Wind of Destiny

by Christopher Nicole

  ‘Excuse me, senor,’ the valet said. ‘I encountered His Excellency downstairs, and he asked me to deliver this note to you.’

  It had been lying on the tray all the time. Joe looked at it as if it might have been a bomb.

  ‘Your answer,’ Jerry suggested. ‘You simply have to read it, you know.’

  ‘Yes.’ Joe took the envelope, knew at once it was from Christina herself; the handwriting was that of a woman, and it had a faint scent of perfume. His heart pounding quite painfully, he slit the envelope, and extracted the single sheet of paper inside, breathing a sigh of relief as he discovered she had written in English.

  ‘My dear, dear Joseph McGann,’ Christina had written. ‘My father has informed me of your wish to obtain my hand in marriage, a desire of which I should perhaps have been more aware. I would like you to know that I am more flattered and honoured than I have ever been before in my life, and that I will cherish your proposal from this moment until the day I die. I would also like you to know that there is a great part of my mind and my body which cries out for me to accept your so generous and loving offer, regardless of the circumstances in which I find myself. Alas, those circumstances make it necessary for me to refuse the dictates of my heart, and it is with the greatest sadness that I must decline your offer of marriage. In case you think otherwise, my heart is not engaged elsewhere. It is simply my sworn resolve never to marry, and this resolve cannot be changed.

  ‘I know you are too much of an American gentleman to wish to increase my grief by discussing this matter in person, or to raise it with me on any future occasion, or to press my unhappy father upon the subject. That we must often meet, during the course of our lives, as we are to be related by marriage, is one of the few solaces left to me. To feel that I must also avoid your company, would be an insurmountable blow to my happiness.

  ‘I also know that you will treat this letter as a private and confidential expression of my feelings, and wish to tell you how certain I am that you will soon forget me, in the sense of your proposal, and find yourself a wife in every way worthy of your love, which I am not.

  ‘Yours most affectionately, your sister-in-law elect,

  ‘Christina Carlotta Diaz Vasquez de Obrigar.’

  ‘Well?’ Jerry demanded, as Joe reached the end of the page.

  Joe crumpled the letter into a ball, then struck a match, and slowly burned it in the ashtray on his dressing table. ‘The lady says no,’ he told his father, in a voice he hardly recognised as his own.

  Chapter 5

  The Plantation — 1894-95

  The railway from Havana followed the very backbone of Cuba, along first of all the north coast to Matanzas — the scene of one of the great naval battles of history, Joe McGann recalled, when in 1628 the Dutch Admiral Pieter Pieterszoon Hein chased an entire Spanish treasure fleet into the bay and destroyed it, escaping with more wealth than any freebooter in history — then turning inland to Colon, Santa Clara, and after a tedious but breathtaking journey through the mountains, arriving at the city of Camaguey. From there it plunged down into the lakes and swamps surrounding Bayama, before, almost a hundred miles further on, it arrived at San Luis junction, where a branch line turned south to Santiago de Cuba. From Santiago there was another small branch line which actually ran as far as Daiquiri itself, for the small port was much used by the local sugar planters, and especially the Diazes of Obrigar, for shipping their produce.

  The journey, with its innumerable stops and starts, its long siestas, its leisurely conversations between drivers and conductors and station masters, or anyone else who wished to chat, took five days, but Joe, having been unable to find a ship bound from Tampa or Pensacola for Santiago itself, had been forced to settle for the short sea crossing from Florida to Havana, and then had no choice but to use the railroad if he wished to reach Obrigar in time for the wedding, even if the journey, going and coming, would so eat into his furlough that at most he would spend two days at the plantation. This time he was travelling alone, as the rest of the family had gone on ahead.

  If he wished to reach Obrigar for the wedding. There had been several occasions during the past six months when he had all but written to Rafael Diaz, at least to excuse himself from acting the part of best man. But as it was unthinkable not to attend the wedding of his only sister, he had reflected that he might as well do so in a position of importance, rather than as a mere guest. Besides, being best man meant that Christina would have to walk with her hand on his arm. Indeed, he would even have to kiss her.

  Did he want to do that, knowing that he could never do more? Would it not have been better never to see her again. He had no idea. He did know that never to see her again was an impossibility, as she was soon to be his sister-in-law, and that for a thirty-two-year-old naval officer, whose career had just begun to open in front of him, to be experiencing the tortures of a lovesick schoolboy was absurd. In fact, the memory of that letter had not interfered with his work. Rather had he become more absorbed in it, in his determination to shut out all other thoughts. He had already left the Houston, and was now installed in Norfolk, Virginia, at the navy yard where the Maine was slowly taking shape. No captain had been appointed to the new battleship as yet, and he was therefore effectively in command, spending hours each day discussing every aspect of the vessel with the draughtsmen and building superintendents, the engineers and armourers, determined that she would be the finest ship ever to put to sea. And then returning home to his lonely quarters to attempt to study naval history, strategy and tactics, once again trying to shut out the anguish which kept threatening to take over his mind.

  What made the situation so unbearable was that he still did not know why he had been refused — or even if the refusal actually was as final as she had indicated. Both the Diazes seemed to have been in favour of the match — unless Arnaldo was unutterably two-faced and had presented the proposal in a totally negative light; certainly Carlotta had pressed his hand and embraced him most warmly when he had said goodbye. Rafael, of course, had known nothing of the matter, and neither had Ma nor Toni.

  While Christina herself had been unchanged, pensively charming, as ever, except when she had said goodbye, and then he had been sure her eyes had been moist. So … why? Was she simply not prepared to give up her luxurious life on Obrigar to become the wife of a sailor-cum-farmer? That would be to suppose she was not worthy of his love, and he did not accept that for a moment. There had to be another reason, and he was more certain than ever that it had to do with Lisle. But for the life of him he could not decide what.

  And now he was returning to Obrigar, for a weekend of mixed ecstasy and agony. And down to last November he had counted himself the most sober, level-headed of men, who had always smiled with gentle condescension at his fellow officers when they found themselves embroiled in amorous misery.

  He sighed, and relit his pipe, and stared out of the window, and discovered that the train was stopping. According to his reckoning they could not have reached Daiquiri, but now there was a screeching of brakes. He got up to look out of the window, and was visited by the conductor, who came almost crashing through the door of the reserved compartment. ‘Down, senor, down,’ he shouted. ‘There are bandits.’

  At that very moment Joe saw several mounted men, armed with rifles and with bandoliers slung over their shoulders, riding up beside the train, and even as he watched, one pointed his rifle into the air and fired. Joe sat down with a bump, less because of any fear of being hit than because at that moment the train came to a halt with a tremendous jerk.

  ‘Guerrillas,’ the conductor moaned from the floor, where he had been thrown, and where he had apparently decided to stay. ‘They will shoot us all.’

  Joe wondered if the frightened little man was serious. He was not armed, save for his sword, which was on the rack above his head; one did not take one’s service revolver to a wedding, even in Cuba. Although the dress sword was a serviceable weapon, he didn’t like the idea of opposing it
to a rifle, so remained sitting, listening to shouts and screams from further down the train, as well as the occasional shot — there was no way of knowing, whether these were directed at people or into the air — while more horsemen appeared outside his window, brandishing guns. For all the heat, he had rolled the window up some time earlier, to prevent the soot from the engine from blowing into the compartment and soiling everything. Now he certainly was not going to roll it down, however much the men might gesticulate. At the same time, he felt rather pleased with the utter calmness of his reactions; for all his years in the navy, the several storms he had survived at sea, he had never actually been under fire, or under the threat of fire, before — even on his West Indian patrols he had never been one of the lucky ones to have his ship sight a pirate — there were few of those remaining in the Caribbean, anyway.

  Spurs jingled, and boots crashed on the corridor. The door of the compartment was still open, and now two men stared at him. They were very like the men outside, dressed in cotton shirts and trousers, wide-brimmed straw hats on their heads, machetes hanging from their belts. They might have been peons from Obrigar, but for the rifles and bandoliers.

  ‘You,’ they told the guard. ‘Up.’

  The terrified man scrambled to his feet, hands held high. ‘Do not shoot,’ he begged. ‘Do not shoot. I am for the revolution. Viva Marti! Viva Gomez! Viva Garcia! I can tell you, senors, Pedro Garcia is a friend of mine.’

  ‘You are a rat,’ said the first man. ‘Pedro Garcia is a friend of yours? I am General Garcia, you little runt.’

  ‘You? But … ’ the man licked his lips.

  ‘Outside with him,’ Garcia told his companion. ‘Whip him for dishonesty.’ He looked at Joe, who had remained seated. ‘I wish your money.’

  Joe shrugged. ‘Help yourself. There’s not much.’

  Garcia frowned. ‘You are not Spanish. You are American?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And so large. You must be the Lieutenant McGann.’

  ‘Right again,’ Joe said.

  ‘Ha ha,’ Garcia said. ‘You are on your way to Obrigar for the wedding. Oh, keep your money, my friend. The Americans are my friends. So are the people of Obrigar.’

  ‘Well, that’s very nice of you,’ Joe said.

  Garcia pointed. ‘You tell them that Pedro Garcia has sent you to them, safe and unharmed, as a wedding present for Rafael. You tell them that, Lieutenant McGann.’ Then he grew serious. ‘And when we start to kill the Spanish, you come back to Cuba, with your ships, and fight for our cause, eh?’

  ‘Who knows,’ Joe said. ‘Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘Then you and I will be friends forever,’ Garcia said. ‘Adios, American Lieutenant. Enjoy your visit to Cuba.’ He left the compartment, and left Joe to some very serious thoughts.

  *

  ‘What a thing to have happened,’ Arnaldo Diaz complained. ‘Two days before the wedding. Oh, that Garcia is a thug and a monster. Now the place will be crawling with police.’

  ‘He described himself as your friend,’ Joe remarked.

  ‘Good heavens, what impertinence,’ Arnaldo declared. ‘The effrontery of these people.’

  ‘Anyway, it mightn’t be a bad thing to have a few cops around,’ Jerry McGann observed. ‘We don’t want this Garcia character paying us a visit during the ceremony, do we?’

  ‘Oh, he would never … ’ Rafael began, and then bit his lip.

  ‘I am sure he would never risk it,’ his father agreed. ‘Anyway, as I say, by then the whole area will be crawling with Lumbrera’s policemen. Robbing a train, indeed.’

  Toni felt like stamping her foot in anger. Trust Joe to come along and steal all her limelight. She had so wanted nothing to go wrong with her wedding, nothing even to distract her from the great event. She had felt she was getting on top of the situation, over Christmas, and during the months of preparing, of being fitted with her gown — yards and yards of white satin and lace and tulle — trying on the veil, in which her McGann grandmother had been married, almost yellow now with age, being given long and serious and exciting talks by Ma on what to expect from her husband, and of her husband — and not only on her wedding night — feeling the excitement slowly building … and the memory of Jack Lisle slowly dying. She had been able to feel horrified at that terrible last thought on the night before leaving Obrigar.

  That was what she wanted to have happen, at least in the sober atmosphere of Long Island in the winter. She told herself that Lisle had so attracted her because he had been so totally unlike her concept of him. Figures bent on vengeance had always been dank and sinister in the books she had read. Of course, there had been something just a little sinister about Jack — but that had made him the more attractive. So she had just about flipped her lid. Thank God Joe was the only one to have noticed. She blamed her upbringing. It had been just too sheltered. And suddenly to take her away from the farm to such an exotic and romantic place, and expose her to two such exotic and romantic men at the same time … the wonder was that she hadn't done something stupid.

  Jack Lisle was not for her. She was going to marry Rafael Diaz, who was just about the sweetest and most handsome boy she had ever known.

  Thus Long Island. But her heart had been pounding fit to burst when they had returned here a week ago. Not only because it was the first time she had seen Rafael in all that time. They had written to each other every week, and his letters had quite made her blush as she had read them in the privacy of her room on the farm. Certainly she had not been able to match them in her replies — not that she would have wanted to. Such terms of endearment, varying from praise of her legs and even her breasts, which he had never seen, to her lips and her hair and her eyes, were all very well for a man to express. But hardly for a young lady.

  Which was something else she had had to study very hard to become. Ma had absolutely forbidden trousers, at any time, on their return from Obrigar, or riding astride, and she had had to put her hair up every night for dinner. ‘Of course,’ Ma had said. ‘On Obrigar there will be a maid to do it for you.’

  Ma was happily reliving, vicariously, the glories of her own girlhood. Perhaps even her own marriage, in such southern splendour to a handsome young naval officer, just before her world had fallen apart.

  Well, her world was not going to fall apart. Toni was determined. There was no way that it could. To see Rafael again in the flesh, have him embrace her and murmur some of his so romantic bits of nonsense in her ear, to know that in another few days she would be his wife, to inhale the always vaguely sweet smell of the plantation, feel the warmth of the breeze on her cheek, give Christina a hug — soon they would be sisters — greet the maids and butlers in fluent Spanish, as she had worked hard all winter mastering the language, with surprising ease, looking around herself and know that this was her home, now and for the rest of her life, and really explore it for the first time, the endless stretches of corridors on the second floor, where were situated the guest bedrooms and the sewing rooms and odd little cubby holes where no one might have entered for years, the splendid luxury of the main bedrooms on the first floor, the wide sweep of the polished gallery which fronted them and led to the great staircase, the huge area of the open plan ground floor, where dining merged insensibly into the drawing room, and only the men’s smoking and card room, and Don Arnaldo’s study, were actually closed off, and then into the kitchen, built at the back and away from the house to lessen the risk of fire, where Salvador ruled, and beyond which were the servants’ quarters and the vegetable garden, separated from the house garden inside the gate by a high stone wall … here was an empire to be ruled.

  And then to see Jack Lisle climbing the front stairs to pay his respects.

  Now she was more prepared, could face him without that tell-tale flush. ‘Miss McGann,’ he had said. ‘Dare I say that you are more lovely now than six months ago?’

  As you are more attractive, and dashing, and sinister, she thought. ‘Well,
I am six months older,’ she pointed out. And thus less susceptible to handsome strangers, she reminded herself. And then told herself that there was nothing wrong in being affected by Jack, so long as it helped to make her more attractive for Rafael, when the night came. Only that mattered. And to think that it could be spoiled by some crazy Cuban bandit …

  For Don Arnaldo was proved right. Within twenty-four hours the plantation was swarming with policemen, and a detachment of troops had apparently moved into Daiquiri. ‘It is a serious business,’ Colonel Lumbrera said, reading Joe’s statement. ‘But you actually met this scoundrel Garcia?’

  ‘I met someone who claimed to be General Garcia,’ Joe replied, carefully.

  ‘Then you can give me a description, eh?’ Joe studied the colonel. ‘Indeed I can. He was short, slightly plump, and had long moustaches. He was dressed as a peon.’

  ‘Ha,’ Lumbrera said. ‘That could be anyone. But he is growing too bold for his own good. Robbing a train! That is virtually rebellion. I can tell you that this time we shall be ready for them, Senor McGann. Oh, yes, this time they shall not be let off so leniently.’

  ‘I had no idea they were let off leniently the last time,’ Joe observed.

  ‘You think not? Oh, we were gentle. We worried about public opinion. This time, we shall hang one of the dogs from every tree in Cuba. Oh, yes. And their women beside them.’ ‘You quite make my skin crawl, Colonel,’ Don Arnaldo said. ‘I trust you do not mean your men to remain on my plantation during the wedding? My guests commence arriving tonight.’

  ‘You are not afraid of being robbed, eh? Just as Lieutenant McGann was not robbed. I should be interested to know why you, alone out of all the passengers on the train, senor, was neither robbed nor beaten.’

  ‘Because I am an American,’ Joe said. He had of course repeated nothing of his conversation with Garcia in his statement. ‘General Garcia expressed his hope that should the revolution start again, we Americans would support his people in the field.’