The Farm Girl's Dream by Eileen Ramsay

Author:Eileen Ramsay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction

12

Las Estrellas, Mexico

CONSIDERING THAT SOME OF THE battles of the bloody civil war had raged very close to them, the tiny village of Las Estrellas looked quite lovely in the sunlight. The bunting, hung everywhere to celebrate the end of the civil war, added to the air of festival. Ragged, barefoot children ran shrieking around in the dirt, sending clouds of red dust scurrying into the air. The dust immediately draped itself on the nearest object – dog, or peasant, or sidewalk table. For the children it was good to run for the sheer joy of being alive. For years they had run – from bullets, from machetes, from plunging horses – and they had run quietly, their eyes staring in horror, soundless mouths wide open, too terrified to scream. Now they ran and yelled in the hot sunshine and their elders sat at the rickety wooden tables and washed the dust down into their stomachs with warm beer or fiery tequila, distilled from the Mezquite that grew everywhere in this otherwise almost barren land. A hairless dog chased its own tail until it was exhausted and then it too lay down in the dust.

John Cameron, brown as a nut from his months with the guerrillas, sat at a table on the verandah where there was some shade and sipped the raw red wine that was produced in the area. Now that this blasted war was at last over, maybe the peons could get back to tending their grape vines, most of which had withered and died in the past few years. He laughed at himself for his bad luck in running away from one war, only to be caught up in another one, and for his good luck in managing to make money – even though he was unsure as to the value of pesetas in real terms – out of that war. Gun-running was extremely profitable, and here in Mexico there was money to be made if one had a brain and no conscience.

‘Madre de Dios,’ he said and sat straight up in his chair. One of the sons of the local padrón, Don Alejandro Alcantarilla Medina, was riding past on a magnificent stallion. But it was not the horseflesh – superb though that was – or even the dignified, aristocratic bearing, the almost insolent arrogance and self-confidence of young Don José Luis, the padrón’s eldest son, that drew his eye. The young hidalgo had his sister with him. She was riding, as aristocratic Spanish girls often did, behind her brother, her arms around his slim waist: she had no fear of the strength of the dancing horse, for was not José Luis in complete control? La dama Lucia, sixteen years old, and home from her convent school for the first time in months, was wearing riding dress: a wide, blue skirt exquisitely embroidered around the wide hem, which fanned over the rump of the horse: a matching short blue jacket that was also embroidered with – could

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