Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  “And you, sir. You — all of you — have been in my thoughts these last months.”

  “As you have been in ours,” he replied.

  There was no time for more. The line behind her pressed Eleanora forward. As she moved away, she took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. He had not denounced her. There had been nothing in his manner to indicate that he knew of any blot upon her name. The idea had crossed her mind that he was trying to convey a message to her with his last words, until she remembered his habit on ceremonial occasions of speaking in the royal plural.

  She wandered about at something of a loss, inspecting the arrangements of flowers, huge bouquets of roses and jasmine in urns on stands, and the streamers of ribbon in red and black draped from the chandeliers fastened to the walls in loops with ribbon rosettes. The supper tables were already laid with the hotel’s famous gold service, and centerpieces of nougat were in place, formed in the shape of a cannon, a flag, and a five-pointed star. There were several dowagers present, friends of her grand-mère with whom she had a nodding acquaintance. She saw one or two friends from convent school who plied her with eager questions, for the most part concerning not William Walker but the family of her titled husband. If they had heard of the birth of her child they did not ask after him, and Eleanora found she was not anxious to expose so private a matter as his birth — and with it the question of his succession to Luis’s honors — to their curiosity.

  By contrast, the gruff and hearty good wishes of Colonel Thomas Henry were like a breath of fresh air. Standing talking to him, she was aware of the way his uniform had faded, of the darned places on it and the tarnished, verdigris look of the fringe on his epaulettes.

  He was favoring his left hand, keeping that bandaged member behind his back. The end of his forefinger had been shot away just below the first knuckle and had not healed as it should. Eleanora rallied him on his accident-prone ways, accusing him of shooting himself; but she agreed to look at it as he insisted, if he would come to her home. She had then to listen to a recital of all the things he had learned to do one-handed. When he included carrying two punch cups in one hand, she accepted with gratitude his offer to prove it.

  It was hot in the room from the growing press of people and the light of the gas lamps. She would have liked to have withdrawn to an open window but thought it best to stay where she was so Colonel Henry could find her when he returned. She was opening the fan of handpainted parchment which hung by a silk cord from her wrist, when she saw Grant. He stood straight and tall just inside the door. He wore no hat and his hair, in the wavering light, was as shining and blue-black as a crow’s wing. There were new lines engraved at the corners of his eyes, and, though she would have thought it impossible, a leaner, tougher set to his shoulders.

  As if drawn by the intensity of her regard, he turned his gaze toward her. His eyes narrowed slightly and she was certain he lost a shade of color under the mahogany darkness of his skin.

  Her lips curved in the faintest possible trace of a smile, she slowly raised her chin. No breath disturbed the roses at her breast until he moved in a slow step toward her.

  And then, without the least change of expression, he stiffened and the black fire of his stare seemed to pass through her. He halted, turned as if at a command, and made his way against the tide of people out of the ballroom.

  Eleanora stood still, the carved ivory sticks of her fan bending under the grip of her hand. The sound of one of them cracking broke the tension that held her. Then she swung around, her cheeks flaming, as a man spoke from where he had moved, unnoticed, to her side.

  “Look what you’ve done,” Neville Crawford drawled, reaching out, taking up the fan that dangled at her wrist to spread the fragile parchment open. “It’s broken.”

  24

  Eleanora received Neville formally in the salon. She had considered refusing him admittance, but discarded the idea. There might be a certain cold satisfaction in it, but there was greater satisfaction in making the weight of her displeasure over his conduct at the ball personally felt.

  Neville was no fool. He was fully alive to the nuances of social conduct. Glancing around at the elegant room as he walked down it, at the pale-green striped silk walls, white brocade settees, Aubusson carpet in a design of cream and green and rose, and rose velvet drapes, he lifted a brow. “I am suitably impressed by your new grandeur, my dear, but I prefer the simple comforts of the courtyard — unless, of course, you have something of a private nature to say to me?”

  His smile was calculated to charm but it left her unmoved. She did not come forward from where she stood stiffly in a morning dress of orchid-flowered white lawn beside the marble mantle. Neville, perforce, had to remain standing also.

  “You know what I wish to speak to you about,” Eleanora said challengingly. “There can have been no doubt in your mind, after our discussions on the subject, of Grant’s reaction to seeing you standing beside me. It could not help but look as if we were the conspirators he suspected, if not more. Why? Why did you interfere?”

  “Shall I be honest?” he asked, tilting his head to one side. “I think yes, since I doubt anything less will serve. I have noticed in you, my dear, a lamentable preoccupation with our Colonel Farrell. I saw signs that you had come to regret the impulsive way you left him, signs that you might be inclined to use young Michael to further a return to your old relationship, now that Walker is finished. I couldn’t allow that.”

  “A man has the right to know he has a son!” she defended herself.

  “You could have written him a note,” Neville said dryly. “But that would have had none of the force of a personal confrontation, would it? It would be harder for a man to ignore the natural duty of caring for the child, and perhaps its mother, if he was face to face with them?”

  “I find your suggestion contemptible,” she declared. “I have no need for a man to care for me.”

  “That may be. Deny, if you can, however, that you have no need for a man—”

  Eleanora lifted her chin, aware of the flare of lust in Neville’s eyes. “You are being deliberately offensive.”

  “Am I? It’s no more than the truth. I thought these last few months that you were beginning to see me as a fair substitute for your precious colonel. I thought, until Colonel Grant Farrell came back, that you and I might throw in our lot together. We would make a good team. With your beauty and my brains we could turn that pittance you got from Luis into a fortune. We could live like royalty, move in the first circles in the East and in Europe. If you would let yourself, you could learn to care for me, I think. In the meantime, what I feel for you will be more than enough to carry us through.”

  “I don’t—”

  “No, wait! I’m not suggesting anything in the least underhanded. I want to take care of you, to marry you. I’m asking you to be my wife.”

  Eleanora stared at him, her green gaze level; her tone when she spoke at last was scathing in its contempt. “You are the most arrogant, conceited, viciously immoral man I have ever met! You contrived to have my brother and me arrested on charges that could have led to death; you allowed men who had been your friends to go to the firing squad when you could have saved them; you lied to me, blackmailed me; kept the knowledge of my brother’s suicide from me in order to arrange a political murder, and yet you expect me to entrust my fortune and myself to your tender care? You must think me the most stupid woman alive! I thought more of your intelligence. I thought you realized that all I wanted of you was the information you could give me about Walker and the Phalanx. If you thought anything else, if you have been staving off your creditors with the expectation of having my fortune at your disposal, then I am sorry for you. I recommend that you leave town before you are found out. There is nothing to be gained by lingering, I promise you!”

  He smiled, a cynical twist of the lips that left his eyes cold. “That is your pride speaking. Women, in our society, have an awkward time of it alone, especially a woman like you. In
time you will reconsider, and when you do, I will be waiting — impatiently.”

  He had moved gradually nearer as he spoke. With the last word he reached for her, grasping her shoulders to drag her against his chest. His fingers caught the back of her neck, forcing her face up, and his lips came down, devouring hers. He wrapped one arm about her waist, and with his free hand explored the curves beneath the softness of her lawn gown.

  Shuddering in disgust, Eleanora brought her hand up with the fingers curled, ripping at his face with her nails. As his hold loosened, she tore herself away and grasping at the mantle, tugged hard at the tasseled bell pull which hung beside it.

  Neville drew himself up. Taking out a handkerchief, he put it to his face. “If it wasn’t for your houseful of servants, I would teach you a few things about yourself.”

  “Would you?” Eleanora asked, looking up from straightening the frill at the neck of her gown, and running a hand over her hair. “Pretty behavior for a gentleman. I wonder who taught you, unless it was Niña Maria? I’m persuaded the two of you were well suited.”

  “She at least had sense enough to know how to pick a winner. I expect she is queening it in León at this very moment.”

  “I wish her joy of her victory,” Eleanora said, her lip curling, “and of you, if you should decide to join her.”

  “Maybe I will,” he told her, adjusting the cuffs of his shirt below his coat sleeves, “if I don’t hear from you within the week. It may help you to make up your mind once and for all if I tell you that your colonel has followed his gallant leader to Memphis, so there’s little chance of him coming to heel.”

  The opening of the door prevented Eleanora from replying, though the glacial look in her green eyes was sufficient to blast the hopes of a less egotistic man.

  The butler had Neville’s beaver hat in his hand. Taking it, Neville threw a last look at Eleanora, a look of hate and frustration and whetted desire. “I can see myself out,” he said shortly, and slapping his hat on his head, strode from the room.

  Memphis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Washington, New York; it was possible to trace Grant’s whereabouts with Walker through the news sheets. Uncle Billy was greeted everywhere with acclamation. At Wallack’s Theater in New York his arrival was marked by the band playing “Hail Columbia,” and he was forced to make a speech from his box. He was in that city for the touching reunion with the remnants of his army as his men straggled in from Panama.

  Not everyone looked on him with favor, however. His complaints about Commander Davis were ill-received in some quarters. In addition, Vanderbilt had no time to exchange either compliments or recriminations with him, and his pleas for a meeting with President Buchanan were ignored. Before long he turned toward the more receptive climate of the South again, moving his entourage to Charleston.

  Eleanora, for her own self-respect, did not sit around and mope. This was due largely to the effort of Colonel Thomas Henry to get himself killed. Deep in drink and boredom, he had entered into a bet with Major Joe Howell, a sometime friend, sometime enemy, sometime opponent in fisticuffs, sometime drinking companion. The bet over the fighting prowess of a couple of newsboys had ended unsatisfactorily and the ensuing argument had turned into a duel in which Colonel Henry was the injured party. Laid on his bed with a hole in his arm and another in his abdomen, he had cursed the doctor chosen to minister to him and sent for Eleanora. When he was able to be moved, she had had him brought to her house and put into one of the best bedchambers.

  A great favorite with his men, the colonel drew visitors like flies, many of them men of the phalanx who had chosen to land at New Orleans from Panama. Eleanora’s house became a mecca for the men who, by and large, rightly or wrongly, considered themselves legal citizens of the Republic of Nicaragua. A few of them had small hurts which they brought to her, but for the most part they needed only feeding, a place to sleep for a day or two, a small stake on which to return to their homes. Eleanora, with some understanding of what it meant to be tired in body and soul with no money, no food, and nowhere to go, was glad to do what she could. She was treated at all times with the greatest of respect, perhaps because of the presence of her servants and the bull-like Colonel Henry, perhaps because of something within herself. She could not begin to think what tales must be going around the city concerning the constant stream of men passing in and out of her house, and she could not bring herself to care. Let them think what they would.

  Toward the last days of August, the number of men who came began to drop off. One by one the familiar faces disappeared; one of the last ones to go was a tow-headed boy with a soft country accent, the boy who had defended her the day she was arrested in the hospital. He came to say thank you, to wish her happiness and tell her he was going home to a small farm in the back-hill country of northern Louisiana, a farm he hoped he would never have to leave again. By the middle of September they were all gone except for Colonel Henry. Soon she would be alone again.

  Not quite, of course. She had Michael. Michael, with his fine black hair, skin which looked to be permanently sunburned, and eyes as brown and shining as chestnuts. At five months he was a good child, seldom crying except when he was hungry or wet, though he was just the least bit spoiled from all the attention he had received from the men who could not resist picking him up from his pallet in the courtyard when they found him there.

  Eleanora, kneeling on the pallet in a billow of skirts, told him so in fond accents as she changed him one mellow September afternoon. There was a feeling of autumn in the air. The leaves were falling from the trees around the city. A drift of pin oak leaves from a nearby courtyard had landed on the pallet, and she removed one of them from the baby’s determinedly clenched fist before propping him back upon his pillows. He was learning to sit alone, and could do so by himself for several minutes at a time, holding the position by sheer willpower exercised with the most humorous look of total concentration. She had sat him up, holding both hands out to catch him if he fell, her lips curved in a fond maternal smile, when a sound caught her attention.

  She had heard no bell. Looking up, she half expected to see Colonel Henry or perhaps her old nurse coming to take Michael for his nap. The man she saw instead was Grant, and beside him, a white-haired gentleman of noble bearing whom she recognized immediately as Don Estebanthe Conde de Laredo.

  Something grim in the features of the two men sent alarm coursing along her veins. Her first reaction was instinctive. With a swooping reach, she picked Michael up and held him against her. The child in her arms, she struggled to her feet, hampered by his weight and the treacherous width of her full skirt. In the surprise and unreasoning agitation of the moment she abandoned preliminaries. “How did you get in?” she demanded. “And what do you want?”

  It was Don Esteban who answered. “As to how we got in, a gentleman who was just leaving informed us where we could find you and assured us of a welcome. What do I want? You must know, señora, that I have come for my grandnephew, the new Conde.”

  Eleanora glanced at Grant. His face betrayed no expression, he seemed not to have heard as he studied the face of his son with every appearance of no more than dispassionate interest. Steadying her voice with an effort, she said, “You have been misinformed.”

  “I think not, señora. I have in my possession a copy of the baptismal record of this child. I have been in correspondence with your paramour, a man named Crawford. He dared to send the copy to me along with the threat of exposing the birth if I did not pay him blackmail money. The pair of you mistook your man, I fear. I would never usurp the place of the rightful heir to the title. I am convinced, however, that you are not a fit person to have the custody of a child of such importance, if you would consent to let him be used in such a manner. Therefore, I have come to take him with me back to Spain. You can fight it, of course — I would not expect otherwise considering the fortune at stake — but that fortune can and will be used against you—”

  “One moment,” Eleanora interrupted,
her voice hard in her efforts to keep it from trembling. “I know nothing of such a threat. I deny completely ever having a part in it. Why should I blackmail you if I have such proof of my child’s birth? Why not claim the title with the money, the exalted position of dowager Condesa, and the guardianship of the estates which goes with it? Why would I settle for less — unless this child was not your grandnephew?”

  “The baptismal certificate—?”

  “A subterfuge, to keep from branding my child a bastard,” she said, uncaring of her choice of words as long as they had the required effect.

  “You are saying your child is illegitimate, fathered after the death of my nephew? This I cannot believe of you. My reading of your character—”

  “I am sorry that you have traveled so far on a useless errand. I am sorry that I cannot gratify you by claiming a relationship with you for my son, but my child was not fathered by Luis de Laredo.”

  The old man shook his head. “I think perhaps you were afraid the child would be taken out of your hands if you claimed the title. I think you thought, you and this Señor Crawford, that you could keep the child and bleed the estate, having your cake and eating it too, as the English say.”

  “You must make up your mind, Don Esteban, whether you consider me an overprotective mother or a monster who would let her child be used as the pawn of a blackmailer. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “Perhaps not,” the old man said with dignity, “but I must ask you to reveal to me the father of this child, the man to whom you turned so soon after wedding and being widowed. I feel you owe me this much proof of good faith.”

  Involuntarily Eleanora looked at Grant, half expecting him to claim parentage. He gazed back at her, his face still. She could not tell what he was thinking behind the deep, fathomless blue of his eyes, any more than she ever could. It was odd that he was content to let Don Esteban be her inquisitor, but then, it would not have been like him to hurl accusations at her in company with any man. Alone perhaps, but not with another. The baby held close against he, sensing the tension around him, began to fret.