The Flesh and the Devil (76 page)

         
'It is for you. You cannot starve yourself, Juana.'

         
She paid no attention. 'He is too hot, he keeps throwing
off the bedclothes, is there nothing else we can do?'

         
‗Nothing, but it will be night soon and then he will
be cooler.‘

         
They must have had this conversation a dozen times already,
Luis thought, but he made no comment; all the girl‘s attention was for the
shifting form on the bed. Her pointed face was grey with lack of sleep and
there were dark shadows under her great eyes; she had not stirred out of this
room since Tristán has been carried into it, and had sat by him since just
after dawn: tending him, bathing his burning skin with cold water, tirelessly
replacing the covers that his fever-racked body tried to cast aside. Even
Elisabeta‘s resentment was subsiding under her anxiety for Juana, and Luis felt
nothing but compassion for her – the girl looked as though she were spending
her own strength in Tristán‘s fight for life.

         
Gently, he said, 'Try a mouthful of Elisabeta‘s soup and I
will tell you the latest news. The whole town is buzzing with what happened
last night.'

         
For an instant Juana‘s eyes left her husband‘s face, but
only for an instant, and she accepted the bowl unresistingly. 'Have they caught
the men who shot him?'

         
'Not so far, but more has happened than that.' Luis leaned
against the door, watching both the man on the bed and the girl on the low
stool beside it, as he spoke. 'The talk goes that there is a warrant for
Felipe‘s arrest, for the cruel attack on Don Diego Ruiz at
la viuda’s
house last night; our governor‘s son has had his handsome looks spoiled and he
is after blood.'

         
I was something rough with him
. Tristán‘s voice
sounded, light and dismissive, in Juana‘s ears, and she said, 'he told me he
had – I did not realize what he meant when -'

         
Of course, she thought, in Tristán‘s arms she had not cared
what had become of Don Diego Ruiz; she certainly had not believed that he had
been waiting for her at the end of the gallery, for it would have been too
absurd to believe it – the past could not repeat itself so cruelly. She bit her
lip and fell silent, her cheeks flaming.

         
Luis continued, apparently deaf to her confusion, 'And the
mayor is in no humour to care for any gentry who amuse themselves by shooting
foreigners, not when he is setting forth upon a witch-hunt. A witch escaped his
house last night, they say, and two people are supposed to have died by
witchcraft - Doña Jerónima de Herreros and the man who was staying with Don
Bautista as his guest. The word is out that they are seeking a young woman
called Margarita Armendariz. Why choose that name? It will draw them straight
here when they begin to search in earnest.'

         
He spoke matter-of-factly, his deep voice unperturbed. As
she stiffened, he added, 'Eat up, it will be cold.'

         
Her hand trembled as she obeyed. 'Do you believe I am a
witch, Luis?'

         
'Not I, though I thought you must be one when Felipe said
that he had married you. If you knew what he has said of women, and then to wed
- ! But there will be many who do believe it, and fear is a great persuader. If
you are once caught, there will be many to say that they saw something strange
about you from the first – and Don Bautista is a fearful man. The witches he
takes always confess before he has them burned.'

         
Juana felt as though she were suffocating. Last night Don
Bautista‘s fear had been something ridiculous, a fantasy to be dismissed with a
sharp word, but now it was gaining in strength and danger like a storm-cloud.
Through dry lips she asked, 'You say he will search the town?'

         
'He has already begun. He has sent for soldiers to help
him, but it will be at least a day before they come, you have so much grace.
Will you -'

         
She gave an odd little sigh of relief and regret that cut
short the question.

         
'By tomorrow I shall know whether Felipe will live or die.
Only bear with me until then, and I shall give myself up; if I am found here, I
shall say I cast a spell on you to make you harbour me, but otherwise I shall
go out and find them. Perhaps they will not burn me until after the baby is
born – I know that is the law.'

         
She spoke the last words almost to herself, her eyes going
hungrily to Tristán‘s hollow-cheeked, frowning face, and did not see Luis‘s
mouth drop open.

         
'You are – you mean you are pregnant?'

         
'Yes. I only knew two days ago.'

         
'Is it -' he hesitated – 'is it Felipe‘s?'

         
'Oh, yes.' Juana did not bother to elaborate; a very faint
smile had touched her pale lips, and her look of strain dissolved momentarily
in a gentleness he had never seen in her before.

         
'Are you sure that it was not why you quarreled with him?'
Luis was drawing on his own experience of the foibles of women as he asked the
question, darting a slightly furtive look towards the bed as though the
unconscious man might suddenly be able to hear him. 'When he had the letter you
sent him, he -'

         
'He does not know about the baby, and now he will not.' She
answered impatiently. 'Luis, this fever has held him for twelve hours now –
surely he cannot endure it much longer? He keeps calling out for something, and
I cannot understand what he says.'

         
Luis gave her a doubtful look, then said quickly, 'I do not
know either – I have no English. Juana, listen to me. You cannot give yourself
up to Don Bautista if you are carrying a child. You do not know what they do to
suspected witches to cast the devils out of them.'

         
'Should I hide instead until I have drawn suspicion on you
and your family for helping me, and made sure that they find Felipe?' She put
down the barelytouched soup, her eyes blazing. 'I have spent too long hiding my
eyes from things that have been done and trying to escape their consequences. I
am guiltless of both Doña Jerónima‘s death and Eugenio de Castañeda‘s – Yes, it
was Eugenio,' she added grimly as Luis started. 'He followed me here to try to
take me back to the Castillo with him, but it does not matter now. As soon as I
know whether Felipe will – will recover or no, I shall go to Don Bautista and
tell him the truth about what I know of their deaths. Whether he believes it, I
care not.'

         
Luis stared at her for a long moment, his heavy face
crumpled, before he muttered, 'I shall speak to Elisabeta. Call me if there is
any alteration in Felipe,'

         
and went out, closing the door behind him.

         
Juana did not reply; she had risen and was bending over
Tristán again to sponge his face water that had already grown tepid in the heat
of the room.

         
He moved restlessly and she pressed him down with all her
strength, knowing that gentleness would be of no avail in holding him, her
hands against his chest. Already the bones felt sharper through his skin. It
was as if the fever‘s heat were melting his flesh away from his bones, exposing
the skeleton beneath. Then, as though the sudden yearning despair that gripped
her had communicated itself to him, Tristán‘s eyes opened, glazed and as bright
as emeralds in their deep, shadow-rimmed sockets. For a moment she thought that
he did not recognize her, but then they narrowed as if he were straining to
focus them, and filled slowly with a look of pure bitterness.

         
'You saved your enmity to good purpose,' he said
scathingly, and then the breath left his lungs in a shallow gasp and his heavy
lids fell leadenly shut.

         
The next few moments were such confusion that Juana could
never untangle them in her memory. She remembered screaming for Luis, the sheer
bewilderment of hearing that her husband was not dead but sleeping; she
remembered the tears in Luis‘s eyes when he told her that he was more likely to
recover if he had revived even for a moment. But everything was wrapped in a
black mist of confusion that clouded her thoughts and made her suddenly as
helpless as a child, while her thoughts circled fascinatedly round what Tristán
had said.

         
You are wasting your enmity – save it for some better
occasion, when itmight kill me
he had said to her that day on the road,
when she had stanched the slight would that Jaime had given him. Did his
fever-blurred mind blame her now, she wondered, for this much greater hurt? She
had recognized the look in his eyes as they rested on her – piercing, watchful,
as if in expectation of attack. She had seen him look like that when he looked
at Torres across Eugenio‘s body in a look that held naked combat.

         
Felipe began murmuring again as the light faded, as harsh,
incoherent muttering that made Juana ache to understand. But his voice was
growing fainter now, his words less distinct, as though fainter now, his words
less distinct, as though sickness were at last overriding the last reserves of
that arrogant, almost superhuman self-control. His movements had become jerky
and spasmodic, as if he had not the strength for more than an occasional
effort. He was losing the battle for life, Juana thought, and had to force down
the longing to scream at him to fight and go on fighting, that he was wrong to
think that she wanted him dead…

        
Elisabeta had been in and out once or twice; there was no
sign of Luis, but Juana did not wonder where he was. She sat unmoving beside
the bed, oblivious to everything but Tristán. Her wide, shadowed eyes were
filled with him as she deliberately stored up every detail for the long
separation to come, for whether he lived or died, she thought, she would need a
last image of him to take with her when she went to face Don Bautista.

         
The scarred side of his face was towards her, but now it
was not at the cruel disfigurement that she looked. Her gaze now was for the
classic profile, the straight nose broken long ago in some accident of battle
and slightly crooked at the bridge; at the tilted eyes, set startlingly aslant
now that their colour did not distract the eye. It was their obliquity, as much
as their colour and those curious, deep-gouged sockets and grotesquely heavy
lids, that gave his face the look of a lazy, dangerous lion. And when she
looked at his mouth it was not the hard line cleaving the corner of the upper
lip that she saw but the shapely beauty of what it must once have been.