by John Jakes
“I don’t need promises, Luis. I just need you.”
Again he averted his head. “Sometimes I wish I’d never seen you. But I did. And I have come to—to love you with all my being. More than I have ever loved any woman.” He raised his head. “Any woman.”
“If that’s how you feel, nothing else is necessary. Blow out the lamp and lie down with me—”
She saw the dawning wonder in his eyes. Wonder mingled with suffering. He was still agonized by what he had revealed about himself. She tried to relieve his conscience with a light tone.
“It is about time you treated me as a proper camp follower! Besides, I’m too sore to sleep on the ground one more night.”
Slowly, slowly, a smile forced itself across his mouth. A tentative smile that turned to joy as he reached upward for the lantern.
iv
In the darkness, he cursed, then apologized. He’d tangled his feet in his breeches as he pulled them off.
He lowered himself beside her on the narrow cot, touching her cheek almost hesitantly. She circled his neck with her arms, turning her head to the proper angle for a kiss.
When their lips touched, much of Cordoba’s restraint disappeared. He pressed his mouth hard against hers. She felt his yearning in the sudden clasp of his arms beneath her back—
He murmured her name over and over as they embraced. He spoke lovely, courtly Spanish as he caressed her body. She sighed with pleasure when his hands closed on her bare breasts.
A moment later, she maneuvered beneath him, guiding him and laughing when he gasped at her boldness. He entered her gently, although his breathing roared loud as a storm in her ear. When she urged him to speed, he complied, and with each quickening movement of his body, she understood again that this was no weak man, only one who was tender and humane in a world that sometimes derided those virtues. With the straining of her own flesh, the movement of her hands, the press of her mouth, she tried to show him that she admired and prized what he was.
He was quicker than she, bursting into apologies afterward. She stilled them with a kiss, then drew him into the curve of her arm. Holding him close, she murmured that, before the night ended, there would be another time. A better one—
“Oh,” he said, alarmed, “I don’t know if that’s possible for me—”
“It is. You’ll see.”
She caught the sound of a boot scraping in the dirt street outside. Another eavesdropper?
She felt sorry for him, whoever he was. Skulking in the April dark, he could only hear the sounds of love-making. He would never imagine the sense of completion and peace and—yes, admit it—affection that warmed her soul after long, long months of privation.
v
After that night, Manuela never bothered her again. An even happier result was the change in her relationship with Cordoba.
Before, their conversations had been largely superficial: the events of the day’s march; the suspected position of Sam Houston’s little army; the latest example of incompetence or dishonesty on the senior staff. But once they had shared each other’s embraces, she and the major wanted to share the whole sum of themselves as well—their hopes and histories, their dreams and disappointments.
As the army worked its way south toward Thompson’s Ferry, their evening lovemaking usually ended not in languorous slumber but in quiet conversation. Nights when they were both too tired, conversation sufficed.
The only subject Cordoba wouldn’t discuss was his wife. Otherwise, he held nothing back. What he had said about himself was true: his background—his world—was limited to soldiering.
He had been born in Veracruz, the fourth of his father’s children, and the only son. He was a young subaltern in the army when the political upheavals began in the 1820s. His father, a prosperous importer, remained loyal to Spain. After much painful deliberation, Luis Cordoba put himself on the side of independence, helping to overthrow the Spanish government, then that of the professed revolutionary Iturbide, who had turned on his separatist followers and maneuvered himself into the role of emperor.
Iturbide had been deposed in 1823. A year later, a revised, democratic Mexican constitution began luring the Anglo-American empresarios to Texas. Through it all, Cordoba said, he had remained loyal to Mexico first and the army second.
“When the separatist movement developed, I had the highest of hopes. I thought that, at last, I could fight for something other than simple military victory. For principle. Over the years I’ve learned how easily principle can be crushed by those with ambition. Now I’m virtually back where I started—obeying orders. Hoping to win if there’s an engagement. Not daring to look too deeply into why we’re fighting. A man can die in many ways, you know. Death in battle is perhaps the most final, but the least grievous. It’s much worse to struggle for a cause, then perceive that you’ve struggled for nothing. I felt that way—cheated, dead—when His Excellency jettisoned the constitution.”
“There’s no hope of unseating Santa Anna?”
“Next to none. He’s firmly entrenched. God—what a poltroon he is! In its short history, your country has been fortunate to escape his kind, Amanda.”
“Oh, we’ve had our share of poltroons, I think—” She shook her head. “I get such an odd feeling when you speak about the United States.”
“Odd? What do you mean?”
“It is my country. Yet sometimes it doesn’t seem so any longer. My grandfather did fight in the Revolution—”
“Did he! And survived?”
“Yes, though he was wounded. He limped for the rest of his life.”
“The Americans have a positive passion for rebellion! Even more so than those of us south of the Rio Grande, I think.”
“That isn’t always a good thing, Luis. Do you know that when we fought Britain again, twenty-five years ago, several of the northern states wanted to secede because they hated the war? And four years ago—I remember being shocked when I read it in the papers—South Carolina nearly left the union because of Nullification.”
“I don’t know the term.”
“It means a state placing itself above the law of the country. South Carolina didn’t like one of the government’s tariffs. So the state legislature nullified it. Said it didn’t apply to South Carolina. Old Hickory—”
“The president, Jackson?”
“Yes. He said it did, because no state could declare itself separate from the union. He promised to send in troops if South Carolina continued to disagree. The state gave in. I suppose that was proper. I remember hearing my father say that once the country was formed, no one could tear it apart. I didn’t understand—I imagined huge ditches in the earth. Now I know what he meant—and how serious the question is.”
“Your country is still divided on at least one great issue.”
“You mean slavery?”
He nodded.
“That’s where our passion for rebellion as you call it could prove our undoing,” she said in a somber way. “There are people in the east—mainly in New York and Boston—who call themselves abolitionists. They want to do away with slavery completely. The south can’t afford that. There’s trouble coming—you can tell even by reading the papers out here.”
Boston, Amanda revealed, was the city in which she’d grown up. She had lived in a splendid house owned by Gilbert Kent, her father, a well-to-do printer of books and newspapers.
Gilbert Kent had died at a relatively young age, leaving Amanda in the care of her pretentious and somewhat unstable mother, Harriet. Gilbert’s widow had made a poor choice of a second husband—a wastrel named Piggott. He had succeeded in gambling away most of the family’s assets, including the printing house, Kent and Son.
“The loss was probably no accident, I learned later. My cousin Jared—the son of my father’s half brother Abraham—served in the navy in the 1812 war. There was an officer aboard Jared’s ship—Stovall, his name was—who fancied boys and men in preference to women—”
Cordoba snor
ted in disgust.
“Jared got in a scrape with Stovall. Injured Stovall’s face—scarred it. Permanently. The man never forgot. After the war, he came to Boston in secret. He was the one to whom my stepfather lost Kent’s.”
“You think this Stovall planned it? Maneuvered your stepfather into a game and cheated him?”
“I’m almost certain of it. Anyway, my cousin had a terrible temper in those days. He set fire to the printing house and shot and killed Stovall’s general manager, a man called Waltham—Walpole—something like that.”
“In heaven’s name, why take vengeance on some flunky?” Cordoba exclaimed.
“Jared didn’t intend to—he was aiming for Stovall.”
“And so those tragic circumstances marked the end of the family business?”
“I’ve no way of knowing. Books are fairly scarce out here—especially among poor people. Now and then I’ve asked questions. No luck. Besides, if the firm burned to the ground, it might not have been rebuilt at all. But I never heard that Stovall had any connection with publishing. His family operated an iron works of some kind.”
“How about the fellow himself? Is he living?”
“There again, I’ve been too busy staying alive to look into it—and I’m not trying to be clever saying that. It’s God’s truth. I haven’t had the money—or the necessary eastern contacts—for making an inquiry. I know our family employed a Boston law firm, but the name is another of those details that’s completely slipped away from me. Sometimes, I think I’m much better off leaving the whole question alone. I’m afraid that if I learned Stovall was still alive, I’d spend all my energy on schemes to repay him.”
“You have a deep hatred of him, obviously—”
“Without ever having set eyes on him. If he hadn’t lured my stepfather into a gambling game with the firm at stake, my mother might have lived. She died the same day Jared burned Kent’s and shot the general manager.”
“How did she die?”
“She was run down by a dray right in front of our house on Beacon Street. Everyone called that an accident too, but my mother’s second husband caused it. My mother had a fight with Piggott. He told her he’d lost the printing house. She rushed out, intending to go straight to the firm. She stumbled on the curb—the drayman couldn’t stop in time—”
Amanda paused, reliving the scene in her mind. Cordoba whispered a word of sympathy. She let a shudder work itself out, then went on.
“That same night, Jared crept back to Beacon Street and told me what had happened. That he’d set fire to the firm because he couldn’t stand the thought of someone like Stovall taking over what the Kents had worked so hard to build.”
“This Jared sounds like a headstrong sort. Did he have no one to discipline him?”
“No. My mother tried, but she and Jared despised one another.”
“What became of his parents?”
“Abraham, his father, tried to homestead in Ohio. Jared’s mother was killed there. By Indians. Abraham gave up and came home. A few months later, he disappeared completely. On the very night I was born, in fact. I remember hearing very little about him except that he was a noisy, quarrelsome man. He was drunk most of the time—anyway, the night the printing house burned, Jared convinced me that we had to leave Boston together. We had no one except each other, and he was afraid of being arrested for murder. We started for New Orleans. I can’t remember much about the early part of the trip, except that it was winter. We were always half frozen and half starved. We met a few kind people. I recall one little girl named Sarah, in Kentucky—her mother and father were farmers. They treated us well and helped Jared recover from a sickness. We didn’t get far after we left Knob Creek, though. Only to Tennessee—”
From the pain of the past, she summoned the rest of it: her rape and abduction by the bogus preacher Blackthorn, who sold her in St. Louis to a trader named Maas. He in turn sold her to a warrior of the Teton Sioux, a young, not unhandsome man whose Indian name translated to Plenty Coups.
“Some of this you’ve already heard—”
Cordoba grinned. “How you were experienced with men at age twelve, for example? I’m certainly fortunate to have the benefit of all that training—”
She pinched him. “I didn’t ask for it, Luis! I was pretty well filled out by the time I was twelve—”
He rolled his tongue in his cheek. “That is not hard to imagine.”
“Oh, be serious! Do you want to hear this or don’t you?”
“I do. Please continue.”
“Being a woman was the only weapon I had when I was sold to the Sioux. If I hadn’t used it, I would have been treated a lot worse by Plenty Coups.”
“How long did you stay with the Indians?”
“Eight—no, closer to nine years. Like you, I never had any children. For some reason, Plenty Coups couldn’t.”
“I’d say you were lucky to survive such an experience.”
“I’ve told you before, it wasn’t all luck.”
“Ah, yes. The old chief’s compliment when you left—”
“Determination was only part of it. Something else helped me get through those years—and the ones since. Somehow I’ve always been blessed with almost perfect health. I never realized how precious that was—how rare among women especially—until I saw all the sick squaws in Plenty Coups’ village. Work and childbirth and white men’s diseases killed more of them than I can remember—”
She told him the rest on succeeding evenings: how Plenty Coups had been injured in a fall from his horse as he rode in to strike a huge bull buffalo with his coup stick during a hunt. Three weeks later—just about the time, they figured out, that Iturbide had been at the height of his power as Emperor Augustin I of Mexico—she was a widow.
A month after Plenty Coups’ death, a party representing John Astor’s American Fur Company had visited the tribe.
“Jaimie de la Gura, my husband, was one of those men. The American and French winterers and the Delawares who worked with them called him Spanish Jim. He was very handsome—”
Cordoba pulled a face. “More handsome than I?”
“Just about the same.” She leaned up to kiss his lips.
“You told His Excellency your husband came from New Orleans—”
“That’s right. His father was quite well off. Ran an elegant coffeehouse. But that was when he was older. Civilized, you might say. There was a wild streak in the de la Gura family. Jaimie’s father came by most of his money running slaves with the Lafitte brothers. He wanted Jaimie to enter the clergy or perhaps study law. Jaimie wouldn’t do either. He didn’t like town living very much. He ran away up the Mississippi when he was eighteen, went to work for a fur trader in St. Louis, and traveled west from there—”
“To find you in the Sioux village.”
“Yes. I was allowed to be seen by white men after Plenty Coups died. Jaimie took a liking to me. He asked me to go with him—and he was willing to pay the old chief in trade goods for my freedom. My life with the tribe had come to a kind of ending, so I said I’d go. Jaimie was ten years older than I was. A good man.”
“And obviously one of impeccable taste.”
She laughed. “We were married in St. Louis. We spent our honeymoon in a real hotel, with solid walls, and beds with the most marvelous sheets and blankets—I’d forgotten what that sort of existence was like. Jaimie still didn’t care for it, though. And he was too independent to work for one employer very long. He didn’t keep on as a trapper because he felt the life was too hard for a woman. We went south. He worked at odd jobs—we covered a lot of territory before he finally decided we should come to Texas and try farming.”
She described the events that had led to Jaimie’s death and her subsequent venture with the hotel.
“So you can see I’ve done a good many things in thirty-three years, Luis—some of which I’m a little ashamed to talk about.”
He brushed his mouth against her cheek, as if to dismiss her con
cern. Then he shifted his position so she could lie more comfortably. He asked, “This Jaimie—did you really love him?”
“I think so. He was kind to me. I never felt any great outpourings of emotion when he was alive. But I liked him—I enjoyed being with him—at least until things went sour for us. I mourned a long time when he died. If that’s love, then yes, I loved him.”
The major touched the rope bracelet. “Did he give you this?”
“No, my cousin Jared did. He made it from cordage on the Constitution, the frigate he served on during the war.”
“Do you know where your cousin is now?”
She shook her head. “That day in Tennessee was the last I ever saw of him. He may be dead. He might have gone back to Boston, though I doubt it—”
“You sound sad when you speak of this Bos”—he had trouble pronouncing it—“Bos-ton. Do you miss it?”
“I miss never being hungry, or cold, or worried about tomorrow. I sometimes feel Boston’s where I belong.”
“Because of the comforts?”
“No, that’s not it. My father came of a very independent, idealistic family. I can still see him in the front sitting room one night when I was little. He was speaking to Jared. I can’t recall the exact words, but I understood his meaning, and it made a great impression. My father said anyone who belonged to the Kent family had a duty in this world. A duty to give, not just take—”
Lost in the reverie, she closed her eyes. The images in her mind—a flickering hearth, her cousin’s tawny hair and blue eyes, her father’s sallow face and frail body beside the mantel, a long, polished muzzle loader, a gleaming sword, a small green bottle—were incredibly vivid.
“I can hear his voice to this day. And see the things above the mantelpiece. A little bottle of dried East India tea my grandfather collected when the colonists dumped the shipment in Boston harbor. There’s a sword my grandfather got from the French general, Lafayette—and a Virginia rifle—”