LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  “What—whatever is going on?” demanded an imperious feminine voice.

  With little hope that the question could possibly be directed elsewhere, Jeanette cautiously poked her head around Cristobal’s broad shoulder. From behind her lorgnette, Elizabeth Crabbe, the matriarch of Brownsville society and the possessor of a voluble tongue, glared with shocked outrage. Next to her stood Claudia Greer, the hostess’s married daughter, and Jeanette caught the sympathy in Claudia’s plain face. However, on Elizabeth’s other side Aunt Hermione looked as if shock would topple her into the cistern behind her.

  His hand still lodged between Jeanette’s breasts, Cristobal said drily, “I fear this is going to be difficult to explain.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “However will I explain to everyone what happened tonight?” Aunt Hermione whinnied. “And what, God forbid, will my dear brother say when word reaches him of your outrageous behavior?”

  Jeanette barely heeded Aunt Hermione’s agitated prattle during the hour-long drive along the dusty River Road that had been built as a military highway during the Mexican War of 1846. Absently she looped the black silk Lyons shawl over her shoulders, though the summer breeze that mercifully rustled in from the coast some twenty miles distant hardly warranted the wrap.

  “Dear me, a widow scarcely a year and already those young soldiers were ogling you tonight, Jeanette. Crude, unchivalrous men. That is what war does to men. Turns them into animals. And Cristobal—I would never have thought it of him. He seemed to have such impeccably good taste. Men in my day . . .”

  Why not run the blockade?

  Preoccupied with the plan taking root in her mind, Jeanette scarcely noticed as the brougham rumbled down Columbia’s long drive guarded by tall, stately palms. The trees seemed to march against the night’s star-studded sky like platoons of well-drilled infantry, never out of line, never out of step.

  Aunt Hermione droned on while the carriage clattered over the short wooden bridge that spanned the resaca, a water-filled channel cut by the overflow of the Rio Grande, and rolled to a halt amid retamas, mimosas, and pepper trees. The trees fronted a two-story house, a peculiar mixture of Southern colonial architecture with its white columns and New England slate shingles and dormer windows.

  Aunt Hermione’s gnarled hand plucked at Jeanette’s pagoda sleeve. “Jeanette? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

  Absorbed in thought, Jeanette descended from the carriage to climb the pillared veranda’s wide brick steps. Aunt Hermione, her face drawn now with real concern, hurried after her. The gaunt old woman’s black cape flapped about her like crow’s wings. For years now she had hovered nervously over her charge. Jeanette could even remember the occasion that triggered Aunt Hermione’s arrival and the end of her childhood’s carefree days: the afternoon her father caught her riding astride in boy’s britches with Armand and Cristobal. Up until that time his lack of a son and the death of his wife in the throes of yellow fever had fostered a neglect of his daughter.

  Not so that afternoon. Her father’s ruddy face had paled; his jowls had quivered. “I won’t have it! Sure, you can read and ride. But can you knit? Can you cook? You’re a girl, Jenny, not a boy. God, but I wish your mother were alive!”

  And that was the summer Aunt Hermione had come to stay, had come to train Jeanette in a woman’s role in life.

  “Talk about the soiree tonight will be all over town by tomorrow, Jeanette. I just knew we should have delayed your first outing since Armand’s death. Whatever shall we do?”

  “What?” Jeanette turned in the parlor to focus her distracted gaze on her father’s sister. “Why, nothing, Aunt Hermione.”

  The old woman’s mouth dropped open, but Jeanette turned to climb the worn-carpeted stairs to her bedroom. She walked around the four-poster bed where she and Armand had lain entwined and went to stand absently at the window, her mind sorting out what would be needed to put her plan into action.

  All those years marriage with Armand had occupied her mind and heart. If only . . . if only there had been a child to link her with Armand, to bridge the gap gouged by death. As it was, of Armand she had only her wedding ring and the letter from General Beauregard advising her of her husband’s death. Armand’s wounded body slowly putrefying in the filthy Yankee Fitch Prison, General William “Monster” Morgan’s refusal to render medical attention to the prisoners . . . These were things she did not often let herself think about.

  Instead she had concentrated on keeping Columbia running in the face of what seemed insurmountable odds. But now—now the blockade runner, the mysterious Kitt, offered hope.

  Hope that Aunt Hermione seemed intent on dashing. For early the next morning the old woman cornered Jeanette in the parlor. “We must do something, Jeanette, to allay the gossip that will surely circulate.”

  “What gossip?”

  “Why, about last night,” Aunt Hermione stuttered. “About you and Cristobal. And what he was—was doing out in . . . ” she trailed off, unable to finish describing the mortifying scene.

  Jeanette thought Aunt Hermione seemed about to swoon. She paced the parlor, trying to think of a way to placate the old woman. Her aunt sat in the Boston rocker and clasped and unclasped her liver-spotted hands in agitation. From the cage hanging in the stand next to the rocker, Washington jutted its hooked beak at Jeanette and cawed, “Help! Run!”

  She wanted to run. Instead she said with a stoicism born of what seemed long suffering, “I have explained what happened. A simple accident. It could have happened to—” She halted at the thud of the door knocker.

  “That must be Cristobal!” Aunt Hermione said.

  “What could he possibly be doing here at this time—”

  “I sent Trinidad to Cristobal’s quarters in Brownsville,” the aunt explained.

  Tia Juana, Jeanette’s old black nurse, waddled past the parlor door to answer the knock. She had been with the Van Ryan family since Trinidad married her and brought his young bride to the Texas border to escape the persecution that followed the mixed marriage between the Mexican and the Negress.

  Weighing in excess of two hundred pounds, Tia Juana had run the house to suit Jeanette’s father and ruled Jeanette and Trinidad to suit herself. They both loved her. No hand could soothe a child’s fevered head as hers did, or lovingly stroke a man as she did the pint-sized Trinidad.

  “Well, knock me over,” the strapping black woman exclaimed, “if’n it ain’t Cristobal Cavazos!”

  The tall, elegantly dressed man replied something in Spanish and kissed the black woman’s piano-key-sized fingertips. When he released her hand, she snorted her contempt for the boy who had grown into the man before her. “Hmmph. Clothes don’t make no man!”

  “Cristobal!” Jeanette impatiently called out. “Do come in and unscramble this awful mess to Aunt Hermione’s satisfaction.”

  Cristobal entered the parlor and swept both women a bow that would have been the envy of St. James’s Court. “I am at your service, Miss Van Ryan,” he told the flustered old aunt.

  Jeanette maneuvered her hooped skirts around the chaise longue to come before Cristobal. She was short, barely five feet, and he was well over six feet; yet she glared at him with all the defiance of David facing Goliath. “Please clarify to Aunt Hermione what happened last night.”

  He raked a well-defined brow. “What happened?”

  Jeanette stamped a kid slipper. “Cristobal!”

  “Ahhh, yes. I see.” He turned from the furious blue eyes to meet Aunt Hermione’s anxious ones. “I spilled some wine on your niece’s—uh, bosom—”

  With a moan Aunt Hermione’s hand fluttered to her flat chest.

  “Aawwk! Help!” Washington squelched.

  Cristobal cast an uncomfortable glance at Jeanette. It was the first time she had ever seen him ill at ease. He cleared his throat and finished with one of his silly laughs that was meant to be reassuring, “I was merely making reparations, Miss Van Ryan, when you and your companions h
appened to chance on your niece and myself in the courtyard.”

  Aunt Hermione began rocking the chair in discombobulated motion. “Jeanette’s reputation will be ruined,” she moaned half to herself. “Your father will think me the poorest of guardians if he hears of this. There is nothing left but for you to offer marriage, Cristobal.”

  “What?” the other two cried in unison.

  “Aunt Hermione,” Jeanette said when she regained her faculty of speech, “you’ve lost your senses! You’re getting senile! Utterly mad! I could never remarry.”

  “Pshaw!” the old lady said, more firmly now that she had arrived at a solution. “People who are not in love marry all the time. I should have married that old undertaker instead of waiting for some Lancelot to ride along and whisk me off to Camelot. Now it’s too late,” she mused. “Old Orville lies in one of his own coffins.”

  Jeanette could see that this conversation was going to be a new low in an already hellish day. “I’m not waiting for Lancelot or any man to—”

  “You could come to care for another man—yes, even Cristobal here—just as much as you did for Armand,” her aunt continued, unperturbed at the volcanic tremor that seemed to be threatening her niece.

  “I will never care for anyone as I did for Armand,” Jeanette said, underscoring each word with clenched jaw muscles.

  “Ahhmmm.” Both women turned to look at Cristobal. “Ladies,” he interrupted, “your discussion does me great honor, but I must beg off.”

  “What?” Aunt Hermione demanded, shocked far beyond her previous dismay.

  “Oh, do listen to him,” Jeanette pleaded. It wasn’t just the thought of marrying another man that upset her. It was the knowledge that with Cristobal underfoot, all her hopes of running the blockade would be demolished. Slow-witted Aunt Hermione would be unlikely to guess the furtive operations she had in mind. But Cristobal . . . Very likely he would suspect something.

  “To put it indelicately,” Cristobal said, “my interests lie elsewhere.”

  “Another woman?” Aunt Hermione demanded, incredulous that any woman could take precedence over her niece. Had not Jeanette been the toast of the Rio Grande Valley for one brief summer after her return from Philadelphia? And then Armand St. John had secured her as his own.

  “No . . . not another woman,” Cristobal said hesitantly.

  Jeanette’s breath sucked in. Did she correctly interpret his innuendo? She found it difficult to believe that her childhood friend, the handsome man who stood flushing before the two women, could be one of those strange types said to prance about New Orleans’ Latin Quarter.

  Now Aunt Hermione blushed to the very roots of her pewter-gray hair. She grabbed up the fan from the cherry drop-leaf table and began to fan herself rapidly. “I see . . . I see.” Then: “But, yes! That solves everything!” The two turned incredulous eyes on the old woman. “Well, my dear, since you don’t—don’t want another man—oh, this is so difficult to explain.”

  “Do not tax yourself, Miss Van Ryan,” Cristobal said drily.

  “—to love you as Armand did,” Aunt Hermione continued, and Jeanette knew stopping the old lady now would be like halting a runaway locomotive, “and Cristobal has no wish to proceed in that direction with you, dear . . . why then there is no conflict in interest. You can marry one another and both go about your own ways,” she finished up with a grand flourish of her fan.

  Cristobal rolled his eyes and shrugged his broad shoulders. “I fear your aunt has a bee in her bonnet.”

  “Never!” Jeanette cried. “Elizabeth Crabbe will have to throw tomatoes at me in front of the opera house first! General Bee’s troops will have to lock me in the stockade. The nuns at the Immaculate Conception Convent will have to burn me at the stake.”

  “Be reasonable, dear.”

  “I’m afraid she’s beyond reason,” Cristobal wryly counseled the old woman.

  “I would rather live out my days as a widow of questionable virtue than marry again!” With that pronouncement Jeanette picked up her skirts and headed for the stairs.

  Her lips curved into an elfin smile, her first genuine smile in a long time. Her blue eyes twinkled, revealing the essence that shimmered just beneath the young woman’s surface and lent her an aura of exquisite beauty.

  A giddy widow involved in amorous dalliances would hardly be thought capable of running supplies against the mighty Federal blockade.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Trinidad Cervantes knew everyone and everything that happened in the Rio Grande Valley, but Jeanette wondered if Columbia’s old foreman could help her track down the elusive Frenchman, Kitt.

  Trinidad was a dried-up, wizened little man with a monkey face and agile bowed legs; he always insisted that his growth had been stunted when he was a jockey by the horse trainers putting him on too light a diet and burying him up to his neck in the manure box for too long a time. After that, her father’s offer to oversee Columbia had seemed to the little man like a miracle from St. Jude.

  It was true that Trinidad could neither read nor write, nor did he know a note of music, but many a so-called educated white man envied him his accomplishments. He spoke both Spanish and English fluently and played the violin like a virtuoso. He made beautiful rings and bangles out of tortoiseshell with only his pocket knife, a round stick, and a pot of hot water for his tools. He also made fancy ropes for bridle reins and girths out of horsehair. But it was his gentle love and concern, which her stern father had been unable to demonstrate, that endeared Trinidad to Jeanette.

  Trinidad had cousins and nieces and nephews in all the villas strung along the Rio Grande line like glass beads on a necklace. If anyone could elicit a piece of information, he could. Yet she had been riding with the leathery brown old man since sunup and had uncovered nothing about the Frenchman.

  She had reasoned that perhaps the Frenchman was running contraband in one of the small ships of light draft that could operate in the shallow coastal waters where ships of the line could not venture. Perhaps, as a few other blockade runners did, he sailed into one of the inland waterways or even slipped in over the bar at the mouth of the Rio Grande, and transferred his contraband to lighters, large, open barges.

  Working their way down the river toward the coast, she and Trinidad stopped before every adobe jacale to question the inhabitants about the Frenchman. The sun, an orange- hot coal, now rode high in the blue-white sky, and she was tired and her thighs were sweaty in the boy’s dungarees. Yet she said nothing to Trinidad of her parched throat or muscle-sore derriere, for he had wholly disapproved of what she had in mind.

  “Eet ees bad enough that you must dress and ride like un muchacho,” he reproved her in that avuncular way he had used on her since she was three and old enough to sit astride a horse. But she had not ridden horseback since she went off to the finishing school at twelve, and she was dearly paying for it now. That she straddled a scurvy burro, a jenny, did not help.

  Trinidad continued his diatribe, unaware that she had reined up her burro and was no longer following him. “But thees mission you are on—híjole, sobrina,” he said, using the Spanish equivalent for niece, “eet could land you en the calaboose. And whachaya think, if the Yanquis catch you, they hang you for a traitor.” He snapped his horny fingers. “Muy pronto, no?”

  Jeanette drew off her floppy hat and let the long braid she had tucked into the crown fall between her shoulder blades. She turned her face to the treeless shoreline, hoping to catch some of the breeze that was nudging the tide’s waves toward the beach. But the wind playfully hovered just off the sultry coast. Overhead a flock of curlews wheeled. With the back of her arm she shielded her eyes against the sunlight that glared off the white sand and watched the curlews’ arrowhead formation with distracted interest. “Trini,” she mused, “maybe this Kitt—maybe he doesn’t operate off the coast at all. Maybe he operates from right there out of Fort Brown.”

  Trinidad heeled his burro about and loped up alongside the young woman he
loved as much as his own eleven children. “One of the soldados, eh?”

  Jeanette began to fan the soiled hat before her face. “No,” she said slowly, “I’m sure I would have recognized him among the soldiers I danced with. His face would have betrayed his strength of leadership, his cunning, his bravery in serving a noble cause.”

  Trinidad guffawed and slapped his bony knee. “You, mi sobrina, ees una romantica—and a leetle bit loco, no?” She sighed and smiled wistfully. “Yes, I daresay I am. This Kitt is probably all Cristobal says he is. A crude rascal out for his own profit.”

  In the village of Bagdad on the Mexican side of the border Jeanette’s search was finally rewarded with a clue. She should have deduced that since Bagdad was a neutral port it would be simple to bring cotton across the river from Texas and load it on one of the vessels anchored in Bagdad’s harbor. The Federal blockaders could not intervene until the ships cruised outside the territorial limits.

  Situated between a stretch of sand dunes, Bagdad’s flat beach fronted the Gulf of Mexico. The village of fishermen’s board shanties offered tolerable anchorage and harbor facilities for the growing number of vessels—now a dozen or more—that were participating in the dangerous occupation of shipping Confederate cotton.

  Beneath her hat’s floppy brim Jeanette’s eyes swept uneasily from one side of the dirt street to the other. Saloons and bars jostled for elbow space with homes whose pastel paint was peeled off mud-brick walls by the sun and wind and salt. Apparently she was not the only one with the idea of transporting cotton to the Mexican port. The dusty streets were rife with men—Mexican teamsters, cotton buyers, cotton sellers, speculators, peddlers, foreigners.

  Their clothing, hair, and beards were saturated with so much dust that they looked like millers, and the horses and mules shook their heads to throw the dust out of their ears.

  Although the sun was still high, balancing atop the spire of the unfinished cathedral, people were spilling out the swinging doors of a crowded cantina when Trinidad roped in his burro. The painted placard over the cantina’s door announced: la fonda del olvido, the Inn of Forgetfulness.