Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  “Hello, Eleanora,” he said awkwardly, then stood staring past her until she drew him into the room.

  Introductions to the others were noisy and exuberantly confusing. She could not entirely blame Jean-Paul for the stiffness of his bow. He remembered Mazie, naturally, but his greeting was so brief, so ungracious, that his sister flushed, though more in irritation for his lack of manners than in embarrassment.

  “Could I — would it be possible to speak to you privately?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “I’m sure it can be managed,” Eleanora replied with emphasis, “if my friends will excuse us.”

  As soon as she led him into the curtained cubicle she was to share with the blonde ingénue, Jean-Paul swung on her. “What have you gotten yourself into this time? These people look like gypsies.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Eleanora told him in a fierce undertone. “They are actors, and they have been most helpful and kind to me.”

  “Actors? Halfwits, whores, and pimps would be more like it.”

  “Jean-Paul!” she exclaimed involuntarily.

  “Don’t be coy, Eleanora. After the way you have spent the past ten days, you needn’t pretend you aren’t familiar with the terms.”

  “I never thought to hear you use them.”

  “And I never thought to see you in a situation where it would be warranted. You were a lady, Eleanora.”

  Eleanora’s face went smooth with shock. “I still am.

  “Don’t try to cozen me. You were the colonel’s mistress.”

  “So I was. And you must have had some inkling of the reason for it, since you challenged him. Or did you do that, Jean-Paul, not for my honor, but for your own?”

  “For the family name,” he grated, the light in his cinnamon brown eyes burning with a feverish brightness.

  “You will forgive me, but I don’t believe even Uncle Narciso, libertine that he is, would approve of avenging the family honor by callously shooting a man who has deloped.”

  “I didn’t — that is, I was so astounded I couldn’t hold my fire, and I had no time to pull up completely.”

  “You should not have issued a cartel without first speaking to me.”

  “Why? Every loafer in the city knows the colonel picked you up in the streets and carried you into his quarters like a common trull.”

  “He had some reason to believe that was what I was,” she said with a weary gesture.

  “Because of that woman in there, that Mazie.”

  “I suppose, though she meant only the best.”

  He stared at her, then looked away, running one hand over the rough curls of his hair. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that. It’s just that I — I feel such guilt. As long as you are being forbearing, perhaps you will forgive me, Eleanora, for bringing you here, to this God-forsaken country.”

  Reaching out, she placed a hand on his arm. “Don’t torture yourself, Jean-Paul. I didn’t have to come. Some things just happen; they are accidents of nature for which no guilt can, or should, be assigned.”

  “You can’t ignore cause and effect.”

  “No, nor do I have to be crippled by them.”

  “That’s not a comforting philosophy. It does away with God as a crutch.”

  “And leaves Him for more important things.”

  It was not possible to persuade Jean-Paul to stay for the late supper. He could not be easy with the group of actors and actresses, and would not pretend otherwise. He made no suggestion, however, that Eleanora leave them. He was too well aware she had no place safer to go.

  Marketing, housekeeping, sewing, were her skills. With these she began to try to pay for her keep in the following days. With the amiable giant, or John Barclay, at her side to carry her basket and act as protective escort, she took over the buying of the food, and eventually, its regular preparation. She was often in the central plaza then, since there were few facilities at the made-over theater for the storing of food. Mornings, and again in the afternoon, she would stroll past the palacio. When the large man was at her side, she would send him to inquire of the guards still posted before the doors how the colonel fared. Never did she speak of him as Grant. It was a polite fiction, this pretense of distant acquaintance, one in which they all participated.

  Bit by bit she was able to piece together a picture of what was occurring within the palacio, regardless of how little she liked it. Grant was not in danger, but his wound was fevered. The field surgeon with Walker, Dr. Jones, had removed the lead slug and left him in the care of an orderly, a Nicaraguan as broad as he was tall. The man was deathly afraid of the colonel, and irritated him by showing it. Señor Paredes also exacerbated his temper with her fluttering ways and her dependence on the orders of the surgeon, rather than his personal wishes. He refused to stay in bed, preferring to move during the day to a chair at the table where he worked as hard as he would at his desk at the Government House. His visitors with problems were as many, his hours as long. Though he never complained, he used his left arm no more than was necessary; in the opinion of the orderly — as given to the guards — he used it less every day.

  Some of her information on Grant’s progress came from Luis. He was coming from the Government House as she crossed the plaza on her second shopping excursion for the troupe.

  “Chiquita! How I have missed seeing you. I have promised myself each morning that today I will come to visit you. Grant would not tell me where you had gone, but I have my ways of finding out these things. I know now where you stay. Still, this business of Grant has me working like a hundred horses. I am Walker’s right hand while Grant is not able, and I am telling you I am amazed at my amigo’s strength of body and will. I say to myself a dozen times already this morning, I will work myself into the grave for this man, my general — or else I will cut his throat!”

  He walked with her as far as the cathedral, where she was to take a cross street away from the Calle Celia. There they stopped beneath a mass of white jasmine hanging over a patio wall. The petals littered the ground as thick as snow, as if trying to cover the refuse lying in the open gutter beneath their feet. Looking up abruptly, Luis said, “I am worried about Grant. This medico, Jones, is good enough of his kind, but he has seen many wounds in the last months. If a hole does not spout blood and show bone, he feels no challenge to his skill; it is a small thing which any Falangista can heal by himself, alone. He forgets the dangers of the climate, makes no allowances for a man who will not lie down and let his body do its work.”

  There was nothing Eleanora could do, a fact he accepted, finally, before he let her go. Even so, Luis’s misgivings could not help but affect her. She stared long and hard at the palacio the next morning as she moved slowly past. It was quiet, still somnolent in the early-morning sun. That did not allay her anxiety. What if Grant died? The general might have Jean-Paul shot if he lost his second-in-command. Walker, in effect, was judge, jury, and executioner for Nicaragua. He did very much as he pleased.

  The door leading out onto the galería from the bedroom she and Grant had shared stood open. As she watched through her lashes she thought she saw a flash of movement in the dimness beyond, though the shadow beneath the overhanging roof was too deep to be easily penetrated, and she would not stare. Head high, she moved on; she even managed a smile and a comment for John Barclay strolling beside her.

  They were returning across the sun-burned earth of the market place on the far side of the plaza when they saw Grant’s orderly running toward the Government House. His round face ashen, he called out to the guards as he neared them, “Hola! Send at once — pronto! — for the médico. Colonel Farrell has fell himself down — and he will not wake up!”

  His message given, the man spun around and panted back toward the palacio. Eleanora picked up her skirts without thinking and hurried after him. From a distance she could see the black shape of Señora Paredes crouched on the galería. She hovered over Grant, trying to shade his head from the hot sun creeping inward over the
floor toward the wall.

  The guards passed Eleanora without question. John Barclay was detained the length of time it took for her to turn back and vouch for him. That done, the two of them followed the orderly up the stairs to the room she had left in such furious haste so short, and yet so long, a time before.

  The orderly, realizing he had been followed inside, looked disturbed, but his relief at being no longer alone with the responsibility for the colonel’s life overcame his scruples. The four of them, with a sheet for a makeshift litter, managed to get Grant back inside and on the bed. He lay unmoving, the blue shadow of his beard making him look gaunt and unkempt.

  Bending, the orderly removed his boots. Fighting against a wave of sickness mingled with the salt ache of unshed tears, Eleanora reached to adjust his arm, which seemed to be lying too high upon his chest in its sling. The movement dislodged the triangle of black cotton, exposing the bulky bandaging beneath his shirt. Then, as she traced the outline of the bandage with her eyes, the red of his shirt over the shoulder began to darken.

  John Barclay drew in his breath. “He’s bleeding. His fall must have reopened his wound.”

  10

  Dr. Jones was brisk and efficient, a man nearing middle age with center-parted, pomaded, gray hair, steel-framed spectacles, and wearing a long surgeon’s coat of white cotton shadowed in splotches by ancient, irremovable blood-stains. He cut the bandage away from the still-unconscious man, viewing the suppurating wound with its swollen proud flesh with detachment. At the unmistakable stench of putrescence, he did frown slightly, waving forward the orderly holding the bottle of diluted carbolic acid.

  Eleanora winced as she watched his thorough cleaning of the mangled hole. In her concern for the neglected state of Grant’s injury, the welling blood no longer affected her. Her fingers tingled with the need to take the pad from the surgeon and finish the task with more care.

  The reek of carbolic cleansed the air, and then the doctor began to bandage the wound again. At a barked order, the orderly, panting still from his search for the doctor, leaped to lift and turn the inert man, and to hold the thick pad of cloth over the wound while it was bound in place.

  As the flat knot was tied, the surgeon stepped back. “Now I want to know how Colonel Farrell came to fall while he was in your care?” he said to the perspiring Nicaraguan.

  “I do not know, sir. He complained of a fever. I brought the cool water to bathe him with as I was shown, but he would not let me. He said to take it away. He was not himself, I could tell by his eyes, but what else could I do? He is the colonel. I took it. I heard him cry out, as to someone in the street, and when I entered the room, I saw him on the floor. Is he in extremity, sir? Will he die?”

  “Not that bad,” the surgeon said. “He’s got a lump the size of a goose egg on his head. With that, and being as weak as he is, it may be a while before he comes around. You can count yourself lucky he didn’t take a fall over the railing in his state. If you can’t take care of your patient you’ll have to go back to the field hospital.”

  “I will do better, Señor Médico, sir, I promise. But you must tell the colonel to allow me to tend him.”

  “It’s your job to persuade him.”

  “I know, sir, but who persuades the Iron Warrior to do what is against his will, even if it is best for him?” The man shrugged, a hopeless gesture.

  Eleanora raised her eyes from the hollows beneath Grant’s high cheekbones. “I could try.”

  The doctor swung on her as if seeing her for the first time. “And who are you?”

  “I — I am the colonel’s mistress,” she said.

  “I see,” he told her, nodding his head with narrowed eyes. “The woman who caused all this?”

  Eleanora did not reply. The surgeon studied her proud chin, the firm mouth, and steady gaze of her green eyes. Abruptly he nodded. “All right. He’s yours if you want him. The orderly will come in handy for the heavy work, but if you’d rather not have him around just say so.”

  “I’m sure I will need him.”

  “Good. Then I will leave Colonel Farrell in your hands. God knows you have to be better than Pedro here.”

  His instructions were brief and concise. These given, he did not linger, but picked up his leather case and strode out the door, his white coat flapping about his knees.

  John Barclay touched Eleanora’s shoulder. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  “I have to,” she replied. “But you needn’t stay. The troupe will want their breakfast.”

  “Yes,” he agreed with a rueful glance at the basket he had set down out of the way in the corner near the door. “I hate to leave you.”

  “I’ll be fine. It’s not as if I were alone.”

  “No, but I have to answer to Mazie, you know,” he said, his mouth curving beneath his mustache with gentle humor. “She will probably be around to talk you out of this.”

  “You can tell her she won’t succeed,” she warned.

  “With Mazie, I don’t think that will make any difference. She’s a lot like you that way; she has to try.” Putting a finger under her chin, John Barclay leaned to brush her cheek with a kiss. Turning, he picked up the woven basket and let himself out of the room.

  The click of the door latch was loud in the silence. Eleanora took a deep breath, giving herself a mental shake. The orderly was watching her with patient eyes. She smiled at him. “I think, Pedro, that first we will try bathing him with that cool water again”

  Though it lowered his fever, the sponge bath did not revive Grant, nor did shaving him, though it did make him look more alive. When smelling salts held beneath his nose had no effect, Eleanora abandoned the effort. Sending the orderly from the room, she drew a straight chair to the side of the bed and sat down. She was still there when Señora Paredes brought her noon meal to her on a tray.

  The woman set her burden upon the table before she looked directly at Eleanora, and then her glance was veiled. Clasping her hands in front of her, she said, “I made the colonel some broth, good broth with the strength of beef.”

  “I will see he eats it if he regains consciousness.”

  “Is he bad?”

  “The doctor doesn’t seem to think so, but his idea of bad may be different from ours.”

  “That Pedro is filling his belly in my kitchen. Do you need him?”

  “Not just now.”

  “I will not let him leave. If you will step outside and call from the galería I will send him to you.”

  “Thank you,” Eleanora said in some surprise.

  The woman left without answering.

  As the afternoon wore on Grant’s fever began to climb again. By nightfall he was growing restless, plucking at the sheet and pressing his hand to his shoulder. Loosening the bandage seemed to help for a while, but he was soon turning his head on the pillow and pushing at the sheets as if fighting the restraints, like trailing ropes, that held him to unconsciousness.

  Beyond bathing him again, there was little that could be done. Eleanora could only sit, watching him, thinking. What had she done? It was stupid to come back here, a foolish sentimentality to indulge in simply because she suspected that Grant had been calling after her when he fell. Perhaps it was more of a wish than a suspicion? Ridiculous. Or was it? She had not hesitated when a chance arose to return. Was duty, then, only an excuse? Certainly not. She felt a very real obligation. Grant would be unharmed except for her. Anyone could be moved to compassion by the sight of a strong man reduced to such helplessness. Just because she was affected to the point of tears did not mean she loved him, did it? It would be different when he was himself again, awake, rational, on his feet. He would have no need of her then. She would like to be gone before that time came.

  On four separate occasions a courier from the Government House came to the door asking to see her patient. Each time Eleanora told him the colonel could not be disturbed. The fourth time, when the knocking roused Grant from what had appeared to be the beginni
ng of natural sleep, Eleanora lost her temper. “Inform General Walker that Colonel Farrell is unconscious, that he is unable to answer questions or prepare reports, or to be useful to him in any capacity, and if he ever expects him to return to duty he would do well to leave him alone!”

  “And who am I supposed to say the message is from?” the soldier had asked, grinning.

  “Eleanora Villars, his mistress!”

  Once again she had proclaimed it. When the man had gone and she had resumed her post beside the bed, Eleanora sat with her hand over her mouth, staring at the harsh face of the man who lay there. Within her chest her heart beat with the painful heaviness of a leaden weight. Slowly, then with growing violence, her head throbbed in time with its beat. For someone of her upbringing, the desire to own herself the mistress of any man came perilously close to love. When that man had taken her by force, kept her prisoner, and, tiring of her, sent her from him, and she still could not deny him, must that love not be a proven fact?

  Grant stirred. Reaching out, she smoothed his dark hair back, laying her cool hand across his burning forehead. He muttered something under his breath, a whisper of sound. Eleanora leaned to catch it, but, lying quiet, a long shape under the sheet, he did not speak again. When she moved her hand, however, he grew restless once more, and so she stayed with her arm outstretched until the muscles of her back became hard with cramp and the orderly entered the darkened room bearing a lighted candle to relieve her while she ate her evening meal.

  The night passed with aching slowness. Hourly Grant grew worse. Tossing in delirium, he seemed to be reliving the march from Sonora. The thought of water preyed upon his mind, but though Eleanora and the orderly moistened his lips and allowed drops to trickle down his throat time after time, he was never satisfied. At first her touch served to soothe his movements, but toward dawn that failed and he had to be restrained from leaving the bed and reeling across the room. The bandages they had loosened earlier had tightened once more as his shoulder swelled. Red streaks ran down his arm and in radiating lines across his chest.