LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  She avoided the leering man beside her and kept her gaze trained on the motley line of Mexican gunmen strung out ahead of her wagon. She knew she was safe, even through the night, until the caravan reached the Sierra Madre Mountains and the Huasteca Canyon of which the pistolero had spoken. Before then the band of Juaristas could not afford to halt for fear of running into other depredators who wanted gunpowder as badly as they—namely the insidious revolutionary bands or the French troops who scoured the countryside looking for Juarez’s government, which was in hiding somewhere in the desolation of northern Mexico. And soon she would know where.

  She had been right about her foreboding. She knew now the Mexican clerk must have tipped off the Juarista band about her caravan of gunpowder leaving Monterrey. The Juarista who now drove her wagon told her as much. “He is our—intelligencia, entiendesl"

  Yes, she understood. The man took mordida, a bribe, to notify the Juaristas whenever wagon loads of supplies that the Juaristas needed left Monterrey. The Juaristas had given her teamsters the choice of joining the band or crossing the barren desert on foot. The memory of sun-bleached bones along the desert route had quickly decided the teamsters. Her, they had given no choice. She was to provide their amusement.

  The approach of nightfall did not halt the Juaristas. But the Sierra Madres loomed dangerously closer for Jeanette. Just in front of her a Juarista’s horse stumbled and would not rise. The Mexican driving her wagon swerved the large wooden wheels around the prone animal, and a few seconds later she heard the crack of a pistol shot. She shuddered and squinched her eyes, but behind her lids her imagination conjured up too vividly what must have happened. She feared she was going to be humiliatingly ill again.

  Although the sun had long since dropped behind western peaks, heat still shimmered up off the desert. Overhead even the stars seemed to bum hot. Now she wished she had drunk from the Juarista’s canteen. The tip of her tongue darted out to moisten her cracked lips. “Water— please.” The words whispered from her parched throat.

  “Ah, maybe now you will be good to me, eh?” He threw an arm around her shoulder and his hand groped among the ties of her buckskin shirt, seeking entrance. His callused fingers found her breast.

  What did it matter? Another man had touched her, and she had survived. What was one more—or ten more—as long as her lungs continued to expand with the precious breath of life? Then she pitched forward.

  Cursing, the Mexican maneuvered the wagon’s reins with one hand while he shifted her back against the seat. He had felt the heat rising off her breast. Sunstroke. Awkwardly he flipped the cork from his canteen and held its lip against her mouth. She really wasn’t that pretty. Burned skin, matted hair, blistered lips. Except for the eyes. Whenever the puta lowered herself to glance at him. Unusual color. She coughed, choking on the brackish water. He grinned. She would live. Long enough at least for him to empty himself into her later that night.

  During the long night the caravan of wagons snaked upward through the canyons of the Sierra Madres filled with straggly pine trees. Every so often the Juarista peered through the dark at the woman who slumped against him. Her soft moans and shallow breathing informed him that she continued to live. But when they reached the Juarista camp high in the pine-shrouded mountains and he lifted her from the wagon, her skin scalded his hands. She muttered deliriously. English words he wasn’t sure he understood.

  “Kitt . . . the Frenchman . . . our baby . . .”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Music. Cool nectar. For one flashing moment it seemed to Jeanette that heaven had swung wide its pearly gates for her. Gradually her vision cleared. Above her the emerald ceiling slowly coalesced into pine fronds. Their fresh, resinous scent filled her nostrils. Instinct prompted her tongue to lick her lips. She tasted the nectar, cool droplets of water. And the music—she could distinguish it now as the most pleasant of sounds, a gurgling waterfall somewhere nearby. She tried to tum her head, but the effort pinched nerves that tapped with nauseating persistence at her temples. Cautiously she moved her hand, encountering pine needles. Evidently she lay on a bower someone had prepared for her!

  Her gaze left the ceiling to sweep carefully about her. A wall of trees. Then at the perimeter of her vision a figure stirred, rose. A man’s broad chest and head blocked out all else. She must still be delirious!

  She closed her lids and opened them again. “Cristobal,” she rasped, her voice as scratchy as the pine needles. Disbelieving, she lifted her fingers to touch his jaw. It was real. Flesh and bone. Shadowed with the dark stubble of several days’ growth of beard. Only then did she notice that her fingers were wet with her husband’s tears. Cristobal—crying? The self-centered, cavalier Cristobal Cavazos shedding tears for someone? For her?

  Weak, her hand slipped down to her concave stomach.

  She knew now she had been with child. Did she still carry Kitt’s baby?

  “Jen.” Cristobal’s voice sounded as cracked as hers. His hand slipped behind her neck, and he raised her head to meet the tin mug he held to her lips. “I was afraid the sunstroke left you comatose. Three days now! Sacré tonnerre, vous . . .”

  Her lids fluttered closed. She wanted to hear what else he was saying. But she was so tired. He was saying something in French. She really must master the language.

  “Well, you have decided to awaken.”

  The voice, a gravelly one, addressed her in the most elegant Spanish. She tried to focus her eyes. A bronzed, stony-faced Indian, clothed impeccably in gray frock coat and striped trousers, shimmered then solidified before her. He stared unblinkingly at her for a moment, after which he turned to utter something to someone beyond her range of vision. Her gaze slid from the Indian, past the tent’s canvas wall, to the massive figure that stepped out of the shadows.

  Cristobal! Then he had not been a dream. He knelt beside her cot. His hand brushed away the hair clinging to her cheek. At that moment she realized her hair had been unbraided; it spread out over her shoulders and breasts, which were covered in a white cotton gown. Her brows knitted. Who had dressed her—no, undressed her? Cristobal? The fever, Monterrey, her husband, the attack— they were a discordant swirl of wind-whipped leaves.

  He sensed her disorientation. “One of the Juaristas, Jen—he recognized you. Immediately after the attack, he rode to tell me. I came as quickly as possible.” Questioning, her gaze lifted beyond him to the Indian, and Cristobal said, “My friend—Mexico’s President, Benito Juarez. Benito, my wife . . . and my friend.”

  She would have denied the last. But hadn’t Cristobal acted as befitted a friend? Had he not ridden more than a hundred miles to her bedside?

  “Señora Cavazos, mucho gusto," the dignified Indian acknowledged the introduction gravely. “My headquarters, such as they are, will be your home until you are well enough to leave with your husband.”

  She had always considered Juarez just another of many Mexican chieftains, a pure Zapotecan Indian whose role she did not quite understand. But meeting him, she realized he was one of those people who are larger than life.

  Benito Juarez was the constitutional president of the Mexican people, but he was more. The leader of a social movement to which his people were devoted, a president without a capital, a highly educated man—on the run. And a friend of Cristobal? How?

  Everything was so utterly confusing. She opened her mouth to ask, but Cristobal laid two fingers across her lips. “Later I’ll explain everything more fully, Jen. For now—rest. We’ll be leaving soon. Tomorrow or the day after—as soon as you’re better.”

  She had rested too long as it was. Although her body was still weak, her mind twisted through the puzzling maze of the last few months. Something nagged and rattled in a tiny compartment at the back of her brain. It had been back there, demanding to make itself known, for some time now. And now she sensed that whatever it was, it wasn’t pleasant.

  Later Cristobal entered the tent with a bowl of stew. Through her forest of lashes she watche
d him set the bowl on the crate, a makeshift stand, and pour a cup of wine from a wicker-covered flask. More lucid now, she realized that the Cristobal to whom she was accustomed barely resembled the man who moved before her now. He still possessed the same lithe grace, the same arrogant good looks—perhaps it was the clothing. He wore common denim pants and a rough, linsey-woolsey shirt. A dirt-stained sombrero hung from his neck by a leather thong. Then she saw what it was that was so incongruous.

  “The .45 strapped to your leg—when did you start carrying a revolver, Cristobal?”

  The cheap wine sloshed over the cup’s rim. He straightened the cup, then grinned. “La, Jen, these desperadoes are dangerous curs.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “If ever I saw a dangerous-looking desperado, it’s now.” And it was true. Cristobal’s infuriatingly lazy smile only made him seem that much more wicked. Her fingers nervously plucked at the multicolored blanket. She much preferred her foolish husband to this stranger who had ridden over a hundred miles to claim her. “I thought you told me the Mexican president was your friend.”

  He laughed, that whimsical chortle, and she relaxed some. “Benito is. That doesn’t make him any less dangerous. These Mexicans are all a dangerous lot.”

  “You’re a Mexican,” she pointed out.

  He sat down on the cot beside her and dug a rusty tin spoon into the stew. “I was also born on the United States side of the Rio Grande, and spent the majority of my life in France—and elsewhere.”

  Something clicked inside her brain, but in that split instant before she could collate the information, he spooned the stew between her lips. Obediently she chewed and swallowed the stringy beef, tough vegetables, and broth. The isolation of the tent in a mountain range in the middle of nowhere made her acutely aware of her husband. His virility was no longer mitigated by foppish apparel. Funny, that she could feel the faint stirrings of desire for him in spite of his despicable, worthless nature.

  When he reached for the cup of wine, she put a hand on his wrist. His brows arched questioningly over his dark eyes. “What?”

  “You were crying—that first time I came to. There in the forest. Why?”

  His eyes stared into hers, looking for the answer within her. Could he risk telling her the truth? She would laugh hysterically were he to declare his love. And for the truth of his duplicity she would hate him forever. As it was, someday—when the war ended perhaps—the privateer, the Frenchman, Kitt, could die also. Maybe, as Cristobal, he could re-establish all they had lost. He settled for a half-truth. “I was afraid you might die. I’d miss your charming company. And besides, you know how I would hate being stuck with the petty business details of running something like Columbia.”

  She snorted her disgust and changed the subject. “I need a bath.”

  “You’ve had enough baths to last you a week. Your body temperature was hotter than a sloop’s engine room. For three days I kept you at the falls, hauling you in and out of the icy water.” He shoved another spoonful into her mouth.

  He could tell the word body threw her, embarrassed her. He had seen her without clothing. What a little prude she still was! Incredible, considering the kind of sordid life she had been trapped into leading over the past two years. Obviously, she did not know what to say. Keeping her lids demurely lowered, she concentrated on chewing the gun-metal-hard meat.

  His deception had bought a little time.

  The next day she was strong enough to stand. Protesting that she at least had to wash her sweat-matted hair, she persuaded him to let her bathe. He looped his arms beneath her back and legs. Ignoring the stares of the gun-toting men and the camp women, the soldaderas, they passed, he hefted her all the way to the secluded glen. Her arms clung to the thick column of his neck. He could tell that for once she liked the feeling of being catered to. But she obviously didn’t like his discerning brown eyes watching her.

  She lowered her lids against the intrusion of the gaze and asked to be put down. “Now go away,” she told him when he set her on her feet, her bare toes peeking beneath the hem of the cotton nightdress.

  “You don’t think I’d leave you to the mercy of some lecherous Juarista?” She looked just like a child, he thought. A wasted child. The dual life she was leading had worn out her body. It had made her susceptible to sunstroke. “I’m staying here to watch you.”

  He delighted that his smiling retort, his air of calm assurance, infuriated her. “You wouldn’t!”

  “I would.”

  “You’re going to?”

  Like a fool, he grinned foolishly and shrugged. “I’ve got to.”

  She turned her back on him and majestically sailed down the leaf-thicketed path toward the sound of the waterfall. In the twilight of the deep forest her senses were inundated by earthy smells, the faint perfume of the wild orchids, the sheen of rain-washed foliage. She had split-second glimpses of disturbed wild creatures scurrying through the underbrush—a large dinosauric-looking lizard, a chattering squirrel.

  The nearer she drew, the louder the thunder of the cascading water became. But she was unprepared for the sight of the thousand-foot gorge that abruptly opened before her. Extraordinary, bizarre-looking rock formations jutted out to form the funnel for the explosive fall of water. The view made her dizzy, and after an awe-inspiring moment she turned away, directing her feet along the path leading farther upstream to the river that fed the waterfall.

  The noise was still ear-shattering, but at least the rushing, crystal-clear water was more accessible, only a few slippery yards down a pebbled bank. From the appearance of the ill-kempt band of Juaristas, soap was a commodity obviously lacking in the camp. Jeanette resigned herself to washing her hair without the benefit of soap as she knelt on the knee-gouging pebbles at the water’s edge. Her cotton nightdress soaked up the damp beneath her knees. She slid her forearm behind her neck and brushed the length of her hair forward over her head. Her hair muffled somewhat the volume of the waterfall. Still, something made her sense Cristobal’s presence.

  She looked over her shoulder and discovered him haunched immediately behind her. He proffered a dried, ochre-colored shrub. “Yucca root,” he said, his breath tickling her ear. “It makes suds.”

  She nodded her understanding and took the shriveled plant. Still her husband did not leave. She sighed and, dipping the root in the water, began lathering her hair. Halfway through her task, she glanced out the corner of her eye. Cristobal, nibbling on a twig, watched her, a peculiar light in his eyes. They burned with something smoky and dangerous that she did not quite understand. At that moment she wished again for the old days of their friendship. But other things crowded between—her unaccountable desire for him that mixed impossibly with her contempt for him. The two feelings were incompatible. So how? Why?

  When she had rinsed her hair and wrung out the excess water, Cristobal stood, spit out the twig, and bent to scoop her up. Another time, another place—a man had carried her so. The Frenchman. What was it that . . . ?

  Cristobal did not let her pursue that train of thought. “What were you doing out in the middle of a Mexican desert, Jen?”

  She had hoped to postpone that question until she could conspire with her campesinos. She sighed. “It’s a long confusing story, Cristobal.”

  “I gathered it would be,” he said drily.

  Quickly she glanced up, but his face was bland as he made his way back along the overgrown path. The best defense was a counter-offense. “How did you know the Juarista who rode to tell you of my capture?”

  “I’ve faced him over a dirty pack of monte cards before,” her husband replied easily. “He must have seen you with me in Brownsville.”

  “Have you talked with any of the captured teamsters?”

  “Hardly. They’re not the sort I mingle with unless it’s over a game of cards or in a cockfight arena.”

  “Well,” she began, “I was out riding—with a . . . ummh, male friend.” Her gaze skittered up to his. “You remember our agreement�
�that we each could go our own way?”

  “Quite.”

  Had she detected amusement in his tone. “Anyway, my friend—uh, has a hacienda just south of Matamoros. We were out riding that evening, too far really, and chanced upon this caravan of goods.”

  “You ride dressed—like a boy?”

  “There’s no society matrons at his ranch to disapprove,” she retorted.

  “What happened next?”

  “He—my friend—was haggling with them over a—an article he wanted to purchase, when Hannibal and his elephant horde swarmed down on us. Luckily my friend was able to escape.” Pleased with her improvisation, she grinned. In the pine forest’s fragmented light the freckles danced across her nose. “Really quite simple, after all.”

  “Rather.”

  She caught the derision in his voice and glanced up sharply, but he was watching the path ahead. “We’ll leave tomorrow, if you’re up to it. I have an engagement two days from now. Rather important one.”

  “Cards, a cockfight, or a woman?”

  He looked down at her through the thicket of curly black lashes. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous, dear girl.”

  Was she? Impossible! “To quote you, Cristobal, hardly.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Cristobal flicked the lash over the burros’ backs with all the expertise of a mule skinner; hardly compatible with the man who spent his days and nights in darkened grogshops and gambling houses. Her glance skirted over the profile of the man on the wagon seat beside her. The faint lines about his eyes, lighter than his teak-shaded skin, were laughter lines; but in another man they could just as easily have come from squinting long hours at a far horizon under a harsh sun. She had always thought his foolish smile made his mouth weak, but studying it now, she detected a pride etched there, certainly; and a sensual quality.