Standing Alone collapsed into Childress’s arms, a strange, guttural sobbing racking her. The thin serving girl stood, paralyzed, bewildered, and then began edging away.
Victoria cried out to her: “Wait!”
But the teenaged child, her gaze riveted to the woman in fancy clothes and a great hat, cried out, and then backed away.
“No!” cried Victoria.
But the girl vanished into the private rooms of the governor’s palace.
Childress, seething with curiosity, helped the stricken woman to her feet, and signaled to Victoria, who began talking to the Cheyenne woman in the lingua franca they had worked out.
“Ask if that was her daughter!”
But Victoria had already done so. She nodded. “Yes, in all likelihood, but it happened so fast that she’s not sure. The girl! Right age, right face. The strong cheekbones of her people. Little Moon is the name she was given.”
“She must be sure. We need to see her. And then, if it’s her daughter, we must plan. Fast!”
Standing Alone stood now, gulping air, staring at that
massive wooden door where the serving girl had disappeared. The gaunt girl was barefooted, wore only a simple shift of unbleached muslin, minimal clothing, the least possible cost for a slave.
“She must be sure. We must see that girl again. They must talk to each other! If this is her daughter, it’s a stroke of luck! Maybe she knows where her brother is.”
But Standing Alone was mute, staring at that forbidding wooden door with great iron straps holding it together, a door that must lead from this antechamber to the governor’s private apartment in this long box of a building. He was tempted simply to barge in, take the women with him, and plead ignorance of local custom if they ran into trouble. Get a look at that girl one way or another. And if she was Standing Alone’s daughter, begin to plan, plan, plan.
“Victoria, tell her we’ll sit here in this waiting room. This is a room where people wait to see the governor. A reception room. See the benches. If this was her daughter, the girl might recover soon enough, and come peek, eh?”
Victoria nodded. She looked cross, as if Childress were intruding on some private matter, some women’s prerogatives. But she led Standing Alone to the cottonwood bench, and there they sat. Childress didn’t mind. His mind was teeming with ideas. He had Skye to worry about, and as yet he hadn’t any notion of how he might free the man. Things were happening too fast. He had supposed he might have days, even weeks, to work out a scheme, a bribe, a trick, a political ploy, an escape. But this was Mexico, and trials and executions scarcely lasted fifteen minutes.
They sat in the anteroom, waiting. Occasionally Mexicans entered from the plaza, glanced at these exotic foreigners, vanished into one door or another. Others emerged from the governor’s chambers, and left. The girl didn’t return. Then, when the plaza door opened, Shine leaped in, and with a bound settled beside Childress, tugging his sleeve and reproaching him for ignoring his friend and ally. Childress
rubbed the monkey’s back, and the monkey chittered and delicately scratched his own belly.
The girl did not appear. Time was wasting! Childress’s mind teemed with schemes, but nothing gelled. He strolled outside. His trotters were restless. They needed water and a rubdown and some good feed. But they would have to wait. He couldn’t leave here. He surveyed the plaza quickly, noting its bustle, the babble of many voices from many lands, the street vendors, the carretas, burros, young women sashaying along, the dogs circling. When Skye arrived, these people would all amass right here, drawn by gossip and rumor and the thrill of death.
He returned and settled again on the bench in the anteroom. The women stared at that silent door, willing it to open, willing that child, not so much a child anymore, but a woman, to open it.
And she did, an eternity later. The door creaked. Deep in shadow stood that girl, peering at them, safe in there, ready to slam the heavy door shut in an instant.
Standing Alone had removed her hat, the broad brim of which had veiled her face during the first encounter. Now her sleek jet Cheyenne hair, parted in the center and drawn severely back, was not hidden.
They stared. Standing Alone groaned, and staggered to her feet. She said something in her own tongue, a name, Childress guessed. Little Moon. Little Moon! The girl cried out, looked about fearfully, and closed the door in the very face of her mother. But then she opened it a crack again, and Childress saw the mother reach out and touch her daughter, and her daughter touch her mother, and he heard the sound of soft keening in the gloom. Then someone came in the plaza door, and swiftly the inner one slid shut. But moments later it groaned open again, and there were furious whispers.
“Tell her we’ll get Little Moon out,” Childress said to Victoria, but Skye’s wife glared at him, as if he were interfering with something sacred. Childress sighed impatiently.
Standing Alone was crying softly, and the girl, still deep in shadows and fearful to come out of the door, stood tautly, choking back her joy and terror.
He turned to the monkey. “Go,” he said. The spider monkey sailed through the air, slipped into the darkened door, and tugged at that dim figure within, but the girl only squealed in alarm. There was a new volley of whispering between mother and daughter, and this time Standing Alone reached down to pat the monkey. So Little Moon was learning about the monkey, and that was the next step: expect the monkey.
It seemed a long visit, growing more dangerous by the second, but then the girl begged off. Standing Alone cried out, but the girl slipped that dark door shut. Only then did Victoria help her friend back to the bench, and the monkey joined them, clucking beside them.
Slowly Standing Alone translated, with fingers and words, everything that had transpired, until Victoria got it whole.
“It’s her, Little Moon. She’s not sick. She wants to go. She’s damn afraid. She works for the governor, makes food, cleans up, and he’s got big medicine that can track her down to the sunset or the sunrise and throw her into a hole. She’s plenty sick with worry.”
“How’s Standing Alone?”
But he didn’t need to ask. She sat there, rapt, her mind a thousand years away, something so sweet and beautiful on her features that Childress marveled. For all those years she had sat at Bent’s Fort waiting for news, waiting for this very moment. And now it had happened. She had seen her daughter, whole and unharmed.
“Tell her that we’ll think of something,” he said gently.
Victoria nodded.
“Did they make plans to meet again?”
Victoria shook her head.
“We know where she is. We know how to reach her. Now
we’ve got to do some planning. Skye’s coming soon. We have no time at all! I thought we’d have days to work this out.”
Victoria stared at him so darkly, with so much pain in her eyes, that he was driven back by it.
“Come along outside now. It won’t do to linger in here. I’m the royal viceroy. You’re the queen of Zanzibar,” he said.
She only stared at him. Right now she was no one but Victoria Skye and her friend was no one but Stands Alone of the Cheyenne people. Nonetheless, at his beckoning, they abandoned the Governor’s Palace and stepped into the bustling plaza. No time, no time!
The horses were restless, but he chose instead to walk his women around the plaza. They needed to walk. It was as if walking was their salvation. He could not walk far, his enormous bulk paining him with every step, but this time he plunged forward, the women on each arm, Shine resting on his shoulder and drawing stares and laughter.
The plaza bustled with vendors selling dulces, tortillas filled with hot meat, and tamales, and he was reminded that he hadn’t a cent. They hadn’t eaten for some while. The horses needed feed and water. Yanks were haggling with Mexicans about the contents of those begrimed prairie schooners that had just come in from the States. Oxen drooped in their yokes. But no ideas came to him. Rarely had his good swift mind failed him so utterly.
The toured the plaza, and Childress settled the women in his carriage. He peered at their hungry, distraught faces, and then at Shine, who sat beside him, picking his nose.
He glanced about, fearful of discovery. “Fetch,” he said to the little creature.
The monkey sprang gracefully to the clay, and then in bounds, clambered to the roofs, and dropped downward again, hidden from view. People squealed, jostled one another for a look at the little fellow, and he swung upward, the projecting vigas of the adobe buildings offering him his own walkway. Then he vanished. Childress waited patiently, trying
to look as though he had no part of any of this. When the little fellow did appear, it was so suddenly that Childress startled in his seat. Shine simply bombed down from a rooftop into the carriage, one of his little hands clutching his loot, several steaming tamales wrapped in cornhusks, and carried in a sheet of coarse brown paper.
“Ah, the pirate has struck!” Childress said, his stomach growling with anticipation.
He doled out the meal, furtively watching the crowd, which had failed to notice Shine’s arrival in the carriage. The monkey ate one of the tamales himself, licking his fingers and smacking his hairy lips.
And then, as swiftly, he was gone again, swinging casually along the roofs, unseen by anyone this time. Childress didn’t like it. He wanted to get out of the plaza. The ebony calash and its handsomely dressed occupants were drawing too much attention in this rude frontier town. He waited itchily, irritably, and finally with anger, but the monkey did not reappear.
He turned. The women had finished eating, and were staring at him. The anguish in their faces touched him to his core.
Then Shine appeared, this time with more booty: a small burlap sack of white beans, rustled from some grocer. They would have to be cooked somewhere, but there was nourishment in them.
White beans. A plan bloomed in Childress, at last. He eyed the monkey, wondering whether there was time to train him.