“Kitt?” Solis peered into the darkness.
“Here,” Cristobal mumbled and groped for something to steady his wobbly legs.
Solis prowled through the jumble of boxes and barrels until he located his friend. “We’ve got to get out, Kitt,” he said and slid a hefty shoulder under Cristobal’s arm to support him. “The Yanquis will be boarding at any minute.”
“The others?”
“Already on the beach. Scrambling for the cover of chaparral.”
“Good,” Cristobal grunted. Negotiating the stairway was no easy feat. The steps cagily shifted positions under his feet.
“Mrs. St. John—I mean your wife—is up there waiting for them.”
“The minx will carry off her part magnificently.” With the back of his sleeve Cristobal wiped at the blood that streamed in his left eye. “And I fear she’ll have her revenge on me—and on you, too, Solis—if we don’t get out soon.”
The wind slammed against the two when they emerged from the hatch. Cristobal blinked against the sudden light of the lantern held up to his face. A semicircle of bayonets pointed at him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Sacré tonnerre! Aawwk. Rape!”
“Tia Juana, will you shut up that infernal bird!” Jeanette tossed her pen down on the secretary and put her hands to her temples.
Behind her the old negress shook her head and rolled her eyes. Her mistress had been riding a broom ever since her return from that sea voyage. If Tia Juana didn’t know better, she’d say Halloween was today instead of next week.
“I’d think you’d be tickled pink that that ol’ coot of a general done retreated.” She picked up the cage. “No mo’ of dem curfews for us free folks—eh, Washington?”
“Rape! Help!”
Jeanette waited, head in her hands, until Tia Juana had left the bedroom. Slowly she pushed back from the secretary and walked to the window. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. The October day was bright and balmy. A perfect day for—for boating on the salt lake.
Oh, damnation. Why had not three months wiped her memory clear of Cristobal? The whole voyage seemed an odyssey. She tried to tell herself her restiveness was because Morgan had moved his army out of Brownsville. Brownsville’s citizens were rejoicing, but Jen had been deprived of her revenge on the general.
True, Morgan still maintained a few regiments of Federal troops out on Brazos Santiago; mostly the black Union Corps d’Afrique—a more even match now for Ford’s troops who had moved back into Fort Brown, which especially delighted Annabel. The week following the triumphant return of the Confederate troops, she married her Major Hampton.
Perhaps, Jeanette thought, it was the thrill of running the cotton that was gone for her. Perhaps the removal of the Yankee soldiers had taken the challenge out of it. Yet she was just as determined as ever to drive the Yankees from Texas—and to have her revenge. That goal had never changed.
She had. Cristobal had changed her in some subtle, indefinable way.
Her fingers curled about the window curtain. Where was he? Oh, Heavenly Father! She never really wanted to see him swinging from some frigate’s yardarm. But, damnit, after all the underhanded, vile things he had done to her, he deserved to rot out the rest of the war in some moldy Northern prison!
So why did her heart lighten when she told herself that, though all logic dictated against hope, he might have gotten away with the others? When he and Solis had shoved their way through the boarding soldiers and leapt overboard, she had held out little hope they could escape the rain of Northern bullets.
Rubia had disappeared from Columbia shortly before Jeanette’s return. Yet Jeanette knew, with a woman’s intuition, that Rubia was waiting for Cristobal somewhere— if not in Bagdad. Trinidad reported that the woman had not returned to her place of employment. Rubia, Jeanette sensed, was a soldadera now, a woman following her warrior.
Behind Jeanette, Tia Juana cleared her throat. Jeanette turned. “Yes?”
“Trinidad is a-waitin’ downstairs.”
She sighed. She supposed she should be grateful that it was time to make another run to Alleyton for cotton. Cotton trading was running more smoothly once more from Brownsville to Matamoros, where the Imperialist government now ruled and was friendly to the Confederate cause. The twin cities were once again thriving emporia. Commercial ventures flourished because of the backlog of business that had built up during the Federal occupation of Brownsville and the fear that the current conditions would not last.
The situation in Matamoros was more precarious. The French Imperialists held Matamoros, but in the countryside bands of Juarista liberals roamed undisturbed. Was Cristobal with them now? All Jeanette knew was that the Revenge no longer anchored in Bagdad’s harbor.
She put on the broad-brimmed straw hat, though it was beyond her why she attempted to protect her complexion when she was already as brown as Trinidad. Old leather. That's what my skin looks like. No wonder Cristobal preferred Rubia to me.
Trinidad seemed as restless as Jeanette. He followed her into the chapel while she squeezed through the aisles of stacked cotton bales, counting them for the next run.
“Señora?”
Jeanette swung in the direction of the voice. A man— Solis—emerged from a crevice formed by the bales. That explained Trinidad’s nervousness. He had known Solis was there, waiting. “I have brought you something, senora.” Solis came forward, his hand outstretched.
Wordlessly she took the object. It was wrapped in crinkled paper. She unfolded the paper to find her wedding ring. She looked at Solis. “The paper is for you, also, senora.”
The dimness of the chapel made it difficult to read the writing. “What is it?”
“A draft. Drawn on the Bank of England in Bermuda. Cristobal has been keeping your money for you—in British pounds instead of Confederate dollars. He meant for you to have this when we were in Bermuda.”
She looked into the smooth-skinned face, trying to decipher how much he wasn’t telling her. “Where is Cristobal?” She saw his hesitancy. “Please,” she begged.
He saw in her eyes the same yearning mixed with relief that he had seen in Rubia’s eyes when he and Cristobal had returned to Juarez’s headquarters, now in Chihuahua.
At first he had thought Rubia’s sentiments directed solely toward Cristobal. But now, having spent time alone with her and listened to her speak of her life at her husband’s rancho or later in the bordello, now he had hope. If for no other reason than the way he caught her covertly studying him across a campfire or in a cantina or late at night when he pored over maps with Cristobal.
“I will tell Cristobal you have asked of him,” Solis said at last. He wheeled away before she could ask more.
Jeanette wanted to call him back, but what could she say? Could Cristobal ever forgive her for her stubbornness, her nasty words, the grief she had brought on him and his friends? Without meaning to, somewhere along the way she had forgiven him.
“Sobrina, ” Trinidad said.
Preoccupied with remorse for the first time in her life, she looked back to her overseer. “What is it, Trini?” Trinidad fixed his eyes on the lint-strewn floor. “I theenk I knew all the time Cristobal was the Frenchman. I remember heem as a keed. A wild one—untamable as the mesteno. Like you, sobrina.”
She closed her eyes and laid her head back against one of the stacks of bales. The ring—the banknote—in her hand, they were only objects. “I think you may be right.”
“I respected Señor St. John—but, sobrina, never did you laugh—never were you the wild mesteno unteel after he died. Weeth Senor Cristobal—you were free to be yourself, no?”
What was Trinidad trying to tell her? That all those years of marriage she had conformed for Armand? But she had loved him. She still did. But that love . . . it seemed fuzzy, like a badly taken daguerreotype. Like her memory of him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Jeanette jammed her hands in the pockets of her pants. Now that she
lived alone, she wore the pants more often since there was no need for simulation. She had even taken to keeping Washington in her bedroom just to break the silence in the great house.
Outside her bedroom window the spring rain had been funneling down the glass panes. Now there was only the percussion of the dripping leaves. So much for the planned run to Monterrey. First the winter rains and now the spring rains. It was just as well. Reports had it that cotton trains above and below Brownsville were mud-bound these days. Between the weather and the rumors that the South was contemplating surrender, goods were stacking up in Brownsville and the price of gold was suddenly declining on the world market.
It did not help that the Juarista forces, who had the support of the United States, had driven the Imperialists from northern Mexico two weeks earlier, cutting off the South’s communications with the outside world through Mexico. And that was the worst of it—she did not know if Cristobal was alive or if his body had been dragged off and tossed on the mound of bodies formed by both the Imperialist and the Juarista dead.
Her friends believed that she and Cristobal had gone to visit her father and Aunt Hermione, but did they believe her story that Cristobal had stayed to cover the war’s effect on New England for some European paper?
How she missed Cristobal! The months had not lessened the ache or the memories. Some instinct told her that he was still alive. Did he ever think of her? He had to. Though he had never actually declared his love in so many words, she knew he loved her. Had loved her. Did he still? Could he still . . . after all that had happened?
Alejandro’s death—all the tears she had shed for the boy would not bring him back now or change Cristobal’s feelings for her, whatever they were. She could do nothing but hope . . . and wait.
Waiting—it was a woman’s lot in life. And she chafed against it. Other matters needed her wayward attention. Columbia faced financial chaos unless she divested herself of the cotton stored there. For once Jeanette knew hardship. No longer was Tia Juana able to serve roast mutton and boned turkey, plum pudding and oyster soup, Madeira and pate de foie gras all in one meal.
Now Trinidad mixed the oil of cottonseed and ground peas as a substitute for coffee. Tia Juana was pulling the blue thread from bed ticking in order to patch worn clothes. Felix mixed soot and cottonseed oil to make shoeblack, and Jeanette and Pedro and the other campesinos were making their own bullet cartridges with one musket ball and three buckshot, dipping the paper cartridges in melted beeswax.
Yet all the scrimping did not seem really to help that much—not when a barrel of flour was going for $1,250 in Confederate currency. Jeanette was tired of waiting for a change in everything—Cristobal, the weather, the war, finances. She was determined at least to take control of the serious financial situation.
She swung away from the window and took the hall steps two at a time. Snatching her hat from the hall tree, she hurried outside and hailed Trinidad, dispatching her instructions. The cotton was to be hauled to Brownsville for sale.
However, by the time she and the campesinos arrived in Brownsville that afternoon, her idea did not seem like a good one.
All was gloom in the city. Activity centered around the auctioneers in almost every street crying, “Going, going, gone!”
Beside her in the wagon sat Trinidad, who shook his head sadly. “Eet ees hopeless. A cousin—he told me, sobrina, that store owners—they damage their goods now for the insurance.”
From beneath the boardwalk’s porticoes Jeanette glumly watched inventories sell for as little as twenty cents on the dollar. All of Brownsville seemed to crowd the streets watching, from infants-in-arms to infantry with arms. And even their uniforms were dismal—homespun cloth dyed from organic matter and called butternut made at the Huntsville penitentiary. Before Jeanette’s cotton reached the auction block, a cavalryman galloped down the streets, waving his saber above his head. “The Yankees are attacking!”
A padre in the brown robe of the Oblate Brothers stepped out into the horse’s path and grabbed the bridle. “Where?”
“Palmito Hill!” the soldier gasped. “General Ford needs all able-bodied men!”
It was like a stampede of buffalo. Women and children fleeing to the safety of their houses. Men—the infirm, the old, those on leave—yelled the Rebel war cries and ran or hobbled for their horses and wagons. The frantic hope that the Confederacy could still win surged through the crowd, sweeping over Jeanette as well. Without waiting for Trinidad, she whirled and ran back to the yard where her wagons waited. “Unload the cotton!” she called to Juan and Felix. “Pronto!”
It seemed an interminable length of time before the heavy bales had been dumped and the wagons were on the road leading to Palmito Hill, twelve miles northeast. All the men were far ahead of Jeanette’s wagons. And because of the salt marshes, her wagons were forced to keep to the winding River Road rather than take the more direct route. While she cursed the oxen’s creeping pace, she also belatedly realized she had only the revolver—and her campesinos were armed with their rifles and one round of ammunition. Not much to wage a battle with. Still her blood raced with the excitement of the conflict.
In the distance she could hear the intermittent whoomphing of cannon. The closer the wagon rolled the thicker grew the smoke that hazed the sky. A large strip of salt marsh that was little more than a mire hole forced her to abandon the wagons. “You wait here with the wagons, Trini.”
He shook his shaggy head. “I go weeth you, sobrina."
She saw the determined look in the rheumy eyes. But she was just as determined. She wouldn’t be responsible for the death of yet another beloved soul. He was finally dissuaded when she agreed to take Felix and the other campesinos with her. It seemed they loped through the chaparral for miles and hours. Rifle fire pinged the air the closer they crept through the palmito bush and mesquite thickets on the broad hill. Men stretched on their stomachs and crouched on their knees and signaled that she had reached the battlefront.
The Rebels fired at a nebulous enemy somewhere beyond and below. Her stomach knotted, as it had in that ultimate moment when the Frenchman—when Cristobal- had taken her beyond herself. Strange that the body’s responses to generate opposing feelings—of love and war— should so closely resemble one another. But then hadn’t Cristobal called that one mystical moment of lovemaking “the little death”?
The shouting, the roar of the cannons, the boom of the rifles was deafening. Jeanette, flanked on either side by her campesinos, edged to the top of the bluff. A dense fog of smoke hung in the air below, obscuring the thickets and the Federal troops who returned the fire. She called out to the nearest Reb, a young boy of no more than twenty, “How many Yanks down there?”
He turned, and she saw the gunpowder that blackened his face and rimmed his weary eyes. “Maybe three hundred.”
Three hundred against a hundred ninety or so. The odds weren’t in the Confederacy’s favor. Yet her blood seemed to sing in her veins. At first she fired blindly into the thickets. Once a blue-coated soldier staggered out and crumpled to the ground. Ironically she hoped it wasn’t her bullet that had killed him. Then when the young Reb just down the line from her buckled and rolled, exposing the shot that gaped open his jaw, she paused and with a chilling cold-bloodedness took more deliberate aim. Never did the fear occur to her that soon she could be lying contorted and mutilated like the Reb.
An hour later when Ford charged by on his horse shouting, “Attack!” Jeanette experienced an exhilaration that almost made her dizzy. She forgot all else but the battle. With the hundreds of other men she surged to her feet, shouting hoarsely and brandishing her rifle like it was a scimitar.
Felix grabbed at her arm to hold her back. “No, señora!”
She shook off his hold and charged down the hill between Pedro and Juan. Behind her Felix broke into a sprint to catch up with his mistress. Bullets creased the air all around her and hummed in her ears. The breeze ruffled against her face. Her hat blew off her h
ead and her braid swung free. She continued to run, stumbling once. But Pedro was there to grab her up, and she took off again. Ahead the Federal soldiers sprang from the thickets like rabbits and fled in retreat.
Then General Morgan loomed before her eyes. The general’s saber swiped furiously at the Rebel soldier who clung to the bridle of his horse. The saber embedded in the Reb’s shoulder, and he went down beneath the prancing hooves. In mid-step Jeanette halted and raised the rifle to her shoulder. All her anger—all her hatred—of Morgan poured forth into the minute movement of her forefinger that would be needed on the trigger. For some inexplicable reason, perhaps the instinct of the wary beast, his head spun in her direction. At that second their eyes locked, and she saw stark surprise in his. His thin lips mouthed her name.
She thought of Armand. Left to rot to death because of Morgan. No wonder soldiers became inured to killing. It would take so little to kill the monster now.
“Drop the saber!” she commanded. “And dismount. You’re my prisoner.”
His eyes glittered, and she knew he would not hesitate to kill her if she were careless enough to give him the chance. Like a wall, the other campesinos shielded her from fleeing Federal soldiers as she prodded Morgan ahead of her.
The makeshift camp was at the nearby Palmito Ranch. The captured soldiers, most of them black men from the Corps d’Afrique, were herded either into the dilapidated barn or the corrals. Already the Confederate soldiers were celebrating the battle they had won, passing around cheap aguardiente. One bearded soldier tilted to his mouth a bottle of Kentucky mash he had rescued. But everywhere activity stopped as Jeanette moved among them. A woman in man’s clothing!
Unperturbed by their reactions, she marched General Morgan to the ranchhouse to report to Ford. He was as surprised as the others. From behind the kitchen table he eyed her suspiciously. “I’d think I was hallucinating if I didn’t know better.” Then he smiled. “My little Mexican gunrunner, a lady.”
LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) Page 25
