“Enchanting,” Jeanette said.
“You weel wait here.”
“No.” She slid a leg over the burro’s scraggy back and hopped down. “Now is as good a time as any to put my masquerade to the test.”
“Dios mio,” the old foreman groaned, shaking his sombreroed head. “I should have told your padre every time you crept out your bedroom window.”
“Using the trellis as a ladder,” she recalled, “and scouring the countryside at night with Cristobal and Armand.”
“Pues, a few well-placed whacks—”
“No, it would not have changed the girl. Only made me more rebellious and obstinate than I already was.”
Sawdust sprinkled the hardwood floor of the smoke-filled cantina. A brass rail was flanked by ornate cuspidors and the mahogany bar was banked with customers—businessmen, soldiers from Fort Brown, drifters, and gaily painted girls whose attributes spilled over their low-cut, black-laced necklines. Jeanette hunched her shoulders so that the buckskin shirt hung loosely, concealing the small breasts. She jammed her pale, delicate hands in her pants pockets, assuming a masculine stance.
“Hey, paisano," a mustachioed monte dealer called to Trinidad. “No muchachos in the place.”
Jeanette shifted to the other foot and braced her mouth in a sinister mug. She was careful to keep her hat’s brim shadowing her blue eyes, though many a Spanish conquistador had left blue-eyed, fair-haired descendants. “I’m not a boy,” she gruffly told the dealer in her best Spanish.
Trinidad winked broadly. “I have brought my nephew for—some experience.”
Nearby the men who girded a green-baized table mounded with silver dollars and gold pieces chuckled and elbowed one another. “Ahhh, yes,” the dealer grinned. “Perhaps Maria or Hermosita?”
“No, no,” Trinidad said. “She must be young. Rubia— is she still here?”
The dealer jerked his head toward the stairs. “She has a select clientele, paisano. But you can try your luck.”
The stairs creaked beneath Jeanette’s boots. A threadbare runner showed the way down a dimly lit, seedy-looking hallway. From below drifted the American hoedown, “Little Brown Jug,” banged out on a tinny piano. Trinidad stopped before the third door on the left and knocked. “Rubia, it is Tio Trinidad.”
Jeanette sighed. Another niece.
“One of my sons knows Rubia,” Trinidad explained baldly before the door parted to admit them.
Jeanette took one look about her at the gilded mirrors, the velvet draperies, and the painting of the nude woman partially shielded by a boa fan, and decided that in comparison similar places in New Orleans must look like Methodist meeting halls. Such ornate trappings in such a claptrap establishment!
And such a woman who turned from the oval mirror to face her! Jeanette judged the woman, dressed in a demure gown of dove-gray muslin with a high white collar, to be twenty-one or -two. Her golden-skinned face was devoid of makeup, her lips soft, her pale hazel eyes vibrant against the honey-blonde hair that clouded her shoulders.
Rubia, Spanish for blond. And to think this regal creature of undoubted Spanish heritage was a lady of the night!
The young woman set down the ivory-backed brush and smiled. “Tio, como esta? Y que pasa por sus hijos?”
Raised among the campesinos and, of course, with Cristobal as a friend, Jeanette easily followed the conversation in Spanish. She had to repress a smile when the young woman reproved Trinidad for bringing the slim, callow youth to her. But Trinidad, removing the sombrero from his grizzled head, replied, “It is not for that we come, Rubia. We come for information. We look for a man—un francees, se llama Kitt."
The face, like a beautiful flower at sunset, closed over. Jeanette’s heart leapt. The young woman knew something!
Rubia took up the brush and began toying with her curls. "Por que ? ’'
“You have heard of him?” Jeanette asked, unable to constrain her excitement. “You know him?”
Rubia’s pale-eyed gaze moved up and down Jeanette’s disreputable-looking person. Her lids narrowed. “Who is the boy?”
“Another of my brother’s sobrinos. He will say nothing.”
“And I can tell you nothing—until you tell me why, tio, you wish to find this hombre, this Frenchman, Kitt.”
Trinidad turned the sombrero in his hands and recreased the high crown. He flashed Jeanette a furtive look. “We are in need of someone to transport certain cargo.”
Rubia nodded her head. For a moment she tapped the brush lightly on the dressing table’s tiled top. Jeanette held her breath. To come so close to finding the mysterious and elusive Kitt . . .
Then, “A water boy, Alejandro, may take you to Kitt— under certain conditions. You will most likely find Alejandro pushing his cart along the oceanfront, tio."
Thirty minutes later Jeanette sighted a little Mexican aguatero trudging along the hard-packed sand behind an ox cart loaded with water barrels. With Trinidad close at her heels, she threaded her way between the kegs, boxes, and bales of tobacco, cotton, and hides waiting to board the few ships, mostly English merchants that sat three miles out in the Mexican harbor.
Alejandro, who could have been no more than eleven or twelve, possessed angelic, bird-bright eyes. From his dirt-smeared, cherubic mouth drooped a cigarette butt. Trinidad explained what they wanted, and the urchin flipped the butt out on the sand. "Si,” the boy replied indifferently, as if it were of little consequence to take them to the famous or infamous blockade runner, depending on which side one was for. “Come back after sunset. We go then.”
For more than an hour Trinidad and Jeanette, trying to look as churlish as the Mexican water boy, sat in a sleazy cantina that fronted a sea-rotted wharf while they waited for night to pull its blanket over Bagdad. By the time they left she was more than a little dizzy from the smoke and the noxious fumes of the pulque and mescal that lay like a fog over the cantina.
She found she was to grow even more dizzy a short time later, for Alejandro informed the two of them that once they boarded a lighter, he would have to blindfold them. She was slightly taller than Alejandro, but when he started to knot the smelly bandanna about her eyes, she could see his disgust at dealing with such a sissy-looking boy. Beneath the floppy brim of her hat she glared back at him. What would a boy have done in similar circumstances? “Caramba, mono!” she cursed gruffly, calling him a monkey. “I could tie the thing better and faster myself!”
She caught Trinidad’s approving grin and the boy’s expression that lost some of its contempt, before the world was blackened by the bandanna. It was a curious feeling, the lack of sight—the shifting motion of the lighter’s planks beneath her feet, the skipping of the cool wind across her cheeks. She could have sought the refuge of the lighter’s cabin, which was little larger than a pup tent. But she preferred to taste the sea’s salt tingling her lips and hear the surfs rhythmic pounding against the sandy shore as the lighter moved out into the harbor. Time ceased altogether.
A while later, came the booming of the lapping waves against something broad—a ship’s hull? Then the thud of the lighter bumping on wood and the sudden jouncing. After that she detected the swish of what must be a rope ladder, followed by unintelligible conversation far above her. Alejandro put a ladder between her hands. “Climb,” he instructed.
The rope was rough against her palms, and as the ladder swayed with her weight she was glad she could not look down. The scent of smoke—a pipe, perhaps—reached her, signaling she was nearing the top. And a keen sense of joy filled her. Soon she would be able to participate once more in something that had meaning.
It wasn’t just her hope of bringing revenue to Columbia again. Nor was it just the idea of avenging Armand’s death that was responsible for giving her life substance once more. Steadily there grew in her a vision of aiding the Confederacy—a vision born of one brief visit to Columbia back in 1859 by Robert E. Lee.
At that time Mexico was undergoing constant political strife, a
nd Brownsville received, with almost equal frequency, the bullets and the refugees of battles between rival Mexican factions in Matamoros. Deserters from the various factions looted both sides of the river impartially, and so great was the disorder that Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee was sent out from San Antonio to investigate the situation. One evening after dinner he had remained at the table with her father and Armand.
From the parlor she and Aunt Hermione could hear the men talking, could hear Lee’s low voice speak of his love of the South and his concern for its future. Though he had freed his slaves years before, he still held a passionate devotion to the South.
After he left, when they were in bed, Jeanette wrapped in his arms, Armand said quietly in the dark, “I felt I was in the presence of a man who was cast in a grander mold and of finer metal than other men.”
She had felt the same. She had been impressed with the fairness and kindness that surrounded Lee like an aura. Much later she often wondered if Armand realized he was himself cast in that same mold of fairness and kindness.
But just now the vision of actually aiding the Confederacy paled in her excitement at meeting the recklessly daring and resourceful Kitt!
Hands grappled under her arms and hauled her over the ship’s bulwarks. Vertigo attacked her and she lurched unsteadily on her feet until hands at her shoulders steadied her. A few voices could be heard, mostly Spanish; then— yes, she picked up a rich male baritone speaking in French. Oh, why hadn’t she tried to learn more of the language from Armand?
Another voice, at her shoulder, replied, "Oui.” Her arm was gripped, and she was led off. The shutting of a door combined with the resinous scent of cedar. The same voice that had answered at her shoulder, sounding like that of a younger man, said in Spanish now, “Our captain wishes to know what is it you want of him?”
“Can we have our blindfolds removed?” she asked, forgetting that Trinidad was to have taken the part of the negotiator.
The melodious baritone voice she knew instinctively was Kitt’s snapped an order in French, and she felt her elbow released. Taking it as a signal that permission was granted, her hand slipped up to the bandanna only to be checked by a banded grip at her wrist. At once she could sense another presence standing immediately before her—the heat of a body, much larger than hers; the warm, rum-scented breath.
Him.
CHAPTER FOUR
The squeaking of the door’s hinges told her that one or more people had left the room. “Trinidad?” she whispered anxiously.
No answer. Where had they taken him? The man who stood before her, so close, spoke now, and his breath rustled the stray tendrils that had escaped the braid concealed beneath her hat.” Mon jeune homme, a quoi . . .”
It was useless; she got no farther than, “My young man, to what ...” and then she was unable to make any sense of the low, melodious words he spoke.
She began to shake her head to indicate her ignorance of the language when she was surprised by another voice in the room—the younger one that had spoken before, translating the Frenchman’s commands to Spanish for her. “Our captain requests that you do not remove the blindfold, as he desires to keep his identity a secret—and he wishes to know to what he owes the honor of your presence?”
She sensed that the Frenchman studied her closely during the exchange of words. The hand that encircled her wrist like a handcuff released hers. She dropped her hand to her pockets in a boy’s swaggering stance and pitched her throaty voice at an even deeper level. “Tell him I have heard of his reputation for evading the Federal blockaders—that he has yet to lose a ship. Tell him I have warehouses of cotton that I wish to sell.”
Another exchange in the fluid French, and the young voice said in Spanish, “There are other ships in the harbor willing to take on your cargo.”
Such an uncomfortable feeling not to be able to see to whom one is talking! It had to be something like that of a penitente at the confession box. No wonder she had never embraced Armand’s Catholic convictions. “Yes, but those ships offer only money or mercantile goods in exchange— liqueurs, dress material, ladies’ hats. I also want guns and ammunition—and quinine for the Confederacy.”
The translation was made. A low chuckle escaped the man who stood immediately before her. She turned her face back up in the direction of his. “You are not in it for the ‘Cause’?” she asked, disillusion slowly worming its way into her brain. Then quickly she remembered to spit on the floor in an imitation of the aguatero.
The younger man, whom she suspected by the accent to be a Mexican, made the translation to his captain. The man before her—he had to be very tall, judging by the source of his voice—laughed again and uttered something in French.
The Mexican said, “The captain says to tell you that he is in it for himself.”
“I will give your captain more than a fair share of the proceeds from the sale of the cotton, more than the standard five thousand dollars a blockade-runner captain gets for a round trip.”
It was an easy promise. In the textile mills of England four million workers were dependent on Southern cotton. And in France six hundred thousand people were likewise employed. Europe was willing to pay for the cotton.
The words flowed between the two men, then the Mexican replied, “The captain says that since he owns his own vessel, he is making money quicker than he can invest it, that—” he broke off as the Frenchman interrupted.
She felt what seemed to be the back of the Frenchman’s fingers lightly stroking her cheek. The Mexican made a choked sound and continued. “My captain says that—he sometimes prefers—beardless young boys in his bed.” This was indeed no gallant Armand she was dealing with. Her mental image of a brave and dashing gentleman rapidly evaporated. Sweat broke out under the band of her hat. Where in tarnation was Trinidad? She gathered her wits about her. “Tell him—tell him I prefer girls.”
Another low laugh followed the translation. Suddenly her hat was jerked off, and her wrist-thick braid swung down to flop against her shoulder blades. The Mexican swore. The masquerade was over! A hand pulled the braid over her shoulder to lay upon her rapidly rising and falling chest. His fingers continued holding the braid, playing with it. Her breast tingled at the sensation of those fingers resting so brazenly against it.
He murmured something, and the Mexican actually snorted. “My captain also takes his pleasure with girls. He is still willing to consider a trade other than money for transporting your cotton aboard his ship.”
Her mouth dropped open at the blatant suggestion. Her interest in the French blockade runner dropped well below freezing. “Tell the gentleman his ship can rot in Davy Jones’s locker first!”
At that the Frenchman erupted in laughter. The weasel! He was enjoying toying with her. Watching her squirm. “I wish to leave now,” she said stiffly.
In her anger she missed the exchange between the Frenchman and his man, but the Mexican said, “He tells you to go back home—where a woman belongs.”
Where a woman belongs! It was too much! Her hand swept out to make sharp contact with the Frenchman’s jaw. She heard his grunt with a grim feeling of satisfaction—until he jerked her braid, yanking her head forward. She stumbled against him, and his hands grabbed her by her shoulders to steady her. He held her close against his chest. One arm—its muscles seemed as large and thick as an anchor’s cable—slid about her waist. His free hand grasped her braid and tugged, forcing her chin up.
“Let me—”
But his mouth silenced her. His lips ground against hers with a hunger that stupefied her. Armand’s passion had been sweet, tender . . . nothing like this savagery she was experiencing. Her head was bent so far back she thought her neck would snap. Frightened for the first time in all the harrowing day, she shoved her hands against the massive chest until he released her.
“Tell your civilized captain”—she gasped for breath— “that I shall seek out the ships anchored at Bagdad until the day comes I find a captain who isn�
��t so mercenary!”
The Frenchman did not let the Mexican finish the translation but caught her to him once again. His lips softly moved over hers, as if he were memorizing the shape of her mouth. Then he released her before she could recover from the shock of the second kiss and vent her anger. “Bon soir, ma cherie,” he said and, turning her around by the shoulders, placed a well-aimed whack on her bottom.
Tia Juana laid a finger as large and black as a shotgun barrel to her lips. “Ssssh, missy.”
Jeanette tiptoed through the kitchen, with an anxious Tia Juana following. But the big black woman’s head brushed one of the many copper plates and kettles suspended from the ceiling. Like dominoes the pots and pans clanged one against the next. Tia Juana’s pupils rolled heavenward to display their whites.
“Tia Juana, what the thunder is—” Aunt Hermione charged through the door and hauled up short. Jeanette thought the old woman looked as if she would have an apoplectic fit. Not even the news of Armand’s death had seemed to shock the woman as much.
“I can’t believe my eyes!” The old woman practically whinnied. “All those years trying to train you to be a proper lady—and this.” Her accusing finger trembled as she pointed at the offending getup. “This!”
Jeanette almost expected a snorted neigh from the horse faced woman. “I told you I was going out riding for the day with Trinidad.”
“But not—not dressed so scandalously. And not riding all day—and night! I’ve been beside myself, Jeanette. Thinking that you’d been carried off by a band of Kickapoos—or worse, those awful Mexican desperadoes.”
Tia Juana, who had returned to the stove, flashed Aunt Hermione a withering look and with a haughty expression on her pitch-black face returned to slicing scarlet chilis into a cast-iron skillet.
Jeanette crossed to the sink. “But you can see I am perfectly safe. We were delayed by a rain shower.” Which was true, since showers occurred almost daily that time of year, cleansing the air of dust and sand. She pumped some water over her hands, splashed her dirt-streaked face, and mumbled, “And I plan on riding more often. The year of mourning has made me forget how pleasurable riding can be.”
LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) Page 3
