He shook his head. "That horse won't run, querida. I'll not let you goad me into doing something both of us would regret. Stay here where you belong."
Driven by some perverse devil that wouldn't let her terminate the conversation, she murmured almost defiantly, "And if I don't?"
His gray eyes narrowed and a slightly cruel smile curved the full mouth. "Crossing swords with me, English? If you were foolish enough to run counter to my advice, you would regret it, I can promise you that! Stay here where you are safe, nifia, but rest assured that if I ever meet you again, and in similar circumstances, I shall treat you as you deserve."
With a catlike grace he left the bed and, not looking 100
at Elizabeth, he swiftly dressed. Fully clothed once more, he walked over to the bed and glanced at her as she lay in the tangled sheets.
Elizabeth knew he would leave her in a moment, knew he was on the point of walking out of her life, and yet, regardless of her marriage, she wanted frantically to make him stay.. .or take her with him. The violet eyes were bright with unshed tears and the soft mouth was tremulous as she stared up at him, wanting somehow to keep him with her, to make time stop.
There was a brief silence between them, Rafael's eyes unmoving on her features, almost as if he were memorizing them, and then with a low groan of frustration he dragged her head up to him and kissed her with a rough sort of tenderness.
''Adios, English," he muttered thickly, and, suddenly releasing her, spun on his heel and walked away. He didn't glance back, didn't see the bloodstained sheets that told of virginity lost and that might have made him question the lies he had been told. Sickened and disgusted, as much with himself for being momentarily blinded by a pair of wide violet eyes and an enchanting mouth, as with the others involved, he walked deliberately out of the room, the gray eyes cold and empty.
With a queer pain in her heart Elizabeth watched him go, one small tear trickling down her cheek. Unhappily she fell back against the pillows, staring blindly into space. She must have fallen into a fitful doze, for she didn't fully awaken until a hand at her shoulder shook her gently. Groggily she stared up at the woman's face above her and memory came flooding back as she recognized Consuela's maid.
Elizabeth sat up abruptly, feeling a slight pain between her legs, and, horrified, she glanced down at the bloodstained sheets as more and more memories she didn't want to face came rushing back. There is no describing the emotions that Elizabeth experienced as the full import of what had transpired flashed across her brain, but horror, fright and pain were all there as well as rage and a queer regret.
Shattered by what had happened, listlessly, like a child that has had too much to bear too soon, she al-
lowed herself to be sponged off and dressed by the silent, oddly gentle maid. And then, barely aware of what was happening around her, she was placed in a carriage and taken back to the hotel she had set out from, what now seemed like eons ago. Resembling a small, pinched-face statue, she eventually found herself in the hotel suite that she and Nathan had reserved.
Bewilderedly she glanced around the room, her gaze locking on the note on the mantel she had left propped for Nathan, what seemed like years ago. Slowly she approached it and just as slowly ripped it into shreds. No one, her tired brain said, no one would believe her. She didn't believe it herself, exQ^pt that the faint pain between her thighs told her it had happened—that Rafael Santana had taken her virginity and hadn't even known it. And somehow, that made everything so much worse
Still moving in a trancelike daze, she wandered into her bedchamber, smiling mechanically as Mary looked up from the embroidering she was doing while waiting for her mistress to return.
Mary smiled, saying calmly, "Did you have a nice visit with your friends?"
A hysterical little laugh burst from Elizabeth and she answered feverishly, "Oh, yes. It was delightful. We had tea, you know." She was babbling, but anything was better than the truth.
Mary looked at her sharply for a moment before saying placidly, "Well, that's nice. It will be good for you to meet a few of your own companions."
Everything was suddenly more than she could bear, and in a voice clogged with pain and suppressed tears, Elizabeth said raggedly, "Would you mind leaving me, Mary? I would like very much to be alone."
Startled, but being a well-trained servant, Mary gathered up her things and departed instantly, wondering what could have made her little mistress look so forlorn... and abused.
For a long, long time, Elizabeth lay on her bed. She thought of many things during those hours that passed so very slowly—Consuela, Lorenzo, and most of all of Rafael Santana's careless taking of her. She blamed
him and in another way she didn't. He had believed her Lorenzo's lover and there was no way he could have known she was a virgin, and yet...
Her eyes were dry, and despite the ache of tears behind them, she never did cry as she lay there alone with her painful thoughts. She couldn't—she was beyond tears. Instead she tried to think of some way in which some sense of this afternoon could be made, but she found no solution. If Stella had still been here in New Orleans, she could have told her what had happened, but she shrank from telling anyone else. And again the thought went through her brain— who would believe her? Even now she had trouble believing it. And, thinking of the scandal, the curious looks and the disbelief that would greet her words, she knew she would say nothing, that Consuela had won. That beastly woman had accomplished what she had set out to do— and at a great cost to Elizabeth.
What was she to tell Nathan? she wondered dully. He didn't deserve a soiled wife... a wife used by another man.
Her head pounding like a drum, she tossed on the bed. She would have to tell him, and if she did, would he then challenge her despoilers? Oh, my God, he could be killed! With a low moan she turned her face into the pillows. And it was then that the most frightening thought of all occurred—she could have Rafael's child. Oh, God, no!
In the end she decided painfully that Nathan had to be told some of the truth. There was no way she could avoid it, and, suffering from the shocks she had sustained during this disastrous afternoon, she could see no other path open to her. She feared most that Nathan would challenge the two men involved to a duel—her own dishonor paling in the face of the possibility that either Nathan or Rafael might die because of w^hat had happened. Of Lorenzo's fate she was indifferent. Consuela, she realized bleakly, would escape with little more than curious looks. It was so unjust that Elizabeth quailed at the thought and knew in that instant that while she would tell her husband the bare facts of what happened, she would never allow the names of the peo-
pie involved to be torn from her. It was the only way ^e could think of to avoid a duel. She couldn't bear it, if Consuela's plotting caused the death of either her husband or Rafael.
She heard Nathan come in not many minutes later, and then before her courage failed her or before she could change her mind, she left her bedchamber and walked slowly toward Nathan's set of rooms.
It was only then that it occurred to her that her husband might very well cast her out into the streets, or that he might not believe her... or even blame her. She stopped for a moment, shaking with terror. But she had to tell him—it was his right to know. It took her several more seconds to gather her deserting courage and face the full implications of the step she was about to take. It would be so much easier, she thought weakly, to say nothing. But I cannot live with this lie, she decided at last. She would tell him, and if he cast her out into the streets then it was no more than she deserved. Perhaps, she was a slut, she thought sickly.
Standing before Nathan's door, she took a deep breath and quickly knocked before she had time to think further. At his answer she slowly opened the door and entered the room.
PART TWO
DESTINY'S JOURNEY
January 1840
^d^ Thlt-fc ^1!P dfP
Ah love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this Sorry Scheme of Things en
tire. Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
— Edward FftzGerald, The Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, Stanza 99
CHAPTER SIX
January of 1840 started out as a dreary, wet, unpleasant month. Seated in her cozy oflfice at the rear of the house, Elizabeth stared out at the fine drizzle of rain that had been falling all morning. Rain would delay the spring planting, she thought glumly. Through her surprisingly shrewd management, Briarwood had survived the "Panic of 1837" and the three years of ensuing depression virtually unscathed, and she wanted no setbacks.
The plantation had become her entire life. The handsome white-columned house and the broad, fertile acres were her reason for living, her reason for driving herself. Every waking moment was spent lavishing thought and care on the plantation, and through her steely determination, the fallow acres had been turned into tall rows of sugarcane and corn and fields of oats, wheat, and barley.
It had not been an easy four years for Elizabeth. Outwardly she and Nathan had a very pleasant marriage, and no one, seeing their comfortable manner with one another, would ever guess that Elizabeth now slept alone and that Nathan was impotent. If he still had an occasional male lover, he was inordinately discreet about it. Sometimes Elizabeth suspected he did, knowing that he did frequent Silver Street in "Natchez under the hill."
They had persisted in attempts to consummate their marriage, but Nathan had continued to find himself incapable of doing so. Elizabeth suffered with it for as long as she could and then, after too many repetitions of the nights in New Orleans, gently but firmly banished him from her bed. That had been some two years
ago. She tried hard not to feel that Nathan had cheated her, but sometimes as she lay alone in her bed and thought of the nights of pain and embarrassment they had spent while Nathan tried again and again to prove himself a man, she could not ignore the tide of unhap-piness that swept over her.
It had been overwhelmingly difficult for her to confess the events of that ghastly afternoon in New Orleans, but she had forced herself to explain to her husband that another man had taken what was rightfully his. Nathan's reaction had been one of horror that she had been so mistreated, and she found herself in her husband's arms as he comforted her and attempted to soothe her, to lessen her terrible feeling of shame and to stem the tears that had fallen at last.
And it was only when she had gained some semblance of composure, when the sobs had become only heartbreaking hiccups, that Nathan had mentioned the one thing she feared most.
Watching her closely, he had said with an effort, "Elizabeth, my dear, you must tell me the names of these wretched people. I mean to challenge them, to kill them for what they have done to you. As for that wicked, wicked woman, whoever she may be, I can only wish for her an agonizing death. Please tell me their names— I cannot let your honor go unavenged. My own," he had finished with an unhappy twisted smile, ''is completely in tatters—with you, my dearest, I have no honor."
Dully, she had murmured, "If you do care for me, as you say you do, Nathan, then I implore you to let it be." And knowing intuitively there was only one way to stop him, she added, "Will you make me suffer the shame and the scandal a duel will bring? Do you want it bruited about that your wife was known in the most intimate way imaginable by another man? Please, I beg of you, do not force me to endure that too."
It had been a telling argument, and staring down into her tear-drowned violet eyes, Nathan had known then that he would do exactly as Elizabeth wanted. He wanted nothing to distress her further, and so reluctantly he allowed himself to be swayed.
Fortunately Elizabeth's fear of a child had not been 108
realized, and once that was confirmed she never consciously thought of what had happened in New Orleans ... except once. It had happened about a year after she and Nathan had arrived in Natchez, and Elizabeth was never quite certain if the man in question had been Rafael or someone else entirely. At any rate, she had received a jolt of queer excitement and dismay when one of the more formidable matrons of Natchez had sailed up to her that spring of 18.37 and asked in an arched tone if the tall, dark stranger had called upon her. At Elizabeth's blank expression the woman had looked even more arch and murmured, "He seemed most insistent about seeing you—described you most thoroughly, and I of course assumed from his manner that he was some acquaintance of yours. But then, with the gentlemen one never knows, does one?" The woman had sighed theatrically and added, "I understand your reserve, my dear—I certainly wouldn't want my husband to know that a man like that, so handsome and dev-astatingly attractive, was interested in me!" The subject was dropped, but for several days thereafter Elizabeth was on edge wondering with a mixture of hope and fear if indeed Rafael had come to Natchez looking for her. It appeared not, and eventually she dismissed the incident, telling herself that Mrs. May-berry must have been mistaken about the gentleman and whom he wished to see. And in time Elizabeth was able to push everything connected with New Orleans and Rafael Santana out of her conscious mind. That time and those events were locked away with her youth, her dreams, and her longing for love.
Oddly enough, she and Nathan, after the first incredibly difficult months, both gained a certain amount of satisfaction from their strange marriage. Nathan, his fears and secrets open between them, found his conscience considerably lightened, and Elizabeth gained growing room and freedom such as she had never known.
Outwardly the scars of that afternoon and the nights of Nathan's impotent fumblings had faded and to a certain extent healed, but instead of following the usual pursuits of a young, beloved bride, she had thrown herself into turning the raw and newly built Briarwood
into a home that was the talk of Natchez. And she did it—the sumptuous furnishings, the spacious rooms all were the envy of half the wives in Natchez, and the surrounding grounds rivaled those of Brown's Gardens, Andrew Brown's plantation built near "Natchez under the hill."
Hard work in those early days at Briarwood was the only thing that kept Elizabeth from giving into self-pity. That and books. She devoured them. Oh, not the romances of her youth, but books that were peculiar for a young lady—books on farming practices, breeding genetics, and, for pleasure, the rare books that came her way concerning the early Spanish conquests and explorers of the New World. Oortez, Ponce de Leon, Pizarro, and even the fabulous stories of Cabeza de Vaca and his incredible eight-year journey through the uncharted wastes of what was now the Republic of Texas and the northern provinces of Mexico—she read them all. Why these men fascinated her she did not care to speculate, but perhaps it was because they had all displayed the same ruthless intensity of that silvery-eyed devil—Rafael Santana!
From the practical books she learned a great deal of farming and breeding—knowledge she put to good use; from the others she satisfied a yearning for adventure.
There was little resemblance between a young woman who now called herself''Beth" in January of 1840 and the shy Elizabeth who had gone so miserably to her husband that night in 1836. The events of that afternoon had done more than just take her virginity—they had stripped away her innocence and left in its place a shell. A shell no man was ever going to shatter!
She had changed physically, too, her body ripening into the beauty that had been just a promise that night. Slim'still, but a slimness that did nothing to hide the small, full, upthrusting bosom, or the narrowness of the tiny waist or the slender shapeliness of her hips. Her face had matured, too, revealing the exquisite loveliness that had been there all along. She had gained a certain amount of confidence, too, with her successes with Briarwood.
No one had been more surprised than Beth at the 110
excellent results of her ideas concerning Briarwood. She had discovered in herself a love of the land and an uncanny ability to foresee certain economic trends. She was, she thought with an enchanting little gurgle of laughter, simply a clever farmer at heart.
But now, on this dreary morning of January, she felt a sense of
dissatisfaction, a dissatisfaction that had been growing for several months. The passionate desire to prove all those haughty cotton kings wrong was gone, the challenge of taking the raw land and making it productive was gone, the pleasure of turning Briarwood house into a showplace was gone.
Will this be my entire life? she wondered wistfully. To continue to gamble with the elements of nature, to face skepticism and patronizing amusement at her attempts to try new ideas in an area where old ways died hard, and to turn a blind eye to the pitying looks of other wives whose husbands were the leaders of society? She shook her head slowly. No, that wasn't how she envisioned her future.
Certainly she had no longer dreamed of love and romance, but there was driving hunger for something more than the life in which she found herself What she longed for she couldn't even name, she just knew that she wanted something more than to continue to live out her remaining years in this half-alive fashion. She craved excitement and new horizons, new challenges, even danger. Anything was preferable to this humdrum existence.
For a moment her glance slid to Stella's letter lying on the walnut desk, and she pulled a face. That was probably why she was so moody this morning. Stella was full of the hacienda and the news of the birth of her second child four months ago; Beth decided she was probably envious of Stella's happiness. Thinking of that second child, a girl named for herself, she felt a pang deep in her heart—she would never have a child—and momentarily a sudden resentment of Nathan clogged the back of her throat.
But that feeling departed soon enough, for in many ways she was grateful to Nathan—he was kind to her and he encouraged her to attempt things she would not
have dared by herself; he infused her with courage during those times when she wondered if perhaps she had blundered and made a wrong decision.
Suddenly angry with herself for indulging in this oddly maudlin mood, she deliberately shoved Stella's letter into one of the drawers of her desk. There! Out of sight, out of mind, she told herself grimly. But the yearning the letter aroused—the longing to see Stella and the new baby—would not be banished, and the thought occurred to her that there was really no reason why she shouldnt see her friend and... and to travel the old Spanish route through San Antonio, down to Durango in Mexico, then head north up toward Santa Fe! ":
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