LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  The following day the muscles of her bottom protested just the opposite. Pleasurable riding was not to be had, at least on one of Trinidad’s burros. She would openly ride one of Columbia’s fine bays before she would submit her posterior to that torture again.

  With each movement of the bay Jeanette ached abominably, but her need to find a willing blockade runner was greater than her suffering. Remembering the whack, the insulting kiss, the cavalier treatment she had endured at the hands of the French blockade runner, Jeanette grew hot with indignation. From now on she would carry a knife or a derringer when she sallied forth on her mission, though she little knew how to use such weapons.

  The British and French merchant vessels she and Trinidad called on that afternoon openly admitted that, rather than returning with bulky firearms, they preferred liqueurs and silks and other items that occupied a small amount of space in relation to their value. Then, too, they were unwilling to risk the ire of the United States prize courts if they were caught. Penalties were a lot stiffer for smuggling arms and ammunition.

  If there was a bold and recklessly brave man among the blockade runners who was interested in her proposal, she didn’t find him that day. She returned early enough to change and bathe for the opera she had promised to attend with Aunt Hermione. Sitting through the tedious Faust that night was even more agonizing than riding had been. Every so often she would shift uncomfortably, and her rustling taffeta skirts would bring a baleful eye from Aunt Hermione. Intermission could not come quickly enough.

  Lady Olivia Mountbatten was in the midst of her grand aria, the glorious finale to the first act, when Jeanette spotted Cristobal in the box of no less a personage than General Bee and his wife. The plump little woman looked perfectly delighted at something Cristobal whispered behind the back of his beringed hand, one of his witty bon mots, no doubt.

  Perhaps Cristobal had better success than she had in locating a blockade runner with bravado! When the intermission came and the soldiers crowded the curtained entrance to her box, she expressed her desire for fresh air with the hopes she could corner Cristobal in the opera house’s lobby below.

  Aunt Hermione practically beamed that her headstrong niece had regained her senses and was behaving like a lady instead of some hoyden. It had never occurred to her that after the year of mourning Jeanette would turn wild again. Aunt Hermione had thought that marriage with Armand had once and for all settled the chit down. To see the young woman married off once more under the thumb of some strong-willed man would mean her duty to her niece and brother had been carried out!

  Escorted by her entourage of military admirers, Jeanette found Cristobal surrounded by a coterie of Brownsville’s younger people, who appeared to hang on every utterance of the effete fop. But Cristobal did cut a fine figure. The new tight black trousers, which had replaced the wide peg-top fashion, displayed his splendid physique. A droll smile lit his heavily lidded eyes at her approach with the three soldiers trailing.

  “A lovely peacock among turkeys,” he quipped.

  In the general laughter that followed the man on her left, a lieutenant who stood some seven inches shorter than Cristobal, said, “I take umbrage at that, sir, and wish to call you out!”

  With a bemused expression Cristobal looked down from his height at the little man. ‘‘Whatever for?”

  “For the insult, of course!” said the lieutenant, whose face was quickly taking on a choleric color.

  “Fie!” Jeanette intervened with a disarming smile for the young people gathered about. “The two of you look like a cock and a bantam.” She held out a dainty hand. “Cristobal, do escort me back to my box and tell me of your latest travels.”

  “La, Jen,” he said when he had taken her arm and they had moved away from the others, who were still chuckling over the incident, “your rescue came in time. That little poppinjay would have been snapping at my heels all evening.”

  “I was afraid your bravery would cost the life of one of you,” she snapped.

  "Dios! I’m not so foolish as that,” he said with his imperturbable bonhomie. “About my travels, did I ever tell you that there is a most fragrant, flowering shrub along the Mediterranean called the lavender? The exact same shade as your eyes—lavender blue.”

  Her fan never stopped its swaying motion. “You do say the most flattering things, Cristobal. But tell me, how is your article going? Have you located our mysterious Kitt?”

  “Not a scent of a trail!”

  “But where all have you looked?”

  He fixed her with an amused glint in his eye. “My dear, I have looked in establishments that a proper young lady like yourself would never dream of entering.”

  She held back a grin of triumph. She had succeeded where a man had not. She had found the elusive Frenchman—to no success. “But surely you have heard the whereabouts of other blockade runners who are willing to . . . run risks out of the ordinary?” If she could just worm one name out of him.

  “Bah! They are here today, gone tomorrow. I heard through a good source at the Pelican Pub that the U.S.S. Albatross captured the blockade runner Two Sisters off Brazos Santiago yesterday.”

  He turned a humorous countenance on her. “But surely, you still aren’t attracted to such rogues as the French blockade runner?”

  “Hardly,” she snapped heedlessly. Yesterday had cured her of any idealistic notions she had entertained about the Frenchman. There were other ways to market her cotton before she would have to resort to his contemptible terms!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The trellis swayed precariously. Jeanette held her breath. No longer was she the elfish tomboy who had scaled the trellis like a buccaneer the mast. She often lamented over the way her once slender frame had filled out. The budding breasts whose existence had sorely annoyed her at twelve had bloomed into a lushness that often threatened to spill out of her low-cut dresses. Yet the armoire’s mirrored doors reflected the slim hips of a woman who has yet to bear a child. Would that she had.

  When no noise of cracking latticework followed, she relaxed and drew a deep breath. The scent of the fragrant roses that laced the trellis mingled with that of luscious oranges and bananas from the Columbia’s fruit groves beyond. Quickly she skimmed the rest of her way down the network of slats.

  “Hell and damnation!” she hissed when she reached the bottom. She thrust her forefinger in her mouth to suck where a thorn had pricked it.

  Spitting out the blood that salted her tongue, she laughed aloud. It had been even longer than the period of mourning since she had enjoyed herself. Perhaps since that day when Aunt Hermione had made her put up her hair and let down her skirts and society had cast her into the role of a young woman.

  From behind her a voice cautioned, “Ssssh!” In the moonlight she made out Trinidad’s weather-beaten sombrero. “You laugh loud enough to wake the cemetery. You want your aunt she should hear us? “

  But she knew old Trini was in good humor also. Riding was in Trinidad’s blood. The little man’s rounded shoulders squared, his back straightened as for the first time in more than a year, he sat astride a superb horse. With the effects of the war, the bays had been reserved for drawing the brougham only. In Richmond and Wilmington and Charleston thoroughbreds now pulled caissons instead of carriages.

  Jeanette tried to repress her own capricious good mood. But as the bays clip-clopped their way along the River Road toward Brownsville and Matamoros she laughed gaily. The delicious solitude of the dark, when no proper lady would be about, the feel of the invigorating night air on her face, and the freedom of her body unrestrained by stays and hoops only heightened her spirits.

  At her laughter, the old Mexican overseer cocked his head, and she explained, “Trini, sometimes I think that when God cut me out of His bolt of cloth, somehow He slipped on the pattern and I wound up a female when I should have been a male!”

  Trinidad chuckled. El Señor, He never slips up. One day, sobrina, you weel find thees pattern from which He made
you.”

  She doubted it. There was no pattern for a twenty-six- year-old woman who behaved like a sixteen-year-old boy . . . except for the mentally incompetent. That was it, she really must be deranged. Only an imbecile would set out on such a futile expedition.

  She laughed again, and her exultant laughter echoed up and down Brownsville’s sleeping streets. Even the saloons and mescal joints snoozed in drunken slumber. Not so Matamoros. The cantinas that wedged every corner were more active than a Baptist riverside revival. Drunks staggered out swinging doors as ready replacements shoved their way in. A brassy trumpet mourned the loss of fortunes on the monte tables. Sloe-eyed women with painted faces struck seductive poses as they displayed their wares outside cantina doors and in the rooms above.

  But Jeanette had had enough of cantinas three days before. She let the bay pick its way through the refuse-ridden Plaza de Mercado toward the Camino a Los Cemeterios while she formulated the rest of her plan. The bay danced to a halt in front of a stucco building that had openings for rifle barrels in the second-story walls and a large dome used as a lookout post rising above the flat roof. The walls were pitted and scarred with bullet holes from the numerous revolutions. This was the regional headquarters for the Mexican Guardia Nacional. Two soldiers came sleepily to their feet at the approach of the peach-fuzzed youth and the stooped old man.

  Fearlessly Jeanette looked over the soldiers’ bell¬mouthed escopeta. The shotgun was almost an antique. “I wish to see your capitan.”

  “He sleeps.”

  “It is important,” she pressed.

  The soldier, whose jacket was stained and sloppily buttoned, shrugged at the other, and replied, “Come with me.”

  They followed him into a room where light peeked through chinks in the mud-brick walls and, at the soldier’s bidding, waited while he disappeared down a hallway. The room contained a battered desk and only one chair, but Trinidad found a nail keg for Jeanette to sit on. Soon the soldier reappeared, followed by a stocky man struggling into the jacket of his uniform. This was the officer whom Trinidad told her was known for negotiating deals above and beyond the call of duty—and his office.

  He eyed them suspiciously over the bristle of his handlebar mustache, "Pues?” he grumped. “Well? Well? What is it that brings you bats out at this ungodly hour of the night?”

  “Cotton,” Jeanette said in a young man’s low-pitched voice.

  “Cotton?” the captain roared.

  “Cotton,” Jeanette answered, unperturbed at the way the captain’s mustache flapped with the jowls that worked in muted outrage. “More cotton than you ever dreamed.”

  She hurried to explain the plan she had formulated over the last two days—the idea to establish an overland route from the railhead between Galveston and San Antonio for shuttling cotton to Matamoros by teamsters.

  “Why Matamoros—why not Bagdad?” the captain asked when she had finished.

  “Because I want guns and ammunition, and the European blockade runners don’t like to risk running firearms through the Federal blockade on the Gulf. But with you as a middleman—and taking a handsome profit—cotton could be freighted to Guaymas on the Pacific in exchange for guns and ammunition from the merchants who risk no blockade.”

  “Ask for wagon loads of whores! Ask for barrels of aguardiente! But do not ask for guns and ammunition!” The captain flung a hand at the escopeta the soldier cradled. “Do you think my men would shoulder a weapon as outdated as a bow and arrow if we had the means to obtain modem firearms? We need them to fight the French. Even at this minute los franceses wait like sea wolves outside Veracruz’s harbor to set up their Austrian Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico. Bah!”

  Political machinations in that decade were rife. The French, through past-due debts owed by Mexico, hoped to gain control of that country’s unstable government, which was already torn asunder by its continuous internal revolutions. Of course, France’s intervention violated the Monroe Doctrine and forced the United States to align with Mexico’s fugitive President Juarez. Thus the Confederacy and France found themselves strange bed partners, both allied against the United States.

  “Then why not buy the firearms?” she ventured. “Mexico has cattle—that means beef and hides. Food and shoes for the European countries.”

  The captain grunted, and his great mustache flapped. “Because of Juarez’s order to defer payments on our national debt, other countries refuse to deal with us. I am sorry, joven” he told the young man, “but I cannot help you—nor myself, ay de mí."

  On the trip back to Columbia Jeanette slumped low on the bay’s back. Anything she hoped to do for the Confederacy, anything she hoped to do for Armand’s memory, even for Columbia, would have to be done in a woman’s limited capacity. Knitting socks and underwear and making bandages and canteen covers. Her contemptuous snort nearly equaled that of the weary horse.

  She crawled into her four-poster just as dawn shafted the eastern sky. But sleep eluded her as the memory of the blockade runner’s kiss plagued her thoughts. The kiss had not been that repulsive. Surely some terms short of total capitulation could be agreed on.

  While the last blistering rays of July sun gilded the cathedral spire, the brougham rumbled through Matamoros, an old fortified city that once offered Easter-egg painted homes, semitropical fruits, exotic flowers, and salt marshes converted to tree-shaded lagoons.

  “Not like it used to be when we would come over for all manner of fiestas and fandangos,” Aunt Hermione declared and pulled her black lace shawl more tightly about her. “A romantic place, Matamoros was then, with gallant caballeros and handsome soldiers everywhere. But now, now—it’s not safe for a woman to be about.”

  Now cotton was beginning to flow out of the South through Texas to Matamoros and from there to the neutral port of Bagdad, which the Federal Government could not blockade. The formerly sleepy little border town of Matamoros was overflowing with twenty thousand speculators from all over the world. The influx of foreigners was catered to by the accoutrements of most boom towns— brothels, gambling houses, and innumerable saloons.

  Yet, like the much-smaller Bagdad, Matamoros had scarcely any sidewalks, no gas works; the streets were not graded and ordinarily had an average depth of eighteen inches of mud. There were likewise no waterworks and peons hauled silty water from the river for two dollars per forty-gallon barrel.

  Aunt Hermione’s fan indicated the peons who lounged about the Plaza de Hidalgo in bare feet and dirty sombreros, the drunken soldier who lurched from a hitching post to the plaza’s iron picket fence, the three beady-eyed pistoleros whose hands rode their gun belts. “Rape—mark my word, Jeanette. The Yturrias’ ball is not so important to take a chance on—”

  “Rape,” Jeanette finished with a sigh. “Aunt Hermione, rape is particularly unnecessary in a town with such a supply of hospitable prostitutes. You have little to fear”—or hope, she added mentally—“of rape.”

  On the other hand, Jeanette knew she would have to worry about rape that night—unless she played her cards right, which was just what she had in mind.

  Behind the Yturria’s high, pink adobe walls the ancient and patrician names of Mexican history were represented—with the exception of Cavazos. But then Cristobal was off researching his article—no doubt in a saloon or brothel. For once she was glad he was not along to relieve the tedium with his foolish yet funny repartee. He would make an excellent red herring that evening.

  Many women would readily believe she could leave the ball to have an assignation with such a handsome and distinguished man. The women would be quite willing to overlook the inane laugh and the affected mannerisms for a heavy diamond ring on their finger, bought with a lucky or skillful hand at cards, and their name coupled in marriage with the Cavazos name, which still retained the grandeur of its aristocratic past. More than once that evening Jeanette mentioned Cristobal with lowered lashes and a giddy smile at the other young women.

  Only with Claudia Greer did she
lower her guard. But then Claudia, like Armand, had always been sensitive to others and would have seen through her sham. Even now the plain-faced woman perceived how forced was the bright smile that Jeanette wore. As a properly married woman with a husband away at war, Claudia joined the dowagers and duennas. These women sat against the adobe walls of the large lantern-filled courtyard, away from the fun and festivities.

  Claudia put her hand gently on Jeanette’s and lowered her voice so the other women would not hear. “I know it must be very difficult for you, Jeanette. I know how much you loved Armand . . . and how very much he loved you.”

  Jeanette blinked back the tears of shame at her deception and answered honestly, “Sometimes I forget, Claudia. Sometimes it seems that I never was loved; that Armand was a trick of my imagination.”

  “I think it’s time’s way of lessening the hurt of losing a loved one. But I don’t think the Lord ever meant to limit our love to just one person.” Her stubby-lashed eyes searched Jeanette’s. The young woman’s mouth, much too large for her narrow face, smiled tenderly. “Don’t wait for the perfect person, Jeanette. There are no perfect people, only perfect moments.”

  But Claudia had not known Armand as she had. Jeanette stayed just long enough in the Yturrias’ courtyard to mingle with the citizens of Brownsville and Matamoros and dance a few waltzes with the officers who had come over from Fort Brown. When the mariachis launched into a melancholy rendition of “La Golondrina,” she drew her aunt away from the rotund and pompous Senora Morales to murmur, “I have decided to leave early, Aunt Hermione, but our carriage will be at your disposal whenever you desire to leave.”