LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  “Señora,” Felix said and handed her the flattened edge of the bar with which the keeper had attacked them.

  Swiftly she loosened the screws. It took Felix and Xavier to help her raise the immensely heavy lens drum. The keeper twisted and rolled on the floor while the three carefully edged their way down what seemed to her a mile of steps. The lens’s metal-rimmed base cut into her fingers, and her spine ached from descending the stairs at a stooped angle.

  Once they reached the bottom, the other two campesinos stepped out of the dawn’s semi-light and relieved her of the burden. She massaged her numbed fingers, took a last look at the trussed-up picket, and followed her men into the salt-cedar thicket. They buried the lens in the wagon’s depth of hay, both to cushion it against the jarring from potted roads and to conceal it against the prying eyes of possible Federal troops.

  The precaution turned out to be a necessary one, for as she drove the wagon toward the outskirts of Brownsville a detachment of cavalry could be seen against the horizon. She rapped an order to her campesinos, and they immediately pitched face forward in the hay.

  Within minutes the detachment surrounded the wagon. Each of the soldiers, who all sported flowing beards, trained their bayonets on the five Mexicans. Fear prickled her neck, and she experienced an immediate need to relieve her bladder. The urge was followed by a rolling feeling in her stomach.

  “Que pasa?" she asked the lieutenant who rode forward.

  “Speak English, boy,” he commanded. He twisted in the saddle and ordered the eight waiting soldiers, “Search the wagon for firearms.”

  She watched in horror as the soldiers moved their horses forward and their bayonets came up to prod the hay. “My brothers,” she jerked out, “they are seeck. I take them to the doctor. Yellow jack.”

  She vividly remembered her mother’s last day—the black vomit, it was a sure sign of imminent death from yellow fever. The churning in her abdomen—she felt like throwing up again. She clung to the side of the wagon, waiting for the stomach spasm to pass.

  The bayonets halted. The soldiers looked from one to the other in apprehension. The lieutenant reined his mount back sharply. He jerked his chin over his shoulder. “Get a move on it, greaser!”

  When the wagon was safely away from the patrol, she laughed weakly, releasing the tension that had steadily built since she set out for the Point Isabel lighthouse. Wait till General Morgan found his next note!

  Word of the daring escapade reached Brownsville citizens in the Weekly Ranchero two days later.

  The Gulf Coast shores will be dark this year,

  now that the lighthouse lens has disappeared.

  Cristobal paused in reading aloud the couplet and looked over the top of the newspaper. His honey-brown eyes fixed on Jeanette across the breakfast table. “It’s signed, of course, Lavender Blue.”

  “Lavender Blue!” squawked Washington from his cage and jabbed his hooked beak at Jeanette. “Help! Rape! Lavender Blue!”

  She wrinkled her nose in disgust at the macaw. Now wherever did the cursed bird learn the words Lavender Blue? Shrugging her shoulders, she said firmly, “I’m tired of listening to anything to do with the war, Cristobal.” She wished she could tire of him. Beneath the concealing shadow of lashes her eyes flicked to her husband. Dressed in his robe de chambre of black-and-silver-printed cashmere, he disregarded her statement and continued to read aloud the news. His swarthy face was arresting with its arrogant nose, high slashing cheekbones, and thickly lashed eyes. Yet her contempt for what he was bordered on sheer revulsion; then, why did she find herself seeking her husband in the midst of a crowded room?

  And she knew the answer. Because everyone else bored her. Everyone but Kitt. Oh, hell and damnation! Neither man was worth Armand’s little finger. Yet, damn their black souls, each appealed to her in a different way. Kitt, through her body; Cristobal, through her intellect. Disgusted with her inconsistencies, she dug her spoon into her grapefruit. The grapefruit’s bitter taste prompted her as usual to reach for another pinch of sugar.

  “‘ . . . and with the discovery of the ribbon in the lantern room, it is believed that Lavender Blue could possibly have a female accomplice, though neither the picket nor the keeper sighted a woman.’ ”

  Shock sucked in Jeanette’s breath, and the wedge of grapefruit lodged in her throat. “A ribbon?” she choked. She had been unable to find a leather thong to bind her braid and had hastily substituted the blue velvet ribbon. Later, when she helped unload and hide the lens at the chapel, she realized she had lost the ribbon. How careless of her!

  “A blue velvet ribbon, General Morgan’s aide-de-camp states,” Cristobal added. Over the shallow Dresden bowl of swollen hot-pink roses that Tia Juana had picked that morning his sleepy eyes watched her. “Perhaps Lavender Blue’s accomplice is Annabel. She did sing a song with those words that evening, Jen.”

  “Oh, surely not!” As little as she liked Annabel, she did not wish to see her end up being questioned in “Monster” Morgan’s office. Jeanette shuddered at the thought. The general would not be a pleasant man to deal with.

  “Perhaps Lavender Blue is even a woman.”

  Too swiftly she inhaled and the sweet, heavy scent of the roses filled her nostrils. She glanced up sharply, but Cristobal was already lost behind the pages of the newspaper. “What makes you say that?”

  “What, hmm?” He lowered the newspaper to sip at the Mexican chocolate.

  “What makes you think Lavender Blue could possibly be a woman?”

  “Merely an idle comment, Jen.”

  Her husband’s blatantly sensual gaze dropped to the low V-neck of her pale-ivory, satin deshabille and flagrantly lingered there despite the way her hand moved to nervously finger the lacy border. She felt the hot flush of color creep up over her collarbones toward her neck and face. The kiss Cristobal had last bestowed upon her leapt unbidden to her mind. She had actually enjoyed it, though to this moment she had been unable to acknowledge the fact. What kind of woman was she that she could take pleasure in a kiss from a man she so utterly loathed?

  What kind of woman was she that she could take pleasure in the act of copulation with an unknown man? But that was not completely accurate. She knew every sheath of smooth muscle and every area of roughly textured skin of that unknown man. She knew his scent, masculine, musky with salt spray and sweat, not tainted with the cologne Cristobal wore. She knew his rich baritone voice, with none of Cristobal’s affectations.

  Still, shyly, in an almost virginal manner, her gaze went to her husband’s bronzed hands. What would it be like for those supple fingers to trace the patterns of love on her naked body?

  She must be utterly mad!

  Above the roses her gaze locked with Cristobal’s. Did he see the sudden yearning that possessed her? Oh, how she hated this new side of her! She had never been like this before she took up the damnable farce. But she had been like those roses—a bud, swollen with life contained too long. The Frenchman had picked the bud, had kissed it with his lovemaking so that it bloomed into a full-blown rose. She had opened herself to his sunlight—to the sunlight of everything. Of life. Would she truly want to fold up her petals with the night and deny life’s excitement that was as heady as the roses’ heavily sensuous odor?

  “Jen . . .” Cristobal began.

  She missed the pleading in those dark eyes but heard the odd tone in his voice. There was something about that voice. For one crazy moment she could have sworn it sounded like the Frenchman’s. How absurd! She really must be losing her mind!

  She put the back of her hand across her eyes. “I—the early morning heat. I think I’ll go back to bed for a while, Cristobal.” In truth she really did not feel that well; as Tia Juana lectured, she was running herself ragged.

  With brooding eyes Cristobal watched his wife leave the breakfast room. Jen was treading on dangerous ground. The fatigue of carrying on her own masquerade was making her careless. He let the newspaper drop on the table. Listlessl
y he rose and, stretching his massive frame, turned to the bay window where the macaw’s cage was suspended. ‘‘Lavender Blue . . . you must be careful,” he mused aloud.

  “Lavender Blue!” Washington echoed. “Lavender Blue!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Plaster showered the floor. A second fusillade of bullets zinged erratically about La Fonda del Olvido’s stucco walls. Rubia flung herself back from the window where she had been watching the fighting since dawn—this time too late. Dazed, she looked down at the crimson streak where the stray bullet had burrowed along her arm.

  A French bullet most likely, she thought, as she rummaged in the chest of drawers for something to staunch the copious bleeding. Under the Mexican Imperialist general, Tomas Mejia, the French had taken Monterrey and were besieging Bagdad. The fighting was nothing new to the Mexican towns. They had known revolutions and guerrilla attacks throughout their unstable histories. Only the men fighting that morning were different. Not just Mexicans this time. On the streets below the motley clothing identified the other nations—Polish, Austrian, and Hungarian mercenaries. But the French Foreign Legion troops predominated. Those Régiments Étrangers stood out in their brilliant blue and red uniforms and the kepi hats with the white suncloths that shaded their necks.

  Rubia located a lace-edged handkerchief, one her Castilian grandmother had crocheted. She sat down on the edge of the bed and tried unsuccessfully to wrap it about her arm. Blood was everywhere now—splattered on the royal-blue velvet draperies, dribbled across the muslin sheets, smeared across one breast and her stomach. With a detached interest born of the shock from the wound her hand touched her stomach, still flat but penciled with stretch marks. The marks left from pregnancy. But would anything erase the marks left on her soul and imprinted on her mind? The image of her infant daughter, scarcely eighteen months, raped in the same room even as she was raped, flashed before her eyes.

  She shuddered and was surprised to find tears spilling off her cheeks. Never had she cried. Not then, or later when her blue-blooded husband shunned her as dirt beneath his feet. Oh, how wrong her grandmother had been to insist that she marry nobility. And Don Bartolome Hinojosa had been the only gentleman there in the wilderness of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas whose family was of noble Spanish birth, untainted by Indian blood. Yes, her husband was noble, noble enough to keep her as his wife, despite her soiled body.

  Another battery of gunfire ripped through the room, yanking her back from her reverie. Somewhere a cannon boomed, and the walls and floor vibrated. More plaster flakes drifted down around her, incongruously like the peaceful snow that fell on Spain’s mountains. Behind her the door burst open, as if blown by the powerful blast of a hurricane. The French? The Juaristas? The fear arrowed through Rubia’s mind in the second that she whirled, pulling the sheets up about her nudity.

  His dark, flat face looking savage, Solis stood in the doorway. He was panting with the dash he had made from the beach, through the streets rife with crossfire, and up the staircase to her room. The words that had been on his tongue—about how the Revenge had just put in, the sight of the smoke hanging like a pall over the city, Alejandro’s confirmation of the French invasion—the words and the overwhelming fear for her safety faded at the sight of the aristocratic young woman whose beauty was inadequately concealed by the thin sheet.

  “Solis,” she breathed.

  Her sleep-tumbled, spun-gold hair curled over one shoulder; her pale hazel eyes, lined by thick, sun-tipped lashes, were wide with fear—and pride. A goddess, he thought, bemused.

  Then he saw the red splotch that stained the sheet, just above her breast. Without thinking, he crossed the room in two strides and yanked the sheet from her. She screamed. Fists pummeled at his face and shoulders. “No! Dios, no! Not again!” she cried.

  He understood. Her fear of rape. He tried to catch her flailing hands. “Sssh!” he murmured. “It’s all right, mi amor.”

  But she would not be quieted. Hysteria contorted her delicate features. It wasn’t the hysteria but the blood that he saw pouring from the wound in her arm that made his palm snap across her face. Her head jerked with the impact and her body splayed across the bed.

  Immediately Solis crawled over to kneel at her side. He could see by the glazed pupils that her hysteria had been replaced by a numbed curiosity. He forced himself to forget the small, exposed milk-white breasts that rose and fell rapidly, contrasting so with the swarthy pendulous ones of the Indian women he had known. For the briefest of seconds his observant gaze skimmed over the apex of her legs mounded by a golden moss. Then he turned his attention to the wound in her arm that looked as if it had been gouged by a slicing rapier.

  He ripped the sheet down one edge, saying softly, “The French will soon occupy Bagdad.” Talking, maybe it would calm her. “If not by tonight, then tomorrow most certainly. ” He lifted the dead weight of her arm and began to wrap the wound with the muslin strip. “You can’t stay here. Sooner or later you’ll be identified as working with the Juaristas. Kitt can take you on the next run out—to Bermuda, Cuba, the Bahamas—anywhere you wish.”

  Her eyes blinked. Sanity restored? “No. I belong here. I was born in Mexico. My daughter was born here. And died here. I will die here, Solis.”

  A child? How had her daughter died? Some fatal childhood disease like the pox? It took eighty-six percent of the infants in the Indian villages like his. He knotted the strip, and she winced. “You will live to be a very old lady and tell about the French intervention before you die,” he said gently. “But in the meantime you must leave. You can come back after the fighting is over.”

  “Will Mexico’s fighting ever end?” she asked in a distant voice. Then her eyes focused on his intense face, just above hers. Unconsciously her hand slipped up to stroke the hollow beneath one high cheekbone. “No, I will fight in my own way, Solis. These wars—these revolutions—the guerrilla bandidos—they must come to an end one day. So families can live peacefully.”

  Without thinking what he was doing, he turned his face so that his lips brushed the fingertips of the grand lady. Afraid to see her response, her repugnance at the audacity of his intimate action, he rose and went to the door. With distance between them, he trusted himself to look back at her. There was a curious look in her eyes. He could not identify it. But at least her lips, naturally pink without the adornment of the rouge pot, did not curl with their contempt. They were parted—and soft.

  “I’ll be outside the door until dusk,” he told her. “Kitt is with the Juarista commander now. But at nightfall he’ll return. We’re leaving then. All three of us.”

  “Sweet Mary in Heaven, but you look bad!”

  Cristobal paused in the bedroom doorway and rubbed his unshaven chin ruefully. His pinstriped trousers were streaked with dust where he had elbowed his way across a dusty street with bullets winging over him. “I had the misfortune to be visiting a—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Jeanette said from the bed, “a brothel.” She laid aside the newspaper she had been reading. It carried the latest news of General Sherman’s devastating march through Georgia, his Federal troops destroying everything like a plague of locusts. Atlanta, the Confederacy’s military depot, lay in his way. The question was how long the city could hold out against Sherman. How long could Brownsville hold out against General Morgan? How long could Matamoros hold out against the French?

  How long could she hold out against the Frenchman?

  “Well, yes,” Cristobal drawled, “as a matter of fact, it was a brothel. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  He paused, and she raised a brow. “Yes?”

  “Why the devil don’t you wear a nightcap, Jen?”

  Self-consciously her hand went up to her hair where it lay upon the shoulder of her soft pink nightdress. She shoved it back behind her shoulder. “That’s totally irrelevant to our conversation.”

  “Right, of course. Well, curse it, Jen, this is a highly irregular conversation
. But, this brothel’s across the river in Mexico.” He glanced sheepishly at his scuffed boots. “And I was—uh, there when the French overran it this morning. You heard the fighting?”

  “Yes. Do get on with it, Cristobal. I’m tired.”

  “It’s my friend—”

  “A woman, no doubt.”

  “Well, yes—anyway, Jen, I’m concerned about her safety.”

  “I would think your friend would be thrilled about the fortune she could make servicing the French soldiers.”

  An unholy light flickered in Cristobal’s eyes. A demonic grin played on his lips. “Indeed, Jen, Frenchmen are rumored to make marvelous lovers, aren’t they?”

  She blanched. Did he know about the blockade runner? “Are they?”

  “Armand was a Frenchman.” He stepped into the room. “You tell me.”

  At his approach she pulled the bedcovers up to her chin. “That’s none of your business!”

  He halted next to the bed. “So it is.” His fingers played with a tendril that had strayed from her hair. “As I was saying,” he murmured softly, “I’m concerned for my friend’s safety. I would like to bring her here for a few weeks, until everything settles down.”

  “What?” She sprang upright in the bed. “Install your doxy in my house? Have her here for the two of you to— to—”

  ‘‘To parrot you—what we do is none of your business.”

  Her fists crimped the sheets. “It’s my house, and I won’t have—”

  He caught one of her fists and, with the slightest pressure at the underside of her wrist, forced her to release the sheet. She tried to yank her hand away, but he brought it to his lips. “I seem to recall that nicely folded billet Mark Thompson passed you in front of Kleiber’s Drugstore. If I don’t mind you meeting with your paramour, you certainly shouldn’t—”