LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance)
Page 16
Even at that moment he could see she was trying to stifle a fit of giggles. From the pew’s far end Brownsville’s matriarch, Elizabeth Crabbe, jutted her gray eagle’s head around and cast a severe frown at the two. Compressing her lips, Jeanette seemed to be trying to concentrate her attention on the minister in the pulpit. Cristobal smiled broadly at Mrs. Crabbe and nodded. The matriarch sniffed and swerved her head forward.
The dreary sermon suffered through, he stood and made way for Jeanette’s umbrella-like skirts. As she passed near him, he inclined his head and whispered, “At least in the Catholic church, we don’t have to sing.”
She shot him a murderous look. But he thought he detected a recalcitrant grin lurking in the curve of her lips. Oh, those luscious lips! At the church’s double doors he and Jeanette converged with General Morgan. Henri reported that Morgan was disciplining his soldiers unmercifully for failing to locate Lavender Blue.
The general executed a formal, half-military bow over Jeanette’s proffered hand. “Mrs. Cavazos—Cristobal,” he said. “Such a pleasure to find citizens attending church who still support the Federal Government.”
Jeanette acknowledged the ambiguous tribute with a vapid smile and presented her gloved hand to the special agent, who stood at the general’s side. “Mark,” she said, using an insipid tone that made Cristobal want to shudder again, “you and General Morgan must come to Brownsville’s April Fool’s Ball.”
She turned back to the general, who was much shorter than either Mark or Cristobal, and smiled sweetly. “That is—if you’re not too engaged chasing that infamous Lavender Blue.”
Cristobal groaned inwardly. He spoke several languages but could not master the tongue of his wife! Jen, you little fool! What is it that prompts you to take such needless risks? But then, what is it that goads me to do the same? We are cut from the same cloth, my dearest friend . . . witless, mad humans we are, who enjoy living life to the fullest.
The general’s steely falcon eyes fastened on the lovely face. Jen’s freckles were misleading, making the woman seem more like a child. But Cristobal knew the man was not one to let appearances deceive him. That was why he had reached the rank of general at such an early age. Word was he had no family but the military. It was mother, father, and, yes, even God to him. He meant to retain his rank until he could no longer sit straight in the saddle. For the military no sacrifice was too great, no duty was too mean.
He smiled, a friendly, benign smile that might have graced the face of the minister. “Oh, I shall find Lavender Blue sooner or later. Even if it means turning the town inside out for the renegade—even if it means playing King Herod and destroying the innocent in order to locate the guilty. I shall do that, too.”
Jeanette and Cristobal witnessed a demonstration of the general’s grim adherence to his code of duty the following week when a continuous roll of muffled drums drew curious spectators to the quartermaster’s wall, as it was meant to.
Pup tents splotched the grounds now, and the Union Jack waved desultorily in place of the Bonnie Blue. The bugle notes of “Boots and Saddles” summoned the fort’s detachments to the parade grounds. Into the suddenly silent mass of civilians and soldiers walked the short general. He was faultlessly dressed in the single-breasted dark-blue woolen uniform, its brass epaulettes gleaming in the winter sun, and jack boots that clinked ominously with rowel spurs.
Behind him two soldiers dragged a fighting brown-skinned boy of perhaps nine. The child was dressed in little more than rags. But then, since Brownsville’s mercantile trade with the outside had been shut down by the Federal Army’s occupation, poverty was more obvious about the city. The women were wearing old gowns made new by beribboned trim. Food was scarce and dear when available. Brownsville’s glorious days as the back door to the Confederacy were ended.
In a thundering voice at odds with the small body, Morgan said, “For trying to steal government-issued beef from the fort’s commissary, I hereby order ten lashes for the offender.”
A burly sergeant tied the boy, still struggling against his captors, to a hitching post. With whip in hand the sergeant took his station behind the urchin, whose bare back exposed protruding shoulder blades and a prominent rib cage. Morgan grasped the saber sheathed in the steel scabbard by its brass hilt and raised it high. The blade, deeply curved like a Turkish scimitar, reflected the sun’s angry light. The roll of the drum began again.
“Scalawags!” spat a woman to the right of Jeanette.
Farther down the quartermaster’s wall a thin woman, whose bowed head was covered by a black mantilla, wept loudly. "Que ayudale, Dios!” she pleaded. “Help my son!”
Jeanette turned to Cristobal. His usual droll countenance was gray. “Cowards,” she breathed in sibilant hiss. “Perhaps if more of those despicable cowards fought, that child would not have to steal beef. Maggoty beef at that. Can’t anyone do anything?”
His hand tightened about his ornate walking cane until the knuckles were white. But the voice was light, affected. “What in the cuckoo’s nest would you have me do? Would you have half the town whipped for a scrapper who most likely has lifted more than one purse? He no doubt deserves the punishment.” That child could have been myself—a dirty, ragged Mexican-American boy who picked fish bones off Nantes’ wharf when his mother’s job as a scullery maid did not earn the food for the table.
“Barbarians!” she muttered. “All of you. I feel like I’m going to be sick, right here in front of everyone.
Cristobal withdrew a handkerchief from his lace cuff and languidly waved it before his nose. “My dear, please don’t include me in the same category as those uncouth savages.” Dared he risk one for many?
His wife stepped forward, leaving him no choice. His hand shot out to encircle her wrist and hold her back. His strong, rich voice rang out across the parade ground. “Ho, there, General!”
The drumroll faltered. In the deafening silence all heads swiveled toward the dandy leaning nonchalantly against the wall. The man must be deranged!
Cristobal straightened and strolled across the dusty parade ground toward General Morgan. Purple veins throbbed in the general’s temples, but he obviously curbed his impatience. Cristobal knew the monster of a man had to take into account that the fop and his vapidly pretty wife were his only sources of amusement in that hellhole of a frontier post. “Yes?”
Indolently Cristobal swung his cane up to his shoulder. “I’d take an oath this is the same urchin who pilfered my gold watch last week, General, and I demand the satisfaction of laying the lash myself.”
In the general’s calculating eyes Cristobal easily divined his direction of thought – a cold-blooded fish the dandy was, but his type of man. No lily-livered knave to go sick at the sight of blood. “I’m afraid this is a military concern, Cavazos.”
“But I am a civilian, and that—” he jabbed his cane in the direction of the trembling boy who watched fearfully over one shoulder. His dirty cheeks were streaked with tears. “That smelly wretch of humanity,” Cristobal continued lazily, “no doubt lays claim to being a civilian.”
Plainly, Morgan’s patience was shredding. He clearly wanted to get on with the whipping. Around the wall the citizens, straining to catch some word of the conversation, were shifting restlessly. If the Morgan was careful, he would to have to quell some rowdy demonstration. “But Brownsville is under military rule, Cavazos,” he said with finality, “and I mean to set an example. The military is supreme here.”
“But think, General,” Cristobal rattled on blithely, unperturbed by Morgan’s shortness, “what an example it would set for one of their own to administer justice.”
Morgan’s lids narrowed until they seemed almost closed. “You may have something there,” and Cristobal knew the general calculations were following the direction he had hoped: An example set—with the public opinion trained against the dandy rather than the military. Morgan looked over his shoulder and nodded his head at the sergeant. “Give Cavazos the whip,” he rapped.
When Cristobal stepped before the hitching post, a gasp of outrage swept through the crowd like wildfire over a dry prairie. The man meant to whip the child himself! “Beast!” murmured one mother with a tot’s curly head pressed against her neck. “Stinking mucker!” cursed the old bootblack who plied his trade a block over from the fort. Jeanette stood paralyzed with shame. Regardless of the vile act Cristobal was about to perpetrate, he was her husband. She would not speak out against him now. But later . . . her hands clenched at her sides until her nails cut half-moons into her palms.
Cristobal passed his cane to the waiting sergeant and shrugged out of his black frock coat before he took up his stand before the post. The lad’s small rib cage heaved with fright. The whip’s leather lash swept upward. The crowd’s indistinguishable words of anger began to rumble through the still morning air. Cristobal’s pause seemed a calculated insult, and more than one man felt the bile rise blackly in his throat. But none had the courage to step forward.
Morgan thought uneasily that his soldiers still might have to quell an unruly mob. The lash snapped, cracking loudly on its downward course—and entirely missed the boy. “What the—?” the stocky sergeant cursed, when the lash gouged the dust dangerously close to his boots.
A faint titter arose from the crowd.
“Sorry,” Cristobal said. “Not used to applying such a long whip. Prefer the quirt myself.”
Once again the whip slashed and snaked and sliced through the air. A gasp rose from the crowd when Cristobal, ineptly following through with the swing of his arm, lost his grip and stumbled forward. The whip sailed through the air. Its butt struck the sergeant in the stomach. At the man’s surprised grunt, smothered chortles erupted from the civilians and soldiers alike.
“Cavazos!” Morgan barked. The dandy was making a fool of himself, not to mention a complete mockery of the military.
Cristobal hefted his ungainly frame upright. “I shall do better next time, Morgan,” he muttered, meticulously brushing the dust from his trousers.
Impatience mingled with chagrin to ruddy the general’s complexion. “You are bungling the whipping, Cavazos!”
Unperturbed, Cristobal wiped the dust from his hands. “My methods of punishment are more subtle, General. I vow I could worm the whereabouts of my watch from that urchin if you would give me half an hour alone with him.”
“Just take the little heathen and leave!” Morgan nodded curtly at the bugler and rapped out, “Dismissed!” to his troops.
Cristobal took his coat from the bristling sergeant and grinned drolly. “Sorry to strike you, old man.” Before the sergeant could muster a retort, Cristobal added to the general, “And, Morgan, I shall let you know if my watch turns up.”
“Blithering idiot!” Morgan muttered and stalked away.
The bugler’s notes were drowned out by the crowd’s boos and laughter as Cristobal grabbed the boy’s ear and pulled him along with him. The boy kicked and flailed, finally breaking loose to dash for freedom through the press of people.
Cristobal shrugged his broad shoulders and ambled off toward the black-iron gate, carelessly swinging his cane. The men and women made way for him, all the while hooting at the buffoon that he had made of himself. Jeanette stood her ground, but he saw burning in her eyes a contempt no longer tempered by her friendship for him. The freckles across her nose leapt out from the deathly pallor of her skin. She said not a word when he took her elbow.
They walked a block toward the center of town in tense silence before he raised a hand to hail a hack. “I had no idea the exertion of applying the lash could be so wearing,” he said, handing her up inside the carriage. “While you finish your shopping, I think I shall lift a draught of refreshment.”
“Oh, by all means do!” she retorted and jerked her hand from his grasp.
“Now, Jen, you’re not going to be one of those wives who nag about a little drink?”
She drew a shuddering breath. “Madame Dureaux’s Millinery,” she told the driver.
Cristobal watched the hack roll away before he turned his footsteps toward the Matamoros ferry. During the twenty-mile stagecoach ride from Matamoros to Bagdad he contained the misery that pricked at his soul. He stretched out his long legs diagonally to avoid the bony knees of the drummer across from him, and closed his eyes. But the contemptuous curl of Jeanette’s lips haunted him, and his eyes snapped open, unseeing of the mesquite-studded hills and sandy marshland that rolled past the coach’s window.
La Fonda del Olvido was packed with sailors of every nationality waiting out the afternoon’s rough sea. The room was hot with the press of bodies and reeked of stale beer, pulque, and aguardiente. Cristobal’s eyes searched the smoke-congested room to find Solis in a far corner with three more of the Revenge's sailors. Cristobal could not face such camaraderie at that moment. Solis looked up and lifted a swarthy hand in greeting.
Cristobal shouldered his way to the table. “A boy was almost whipped for theft at the fort,” he said tersely. “I want you to find his mother and see that the family is well cared for.”
Solis nodded, but his finely arched brows rose in curiosity that his captain would concern himself for one boy in particular.
Cristobal offered no explanation but left them to weave a path to the long bar. “Brandy,” he grunted when the white-aproned bartender approached.
He took the mug and headed for the stairs and the room he kept.
But the mug remained on the bureau, the brandy untouched. On the bed’s edge Cristobal sat with his head buried in his hands. Was the need for deception worth the anguish of what he had lost? A friendship that overrode the bounds of sexuality. Never could she despise him more. But that was not completely true; her loathing would be as sharp as a machete—and as deadly, should she ever discern his masquerade.
Sometime during the evening Rubia entered. Her pale hands lowered to cradle the weeping man against her stomach. Desolate, his arms went around her hips. “Hush, Kitt, love,” she consoled him. “Everything will be all right.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The cawing of a blackbird announced that soon blood-red bars of sunlight would finger out from the Gulf’s eastern horizon. The denuded branches of a nearby salt-cedar mott, grotesquely bent by the prevailing winds, all pointed toward the west. Concealed within that mott, Felix, Xavier, and two other campesinos huddled about a hay-mounded, high-slatted wagon for protection against the chilly March dawn. They waited for their mistress’s signal. Every few minutes another type of signal came from the tall, brick tower shrouded in the Gulfs ghostly fog.
Jeanette’s eyes strained through that thick fog. She timed the intervals between the lighthouse’s signals through the heavy gray curtain. Two and a half to three minutes or thereabouts. Enough time to overpower the pickets on the entrance side. Another three minutes to disassemble the lighthouse’s lens—if the keeper offered no resistance—and get away.
Colonel Ford, who only that week had retaken from the Federals the Ringgold Barracks farther up the Rio Grande, had thought the plan suggested by her, or rather the boy she disguised herself, a good one. The same night she heard of the fort’s capture, she had ridden the four score miles out to Ringgold Barracks.
“A darkened lighthouse,” she told Ford in simulated broken Spanish thirty-six hours later, “will make it easy-like for los blockade runners to put in por la costa.”
In the poor lantern light, Ford’s sharp blue eyes, eyes of a born marksman, squinted at her. For one long uneasy moment she feared he had guessed her masquerade. But he shook his head and rubbed those eyes with a gunpowder-stained hand, saying, “I’ll approve your da
ring attempt with the stipulation that you hand the lens over to us for safekeeping.”
Getting that lens safely away from the lighthouse presented a much more difficult task than simply smashing it in its frame. But she would worry about that problem once she made it to the lantern room. The beam passed over her. She raised her hand, silently beckoning the campesinos to follow. Her worn boots sank into the sand, but the smashing of the breakers against the distant shore muffled the crunching noise. The picket, a shadowy blue figure, paced regularly before the lighthouse’s wooden door. “What—hey!” the man exclaimed when she jammed the revolver’s muzzle against his backbone.
“Not another word!” she snarled. At once her campesinos surrounded her. With soundless efficiency they bound and gagged the picket, whose eyes bulged with fright at the specters who had appeared out of the soupy fog.
She left two on guard and took two with her. Quickly, quietly, they climbed the stairs that wound through a series of rooms to the lantern room at the top. The grating of the lens swiveling above them in its frame covered their shuffling footsteps. They paused at the open door of the glass-sheltered room. In the room’s center on a railed gallery around the lanterns, a crusty-looking sailor half knelt, puffing at a corncob pipe. Turned three-quarters away, he rotated the crank that set the revolution of the lens in motion. Perhaps his peripheral vision alerted him to the intruders, for he wheeled to his feet. The pipe dropped from his weather-seamed lips. His hand grabbed for a flat-edged bar to his right, and at once Xavier and Felix hurtled toward him.
They wrestled the keeper to the floor and knotted the hemp rope about his hands, while he abused them with a variety of colorful oaths. “You lubberly sons of a sea cook!” he managed to hurl at them before they at last stuffed the handkerchief in his open mouth.
Jeanette spun away and put her effort to the lens. It was barrel-shaped, some four feet high and three feet in diameter. How to remove it from its frame without shattering it? And quickly! She studied the old wooden screws and determined that once they were loosened it was simply a matter of raising the thick, multi-prismed lens that encircled the lanterns.