Chapter 3
Thursday 6th April
Puente de Congosto, Castile and León, Spain
It might have been delayed shock, or perhaps, just simple emotional and physical exhaustion but the two women had slept, fitfully, until the light of dawn began to explore the sky and a cold flecking rain began to fall. The boy, Pedro, whom they had rescued from yesterday’s ambush at El Barco de Ávila, whom they now guessed to be three to four years old, had nestled between them beneath their single, damp-smelling blanket.
“We can’t stay here!”
Melody Danson blinked myopically up into Albert Stanton’s bruised and scarred face. The Manhattan Globe’s star reporter’s steel-rimmed spectacles, still rested at a slightly odd angle on his nose, broken, or certainly re-aligned in his recent insanely courageous parachute jump.
“What?” She muttered, still half-asleep and seemingly, aching from head to foot, not to mention suddenly chilled to the bone. Next to her Henrietta De L’Isle began to stir as the two women started, unconsciously to untangle their limbs, one from the other.
“We can’t stay here,” the man pointed out. “We’re virtually out in the open. Anybody could come along and find us!”
Melody was aware of the rushing of the river now.
Last night the stream had bubbled and gurgled, gently carried their two flat-bottomed punts along. Something had changed overnight.
The rain began to fall harder, persistently.
She looked around.
Everything came back in a flash.
The two teenage boys, Jesus and Felipe, who had steered the boats downstream well into the night had insisted they haul the skiffs ashore above the town. In fact, they had refused, point blank, to go any further. They had ‘people’ who depended upon them back ‘up river’. And besides, within a few hundred yards the waters narrowed to a rocky, twisting channel where the river passed through the nearby town, and beyond the ‘dangerous reach’ there was a high weir, and below that lay several more impassable rapids.
Albert Stanton had angrily accused the kids of betraying them.
Melody had stepped in to avoid an unpleasant scene.
The boys had families up river, they needed to know what had happened to them in the fighting at El Barco de Ávila, after the Cortez family convoy had been attacked and the survivors scattered. Whereas, in the heat of the moment it had been everybody for themselves; understandably, the boys needed to know if their loved ones and dependents were still alive.
Henrietta had followed Melody’s conciliatory lead. The women had hugged the boys – young men for all that they could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen – and thanked them for coming this far.
‘God rewards men of good heart,’ Melody had told Jesus and Felipe and shortly thereafter, the party had split up on good terms, mutual goodwill fortified by her insistence that Albert Stanton surrender both the hand guns to the kids as a token of their thanks for rescuing them from the previous day’s battle.
The man had been fuming as he watched the boys disappear into the night.
‘They didn’t have to help us, Albert,’ Melody had gently reminded him. ‘We’re still alive because they risked their lives to help us, strangers.’
Actually, she had been more than a little vexed by the newspaperman’s attitude, realising then how much better she understood the people of this benighted country. She had after all, spent over three years in Spain as a child, watching, learning, exposed to the rhythms and nuances of many aspects of the daily lives of ‘ordinary’ people. Very few Spaniards of the country were likely to bear them, even if they knew them to be foreigners in a time of civil war, any particular malice. To the contrary, the reaction of most of the people they were likely to encounter might be to offer what, little, hospitality they could afford. Particularly, to two women with a small child in their care…
‘These people owe us nothing,’ she reminded the Manhattan Globe man. ‘We have no right to demand anything of them.’
A little later Albert Stanton had apologised.
‘Look. I feel responsible for your safety. I feel as if I have let you down.’ The man still had the German sub-machine gun but after a brief discourse, the women prevailed upon him to throw it in the river.
‘Honestly, Albert,’ Melody had comforted him, ‘if you ever had to use it, we’d already be well… screwed.’
Now, in the light of the new day, she was looking meaningfully at his wristwatch.
“That has to go, too. Sorry. It shouts NEW YORK and people around here don’t have any kind of timepiece smaller than a dinner plate…”
Albert Stanton did not argue.
The designer watch, expensively personalised by an Albany jeweller disappeared into the river along with the evil-looking gun.
“So,” the man had asked, “what’s the plan?”
“I don’t have a plan,” Melody had confessed, too tired to think straight anymore.
They had no food, the wrong clothes – Henrietta and she were dressed like boy farm labourers, from a distance with their shorn heads they had to look decidedly androgynous but that was not going to work close up – no documents, no friends, strangers in a strange land…
“Pilgrims,” she yawned. ‘’You,’ she had decided patting Albert Stanton’s arm, “and Henrietta are in mourning, travelling under an oath of silence to seek comfort for the loss of your daughter to small pox, at Santiago de Compostela.’
‘What about you?’ The Manhattan Globe man had, not unreasonably, asked.
“I am your sister. I will do all the speaking from now on.”
The others had been too tired to argue.
“We can’t stay here,” Albert Stanton hissed.
Melody sat up.
“Yes, we can. We’re pilgrims, remember? We have placed ourselves in God’s hands for so long as we walk the Camino de Santiago, the way of Saint James, in humility, poverty and penitence.”
Henrietta had sat up, hugging Pedro to her breast.
The child was still traumatised, clinging desperately, uncomplaining to Henrietta, despite the hunger which had to be gnawing at his belly the way it was with the three adults.
Melody reached over and ruffled the kid’s hair.
Henrietta kissed the top of Pedro’s head and he clung on harder, shivering.
Albert Stanton pulled off his jacket and gallantly spread it about the younger woman’s shoulders. She gathered it tight about herself and the boy.
“Thank you…’
The man blushed, feeling horribly guilty for not having offered the jacket sooner.
“Okay,” he decided, fixing Melody with a determined look. “You’re in charge. What next?”
Melody Danson frowned.
“I’m not ‘in charge’,” she objected. “All I did was suggest what I believe might be a way to go…”
Her voice trailed off.
Why deny it?
She was in charge and she was pushing at an open door. By stepping in to the ‘situation’ with the two boys last night she had taken upon herself the slim mantle of authority which the Manhattan Globe man had previously been hanging onto like grim death – almost entirely for the benefit of Henrietta and her – and now it was up to her to step up to the mark.
It made sense for her to ‘take over’.
She knew the country better than they did; understood ‘the Spanish’, something of the ways of the ‘ordinary people’, even a little of the rhythms of life outside the big cities, albeit her experience was of travelling on her parents’ coat tails as a child and young adolescent and more than twenty years out of date.
“Pilgrims,” she announced, this time with modicum of certainty. “People go on pilgrimage for all sorts of reasons, and in all sorts of ways. Practically anything will seem plausible to many of the people we meet on the road. Any of the people we meet may once have been, plan to be, or simply will be, pilgrims. Catholicism is at its purest out here in the rural heartlands.”