LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  In the middle of Washington Street a detachment of soldiers set fire to a pyre of two hundred cotton bales rather than let it fall into Federal hands.

  She must get back to Columbia and prepare it for the invasion! Shouldering her way through the frenzied crowd, she reached the Yturria Bank; her carriage was gone! It was too late to wonder if the horses had run away or the wagon had been stolen. She had to make her way out of the city before it went up in fire. Windows in the dry goods store across the street shattered from the intense heat. The store’s wooden frame whoomphed in a tom curtain of flame. At that moment she heard a child’s frightened cry. Through the whirls of smoke she spied a little girl standing paralyzed at the edge of the boardwalk before the blazing building.

  Swerving for a runaway wagon, Jeanette dashed across the street and reached the girl. “Mama!” the child sobbed wildly. “I want my Mama.”

  “Ssshh,” Jeanette consoled, kneeling to stroke the tot’s sandy curls. “We’ll find your mother.”

  When or where she did not know. She took the only feasible action that occurred to her, lifting the little girl in her arms and running toward the French quarter, which looked as yet untouched by the inferno. With any luck Cristobal would be there. Her damp skirts and the weight of the little girl, whose frail arms clung to Jeanette’s neck, hindered her progress.

  “Annie!” a woman called.

  Jeanette turned to see a woman her age, arms outstretched, hurrying toward her. “I thought I had lost her,” the woman cried and took the child, who whimpered, “Mama!”

  With tears of relief in her eyes and words of thanks on her lips, the woman hurried off into the smoke-filled street with her little girl. For a moment Jeanette stood still, empty-handed and alone. Where were her family, her children, someone to care about? Then she thought of Cristobal and hurried on toward her friend’s—no, her husband’s apartments.

  Exhaustion slowed her legs. She had almost reached Cristobal’s apartments when the entire wall of a livery stable crumbled. Instinctively her arms flew up to shield her face from the falling debris. A timber struck her back, and she staggered to her knees. Several seconds passed before she shook her head, trying to clear her befuddled mind – only to discover that her hair was on fire!

  Through a haze of tears she started swatting at the flaming hair about her waist. A nightmare! Then someone was there, wrapping her in a coat, rolling her in the dirt. She thought she would suffocate. No! She would not let herself swoon! But blackness began to engulf her as she was lifted and cradled against a solid chest.

  "Cherie . . . cherie. ”

  Her last thought was one of panic—the Frenchman!

  “Tttchh, tttchh!” Rubia stood back to view her work, hands on hips.

  Jeanette stared at herself in the oval mirror. Soot still smudged her left cheek and streaked a shadow over one arrow-like brow. But her hair—Rubia had clipped away the singed portion. Jeanette turned on the padded stool to better view the result in three-quarter profile. Formerly straight because weighted by mass and length, her tresses now curled and feathered about her shoulder blades. She wrinkled her nose at the reek of the burnt hair scattered over the hardwood floor.

  “It is the best I can do with such a mess,” Rubia said in Spanish.

  Jeanette realized the young woman had thought her grimace at the acrid smell was a criticism of her work. “Oh, no, I like it.” She ran blistered fingers through the soft curling strands. “I like—the freedom from all that weight.” She dimpled a smile at the beautiful blonde who looked at her in the mirror. “You should have cut it all off.”

  “It would complete your boy’s disguise, would it not?”

  Crimson washed over Jeanette’s face. “He told you!”

  Rubia turned away to put the scissors in a bureau drawer. “Kitt? No, he speaks to me of nothing . . . other than that which is very dear between us.”

  Jeanette suffered a twinge of—she told herself it was resentment; resentment at being numbered among those women who shared the Frenchman’s—Kitt’s bed.

  “I have put two and two together—your midnight visit here. Another time I returned from the Revenge and caught sight of a boy, with a face very much like yours, talking with Alejandro.”

  “Kitt—he brought me here?” She had been wanting to ask the question since awakening on Rubia’s bed half an hour earlier. She remembered very little after her hair caught fire—being rolled in the dirt, carried somewhere— by the Frenchman, she presumed—and coming to in the bed of a wagon. Recalling the wagon’s jarring motion, she put a hand to the back of her head. The smoke-blackened sky above the bouncing wagon had presented itself to her view only temporarily before she lost consciousness again.

  “It was Solis who brought you in the wagon. When Kitt found you, the Yanquis—they were marching on Brownsville. He felt you would be safer on the Mexican side of the river. The Yanquis have already taken possession of the fort and mounted cannons on the earthen embankments.”

  So, she had had her opportunity to learn the mysterious Frenchman’s identity but, just like a woman, had lost consciousness first! A man wouldn’t swoon because of a little smoke and fire. Hell and damnation! Her feminine curiosity got the best of her. “How long have you known Kitt?”

  “More than a year.” Rubia handed her an ivory-lidded box of hairpins. “My husband’s hacienda—it was attacked by the guerrillas who hide in the Burgos Mountains south of here while he was away. Afterward . . . after the bandidos were finished with me, my husband—he tolerated me.” She shrugged. “For a while I sought refuge in the convent at Monterrey. But the sisters—I could see they thought I was basura—trash. I came here—to look for the only kind of work left for a woman like me.”

  For a moment Rubia’s face softened. “Kitt was in the cantina. He arranged—for a better position for me.”

  “I see.” A position on her back? Jeanette was disgusted with herself for her small-mindedness. Were it not for the small pittance of revenue from Columbia, with Armand’s death, she could have easily been in the same predicament as Rubia. She grimaced as she began coiling her hair and inserting the pins. She had been in that position—Kitt had placed her in the predicament of making a choice. And she had chosen his bed. She and Rubia were sisters in sin after all.

  She finished her chignon and turned on the stool to face the young woman who watched her. “You love him, don’t you?”

  “Love him?” Rubia asked and paused. “I don’t know if I could ever love a man again.” Her voice rasped as harshly as a fingernail on a file, then softened. “But I care very deeply for him. Very deeply. And you?”

  She laughed abruptly. “Hardly.” She guessed she must hate the Frenchman as much as Rubia cared for him. “I prefer a more considerate man.”

  Rubia glanced at the ring on Jeanette’s finger. “You have married since last you were here?”

  “Yes. And my husband is at least considerate enough not to force himself on me.” She blushed, realizing what she might be revealing about her marriage with Cristobal. “My feelings are also considered,” she explained carefully.

  “I see.”

  Jeanette rose and straightened her skirt. “I thank you for everything,” she said sincerely, taking Rubia’s hand in hers. She felt a kinship with the Mexican woman. “If you should need something, please let Trinidad know. I would very much like the opportunity to return your kindness.”

  Rubia accompanied her to the door, saying, “I doubt that any stages are operating between here and Matamoros, so I took the liberty of sending a boy to Columbia for Trinidad. He’s waiting for you below. Be sure to keep on this side of the river when you return home.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  Jeanette opened the door, but Rubia put a hand on it. “Something else, senora . . .”

  “Yes?” Jeanette drew in her breath at the bleakness she saw in the woman’s eyes.

  “Kitt has left a message for you. ’

  Kitt. It was difficul
t for her to think of him in terms of a given name. He was always the anonymous “Frenchman.” She steeled herself for the message Rubia was about to relay. “What is it?”

  “He says that with the Yanquis controlling the left bank now—and along with the French blockading the Gulf . . .”

  “What?” Jeanette prompted when the young woman hesitated.

  “That any further business negotiations with him will have to return to the original terms agreed upon by yourself.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “How long do you think you can continue to fool Napoleon’s navy, Kitt?” Rubia demanded. “Sooner or later they will deduce your cargo is not headed for their French troops.”

  Solis propped his worn boots on the small table and sipped from the whiskey glass. From his chair in the corner of the room he could watch Rubia’s face as she paced from the door, past the bed where Cristobal lay indolently stretched out, to La Fonda del Olvido’s dust-filmed window, and back again. Her gentle demeanor was stirred by concern for Cristobal. How much concern? How much was she in love with his friend? Or was her concern more out of a deep gratitude?

  Solis hoped it was. Because for Cristobal there was only one woman—Jeanette. Cristobal needed that fiery, more willful woman whose temperament matched his own.

  Few besides Solis detected the sweet, soft core in Rubia. Yet he knew she could be determined and brave—he had seen the evidence in the way she proudly held her head, the way her gaze steadily met the eye, despite the shame he sensed still burned in her heart. And even now, with the French conquering one town after another in central Mexico and slowly moving northward in pursuit of Juarez’s itinerant government, Rubia continued to work for the Juaristas, knowing full well that she could face a French firing squad.

  Solis acknowledged it was more than concern that prompted his feelings for the woman whose sweetness, whose softness he longed to reach out to. He understood what it was to have to sell one’s body for survival, and doubted if anyone who had never been forced to endure such degradation could ever understand. The one time he had done so—as a child—it had meant food for his mother and sister. The next time—gracias a Dios—the customer he approached had been Cristobal’s father. That gentle-hearted man had refused and offered instead a position as a retainer on the family’s estate. He owed Cristobal much.

  “I agree with Rubia, Cristobal,” he said now. “It is dangerous enough that you run the Federal blockaders without risking it against the French also. You could just as easily aid the Juaristas by commanding their northern forces.”

  “And what would we use for weapons—broomsticks?” Cristobal responded laconically, not bothering to open his eyes. He had spent forty-eight hours at the Revenge’s helm during a nasty southwesterly gale, not trusting anyone else to bring the sloop safely to port, and he was exhausted.

  He slit one lid. “Instead of making the long run to England, I plan to operate between here and Bermuda, and transship supplies out of Bermuda to and from Europe. With that neutral port listed as my destination on the manifests, even if the United States or French men-of- war haul us over, their courts will have a difficult time proving I am intentionally breaking the blockade.”

  “In the meantime you could rot in some Yankee prison for Dios knows how long,” Rubia said, halting before the foot of the bed.

  His hands cupped behind his head, Cristobal winked. “Somehow I think a prison safer than risking the wrath of our little cotton runner.”

  Rubia smiled, but her eyes were shadowed with bleakness. “I truly believe you and your wife are two of a kind, Cristobal—hopeless renegades.”

  Jeanette’s eyes were even more bleak a month later at Fort Brown when she stood alongside Cristobal in the outer office of her bitterest adversary, Major General Morgan. The Federal general’s aide-de-camp said, “Raise your right hand and repeat after me, please.”

  First Cristobal took the Oath of Allegiance in his distinctive, lazy voice; then Jeanette repeated the words. Brownsville was divided almost fifty-fifty in its loyalties, and she knew that many of her friends and acquaintances, loyal to the Confederacy, would turn against her. She had no doubt that she would be ostracized by the very people whose opinion mattered most. Yet she saw no way, with the Federal troops now controlling the Texas side of the Rio Grande, to continue running the contraband without arousing suspicion. Besides, she consoled herself, posing as a Union sympathizer, she could find out much about the Yankees’ activities.

  Even as Jeanette repeated the oath to the Union, she mentally swore to bring down Morgan one way or another. If nothing else, the Federal invasion afforded her the opportunity for personal revenge.

  Still, it was no consolation when an hour later Cristobal escorted her down to the river’s bank to say good-bye to Claudia and her parents. Though there were many who had refused to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Union, General Morgan hadn’t singled out any Rebel family for retribution—until his soldiers intercepted Rebel mail. Among the letters was one from Claudia to her husband in Richmond with Lee, giving him detailed information about troop strength at Brownsville.

  The “Sesesh” lady, a term used for patriots of the seceded states, and her parents were now being escorted to the steamer by a squad of Union police guards because of what Morgan called their “intolerable impudence.”

  “Banishment to Mexico,” was Claudia’s punishment. Morgan was setting an example with one of Brownsville’s most prominent families.

  A group of friends had gathered at the landing to bid the Scharbauer family good-bye. As they perceived Jeanette’s approach, one after another silently turned away, making a path for her. As if she had leprosy, she thought miserably. But could she blame them? She could understand their loathing for her. A traitor in their midst with no ethics, no principles.

  Chin tilted rebelliously, she made her way through the silent group to Claudia. Behind her Cristobal followed, seemingly indifferent to the scornful eyes, the mouths curled with contempt. Claudia turned from kissing a friend’s cheek, and Jeanette knew a moment’s discomfort in facing her friend. Yet Claudia smiled sincerely. “Jeanette,” she said warmly, reaching for her friend’s hand. “I was so afraid I would miss you.”

  “That’s because the Cavazos were busy taking the Oath of Allegiance!” Pauline Scharbauer said in a scathing voice.

  “Mother,” Claudia reproved in a quiet but firm voice.

  “I’ll miss you very much,” Jeanette whispered, afraid she would begin to cry. “I did not know if I should come. I didn’t want to spoil your leave-taking.”

  “You are!” Pauline said.

  Claudia ignored her mother. “I understand—everything. Each of us has to do what we think is right in our own hearts. And I know—beyond a shadow of a doubt, Jeanette—that you are doing what you believe you have to do. That is enough.”

  Jeanette’s throat was choked with tears. She squeezed Claudia’s hands before releasing them, but Cristobal said in his deep, resonant voice, “You are a very gallant woman, Mrs. Greer. I feel it an honor if you would continue to count Jeanette and me among your friends.” Somehow, as Jeanette stood beside Cristobal and watched the steamer carry the exiled family toward a foreign shore, she found herself envying the respect that Cristobal had paid to Claudia. Never could she remember him considering any other human worthy of respect. Even himself he seemed to treat with a kind of amused self-derision.

  She glanced sideways at her handsome husband. What would happen if that night she were to tell him of some of her thoughts? It had been a long time since she had shared any of the things she held deep inside. Her fears, her hopes. “Cristobal . . .”

  He took her gloved hand and brought it to his lips. “I’m afraid I must desert you tonight, my dear, for a game of cards. With Morgan’s aide-de-camp, no less. Pity taking money from those glorious soldiers.”

  “But . . . I was hoping . . .”

  “Hoping what?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

 
; “Trinidad’ll see you safely home. Don’t wait up for me.” He grinned crookedly then. “As if I ever thought you did, Jen.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  "Lavender's blue, dilly-dilly . . . lavender’s green.

  When I am king, dilly-dilly . . . you shall be queen. ”

  Ignoring Annabel, who sang so badly in a pretty way, Cristobal watched Jeanette with heavily-lidded eyes. Across their parlor his wife flirted outrageously with the good-looking Mark Thompson, Special Agent for the United States Treasury in charge of all captured and abandoned property.

  Cristobal knew gossipmongers whispered about her. She had emerged from that cocoon of mourning a bright, vivacious butterfly that seemed delighted to tease the dangerous flame of public opinion. Jen was rapidly earning the reputation of a Madame de Montespan. Polished, frivolous, elegant—Jeanette Cavazos entertained often. And gradually she was introducing Union officers into her fetes. The presence of the formidable enemy at her parties kept at home only the staunchest of Confederate patriots among Brownsville’s elite. And if that winter of 1863-64 Jeanette noticed the few snubs directed at her on the streets of Brownsville, she seemed not to care.

  Thompson, a man in his early thirties with crisply cut black hair, leaned close to Jeanette now to whisper something in her ear, and Cristobal caught the provocative smile she turned on the special agent. How much of that smile was meant to gain knowledge of enemy movement—and how much was meant for the charming man himself?

  Cristobal felt that old knot tighten in his guts. Even though he had made her his wife, she would never be his. Sometimes being near her and unable to hold her, or to kiss those tempting lips, was more than he could bear. Perhaps that was why, despite the presence of the Federal troops in Brownsville and the French and Federal troops blockading Bagdad against war supplies coming to either the Juaristas or the Confederates, he recklessly chose to run the blockade even more often than before.