Daughter of Fortune (7 page)

Maria looked up, her eyes bright with tears. “The
jewels are gone,” she repeated. “The Indians took them.”

“So you come to me with nothing?” her sister
murmured. “And now I am to provide for you and my five daughters
besides? Five daughters, Maria, bless the Lord. And now you.”

Maria said nothing. There was no refuge for her in
this miserable mud town on which she had pinned all her hopes. She
had made a terrible mistake, one she had no power to rectify.

Again there was that cool appraisal from Margarita
Espinosa de Guzman, the bloodless assessment of the auctioneer, and
not a sister .

Maria clasped her hands tighter and raised her head.
She would not give Margarita the satisfaction of knowing how
terrified her little sister was.

Finally Margarita spoke. “As the situation stands
now, Maria, I cannot help you,” she said evenly. “My husband, rest
his soul, left me in debt. Great debt.”

“But Diego said you ... he said ...” Maria
interrupted, then stopped.

“Lies! You can no more trust a ranchero than fly! I
am a poor widow. When I received your letter, I had hopes that our
mother’s jewels would clear the books.”

Maria interrupted again, a column of fear running
the length of her back. “But, sister, I told you in the letter that
it was not much!
”

“Don’t interrupt,” the widow snapped. “I have five
daughters who must be provided for. It will take all my resources
to keep them fed and clothed. You will have to look elsewhere for
help.” She paused and again scrutinized Maria as she would a melon
in the marketplace. “A pity you are not married.”

Maria wrenched her eyes from her sister’s unwavering
gaze. “After Papa died, my dowry money went to help pay off his
debts. There was nothing left.”

Margarita continued her scrutiny. “But then, I am
not sure that the fortune of Cortez himself could have secured you
a husband. Men have some taste.”

Maria raised her eyes again to her sister. “I look
more pleasing when I am clean!” she shot back, biting off each
word. She felt a great anger growing in her.

This time La Viuda looked away. “Well, as I have
said, you must look elsewhere for help. I can offer you none.”

Maria rose slowly. She had thought that she would be
relegated to some menial position in her sister’s household, but
not this, never this. She understood Diego’s uneasiness now, and
panic rose in her. “Doña Margarita,” she whispered, fighting to
control her voice, “I have nowhere to go. I know no one. I have no
clothes, no money.”

“Then you must become a ward of the town,” said
Margarita decisively. She reached into the reticule that hung from
her waist and pulled out a lace handkerchief. Dabbing at her dry
eyes, she continued, “I am a poor widow now, Maria. Surely I cannot
be expected to nurture every stray and waif that it is my
misfortune to know.”

“But I am your sister,” Maria said simply.

“So you say, but I have no proof of that. You were a
small child the last time I saw you. Who can say that you are not
an imposter, seeking to work into my good graces? Why should you
survive cholera in Mexico City and an Indian raid here?”

Maria shook her head. “No, no,” she whispered.

Margarita turned to go, then looked back. “I have
lived in this miserable place for ten years now. I learned early
that survival is the only consideration. A ward of the town you
will be, Maria. Good day. ”

Maria followed her to the palace gates, but the
widow would not look back. Squaring her shoulders as if to shake
off the demeaning experience she had been subjected to, the widow
pushed her dry handkerchief back into her reticule and walked
rapidly away, her black skirts sweeping the ground behind her.

Maria leaned against the gate and closed her eyes. A
ward of the town! With pain she remembered the wards of Mexico
City—the homeless, the unwanted, the confused. She remembered as a
child following the ragged shadows as they swept offal from the
streets, taunting them, teasing them. She remembered the handful of
coins her father used to give her to put in the church’s poor box,
money for the minimal upkeep of
Los Olvidados
, the Forgotten
Ones.

“And now I am La Olvidada,” Maria said out loud.
What was it Diego had called her only yesterday?
La
Afortunada
, the lucky girl.

Diego. Maria looked around quickly, then glanced out
into the plaza. He had gone, riding away to his own holdings as
soon as La Viuda appeared. Numb, she sat on the bench again,
oblivious to the pain in her back and legs, still as a statue. Her
mind was as blank as it had been during the Indian raid. She could
think of nothing except that there was nothing. She was hungry,
dirty, and above all, afraid, but no one cared. La Viuda had told
her to become a ward of the town, but Maria knew that she could not
seek refuge from the splendid Governor Otermin. She would be too
humiliated ever to do that.

I am not the daughter of my father for
nothing
, she thought then, jarring her mind back into action.
Even after his fortunes were gone, Papa had swept his cloak about
him with the same swirling bravado, faced his friends with the same
pride of presence. He had gone uncomplaining and courageous to his
death.

Maria looked down at her hands. They were scratched
and brown, her fingernails broken and dirty. She smoothed her
tattered remnant of a dress. Eight months ago, she had been
somebody, a beloved, pampered daughter. Now she was nobody. As a
ward of the town, she would be less than nobody. She belonged
nowhere, not in Mexico City anymore, and not even here in this
depressing backwater mud fortress. For one terrible moment, she
trembled with a great, overpowering hatred for her parents. How
could they have left her, Maria Espinosa de la Garza, in such a
situation?
La Afortunada
, indeed.

The moment passed. She sat in silence on the bench,
her back straight, her ankles properly together, her hands folded
in her lap. “I was supposed to have died twice over, but I did
not,” she said out loud to the water splashing in the tile pool.
She stood up, arranging the tatters of her dress around her with
the same delicacy of movement her mother had taught her to use when
walking in velvet and silk. She folded her hands in front of her
again and looked back at the governor’s palace. She would not give
anyone the satisfaction of her defeat. Margarita had said something
about survival. She, Maria Espinosa, would survive, and in a style
that would bring a smile to her dead father’s face, a nod of
recognition.

She glanced through the window into the offices. She
could see the governor bending over a man seated with his head
bowed. Surely the husband of Carmen de Sosa, she thought. Poor man.
She straightened her shoulders and walked out of the courtyard and
into the plaza. Diego had mentioned that he lived three leagues
north, a place called Tesuque. She would find him. Perhaps he would
take her into his household as a servant. She had no skills, but
she could learn household tasks.

If I cannot gratify my relatives and die, then I
must live. There is revenge of sorts in that, she told herself as
she started north on the road out of Santa Fe.

The streets of Santa Fe were deserted. The calm
stillness of the late afternoon rested on the town, the same
stillness to be found in any township or city in any part of the
Spanish New World. Maria was long familiar with it and the very
silence around her offered comfort in its familiarity. The citizens
were eating dinner behind the strong, cool adobe walls of their
homes.

Her stomach rumbled. She had eaten nothing since the
hasty meal of hardtack and jerky, taken in the saddle. She found a
rain barrel leaning against someone’s wall, wiped away the green
film, and scooped up a drink.

The road north was the same rough oxcart path she
had followed with increasing weariness for the last six months. She
stood in the middle of it, looking north.
Camino Real
,
indeed. This King’s Highway held no promise, but she could almost
hear Diego’s words in her ear, reminding her to cut the cloak to
fit the cloth. She started walking north.

The road continued the steady climb from lower plain
to mountain plateau, winding now around conical hills and green
juniper, fragrant with early spring.

She had gone less than a league when the strap on
her shoe broke. She took it off and kept walking, her damaged shoe
in one hand, her eyes looking north. The sun was low in the west,
and she looked east toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. When the
sun left them they would be dark and mysterious again. And with
night would come the dreams. Maria shuddered and hugged herself.
She knew she had not left Father Efrain and Carmen de Sosa behind,
and now there was no Diego with his sword to send them loping into
the bushes. She would not sleep. She would walk until she
dropped.

She knew she ought to be rehearsing in her mind what
to say to Diego Masferrer when she found him. He would be
surprised, of course, and shocked, perhaps even angry. No, she
decided, he would not be angry. Then she shook her head. How could
she know? Only an hour or two ago she would never have guessed that
her own sister would spurn her; how could she say that she knew
anyone’s heart anymore? But she would throw herself on his mercy.
She could do nothing else. She would offer to wait on his wife and
children, serve as their maid. He had mentioned someone called
Erlinda. Maria could offer to dress his wife’s hair. She had some
talent in those directions. Mama had always liked her to arrange
her hair on special occasions, even though Mama had had a servant
girl whose sole duty it was to wash and display her mistress’s
hair.

Maria fingered her own tangled hair. Diego would
never believe her. The only other possible talent she possessed was
a certain cleverness with paint and likenesses. She smiled to
herself, remembering the small portrait she had done for her
mother, presenting it with a mixture of shyness and pride on Mama’s
last birthday. Her smile faded and she stumbled on the road. Two
weeks after her birthday, Mama was in the arms of death. Where was
the miniature now? Probably sneered at by the
fiscales,
tossed out by the solicitors and long since burned. Her talent for
painting would do her no good, not in this hard place.

The sun hung for a long, tantalizing moment on the
rim of the western edge of the world, then sank suddenly out of
sight. Maria stopped in the middle of the trail, whimpered, then
looked around to make sure that no one had heard such weakness from
an Espinosa, a descendant of
conquistadores.
She began to
walk faster. She must come to this Tesuque before all light left
the western sky.

When she thought she heard someone following her,
she started to run, but surely it was only the sound of her own
feet. Maria looked over her shoulder and gasped. There was an
Indian behind her. She caught her foot in her dress, fell and cut
her knee. The blood ran down her leg and she dabbed at it with her
skirt, her fingers cold and stiff She was too tired to run, too
weary to care anymore. Her mind was blank again of everything
except the approaching Indian.

He did not hurry his pace, but walked steadily on,
burdened by the load on his back. He was not dressed like the
Apaches who had massacred the mission supply caravan. His hair hung
long and free, and he was dressed in the shirt and loincloth common
to the Indians of the pueblos she had seen in her months of travel
in the province of New Mexico. He came toward her slowly, bent
almost double by the weight on his back. Maria closed her eyes in
relief. He was an old man. He approached with slow steps, then
stopped in front of her and smiled, a wide, almost toothless
smile.

Maria raised her hand slightly in tentative greeting
and began, “
Buenos noches, viejo. Habla español
?”

He nodded. “Of course I speak Spanish. Would you
tell me to my face that I have learned nothing in fifty years?”

“No, not I, Old One.”

He was a tiny man, even shorter than she, looking
smaller still bent over as he was by the load he carried. His hair
was white and his face wrinkled, but his hands were shapely and his
fingers long. They were the hands of an artist, but that could not
be. Not in this hard place. He shifted his feet and dropped part of
the load, muttering under his breath. Maria smiled. She stooped to
retrieve what had fallen to the ground. It was a bundle of
deerhides, scraped clean and softened.

“Let me carry it for you, Old One,” she said,
holding the hides to her.

Without a word, he set off again, moving faster than
before, now that his load was lighter. She hurried to keep up with
him.

As they walked, he watched her out of darting eyes.
“Where are you traveling, Señorita?” he finally asked.

“I really don’t know,” she replied. “To Tesuque, to
the hacienda of Diego Masferrer. Do you know him? Am I going in the
right direction?”

He grunted, and she tagged along beside him, hard
pressed to keep up. The hides were heavier than lead in her arms,
and she wondered that he could carry his own pack. The Old One said
nothing more. After his initial long, sideways glance, he did not
even look at her again.

They climbed steadily for another hour, then two.
The moon rose over the mountains and the stars came out. Still they
plodded on. Maria’s arms were numb and her mind blank again, this
time from weariness. She was beyond hunger, maybe even beyond
sleep, so all consuming was her exhaustion. All she desired was to
lean against a wall somewhere and remain motionless, not thinking
about the future or the past.

While she was convinced that her next step would be
her last, the old Indian stopped so suddenly that she nearly fell
over him. He threw down his pack and took the hides from her arms,
placing them at her feet.