January’s first wife had been a dressmaker, so he recognized at a glance that this young lady’s snuff-colored delaine dress was the attire of neither a whore nor a poor woman. It wasn’t new, but had been carefully treated; the creamy lace that trimmed collar and cuffs set off the delicate peach-fair complexion, the red lips and the ash-blonde curls just visible under the stylish bonnet. Her gloves were reasonably new as well.
John Dillard – with whom the girl he’d known four years ago as Valentina de Castellón had eloped from her father’s hacienda near Mexico City – must be prospering.
He saw she still wore her mother’s sapphire earrings.
Her eyes sparkled up at him: sea-blue, for she was pure-blooded Spanish with no admixture of Indian blood, a tribute to her father’s dedication to the limpieza de sangre so prized among the Mexican upper classes. ‘And Señor Enero! But what are you doing in Texas?’ Then her glance went to the tin slave-badge around January’s neck, took in the three carpet-bags he was carrying, and flicked to Hannibal. The butterfly-wing brows tugged into a frown.
‘My dearest Mrs Dillard—’ Hannibal, still holding her hand, drew her a little closer to him and lowered his voice.
The young woman said, still in Spanish, ‘It is not Mrs Dillard anymore, Hannibal.’ Her chin lifted a little. ‘John was killed, fighting—’
With a tiny shake of her head she thrust her lover’s memory aside, and for an instant, in the reflected lantern-light from the nearest saloon, January saw the glint of tears that she blinked away unshed.
‘After the fighting was over, my uncle Gael took me in – for I would not and will not return to my father! – and two years ago I married another American, Señor Taggart. It was of course Uncle Gael’s land he wanted – he had a rancho of ten leagues of land and wanted the twenty leagues Uncle would give me upon my marriage. But he was – is –’ she corrected herself, ‘a man of … of kindness and decency.’ Her lips tightened very slightly. ‘My uncle was then very ill. And indeed, he died early in the following year. It is a hard country,’ she concluded, ‘for a woman alone.’
January remembered her, flirting with Generalissimo Santa Ana’s military aides over her father’s dinner-table. She was flirting with the priest at her first communion, a family member had said to him. Flirting, and scheming to get what she wanted, whether it was a new pair of slippers or the love of a man her father and brother detested: beautiful, laughing, and curiously intrepid. She had been, he recalled, affianced to another man at the time, and had blackmailed Hannibal into translating her love letters to her American swain. When her enraged brother had come close to killing Hannibal as a result, he remembered that she had not seemed particularly contrite.
She must be twenty now. There was a tiny scar – several years old, of the kind made when a bullet strikes rock-chips from a wall near one’s face – on the corner of her cheekbone, and a velvety depth of shadow at the back of her eyes.
He said, ‘I am sorry,’ and she shook her head. While she’d been speaking a vaquero had emerged from the traffic on the street, a lean-flanked, craggy old desperado with a long white mustache and silver hair trailing from beneath his headscarf. He stood a respectful distance from her, watching with folded hands. Valentina did not give him so much as a glance.
‘But you, Señor Enero …’ Her smile flashed bright once more. ‘When last I saw you, you were a man of wealth, with a valet and a carriage and a maid for your beautiful Madame Rose …’
January set down the bags, and touched his finger to his lips. ‘Señora,’ he said softly, ‘if ever you cared for our welfare – if ever either of us did you a service –’ though Hannibal did not so much as flicker an eyelid, January could almost hear him sniff – ‘I beg that you will forget such matters. We came here to find a young lady of color, one of the pupils at my wife’s school. She ran off with a scoundrel and was betrayed by him, and sold as a slave.’
Valentina’s splendid eyes flashed with shocked outrage and her mouth popped open, but January gestured her silent again. She whispered, furious, ‘Bastardo!’
‘The scoundrel has come to a bad end,’ Hannibal reassured her.
‘Already?’ Her expression brightened. ‘That was quick of you!’
He made a deprecating gesture. ‘My dearest Valentina, age cannot wither nor custom stale your infinite charms. You wouldn’t happen to know of a rancher named Pollack, would you, bella domina?’
At the mention of the name, her eyes grew dark. Anger, bitterness, suspicion …
‘We are acting on behalf of the girl’s father,’ said January. ‘We have funds to buy her free.’ The truth was more complicated than that – certain as he was that Roux Bellinger would reimburse every penny they spent, he had met an astounding number of men willing to sell their children of color – but now was not the time for a lengthy explanation.
‘Que tengas mucha suerta.’ Valentina’s exquisite mouth twisted. ‘Señor Gideon Pollack would, as they say, skin a flea for its tallow and hide, and his brother Señor Rance pays the very whores with worthless Texas paper.’
January and Hannibal traded a glance. Damn it …
‘Their plantation – Los Lobos, and I cannot think of a better name to describe its owners! – lies close to ours. Ours is called Perdition, on the Pedernales River west of Austin. Up until October these Pollacks were my husband’s enemies. They would steal one another’s cattle, their men would beat up my husband’s riders when they came into town. Now they are my husband’s friends, and my husband lets Señor Pollack run his sheep on our hills.’
She didn’t sound any too pleased about it.
‘Have you been on Los Lobos, then?’ asked January. ‘Might you—?’
She startled then, and turned her head. Two women, followed by what were clearly bodyguards, were making for them with purposeful strides. Like Valentina, the women were dressed in the respectable challis and close round bonnets of planters’ wives or sisters – not the garb of women one generally saw walking about the streets at night. They stared straight ahead, rigidly ignoring the ballyhoo of the saloons, and held themselves as if trying not to actually touch the dirt of the unhallowed street.
He said quietly to Hannibal, ‘Hic venit Gorgones,’ – Here come gorgons – and stepped back, like a good servant, to stand beside the carpetbags, so that it would not appear that he was part of the conversation. Hannibal bowed once more over Valentina’s hand.
‘And might I chance to encounter you again before you leave the city?’ he inquired, switching to English and glancing – without turning his head – in the direction of the advancing gorgons.
Valentina, likewise, gave no further sign of having seen the two women, save by a quick sidelong look in their direction – a caution which told January a great deal, even before the newcomers came close enough to speak. She herself said, ‘I fear not, Mr Sefton,’ also in English, as the taller of the advancing women quickened her stride to reach them.
‘There you are,’ said the gorgon. And, after a glance at Hannibal, added, ‘dearest,’ in a flat tone that ill concealed irritation and disgust. ‘Where have you been?’ She was trying to speak lightly, but January had the impression that she wasn’t really capable of it. Her light-blue eyes, protuberant in a square, heavy-featured face, flicked from Valentina to Hannibal, and then to Valentina’s silent bodyguard, hard with suspicion.
Given the young woman’s history of flirtations, reflected January, this wasn’t an altogether surprising reaction. And bodyguard or no bodyguard, it wasn’t usual for a married woman of good reputation to walk about at night.
January found himself wondering where she had been …
Not, he reminded himself, that it was any of his business …
The younger gorgon seized Valentina by the arm and jerked her away from Hannibal, fixing the fiddler with a disconcerting, insectile stare from behind thick spectacles. ‘We have looked all over town for you!’ Her gaze, too, flashed to the bodyguard: frightened, suspicio
us, and at the same time fascinated. A gaze that lingered too long, and too intently, before it transferred itself, first to Hannibal, then to January himself. ‘And who is this?’
Valentina’s chin went up. ‘Mama, Aunt Alicia,’ she said in a pleasant voice, ‘please permit me to present Señor Hannibal Sefton. He was a friend of my father’s in Mexico.’
January wasn’t sure that ‘friend’ would adequately describe the relationship with a madman who had held Señor Sefton prisoner on his hacienda for five weeks, but couldn’t think of a word that would adequately describe Don Prospero de Castellón.
‘Señor Sefton, Madame Taggart, my husband’s mother. And this is Miss Alicia Marryat, my husband’s aunt.’
January, of course, being assumed to be merely Hannibal’s valet, did not merit introduction of any sort, any more than the bodyguards – presumably free men – did.
‘Enchanté.’ Hannibal bowed over the hands of each gorgon in turn. Mrs Taggart – tall, stout, firmly corseted into subdued (but new and stylish) mauve faille – regarded him with narrow mistrust. Her mouth was heavy enough to suggest sensuality, but was closed hard as a bear-trap, deep lines of peevish anger grooved from nostril to chin. Aunt Alicia snatched her hand away when Hannibal bent over it – his lips never came within two inches of her kid-gloved knuckles – and backed from him, still gazing with that unwavering stare.
‘He kissed me,’ she gasped, clutching her violated hand. ‘Amelia, he kissed me!’ She sounded as if he’d seized her and stuck his tongue halfway down her throat.
Mrs Taggart gave her a glare that would have silenced rioters on the Paris barricades. The younger woman turned quickly away, and January saw tears in her eyes. For one moment his glance crossed Valentina’s: You’re living with THAT?
To Hannibal, Mrs Taggart lied, ‘Pleased,’ with barely a nod of her head. She went on, ‘I’m sure you’ll forgive my daughter-in-law her ignorance of good usage, Mr Sefton. She is Mexican, though she doesn’t look it.’ She made it sound as if Valentina’s northern Spanish fairness were a deliberate deception. ‘If you are acquainted with her father, you must be aware that her upbringing was somewhat neglected.’
Valentina opened her mouth again to protest, but Mrs Taggart turned upon her that same basilisk stare. January knew it well. It would have meant a beating to any slave, but he was surprised when the young woman – the tart and impertinent girl he had known – fell silent.
She’s afraid …
And from the corner of his eye he saw, just for a moment, the white-haired old ruffian who’d stood behind her in silence all this time shift slightly on the balls of his booted feet.
Throughout the conversation, the gorgons’ bodyguards had stood likewise, with arms folded like comic-opera eunuchs, just outside the rectangle of dim light thrown by the door of the nearest saloon. They were tall men, white, the older sandy and rather flat-faced, his dusting of freckles doing nothing to mitigate the meanness of his close-set, pale eyes and the small, ungiving mouth. The younger was bulky and powerful with barely a dusting of ginger peach-fuzz on his heavy cheeks. Given the fact that yet another fight had broken out across Main Street – men cursing, whores shrieking, the town constable in his black frock coat firing his pistol futilely in the air – January couldn’t blame Mr Taggart for assigning protection to his womenfolk.
The senior Mrs Taggart went on, ‘Now I fear that we must return to our hotel, sir. It would not, I am sure you must be aware, do for us to be out when my son returns. Good evening, Mr Sefton.’
Her glance at Valentina was a summons. And Valentina, to January’s disconcerted surprise, obeyed without argument, only bobbing a curtsey to Hannibal and giving January a quick glance of apology.
‘Alicia!’
The command had the force of a riding-whip slapped on a table-top, and the spectacled woman cringed. January wondered whether Mr Taggart backed his mother’s arrogance with threats of his own, or whether she was simply one of those women so capable of making the lives of everyone around her hell that it was easier to simply knuckle under and obey. Her sister – as well as he could see her in the shadows and lamp-gleam of the dark street – seemed to be a woman in her early thirties, her features far more delicate but pinched by constant fear and suspicion. She glanced back repeatedly at January as she followed the older woman away up the street, obsessed and fascinated.
The three bodyguards followed them – clearly in the direction of the Commercial Hotel – the white men trading a sotto voce remark, the elderly vaquero silent as stone.
‘Back in Mexico,’ said Hannibal after a long moment of silence, ‘I would have given almost anything to put that young lady over my knee and spank her. Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis, I’m sorry to say – and surprised to say that I’d ever feel sorry that Valentina would change with the change of times. Did you get the impression she was meeting a lover?’
‘No,’ said January.
‘Nor I. And not because she had Briareus trailing about after her, either – he could easily have been disposed of. Maybe she was making plans with someone to flee?’
January asked, very simply, ‘Where could she go?’
As Valentina had said, it was a hard country for a woman alone.
She had run away with a man once, four years ago. And Fate had led her, roundabout, to this place, barely better – it seemed to him – than she had been in her father’s house in Mexico.
Where could a young woman go, without a protector, without money or land? Valentina was fortunate that she couldn’t be seized as literally a slave, as Selina had been. But her options were little better.
Ahead of them, he saw her in the light of the lantern above the Commercial Hotel’s door, as her mother-in-law and Aunt Alicia preceded her up its shallow steps. It was the best hotel in town: he wondered what they’d do if the bald-pated Gervase Hookwire from the Rosabel were staying there also.
‘All things considered,’ he said, ‘it might be best to get out of Houston at first light, before we encounter anyone else you know.’
‘Idem velle et idem nolle,’ agreed the fiddler, hanging back a pace to let January glance through the door into the lobby, to make sure the coast – as the smugglers said – was clear. ‘Ea demum firma amicitia est. Our thoughts chime together, amicus meus – the scum of the entire earth does seem to have gravitated to Texas, the lovely Valentina excepted, of course. I wonder if the good Lieutenant Shaw has managed to make arrangements for the purchase of horses at this hour?’
FOUR
Horses were cheap in the Republic of Texas. Shaw had, indeed, arranged to buy six for a hundred and thirty dollars, and three rather broken-down saddles for another sixty. This left the rescuers with far less than what anyone would have reasonably paid for a good-looking slave girl, but it was four days’ ride to Austin and nobody in Houston – said the Kentuckian – was willing to rent to three strangers for less than that.
‘By what you tell me this Miz Taggart says,’ remarked Shaw, as the three riders left the town behind them in the clammy dawn, ‘don’t sound like this Pollack feller’d take even the whole seven-fifty for her, so likely it don’t matter much.’ He spit into the weedgrown ditch that bordered the road; Houston lay in the bayou country, where cotton fields alternated with long flats of head-high grass. Unlike the Louisiana sugar plantations, which could rely on corn, hogs, and pumpkins from Ohio and Illinois, the Texas holdings grew their own corn, their own wheat, their own vegetables and fruit as well as cotton. Baby jackrabbits peeked cautiously from among knee-high green stalks. Wild turkey and prairie-chicken burst from the young trees of orchards in flurries of feathers. Raptors circled, almost out of sight overhead.
The shadows of the riders lay far out ahead of them on the muddy track, but already the morning was hot.
‘Most we can do,’ the Kentuckian went on, ‘I’m thinkin’, is speak to him an’ let him know there is a question ’bout the gal’s freedom. Might be enough to keep him from sellin’ her o
n. Nobody wants to find himself losin’ a woman to a lawsuit, an’ nuthin’ to show for it. If the man’s reasonable, he’ll take earnest-money on our promise to bring whatever sum he names, soon as we can fetch it from her pa. It may even be enough to keep him from meddlin’ with her, iff’n he knows he’s gonna be answerable to her pa, though I wouldn’t count on that.’ He spit again, a world of comment implied by the action and by the dry silence that followed it.
Either he had found lodging last night at a cheaper hostelry than the Commercial or had – January guessed – slept with the local vaqueros among the corrals. He looked as he usually did, grubby, greasy, and surprisingly inconspicuous for one so tall.
He had also acquired – from heaven alone knew where – two six-shot Colt pistols, of the kind sometimes known as wheel-guns, the rear portion of the barrel being replaced by a revolving cylinder which could be loaded six times in advance. An enormous saving of time, January reflected, in the sort of brawls he’d witnessed in Houston.
He only said now, ‘We can only see.’
They’d talked the matter over on the voyage across the Gulf, and neither had need to speak now of what was in both of their minds: that guilt still gnawed at January’s heart, for not going to the bank and mortgaging the house to raise more money. Guilt that a dark cynical voice at the bottom of his soul whispered, If her pa will pay …
He might not.
Having seen the man, January would have bet – Well, he reflected, bet seven hundred and fifty dollars anyway – that to retrieve his daughter Roux Bellinger would gladly mortgage his acres, or sell …
Sell what, exactly?
Some of his slaves?
And putting aside the fact that January was fairly certain that in order to retrieve his daughter from slavery, the planter would take a husband from a wife, an adolescent boy or two from their families and friends and everyone they knew, and pass them along to dealers like Andreas Neumann …
Are you certain enough of his love for this child that you’d jeopardize Rose’s school? Jeopardize the home of your sons and your wife?
Lady of Perdition Page 4
