“He’s not my—there’s a difference.” That conceited bore and his ridiculous note suggesting an assignation! “I don’t meet him in my house. Any more than I’ll allow you to—
“Jen, dearest, it’s only for a few weeks. It’s her safety I’m concerned about—more than her body. I thought you were above being small-minded. Don’t tell me I have married another Elizabeth Crabbe.”
He released her hand, and she rubbed her wrist, as if his grip had hurt her. That was something he never wanted to do. Hurt her. But he knew he was doing so, and she would know it, too, when the war between the French and Juaristas was over and his masquerade was revealed. Alas, at the moment he had more important things to worry about. First Rubia’s safety. Then Alejandro. In no time the French would track down the boy who had aided the Juaristas. He would make Alejandro his cabin boy. But Rubia—he was counting on Jen’s innate generosity.
“All right,” she said grudgingly. “But there must be a hundred whores in Matamoros. Surely you aren’t going to bring all of them here, are you?”
“Of course not. And she’s from Bagdad. Said she’s been aiding the Juaristas in some way. I couldn’t help but offer Rubia asylum, could I?”
“Rubia?” Jeanette gasped.
Cristobal lifted a brow. “You know her? Surely not.”
“No . . . no,” she stuttered. “It’s just a rare name for a Mexican.”
“Oh, she’s quite blond, I can assure you that.”
“I’m certain you can,” Jeanette said drily. She should have realized that Cristobal would eventually bed one of the most beautiful prostitutes in the Valley! Rubia could identify her as the boy blockade runner. And if Rubia was working for the Mexican liberals, the Juaristas, then she was in actuality aligned with the Yankees—and against the Confederacy. Which made the two women enemies.
Yet somehow Jeanette knew she could trust her. Instinctively she liked her, despite the irony that Rubia shared the embraces of the two men in Jeanette’s life.
“Yes, you may bring her,” she agreed, unable to fathom her reluctance. Surely it did not bother her—that Rubia shared Kitt’s bed. Certainly no more than it bothered her that Rubia shared Cristobal’s bed!
“Even a pelican has better manners than you, Washington.”
Sitting in the wing-back chair, Jeanette lifted her gaze from the altar cloth she embroidered to fix on Cristobal. With the utmost unconcern for his nipped finger, he once more inserted his hand through the cage’s open door. “That’s it, Washington,” he gently coaxed. “Step aboard. Walk ye ol’ gangplank.”
The badly knotted embroidery work dropped to her lap while she watched in surprise as the macaw actually permitted Cristobal to remove him from the cage. Traitorous bird, she thought. The macaw pecked her hand into a sieve whenever she tried to remove him from his cage.
Cristobal, wearing the elegant plum-colored jacket that he had donned earlier for dinner, set the bird on his shoulder. If only Washington would leave bird droppings on the jacket. Jeanette still smarted from Rubia’s installation at Columbia earlier that afternoon. Oh, the young woman was polite and gracious and, judging by the idle conversation at dinner, seemed well educated. Not at all what one would expect from a—
Jeanette blinked and tried to return her attention to the embroidered mess. She wished she wasn’t so small-minded about Rubia. She knew that under other circumstances she would have liked her very much. And the woman had not betrayed her recognition of Jeanette; rather, she had given her a reassuring wink at the introduction.
Jeanette told herself that it was simply all the attention being paid the lovely wounded refugee. Both Trinidad and Tia Juana hovered over Rubia, awaiting the slightest wish from the soft-spoken woman. And the woman was not really a cousin—not really related in any way to Trinidad Cervantes.
Why, Trinidad and Tia Juana had never showered that much concern on her! It was bad enough that her husband devoted an inordinate amount of attention to Rubia. Even now—with the ungodly bird perched on his shoulder—he swept a bow before Rubia, who reclined on the sofa. With a delighted laugh she clapped her hands, murmuring, “Bravissimo!”
That was the core of the problem. Rubia was involved with both Cristobal and the Frenchman. Jeanette jabbed at the altar cloth, tangling the thread. She was jealous of Rubia! Now shame did wash over her. Why couldn’t she be different? Why couldn’t she be content to be a lady? A true lady. A grand lady, as she intuitively suspected Rubia was.
The door knocker interrupted her thoughts, and Tia Juana waddled over to the door. A moment later Mark Thompson appeared in the parlor’s doorway, his hat tucked courteously beneath his arm, his military bearing ramrod stiff.
“Help!” cried Washington, poking his beak in the special agent’s direction.
Mark ignored the macaw. Instead his keen-eyed glance took in Cristobal sitting on the sofa’s arm near Rubia. “You seemed surprised to see me, Agent Thompson,” Cristobal drawled.
Mark arched one contemptuous brow. “Quite, Mr. Cavazos. We were under the impression that you spent your leisure time elsewhere.”
“And doubtlessly you came to keep my wife company?”
Jeanette glanced sharply at Cristobal, not quite certain she had interpreted correctly the saber edge in his voice. Before Mark could reply, Cristobal continued, “I do wish you would check on Jen now and then. I worry about her being alone in my absence—I write articles, you know, and perforce must travel.”
“And I’m sure you do an extraordinary amount of research,” Mark said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm.
“Oh, yes. If I could tell you all the places my research takes—”
“Cristobal,” Jeanette intervened before he could launch into some colorful account of his afternoons spent in cantinas and cathouses. She knew very well that he would take great delight in discomforting the man. She laid aside her embroidery, saying, “We have a guest who should be introduced to Mark.”
In the midst of making the introductions, she missed Cristobal’s narrow-eyed reaction to her free use of the agent’s given name. Mark bent over Rubia’s fingertips with a polite phrase of acknowledgment, then turned to Jeanette. “Madam, one of our units—the Thirty-seventh Illinois Infantry—has decided on the spur of the moment to have a starvation party tomorrow night.”
More parties. The starvation parties were the latest fad of the elite who had sacrificed luxuries since the war’s inception. With rumors and reports of losses and defeats on both sides flying like birds of omen, people seemed obsessed with gaiety, very much like Paris at the height of the French Revolution.
“I would like to invite you,” Mark finished. His glance swept over Cristobal. “And your husband and guest, of course.”
Something perverse made Jeanette hasten to reply, “How marvelous! But I’m afraid Rubia has been ill. And, naturally, my husband has other plans. Isn’t Tuesday night your—er, card night, dear?”
“Quite so,” Cristobal replied carelessly. ‘‘But do enjoy yourself, Jen. Whatever do you serve as refreshments at a starvation party—water from the Rio Grande?” His chortle made Jeanette wince.
“Hardly,” Mark said, relaxing now, his smile contemptuous. “We’ve managed to secure several kegs of bay rum.”
Cristobal stroked the bird, who nervously walked the length of his shoulder. “No doubt from the stores of blockade runners your ships have captured.”
Jeanette knew that the thirst of Southern politicians waxed greater those days. Meat destined for starving Southern families was allowed to spoil on island wharves and wounded soldiers went without quinine and chloroform, while blockade-running captains carried sherry and cigars and silks.
“Captured—and confiscated,” the special agent stated. Sensing more verbal combat was underway, Jeanette took Mark’s arm, steering him toward the door. “Do count on me to come, Mark.” She leaned closer into the man, adding softly, “It seems months since I’ve danced.”
She might glean much from the s
tarvation party. She would like to know how soon before the Union soldiers finished the narrow-gauged railroad they were building from Brazos Santiago to ease their transportation problems.
When she returned to the parlor Cristobal was busy talking to Rubia while he stroked and petted the irascible macaw. Despite her husband’s surface charm, he really was detestable. What Rubia saw in Cristobal was beyond her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
El Valle de los Gigantes. The Valley of the Giants. The giants were the 7,800-foot-high Cerro de la Mitra and the 5,800-foot-high crests of the Cerro de la Celia, or Saddle Mountain, which totally surrounded the provincial city of Monterrey, Mexico.
When the first scattered jacales of Monterrey’s outskirts came into sight, wavering in the hot blast of the summer sun, Jeanette halted her wagon along a rocky arroyo that barely trickled with water. She relaxed her grip on the British Enfield for what seemed like the first time since she left Columbia. For more than five days she and her campesinos had traversed the 135 miles of savanna, wind-whipped desert, and fertile valley, constantly on guard against Mexican renegades, French troops, and Juarista bands.
Several times a day they passed other caravans laden with contraband—long files of trotting, jingling pack mules, broken-down hay carts, and ox drivers who whipped their bony animals ahead of them. Because of the scarcity of water, Trinidad had exhorted her to look for water holes rimmed by animal tracks, but unpolluted by their corpses.
Sand gritted in her eyes and abraded her tongue. Despite her hat, the sun baked her skin. How would she explain her burned skin to Cristobal? That she and her latest lover had spent days frolicking in the sun? But then he never bothered to ask about her absences, as she kept quiet about his.
Merely to share the same house with the cruel, worthless representative of the human race was often more than she could endure. If only for that reason she had sacrificed attending the starvation party. One more week in the house with Cristobal and Rubia would have been too much. Instead she had elected finally to make the cotton run to Monterrey.
More than once she wondered if the journey to Monterrey was worth the agony. The excitement she always experienced before departure paled beneath the hot sun, evaporated like the countryside’s dry water holes. But she had only to remember Armand—the Confederacy—Robert E. Lee—Morgan. Mere words, yet they carried emotional weight for her. She could—and would—do no less than the thousands of gallant men. When the war was over, perhaps she would return to the staid life of a woman.
The idea appalled her.
She flexed her stiff fingers, then took off her sweat-stained hat. Her braid tumbled free to bounce against the small of her back. She leaned against a cotton bale and fanned herself while she waited with the campesinos for Juan to return from his scouting of Monterrey. The Old World city’s cathedral spires glinted in the distance like beckoning fingers of gold. Why then did cold ripples of foreboding lap at her feet? Surely the danger of dealing with the mercantile houses of Monterrey could not be as bad as the horror of debasing her own body and mind that she had undergone in dealing with the Frenchman.
“Señora!” At Pedro’s call, her gaze swung in the direction he pointed. Wisps of dust smoked the air between them and the city. Not enough dust for a band of horses to kick up. And drifting too slowly even for one horse. A relieved sigh escaped her cracked lips. Most likely the burro Juan had taken. In the twenty-odd minutes more she waited for Juan she made up her mind that once the negotiations were finished she would rent a hotel room, take a long, leisurely bath, and consume a heaping plate of Monterrey’s spiciest enchiladas. And she would sleep off the replete evening while her campesinos made their rounds of the cantinas. Tomorrow would be soon enough to start back with the supply of firearms and medicines.
Juan’s handlebar mustache drooped with a heavy coating of sweat and dust when he slid off the burro and crossed to her wagon. Respectfully he doffed the sombrero, though she doubted she resembled a woman in any way at that moment. “French Legionnaires—they corral at every street corner, senora.”
“But what about the British firm—Knight & Knight?” she prompted, curbing her impatience.
“The Ingles—they have no firearms, no one does. The firearms go out as quickly as they come in. But the Ingles, they have gunpowder. They will sell us the gunpowder for the cotton.”
She rifled through her memory and recalled that two powder mills operated out of San Antonio. Not that much out of the way from the Brownsville—Alleyton run. “Let’s dump the bales on Knight & Knight.”
Jeanette led her caravan into Monterrey toward Plaza Zaragoza, the center of town. The facades of the centuries-old homes they passed faced shyly backward, toward their patios. She shifted uneasily on the wagon seat. Even the burros seemed restive and tossed their heads nervously as they plodded past the Baroque cathedral and down one of Monterrey’s narrow old streets bordered by the two-story colonial Spanish homes that blocked the sunlight. Once Jeanette had to rein the wagon flat against a time-darkened, gray stucco house in order to allow a diligence to edge past.
Just beyond the residential section mercantile warehouses crowded both sides of the wider cobblestone streets. She and Juan went inside the corrugated-roofed establishment of Knight & Knight, of Charleston and Liverpool. Heat suffused the warehouse piled high with crates, boxes, and barrels labeled misleadingly with contents such as dry goods, combustibles, and lard, which she had learned was usually packed with Boston pistols.
She was grateful for the dim interior as she approached the desk stacked with ledgers and sheaths of letters. A balding man looked up over the wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his little nose. “Yes?” he asked in a clipped accent.
Resorting to broken Spanish, she quickly negotiated the deal. A Mexican clerk, small and as impeccably dressed as the Brit, hovered in the background, recording the transaction into Spanish for the government’s records. Jeanette should have been pleased that she had obtained the astronomical price of ninety-five cents per pound of cotton against the gunpowder, but something in the way the Mexican clerk’s nut-brown eyes studied her made her even more uneasy—uneasy enough to postpone that thought of a hot bath and dinner and a restful night at the Gran Ancira Hotel. She sensed she would sleep better that night on the desert with the howling of the lobos, the great Mexican gray wolves, for company than in one of Monterrey’s sheeted beds.
The sun was rocking over the western peaks when she snapped the whip over the burros’ backs and headed the wagons out on the dusty road north to Matamoros and Brownsville. Even after dusk descended across the alkaline desert, she drove steadily onward. A silly feminine notion, she told herself, that uneasy feeling that had grown steadily worse in the Knight & Knight warehouse in Monterrey. The British speculator was faultless in his negotiations with her, regardless of whether he believed her to be a dirty Mexican boy representing a substantial American firm or a young bandido who stole the contraband. Yes, it was a silly feminine notion.
A sliver of a moon lit the camp that night. Jeanette ate little of the tinned jelly with biscuits and highly salted smoked bacon. Neither did her campesinos. They sat around the orange tongues of the campfire, talking desultorily. “Ahh, she was a flashing-eyed dark beauty,” Emilio said of the maiden he had glimpsed in a Monterrey doorway.
“I tell you the Monterrey cantinas offer the highest monte stakes,” Xavier proclaimed knowledgeably, though the young Mexican had yet to enter one.
She sat off by herself, leaning against a wagon wheel, and half-listened to the yarns they spun. For once she did not want to join in their camaraderie. Instead she cradled the Enfield in her arms and peered into the darkness beyond the comfortable perimeter of firelight. She still could not shake the feeling of foreboding. When it came time for the men to turn into their bedrolls, she stationed two more guards about the camp and elected to share the first watch herself.
But it had been a long, arduous trek from Brownsville with no layov
er for rest. The physical and mental strain dropped each guard’s chin against his chest in slumber. Her own lids slid closed, and her hand dropped from the rifle stock. The Enfield’s barrel dangerously nosed the sand when the ping of the first shot creased the air.
She snapped to her feet. Her knees almost buckled from the numbness of sitting in one position so long. Too late she swung the rifle up to her shoulder, her gaze sweeping rapidly about her. Even as she encountered the glittering eyes of a hundred or so shadowy forms encircling the camp, a hand jerked the Enfield from her hands. Arms encircled her waist. Then shouts of confusion, oaths, and commands broke out all around her. She screeched her ire and kicked and flailed her arms and legs at the two men who sought to constrain her.
“Hijole una mujer!” shouted one when her hat tumbled off and her braid swung loose—at the same instant another’s fist clipped her jaw. Blues and reds and greens splintered kaleidoscopically behind her eyes. The stabbing pain vanished with her consciousness.
Wild gusts of wind, carrying sharp grains of sand, pelted the men and animals that straggled across the desert. Tumbleweed bounced against the wagon wheels. Jeanette pulled the cork from her canteen. When she turned the canvas-covered container upside down, a few drops watered the rim. The Mexican, who had been put in charge of her wagon, sniggered. His yellow teeth gleaming against the bristly beard, he hauled in on the reins and offered her his canteen. She shook her head in repulsion.
“You no wanna drink after stinking Mexican, eh?” he grinned. “But tonight—you lay beneath one.” He snorted again. “You lay beneath many. Well, you stink, too. So it will not be so bad, eh, woman?”
It would be unbearable. But she had borne one man’s rape, though she doubted the Frenchman would call it that. Could she not bear several? She wondered. She had heard of women hemorrhaging after multiple rape. She shivered despite the full blaze of the sun that left her head pounding and a fever running through her body.
LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) Page 18
