The army’s electronic proving grounds and the state's futuristic superhighways now desecrate a wilderness that knew only the tracks of the jaguar and coyote, the lonely soughing of the wind, and the gentle whisper of a lover’s words. Much has changed since then, yet the tales of the Ghost Lady persist.
The old-timers tell different versions of the woman who rode sidesaddle, sometimes on a blaze-faced roan and at others on a rangy bay. But in every version the Ghost Lady, dressed in a black formal English riding habit with top hat, always appeared first near a Joshua tree.
It is at that point the similarity of the versions ends. Some say she haunted that area of Cristo Rey because she was a tormented wraith looking for the lover denied her in life. And others say she rode the area, its barren deserts and rock-clad mountains and lush, grassy valleys, because her soul was condemned to wander Cristo Rey until the fifty thousand acres—and the Stronghold—were at last returned to her heirs.
Of course, I preferred to believe the latter . . . perhaps because at that young age my childish mind could not conceive of a love so great that it would transcend time and space. I had yet to taste of love’s binding passion. But in all likelihood I chose to believe that version of the tale because even then I knew, like my Ghost Lady, my soul would know no peace until I possessed what rightfully belonged to me . . . Cristo Rey.
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PART I
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
CHAPTER 1
1863
"The tests are all in, Catherine,” Dr. McFarland said.
He studiously wiped a handkerchief over his spectacles’ thick milk-bottle lenses, and Catherine realized he was afraid to meet her gaze.
Why, she could not imagine. Surely, after watching death claim the hundreds of men given into his hands by the rapacious War Between the States, one more death could not be that difficult to acknowledge. But then, she reminded herself, the good doctor had been in love with her mother for years.
“Dear Dr. McFarland,” she replied as she worked the fingers of her kid gloves onto her hands, “please don't imagine for one moment that I am incapable of shouldering unpleasant news. I have worked at your side too many times during the last year when Death came for its victim.”
She laughed then, a laugh husky with rare, humorous insight, and the aging doctor was once again stricken by the transformation—a rather common face made uncommonly beautiful. “But then it was not one of my family Death was seeking those other times, was it? I assume it is pleurisy?”
Dr. McFarland jammed his spectacles back on his bulbous nose. “Interlobular pleurosis, to be exact.” His walrus mustache fluttered with the grunt of exasperation he expelled. “But it’s not just your mother I’m concerned about. You’re wearing yourself ragged taking care of her and working here at the hospital also.” She fixed him with steady eyes that were neither green nor gray. Crème de menthe, her sister called the color. “But that is neither here nor there,” she said crisply. She fastened the buttons of her kid gloves. The gloves, like her dress, were meticulously mended so that only the most observant eyes noticed. “There is no justice in life—isn’t that what I have often heard you mutter?”
The doctor had the good grace to flush, realizing Catherine was referring to the times he had resorted to alcohol to alleviate the pain in his soul which no physician could heal. She was right—what man was doing to himself in the bloody Civil War was horrendous. He occasionally half wished he could die along with the men on the makeshift cots that crowded the hospital’s wards. Sixty-six years was too old. He had seen too much.
He regarded the woman sitting so properly on the other side of the desk. He was fond of Catherine Howard. Perhaps because of her mother—though twenty-six-year-old Catherine did not seem to possess her mother’s exotic delicate beauty as did Catherine’s sister. But what Catherine did possess that her mother and sister did not was a strength of will and an unsuspected courage demonstrated in her care for men mangled beyond recognition.
“Well, Dr. McFarland?” she asked, her hands clasped lightly in her lap. “What do you propose? Don’t bother to gloss over whatever you have to tell me. By this time I am all too familiar with pleurisy’s—effects.”
The old man complied. “Then I don’t need to tell you about the chills and fever, nor the hacking cough.”
“No, all that I know. Tell me rather how much time my mother has left—approximately, of course.”
The doctor’s shoulders hunched with the weight of the prognosis he had to impart. “No one knows much about the disease. We do know that the patient needs plenty of rest and treatment—what little we can give with our limited medical knowledge.”
Catherine rose, drawing the string closed on her reticule as tightly as if she were drawing it on her emotions. “I will see that my mother gets the best care I can give her. Good afternoon, Dr. McFarland.”
Despite the frigid March air that blasted through Baltimore’s snow-packed streets, Catherine was perspiring as she maneuvered about the attic’s dusty boxes where her father’s belongings were stored. Then she located the crate with the word Books penned across in her father’s precise handwriting.
Her father had been a schoolmaster, and it was he who had taught her the appreciation of books and knowledge—of languages and histories; as her mother, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, had taught her the appreciation for the finer things of life. But it was her father, Catherine reflected wryly, who in a way was responsible for the decision she had made that afternoon— the decision to head toward the gold fields of the West, for her father had done the same in 1850, the year after gold was discovered in California.
He had abandoned the wife who loved him so little, who found a schoolmaster’s salary inadequate contrasted to her former way of life. Disinherited by her parents for eloping with the schoolmaster, the pampered woman was left by herself to care for the thirteen-year-old Catherine and the six-years-younger Margaret . . . or rather Catherine was left to care for her mother and younger sister.
The newest gold fields were in Colorado and Arizona now, and that was where Catherine meant to go. That afternoon, when she returned from Dr. McFarland’s office, she stood before the long pier mirror and looked at herself ... the face made pallid by too little sunlight and her body emaciated to a rail thinness by too much work. The mirror told her she had little hope of courtship from war-weary men. No, they would have their pick of buxom, voluptuously curved young women, who outnumbered the men and were anxious for the taste of romance and marriage that the Civil War had long denied them.
It took only a moment to locate the Encyclopedia Americana. She began to scan the facts about Arizona, which had been a part of the Territory of New Mexico until only two weeks prior, in February, when the U.S. Congress had established it as a separate territory.
She read about the Hohokam Indians who had come to Tucson’s teacup valley long before the Spanish and whose origins were lost in the course of time. And she read about Tucson itself with its watchtowered walls. As a sleepy Spanish pueblo, the Royal Presidio of San Agustiin de Tucson, it was the same age as the American Republic.
When the last light of the afternoon faded from the small attic window, she put away the thick book with the certainty that Tucson was where she would go—where hordes of men had migrated a decade earlier, where women were few. Out there in that barren territory she could earn the money to see that her mother received proper care. Out there she still might find the husband and children for which her own heart cried out.
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LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) Page 27
