Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  He stopped, his breath coming quickly in the quiet. “You need not explain to me,” Eleanora said, masking her sudden apprehension with a tone of indifference, though her slim fingers plucked at the rough, homespun wool of the blanket.

  “Even I” he repeated as if she had not spoken. “I told you once, did I not, that I had reason to seek the forgetfulness and danger of war. You are my soul, why should you not know the reason? It is a tale that begins in Spain. The house of my father is an old one, perched on the hillside among the olive groves above the Guadalquivir Valley. Pride, in my home and my family and in the Moorish blood that runs in my veins, was drilled into me in the nursery. My life was set before I was born; I would be educated as suited my station, I would be taught to revere Mother-Church, to wear always the attire of a gentleman, to acquit myself with a rapier, and to wear one on dress occasions without tripping over it. A marriage with a suitable parti would be arranged for me, I would be presented at the court of the young Queen Isabella II, where I would be expected to take my place among the conservatives. On the death of my father I would, of course, assume the responsibilities of the patron for the people who lived in the villages that belonged to me, people who had worked for my family for generations. I would look after the land and produce children to carry on after me. My portrait, with that of my wife, would be placed in the long gallery of my house, and with the march of the years my bones would lie in the cathedral with those of my ancestors. I was not dissatisfied with such a prospect. It was my destiny, and I don’t recall entertaining the thought that it could be otherwise. Then I met Consuelo.”

  Eleanora glanced at him quickly through the darkness. He caught the movement, for he gave a short laugh. “You need not be jealous, my dove,” he said with irony, “although she was very beautiful. I saw her one day on the steps of the cathedral as she came from mass, and I thought she was the loveliest thing I had ever seen. She wore a white mantilla over her midnight black hair, and her dueña hovered about her like a butterfly around an exquisite flower. I could not have been more awe-struck or more moved if one of the images of the sweet saints had stepped down from its niche. She smiled at me, the picture of shy innocence, and I was enraptured. I could not speak to her, of course, it was not allowed. But nothing could prevent me from learning her name or from conceiving for her such a sacred passion that I went at once to my father and demanded that he arrange a marriage. It was done. There was no bar to the union; she was of good family, the daughter of a neighbor of no more than fifteen miles’ distance in fact, and only just out of convent school. Her father was a minor official at court, but a man of influence, since his wife was distantly related to the queen. She had also an uncle who was a general and a leader of one of the political factions. The betrothal was announced with much ceremony, and then, as is the custom, the courtship began.”

  His voice changed, becoming abrupt. “It is necessary for me to tell you that Consuelo, though she did not object to me as a husband, was not warm to the idea. I was not discouraged. With all the optimism of a youth barely of age, I felt that the warmth of my ardor must kindle an answering flame in her breast. I set siege to her heart with every ruse known to a lover, I wrote verses to the beauty of her eyes, arranged for serenades, escorted her with her crone of a dueña wherever she wished to go. I sent her gifts without number. Learning that she loved to ride and was an accomplished horsewoman, I sent men to the horse auctions of Spain, searching for a mount suited to my beloved. An Arabian mare of a whiteness and a purity of bloodline that could have been meant only for Consuelo was found. On the day that it was delivered I was the happiest of men, certain that at last I had found a gift that could not fail to please. With the mare on a lead-rein, I rode to the house of her father and presented myself at the door. Imagine my disappointment when I was told she was from home, riding out with her groom in attendance. So determined was I to see her pleasure, however, that I decided to await her return. Heated from exercise the mare could not be left standing, and I wanted to have the dust brushed from her coat before Consuelo saw her. There was a servant on the forecourt of the house, but I wished to see to it that the mare was walked and watered and rubbed down with the care I deemed necessary.

  “Inside of the barn was dark and musty with the smell of old hay. The hot sun had searched out the cracks and holes in the structure, sending yellow shafts boring through the darkness in which dust motes turned, disturbed by my footsteps. I stood for a moment just inside the door, waiting for my eyes to adjust, and in that moment I heard voices coming from the tackroom that opened to my right. A woman laughed and I recognized Consuelo’s voice. My suspicions were not aroused, my single thought was that my wait to see my betrothed was over.

  “It is odd. For years what I saw that afternoon has been enough to make me feel that my eyes are bursting from my head and my heart exploding in my chest. Now it merely seems laughable in a bawdy kind of way. Consuelo, with her riding habit bunched about her waist, was seated on a saddle on a rest. Her groom stood between her legs with his breeches around his ankles, grunting under the whip she plied on his backside. There is no way to describe my shock then. My single coherent thought was that she had profaned my love for her. My pride, so carefully cultivated all my life, rose up in rage. I drew the dress sword at my side and cut the groom to ribbons with no more compunction than you would feel on killing a rat. That I did not kill him outright was due solely to his cowering, abject submission. If he had so much as looked about him for a weapon or raised a hand in his defense, I would have run him through. And then I turned to Consuelo. For her I chose the punishment of my Moorish ancestors for an unfaithful woman. I cornered her among the bridles thick with dust and spider webs, and grasping her chin in my hand, slit her nose. With my sword’s edge I sliced it half off and stood and watched as her face dissolved in blood.”

  “Oh, Luis,” Eleanora whispered, her voice an ache in her throat. She could think of nothing to say, no word of comfort or condemnation.

  After a moment he went on. “A terrible waste; her beauty, her life — and my own. And beyond that, countless hours of remorse and self-disgust that did no one any good, least of all myself. To be cut off from friends and family, denied my country, may have been no more than I deserved, but it has, this decade and more, been a true punishment.”

  “I would have thought the courts would have been lenient to a young man who acted with the provocation that you had,” Eleanora said.

  “They might have if Consuelo’s relatives had not been so firmly entrenched at court. Her father and her uncle swore to see me hanged, and they might have succeeded if my father had not also had his friends around the throne. As it was, I was banished. They thought to have a hired assassin complete their death sentence for them, but after I returned to them in a box the head of the third man they had sent, they stopped trying. During this time I was reduced to being always a guest in another country, wandering from London to Paris to Rome in winter, and in summer from one of the watering places of Europe to another, wagering nightly at the gaming table, returning the many entertainments I received, planning others in an attempt to find surcease from thinking. Such a life not only played havoc with the allowance paid to my bankers by a grieving and therefore indulgent father, but because it was not what I wished to be doing it grew tedious. Pitting my wits against the hired killers of Consuelo’s relatives, I had felt more alive, and glad of it, than in months. Such a discovery, combined with such a talent for violent death, should not be wasted, I thought. I became a paid soldier.”

  “And had the misfortune to join William Walker?” Eleanora commented.

  “There were other causes, other countries, first. But yes, eventually I came to California and Walker. A misfortune? I cannot agree with that, since the general led me to you.”

  Eleanora laughed, a husky sound. “That may have been the greatest misfortune of them all.”

  Reaching out, he touched her face with gentle fingers, turning her face to his.
“Never say that, pequeña,” he murmured against her mouth. “Never say that, ever.”

  His fingers trailed down the curve of her neck to the hollow of her throat, resting for a moment on the pulse that beat so steadily there. Then he moved lower, his palm smoothing over the soft mound of her breast.

  Eleanora lay unmoving, neither accepting nor rejecting his caress until he lay still, his chest rising and falling evenly. Her sense of obligation warred with a feeling of disloyalty inside her. She had hardly dared to think that Luis might be right, that the order for her arrest had been forged by Niña Maria without the knowledge of the general, or more importantly, of Grant. To think of him returning to the palacio and finding it empty, learning that she was gone with Luis, sent a feeling of panic scurrying through her. What would he do? Would he believe Niña Maria’s accusation? Would he think that rifling his papers and selling the information had been her retribution? There was, from his point of view, a certain logic in that explanation. Drawing a deep breath, she sighed. What was the use of torturing herself with these questions? Although it mattered desperately to her now whether he had left her behind to be arrested or learned of it only on his return, no doubt if she never saw him again it would, in time, lose its importance. If she never saw him again—

  She was a fool. To let herself be drawn step by step into such a trap of love and hate — there was no other word for it. It was useless to blame Jean-Paul. She did not have to go to back to the palacio when Grant was shot. She had gone of her own free will, driven by an impulse she had no wish to resist.

  Where was her brother? What was he doing while the other men persuaded the woman he had loved to incriminate herself? He would not join them surely? His conception of honor was too nice to permit him to hurt any woman, much less one he had held in something more than affection. Would he, then, have felt obliged once more to come to her defense? If so, he could not hope to prevail, of course. Would he, could he, allow that to make any difference? And if not, was he lying unconscious somewhere, beaten, bruised, growing chill in the cool night air of the mountains? He was getting so thin and haggard; it would not be surprising if he succumbed to pneumonia in such conditions. Another thought gripped her. These men had little respect for human life. If he annoyed them too much they might kill him. She had heard no gun shots, but they all wore knives thrust into their boots.

  Moving with care she placed her right hand on the metal ring upon her left and pushed, trying for the hundredth time to slip it down over her hand with the fingers turned in to make it as slim as possible. She could not ask the sick man beside her to get up so that she could look for Jean-Paul, and she could not lie there, guessing his whereabouts, not knowing.

  It was no use, the ring was too snug, so snug, in fact, that she was certain the bracelet on the other end of the chain must be cutting into Luis’s larger wrist.

  The key, where was it hidden? Was it, perhaps, in the clothes piled so unceremoniously beside the mound of the bed? By stretching a little she might reach them.

  Luis stirred. His arms about her tightened, drawing her nearer to him. The movement shifted the blanket from his shoulder and his hold grew rigid as he endured a paroxysm of shivering.

  “Cold,” he whispered.

  Eleanora subsided. It was cruel to disturb him for what might, after all, be nothing. Turning her head, she stared out through the door at the dark gray anonymity of the night, lit feebly by a late-rising sliver of moon. Unmoving, she watched with burning eyes as that moon waned, giving way without grace to a cloudy dawn. Long before then the screaming had stopped. There was no other sound of life to take its place.

  At last Luis woke, and releasing her, rolled to stretch out flat on his back.

  “Luis?” she said, loud enough for him to hear but low enough not to wake him if he was still asleep.

  After a minute he turned his head toward her, listening.

  “Do you think — she is dead?”

  “They would not go that far,” he answered, speaking slowly, as if concentration was an effort. “She is too valuable a witness.”

  “Valuable to me, to Jean-Paul, but not to them.”

  “But if you are lost, pequeña, so is their hope of reinstatement lost.”

  “I am not certain that will matter much to anyone else but you.”

  “Not so,” he insisted, but he made no attempt to convince her, and his voice held no conviction.

  Whether from the necessity of an early start or simply because the others had not gone to bed, the camp stirred not long afterward. The horses were rounded up with a great deal of noise, and the smell of smoke and coffee and frying peccary rose into the air heavy with damp.

  Luis, drawing on some store of inner strength, dragged himself from their bed and moved outside, where he sat down with his back to one of the poles of the porch. Sitting on his haunches before the fire, in a strain which caused considerable danger to the seams of his tightly filled breeches, Gonzalez had taken over the making of breakfast. Mixing cornmeal, he slapped out tortillas to wrap around fried peccary with a quickness and economy of movement which put Eleanora’s efforts to shame. Slim, Kurt, and their guide, Molina, were already eating, standing about with their breakfast in their hands, washing it down with hot coffee. Jean-Paul was nowhere to be seen, but the sound of voices rang from the grassy savanna where they had left the horses.

  Beyond the radiance of the fire’s warmth the valley was filled with a layer of mist. It hovered closest over the lake, made thicker by the sullen smoke of a second fire near the edge of the water. There was movement among the mist, and Eleanora went still, straining her eyes to penetrate the swirling vapor. It was only deer, a pair of does, and a fawn, coming to drink.

  The clop of horses’ hooves moving at a slow walk heralded the arrival of Sanchez and Pablo. They led four horses, a pack animal and three mounts, on one of which rode Juanita. She slumped over the horse’s neck, a pitiable figure with her face battered and swollen beyond recognition. Someone had thrown a blanket over her, but it had slipped down, exposing her blouse hanging in tatters about her neck and sticking in shreds to the lacerated and bloody flesh of her back. A rawhide lariat was tied about her waist and then around the horse with several hitches to hold her in place. Her eyes were closed, she may even have been unconscious. If she felt the pain that was hers, she gave no outward sign.

  Biting the inside of her lip, Eleanora averted her eyes. Slim, moving with his loping stride, approached with a plate and two cups of coffee. She took the cup of hot liquid, but shook her head decisively at the food. Luis, accepting his cup, nodded at Juanita.

  “She has signed the confession?”

  “She has,” the plainsman said grimly.

  “You had better give her something to drink if you intend to get her back down to Granada.”

  “Coffee is all there is.” Slim gave a laconic shrug, glancing at Eleanora from the corner of his eye.

  “That will have to do then,” Luis told him.

  “Slim?” Eleanora said as the man began to turn away. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “My brother. Have you seen him?”

  “You’ll find him around on the side of the house, ma’am, where he went to puke up his guts after finishing off the last bottle of my supply of rye. But I wouldn’t advise you going to look. He ain’t a pretty sight. He fell down around there, and we just let him lay until he gets through sleeping it off. It seemed the best thing, all things considered.”

  Eleanora dropped her gaze from the man’s far-seeing gray-blue eyes with their hidden contempt. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

  Pablo, his sombrero sitting at a jaunty angle on his head, led the small procession out of the valley, pulling the pack-horse behind him. Next came Juanita, with Sanchez, his hatchet face grim, bringing up the rear. At some council she had not been aware of they had decided only two should return with the woman to Granada. Though good strategy, no doubt, the tactic did not speak very highly of their confidence in the mission, El
eanora thought as she watched them go. Would William Walker listen to them, or was Niña Maria’s sway over him too great to allow him to undo what she had done? There was nothing they could do except wait and see. Staring down into the muddy grounds in the bottom of her cup, she could find no hope to support the waiting.

  The rising sun climbed to the level of the mountain tops that ringed the valley, peering over them with a red and bleary eye. Its rays plumbed the mist, striking copper gleams across the surface of the lake, catching a last glimpse of the figures on horseback grown small with distance. The sun had turned the pale face of Kurt, as he squatted on his saddle beside the fire and watched Eleanora through narrowed eyes, a bright and unbecoming shade of carmine.

  Eleanora turned to Luis. “You may as well come back in and lie down. There is nothing else to do.”

  He did not argue.

  The first week passed quickly and without serious incident. It was pleasant in the valley, with warm days and cool nights. In other circumstances they might have been able to relax, even to lose some of their weariness.

  There was little chance of their starving. Slim, taking a pack-horse, went hunting, returning with venison for a welcome change from the peccary. Molina introduced wild berries and roots into their diet, though they drew the line at the iguana lizard he surprised nosing around the hut and wrestled to the ground. Much disappointed, he withdrew to the lakeside to cook and eat his prize alone.

  Jean-Paul had survived the night of Juanita’s torture in his own way. The liquor to continue in that manner was not available, but it did not seem necessary. He sat around with his hands dangling between his legs, doing nothing, seeing nothing. He did not talk unless addressed directly, and he hardly ate. Sometimes a look of unleashed horror would spring into his eyes, and he would jump up to walk bareheaded out across the valley, even in the glare of the midday sun, striding, breaking into a run as if pursued.