Jeanette pulled her hand from her aunt’s grasp. “I’ll put some rosewater and glycerin on them before I go to bed.” Having extracted the promise that Jeanette would also wear her cotton gloves to bed, her aunt departed, leaving Jeanette to wait through a long, sleepless night for the Frenchman’s summons. It came early that next morning with Trinidad’s appearance at the kitchen door, talking in low tones with Tia Juana. The black giantess patted the little man’s leathery face consolingly. Jeanette wondered if the two had guessed what her mission had cost her or knew of the Frenchman’s deceit.
At the old chapel she changed into the boy’s clothing. But this time she tucked Trinidad’s derringer into her pocket. With Trinidad at her side she rode the bay through Matamoros and on to Bagdad, rather than wait for the stage. As usual, Alejandro could be found pushing his water cart along the wharves. And, as usual, the boy contemptuously spit a wad of tobacco on the splintery planks on which they stood. At another time and place Jeanette would have had to smile at the dirty-faced splay-footed boy. If only she and Armand had had a child . . . Her hand ached to ruffle Alejandro’s shaggy brown hair.
As it was, the tension, as strong as the cable that held the ships at anchor, permitted her only the merest physical motion. Trinidad put a hand on her arm. “I go weeth you, sobrina.”
She shook her head. She could not afford to involve him in what could well be a violent confrontation. “Wait for me here, Trini. I’ll need your help.”
“Sometheeng ees wrong. I sense eet.”
She forced a smile. “Something is wrong—your imagination.” She turned her gaze back to the Gulf. It looked black under a sky boiling with gray, bilious clouds. An appropriate day, she thought grimly, for the task at hand.
A lighter bobbed the waves toward them. A woman clutched its railing with one hand and her hat with the other. Even with the porkpie hat hiding the blond hair, as the lighter drew closer Jeanette recognized the woman by her regal bearing. Rubia. The swine of a pirate had the insolence to make love to another woman before he coerced her to crawl into his bed. Oh, God, the meeting she always dreaded could not come quickly enough this time!
She was half-tempted to shoot the snake with the derringer she carried for protection, but she had not sunk so far that killing came that easy. Not yet.
Rubia’s gaze passed over the two dirty boys who took her place on the lighter with only the barest flicker of interest. But Jeanette’s eyes, blue-black as the ocean beneath her soil-stained hat, burned in wrath. The cold wind clawed at her clothing as she rode the lighter out to the Revenge, but she scarcely noticed how icy her face had become as she kept it relentlessly turned toward the Frenchman’s steamer.
Through the endless night she had thought this moment would never come. Now her breath was ragged; her heart thudded out its impatient fury. Her feet carried her swiftly up the rope ladder to the deck. Solis met her with that same deferential smile that changed to an apologetic one as he held the blindfold to her eyes and knotted it behind her head. After binding her hands behind her, he led her toward his captain’s quarters. Her heart galloped like a racehorse’s. The door shut behind her. And though there was only silence in the cabin, she knew the Frenchman was there. She could scent him—as the lioness scents danger. Her enemy!
Waiting, she shifted her weight with the roll of the ship. Why didn’t he say something? Then at last she heard his booted tread, bringing him nearer to her. When his hand, warm, firm, was laid on the side of her neck, she flinched. "Mon âme, m'as-tu manqué?” he asked in a husky voice.
She shrugged her shoulders. “You know I don’t understand French.” It was said carelessly, in an attempt to disguise her rage.
His lips brushed hers, lingering at the comers of her mouth, but she sensed the hunger contained in the light kiss. For what seemed a long moment he stood before her, so much taller. Silent. His hand gently rubbed along her neck, his thumb playing with the hollow at the base of her throat. As if he had come to some decision, he scooped his arm behind her knees and back to hold her against his chest. Her hat slipped from her head to plop on the plank floor. Then the bed rose up to meet her. She expected the attack now. The removal of her trousers and then being taken. She would let him believe he would have his way with her as usual—and at the last minute she would put an end to this damnable farce.
With some surprise she felt him stretch out on his side next to her. She thought she heard a sigh. She tensed, waiting for his hands at her clothing. But instead a callused finger traced the bowlike curvature of her upper lip. He said something she could not understand. “Speak in English!” she snapped. “I know you understand it.”
His lips covered hers now, and his tongue pried her teeth for admittance. Her body would not heed the warning screamed by her brain. Traitorously her teeth parted, her tongue met his, answered the question posed: her want of him. Her torso shifted to strain against his long, hard, well-aroused frame. When his lips at last released hers and his fingers went to her coat, her head moved frenziedly from one side to another. She could not give in to the lure of this man’s sensuality. She could not let the man who had defiled all that had been good and honorable seduce her so easily.
“My—my hands,” she gasped. “Free them.” His fingers halted at her buttons. She was glad he could not see her eyes. “Please. I want to . . . I want to feel you . . . as you feel me.” Still he paused, and she blurted out, “I want to touch you . . . everywhere.”
She heard his sharp intake of breath. The waves slapped against the ship’s hull while she waited for his answer. “Non.”
She gasped, thwarted. “You tricked me,” she cried out in a tear-rasped voice. “You—you opportunist, you scurvy swine. You have been selling firearms to the Mexicans!” She hiccoughed on her tears but hurried on, “And I bet you didn’t take a soldier to bed as your price!”
“Non,” he said again, gently but firmly. “Tu te trompes. ”
She cared not what his reply was. There was only her hurt, her anger. “You rutting beast!” It came out a hoarse whisper. “Do you think I would ever let you touch me again?”
Her hands itched to scratch his eyes out, to mark his flesh as he had marked her soul. With an enormous effort, spurred by her outrage, she twisted her arms, struggling to free her hands. “Doucement,” he said in a calm voice that only infuriated her more so that she was kicking and screaming expletives she was scarcely aware she knew.
He wrestled with her, trying to pin her motionless. And that was when the derringer went off. The explosion ripped through the room. The acrid odor of gunpowder filled her nostrils—as the Frenchman’s surprised groan filled her ears. The sound of pounding feet on the deck echoed outside the cabin, and the door’s hinges creaked as it was shoved open.
“Madre de Dios!” she heard Solis swear.
Hands were jerking her roughly from beneath the dead weight of the Frenchman and thrusting her outside the cabin. Another voice said in the King’s English, “You blimey little slut! There will be hell to pay for this!”
The English sailor left her then, and she huddled against a damp, briny coil of thick hemp rope. It seemed forever that she sat there, growing cold as the sun hid behind the clouds and the wind off the Gulf blew angrily about her. She shivered, more with terror than cold. What had she done? How could she take another life so carelessly. So this was what war did to people. Hardened them. Made them hold life so cheaply. And now she had destroyed the only lifeline she could establish to run the cotton. Her noble plan to aid the Confederacy was shattered just because her pride had been trampled.
Men were right. Women could not make good soldiers. They allowed their emotions to get in the way. And her tears soaked her blindfold as she waited for judgment to be passed on her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The tall figure, so dark it almost blended with the night’s velvety backdrop, stood on a narrow wrought-iron balcony that was identical to a score of other balconies that decorated the homes in the French section of Brownsv
ille. Settling one hip on the balustrade, the man leaned back against the iron-laced column and, lifting his flushed face to the frost-scored February wind, exhaled a wreath of smoke.
“Monsieur, you are still much too ill to be out,” a little man, a dwarf, reproved in French.
With an amused twitch to his lips the man looked down at his valet. “Fresh air is beneficial to a fever, n’est-ce pas, Henri?”
“Non!” reprimanded the dwarf, a Frenchman of the Gascon type with glittering black eyes and thick, coarse, jet-black hair. “Not when you’ve been severely wounded and you persist in standing bare-chested on a winter night!” He padded over to the man and passed up to him a Turkish silk brocade dressing gown of an elegant cerulean blue. “At least drape this over your shoulders, monsieur.”
Hampered by bandaged ribs, the man allowed Henri to wrap the dressing gown about him. When the dwarf left, muttering dire predictions of consumption, the man returned to his cigar—a long-nine brought out on the Havana run. Still, he was destined to be interrupted once again, this time by a slender, wiry Mexican.
“Caramba, Cristobal!” The gaunt young man crossed the balcony’s threshold. “You should be abed!”
Cristobal emitted a grunt of smoke. It was hopeless. His two friends were worse than the doddering old sister at the convent who had bandaged the gun wound. “How about sharing a glass of brandy, Solis?”
“Bah! A keg would be more like it. It’s the only way you’ll get the young woman out of your mind.” He punched a finger at Cristobal’s chest, who winced. “She has claws, eh?”
“At last,” Cristobal said drily, “we’ve found something we can agree on.”
“I warned you that you were playing with fire.” Solis ambled off to the sideboard in the adjoining room. “A little spitfire.”
“A spitfire no taller than an Enfield rifle and weighing less than a keg of whiskey.”
“Why did you ever agree to run guns for her, amigo?" he threw over his shoulder.
Cristobal inhaled one last time and tossed the cigar over the railing. “I’ve asked myself that a hundred times if I’ve asked it once.” And he knew the answer. When someone wants something badly enough, it doesn’t matter the terms or conditions.
And he had wanted her since—since he was a boy. The lissome girl had been a bright flame dancing with warmth, enchanting two little boys, keeping pace with them, daring them, taunting them, laughing with them. And even after the gringos had taken his father’s ancient land holdings, after the Yanqui courts of law had confiscated what should have been his inheritance—one hundred sitios of land granted by the King of Spain in 1757—he still wanted the Yanqui sea captain’s daughter. Through all those years of his family living in poverty, living off the bounty of French relatives who made his family grovel, he had not forgotten Jen.
One day he would return to Texas, a land almost as large as the Republic of France, as a man in his own right. He struggled for an education, working the docks of Nantes to pay for a tutor. Had he also in mind returning one day to win the Yanqui girl who possessed all the pluck of a worldly adventurer?
He didn’t know. He never assessed the feeling for her that was so much a part of him. But during the years he was trying to establish a line of packet ships between New York and Nantes, he had not lost that want of her. There was not a night in all the hellholes he had slept in that the mere memory of those lively, lavender-blue eyes did not invade his heart’s light.
He had told himself the feeling was only one of nostalgia. Even when he learned she had married his best friend and his guts ached with the thought of her belonging to anyone but him, he told himself that were he ever to meet her again, she would be a plump little wife approaching middle age.
Sacré tonnerre! When he returned to Brownsville, he found Jeanette St. John was even more attractive as a woman. Character now molded her face. Had Armand been responsible for that growth of her spirit, that vitality? He thought not. Armand had been a dreamer, not a catalyst.
But Jen had wanted a man who sighed longingly in fourteen-line iambic-pentameter poetry. And so he had been willing to play the effete fop in order to enjoy the flame of her presence—although the pretense had served him on innumerable occasions when dealing with the Federal Army and Navy, neither of which would normally divulge confidential information to a blockade runner.
As the hapless, lazy hidalgo, he had been able to learn much more—for instance that Brownsville, Galveston, and Indianola each had three Federal blockaders, sloops-of- war on station with two actually on duty at all times. They lay off these towns’ long white sandy beaches, along which continually strolled Texans to watch these men-of-war. And the men-of-war waited, knowing that when a favorable moment arose—a fog bank, a stormy, dark night—the blockade runners would make a dash for it.
Yes, knowing that a Federal sloop’s engine had blown, or in one instance that an iron-clad had every man down with yellow fever, helped him immeasurably.
Solis returned with two glasses and passed one to him. The mestizo’s dark eyes glowed in their sockets like coals. “You know that it was wrong, Cristobal—taking the young woman as you did, bargaining with her for . .
“For her love,” Cristobal murmured harshly, not bothering to hide the pain in his face.
“To Juarez’s victory over the French pigs,” Solis said, raising his glass and tossing down the contents. “Bah!” He wiped the back of his sleeve across his mouth. “You really have become a hidalgo. Aguardiente goes down much better.”
Cristobal cut an amused smile at the friend who as a child had faithfully served his father; faithfully enough to follow him willingly into the exile of poverty in France. Keeping with that tradition, Solis now faithfully served him. He raised his glass to Solis. “To Juarez—to Mexico.”
“Tell me, amigo, why did you ever agree to run the guns for the little boy-woman?”
Cristobal shrugged. “I told you—that it was to help fight the Yanquis. Did they not take my inheritance?”
"Si, but the Yanquis support our own cause—Juarez’s government. And you were already running guns against the French, when she came to you. Why take more chances with the Yanquis—when your services are much more needed by Juarez? And don’t tell me it was for a woman— the boy-woman. You already have enough women—Dios, Rubia is enough woman to last you until the mescal’s worm rots.”
Cristobal tossed down the brandy—and was reminded of Jen, of the way her face had blanched then washed back in crimson when she so boldly swallowed the entire glass of brandy. The corners of his mouth twitched. It did seem pretty damned silly to tell someone you would risk your life for a single night in the arms of one special woman. He had known it would be the only chance he would ever have to love her as he had always dreamed of doing.
And, then too, there was the knowledge that if he did not agree to run the guns for her, with her will and determination she would eventually find a way—and at what price? Her midnight visit to the captain of Matamoros’s National Guard proved that. Did the little fool not realize the danger in which she was placing herself? And then where would her grand idea of serving the Confederacy be?
He sighed, relieved at least that he had had the foresight to keep a tail on her at all times, for all the good it had done in that last little encounter she had with the two highwaymen. The tail had not counted on Jen making such good time. But then the tail did not know Jen the way he did. No one did.
Not her father. No, not even Armand. God rot his noble memory.
“Another brandy, Solis.”
“The Lord have mercy on us!”
The shriek only whispered through Jeanette’s dream, and her legs and arms stirred in lazy protest. Sleepily her hand groped for the mosquito netting that had been draped across the bar against the annual swarm of insects that took wing with spring’s warm weather—as if the netting could shut out the repeated shrieks for heavenly intervention.
The cries only became louder, and then the net
ting was jerked open. Groggily Jeanette slit one lid. Wide-eyed and snorting, her aunt looked like a horse just confronted with a rattling sidewinder. “They’re here! Listen! The guns. They’ll rape us all! Get your clothes, Jeanette. We’re going to the convent.”
Jeanette sat up and pushed her braid over her shoulder. She tried to focus her eyes—and her thoughts. Aunt Hermione stood before her in a high-necked muslin nightgown with a spoon bonnet perched on the bird’s-nest hair. Jeanette gave up and, shutting her eyes, languorously stretched her arms.
“Whatever are you talking about, Aunt Hermione?” she yawned.
She had spent a long night supervising the moving of cotton bales from the church to the warehouse at Bagdad. She gingerly rubbed the small of her back. In the haste to beat the dawn, she had even assisted the campesinos in hefting the heavy bales.
With the sleepy smile of a satisfied cat she stretched again. Things could not be working out better. Fortunately for the Cause, the cursed Frenchman had survived. And apparently his close brush with death had deterred him from further pressing his charms on her. Miracle of miracles, Alejandro had passed the message to Trinidad that the Frenchman required only the standard five thousand dollars for each round trip. It still left her enough profit to cover Columbia’s operating expenses, though her reduced share from the sale of the cotton decreased the amount of war supplies she bought off the Revenge. But as long as she did not have to see the Frenchman again, it was enough.
So why had she awakened with the name Kitt on her lips?
“What am I talking about?” her aunt echoed. “Land’s sake, girl! Can’t you hear the explosions? Trinidad says Federal landing boats are shelling Brazos Santiago beach with field guns. Hurry!”
“Hell and damnation!”
“Jeanette!” Aunt Hermione gasped.
Jeanette sprang from the bed. Mechanically she began yanking clothing from the wardrobe and tossing the articles on the bed. Her camisole, the day dress of magenta faille, her corset. The steel hoops of the cage crinoline got twisted in the bedsheets. Drat! She had known to expect an invasion by the Federal armies. Her Morocco gaiters— no, the heavy brogans would be better. She began lacing the high tops. The Yankees couldn’t permit the Confederacy’s contraband trade out of Bagdad to continue its phenomenal growth and still hope to win the war. Where was her polonaise? But she had counted on the invasion coming when Fort Brown was better garrisoned—and better supplied.
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