by Henke, Shirl
At least since Lucero's return, the priest could no longer accuse her of usurping his role, and the animosity between Father Salvador and her husband was so intense her sins had paled by comparison. With that thought to fortify her, she knocked on the door of his study and entered when he called out for her to do so.
Father Salvador looked up from his breviary, his pale eyes fixed on her intently. “Good morning, Doña Mercedes. What may I do for you? Is there something special you wish to confess?”
“No, Father, I haven't come to make confession.”
“Well, what then? You've missed the mass I celebrated in Doña Sofia's room an hour ago. It would be of comfort to her if you would join her more often.”
Mercedes grimaced inwardly. The very last thing her mother-in-law wished was for her to be present each morning. She barely tolerated her son's wife on Sundays. “I've come about Rosario, Father.”
“Rosario? You mean the child your husband brought here?” His pale face reddened.
“His daughter, yes.”
“But not yours,” he put in, studying her keenly.
“She is my husband's child, an innocent, beautiful little girl, and I'm concerned for her future.”
“Ah,” he interjected, walking around the desk to place a consoling hand on her shoulder.
It felt stiffly unnatural to Mercedes.
“It would be best if you had children of your own. In time the Lord in his mercy may provide. Perhaps if you prayed to Our Lady—”
Now it was her face with the heightened color. “No—that is, of course I want more children, but that has nothing to do with caring for Rosario.”
“I realize your husband's responsibility toward the girl, but it would have been far wiser if he had provided for her elsewhere than at Gran Sangre. Flaunting his infidelities has been a painful reminder to his mother of his and his father's shortcomings. I would think you, too—”
“Rosario is a little girl—not a painful reminder of anything,” she retorted angrily. “She is Doña Sofia's first grandchild.”
He shook his head, for once not at all the sternly self-assured naysayer, but an uncertain old man. “Yes, yes, I've thought of that...prayed on it a great deal. She understands the Alvarado family's responsibility for the little girl...but the child's mother was a mixed blood.”
“That makes Rosario none the less Lucero's daughter.” There was cold accusation in her voice.
He sighed. “No, it does not. I have tried to gain Doña Sofia's acceptance of that fact, but her son was never an easy child himself, always a trial to her as was his father. She finds it difficult to accept the idea of an illegitimate child living in the family quarters of the great house. She is old, used to the traditional ways.”
“And what about you, Father? Are you too old to change as well?” she asked, shifting the focus to him, for she sensed his guilt and confusion. Let Sofia be damned for the hypocrite she is.
His chilly blue eyes softened the tiniest bit. “I am an old man who has spent his life attempting to guide the spiritual welfare of the Obregón and Alvarado families, two of the noblest houses in Mexico. Now it is nearing time for me to turn my attention to the younger generation. In my grief for your mother-in-law, I have not been as diligent a counselor for you as I should have been.”
“I'm not the one who needs your counsel now, Father,” Mercedes said, surprised by the old priest's startling revelation. “It's Rosario.”
He looked puzzled. “Surely she has received Holy Baptism with the Ursulines.”
“Yes, of course,” she replied, dismissing the mistaken idea and blurting out her request. “I want you to teach Rosario to read and write. I know you didn't teach Lucero, but we can't afford private tutors now.”
He considered, then walked toward the small window facing out to the mountains where Lucero had ridden. “Have you discussed this with your husband?”
“No, but he was reading to her the same as I—I know he will wish it, too.”
“I do not mean to sound callous, but it was a mistake, his bringing the child to Gran Sangre. The hacendados will never accept her. If she is educated, raised as a criolla, what will happen to her when she is of marriageable age? Her expectations may be beyond what our society permits.” The old man's concern seemed genuine.
Mercedes could not argue with his logic for she knew what he said was true, but still she heard the voice of a lonely little girl saying, I only want to read. “As she grows up, we'll deal with the situation. Lucero has chosen to bring her into our home and asked her to address him as Papa. She will be raised with all the advantages of the Alvarado name.”
“But she will not have it,” he gently chided.
“I have heard there are ways legitimacy can be arranged,” she said hopefully.
“For natural sons in the absence of legal heirs, perhaps, but for a girl, it would not be easy even in ordinary times, and these are not ordinary times in which we live, Doña Mercedes.”
Her eyes grew haunted, thinking of Lucero's oblique references to the horrors of his wartime experiences. Quashing that thought, she asked doggedly, “Will you teach her, Father?”
His shoulders sagged wearily. “Bring Rosario to me after she has broken her fast and we will begin. I only pray she will prove a more tractable pupil than her father.”
With a small smile of triumph, Mercedes went in search of Lucero's daughter.
* * * *
For the next several days after Mercedes went out to the fields in the morning, Lupe took Rosario to Father Salvador for her lessons. Then just before the noon hour, Mercedes would return to the house to share luncheon, and take Rosario back to the riverside where her men toiled on the irrigation project. Bufón, the child's ever constant companion, watched her zealously.
‘‘When will my papa be back? He told Angelina it would be yesterday, but he isn't here,” Rosario said plaintively early one afternoon at the riverside.
Wiping the rivulets of perspiration from her eyes, Mercedes replied, “I'm not certain. When the vaqueros have to ride out so far, it sometimes takes longer than they can predict. Remember, Gran Sangre has over four million acres of land.”
The little girl's eyes widened as she tried to imagine four million of anything, an impossible feat for a child not yet five years old. Then abruptly switching back to her own earlier query, she said, “I miss him. Do you miss him, too?”
Mercedes was unprepared for the question and quickly glanced about to see if anyone else had overheard it, knowing how the servants gossiped about the marital problems of their patrón and patrona. No one was within earshot as she replied equivocally, “I've been wondering when he'll return.”
In fact she had been losing considerable sleep over Lucero's homecoming, knowing he would by now expect her to come to his bed again. After all, they did have their duty to the vaunted Alvarado name. Gran Sangre must have an heir. And since his return from the war, her husband was amazingly attentive to his responsibilities.
She had heard the servants comment on the long grueling hours he put in on horseback and had seen firsthand how dust-covered and bone weary he was, had even seen the rope burns on his hands and bruises on his body from working with half-wild cattle left to roam free until they were rounded up and driven into safe hiding. If his plan succeeded, the hacienda would actually have preserved a good number of cattle and even some superb saddle mounts.
If only her own project were going half so well. Bleakly she surveyed the irrigation ditch through the withering heat. They had dug the main channel only thirty yards after all these days of backbreaking labor. The soil was hard and dry, but the men were strong and willing to dig. They would have moved three times the distance but for the dense chaparral and prickly pear cactus that grew across the only low-lying area between the river and the arable soil they had cultivated for crops. The sharp spines and dense root systems had to be hacked away with machetes, leaving the workers cut and scratched. The scent of their blood brought th
e torment of flies and there was the ever present danger of infection in the hot climate.
The crops will all die before we reach them with water, she thought despairingly, looking up at the cloudless blinding azure of the noon sky. Then she felt the vibration of the horses' hooves before she spotted the dust cloud stirred up by the group of riders coming toward them.
“Don Lucero!” several of the men called out, recognizing the magnificent stallion her husband rode. Rosario joined the servants, who dropped their tools or paused from eating the last bites of their midday meal, to go greet the patrón. His wife alone held back, standing beneath the shade of the willow near the river, watching the joyous reunion.
Lucero picked up his daughter and spun her around to squeals of delight as Bufón whoofed loudly in welcome. She watched him wrestle affectionately with the big dog, wondering again what had wrought the mutual change in disposition between man and animal. Rosario clapped her hands and giggled at their antics, then joined in.
What a good father he 's proving to be, she thought, amazed. Who would have imagined that Lucero Alvarado would ever even look at his children, especially a by-blow he need never acknowledge. He had even gone to his daughter's room at night and read to her. Mercedes found it too much to reconcile with the dangerously angry man who had broken down her door in a drunken fit.
Then her husband whispered something in Rosario's ear. The child and Bufón remained behind as he walked past the riders watering their horses at the river's edge. He approached her. His hair was matted with sweat and his clothes plastered to his skin. Several fresh cuts and bruises on his hands attested to long and difficult hours working stock. He had shed the bandoleers crisscrossing his chest and opened his shirt, revealing sun-bronzed skin furred with black hair. He studied her through eyes narrowed against the sun's glare, his flat crowned hat pushed rakishly back on his head after playing with Rosario and Bufón. His expression revealed nothing.
“Hello, Mercedes.” He waited expectantly, knowing everyone surreptitiously watched them, waiting to see what she would do.
Her throat collapsed and her mouth was drier than the clouds of dust kicked up by the horses' hooves. He looked hard and dangerous. She could still conjure up the image of him standing in her doorway after smashing it in. “You're late. Rosario and Angelina hoped you'd return yesterday,” she finally managed to blurt out.
A sardonic smile creased his face. “And you, of course, hoped I never would.”
“Don't expect me to deny it,” she replied acerbically.
He laughed and stepped closer, his arm snaking out with amazing speed to clasp her about the waist and pull her to him. “For the benefit of our audience,” he murmured low as his lips came down on hers.
Chapter Ten
Mercedes stiffened at the sudden assault as his mouth took hers savagely. She could taste the salty tang of male sweat as his tongue plunged inside her lips and thrust across her teeth, brushing her tongue. Then abruptly he withdrew, raising his head and looking down at her with hooded eyes. She would have fallen if he had not been holding her up. His musky scent was tinged with tobacco and leather. The male smell permeated her senses as she held onto his biceps, bemused and breathless. The look of predatory hunger on his face was no longer masked. She could feel it arc between them like a lightning strike.
He took a lock of her hair in his fingers, brushing it from where it lay plastered by perspiration to her forehead. “You've been working too hard. Your nose is sunburned.”
Mercedes suddenly realized how dreadful she must look in an old muslin camisa and faded blue skirts, her leather peasants sandals caked with river mud, her hair ratty. “Your mother continually reminds me of my failure to maintain a proper degree of ladylike pallor.”
“I didn't intend that as a chastisement.” He released her, yet stood close, waiting to see if she would back away.
She did not. “Your father said mucking about in the dirt with peons was beneath an Alvarado.”
“As I'm certain you noted, my father could be something of a pompous ass as well as a lazy son of a bitch.”
She smiled in surprise. “I never expected you to say a word against your boyhood idol.”
His teeth gleamed whitely in a rakish grin. “Boys do grow up sooner or later...just as girls do.”
The sexual overtones of his words and his demeanor were unmistakable. Why did he not just go to Innocencia and have done with it? He wants you, an inner voice taunted. Ignoring it, she changed the subject. “You got the black stallion and his herd?”
“All safely penned up for the winter. No one, not even the Juaristas, will find them.”
“I only wish my project were as successful,” she said, looking out to where the peons hacked at the unyielding wall of spiky cacti and gnarled chaparral. “We've been digging for over a week and we aren't halfway there yet.”
“You need a more effective way to clear the brush.”
She looked at him crossly. “A well-directed lightning strike would be very helpful but I don't think you're in any position to arrange it.”
He threw back his head and that rich deep laugh again rumbled. “No, but my vaqueros might be able to do the next best thing.”
As Lucero walked across to the cluster of horsemen and issued instructions, Mercedes called Rosario to her. Bufón bounded beside the child. The three of them watched while he mounted Peltre and the others rounded up their horses from the riverbank. Then the men set to work with reatas, roping the big squat clumps of prickly pear. The ropes bit into the cactus, impervious to its lethal spines. Wrapping the reatas around their saddle horns, they spurred their horses, pulling up giant clumps of earth along with the plants.
“Oh, look! Papa and his men are making the ditch so much faster,” Rosario said, ignoring the dust clouds billowing around them.
Bufón ran out to the horsemen, chasing the great bundles of brushy roots as they bounced along the ground, barking excitedly at the wonderful new game. Mercedes and Rosario laughed at his antics as he veered off course, darting after jackrabbits, lizards and small rodents displaced by the uprooted vegetation.
Within a few hours the riders had cleared a channel over fifty yards long. Juan directed the course of their labors and his men followed behind with their shovels, deepening the ditch easily through the loosened earth. The vaqueros accomplished more by late that afternoon than the peons had in a week of backbreaking work afoot. They would clear a path to the fields within another day.
Everyone returned to the house that evening, coughing from the dust, too exhausted to talk except for Rosario, who rode in her father's arms, chattering excitedly about her lessons.
“Father Salvador is cross sometimes, but he is ever so smart. Already I've memorized the alphabet. He says soon I shall be writing my letters.” Nicholas cocked an eyebrow in surprise, looking across at Mercedes, who rode beside him.
“I convinced him that your daughter would make a good pupil...unlike her father,” she said, daring him to object, yet certain that he wanted this for Rosario as much as she did.
“I'm astounded the old...er, that is, the good father would take to teaching a child.” Especially Luce's child.
Rosario piped up, “He does say I'm his cross to bear in old age—but he says you were awful wicked when you were a little boy, Papa.”
Mercedes hid a smile.
When they reached the house, Mercedes took Rosario from Lucero and looked up at him. “Our crops would’ve died for certain without the irrigation. Thank you.”
He nodded. “What is a husband for?” His eyes locked with hers, his meaning clear as the promise for that night. Then he rode toward the stables.
* * * *
Nicholas expended more energy grooming Peltre then he normally would have, especially considering the hellishly hard week he had just put in on the range. He needed the time to think and to cool down himself before he did something foolish. Mercedes had haunted his dreams nightly while he slept on the cold har
d earth and had filled his head daily as he chased horses. The visions of her lithe golden body incited him to lust, just as her repressed desire and jealousy incited him to anger. And he had been angry that awful night. Killingly angry. He had come within an inch of doing what his brother would have—raping her without a thought of the ultimate repercussion for their relationship.
Never before in his life had a woman stirred his emotions so intensely. Since Lottie had shipped him off to Texas he had made it a point to remain aloof from any personal entanglements. Women were a commodity to a professional soldier, pleasure and divertissement to be bought like whiskey and tobacco, used and discarded the same as he tossed away empty bottles and cigarette butts. Innocencia was that kind of a woman. Mercedes was not.
He, Nicholas Fortune, had a wife and a child through the good offices—however unintentional—of his brother. The child he was finding amazingly delightful to deal with, but not the woman. She was a lady like none he had ever met before. He could still see her standing sweaty and sunburned when he rode up. Even wearing drab loose fitting paisana's clothing, no one could mistake her for anything else but the patrona. Every patrician feature, every movement right down to the regal tilt of her head bespoke generations of breeding. And pride.
Mercedes was proud and Luce had shamed her. That was what complicated their relationship now. She could not trust him. But even deeper lay the question that ate at him as he curried Peltre with long smooth strokes. Could a loner like Nicholas Fortune ever trust a woman like Mercedes Alvarado? “I have to control this obsession with her, dammit! She's my wife and she will come to me. I don't have to beg crumbs from the patrona's table!”
Finally he finished with the stallion and turned him over to the elderly stableman, then went to the bathing room to scrub off a week's worth of ground-in grime. As he dressed for dinner, all he could think of was how much he wanted to make love to his wife. An intimate dinner in the large dining room with only the two of them would fray his already taut nerves past the snapping point.
