by Henke, Shirl
“But the man in that cell is not Lucero Alvarado. He's Nicholas Fortune, an American. He isn't El Diablo.”
Morales looked at her as if she had grown a second head—and had not a brain between the two. “I realize this is most difficult for a gently raised lady, but—”
“I'm not having a case of the vapors, Commandant. Nor am I making up a story to save the father of my child,” she replied, struggling to remain outwardly calm.
“You're saying...” His eyes darted involuntarily to her belly. Then his thin face turned a distinctive shade of fuchsia as he immediately looked back at her face. “That is, ahem—”
“Yes, that is what I'm saying. Nicholas Fortune is my child's father, but he's not my husband. They're half brothers who both bear such a remarkable resemblance to old Don Anselmo that no one can tell the difference...at first.”
Morales began to shuffle papers from one neat stack to another, methodically evening the edges with his small stubby fingers. “This is most irregular, but even if what you say is true, I have no authority to release him.”
“When does the tribunal meet?”
He tugged at the neck band of his crisp blue uniform. “Tomorrow. At ten.”
“I will be here precisely at ten.” She rose and nodded politely.
The officer scrambled to his feet and rounded the desk to see her to the door. Bowing stiffly he said, “I doubt if you can do much good, Madam Alvarado. There are several witnesses. One is a...er, a young woman who was raped by El Diablo.”
Mercedes paled, but thrust out her chin determinedly. “Then she should see that Nicholas has a scar on his left cheek. Lucero has not a mark on him.”
She knew he did not believe her. God and all His Saints, what if the tribunal did not either? If only those witnesses could discern the difference between Lucero and Nicholas—but when one was missing, the other could so easily pass. Many of the people at Gran Sangre did not notice the absence of Nicholas’ scar when Lucero had returned. People see what they choose to see. Just as you chose to do for so long.
The scar! Dear God, what if Lucero wore a beard when he was riding with the contre-guerrillas! No, when he rode back to Gran Sangre, he had been clean shaven. But now Nicholas was not. Here in prison he had been forced to let his beard grow.
At daybreak the next morning, Nicholas was awakened when his cell door screeched open. He sat up groggily, wondering what was happening. Mercedes walked briskly into the small cell, followed by a fat, balding little man with a leather satchel and a burly soldier who carried a heavy iron tub which he set down on the floor with a loud thunk.
Fortune combed his hair out of his eyes with his fingers and looked at Mercedes. “What in hell is going on?”
“I found that in prisons, like in most other places, pullets do not roost so high that they won't come down for corn. I bribed the jailer to arrange for your toilette before you appear at the tribunal.”
She gestured at another soldier, who trailed them into the cell, struggling with two steaming buckets of water. As he dumped them into the tub and left to get more, the bald man extracted the tools of his trade from the satchel, barber's scissors and a razor.
Suddenly Nicholas and Mercedes’ eyes met. Both remembered the time she had attempted to shave him in the bathing room at Gran Sangre. Their expressions betrayed the heated longing the memories evoked. Her cheeks flushed as she placed her reticule on the floor and began to roll up the sleeves of her simple pink muslin day dress. He looked at the way the sheer folds of fabric gathered below her breasts, falling softly around the swell of her belly. His body grew rigid with desire.
It was as if she could read his thoughts. When her eyes met his again, the aching sweetness of passion infused her cheeks and deepened her eyes to the color of warm molasses. She watched as the barber shaved her love's face and trimmed his hair while the soldiers finished filling the tub with warm water. As the razor glided across his cheek with soft rasping strokes, her fingers curled at her sides. She trembled with wanting to touch him. Only wait until they've gone.
As soon as the barber finished, she paid him and the water carriers. All three men left with the jailer. She smiled. “Now, strip off those filthy rags and let me bathe you. I've brought you clean clothes from Gran Sangre.”
He watched, amused, as she took one of Luce's best black wool suits from the small trunk that one of the soldiers had carried in. “I had your shirt pressed. Hurry now, before the guards return.”
He grinned rakishly in spite of his grave misgivings about her being in this hole. “If you're considering an assignation, I ought to warn you about the rats around my pallet.”
A brief look of alarm swept across her face, then vanished. She concentrated on him as he pulled his filthy shirt over his head and tossed it onto the floor. A new angry red scar was forming on his right side. “What happened?” she asked as he favored the wound, wincing as he turned back to her.
At once she rushed over to him, running cool soft hands over his heated flesh, walking around him to examine the entry wound where Hernan Ruiz's bullet had lodged. “You've been shot again!”
“Souvenir of my little expedition to stop Mariano Vargas and his friends from killing the president,” he said wryly. “The doctor thought I was lucky to be alive,” he added with a mirthless chuckle as he began to unfasten the fly of his breeches.
Her mouth went dry, partially from fear that he had almost died in another battle, yet more because of the way his trousers slipped down his long hard legs, revealing his aroused sex, which stood up proudly as if begging for her touch. “Nicholas,” she whispered, unable to stop his name from escaping her lips.
His eyes narrowed, burning deeply into hers. “I love the sound of my name on your lips. How often I wanted to hear it when I came into you and you cried out.”
He spoke low and rapidly, as if he, too, could not stop the words from slipping out. In an instant Mercedes was in his arms, her hands clasped about his neck, pulling his mouth down to meet hers. “Nicholas, Nicholas,” she breathed against his lips.
Then he claimed her in a sweet, savage kiss, holding her tightly to him as his mouth ground down on hers. She opened for his tongue, tasting him eagerly, glorying in his stamp of possession on her as he plunged inside, mimicking that deeper, most intimate possession of all, which had created the life growing inside her.
Nicholas felt his ardor spinning out of control and knew he had to stop before he did take her in the crude filthy cell. Breaking off the kiss and holding her at arm's length, he struggled to regain his composure. “I wasn't exaggerating about the rats,” he said raggedly. “I'm stinking filthy and this is no place for a lady like you.”
“You can be such a fool at times.” Her voice was breathlessly impassioned, but there was an underlying stubbornness in her stance as she gestured to the tub. “Climb in and you won't be filthy any longer.”
“You're an amazing woman,” he said with a grin, doing as she bid him.
Mercedes took the soap from the trunk and knelt at the side of the tub. She wet her hands and worked up a rich lather, then set to work, beginning with his freshly barbered hair. He leaned back under the able ministration of her deft fingers.
After she had finished sudsing right down to his scalp, she said, “Sit up and close your eyes so I can rinse.” He leaned forward and she dumped a small bucket of water over his head.
When he flung his head back, his hair sprayed water around the cell, splashing her with droplets. “Now, you're wet, too,” he said.
His double meaning was not lost on her. She held the soap clutched in both hands, billowing white lather foaming between her fingers as her tongue darted out and quickly ringed her lips, moistening them so they glistened softly, invitingly.
“You'd better put that soap to use before it all foams away,” he said in a hoarse voice.
Mercedes reached out and began to work the lather into his skin, beginning with his shoulders and moving down his arms and chest. T
he slickness of her soapy hands contrasted with the light hair on his forearms and the thick pelt on his chest. Hard ridges of muscle tensed as she touched him, massaging in the soap, then using the abrasion of a washcloth to scrub weeks of prison grime from his body.
She moved to his back, careful of the fresh scar, then scrubbed his long legs one at a time. When all that was left was what lay beneath the water, she paused. Nicholas chuckled, a rich low baritone that filled the stark cold cell with warmth. “You know what to do,” he teased languidly.
“Yes, I certainly do,” she replied in an equally sensuous voice, leaning down and letting her hands glide beneath the surface of the water.
When she found him, hard and aching, he considered for one fleeting moment letting her give him his release that way. It might well be the last pleasure he would have in this life, but he could not allow that any more than he could take her in this vile, unholy place. What they had shared was sacred to him. He could never defile it this way.
“Give me the rag,” he said abruptly, removing her hands from the water and commencing to finish the bath himself.
He would carry the memory of their lovemaking at Gran Sangre with him to his grave.
Chapter Twenty Five
The tribunal was composed of three judges, two of whom were soldiers and the third an official in the Durango state government. All were seasoned veterans who had seen the ugliest sides of this protracted and savage conflict. They sat at a heavy pine table with sheaves of papers dealing with the various cases they were hearing while this special court sat today in Durango. Then they would move on to the next state capital to make similar judgments. The law of the republic was already exercising its jurisdiction, even before the nation was wholly pacified.
Nicholas had been given an attorney of record, a local lawyer whose private practice in the city of Durango had fallen on evil days during the upheavals of the war. Alfredo Naya was elderly, taciturn and smelled of pulque when he arrived at Fortune's cell a few moments before they were due in court. Naya asked no questions, only identified himself and inquired if Nicholas was ready to face the tribunal. Fortune held few illusions that the lawyer would do more than stand beside him when the judges passed sentence.
When he was led into the courtroom, Nicholas was glad that Mercedes had arranged for him to make a presentable appearance. He had little doubt of the outcome, but at least he would face the death sentence with dignity, as befitted an Alvarado, not filthy and disreputable as the New Orleans gutter from which he had fled. If only she were not there to witness this. But Mercedes had insisted upon accompanying him, and since the court believed her to be his legal wife, they had allowed it.
My wife. She was, in truth, the wife of his heart and always would be, just as he was the husband of hers. This would be horrible for her. Having lived for so long as a soldier, he well understood how the military dispensed justice in wartime. Swift and merciless. If she pleaded that he was not her husband and revealed that she had betrayed her marriage vows with an impostor and carried his child, what might that priggish little commandant—or even these stern-faced judges—think of her? Do to her? A handful of his vaqueros had accompanied her to Durango, but they would be powerless to help her if she was assaulted while inside the great stone hulk of the government building.
When she was escorted into the courtroom by a young soldier, Nicholas again exchanged glances with her, silently pleading that she hold her peace, but he knew from the golden fire in her eyes and the mulish tilt of her jaw that she would not do it.
A number of other people filed into the room and took seats on the crude wooden benches lining the walls, facing the judges. Two were well-dressed merchants, a third a village curate and the rest clad in simple, loose-fitting cotton clothes were obviously campacinos. Witnesses to Luce's crimes? Nicholas could only speculate.
One young girl, no more than sixteen or seventeen, was voluptuously endowed, exactly the type that would appeal to his brother. Her waist-length tangle of ebony hair spilled out from beneath a frayed blue rebozo as she stared at him with sullen black eyes that made him feel she was already walking on his grave. Damn you, Luce!
The judge seated in the center rapped a crude wooden gavel and surveyed the room with glittering black eyes. His face was fleshy, yet saved from being soft-looking by a great beak of a nose and a bulldog jaw of granite-hewn proportions. When he spoke, his voice filled the room.
“The accused will stand.” His eyes bored into Nicholas, who stood facing the panel of judges. Naya stood somewhat unsteadily beside him. “You, Lucero Alvarado, otherwise known as El Diablo, are charged with committing rape, murder and common brigandry over the past year in the states of Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí and Aguas Calientes. How do you plead?”
The gray-haired lawyer looked at Fortune with doleful eyes, then turned to face the court, but before he could say anything, Nicholas replied, “Guilty as charged. Why don't you save the republic's money and pronounce sentence right now?”
“No! You cannot!” Mercedes burst out before the startled judge could respond to the prisoner's remarkable statement. She stood up and walked toward the bench. “He isn't guilty. He isn't even Lucero Alvarado!”
“And how, madam, would you know this?” the judge with a drooping handlebar mustache and heavy-lidded eyes asked.
“I am Lucero Alvarado's wife, Mercedes Sebastián de Alvarado, and this man is not my husband.”
The people lining the benches began to murmur excitedly among themselves, all but the young girl with the venomous dark eyes. The principal judge called for silence in his stentorian voice and the room quieted as all eyes fastened on Mercedes. The third judge said to her, “Please be seated, Madam Alvarado. You will be allowed your turn to speak—at the appropriate time.”
With a look of pleading at Nicholas, Mercedes returned to her seat. The accused and his attorney were also seated and a series of witnesses was called to testify. Each in turn took an oath and told a similar tale, shopkeepers and tradesmen, farmers and merchants, all of whom stood by as El Diablo had shot innocent civilians before their eyes, looted their towns and villages, and put their homes to the torch. One of the last to testify was a village priest who described how the infamous raider had ridden his great black stallion into the sanctuary of his church, where he instructed his men to strip the altar of its golden vessels.
Fortune's lawyer made no attempt to question the witnesses. Neither did the accused indicate that the stories were anything but the truth. Mercedes sat on the hard wooden bench, her spine stiff and straight although her back ached abominably. She tried to remain calm and impassive but the lace handkerchief in her hands was shredded before the testimony was done.
Then Margarita Olividad was summoned. The sullen-faced young woman stood up and swished her ankle-length skirts angrily as she approached the judges. She paused beside Nicholas and gave him an insultingly contemptuous inspection, then continued up to the table to be sworn in.
Like the others, she accused El Diablo of cold-blooded murder and theft; but in addition, she also described the brutal manner in which he raped her. Then, with her black eyes blazing with hatred, she stood and pointed at Nicholas. “He has done this dishonor to me! Now he must die for it!”
When Naya made no attempt to refute her testimony, Mercedes could sit still no longer. “Please, your honors, if I might address the court, I think I could show that she is accusing the wrong man.”
One of the military judges leaned backward with an impatient scoff, stroking his handlebar mustache while the judge wielding the gavel sat impassively, regarding her with an unreadable stare. Only the civilian judge appeared ready to consider her plea. The three men conferred briefly among themselves in terse murmurs, then regarded Mercedes.
“You may step forward and give your evidence at this time,” the center judge intoned, then turned to dismiss the Olividad girl.
“No, please, your honors. Let her remain. I have some questions to ask h
er.”
As she walked to the front of the courtroom, Nicholas watched, overcome with dread for the possible harm she might be doing herself and their child. She had changed from the simple cotton day dress into an elegant, deep-green linen suit trimmed with black braid. Her hair was bound up in heavy coils high atop her head and she wore a small black hat with a matching green plume. She looked every inch a criolla, patrona of a great hacienda, and Alvarado's lady.
Swallowing for courage, Mercedes approached Margarita Olividad. “I know you went through a terrible ordeal and were very frightened,” she began slowly. “I, too, lived in an isolated place where soldiers and contre-guerrillas came to rob me...and worse. I was frightened also, but I was very fortunate to have a gun when a French officer trapped me alone in my home.”
Margarita's eyes widened in surprise, but she said nothing, just watched the beautiful lady in her elegant clothes.
“I will never forget his face.” Mercedes shuddered but went on. “And I'm certain you won't ever forget El Diablo's face either.”
“He is the one,” the girl said with a mulish toss of her head, glaring at Nicholas. “I will never forget those horrible eyes, black as hell but glowing like...yes, like silver!”
“Yes, this man has the same eyes as Lucero Alvarado...because he is Lucero's brother.” Another outburst of murmurs rose. “Nicholas Fortune is the illegitimate son of my father-in-law, but in spite of the similarities to Lucero, they are two different men. Nicholas has been a soldier all his life. He carries many scars—scars which Lucero does not have—look at the scar marring Nicholas’ left cheek.” She gestured to Fortune, but Margarita was having none of it.
“You say the French soldiers came to your great hacienda,” she sneered. “But you are a lady.” She said the word as if it were a malediction. “If you had been so cursed as to have a man rip off your clothes and rut over you, you would never forget his face. Never!”