Bride of Thunder

by Jeanne Williams

  In spite of her need to hate Eric utterly, a picture of a battered, despairing boy separated from the only person he loved and dropped into a strange country came so powerfully to Mercy that she almost touched his hand. “Did you ever see her again?”

  He shook his head. “It was a month before I got back to the Midlands. My father was so drunk he didn’t even know me. I had to get the story out of the governess who had stayed to take care of him, and share his bed, I would reckon, when he was capable. Alison had told the worthy gentleman about me. That, quite predictably, shocked him into bleating like a sheep, and he hastily retreated. Alison, the governess said, had hoped my father would exile her, too, and that somehow she could find me. But he found another man, this one debt-ridden, ailing, and as old as the first, who, for a sum, would marry her and acknowledge the child. It was to escape him that Alison took arsenic that was kept to poison vermin. My sister, to die that way! But it was my fault, my piggish, selfish fault! She was goodness to me all my life, and that was how I repaid her.”

  “You … were very young.”

  “So was she—and much more innocent. I had heard talk at school, had been to a few public women.” His gaze turned inward. “I took Alison’s portrait and harp and worked my passage to Sisal, for I remembered hearing that one of my mother’s many brothers was a merchant in Mérida. He gave me a position, and after that I seemed fortune’s darling. But nothing really mattered.”

  “Did your uncle and Doña Elena know?”

  “My uncle was something of a family skeleton himself for going into trade, and he simply assumed I was a kindred spirit, which was true enough. I’d have smothered in England. We’ve Viking blood in my mother’s line, and it surfaces in every generation. I’ve distant cousins scattered from Canada to Texas and from the Transvaal to New Zealand.”

  “I suppose you can’t all stay in England.”

  “If everybody had, we’d be standing on each other’s shoulders,” said Eric. “Meanwhile, Belize is a fairly unusual place. Though it’s been claimed by the British since the time of Elizabeth, they’ve always been a tiny minority here. The first to arrive were mainly British Navy men who traveled up the rivers cutting dyewood. Do you know of it?”

  Mercy shook her head.

  “It’s very valuable wood, the price for which has risen steadily since its discovery by the Dutch in the 1600s. They found it produced a superior, non-running dye. Later, when the settlers came, they were prevented from growing more than subsistence crops of dyewood or anything else, in accord with a treaty with Spain. But all that has changed since Mexican independence and since Yucatecan refugees started bringing in sugarcane cuttings in the late Forties. I have two hundred acres in cane, and McNulty advises that I plant more as soon as the mahogany is cut.”

  “Can’t you leave the trees?”

  “When they command such a price?” Eric turned abruptly from the harp and led Mercy across the hall to a sitting room furnished with what she thought was Regency with some Chippendale: two striped Grecian couches; plush chairs; a teapoy with brass inlay; a variety of drum, pillar, and claw tables and stands. “Useless room,” said Eric, though he regarded it with a certain contemptuous pride. “The only time it’s used is when the governor visits or when an Englishman accompanied by his wife comes this way, which is damned seldom.”

  A large dining room with tapestry-upholstered chairs, a massive oak refectory table, sideboard, and several oak china cabinets took up the remainder of the bottom floor, except for a small room with French doors opening onto the terrace. Two plain comfortable chairs were pulled up to a small round table with a bowl of fruit in the middle of its sparkling white cloth. There were books, pipes, and metal containers, which Eric said contained biscuits, candied ginger, nuts, and other tidbits in case she got hungry between meals. He added, unnecessarily, that he spent most of his waking time here or in his office or library. A walkway led from this room to the kitchen house, a separate structure.

  Upstairs was a huge room used for storage, repairs, and sewing. The room was equipped with two Singer sewing machines. Mercy had seen the hand-cranked machine designed by Howe, a Boston watchmaker’s apprentice, which could make two hundred fifty stitches a minute, out-doing what a good seamstress could accomplish in five or six times that length of time, but Eric assured her that these Singers were far superior and that sewing for the whole household was done on them. On their floor, there were two guest bedrooms besides Mercy’s.

  “And this is where I sleep,” said Eric, drawing her inside yet another room.

  He took her slowly, almost contemplatively, in the canopied four-poster bed, watching her face, with a gentleness more unnerving than his violence. Dear God! Did he try to imagine she was Alison? That story had made it impossible for her to hate him with clean, undiluted purity, but it made her angry with him, too. Instead of making him compassionate, tragedy had turned him into a conscienceless exploiter of people and land. Instead of his love making him respect hers for Zane, it made him pitiless in grasping for a husk of what he’d lost.

  As if sensing her rebellious thoughts, Eric again, with his probing, skillful tongue, won from her that involuntary tribute of cresting, blind, shuddering release before he entered her, drivingly this time, and reached a convulsively trembling climax, after which he seemed to doze for a few minutes, one gold-haired bronzed arm flung over her.

  “Will you rest?” he asked, his eyes still closed. “Or will you visit Pierre?”

  “I’ll see him,” she decided.

  They washed and dressed and went downstairs. She wondered if she’d ever understand this man who was her captor.

  The kitchen was the most surprising room in the house. Herbs grew in long boxes set on every windowsill. Amidst rows, shelves, and cupboards of enamel, copper, and cast-iron cooking vessels and utensils, bins and barrels and containers of foodstuffs, was a long, heavy table centered with shelves of seasonings, measuring cups, bowls, spoons, and knives. A fireplace situated in a small side room was equipped with spits and grills, but the pride of the cook’s heart was a fearsomely impressive system of fast oven, slow oven, pastry oven, steam closet, hot closet, and bath boiler all in one imposing stove fired in the center.

  “The first of this marvelous invention was shown at the great exhibition in Hyde Park in … yes, 1851, I am sure, madame! It cost Monsieur Kensington a small fortune to have it shipped here, but he’s often told me it was worth it, yes!”

  The pantry was almost the size of the kitchen and resembled a grocery. All of the tinned delicacies were imported, and there were bins of flour, rice, beans, and sugar. Crocks of butter, cream, and milk were stored in the coolest corner. Next to the pantry was a tile-topped counter for cleaning and dressing game and fowl, with a large basin equipped with a drain.

  “You could cook for the queen of England,” said Mercy.

  “I could!” Pierre wasn’t one for false modesty. “But this is better. Monsieur Kensington leaves the kitchen to me.” He gestured at the half-dozen helpers who were going about various tasks. There were two boys of perhaps fourteen or fifteen, two young men, and two middle-aged women. “They do what I say, but none can argue over the correct way to prepare faisan à la flamande or galantine de poulard.”

  “Neither will I!” Mercy laughed.

  Pierre couldn’t quite cover his look of relief. “But madame must be pleased!”

  “I’m sure I will be. I like fruit and vegetables, I am very fond of cheese and eggs, and I’ve come to like tortillas.”

  “I don’t serve those, not me!” When Mercy glanced at the woman making the flat cakes, Pierre said, “Those are for the servants.”

  “Well, maybe I can have one now and then,” Mercy said. “Please make whatever you judge best, Pierre, but remember that I can’t eat as much as Mr. Kensington.”

  “When madame has had time to sample my creations, perhaps she will tell me her favorites?”

  Time. Mercy thought again of the food of Perse
phone. But she must endure, and for that she must eat. Of course I will,” she told Pierre. “Thank you for showing me your wonderful kitchen.”

  He bowed her out and began calling orders for what Mercy feared was the start of the noon meal. Going back to the house, she stood on the terrace, reluctant either to go to her room or wander about.

  What was she going to do here? She wasn’t the mistress of the house and hadn’t the slightest wish to meddle in what was obviously a smooth-running arrangement. She enjoyed cooking, but Pierre was lord of the kitchen, and, anyway, she was determined not to seem in any way to be assuming a permanent and contented place in the mansion.

  She could spend some time daily in keeping a journal and recording all she had learned about Yucatán and Belize. Here, as at Zane’s, there was the incredible luck of a good library. She could continue learning Mayan and Spanish, for there were both Mayas and mestizos among the house servants. But these pursuits, interesting as part of a routine, couldn’t be enough.

  Since she was a child, Mercy had felt needed and important, keeping house for her father and then, during the war, filling in for him as best she could. Continuing to help the sick while keeping a garden and trying to manage a house and cook meals as Philip liked them had been more than she could sometimes manage. She’d never get in that position again—trying to satisfy an emotionally infantile man who could only demand but never give. At La Quinta, she’d taught the children and learned medicine from Chepa. She’d been useful there, a part of things.

  Now the need to work, even if she could find something that didn’t intrude in someone else’s sphere, was frustrated by a resolve not to fit in here, not to become part of Eric’s establishment.

  Had she been a painter or writer, she could have been busy without supporting Eric’s ménage, but those weren’t her talents. If she had a gift, at all, a prime concern, it was healing.

  She frowned, suddenly arrested. With all that sugar and logging and the people required to maintain the House of Quetzals, there would be sick and injured.

  Even if there was a doctor, she could be helpful while learning what he knew. Her father had never had time to follow up on home care, diet, and such things. There’d surely be something she could do. She’d ask Celeste. It wasn’t the kind of thing Eric seemed likely to approve of, but once she learned his routine she could pretty much know what hours would be her own. Those hours could help her remain herself, linking the present with her father and Chepa. But at the moment she was driven to walk down to the river and look away toward La Quinta.

  Where was Zane? Was he safe? Would he believe that letter? Even if he didn’t quite, how could he guess what had happened to her? It hurt to be thought faithless, not only by Zane, but by Jolie, Chepa, Salvador, and Mayel.

  Strong arms fitted around her, hands cupping her breasts. “So here you are, sweetheart!” Eric turned her around for his kiss. “Let’s see what Pierre has for luncheon. After our siesta, I’ll show you some of the plantation.”

  He swept her along with him, but she looked back over her shoulder at the sunlit water and in the direction she hoped to travel again toward the man who was the center of her loving.

  The mare brought around to the terrace for Mercy was a pale tan color, so beautiful that in spite of Mercy’s determination not to be blandished by any of Eric’s gifts, she couldn’t restrain a cry of admiration as she stroked the velvety muzzle and touched a mane that would have suited Pegasus, the winged horse of the Muses.

  “I’ve seen buckskins,” she said, “but never one this color.”

  “She’s a palomino,” Eric explained. “A color, not a separate breed, though there’s lots of Arab in the ancestry. It means ‘like a dove.’ I broke this one in myself, though I had her ridden by a lightweight. Her name is Lucera.”

  The saddle was a mellow rust color stitched with gold. Eric helped Mercy into it before he mounted his big bay stallion.

  “My land stretches from the river to highlands, from about sea level to over two thousand feet, so it has great variety,” he said proudly. “I have cattle in the regions unsuitable for cultivation, and I have experimented with coffee and tobacco, but sugar is my main crop, apart from mahogany and dyewood.”

  “Are your workers slaves?”

  Eric shot her an amused glance. “They aren’t likely to leave. They’re all in debt to me. But slavery was abolished in all English dominions in 1840, and the owners in Belize freed their people a year before that. I wonder if you’re aware, delectably self-righteous one, that one of the reasons you Texans wanted independence from Mexico was that their constitution had forbidden slavery.”

  “Then why do they still have it?”

  “Debt-slavery is at least legally different, though the results are the same. And slavery in Mexico and the West Indies has always been bizarre in that blacks were imported to preserve the Indians, who never stood up well to grueling, heavy labor. My cane fields are worked mostly by refugee Mayas, but I use blacks as much as possible for the mill and refinery.”

  They passed gardens and orchards, corrals and sheds, pastures for horses and dairy cattle, and at a distance from the road, in a swampy place, scores of immense black pigs rooted and wallowed. The way twined through stands of trees, new growth, Eric explained, since the original mahogany and dyewood had been felled, used now to fire the boilers, which demanded tremendous amounts of wood in addition to the fibrous refuse of the cane.

  “Besides needing lots of workers to plant, cultivate and harvest the cane, it takes more to cut wood and run the mill and refinery. All these people have to be fed, so the community busied with sugar is a small village with a management separate from the rest of the estate. The mayordomo, chief overseer, and refinery master are all ladinos who fled the War of the Castes and know how to get the Mayas to work.”

  Remembering the hacienda from which she’d rescued Mayel, Mercy didn’t like the sound of that, and she liked less the sight of the whipping post situated near the store in the clearing around which the workers’ huts and small private plots were scattered.

  “I hope that isn’t used,” she said to Eric.

  He looked at the post, a lopped-off tree the height of a man, and shrugged. “Surely you’ve heard the adage that the Indian hears through his back. I don’t interfere with Don Gerardo as long as he keeps production up.”

  “Why, that’s worse than maltreating people yourself! It lets you profit by such tactics without having to accept direct guilt!”

  “I could stand the guilt.” He smiled coldly. “I lack the time. My workers are unusually well fed with plenty of meat, cheese, and eggs. They have Sundays off and the wages are better than average.”

  “So, perhaps, are the prices at your store!”

  He shook his golden lion’s head. “Mercy, Mercy! I’m a businessman, a proprietor, certainly not a saint, but not the villain you’d like to think me, either. I run a plantation, not Utopia. Indians have never gotten more for their labor than a living. They get a comparatively good one from me. It’s not my fault that they spend more than they earn.”

  Thinking of his cook and fantastically equipped kitchen, the daily delivery of seafood, the servants whose purpose it was to keep his house as he wanted it, the quetzals caged so far from their cloud forests, Mercy choked with indignation.

  “How can you say that? How can you seem to think so many people exist just to make you rich?”

  “I think it because it’s so,” he said without anger. “Do compose yourself, my dear. Here comes Don Gerardo.”

  The mayordomo, a handsome middle-aged man with a narrow moustache, greeted them profusely, expressed his delight in meeting Doña Mercy, and his thankfulness that Señor Kensington had returned safely from his journey through the Cruzob-ridden jungles.

  “I had prayed the emperor would send armies from Mexico to crush that vermin, but it seems the French troops have all sailed and the emperor cannot even defend himself,” lamented the mayordomo. “Now, with Marcos
Canul raiding even British territory, what safety is there? Nineteen years ago I fled Tekax, and now I begin to think I can never go home! Not,” he added hastily, “that I wish to leave El Señor’s profitable employ.”

  “If you should, I can replace you,” said Eric equably: “We’ll just have a look at the mill and refinery before riding past the nearest fields, where you will be so good as to accompany us in case there are questions.”

  Don Gerardo bowed and declared his pleasure at then further company. Leaving him to have his horse brought around, they proceeded toward the refining center adjacent to the mill, where mules powered hardwood rollers that crushed the cane, sending the juice into troughs that ran to the boilers, kept bubbling by Negroes who kept the fires stoked with wood replenished by loads brought up by glum-looking burros.

  The refinery director, Don Manuel, portly and sweating, explained to Mercy, at Eric’s request, how after enough boiling of the syrup, sugar crystals began to form. These were separated from the remaining liquid, which was molasses, and refined into white sugar.

  As they rode past the refining kettles and platforms, a smithy, and woodworking shop, Don Gerardo rode up on a handsome sorrel and they approached the fields, which stretched away to the jungle.

  The greenish stalks flaunted tassels that grew twice as high as the heads of the men cutting them off at the ground and tossing them into mule-driven carts to be cut into manageable hunks by other men with sharp knives. When one of these carts was full, it creaked back to the mill.

  “Cortez probably planted the first sugarcane in this hemisphere,” said Eric. “New plants will come up from the stubble of the cut ones, so I get two or three harvests before replanting.” At a word from him, Don Gerardo called the nearest man, who brought a cutting of several joints. Holding it for Mercy’s inspection, Eric showed her where the dormant eyes, or buds, were. “The eyes are placed downward as the cutting’s planted lengthwise and covered lightly. The eyes root and start new plants in just a few days, but we won’t replant till the rains start in late May.”