir to the throne. With the ladies was the young priest who sipped a glass of wine with an impervious air while he listened.

Pilar did not want to attract too much attention, nor give her questions too great an emphasis by dragging either of the men she sought from their game. She found a book lying on a table, a copy of Manrique's poems, including his Coplas on the Death of his Father. She settled down with it in a chair that was made from half a wine barrel.

She sat patiently reading for some time, all the while listening to Enrique and Charro exchange comic quips, slurs on each other's playing, and other assorted insults. Her reward came perhaps an hour and a half later, when another officer took Enrique's place. The acrobat, his face a study in disgust, came and flung himself down at her feet. Drawing up his knees, he clasped his arms around them.

“The luck of some people is enough to make the Pope himself suspicious,” he growled with a backward glance at Charro and the first officer.

Pilar, who had gained a strong suspicion in the time she had been watching that Enrique and Charro were busily fleecing the others, gave him a smile without replying.

Enrique reached and took her book from her hand. Scanning the contents, he flipped it aside. His beatific smile was emphasized by the narrow line of his mustache. “Mediocre where it isn't morbid,” was his comment on her choice of literature, “though I grant you the man writes a good poem on death. But the poet is dead also, and I am alive. Talk to me.”

“Are you bored already?” she asked, more willing than he knew.

“Why not? There is the widow who sees only our Refugio, and the young wife with whom it would be unwise to meddle. You are left, our Venus, to receive the benefit of my charms.”

“I'm honored.”

“No, you are diverted, you are entertained, you are even amused, but you are not honored.” He lowered his voice. “Therefore I am safe.”

“Safe? From entanglements? But I thought the absence of those is what you were deploring?”

“Yes,” he said, and sighed. “But I am also safe from Refugio's wrath, so long as I can talk to you and you only laugh.”

“He requires that you be circumspect?”

He gave her a long look with a lifted brow that might have meant anything. “It seems wise, if not necessary.”

“For us all,” she agreed. “But do you think Refugio would really mind if Doña Luisa was charmed by you also?”

He glanced over his shoulder at the lady with a speculative light in his eyes. With one finger he scratched at his mustache, then smoothed its thin dark line. “Do you think she might be?”

“How can she fail?” Pilar grinned down at him.

“Cruel, cruel female!” he accused. “You are playing with my affections, raising dreams that the lady over there would rend like the rind of an orange. If Refugio doesn't rend my body first.”

“Surely he wouldn't?”

“We were warned last night, all of us, Charro, Baltasar, and I”

It was fitting, perhaps, that the answer she received to a question so far from her real purpose should be oblique. “Don't tell me he fears being supplanted?”

“I think he is more concerned with discretion. Intimate moments have a way of bringing out the truth, don't you find?”

“I wouldn't know,” she said, the words a trifle stiff. She would have to be more careful; it seemed she was also being measured.

“Endearing, if true.” He tilted his head with its powdered and tightly curled wig to one side, watching her with bright brown eyes.

She smiled, holding his gaze. “Isabel tells me you were an acrobat with a traveling fair.”

“A tumbler, to be accurate. But I have been many things.” The last admission was expansive.

“Among them, a Gypsy fortune teller. I would think you would be good at that.”

He put a finger to his lips, looking around him, then leaned forward. “I am,” he said, and gave a modest flutter of his lashes.

Keeping her voice as low and conspiratorial as his own, she bent toward him. “And you are also a good grandee, though I should tell you that most I've met think too much of their dignity to sit on the floor.”

A frown drew his brows together over, his nose. “Is this really so?”

“I give you my word.”

He nodded, then pursed his mouth. He sent a glance toward the corner where Doña Luisa held court, then shifted his sidelong gaze to the card players. He looked back to Pilar. A lithe flexing of muscles, made without touching so much as a finger to the floor, and he was on his feet and moving to draw a chair next to the one where she was seated.

“There,” he said, lowering himself into it, crossing his legs at the knee and smoothing his breeches. “How is this?”

“Excellent,” she answered, her voice grave.

“Dignity. I must remember that. And if I make any other errors, I will trust you to point them out.”

“I'll do that, though, as I said, you are doing very well. Charro also, though his part is not so difficult since he has only to play himself.”

“I doubt he could do anything else. You've noticed his speech?”

“You mean the way he sometimes forgets the Castilian lisp?”

“Exactly. The oaf refuses to admit the elegance of it, says it comes hard to his tongue.”

“They don't use it in the Tejas country?”

He shook his head. “It's a barbaric place.”

“The polish his father wanted for him seems to have been a failure.”

“Not precisely. He discovered a few things about the company of older women, and I have taught him a little about the younger ones, among other things.”

“I'm sure he's grateful.”

“He isn't grateful at all! In fact, he accuses me of stealing his women away from him while displaying my technique. It isn't true, and you must not believe him.”

“No, I won't,” she said solemnly.

But neither could she believe what Enrique said. His answers to her questions were given easily enough, and seemed to bear out most of what Isabel had told her; still, he was not as simple a man as he pretended, none of Refugio's followers were. Enrique might well mislead her for the fun of it, or else might tell her what he thought she wanted to hear out of courtesy. He was also, she thought, capable of clouding the issue for purposes of his own or on Refugio's orders, or else for what he conceived to be the good of the group. She would have to talk to Charro. Perhaps she could then compare what each man had to say and arrive at something near the truth.

With these things churning in her mind, she said softly, “Do you think Refugio is still enamored of the widow?”

“Still? She's a ravishing creature, but I've never heard her name pass his lips before this voyage. More than that, though an indolent attitude and a fund of idle chitchat have an irresistible appeal for some, I would have said these things would drive our leader mad in less than an hour.”

The niggling gladness his words brought was quickly repressed. Pilar pursed her lips. “Still, she is his lost love.”

“A fatal allure, yes. Doña Luisa also has the goad for his ox held firmly in her little white hand.”

“But is he a man to accept the goad? I think not, unless it pleases him.”

Enrique gave a swift shake of his head, his brown eyes grave. “You think he would choose a noose about his neck instead of a woman's arms? He might, out of a grandee's precious dignity, except for one thing. He would not hang alone.”

It was a point. Refugio's care for those who rode with him was legendary. He had, more than once, risked his life to save one of his own from the noose or firing squad.

Pilar had no chance to answer. There came a quiet footfall from the direction of the door behind them, then Refugio bent over them with a hand on the backs of each of their chairs. “Clacking like two crones over the chocolate pot,” he said. “How gratifying it is that you have found a common interest. I am, of course, all fluttery delight to be chosen. What a pity if you should run out of subject matter. Never fear, I will not fail you.”

Straightening, he walked to where the widow sat and took a place beside her. And for the next few hours the company was entertained by as fine a display of accomplished flirtation as was ever presented for public viewing. There were compliments of sonorous grace and gestures of delicate homage; there were glances and sighs and looks of languishing and improper intent. The widow coyly retreated before the courtly advance; the brigand, withdrawing, enticed her to be bold. He took her fan and, spreading it, fanned her flushed cheeks. She retrieved it and rapped his shoulder, then drew the furled lace along the strong jut of his chin with its dark shadow of beard. Doña Luisa fed Refugio a bonbon, and he chewed it slowly, savoring the taste, before running his tongue along the inside edges of his lips.

Pilar refused to watch. She laughed and joked and allowed herself to be drawn into the card game, and only glanced now and then at the performance going forward at the other end of the room. Somehow the evening passed, dinner was consumed, and the hour came when she could reasonably excuse herself and go off to bed.

Sleep was slow to come. Her head ached, the cabin seemed close and airless, and the rolling of the ship more pronounced, as if somewhere on the ocean there was a storm brewing. As the night deepened and the ship grew quieter, she wondered where Refugio, was and what he was doing. Delighting himself, probably, she thought with sour cynicism. Punching her pillow in an attempt to make it softer, she closed her eyes with determination.

It was after midnight when Refugio entered the cabin. He closed the door behind him with noiseless care and stood listening. The night had grown overcast; there was neither moonglow nor starshine beyond the cross-hatching of panes at the porthole. He moved by instinct in the sea-black darkness to the single berth. Going to one knee, he leaned over the woman who was lying in it.

Pilar's breathing was even and nearly without sound. She was, he saw, quite safe, and deeply asleep. She lay in trusting repose, wearing nothing more than a thin shift, for he could see the pale edge of the neckline across her breasts. He put out his hand to touch the silk of her hair spread over the pillow. It was warm, vibrantly alive under his fingertips. He drew back, closing his fingers slowly into a fist.

He was, ten times ten, the fool. This evening he had allowed irritation and despair and a species of jealousy to spur him into a crass exhibition of a passion he did not feel. He had thought that if he was to be damned, then he might as well be damned completely. He had not known how much the condemnation in another person's eyes could hurt. Or how easily the sickness in his mind could reach his heart.