Tala looked down at the parchment in her fingers. “A paper is a strange thing, Jonah. Yesterday, if a deputy met me on the road, he could put an iron chain around my neck because Hutchins had a blue paper with a commissioner’s stamp. Today, if he meets me, he must step aside because I have a white paper with a judge’s seal. Both papers are made of wood pulp and ink. Why do men bow down to one and use the other to kill?”
Jonah leaned his hip against the fluted wood of the pillar. “Because a paper is only a mirror, Tala. It shows what a people have decided to believe about themselves. In Black Mesa, forty men wanted to believe that cruelty could be made decent if you kept it in a ledger with double-entry columns. In that court room, Judge Miller decided that the territory could not survive if every liar with a military voucher was allowed to call himself a master. The paper doesn't make you free; you were free when you were born on the Gila. The paper only warns them that if they touch you, the rest of the world will come down on their heads.”
Tala descended the stone steps, Jonah following with his measured, unhurried stride.
They walked across the dusty plaza toward the mercantile street that ran along the old wall. Tala had sixteen silver dollars in the pocket of her indigo coat—money she had earned from the butter she had churned from the black cow’s milk and the pairs of buckskin moccasins she had sewn during the long winter evenings, which Jonah had sold to the teamsters at the Dragoon crossing.
She entered the shop of a French merchant named Charbonneau—a bright, clean store that smelled of bolts of printed calico, imported ribbons, tea leaves, and lavender soap.
The shopkeeper, a small man with an oiled mustache and a grey alpaca coat, hurried to the counter with a polite bow. In Tucson, the French merchants did not ask questions about who walked into their stores; if a customer possessed silver coin, they were treated with the same crisp linen courtesy accorded to the governor’s wife.
“Madame,” Charbonneau said, his hands resting lightly on the counter. “What may I show you this evening? We have new muslins from New Orleans, very fine, fast colors.”
“I do not want muslin,” Tala said. She spoke in her measured, clear English. “I want sewing supplies. I want two gross of steel needles, size four, that will carry heavy linen thread without bending. I want three spools of waxed harness hemp. And I want six hanks of dyed silk embroidery thread: two of the red, two of the pale yellow, and two of the sky blue.”
The merchant looked at her with renewed interest. He recognized the requirements of an expert needleworker.
“Ah,” he said, nodding with genuine professional appreciation. “The silk from Lyon. It has the true sheen, madame. It does not run when the garment is washed in river water.”
He brought out several flat wooden trays containing spools and skeins wrapped in tissue paper. Tala examined them with her thumb and forefinger, testing the twist of the silk, feeling the temper of the steel needles against her thumbnail. She selected what she required, setting them in a neat pile upon the mahogany counter.
Beside them, she placed three bone-handled awls of different sizes, a brass measuring tape with black enamel numerals, and two pairs of small, pointed steel shears made in Sheffield.
“Is that all, madame?”
Tala paused. Her eye caught a small wooden box on the shelf behind the counter—a tea caddy made of polished cherry wood with brass corner brackets and a small brass key in the lock.
“That box,” she said, pointing.
Charbonneau reached it down, dusted the lid with a silk handkerchief, and set it before her. “It is from England. Cured cherry wood. The joints are dovetailed, very tight. It keeps out the dust and the damp.”
Tala opened the lid. The interior was lined with green velvet, smelling of sweet wood and dried tea. It was small—just eight inches square—large enough to hold a piece of embroidered buckskin, an eagle feather wrapped in red quills, and a certified court order bearing a red wax seal.
“How much for the box and the threads?” she asked.
“The sewing goods are four dollars and twenty cents,” the Frenchman calculated with a pencil on a slip of scrap paper. “The cherry box is two dollars. Six dollars and twenty cents in all, madame.”
Tala reached into her coat pocket, counted out six heavy silver dollars and two ten-cent pieces, and laid them upon the counter. The silver rang against the polished wood with a clear, sharp resonance.
It was the first purchase she had ever made in her life where she did not have to look over her shoulder to see if an agent, a soldier, or a master was standing behind her to approve the transaction. She had earned the silver with the work of her own fingers; she had chosen the goods with her own eye; and she took the brown paper parcel from Charbonneau’s hand with her own fingers.