Oh, he had just realized that, had he?
"If they're the hob's doing, then it won't kill me." It had never worried about hurting him, though.
Gracia returned with a black cape trailing from her shoulders. She carried an empty bucket, but she also had the bottle hung around her neck again. "If the senor will be so kind as to follow me?"
Toby took the bucket and moved to her side, leaving Hamish to empty the first bucket and follow behind. She was ignoring Hamish completely, but she seemed to have lost her fear of Toby, for she shot a few hesitant smiles up at him, which he returned. He felt overwhelmed by her softness, her femininity. He admired the slight bulge in the front of her blouse and thought he could detect a scent of roses from her. A single dark curl had escaped from under the edge of her bonnet, but most of her hair was tied in a long braid, encased in a tube of black cloth that hung down her back. She was a reminder that there were still decent, honest people in this terrible world, vulnerable people.
Hamish, meanwhile, kept trying to flank the lady on the other side but was balked by the narrowness of the road. That did not stop him from talking. He explained dramatically how he and Toby were refugees from the war and had never been part of the Fiend's army. That was not quite true, but true enough. Gracia responded by telling her story. Toby missed much of it, but he gathered that she had lived in a little village called Madrid, two days' walk north of Toledo, where her husband, Hernan Gomez Ruiz, had been keeper of the shrine. The rebel army had sacked the village and stolen the spirit away. Her husband and brothers had died. She did not mention what had happened to her.
"My sons also died in the war," she said. "They died bravely."
The men exchanged puzzled glances. Admittedly a woman could be a wife and mother at fourteen, but Gracia was not much more than that even now. Could babies die bravely?
She led her new friends directly to a shoemaker's dingy workshop, which was in predictable disarray, with heaps of old boots and buskins covering the floor. Obviously the invaders had helped themselves to whatever they could use and left their own footwear behind, and most of it was as disreputable as Toby's. Gracia, though, headed straight to a back corner and produced a brand new buskin of greater size than the rest, an adequate fit for his right foot. Its mate proved elusive. They had almost concluded that it had never existed and the cordwainer had died before completing a special order, when Hamish uttered a whoop of triumph and dragged the missing partner from under the ruins of the workbench. It was a little snug, but it would do.
"I feel guilty robbing the dead," Toby complained, although he knew he was going to.
"Oh, you must not care about that!" the girl said excitedly. "He does not grudge them to me, and I give them to you. So that is all right! Now we must find some better clothes for the senor. And the boy, also." She headed out of the shop, apparently unaware of Hamish's outraged glare or Toby's smirk. She was enjoying herself now. "This way! There are some garments that I believe will fit you. The senor is a very striking man!"
She blushed at her own temerity and moved off quickly. Hamish made a snorting noise and rolled his eyes.
This time she had to investigate several houses before she found the one she wanted. It had been home to someone almost Toby-sized, and no one had bothered to loot the clothes he had left behind in his tiny attic room. Even Gracia could not stand erect under the roof.
"Obviously servants' quarters," Hamish remarked acidly.
"A child's, a growing lad," Toby retorted. He found green-and-brown hose that fit when he cut the toes off, although they were uncomfortably snug around his calves and thighs, baggy at his hips and waist. The anonymous donor must have been wearing his jerkin the last time he went out, but he had left two shirts and a shabby brown doublet that could just close around Toby with gaps at the lacings. Even with the cuffs dangling above his wrists they were a big improvement on his previous rags, and Gracia was as thrilled as a child when he appeared in his new splendor. She wanted him to accept a flat cap of black velvet with a red feather in it, but he perversely insisted on retaining his steel helmet.
"Now the boy," she said as they emerged into the evening light. "He will be harder to fit because he is so ordinary."
Fortunately Hamish had his nose in a book by then and was so busy trying to walk and read at the same time that he did not hear.
"What is the name of this place, senora?" Toby inquired.
"Name?" She hesitated, looking up and down the street. "I believe the house we need is this way, senor."
So she did not know the town's name, and that probably meant she could not read, because a little later in the looting expedition Hamish located some letters and announced that it was Onda. Gracia was also very vague as to how long she had lived there, but she had obviously explored it from cellars to chimneys, and her memory for what she had discovered was astonishing. Most clothes that would fit Hamish had already been looted, but she had noted and remembered a few shirts, hose, doublets, and even cloaks, and was able to lead the men to them.
So they trailed around Onda after her, carrying the buckets, and she picked out the garments. None of them matched any other, some were bloodstained or impossibly soiled, but eventually Hamish was outfitted.
"I feel like a court jester in this motley," he whispered as they followed their guide down a narrow staircase.
"You look more like a looter," Toby responded glumly. Looters were hanged. Stealing made him feel guilty, even stealing from the dead.
Gracia puzzled him. She made him think of a songbird in an invisible cage. Her attitude had changed from abject terror to absurd airs, so that she was issuing orders as if she expected to be obeyed without question, yet next moment she would be laughing and chattering like an excited child. She ignored the bodies in the streets except to lift her skirts when she stepped over them. At times she made nonsensical remarks about how much easier the senor's journey would be if he would just obtain some horses, and a moment later she would comment perceptively on the difficulty of finding anything to eat in the hills.
When she had her new retainers outfitted to her satisfaction, she led them to little caches of food the looters had overlooked: beans, meal, onions, dried fruit, jars of oil, and a sack of hard wheat—most precious of all, because it would keep indefinitely. She had been dipping into it for her own use, but she expected Toby to carry off the whole bag, as well as all the other things she had loaded onto him. He was already feeling like a pack mule, but that did not stop her from detouring on the road home to top him up with bottles of wine and some firewood. Then she took her porters to the cistern so they could fill the buckets. Hamish was too laden with books to be much help.
"The senor is perhaps hungry?"
"The senora has not spoken a truer word since her naming day."
"I am an excellent cook."
"I hope you are also a speedy one, or I shall eat the firewood raw."
Laughing at this brilliant wit, Senora de Gomez hitched up her hems and stepped over a dead child without seeming to notice it.
***
Her little kitchen was clean, tidy, and cosily cramped with three of them in it, a bizarre oasis of domesticity in a city of death. She set half a bushel of beans to boil and rapidly peeled about a hundred onions. She put Toby to grinding the grain in a hand mill and Hamish to opening a wine bottle. By the time they had passed that around several times and he had opened another, the party became jolly. Toby's mouth watered copiously as the scents of food wafted around him—he could not remember his last good meal. Gracia bustled merrily, clattering pans while the fire crackled in the grate and her guests sat on their stools, awkward in their mismatched, ill-fitting finery.