Bride of Fortune

by Henke, Shirl

  He lowered his mouth to take hers, ravaging it hungrily as he murmured against her lips, “You're my wife and I never give up what's mine.”

  * * * *

  Mercedes stood watching Lucero with his vaqueros in the dim light of dawn. He rode Peltre with the inbred grace of a criollo. Every move of his lean, elegant body was arrogant, powerful, completely self-assured as he issued crisp orders for the day's work. Even from the distance of the upstairs window, she could see that errant curl slip over his forehead when he removed his hat. She remembered what that lock of hair felt like when it brushed her skin as he kissed his way over her body. Just thinking of last night sent a hot, hard stab of pain deep in her belly.

  Biting her lip in vexation, she turned from the window. Each night her struggle to lie passively beneath him grew increasingly more difficult. She wanted to know what she was missing, what made her ache, what drove him to that final apex of shuddering, explosive violence that ended their congress each time he took her. It must be pleasure so intense as to almost shatter the soul. Might it be the same for a woman as for a man? Surely not...yet why did some women tease their men and follow them adoringly with their eyes? She had seen such behavior between married couples on the hacienda, even between men and women of her class in Hermosillo.

  The memories of her parents were hazy, yet she seemed to recall her mother's trilling laughter issuing from behind their bedroom door. But that was different. Her father and other men were not like Lucero Alvarado. He would use her, then discard her. Had he not done it once already?

  Mercedes had tried every trick she could think of to keep herself from responding to his caresses, recalling his harsh words at their betrothal, his casual cruelty on their wedding night, even the lethal and bloody way he had dispatched that bandit with whom he had fought on the Hermosillo road. When all thoughts of him, especially those since his return, proved too dangerous, she resorted to mentally inventorying grain supplies, even counting chickens and sheep.

  But nothing worked. She was so tense there were nights she feared she would shatter when he touched her. His possessive hungry words last night still haunted her. Had he meant them? I wouldn't give you up even if you were barren...I never give up what's mine.

  “He's so different now than he was before. He confuses me,” she murmured, rubbing her temple against the headache beginning to build. She bent over the basin of water on the oak table in her dressing room and splashed her face. There was simply too much work to be done for her to waste time indulging in self-pity. What would be, would be. A part of her prayed that she would conceive quickly so that he would leave her. Yet another part, not so deeply repressed as she would like, wondered if he would keep his word and continue lying with her after she began to increase. Did she hope he was telling the truth? That was insane, for all too soon she knew her resistance to his seductive lovemaking was going to crumble, leaving her defenseless.

  As Mercedes performed her morning toilette, Nicholas rode to the east pastures where several small herds of beef still remained scattered in the foothills. His thoughts, too, were centered on the troubling relationship he and Mercedes shared. Then suddenly his reverie was interrupted by one of his vaqueros, calling out to him from the ridge directly ahead. He kneed Peltre into a canter.

  “What is it, Gomez?”

  The hard-eyed rider flipped the cigarette he had just finished smoking carelessly into the grass, then replied, “The men here caught a pair of trespassers. Peons from San Ramos. They've butchered a steer with the Gran Sangre brand on it.” His narrow dark face took on an expectant expression. “Do you want me to exact the usual punishment?” He reached for the whip coiled like a black serpent on the back of his saddle.

  Fortune's stomach knotted but he gave no outward sign of his agitation. He knew the rules in this feudal country where any peon caught poaching livestock from a hacendado was subject to a severe lashing. And that was only the milder punishment. Maiming with a knife, even outright hanging of the miscreant was not unusual.

  “I’ll deal with them,” Fortune said calmly, passing Gomez with a curt nod of dismissal.

  Caesar Ortega stood frozen in horror as the arrogant-looking don rode up. Even though he was dressed in simple work clothes, any man in Mexico would have recognized him as an aristocrat, the finely chiseled features, the lean elegance of his body, the way he sat his mount as if born to command.

  Caesar wished he had not come with Antonio, but his brother had been so convincing. Who on Gran Sangre would miss one steer when the patrón had thousands? The plaintive cries of his hungry children had added great persuasion to Antonio's argument.

  Now who would feed their families when they were crippled or dead? “Mercy, patrón, I beg of you.” Antonio was crying as he fell to his knees in front of the big gray stallion. Caesar remained mute, studying the haughty criollo. It would have gone better if he had taken Sylviana and the children and gone into the hills with the guerrillas. At least that way he could have died fighting like a man. But he would not beg like Antonio.

  Nicholas looked at the two men, the younger one groveling while his companion stood ramrod stiff, utterly silent. They were dressed in dusty white cotton pants and loose over-blouses, frayed and filthy with age. Even the baggy clothes could not disguise the stark thinness of the peons. Their faces were seamed with deep lines, etched not by the passage of years but rather by the harshness of eking out an existence tilling the soil in this unforgiving land.

  With no horsemen to clear irrigation ditches, the peons in the small villages had to rely wholly on rain for their crops. And this was an arid land. There had been little rain during the growing season, less last year, according to his wife, who had been forced to become a proficient farmer. The two men were ravaged by hunger. In the past fifteen years as a soldier he had ridden through hundreds of villages like the one they no doubt came from. Whether it was the Crimea or North Africa, or Mexico, hunger always wore the same face.

  Ignoring the hysterical man, Fortune turned to his older, stoic companion. “What have you to say for yourself?” he asked in a level voice.

  Caesar gestured to the animal, lying with its throat cut in the narrow ravine where they had by luck cornered it. The blood on his machete was ample proof of their guilt. “We killed it, yes. Our children have eaten nothing but cornmeal and water mixed with ashes from the fireplace for weeks. The drought has withered this year's crops. We were desperate. And you had so many cattle. We had nothing.” His statement was eloquent in its simplicity.

  “You're both young enough. Why haven't you gone to fight for Juarez?” Fortune asked and was rewarded by the startled look that quickly flashed in the older man's eyes.

  “I thought of it, yes, but a dead soldier cannot feed his children. I have four. My brother Antonio has three. His wife is expecting again.”

  “They breed like animals,” Gomez said with a sneer.

  Antonio, who finally realized that his brother had elicited a calm response from the don, fell silent, then got up from his knees and stood beside Caesar. “We will take our punishment,” he said quietly.

  “And we'll be happy to give it,” one of Gomez's companions said with an ugly laugh.

  Nicholas looked from their smirking expectant faces, avid with the promise of violence, to the two haggard wretches standing before him. This is how Juarez recruits. We do it for him.

  When had he begun to think of himself as a part of this land, a criollo, a hacendado? The same time he had begun to think of Mercedes as his wife? With an oath of frustration, he said, “Take the damn cow back to your village—but if I ever see you on my land again, I'll personally stake you over a clump of tuna cactus and let you bleed to death while the buzzards pick out your entrails!”

  Giving a curt sign of dismissal to his astonished men, he wheeled Peltre around and headed back to the road. As he happened to glance over toward Hilario, he saw the gleam of a secret smile in his eyes. Then it vanished, leaving Nicholas to wonder if he
had merely imagined it.

  * * * *

  The gossip about the patrón's bizarre behavior filtered across the hacienda. Don Lucero, who had fought four years for the emperor, now fed republican soldiers and misdirected French patrols. He had even freed two peons whom he could have had summarily whipped to death if he had so chosen. The war did strange things to men, they murmured. Usually they returned meaner, embittered, cynical. But the high-living, haughty young don had returned sober and industrious, working beside his people to rebuild what the old don had squandered. He was truly worthy of his lady, whom they all adored.

  All but Innocencia, who bided her time in sullen silence, waiting and watching the mysterious transformation of her former lover. As the months had passed and he remained faithful to his pale little wife, she gave up all hope of ever luring him back to her bed. He was well and truly lost to her and so was the life of ease to which she had dreamed of returning.

  “Lazy girl, quit your mooning and scrub the pots on the hearth,” Angelina chided her assistant.

  Innocencia had been staring out the window at the well where Lucero stood in the blazing noonday heat. She watched as he dumped a bucket of cool water over his sweat-soaked, dust-caked body while his skinny blond woman, also sweating and dressed like a peon, joined him with that brat daughter of his. Innocencia's eyes narrowed in hate as the three of them laughed and bantered while they cooled off from their labors.

  Angelina's voice grew more strident, forcing the serving girl to obey her commands. She walked to the hearth and seized the heavy iron cauldron, setting to work resentfully under the stern eye of her taskmistress. All the while, something niggled at the periphery of her consciousness, something about Lucero...but what?

  Late that afternoon Lazaro interrupted the patrón, who was working on the hacienda accounts with Mercedes. Entering the study, he faced them uncertainly, saying, “A party of men has arrived, Don Lucero, and they have women and children with them.”

  Nicholas rose from behind his father's massive oak desk, a look of curiosity on his face. “I take it they are not soldiers then.”

  “No, patrón. But I do not recognize them. They are gringos. ”

  He made a small grimace of distaste that gave Nicholas an inward chuckle. What would you say if you knew I was one, too? “What the devil are a group of Americans doing riding through Sonora with women and children in tow?” he murmured aloud to himself. “I'll see to them, Lazaro.”

  “We should, of course, offer hospitality,” Mercedes said as she rounded the desk, brushing the wrinkles self-consciously from her plain cotton skirt. Lord, with her hair plaited down her back, dressed in paisana's clothes, she was scarcely fit to greet foreign visitors, no matter how road weary they might be.

  Nicholas watched her fuss with a few damp tendrils of hair. “As always, you look superb. Let's go greet these uninvited guests. They may be nothing more than a pack of contre-guerrillas with their whores in tow, in which case they won't be joining us for dinner.”

  “But if they're American—”

  “Lots of the men I fought with were drifters from across the border, especially disaffected Southerners whose cause was lost when the Confederacy began to go down to defeat.”

  “I've heard of Maximilian's Imperial Commissioner of Immigration, Matthew Maury. They say he's bringing thousands of his fellow Confederates to relocate in Mexico. Maybe they're some of those people.”

  “Maybe.” His tone was skeptical as they walked down the hallway and into the foyer where the group stood waiting, looking dusty and weary but not at all like the hardened mercenaries he had fought beside for so many years.

  The men ranged in age widely, some in their middle years, a few younger. Their women had two small girls and a slightly older boy with them. Several of the men wore faded Confederate uniforms with gold epaulets on the shoulders. The rest were dressed in quality clothing, but well-worn and frayed. The women, in dark linen riding habits, carried themselves with the demure dignity of respectable society belles fallen on hard times, standing wilted and silent behind their men folk.

  “Colonel Graham Fletcher, at your service, sir,” the leader of the group said in a soft west Texas drawl. Fletcher offered his hand to Nicholas. He was a big man with reddish hair and a long narrow face that indicated Scots and English antecedents. His smile was genial as he studied Nicholas with bright blue eyes that crinkled at the corners. The Texas sun had blasted his buttermilk pale complexion to a freckled ruddy tan.

  “Welcome to Gran Sangre, Colonel. I'm Don Lucero Alvarado and this is my wife, Doña Mercedes,” Nicholas said in English, the faint traces of his New Orleans origins still identifiable.

  Fletcher made a courtly bow to Mercedes, then asked Nicholas, “You a Southerner?” He studied the dark-skinned Hispanic-looking man with obvious puzzlement.

  Nicholas smiled. “No, but I've fought here in Mexico beside many Southerners. They taught me to speak English.”

  “Well, that's good, cuz most o' us cain't speak a speck o' Spanish,” another tall, cadaverously thin man with a decided border state twang interjected, identifying himself as Matt McClosky.

  “We're on our way to meet with General Jubal Early. He was our commander in the late war,” Fletcher said, “but I'm afraid we've lost our way. We were to rendezvous with another larger party of immigrants, but somehow we've missed them.”

  “I'm afraid that was my fault.” A man of medium build with colorless eyes and hair materialized from the cluster of people. “I'm Emory Jones, and I was supposedly the guide, but I'm afraid I misread the signs along the trail from El Paso and we ended up here.”

  The bland-looking man was oddly familiar to Fortune, although he could not have said why. Emory Jones was unremarkable in every way. Even his Southern accent was less pronounced than that of his compatriots. Yet there was something...

  “Emory here's a Reb from Saint Louie,” McClosky explained with a guffaw. “Ain't many o' them in that damned Yankee stronghold.”

  “My mother's family were Virginians, resettled in southern Missouri,” Jones said smoothly as Mercedes and the sad-eyed and tired-looking women quietly became acquainted.

  Upon hearing her precise British English, they were delighted. The patrona ushered them and their children into the sala, then went to fetch refreshments and have bedrooms made up. Hospitality was a sacred tradition among the Mexican criollos. If her larder was depleted, it did not matter. She would make do.

  When Mercedes returned, the men had followed Lucero into his study for a liquid libation stronger than the cool lemonade the women were enjoying. Angelina served them as Rosario stood shyly in the doorway, clutching her doll Patricia against her chest, watching the gringo children with curious eyes.

  “Rosario, come meet our guests.” Mercedes was proud of the way Lucero's daughter made her curtsy when she was introduced. Lucinda Mayfield's daughter Clarissa looked longingly at the doll Mercedes had bought Rosario while they were in Hermosillo. “Perhaps you could share Patricia with Clarissa and Beatrice for a little while?”

  The three little girls went off to the courtyard to play, the language barrier seemingly unimportant in their newly discovered friendship.

  “My Bea really misses her play babies,” Marian Fletcher said sadly. Her gray eyes grew flinty cold as she continued, “The Yankees burned us out. We lost everything, even her dolls. It took all we could scrape together to get a stake to relocate in Mexico.”

  The other women chorused the same wistful sadness tempered by an underlying current of bitterness and uncertainty.

  “Is...is all of Mexico as barren as Sonora, Doña Mercedes?” Lucinda asked timidly. She was a thin, birdlike brunette whose once luminous peaches and cream complexion had turned the wan color of parchment, now stretched tight across her delicate cheekbones.

  “No, much of my country is lushly tropical with rich fertile valleys. Many crops grow year round,” Mercedes replied, understanding. “When I first came to Sonora as a b
ride, I, too, found the land forbidding, but there is a kind of stark wild beauty to it that one gets used to. If not for the war, this hacienda would flourish. As it is, we're irrigating nearly a hundred acres for food crops and my husband has rounded up several thousand head of beef as well as fine-blooded horses.”

  “We were told we'd be given land—large tracts of it. Like this,” Marian said hopefully. “How do you keep up such a lovely home in this isolated area?”

  The women discussed various mundane domestic topics. It was obvious to Mercedes that Lucinda and Marian had come from considerable wealth while Callie McClosky mentioned that she was from a small Tennessee farm. All were daughters and wives of the vanquished soldiers who had lost their land, if not their pride, in the American war. Now they dreamed of starting a new life but were intimidated by the alien land. She did what she could to reassure them but tempered it with explanations about the ongoing war in Mexico. War was a subject about which they were all too familiar.

  While the women discussed their fears and hopes, the men cut directly to the heart of their immediate problem, namely getting from Sonora down to Durango where they were to meet the main train of Confederate immigrants bound for the capital. Nicholas got out his map and showed Emory Jones and the others the easiest route. After that matter was settled, the conversation turned to plans for the future.

  “I heerd the Valley o' Mexico is rich as sin, filled with songbirds and lots o' Injuns to work fer us,” McClosky said to Nicholas.

  “Yes. Commissioner Maury assured us each family will receive a thousand acres of prime land,” Fletcher added.

  “Much of Mexico is rich, but the war has changed the old way of life here, too,” Fortune began cautiously. “I doubt anyone, even the emperor, can guarantee you that much free land, much less enough Indians to work it.”