Men!
Melody could not but be painfully aware of her own physical and likely, mental erosion. There had been little time at the Cortes hacienda for her or Henrietta to recover, let alone repair the ravages of the unending, debilitating trek – perhaps less than a hundred mils as a crow might fly but at least twice as far on foot, following precipitous paths and picking their way through rocky passes across the mountains. Now, weak from hunger it would be horribly easy to make a bad mistake, or to misread obvious danger signs. However, some sixth sense told her that it they were not among friends, then the people of the village did not actively wish them harm.
Already the terror and the carnage of the ambush on the outskirts of Barca de Avila seemed somehow, distant. The idyll in Chinchón surreal, the escape from – whoever they had been fleeing from, dreamlike – and the week or so they had been holed up at the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción high up in the Mountains of Madrid, just a cold, miserable foretaste of the exhausting march across the Sierra de Guadarrama and the Sierra de Gredos, by the end of which she and Henrietta had literally been walking in their sleep, roped together lest they fall.
Four weeks ago, practically to the hour, she had been in the bed of Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, the handsome thirty-nine-year-old castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas, content to let him do whatever he wanted with her…
And then the World had gone mad…
“It makes more sense for us to split up,” she said, quashing further debate. “Brother Mariano’s flock have given us shelter. They are clearly good people. Godly people.”
She could hardly say anything else in front of their ‘hosts’.
The women who had accompanied Brother Mariano up the hill to the castle nodded sternly.
Melody smiled to them.
“We thank you with all our hearts. We pray that one day we may be able to repay your charity.”
This prompted oddly blank looks but she let the moment pass.
Alone again, having slaked their thirst from the two earthenware jugs containing cool, fresh water, the ‘pilgrims’ took turns dipping the two wooden spoons the teenage girl had left behind, into the cook pot. It was half-filled with thin cold stew, rabbit, perhaps but predominantly with lumpy root vegetables. To their empty stomachs it was like Manna from Heaven.
Later, in the gloom Melody and Henrietta sent the Manhattan Globe man to ‘keep watch’ while they stripped naked and helped each other pull on itchy, clumsily tailored brown cloth dresses, which, to their surprise, fitted fairly snugly.
“Our boots look out of place?” Henrietta decided.
“We’ll see if we can swap them for some sandals or clogs,” Melody agreed. Both women’s complexions were sun and wind-burnt; they no longer stood out from the locals as they had in Chinchón what seemed half-a-lifetime ago. “And shawls,” she suggested as an afterthought, “or headcloths.”.
Brother Mariano came for them an hour after it was fully dark.
The fugitives had had the inevitable discussion about the dangers of being split up by the time he arrived.
‘What choice to we have, Albert,’ Melody had pointed out. ‘We need to eat as well as possible for a day or two. We either trust these people or we starve, dehydrate and probably get completely lost in these hills.’
She had not given in to the temptation to use the argument about not wanting to fall into the hands of bandits; there was nothing they could do about that.
In the village Pedro and the women were taken to a house close to the bridge they had crossed the day before. They surrendered their old clothes, and their walking boots. Their host’s eyes widened at the quality of the leatherwork.
“These are too good!”
“Sell them, for the good of the children of the village. Or for the Mother Church,” Melody insisted. “We, she indicated Henrietta,” who stood head bowed in humble silence, in character, “just need something for our feet when we continue on the Way of St James, and cloths to cover our heads for modesty.”
The woman of the house, Consuela, was a busty, cheerful widow. Her sons had gone to work in the big cities, there were few young men in the village these days, she lamented as Melody, Henrietta and Pedro nibbled at stale bread ends and gulped water from clay beakers at a table in the big room of the one-storey building, clustered around a single, smoky, guttering candle.
“You are safe here,” she assured them. “There is no,” she struggled to find the right word, ‘telegraph? Yes, telegraph, in the village or for many miles. Sometimes the Inquisition sends people in disguise, men usually, to the valley to test our souls. We live in a land where many things are not what they seem. Had you been agents of the Inquisitors you would not have remained in the castle nearly two days, trusting to God’s providence. Only good people would do that.”
Had we been agents of the Inquisition…
If Melody – until the last few months a career attorney and professional detective – had not been so worn down she might have pondered what intuitively, had seemed to her like a slip of the tongue. But she was too tired, too thankful simply to have a roof over her head and to be, to all intents, safe that night.
So, she told herself not to attach too much importance to what was, after all, probably a mere slip of the tongue; a thing possibly lost in translation.
The woman said Mariano was her uncle but it was said with a quirk of a smile and a hint of knowing, wry mischief in her dark eyes as if to her, ‘uncle’ was a somewhat ambiguous descriptor.
“He was a soldier once. In the colonies. He returned to us these five years ago. But for him we would all be lost.”
There were a couple of straw palliasses in an outbuilding which still stank of livestock. Before Consuela extinguished her candle, the women saw the whitewashed walls of the room, possibly a cleaned-out animal stall, the single window, wood-shuttered at shoulder height. Melody and Henrietta gathered Pedro in their arms, pulled a single blanket close about them and slept the sleep of the sated and safe for the first time since departing the Hacienda de Cortes in Navalperal…
Was that only three days ago?
Why am I suddenly awake?
Melody’s muddled head registered that Pedro was fidgeting, trying to get warmer, more comfortable between her and Henrietta. That was probably a good sign, previously he had been as lifeless as a log.
She had no idea how long she had been asleep.
No, it was not the boy’s wriggling that had awakened her…
“Hen?” She whispered urgently, nudging her friend hard.
“What…”
“Something’s going on!” Melody hissed. “Wake up!”
Pedro yawned and stretched between them, reached out for Henrietta.
“Mama?” He said.
Both women froze.
The boy had said nothing, not a single squeak or a tear or a complaint since they had rolled out of that burning car at Barca de Avila.
Henrietta hugged him to her bosom.
“Everything’s okay, sweetheart.”
“Mama…”
Melody squeezed her eyes shut, tried to focus in the darkness, listening hard, trying and failing not to be distracted by the boy child now inextricably bonded to her partner and lover. And to her too, well, as long as they both lived…
“I can’t hear anything?” Henrietta murmured.
Neither could Melody, now.
“Maybe, you were having a bad dream?”
“Are you having any other kind of dream lately, Hen?”
“Well, no…”
“Sorry, sorry,” Melody breathed. “Maybe, I’m getting afraid of my own shadow.”