She smiled up at him. “There’s two, you know. One is in the minor.”

He stood with his hat held behind himself in his two hands and several conflicting emotions lit him up inside like fireworks. His happiness to be with her, to have touched her, that music mattered to her, that it lived in some secret place in her heart. She was brave. She was in danger. She was astonishingly pretty. He thought of Webb, nearly two years ago at Fort Brown, of how tall he was, whether he had been wearing his sword. If he was any good with a pistol. Then Simon blew out a long breath and reached out to brush away a stray bit of coastal hay stem from her sleeve; it had flown on the wind from a nearby hay wagon as if wanting her attention. He could not stop touching her.

“It’s a sweet tune.” He made himself clasp his hands behind his back again.

“It is, so.” And then, “If only.”

“If only what?”

“We had an entire afternoon to ourselves to work on it together.”

“We will.” Simon smiled reassuringly. “Miss Dillon,” he said. “You have already thought it all out, as to how we could meet. You amaze me.”

She flushed bright red. “Simon, I am ashamed of myself having done all this beforehand. I am very forward. I am bold, unprincipled, and conniving.”

“Good. Good.”

The Mass was over. They could see Mercedes rising from the pew and her jaunty, swinging walk as she came back to join them.

“Now as for messages, can you meet Mercedes here in the market, and give her a note for me?”

The maid, a tall woman with light skin and red cheeks, turned to them and then flipped up the end of her black braid under her nose and twirled it in the manner of stage villains, full of mystery.

She said, “I hide it in the vegetables. Notes in the potatoes, letters in the cabbages.”

Doris laughed aloud. A merry laugh with a quick shake of her head. “I am so nervous,” she said. “’Tis hard indeed to tell you what is going on.” Another pause. “I hardly know myself.”

That night at one in the morning, when the Plaza House had finally run out of its need for music, Simon stood at the attic window looking out at the bell tower, smiling. Damon had been cautiously congratulatory about Simon’s news that he had found Miss Dillon at last, had endured his somewhat incoherent description of her beauty and charms, and said in a grave voice that he wished them both a smooth road ahead. Any chance of that happening?

Simon turned, walked up and down the floor twice, and said, “She made me promise not to get in a fight with Colonel Webb.”

“Why would you do that?”

Again a hesitation; then, “The man is a villain.”

“No. I am astonished. Could it be true?” Damon pulled off his boots. “Well, my man, stick to it. But you know that.”

Damon ate the half of the apple that Simon shared with him, drank off half a tumbler of rum, and then he slept.

Simon thought about the girls in Marshall, where he had hidden in the icehouse. How they were vivacious and flirting at the barbecue, how they must have been meeting young men for talk, for a dance, for rides in carriages. Those girls made visits to one another’s houses. Their parents helped them with clothes and advice and probably sometimes furious arguments. But there was a steadiness, or at least he imagined this. This was how they got to know one another, men and women, and made momentous life decisions. And Doris was being denied this, and her far from home, from her own people and customs, from parents who might be of aid. Living in helpless terror of that villain. How alone she was. Images came to him: the colonel stalking her from one room to another.

Not for long. Simon was having heroic thoughts. Rescuer’s thoughts. Savage thoughts.

Chapter Twenty-one

The old Spanish city was being devoured by new enterprise—by stage services and freighting companies, by land speculators like the Mavericks and the Mengers, by German and Anglo-American and Irish businessmen named Dullnig and Twohig, Cassiano, Horde and Frost. It was a city of markets and transport whose domination had been secured by gunfire. It had fallen easily into no one’s hands. But it had been conquered now by businesses in transportation, vendors to the Union Army, mule yards, wagon makers, ranch supply, hardware, and sewing machines. Now the Menger Hotel offered French wines and sheets edged with lace and a new contraption called a shower-bath. The Irish had arrived and were hungry, used to hardship, worked with roughened hands, and moved from digging new house foundations to poring over account books and finally to afternoon teas.

Mr. Twohig had a house on the bank of the river opposite St. Mary’s and there Mrs. Twohig—she had been a Calvert from Seguin—held an afternoon musical event. It was a big house and there were guest houses all around it, shaded by tall trees. The immense cypresses were bare and stark in the brief winter of south Texas. Robert E. Lee had been a guest before the war when he was stationed in San Antonio, so had Sam Houston, Phil Kearney, John Bankhead Magruder. Simon was made nervous by the ghostly presence of the great and the near great; dangerous people. They could draft you into armies. He palmed up a cinnamon twist the size of a doorknob and devoured it. He had not had breakfast.

Mrs. Twohig looked kindly upon the young Irish girl who sat hesitantly at the piano. Old Mr. Twohig was Irish and charitable, and he had seen Ben Milam shot dead at the Veramendi House during the Battle of Bexar. When Woll took San Antonio again for Mexico in ’42, Twohig gave away everything in his store and then blew it up to prevent the Mexican general from getting the gunpowder, was taken prisoner and dragged to Mexico like a beast of burden. He escaped Fortaleza San Carlos along with twelve others. They had tunneled out with stolen ax heads and pieces of broken tile. Now he was a banker and Simon’s small account lay in his adventurer’s hands, somewhat twisted and hard as sole leather. In another room, old man Twohig and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd were in serious conversation in front of a fireplace.

“Oh, it is out of tune,” said Mrs. Twohig. Simon stood close to the table with the tea and the food. Doris Dillon ran her hand down the keyboard in a scale, struck chords, and flinched when several keys responded with dull flat sounds as if they were discouraged and had stopped trying.

“Aye. ’Tis fair glundie that.” She stared at the keyboard. “You’d think it had been rained on.”

“And you?” Mrs. Twohig turned her broad body to Simon. People were circulating in their long drawing room. Cypress shadows danced on the walls. The walls were painted in the newest fashion: scalding white.

“I am only semirespectable, Mrs. Twohig,” said Simon. “But a musician takes work where he can find it.” He wiped cinnamon frosting from his hand with a napkin and then picked up his bow and his fiddle.

She closed one eye. “Such as where?”

“The Plaza House, the Horde, the Century, the Bull’s Head. For a traveling circus if I had to.”

She nodded and did not smile. Finally she said, “You love your music.”

He inclined his head. “I do.”

“So it is. I will do what I can to advise people of your availability. There are Christmas parties and there is to be a gathering when Commissioner Edmund Davis comes to visit. An evening event. They will need music.” She took the napkin from him. “This is not yet a world with much use for the refined arts, young man. It is still a world of fighting men.” He started to say that much of his art was not at all refined and he had been in a few fights himself, but he thought better of it. She put her hand on his arm, lightly, and moved away.

Simon watched Doris for a moment, across the main room, seated at the square piano. She was in front of one of the tall windows and in the pouring winter light she ran her hands down the five octaves, with a cocked head, listening. He lifted the fiddle to his shoulder and walked over to her and said, “Miss Dillon?”

She raised her head to him. “Ah, I think I know you!”

“Do you, now?”

Once again he was heart-stopped by those wide blue eyes, at present with a wicked glint as she said, “Yes, yes, it’s quite odd, but I do think we have met. You commented on the way I speak, faith and begorrah and blarney and Jesus and Mary and Joseph.”

“Girl, stop.” They were both laughing. And then they ran out of laughter for the moment and looked into each other’s eyes in the clarifying light from the window, suspended in it, in the sound of a honeysuckle trailer tapping against the glass in a slight breeze, the smell of old wood and cloth and the voices of other people that now seemed so distant.

Then she put one hand on the sheet music in front of her. “This is ‘Madame Bonaparte’s Waltz.’ Are you ready, Mr. Boudlin?”