“Can’t you?” Eleanora asked quietly.
“Maybe I could, if I had a woman like you behind me,” he told her with a disarming smile. “Now don’t go all stiff and cold on me. Anyway, it was a wasted trip. Commodore Vanderbilt refused to see me. Said he had no time for failures. A low blow, that, but I suppose the man with victory in his fist can say what he pleases.”
“Victory?” Eleanora asked, her head coming up.
“The nearest thing to it. Minister Wheeler, who rashly took it upon himself to recognize Walker’s regime after the election, has been recalled to Washington by the secretary of state for a reprimand, and asked to turn in his resignation. Hard on old Wheeler, considering that until the last few weeks he had every reason to believe the U.S. Government would applaud his move. The wings of the American Eagle have been spread over the former Mexican territories of Texas and California; why not Nicaragua — or Central America, for that matter? I’ll tell you why not; because Spain and France have both announced they are sending sloops-of-war to watch the shores of Central America. Chile and Peru have pledged monetary support for the states allied against Walker, and England has on the high seas at this moment a squadron of thirteen ships manned by twenty-five hundred men pledged to protect British interests in the area. The climate for expansion, you perceive, is not right. Walker has been abandoned by his country.”
“But — he has not been defeated on the field?” Eleanora asked, a worried look in her emerald eyes.
“Not yet. I’ll have to say — if you’ll pardon the cockfighting parlance — that Walker shows as game as a bantam rooster. There is a rumor that he has declared slavery legal in Nicaragua, an obvious attempt to court the favor of the Southern contingent in Congress so they will sway the government in his behalf — or failing that, secede, as they have been threatening for years, and join him. I think he will find that was a mistake. Slavery has been illegal down there for thirty years. Britain and France, to say nothing of Washington, won’t stand for a return to it. No, I’d say we got out of Nicaragua in the — pardon — nick of time. Something besides the temperature is about to get hot down there!”
Neville went on to talk of other things, but Eleanora gave him only a small portion of her attention. When, realizing her self-absorption, he finally took himself off, she sat for a long time staring at nothing, thinking of Grant and Mazie and John and the troupe, of Walker and Colonel Henry and Doctor Jones and all of the others still in Granada. She wondered what they were doing and what they felt and if they ever thought of her. And she longed with an almost frightening intensity to be with them.
It would not have been the best place for her. A day or two before, while standing on a stool trying to match a scrap of material for new wall hangings in her boudoir to the drapes, she had turned faint. Her old nurse had been near to steady her and lead her to a chair.
“Sit still, Mam’zelle Eleanora,” she had said, giving her the title she had used since childhood. “It will pass away soon.”
“I feel so silly,” Eleanora had laughed with a shaky sound, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“It’s a common complaint among women who are married, chère. Like I suspect these weeks, me. You going to have a bébé.”
A baby, Grant’s child. Thinking back, she knew her nurse was right. In the haste and turmoil of leaving Granada, and the determined busyness of the last few weeks, she had not stopped to consider.
Alone, Eleanora had slowly removed Luis’s ring from her finger and unclasped the medal of St. Michael from her neck. She had often thought, when a bleak mood was upon her, that she had more to remember Luis by than she had the man she loved. That was true no longer.
After that morning, Neville was a frequent visitor. With his connections and mobility, he often had details of the progress of the war in Central America which were not mentioned in the press. As the summer turned to fall he kept her informed on the movement of the armies of Guatemala, Honduras, and San Salvador. For a time it looked as though internal disputes would prevent a concerted attack, and then in early November Costa Rica was able once more to enter the fray.
Within days had come the word that Walker, in a move to protect the Transit Line over which would come his reinforcement in the way of new recruits, had evacuated Granada. Unwilling to leave the town as a stronghold of the allied forces, he had left behind his second in command and a detachment of three hundred men with orders to destroy it.
The allies had attacked the burning town as soon as possible in an effort to halt the destruction. They were thrown back once with heavy losses, then the Guatemalan army had advanced to take possession of Guadalupe Church. The colonel in command had stormed the church, routing the defenders, but his men, with over a hundred women, children, sick and injured, had been besieged in the church by the superior forces of the enemy. For nineteen days they held out, subsisting on horse and mule meat and a dwindling ration of flour and coffee. The dead from the fighting in and around the church were left unburied. With the terrible stench of putrefaction came cholera. Yellow fever, sunstroke, smoke inhalation — it began to look as if disease and exposure would carry off the defenders before they could be relieved. Then on December 12, approximately two hundred and fifty new recruits plus those seasoned veterans who wanted to volunteer for the job landed the lake steamer Virgin above Granada during the night. They stormed the barricades and joined the others within the church. The allies, convinced they were under assault by Walker’s entire field force, withdrew. Within twenty-four hours everyone left alive in the church was loaded on the Virgin and taken to safety. Behind them lay the smoldering ruins of the town and a tattered rawhide banner fluttering in the wind bearing the words Agui fue Granada. “Here was Granada.”
For several days there was no word of the dead. People lined up outside the office of the Crescent, waiting to hear of sons, husbands, fathers, uncles, and cousins who had gone as “colonists” to Nicaragua. Eleanora waited with the rest. When the news sheet was in her trembling hands she quickly scanned the list of more than two hundred names. Grant’s name was not among the men. She sighed, reading lower, and then her eyes blurred with tears. Among the women was printed the name of Mazie Brentwood Barclay, dead of yellow fever while heroically nursing the wounded and the children caught within the Church of Guadalupe.
The months which followed were a time of waiting for Eleanora; waiting for news from Nicaragua, waiting for her child to be born. As the weeks slipped away the sensation concerning her identity faded, replaced by other, more exciting scandal. The fact that after Christmas she ceased to go out and about due to her advancing pregnancy was, no doubt, a contributing factor. She spent her time refurbishing the old town house, making it livable, sewing for her child, and listening for the sound of the newsboys in the streets so that she could send a servant hurrying out to purchase a news sheet while the ink was still damp upon it.
There was no good news to be found. In early January the San Juan River was successfully blockaded, cutting off supplies and men for Walker. While the young gallants of New Orleans cavorted in the streets in Mardi Gras costumes under a banner declaring themselves as the newly organized Mystic Krewe of Comus, Walker and his men were left with short rations and dwindling ammunition to face the combined armies of Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and San Salvador. Walker’s army consisted of less than a thousand men at this point. They were opposed by twenty times that number. In the face of such odds, desertion began to bleed the strength of the phalanx.
According to Neville, Vanderbilt was responsible for much of Walker’s woes. He had hired and equipped a team of professional soldiers to lead the Central American forces, giving direct payment and the promise of loans totaling millions to make the men acceptable to the proud and hot-tempered Central Americans. That leadership was responsible for the river blockade and molding the different armies into a single cohesive force. In addition, Vanderbilt had convinced the leaders of the allies of the lack of wisdo
m in their policy of a war to the death. Thereafter, prisoners and deserters were offered free passage home on Vanderbilt ships.
It was a wearing spring with endless alarms as the filibusters engaged in a series of small battles, repulsing the enemy again and again. In April those American women and children still at Rivas with Walker were taken out under the protection of a guard of Marines from the United States sloop-of-war St. Mary which had been hovering off the coast for two months. The end, all conceded, was very near.
For Eleanora, the end of a part of her waiting was even nearer. On the evening of the ninth of April she dragged herself up to bed. She was awakened before midnight by the first pangs of birth. Before dawn, long before the doctor finally arrived, she was delivered by her nurse of a beautiful, healthy, perfectly formed son.
The world narrowed immediately to the walls of her bedchamber and the cradle that sat beside her bed. She received no guests and little news. Her time and thoughts and cares were taken up by the lusty appetite, the cries of her child, and the rituals involved in keeping him clean, sweet smelling, and comfortably asleep. He was so infinitely vulnerable. The only thing which mattered was to keep him safe and content. Sometimes, lying with his small warm body against her own, she would feel a wash of love so strong it had the feel of an agonizing fear.
A month later, on May 12, the baby was quietly baptized in a private ceremony held at home. The name chosen, after much soul-searching, was Charles Michael de Laredo y Villars. As Eleanora smilingly wiped away the water from her indignant son’s face, she touched the medallion of St. Michael she had placed around his neck. Luis would not mind the using of his name as a protective gesture this one last time. The child had been born nine months, two and a half weeks after his death, not an impossibility from a physical standpoint; babies were often born a little later than expected. The legal limit for a posthumous child did not concern her since she had no intention of making any such claim. This resolve she held despite Neville’s representation of the advantages to be achieved for her son in representing Michael to the de Laredo family as the rightful Conde.
Neville, though uninvited, had put in an appearance at the baptism. Bearing the traditional silver cup and priest’s fee in the bottom of a cone of sugared almonds, he had played the part of godfather to her child. It was impossible, after that, to keep from asking him to participate in the small family dinner which she had arranged afterward. Uncle Narciso, braving his son’s censure, was to come in for the gala meal, though he had declined to be godfather on the excuse, weak to her ears, that he could not afford it. As if turned out, her uncle never put in an appearance. She was grateful to Neville, then, for keeping the small celebration from falling flat.
He did not stay long. Eleanora’s duties as a mother interrupted their after-dinner coffee as her nurse, now heart and soul Michael’s nursemaid, came to tell her he was crying for her.
She tarried long enough to see Neville to the door. His hand was on the knob when he asked, “I suppose you have already heard the news?”
“No, what?” she said absently, her mind attuned to the faint cries issuing from the upstairs bedroom.
“About the surrender?”
He had her full attention now. “Tell me,” she said, a sudden strain in her voice.
“After negotiations by Commander Davis of the St. Mary, Walker and his men laid down their guns.”
“When?”
“The first day of May. He and his officers were taken to Panama aboard the American ship. They are expected to arrive here in New Orleans any day now.”
The steamship bearing William Walker home docked in New Orleans on May 27, 1857. People thronged the levee and the streets leading to it. There was such a crowd of jostling spectators that Eleanora’s carriage could not move, and only by the use of the most shocking language and ear-splitting cracks of his whip was her coachman able to force a passage to a vantage point where she could see without leaving the hooded victoria.
The sight of red uniform tunics, numbering perhaps sixteen, their gold buttons and fringe bright in the warm sun, brought a tightness to her throat. She had to blink several times before she could make out the slight figure of the general, a blackbird among cardinals in his dark frockcoat. And then behind him she saw Grant, standing straight and stern-visaged, looking as gaunt as when he had been ill with the wound in his shoulder. Dazzled by the sunlight, he looked out over the crowd. As his gaze passed over her carriage, Eleanora drew back, though she was almost certain he could not penetrate the shadow beneath the hood.
At the sight of Walker, a great roar went up from the crowd, a sound of welcome, admiration, and approbation, as though he had returned as the conquering hero rather than in defeat. There were shouts of hurrah and hats thrown into the air. Small boys yelled and screamed and ladies applauded with gloved hands. A dozen men surged forward as, after smiling and waving to the crowd, the president of Nicaragua moved toward the gangplank. They lifted Walker on their shoulders and bore him through the crowd the short distance to where a carriage waited. Several of his officers pushed after them to join him. The rest crowded into a second vehicle. Trailed by the main body of his enthusiastic well-wishers, the carriage moved off in the direction of the St. Charles Hotel.
Even then, Walker was not allowed to rest after his weary journey. The people stood outside the hotel cheering and chanting for his appearance. He was forced to make not one but two speeches before they were finally satisfied and began to disperse.
Those who were not privileged to hear him on that occasion were given the opportunity two days later. At a great mass meeting on Canal Street, Walker, flanked by the American flag on one side and his own red-starred flag on the other, spoke for two hours. His face shining with perspiration in the light of the gas lamps, he praised the courage and strength of his men and the warmth and hospitality of the common people of Nicaragua whose benefactor he considered himself to be. From there he plunged into a wholesale denunciation of the people he considered to be the cause of his downfall. He railed against the tyrannical might of Vanderbilt, the shortsightedness of President Buchanan in not coming to his aid, with a hint of graft in public office in official Washington’s preference for the commodore’s viewpoint in the affair. He was critical of Commander Charles H. Davis, chief officer on the sloop-of-war St. Mary, claiming he sold the phalanx out during the negotiations with the Central American allies and blaming the commander for refusing to transport the remainder of his men to Panama, leaving them to make their own way. Lastly, he attacked Morgan and Garrison, the two men he had been at such pains to favor in the takeover of the Transit Line, for not forcing their way through the blockade to bring troops and supplies to relieve the phalanx.
Standing among the crowd with her nursemaid pulling anxiously at her sleeve, urging her to come away, Eleanora could not hear all of William Walker’s impassioned speech. Still, what she heard disturbed her. It would be too much to expect the man to be unaffected by his experiences. At the same time, the shrillness of his voice, the uncontrolled nature of his diatribe seemed to smack of a man at the edge of his reason. It is never pleasant to lose when victory is almost within one’s grasp, and Walker must, she thought, be extremely weary, but he would have been better served if someone had represented to him the wisdom of a long period of reflection before he began to try to justify his defeat. His last words reinforced her views as nothing else could. William Walker concluded his speech with a personal promise to return to the fight in Nicaragua as soon as the men and resources could be raised.
While she was standing, stupefied by this announcement, Eleanora’s nurse caught her arm and drew her away, muttering under her breath. Her mistress was crazed for uniforms, she said with some force. She could not stop Mam’zelle — her, she was too old — but she could see that young M’sieur Michael was given his proper care and nourishment before his mother who had forgotten him went running off to the ball for the military gentlemen.
The event to wh
ich her nurse referred, a reception for Walker with a ball to follow, was to be held in the public ballroom of the St. Charles Hotel. It was to be the event of the spring season with a guest list numbering several hundred, including the governor of the state, Robert Wickliffe, the Baroness Pontalba, and representatives from the best of the Creole as well as American families in the city.
For the occasion Eleanora had ordered a new gown of white tulle banded about the deep scoop of the neckline, sleeves, and at intervals down the enormous skirt with wide white satin ribbon. Between her breasts she wore a corsage of fresh red roses backed by silver leaves, and just beneath it, reaching from her shoulder to her left side, a wide sash of red-edged white ribbon to which was pinned her medal of valor, Walker’s gold star on a black-and-red ribbon. Her hair she wore parted in the center and drawn back into a chignon of ringlets. Tucked into the side of it, just below her ear, she had pinned another, smaller nosegay of rosebuds. The red roses, worn for Walker, should have been a terrible clash with her hair. Instead, they seemed somehow to drain away the fiery sheen, leaving it the burnished color of newly minted gold coins. And if her gown was deliberately reminiscent of the one she had left hanging in the wardrobe of the palacio, who was to know except herself — and one other; the man who had bought it?
“The Condesa de Laredo!”
To Eleanora’s ears, the sound of her name as she was announced echoed over the quiet hiss of the gas from the chandeliers and the polite murmur of voices like a clarion call. She was aware of the turning of heads as she gave William Walker her hand, but she ignored them, greeting him with the deference that was his due.
A faint tremor ran through his fingers, though his face betrayed no surprise as his gray eyes rested upon her, dropping to the medal she wore and then lifting to meet her clear green gaze. “You are looking well, Eleanora,” he said in calm accents. “It is a pleasure to see you again.”
Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2 Page 84
