She had made that first trip running cotton. True, it was Columbia’s cotton, the last of it. And she had been gone only overnight—long enough to haul the cotton downstream, ferry it across to the Mexican side, and from there transport it to the Bagdad warehouse the Frenchman had specified was to be used in his absence.
Trinidad had grumbled about her making the run with only his son Felix and a few other campesinos to accompany her. But she had to feel she was doing something for the Confederate Cause. And she told herself she would feel even better when she had munitions and medical supplies to deliver to the Confederacy purchasing agents in Alleyton.
How she would later arrange the two-week round trip by wagon to Alleyton without her aunt guessing what she was about was something that plagued her. As it was, until the Frenchman’s sloop returned to take on another cotton shipment, she would have to store the cotton she brought back from Alleyton in Columbia’s old Santa Maria Chapel. It was nothing like the Convent of the Immaculate Conception with its three stories and cloistered archways and lichen-covered surrounding wall. But the Santa Maria Chapel, founded by the Oblate Fathers, had a charm of its own.
The abandoned adobe building with its ochre-brown walls fronted a bluff overlooking the sluggish El Rio Grande del Norte and the old Military Road. The chapel was perfect for hiding the cotton until it could be ferried over to the Mexican side of the river. But suppose the Frenchman did not return for another cotton shipment? Suppose he kept the proceeds from its sale?
She knew that a steamer with an average capacity of 800 bales earned as much as $420,000 on a round trip. A shipowner could shrug off the loss of a vessel after two safe round trips through the blockade of gunboats that cruised restlessly in search of prey. It was something she had fretted about over the past week, for the Frenchman’s sloop should have put into Bagdad by now. Of course, there was bad weather to consider, the lack of coal at a harbor, or the moon—for no steamer wanted to make the run in bright moonlight through the cordon of Federal revenue cutters that prowled the seas.
After Jeanette led the bay to the water trough and penned him up, she made her way to the cluster of jacales. An oil lamp burned in Tia Juana and Trinidad’s. She knocked on the rickety corncrib door and at Trinidad’s “Pasale, ” entered. The old man sat alone on the cornhusk mattress. Apparently Tia Juana had already gone up to the house to start the kitchen fires.
A rank cigarro perched on Trinidad’s seamed lips as his pocketknife whittled away at a child’s whistle. “Como se va?” he asked, squinting up at her through the haze of smoke.
“Excelente.” She took the dusty hat from her head and began to unplait the heavy braid that hung down the center of her back. “I passed two other wagon trains of cotton on the Mexican side of the river. It seems all of a sudden everyone is anxious to cash in on the white gold. Do you know, Trinidad, they’re saying now you can almost follow a trial of lint all the way from Alleyton?”
Her hand paused at its task of unraveling the braid. She tilted her head to one side. “You’re quiet. Has something happened?” She came alert. “Did Aunt—”
The old man shook his head. “No.” His hands stopped their whittling, and he fixed a rheumy eye on her. “I saw the aguatero yesterday. He had a message. The Frenchman’s sloop ees een. Your supplies—they are ready. Alejandro says you are to come by for the invoice.”
Her nimble fingers returned to unplaiting her hair. She bit her lower lip. Wasn’t this what she was working for, ammunition and firearms for freighting to the Confederacy’s battle zones? And, of course, she could keep Columbia operating. Was it really such a high price to pay?
“You do not want to see the Frenchman, eh? That one, he gives you trouble, sobrina?"
She looked sharply at Trinidad. She could not afford for his avuncular protectiveness to interfere with her mission. She smiled wanly. “Sometimes I wish he would. I told you I am a romantic at heart. But the Frenchman—he has only a profit in mind. He thinks of me as nothing more than a dirty urchin like our aguatero, Alejandro.”
“I do not like eet that you go alone to him. What if he should discover you are not a boy?”
She managed to laugh lightly. “You saw Rubia, Trinidad. Dressed as I am, I would not hold the attraction for him she does.”
“Then you have not seen yourself, sobrina."
She slept late that morning, until past noon, then went down to the parlor to tell her aunt that her sick headache seemed to be passing.
“Those headaches are bothering you more and more often, dear,” Aunt Hermione said. Her knitting needles never stopped clicking as she continued: “It’s a wonder mine aren’t any worse with the way things are—the French armies swarming against the Juaristas on the other side of the Rio Grande, that Mexican bandit Carbajal ravaging the Valley, and Union gunboats patrolling the Rio Grande’s mouth.”
“War!” Washington squawked. “Help! Run!”
Jeanette ignored the macaw. Over the cup of Mexican chocolate Tia Juana had brought her, she said, “You sound as if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Rebel, Aunt Hermione.”
Aunt Hermione’s lashless eyes blinked wide. “For land’s sake, no. But soldiers are soldiers, dear, whether they’re French, Confederate, or Federal. And it’s not safe for a woman in times like this. We should thank our lucky stars we’re so far from the battlefront.”
Jeanette swallowed the words on the tip of her tongue along with the hot chocolate. No need to alarm her aunt by telling her that with the increase in contraband flowing out of Bagdad Federal troops might at any moment decide to close off the Mexican trade by invading Brownsville. Fort Brown’s four hundred soldiers would be defenseless against any concerted Federal effort.
Fortunately the Union Admiral Farragut felt that such an invasion was not worth the heavy losses of soldiers he would suffer due to yellow fever. Every summer the peal of the funeral toll signaled yellow fever’s presence.
When her aunt informed her she would be attending a quilting bee that afternoon, a sigh of relief flooded over Jeanette. There would be no need to fabricate a lie for her absence. Surely she could make the . . . payment . . . on the war stores within an hour. She simply had to abstain from drinking anything potent. Besides, meeting with the Frenchman during the day appealed to her for other reasons. There was something about doing what she would have to do in the dark, at night; something that seemed to compound her guilt, though she could not put her finger on it. Perhaps meeting the Frenchman in the daylight hours seemed more a business arrangement and less like a—a clandestine affair.
And, of course, it was less dangerous to traverse Bagdad’s streets in the daylight, even though she did not plan to bring Trinidad with her. He must never suspect the price she was paying. Her shame was great enough without guilt she would feel over involving the loyal overseer in a defense of her virtue.
She wore the boy’s disguise again, hoping that her miserable appearance might dampen the Frenchman’s ardent appetite. The foul-smelling, dirt-stained garments certainly put off the people with whom she shared the Matamoros-Bagdad stage. It was the first time in six weeks she had returned to Bagdad, and she was amazed at the forest of masts in the waters. Where before she had counted maybe a dozen ships, there now had to be sixty or seventy vessels, from schooners and sloops weighing twenty tons to brigs weighing two hundred. They were from every nation, eager to capitalize on the cotton trade which was so vast that control of even a part of it could mean millions.
The narrow, winding streets swarmed with Confederate deserters and Union sympathizers; with German, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, and French seamen; and with peddlers, gamblers, swindlers, and smugglers. She almost despaired of ever locating Alejandro among that backwash of the world. She swaggered up and down the length of the harbor, afraid of being approached by some drunken jack-tar. The September afternoon was hot and muggy with not a breath of wind to evaporate the perspiration that beaded around her hatband and beneath the heavy buckskin shirt. Alas, she could not
discard either the hat or the shirt, as some of the sailors coiling ropes or mending nets had done.
It was Alejandro who found her. “I have been waiting for you,” he told her in Spanish without removing the cigarette butt from between his lips.
So, the French blockade runner was not about to let her take the war stores and leave; not without his commission. She shrugged off her misplaced optimism and followed Alejandro to the lighter used for ferrying freight from the shore to the ships at anchor. This time he did not blindfold her. She would finally see the scurvy scoundrel.
She and Alejandro rode the long steady roll of white-capped waves, neither of them speaking. Without the blindfold, she found the sloshing of the small vessel on the immense body of blue-green water much more frightening. No doubt her complexion was the same shade of green.
Mai de mer. Seasickness. She knew her father had suffered great disappointment that she had been a girl, the only child. There were no sons to follow him to the sea. Perhaps that was why she always tried to do whatever sons did. Climb trees, read, ride bareback. And yet her efforts had gained her nothing. Only her father’s disgust that she could not fit into the disciplined life he knew as a sea captain. But at that moment she wasn’t just seasick. She was scared witless.
In the occasional glance Alejandro shot in her direction she detected contempt for the puny boy she presented. Yet she suspected he also resented that another “boy” could so easily obtain the time and attention of the privateer whom Alejandro obviously held in such high esteem. Oh, if she could change places with Alejandro. If she were only a boy; no, a man who could move so easily within his world, unhampered by the restrictions of society.
She repressed the urge to reach out and run her fingers through the urchin’s windblown hair. Instead, she steeled herself for the approaching meeting with the Frenchman. She sorely missed Trinidad’s comforting presence. Alejandro pulled the lighter alongside a long, low, lead-colored steamer. The extreme rake of her masts and three funnels gave her a fast look. With crisp and graceful lines, she was obviously built for speed. Her short mast flew the French flag and bore the name Revenge.
With a bravado she did not feel Jeanette climbed the swaying rope ladder on the steamer’s starboard side and swung up over the railing onto the white deck. Scored by brass tracks for gun carriages and dotted with piles of solid shot standing handily in racks near each piece, it glittered in the hot sun.
Four or five seamen were scrubbing the planks with vinegar and holystone and hosing down the decks. One of them, a weather-beaten sailor, bare-chested and in white trousers rolled to his calves, ambled toward her on bandy sea legs. Before she could ask directions to the captain’s cabin, he produced a red handkerchief from his hip pocket and proceeded to blindfold her. “Sorry, son—captain’s orders,” he explained.
If that was not indignity enough, he caught both her wrists and bound them behind her with hemp. Once again she faced a world of darkness as the sailor propelled her forward, saying once. “Watch your step.” For what, she did not know. Apparently she navigated the deck safely, for a few seconds later he halted her and she heard his rap against the solid door. And then that marvelous, deep voice: "Entrez.”
The door closed behind her. She knew she was alone with the Frenchman. His soft laughter infuriated her, and through gritted teeth she said, “Are you so brave a privateer that before you face a female you need to have her trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey?”
She heard the creak of chair leather and then his soft tread coming toward her. Her lungs ceased to function.
“'Non,” he replied in that same laughing tone and added something—she wasn’t quite sure what—about a woman and a man. Most likely about a woman pretending to be a man. For the umpteenth time, she wished she remembered more of Armand’s language.
“Where is my ring?”
The Frenchman spoke, softly. So close was he, his breath fanned her face.
Exasperated, she stomped her foot. “I can’t understand you. Where’s your friend, your translator?”
A silence followed. He made no move to touch her, and the dreaded waiting was much worse than if he had gone ahead and raped her. Then at least the waiting—six weeks of waiting—would be over with. Suddenly her hat was removed and her braid swung free. Then she felt herself scooped up against his chest. She remembered now—he was tall with broad shoulders and a solid build. That one night she had spent with him had revealed that much to her . . . and that he had an abundant head of hair. Oh, sweet Mary! She blushed with the memory of his parting words—taunting words. “Le baiser français!"
Abruptly her body was released to sink into a mattress. Her heart began to chug erratically. She waited for the mattress to groan with his weight beside her, but his footsteps took him away. Her ears strained to hear—and picked up the sound of splashing water. Then . . . shock as a cool, wet cloth rubbed over her face. And more shock as she realized he was unbuttoning the shirt to throw it open. She tried to move away, but her arms and bound hands were immobile, jammed beneath her by her own weight. Worse was to follow as her buckskin pants were slipped down along her legs to plop on the plank floor. The wet cloth returned again to bathe her shoulders, the valley of her breasts, under her arms. Down past her navel. Gently parting her thighs. The humiliation was too much! Oh, if only she could will herself into a dead faint for the next hour!
Hour? The Frenchman’s lovemaking took that much time and more. How long she could not remember later. The effect of the blindfold was to produce a curious sense of timelessness, of drifting. She was only aware of the hands that ceaselessly caressed her skin; stroking her shoulders, her calves, the indentations and curves of her body—yet never touching the places that she had been taught were forbidden. Places that she was to learn were extremely sensitive. He whispered words that she suspected were sexual in nature. Desperately she tried to make herself unresponsive to what he was doing to her. But it was impossible. Her body betrayed her, reacting with quivering anticipation of the next step in his slow seduction of her.
At last his fingers touched her breasts, and her nipples sprang erect. A small sigh escaped her parted lips. He whispered something at her ear, and the strangeness of the French language did not conceal the triumph in his voice. “Oh, get it over with, you cursed jackal!”
Still, he made no move to enter her, but continued the erotic play on her body. “Please,” she whispered hoarsely. “S’il vous plait,” she begged with the little French she knew.
When he continued to drop careless kisses in the hollows of her neck and elbow, the indentation of her navel, and along the slope of her hip bone, her body arched toward him in a language of its own. Mercifully, he recognized the language. His torso moved up over hers, and she welcomed the warmth and the weight. He stroked her slowly, deeply. It was not enough. Her body moved in tempo with his, seeking the fulfillment she sensed was so near.
Then it was approaching, that glorious explosion of all the senses that was almost painful in its intensity. She ascended, she soared, and finally she floated in that sweet neverland of release. At that moment she was so full of him that she knew she would recognize him even if she found herself next to him in a crowd—he had a subtle musky odor combined with the rich, elusive fragrance of ambergris that she found tantalizingly masculine.
The back of his fingers caressed her cheekbone, bringing her back to reality. He still lay half on her, his heavy calf draped over her knees, and she turned her head in his direction. “I hate you,” she whispered. ‘‘I hate you for what you are. I hate you for what you do to me. For what you’ve made of me.” Her voice dropped to an almost inaudible, agonized rasp. ‘‘And I hate myself.”
She knew he did not understand her and so did not worry about his reaction to her words. Yet there was something in his silence—as if the sadness in her words prevailed in the room. He moved away from her, and the bed creaked, relieved of his weight. His silence was unnerving. After a moment the mattress gave ag
ain beneath the pressure of one of his knees, and her body jerked as he unexpectedly ran the wet cloth between her thighs, cleansing her of their lovemaking. ‘‘Damn you to hell,” she croaked, then resorted to Spanish when the English was not sufficient for her loathing of his impersonal treatment.
That he understood. He laughed, and she liked even his sardonic laughter better than his silence. With the ease of a man in excellent physical condition he rolled her onto her stomach. At once her arms stung with the pain of the blood rushing back through the vessels. Unwillingly she whimpered, and his hands began to massage hers. “Je te prie pardon.”
Surely she had not understood correctly. The Frenchman’s actions were confusing. She wanted to put him in a pigeonhole, but his inconsistent behavior, his personality, as elusive as the ambergris, would not permit her to do so.
“What?” she derided. “You’re actually asking me to forgive you?”
“Yes, I am,” he said gravely.
Then, before she could ponder his reply, he was dressing her and turning her over to someone whom he called Solis.
Outside, the handkerchief was removed and the sunlight blinded her. Trying to focus, she blinked, at first seeing only a smooth olive-brown chest. As she rightly guessed, the man was the wiry mestizo she had glimpsed at La Fonda del Olvido. Like the other sailors, he was dressed only in trousers. She dreaded meeting his derisive gaze, but above the flat cheekbones his eyes were compassionate. Which only made it worse.
“The lighter is waiting,” Solis said gently.
Making no reply, for in truth she didn’t trust her voice, she turned and let him lead her back to the rope ladder. She was as taciturn as Alejandro, who steered the lighter back to the wharf. Her mind cringed as she recalled what had transpired that afternoon.
And in the next horrifying moment she realized that the Frenchman’s last words to her had been in English!
LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) Page 7