Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  The only other event of note was the sighting of a shark in the lake. “But yes,” one of the steamer’s officers had explained when some of the passengers scoffed. “The shark, he has always been in the “Gran Lago,” and very tasty he is, too.”

  The first priority was a hotel. There were, not surprisingly, a number to choose from near the lake shore, the best of which appeared to be the Alhambra. Following their handcart, taken because of the elaborateness of the design painted in green, red, yellow, white, pink and black on its solid wheels, they created quite a stir. Mazie, in honor of the occasion, had chosen a gown of heavenly blue tarlatan trimmed with miles of grosgrain ribbon. Her hat, which she wore tilted forward upon her piled golden curls, was a ribbon confection topped by an enormous Democrático cockade. In her gloved hand she carried a parasol of white lace. Eleanora had no need of such protection. Her hat was a cartwheel in the leghorn style made of several layers of white muslin through which the sun cast pleasing shadows upon her face. The pink ribbon that circled the crown was echoed in the pink cabbage roses strewn across the white foulard silk of the gown Mazie had pressed upon her. Though the two women were near the same height, in their alterations they had forgotten the extra length in the skirt allowed to cover Mazie’s fashionably large hoop. At the last moment Mazie had pressed her extra crinoline, a lightweight collapsible Thompson hoop, upon Eleanora. As a result the gown stood out like the petals around the heart of a flower. The round, scooped-out décolletage was cool compared to her brown velvet, but its lowness brought more than a little warmth to her cheeks. Jean-Paul’s air of smoldering disapproval she found excessive, however, and to spite him she took the major’s arm, entering into a spirited conversation which consisted largely of parrying his gallantries and nodding as he pointed out the features of Granada.

  The town was a vast improvement over the others they had seen. It was built in the Spanish style around a series of squares or plazas. The buildings were of warm golden stone or whitewashed plaster roofed with red tiles. Cool courtyards, known here as patios, were incorporated within the walls of the houses. From them waved the shining green of orange trees and magenta masses of bougainvillea. The bell towers of churches reared above the rooftops, and the figures of sandaled priests in cowled robes moved among the throng crowding the streets.

  The major left them at the hotel steps. Jean-Paul took a room for only one night since he must report to his barracks the first thing in the morning. For convenience Eleanora and Mazie took a room together next door. That she would not have been able to afford so fine a hotel, or choice a room, if she had been alone was a sore point with Eleanora, but she insisted on paying her share.

  Anxious to remove his sister from her present company as soon as possible, Jean-Paul went off at once to discover the whereabouts of the land-purchasing agent’s office as given on a card left in his possession. After looking over the room and ridding themselves of the dust of the streets, the two women waited some time for Eleanora’s brother to return. When it grew too dark in the room to see each other’s features, they descended to the dining room alone.

  In the doorway they encountered a man just leaving. He drew back with a muttered apology and a stiff inclination of his dark head to give their wide skirts room through the opening. The lamplight glittered on the gold fringe of his epaulettes. Eleanora, flinging him a glance through her lashes, recognized Colonel Farrell, the man at whose hands she had suffered humiliation and defeat in New Orleans.

  She looked away at once, moving past him with her face averted. Still, she could not forget the sapphire-hard indifference of his eyes as they raked over her, or the sardonic quirk of lips as he inhaled the violence of Mazie’s amber scent.

  They ate slowly, savoring the strange, highly spiced dishes set before them; Jean-Paul had still not joined them when they were done. It did not seem prudent to remain downstairs. Taking up one of the bed candles left conveniently at the foot of the stairs, they returned to their room.

  The night grew later, the streets quieted. Once they heard the distant clanging of church bells for a fire. That provided conversation for a time, though nothing came of it that they could see from their window. After a time they dressed for bed and blew out the candle.

  Mazie, lying in the darkness, tried to console her. “He probably rode out of town to see this estate; you know how enthusiastic he is. Or he may have had to report tonight and go straight to the barracks without being able to send a message. I’ve heard Walker insists on a strict regimen for his men.”

  “Yes,” Eleanora answered. It was also possible he had decided to celebrate his last night of freedom with some of the recruits of a similar mind. She had waited for him too many nights to be seriously concerned. However, despite the comfort of a bed wider than her shoulders that did not rock, she could not drift into sleep. She was lying, staring wide-eyed into the dark, when she heard the shuffle of footsteps in the hall.

  Plainly through the thin walls she could hear the rattling of a key and a muffled curse as someone tried to fit a key into a lock. At the familiar timbre of the voice, Eleanora threw back the covers.

  Barefooted, she crossed the gritty floor to the door and turning the key, drew it open a crack. “Jean-Paul?” she whispered.

  Mazie, waking, sat up in bed. “Eleanora, what are you doing?” she asked in what was, for her, a sharp tone.

  “It’s Jean-Paul,” Eleanora explained over her shoulder.

  The voices attracted her brother’s attention, and he stumbled into view, putting out one hand to the door to catch himself. He half staggered, half fell into the room. Eleanora clutched at his arm to keep him from landing flat on his face.

  “Eleanora,” he said, the tone in which he spoke his slurred words bordering on desperation. “I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “Yes, but come and sit down first.”

  “No,” he said with the obstinate will of the truly drunken. “I’ve got to tell you now.”

  Mazie, her ripe charms more revealed than concealed by her nightgown, slid from the bed and touched a sulfur match to what was left of the candle beside the bed.

  “All right,” Eleanora agreed, her gaze going to the other woman as she moved to stand on Jean-Paul’s other side.

  “I couldn’t find the land agent. No such street — no such house as on the card. Nobody ever heard of him. I saw Colonel Farrell. He said it was all a cheat. The man was a crook. There was never an estate, no house, no land. He said we’ll never see the money again. Never. It’s gone, Eleanora. It’s gone, and we have nothing.”

  Shock loosened Eleanora’s grip on her brother’s arm. It was Mazie who lowered him to the floor and rolled him to his back with a kind of efficient pity.

  In grim silence they stood staring down at him, staring at the splotches of food and drink that stained his shirt front and waistcoat, at the rip in his waistcoat pocket where someone had stolen his watch and fobs — and the tracks of tears in the dust and perspiration grime of his near-beardless face.

  3

  Money. Everything seemed to come to that essential. Eleanora could not return home, there was no money. She could not stay at the hotel, there was no money. She could not hire a house or engage the companion who would convey respectability upon her singular existence without funds. She could not, in good conscience, accept Mazie’s charity and remain in the hotel at her expense. The other woman refused to understand her scruples, taking Eleanora’s refusal as a personal affront. The rift between them had not been bridged when Eleanora packed her few belongings into a bundle and moved out. Mazie’s sole acknowledgment was to send the things she had given her after her with a curt note saying if she did not feel comfortable wearing them she could consign them to the nearest trash heap — or sell them for what she could get out of them.

  There had not been much time to look for lodgings. Jean-Paul could not really spare the morning he spent at the task. It would, no doubt, be held against him that he had not reported at the ear
liest possible moment. He supposed, with the typical Creole attitude toward the importance of family, that the welfare of a sister would be understood to take precedence. Eleanora was not so confident. If Walker, the civilian who had made himself chief commander of the Nicaraguan army, was a disciplinarian, that facet must necessarily be reflected in his officers.

  The room taken for her was on a side street off the Central Plaza, behind the Cathedral of San Francisco. It was, appropriately enough, in the home of a widow, an ancient crone of a woman with a bent back and an endless supply of shapeless black dresses, all just alike — here would be no sympathy, no companionship, and little protection from that quarter. The old woman was almost completely deaf, and from her silent void, she looked out upon the world with a suspicious and bitter scorn. She had taken the centavo she demanded in payment and clamped toothless gums upon it, more as an insult than a precaution. That done, she had gone into her portion of the house and slammed the door.

  A further drawback was the situation of the widow’s house. It shared a common wall with a cantina enormously popular with the soldiers and the young men in the vicinity. Eleanora’s room was, of course, next to it. Every night the irrepressible din of guitars, zithers, and concertinas competing with raised male voices disturbed her slumbers. To pass the place after noon was to invite insult, she discovered, and more than once she was followed to the door of her room. One gallant even camped outside her door for several hours, until the widow, coming out to do her marketing, stumbled over him and sent him on his way in a barrage of shrill and extremely idiomatic Spanish.

  In self-defense, Eleanora began to wake early, with the silver voice of the cathedral bell calling the early risers to mass, and make her way to the well at the end of the street for water, and to the market for the little food she could afford. She discovered an intense enjoyment of that time of morning. It was cooler, with fewer people about to interfere as she took her exercise, staring at the walls of the central plaza with their pockmarks caused by bullets during the taking of the town by Walker and the Falangistas, the towering front, arched doors and series of rose windows of the cathedral, and the arabesque portal flanked by guards of the Government House where General Walker had made his headquarters. She enjoyed the flaming brilliance of the poinsettias, the waxy whiteness and fragrance of the wild gardenias, and the small sunflowers and ferns that seemed to grow in every crack and cranny. There were fewer people at that hour to bargain with Indian and meztizo — Indian with a Spanish admixture — women for their eggs and stone-baked cakes, their tropical fruits and slivers of meat, which they sold every morning in the open-air market on one side of the plaza.

  Day by day the aimless routine she was following grew less endurable. There was a limit to how long the few dollars she possessed would last, even in a country where a filling, if frugal, breakfast could be had for three cents. She must find something to do, a way to keep herself.

  The possibilities were few. She might be able to teach English. Surely in a country dominated at present by English-speaking foreigners there must be people anxious to learn the language? She was not proficient in Spanish, but there had been enough spoken in New Orleans, a city that had once been an outpost of the Spanish empire, to enable her to make herself understood. If the parents were not interested perhaps they would like to look to the future and have their children taught. Failing that, she might use some of the skills with a needle she had learned at convent school to make articles of clothing to sell in the market. If she were successful she might set herself up as a modiste. Or as a last resort she might become a laundress, joining the other women pounding clothes on the shore of the lake. Soldiers were always in need of laundresses, having little time and less inclination to keep their clothing fresh. Never mind that the position was looked on as only a little higher than that of a camp follower.

  She had been in isolation with the widow six days. She was lying on her bed, trying to do sums in her head despite a Spanish arrangement of “O’ Susannah” coming through the wall, when a knock fell on the door. She waited before moving to be certain it wasn’t coming from the cantina or from the door of the widow.

  “Eleanora?”

  At the sound of her brother’s voice, she swung from the bed to lift the heavy bar and draw the panel inward.

  “Jean-Paul, where—” she began, then stopped as Mazie sailed into the room in a gown of muslin printed with improbable blue poppies. A bunch of scarlet poinsettias filled her décolletage for an effect that was, at the very least, eye-catching.

  “Merry Christmas,” Mazie exclaimed, sweeping Eleanora into an amber-scented embrace that was as forgiving as it was encompassing.

  It was Christmas Eve. Somehow Eleanora had managed to forget the date. That Mazie had remembered, and chosen to remember her, brought a tightness to her throat.

  The other woman, pulling off her lace mitts, fanned herself with them. “It’s as hot as an oven in here. It has to be going to storm again. People who are saying the rainy season is over are out of their heads. How you can stand — but never mind. I have come with a warning, Eleanora, my pet, as well as the greetings of the holiday. Single women, I fear, are not wanted in Granada.”

  Jean-Paul, after only a week as a soldier, seemed leaner than he had been, Eleanora thought as she greeted him with a swift hug. The change was not an improvement.

  “Not wanted?” she asked distractedly looking around for a place for them to sit. There was only one chair in the small room, an article which looked like an unsuccessful experiment in the art of furniture making. Its rawhide seat had stretched, sinking deep in the middle, its frame had warped so one leg on each side was shorter, and the top two rungs of the back were missing.

  Mazie solved the problem in the same manner Eleanora usually did, by sitting on the bed. “Single, unattached women, that is. I had a visit from your Colonel Farrell. He is everything you said he was, arrogant, dictatorial, unreasonable — and more. He explained that he is provost marshal for the town, and in that capacity, advised me to leave as soon as possible!”

  Outrage throbbed in Mazie’s voice. Staring at her, Eleanora frowned. “Can he do that?”

  “As the town is under military rule and he is head of the military police, I suppose he can. But you will never believe why he is doing it. General Walker, if you please, has set himself up as the moral, as well as military, leader of the country. He refuses to have his men consorting with camp followers or the low women of the town. It encourages vice, disease, and disorder. Colonel Farrell actually said that — to me!”

  “If you think that is bad, you should hear the general’s strictures against drinking,” Jean-Paul said, propping his shoulders clad in the red shirt of the Democráticos against the wall. “A soldier caught under the influence gets ten days in the guardhouse to sober up. The second time around he is forced to drink an emetic, then jailed, and the third time it’s the emetic, twenty-four hours lashed to a cartwheel, and jail. A civilian selling liquor to a member of La Falange Americana must pay an arbitrary fine of two hundred dollars, American.”

  Mazie ignored Jean-Paul. “I tried to explain that I am not a common whore, but it made no impression on Colonel Farrell. He seemed to think a woman who saved her favors for one man was, somehow, more dangerous, since she contributes directly to the practice of dueling among the men while she is making up her mind. He contends that women like me grow odious with conceit, having so many men vying for them, and actually encourage the men to compete among themselves out of vanity. Walker is determined not to lose his men to such senseless killing. Never have I been so insulted!”

  “Now, he’s right about the dueling, though maybe not the cause,” Jean-Paul said. “Yesterday two men met, a Frenchman and a Prussian, because they could not agree on whether the Seine or the Rhine River was the prettiest. They were bored. They came to fight, to win honors and booty, and all they get is regulations and drills, a constant harping on duty and discipline. It seems the war was over i
n two battles, won by fifty-six men.”

  “Tired already of being a soldado for Nicaragua?”

  He looked away with a shrug from Mazie’s too-knowing hazel eyes. Eleanora, with a glance at her brother’s drawn face, stepped into the breach. “What are you going to do, Mazie?”

  “The question is what are we going to do? I was told in no uncertain terms to inform any of my friends of a similar mode of living of the new regulations. I very nearly asked him if Walker considered himself above other men, since it is well known that he has taken one of the aristocratic Nicaraguan women into his bed, and it was her influence that brought about the coalition government with the Legitimistas. They even say President Rivas, the man named as head of government, is a distant cousin of hers.”

  “An interesting form of nepotism,” Jean-Paul commented.

  Eleanora shook her head impatiently. “Are you leaving Granada?” she insisted.

  “I don’t know. I’m tempted to stay here just to see what the colonel will do about it. Or perhaps President Rivas has a weakness for blondes? I would give a great deal to prove to Colonel Farrell that I have absolutely no interest in causing quarrels among enlisted men.”

  “You don’t, by chance, suppose his reaction would be to put you on a boat back to New Orleans?”

  “Not if he suspected that is where I had rather go, I’m sure.”

  “I’d join you in tweaking the lion’s beard if I thought he would.”

  “Eleanora,” Jean-Paul began, then subsided as she shook her head at him with a smile.