LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Goaded out of his usual self-containment, he grasped her by the shoulders and spun her around. Her hat tumbled to the floor and her braid swung over her shoulder. “I have been your friend more than you know, Jen!”

  “You call friendship marrying under false pretenses?”

  "You asked me to marry you,” he reminded her drily, “I didn’t ask you.”

  He saw the flush of shame wash out the freckles that bridged her nose. But her lips curled scornfully. “At least I asked you in the name of something worthwhile.”

  “In the name of the Confederacy?” he scoffed.

  “Yes!” Her eyes glittered at him with hatred. “But then you wouldn’t know anything about values such as patriotism and honor and love and—”

  His fingers gripped her shoulders. “And Armand did, didn’t he?” His hands fell away. He pivoted from her and crossed to the cabin’s bay window, darkened by night. His shoulders slumped. “God, there have been times when I almost hated my friend,” he said in a voice raw with self-loathing.

  Animal-alert, he detected behind him a sudden rustling and whipped around. Tears streaming down her face, Jen hurtled herself against him. Her fists beat ineffectually at his chest. “You have no right to call Armand your friend!” she sobbed. “You used his wife, you used the Cause—all for your own selfish needs!”

  He caught her wrists and held her away from him. It was as if he had suddenly donned the Greek mask of comedy. His lips twisted in a travesty of a smile. "Si, Jen. I’m selfish. Selfish enough to take you by force, fraud, or farce. Selfish enough to want you more than any damnable cause. Could you have said as much for Armand?”

  “You’re not half the person he was!” she spit.

  His smile should have warned her. “And you are? A woman who sells herself for a price?”

  Her hand lashed out. He made no move to dodge the stinging blow. Her eyes widened when she saw what she had done. Gingerly he fingered the red imprint on his jaw. “Your social graces leave a lot to be desired, Jen.”

  Expecting retribution, she faltered back a step, but he moved past her and crossed to the door, saying, “Make yourself comfortable in my cabin. It’s time to weigh anchor.”

  “Wait!” She hurried to him. Her hand clutched at the soft cambric of his sleeve. "What do you intend to do with me?”

  He grinned, but it was no longer the foolish grin that the hidalgo, Cristobal, had worn. “Take you with me on the run to Havana.”

  For a moment Jeanette remained rooted before the cabin door, unable to believe what had happened to her, what was happening to her. But there was still time to jump ship! She flung open the door. Solis stepped before the doorway. An apologetic look crossed his ravaged face. “You would never make it to shore, señora.”

  Helpless, she stood with him in the doorway and listened as the heavy iron chain slid out of the water with a splash. Four bells rang in the engine room and the sloop started forward. A moment later she heard Cristobal shout, “Hard-a-port!”

  The sloop seemed to gain extraordinary speed. With hands braced against the companionway wall to steady her, Jeanette made her way out to the upper deck and crossed to the railing. Like a shadow, Solis followed close behind. She loved the feel of the fierce night wind blowing against her face, whipping strands of hair free from her braid. If only she could be free.

  But there was no hope of that as the lights of the shoreline rapidly faded into glimmering specks and then vanished. At that same moment she heard somewhere out beyond the Revenge the beat of paddles upon the water. But sound in darkness was so deceptive that she could not tell from what direction it came.

  Suddenly a warning calcium flare skyrocketed into the night sky. “Merde!” Solis cursed. “The blockaders are riding our wake!” He grabbed her wrist. “Into the cabin, señora, and for the love of God, stay there!”

  He half pushed her back down the companionway and into Cristobal’s cabin before hastily leaving her. She ran to the window. Kneeling on its cushioned seat, she strained to see through the darkness. If only it were the French men-of-war patrolling the Mexican shore who sought haul over the Revenge! She could prove to Mejia that the cargo of cotton was to be exchanged for arms and ammunition—destined for Juarez! Then she could watch Cristobal crumple before Mejia’s firing squad!

  But what if the Federal blockader succeeded in hauling over the Revenge? Cristobal might be able to prove he was running supplies to Juarez, allies of the Federals. With dawning horror she realized that it was she who could be in danger. Cristobal could easily identify her as Lavender Blue. Surely the United States Government wouldn’t shoot or hang a woman, would they? But had not the Confederate spy Belle Boyd been sentenced to an execution squad before she escaped?

  Thunder roared outside the window and the ship’s timbers vibrated at the same moment that water geysered hundreds of feet high directly before her. A man-of-war was shelling the Revenge!

  A second later the sloop rocked violently with the after shock, and Jeanette clutched at the rough-textured abaca curtains to keep from being flung to the floor. The terror of drowning, of sinking to a dark and watery grave, ripped at her stomach like shark’s teeth. The thunder, the spray of water, and the rigorous shuddering repeated themselves. Again and again. The ship’s timbers groaned their distress.

  Jeanette huddled in a far comer of the window seat. Prayer trembled on her lips. God, spare the Revenge. I’ll devote myself to good works. I’ll live a life beyond reproach. Foolish promises but nonetheless sincere ones.

  Throughout the night the bombardment continued, though the interval between each shelling lengthening. In contrast to the heavy iron-clad men-of-war, the Revenge had been built for speed. But the Revenge was weighted down with three hundred tons of cotton. To forget her fear Jeanette tried to focus on more pleasant thoughts, but only Cristobal filled her mind. She was in his cabin. The Frenchman’s cabin! He had made love to her here—her eyes strayed to the wide bunk crouching in the corner.

  There—in that bed. She hid her face in her hands and groaned, and the ship’s timbers echoed her agony.

  She recalled the words of contempt she had flung at the Frenchman in English, thinking he did not understand her. Oh, how he must have laughed at her! Cristobal—the dandy, the fop. Kitt—the Frenchman, the man to whom she had given herself with such wild abandon. One and the same. Ohhh! She opened her eyes to escape the image of her body stretched beneath his, her legs and arms entwined about him, opening herself to his lovemaking.

  But even then she could not escape Cristobal. On the massive desk before her lay his nautical instruments—a polished brass telescope, a glass barometer, a brass-bound sextant, an hourglass. And papers and maps strewn everywhere with his powerful handwriting scored across them, giving evidence of his dominion. As she did.

  Shame, embarrassment, anger coursed through her. She wrung her hands. God grant her revenge, she importuned, completely forgetting her earlier vow to live a life beyond reproach.

  A gray dawn filled the window. Still the Revenge plowed steadily through the rolling waves in its bid to outrun the blockader. At least the blockader had ceased its shelling. Perhaps the Federal vessel had even given up.

  Jeanette, lavender smudges beneath her lavender-blue eyes, left her watch to make her way to the quarterdeck. The deck vibrated beneath her feet. Torrents of black smoke poured from the Revenge's funnels. All about her the deck was piled with bales of cotton. Sailors were pitching bales into the sea, counting on Yankee avarice to stop and pick them up, for the cotton was worth five or six hundred dollars a bale now. Jeanette understood more clearly the desperate effort the Revenge was making to escape.

  A sailor, his face blackened by smoke, emerged from a hatch, and she crossed to him. “Your captain—where is he?”

  Exhaustion denied him immediate speech. He jerked his head over his shoulder toward the hatch and muttered something about thirty-minute shifts before staggering past her.

  The smoke burned her eye
s as she carefully felt her way down the steep, narrow steps. It was as if she were descending into the fires of Hell. The heat intensified. By the time she reached the engine room, sweat beaded her face and rolled down the valley between her breasts. In the fire room a silent, shadowy crew of figures, Stygian wraiths, shoveled coal into the devouring furnace. Its red-hot mouth illuminated the room with an unearthly light. Now she understood the thirty-minute shifts. No human being could stand it down there longer than that.

  The piston rods rose and fell with quiet strokes. Yet the engine room seemed to dance under the vibrating blows of the screw so that standing was nigh impossible. Jeanette staggered against the wall. The hot metal rib burned her fingers and she gasped with pain. A hand seized her wrist and dragged her up out of the hellhole. The fresh salt air hit her. Her face tilted upward, and she greedily gulped in air like a beached fish.

  “You were told to stay in the cabin,” Cristobal gritted at her side.

  Without waiting for her reply, he hauled her back up the companionway stairs toward his cabin. She tried to tug loose, but he shoved her inside and stood with fists low on hips, coolly surveying her as if the two of them had never come together in the intimate act of love. The mouth she had always thought of as handsome but weak was stretched into an implacable line by the grooves of fatigue at either side. Soot blackened the hollows of his jaws, and sweat sheened his swarthy skin. His dark eyes watched her with a grimness that frightened her.

  Would he demand of her what she had so easily given him? Worse, would he betray her to the Federal Government if she refused to comply? She could not bring herself to believe the friend of her childhood would do such a thing. But then, did she really know Cristobal at all? A lot could have happened to him since he and his family left the United States—many things could have changed him and molded him into another man. Certainly, she thought wryly, Cristobal had turned out to be a multifaceted man.

  “Well?” he demanded. “What was so important to bring you out?”

  She held her ground. “You’re jettisoning the cotton bales to halt the blockader’s pursuit. Put me in a longboat. They’ll be forced to stop for me.”

  His lids drooped over hot brown stones, imparting that sleepy look. “No.”

  “Why not?” she cried. Then her eyes narrowed. “You said you were my friend.”

  His eyes flickered warily at her sudden woman’s tactics. “I am, Jen.”

  “Then release me,” she begged piteously.

  “I can’t. A hundred things could happen. Our wake could swamp the longboat. The blockader might not stop for you. They might gain too much on us.”

  “If you were truly my friend you would let me go!”

  A slow grin creased his lips. “I am afraid, Jen, that my friendship for you is overridden by my desire.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Steadily the Revenge sailed for the Cuban harbor of Havana. Once Jeanette, still ensconced in the window seat, uncapped Cristobal’s telescope to search the far western horizon for the blockader. But the Union Jack flag was at last lost in a cloudbank. For the moment the Revenge was safe, as was Jeanette. The demands of eluding the blockader had forced Cristobal to leave Jeanette temporarily.

  All day the Revenge glided on, swaying on the gentle swell of inky water; for that was all Jeanette could compare the water to—a deep-blue ink, transparent blue, changing to a living green where the ship’s bow quickly divided its glassy surface, and to a creamy white where the bubbles in the wake crushed each other in their whirling race after the rudder.

  Some time after noon Cristobal returned to his cabin and, with only a cursory glance in her direction, flung himself across the bunk and fell into a heavy sleep. She thought about bashing in his skull with the heavy sextant, but where might that land her with his crew? Besides, she thought, looking at the unruly mass of dark-brown hair that tumbled over his brow, she could not do it. She, who would have killed a man for attempting to steal her wagonload of contraband, could not harm Cristobal—despite the cavalier way he had used her.

  She sighed and, with knees pulled up against her chest, returned her attention to claims of the Caribbean. Her forehead drooped on her knees. Much later she stirred in her cramped position. She became aware of another presence and turned her head to find Cristobal, his jaw supported by one fist, watching her intently from the bunk. “Hungry?” he asked at last.

  “I want you to let me go.”

  “After the run is completed.”

  “Then you had best kill me, because I swear, Cristobal Cavazos, I’ll tell every French authority I can about you.” He swung his long legs over the side of the bunk and rose to stretch his massive frame. His self-assurance infuriated her. “And what of Lavender Blue?”

  She clamped her lips shut and turned her face to the window where night was rapidly shading the horizon. “I don’t want to ever see your face again at Columbia,” she said tonelessly. “I want a divorce.”

  “Not as long as I live, Jen.”

  Her head swiveled around to meet his gaze. “Then may God put a swift end to your life!”

  The normally droll smile was replaced by the serious set of his lips'. “I’ve wanted you for too long to give you up now. We are married in the eyes of the law, Jen.”

  He left her then, and she stared absently out into the night. It was lit by thousands of phosphorescent insects. It seemed to her that the Revenge sailed on the Milky Way rather than the Gulf of Mexico. Ah, such a night.

  Her bemusement must have shown on her face, for half an hour later Cristobal was at the doorway, saying, “One can easily understand why men claim the sea as their mistress; why they cling to her, fickle though she might be.”

  “Were that she was your mistress instead of I.”

  He sat a tray down on his desk and crossed to her with a cup of steaming coffee. “Tsk, tsk!” he mocked. “Such sentiments from my beloved wife.”

  She steeled herself against the fury he inspired in her and took the cup, saying sweetly, “Then you know my sentiments for a mercenary, a man like yourself without principles.”

  Unperturbed by the contempt in her voice, he hitched a leg over the edge of the desk and picked up a slice of salted beef, popping it in his mouth. “Are my principles any less because my loyalty lies with the Juaristas rather than the Rebels?”

  “Loyalty?” she jeered, jarring her coffee precariously near the cup’s rim. “What does a man like you know of loyalty? Married to one woman and consorting with another!”

  A dark brow quirked in bewilderment and she blurted, “Rubia!”

  “Ah, so it is a question then of faithfulness rather than loyalty.”

  Carelessly she swallowed a mouthful of the hot coffee. It seared every inch of her esophagus, and her throat screamed out in silent agony. But she managed to shrug indifferently. “Call it what you will.”

  He laughed lowly. “I call it jealousy.”

  “Ha!”

  He leaned forward, a forearm braced on his knee. “Then we’ll call it faithfulness. But tell me, were you any more faithful to Armand, taking a lover as you did?”

  “I told you, it’s not the same!”

  He came to his feet and crossed to her. “But it is, Jen. I am conjecturing that you never loved Armand any less—”

  “In all those years Armand was never unfaithful to me! After less than three months of marriage you were already bedding—”

  “You never loved Armand any less,” he continued, “despite the pleasure you found in my arms.”

  “I never found pleasure in your arms!”

  “Oh, Jen, what a little hypocrite you are!”

  Seething at his accusation, she grudgingly took the biscuit and slice of salted beef he passed her. Was she truly a hypocrite?

  After the repast Cristobal left her, and she found herself pacing his cabin, fidgety as a schoolboy on a spring day. She was accustomed to being occupied, if not with the demands of the plantation then with the dangers of runnin
g contraband. She plopped down on the bunk, arms crossed behind her head. She tried to will herself to sleep, but her eyes stared at the smoke-darkened ceiling. The steady swish of water against the sloop’s hull reminded her of her dual captivity—a captive of man, a captive of nature.

  She experienced a terrible desire, almost a mania, to see dry land, to smell the earth, to fill her lungs with other than salt air, to stretch out on some green bank and watch the summer sun filtering streams of light through thick foliage. At that moment her resentment of her captivity was so great that, when Cristobal entered and began to tug off his boots, she snapped, “You smell like the bed of a camel!”

  He laughed and, to her dismay, crossed to the bunk and leaned over her, planting his fists on either side of her ribs. “And you, my dear Jen, do not smell like any bed of roses.”

  His play on words brought a reluctant smile to the corners of her mouth. “That’s better,” he said.

  The smile faded. “No, it’s not, Cristobal! It’s inconceivable that you would hold me here against my will!” His smell was a decidedly masculine smell—why couldn’t it be a nauseating one? Why did she have to be stirred like some cow a-bulling?

  He came to his feet, saying, “Sorry to have to point out the fact, Jen—but you forced your way aboard the Revenge." He began to unbutton the tight-fitting, doeskin britches. “Just be patient and I’ll deliver you back to the comfort of Columbia. Until then you can be my compagnie de voyage.”

  “But when?”

  He pulled his soot-smudged shirt up over his head, muffling his reply of, “In a month or so.”

  “A month or so!” His very nonchalance in the face of her plight—a situation he was responsible for—irritated her beyond caution. She sprang to a sitting position. “Get out. You’re not sleeping here!”