For Her Love (32 page)

“Surely you’ll have to go back inside to get ready for tonight’s customers,” Grace suggested.

With a glance at the sky, where the sun had already passed its zenith, Encantadora said, “
Don
Ramon soon come. You betta tink o’ sinting. When de men get here, de new guards show, an’ dey
serious
‘bout dey work.”

“
Bueno
,” Diego said. “We will wait until you are inside, but act before the new guard is posted. Encantadora, can you distract the two men on guard now? Perhaps call them inside for a moment, once you are in there?”

Encantadora gave him a wary look. “Den she get outta here an’ me left holdin’ de bag.
Don
Ramon not stupid. Me call dem men in, an’ he a-go know I got sinting to do wit’ it.”

Suddenly both women spun toward the cottage door with startled cries. Diego dropped quickly to the dirt. He hadn’t seen who had caused their distress, and he prayed silently that whoever it was had not seen him either.

“What is this?”
Don
Ramon demanded in Spanish. “What are you doing?”

Encantadora’s Spanish was thickly accented, and in many ways as hard to follow as her English, but she efficiently conveyed that the room had been stuffy and that she had thought the fresh air would be good for Grace.

At the mention of Grace’s name,
Don
Ramon demanded, “Turn around. Let me see your back.” Diego heard Grace’s cry of protest and Encantadora’s hasty explanation that Grace needed more time, then there was brief scuffle and the room was silent. He could hear his own blood pounding in his ears. Between his teeth, he felt the grit of the dirt he’d stirred up when he’d dropped out of sight.

A string of curses ripped through the silence. Diego was sure that they were nothing new or shocking for the prostitute, but he was glad that Grace understood no Spanish. “There is not one mark!” Don Ramon shouted. “Not one damned mark. What in the hell is going on here?”

“I can explain—” Encantadora began, but her words were cut off with a cry of pain.

“No, don’t!” Grace implored in English. “Please! It was my fault.
Ma faute! Parlez-vous Français?
Damn it! I do not speak Spanish! Tell him, Encantadora! Tell him that ‘tis all my fault!”

But Encantadora was busy with a litany of now nearly perfect Spanish, words she had obviously spoken countless times before. “Please, Master, do not hurt me! I am sorry! I am very, very sorry. Please, please, mercy! I will do anything,
anything
! I will…” she recited a list of such degrading sexual acts that Diego ground his teeth in indignation. The girl was so young to know of such things.

But inside the cottage was another young woman. An innocent who would also learn the depths of human depravity if he didn’t get her out of there soon. He heard the door slam shut, and he stood up. Grace was pounding on the portal and weeping. From the alleyway, he could still hear Encantadora’s pleas for mercy.

“
Señora
Courtney,” he said.

She spun back around. “We have to stop this! Captain Montoya, we have to help her.”

“
Señora
, I am truly sorry…”

“Nay! Do not tell me there is nothing that we can do. I will
not
accept that!”

There was no time to reason with her. Diego glanced around the corner of the cottage. One of the guards was now helping
Don
Ramon pull a struggling Encantadora through the back gate. The second guard was glancing warily around him, and Diego pressed himself tightly against the cottage wall.

From the side window, Grace called out to him. “Captain Montoya, are you still there?”

“Be quiet! If they find me here, I will of no use to either of you.”

He closed his eyes and felt sweat trickle down his sides as he stood in the heat of the sun bouncing off the plastered wall.
Magdalena
, he prayed fervently,
what am I supposed to do?
From behind the courtyard wall, the first crack of rod to flesh and a scream of agony rent the air. Diego’s eyes flew open, but he forced them shut again.
Magdalena! I need your help!

Inside the cottage, Grace began pounding on the door again. “Someone please get
Don
Ramon. This must stop! Captain, please, I cannot stand this!”

The remaining guard left his post and wandered toward the cottage door. “
¿Qué es lo que pasa?
”

It was now or never. The guard leaned toward the door and pressed his ear to it, his broad, ebony back turned to the side of the cottage where Diego was hiding. Silently, Diego drew his sword from the sheath at his side. He stepped quickly to the front of the cabin and drove the blade forcefully between the guard’s shoulder blades until he felt it hit the breastbone just beyond the man’s heart. The dying man’s cry was lost in another of Encantadora’s screams.

The door had been bolted from the outside, and Diego slid the bolt back and opened it. Instantly Grace tumbled through it, but she stopped short and stifled a cry at the sight of the guard.

“There is no time!” he said. “Ramon will come for you next,
Señora
Courtney!”

“We cannot leave her here!”

“I told you, there is no time.”

“Captain, I don’t want you to suffer on my account, as well. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! You can leave now and know that you have done everything that honor might require of you. But I have to at least try and get her out of here.”

“
¡Caramba!
” he cried in frustration. “We will return to my ship, and if it is at all possible, I will come back and get your friend.”

“Nay, you do not understand. I am not leaving Havana without her.” Encantadora screamed again and again, and the look in Grace’s green eyes turned hard as glass. “We both leave or we both stay. I will not abandon her.”

Diego sighed. “Follow me.”

They could hear Encantadora’s horrible cries all the way around the building until he and Grace reached the deserted front of the brothel. Though it was dangerous to them both to linger, he had to admit that Grace was right, they could not leave the other girl here. She had risked much to help Grace, and deserved to be aided herself. He motioned to Grace to stay at the edge of the street while he cautiously approached the already open front door and peered inside.

The door led into the shadowy, covered foyer and the sunny courtyard beyond, and he saw immediately how it had come to be left wide open. A man, dirty and disheveled, strode purposefully from the shadows into the light. His back was turned, so Diego could not see his face, but the moment that the man reached the yard, Diego caught the glint of sunlight on an unsheathed, bloodstained cutlass. The scene unraveling did not bode well. He quickly ducked back out and joined Grace in the street.

“We cannot do this now, but I am fairly certain that Don Ramon is about to become too busy to do your friend further harm.”

Grace looked at him with apprehension. “What do you mean?”

“Come, there is nothing we can do right now. You will simply have to take my word that he will probably leave the woman alone a while. We will go to my ship, but I promise,
Señora
, we will come for your friend tonight.”

*

Giles felt sick. Sick to his stomach, sick in his heart. A wildly sobbing mulatto was lying on her stomach on the beautifully tiled floor of the brothel’s courtyard, an African man sitting on her back and holding her feet up by the ankles. Standing before them, a white man in a sweat-stained shirt held a crop in his hand, poised to strike another blow to the already raw soles of the woman’s feet. Giles raised his cutlass in response.

“Hold!
¡Pare!
” Like Geoff, he knew the handful of Spanish words required to board and take a Spanish ship.

The Spaniard dropped his hand to his side and gave him a contemptuous look, responding in his own tongue. Giles swore softly. “Does anybody in this bloody place speak English?”

The Spaniard gestured the African man aside, and as soon as the man lifted himself from the mulatto, he yanked her off the ground by her arm. The woman cried out in pain, sinking cross-legged to the ground and cradling her injured feet. When the man moved to strike her, she cringed and wailed, “Me speak English! Me tell him whey you sey!”

Giles took a threatening step forward. “First, tell him that if he raises his hand to you again, I will kill him where he stands.”

“Nay, nay! Me already got big trouble!”

“Tell him that he has purchased my wife and that I have come to retrieve her.” He twisted his wrist slightly, making sure that his bloodstained blade caught the sun.

The woman pulled herself to her knees. “Take me wit’ you, maas! Take me wit’ you, an’ I show you where her be! Please, maas. Grace tell you me a good girl! Me help her.”

His heart lurched in his chest. “You’ve seen her?”

The Spaniard shouted at the woman, and she cringed again, hands up, responding in Spanish. Then she turned to Giles. “Please, help me, maas!”

“Tell him I want both of you.”

“Him no a-go sell us!”

Giles took another step toward the procurer. “I’m not offering to pay.”

The African man shouted in alarm, glancing time and again at the rear gate. Giles braced himself for another opponent, stepping smartly behind the procurer and holding his blade to the man’s throat. To his surprise, the second opponent never emerged.

He turned his attention back to the woman. “Tell him if he wants to live, he will keep his man back and give me my wife and you.”

The procurer responded with a furious burst of Spanish, but he had clearly ordered his man to keep his distance, because the guard made no move toward them.

“Him sey him kill you ‘fore you get us. But me know, maas! Me know where Grace be. Only you gotta promise a take me, too!”

“You have my word. Where is she?”

She pointed to the rear gate. “De cottage out bak. Dey anotta mon wit’ her.”

It took every ounce of willpower he possessed not to draw his blade against the throat of the man he held. The mere thought that the bastard had sold Grace to someone, someone who was, even now, using her, sent him into a blind rage.

“Show me,” he ordered the woman.

She rose reluctantly, cried out when she put her weight on her ravaged feet, and limped slowly to the gate. Giles nodded to the guard and, with a jerk of his head, indicated that he should go next. Then he dragged his stiffly compliant hostage with him to bring up the rear.

The door to the cottage stood wide open, blocked by the crumpled body of a black man. The second guard ran forward to inspect the fallen man, and a sound of anguish slipped through his throat.

The woman fell to her knees again. “Her gone. Dat otta mon take her. Please, maas. Don’t leave me! Me help you find dem! Me seen de mon. “

Giles roared in frustration. He shoved the procurer away from him with all the force of his pent up rage, then brandished his sword. “Get in the house!” he shouted at both the Spaniard and the African and pointing them in the right direction. “Get in the goddamned house, now!”

The two men stumbled over the third man’s body, but they retreated quickly into the cottage. Giles pulled the door shut and slid the bolt home. He turned to the woman, still kneeling in the alleyway, and ground his teeth. He still needed her, but with those feet, she was going to slow him down.

“Where do you think they’ve gone?” he asked.

She looked up at him, her face set, her chin lifted in defiance. “You gotta take me.”

He swept the woman up into his arms. She was surprisingly light, and up close, very young. “Which way?”

“Me tink de harbor. Her call him Cap’n.”

*

Grace wanted to climb the walls of Captain Montoya’s cabin. Instead, she paced, pausing to sit at his desk awhile, then moving to his bunk to study the crucifix on the wall above it before she resumed her pacing again. She wore a set of clothes borrowed from Diego’s cabin boy, Galeno, even though it would be hours before she would need them. As soon as the sun set, she would return to
El Jardín de Placer
with Captain Montoya and one of his crewmen. The crewman would be able to investigate inside of the brothel as a patron without arousing suspicion. Outside, she and Diego would dispatch the guards and help get Encantadora out. She could hardly wear her shift in public, and although the boy’s clothes were snug, they made a good disguise when paired with a large jacket. The plan was dicey, but there had been little time to plot their course.

She was standing at the cabin window, fretting over the amount of daylight yet remaining, when Diego joined her. His long face looked even longer with the corners of his mouth turned down into a grim frown.

“What is it?” she asked.

Diego sank into his captain’s chair and rubbed his lean jaw distractedly. “We are setting sail.”

“What? Nay! You promised!”

“We are too late.”

Grace froze.
Oh God, had
Don
Ramon killed Encantadora?
“Too late for what?”

“I had my man go to the
burdel
. I thought there might be some side entrance we had missed, a better way in or out. He found that
El Jardín de Placer
will not open tonight.
Don
Ramon had gathered a group of men in front, and my man blended in with them. Ramon was ranting about having lost two of his women. Then he said something about a man with a sword stealing one of them. He is coming after us.”

“Two women? Then, Encantadora has already escaped. But that’s good news!” Diego forced a brief smile, and her heart sank. “You don’t think she did.”

“It is possible.”

He didn’t sound convinced, and her heart sank a little further. “You think he killed her. You think that when he found I was gone, he killed her.” Then a hopeful thought slipped in. “But maybe the man you saw when you went back inside…”

Diego shrugged heavily. “I do not know. I think if Ramon would beat her so for lying to protect you, he would be very angry if he believed she had helped you to escape. She told you that he whipped their feet to punish them. How could she have run away? Now, he searches for us.”