The one man Martha had ever caught Belle looking at with any admiration was the one man on God’s earth with whom she could never be partnered. But those had been glances cast on the sly, the kind seventeen-year-old girls were apt to cast on much older, intangible, and handsome men. Thankfully, Gabriel Kings had never acknowledged or returned those glances . . . so far as Mrs. Jackson knew.
Her husband’s time-and battle-tested friendship with Jonathan Kings was what garnered his sympathy for Gabriel and his desperate band. For a criminal, Gabriel Kings was a damned fine man. Jackson always thought he would have made Belle a fine husband, had he entered into another profession.
Unfortunate, is what it was. One night, Jackson had said as much to his wife, and, although she gasped at the moment, she went on to wonder at how beautiful their grandchildren would have been.
Unfortunate . . .
Even more unfortunate was that as each day came to an end, Belle Jackson went to sleep praying for Kings’s safe return, in full knowledge that her prayers were unlikely to receive an answer. Every time he rode away, she knew she might never see him again. The thought that calmed her enough to let her sleep was that, like a bad penny, Kings always turned up, and she clung to that promise.
Funny thing was, she didn’t recognize him when he did turn up again.
A year and three months had passed since she last saw his face, and still she didn’t recognize him.
She was watching, on horseback, at a distance of three hundred yards from the cover of a small grove, as five horsemen meandered through the hills toward her very location. Even through her daddy’s old spyglass, Belle couldn’t make out any of the men’s faces, but by the slump of their bodies they appeared to be dog-tired. Their horses moved at an uninspired walk, heads bobbing level with their shoulders, showing they had put some miles behind them. She waited uncertainly, reins drawn tight in her left hand and murmuring words of comfort to her fussing sorrel mare.
The Winchester was in its scabbard, beneath her right calf, its stock canted upward in the perfect snatching position. But to draw the rifle now, even as a precaution, would be mighty unwise. Who could say what the horsemen were apt to do if they happened to glance around and catch a flash of light off the dark steel?
There was no wind and no obstructions before her. With her sights raised and a bead on, she was confident she could ventilate a tomato can from a hundred yards. A man on a moving horse was another target entirely, and she didn’t know what breed of man these might be.
Belle decided she had lingered long enough. She turned her horse, slapped heels to flanks, and went tearing down the path for the ranch house.
The mare was young and loved to run and carried her rider back along the curving trail to their destination in no time. Lounging by the holding pens were Belle’s brother and the two ranch hands, smoking cigarettes. The hounds, Dauntless and Peerless, prowled nearby—lazy sentries—but at the sound of galloping hooves, they loped back to the pens, barking as they came.
John Bevans was the foreman, a native Texan and seasoned rangeman who had helped the major transform a stretch of hell into a second Eden. Rawboned and gray-haired, he glanced up as Belle pulled in her mount. Bevans hurried over, helped her down, and demanded of the girl who was practically his niece, “You all right, Sis? What’s the matter?”
“¿Bandidos?” asked Fernando Elías, the stocky mesteñero from south of the river.
“Doesn’t look like it.” Belle shook her head, out of breath. “Five men, look like they’ve covered some country.”
“Seem like a threat?” Titus asked.
Again, she shook her head. “Looked like a strong wind could put ’em all in the dirt, and their animals didn’t look much better.” She paused to frown. “Didn’t look like they were hurtin’ for weapons, though.”
Titus kept his eyes on the horizon, backpedaling toward the house. “Awright,” he said. “Belle, you come with me.”
She held back to unlimber her Winchester, then started ahead of him as he turned to the others and said, “You boys stay out here and watch for ’em to come in. Y’all got your pistols with ye?”
Bevans’s belt was hanging on the post of the main gate, and Fernando’s was located not far off. They quickly buckled them on, loosening the rawhide thongs that secured the pistols in their holsters. Bevans was no gunman, Fernando even less so, but they had fought off enough adversaries to call themselves survivors, and could stall, if they had to, until reinforcements came.
Titus knew better than to shoo his big sister into the house, but he didn’t want her exposed too much in the yard. He went in to fetch their father, while Belle took up a defensive position on the wraparound veranda. Resting her rifle across the railing, she knelt behind its long barrel with the butt tight in the nook of her shoulder.
“You still there, Sis?” Bevans called out, without turning around.
“I am, John, and I ain’t goin’ anywhere.”
“That’s the way I’d have it,” the foreman called back.
Thus encouraged, Belle felt the ten pounds of untested steel and wood in her hands lighten considerably.
Inside, Titus cleared the parlor in three bounding strides and charged up the staircase to his father’s study. There he found the major bent over his desk, nose inches from the pages of his business ledger. Jackson was a lean but large-framed and striking man who, if so inclined, could intimidate like the Angel of Death, but when he twisted in his seat to peer over the rims of his spectacles, the Old Man looked no more intimidating than the average notary.
“Titus,” he said. “What’s got you lathered up?”
“Got riders comin’ in, Pa.”
Off came the spectacles, and the man behind them seemed transformed. Pursing his lips to draw the fringes of his elegant tawny mustache together with the top of his Van Dyke beard, Arthur Jackson stood up and was suddenly six inches taller than his son. “They seem friendly or foe-like?” he asked, heading for the stairs.
“Belle reports they look well-armed,” Titus replied, “though she mighta been hasty in thinkin’ they could mean trouble. Still . . .”
As father and son traversed the parlor, Martha Jackson emerged from the kitchen. She was flanked by two small, sloe-eyed girls, daughters of the Spanish-looking Fernando and his mestiza wife, Oralia. The lady of the house motioned for them to stay put, then gathered her skirts and traced the course of her menfolk as far as the doorway.
Bevans and Fernando were waiting at the foot of the steps, facing outward, and Jackson strode out between them with Titus close behind. The hounds were farther out in the yard, pacing and huffing at the scent of the newcomers. From the threshold, Martha noticed her daughter and hissed at her to put her gun away—for God’s sake—and get inside immediately. But Mrs. Jackson’s authority went unacknowledged today. Belle didn’t so much as flinch at her mother’s command, much less lower her sights.
If he had felt any of the apprehension his people evidently did, the Old Man would have been relieved when his eyes touched on the lead horseman. As it was, he was surprised that no one had recognized Kings. At the very least, they should have known his horse—John Reb had been foaled in their very barn.
Moments behind the major, John Bevans chuckled, “Aw, hell,” and reached out to good-naturedly slap his Mexican coworker on the shoulder. Fernando, nearsighted as he was, kept his hand hovering above his gun. Only when he recognized Kings’s all too familiar saddle-posture did he relax, and the fluid dismount drove in the final peg.
Por cierto, aquí era un amigo. If nothing else, Fernando admired the way Kings sat a horse.
Belle recognized that dismount as well, and her heart leapt. Standing, she looked on as her father received the incomers, calling off the hounds that obediently retreated to the veranda steps. Kings came foremost, and the two tall Virginians met in the middle of the yard to shake hands. Neither were particularly sentimental men, but by the hold of their shoulders, the strength of their grips, i
t was plain to see that they were genuinely glad to see each other.
There was an unintelligible exchange of words, and then Kings looked toward the veranda. Their eyes met, and Belle—who had done her growing on an untamed prairie, done things few women of her day had ever done, and had the gumption to rival any man—felt her knees turn to jelly.
Nearby, Fernando’s oldest daughter, Teresa, was tugging on Mrs. Jackson’s dress, crying with excitement, “¡Es el Señor Reyes, el Señor Reyes!” It wasn’t long before Sofía, the younger, picked up the chant.
It was a suitable enough distraction for Belle, who feared that her feelings would be found out if she stayed on the veranda a second longer. Resting her rifle against the railing, she swept past her mother in the doorway and took both girls’ hands in hers. “Vamos, chicas,” she said, then shifted back to English in a way that was common for that region. “Why’n’t you go upstairs and practice your weavin’?”
Disappointed but taught well by her mother to mind her elders, Teresa led her sister upstairs. Belle waited until she heard the door close before moving again. Hands at her waist, she steadied herself, breathed deeply, then stepped into the kitchen.
Oralia, olive-skinned and lovely, was spreading flour for tortillas. She looked up with a gentle but knowing smile at the clicking of la Señorita Belle’s boots.
“Let’s move, Oralia,” la Señorita said. “We’ve got hungry men comin’.”
The Jacksons’ masterfully crafted cherry-wood dining room table had survived a bumpy trip out from Lexington, as had the missus’s china and silverware, and out of a household of nine, it sat ten. That night, the Elías family hung around long enough for Oralia to finish laying out the settings, then retired to their separate quarters, partially to make room for the five extra mouths, but also to quietly nurse their youngest, who had suddenly complained of an upset stomach.
With the hounds circling the table, hoping for morsels to be tossed their way, the Jacksons and their guests ate well, and the conversation was pleasant enough, though it moved at a rather halting pace. The major had the run of it but never dominated or talked down at anyone who might not have been as knowledgeable as he. He was by nature a quiet sort of man—very similar, his daughter had come to realize, to the man she loved. The discussion turned from horseflesh to Indian matters, skirting around the recent bloodshed in Lincoln County, New Mexico, then settling on the patenting of the phonograph by Mr. Edison. How fascinating and strange it would be, they thought, once the invention went into mass production, for a family to hear a brass band or string quartet in their own house.
“Way I see it,” Brownwell said from the far end of the table, “you can keep your phonographs. We never needed none of them back home for some fine music.”
Talk was then given over to the yellow fever epidemic that was wracking the Mississippi River Valley and had thus far claimed over twelve thousand lives, a statistic that caused Mrs. Jackson to cover her mouth with her napkin in horror and implore the menfolk to abstain from such talk at the dinner table.
Her son loudly overruled her in the next breath, saying, “The Quarantine Act’s got everythin’ south of New Orleans sealed up good and tight, but it’s them blamed mosquitoes they got to worry about. They seem to be doin’ more damage down there than anything.”
This statement elicited another shudder from his mother and a balled-up napkin thrown in his face by his father.
“Was there much threat of contractin’ that particular affliction in the war?” Bevans asked, looking across the table at Kings. “Reason I ask is, I had a cousin who died of—well, I had a cousin who died of disease in ’63, but it weren’t yella fever.”
Kings looked up from smearing butter on a biscuit. “Not so much as catchin’ typhoid or dysentery,” he said, then added with a sideward glance, “but I believe that’s all I hafta say on that, John. Like to turn my stomach, and I wouldn’t want to waste this fine meal.”
From his seat at the head of the table, Major Jackson studied Gabriel Kings closely. It occurred to him that although the man’s exhaustion showed clearly in his face and bearing, he was better-looking than his father had been, and Jonathan Kings had cut a fine figure before pleurisy sent him to a premature grave the third winter of the war. His wife, Gabriel’s mother, followed within a month—of grief, it was said.
After the dishes were cleared away, the men repaired to the veranda to smoke. Yeager, Woods, and Osborn did not linger but made a beeline for the barn and its loft, where they would all be bedding down. Brownwell humored Kings for half an hour but kept quiet, content to pick his teeth and spit. He excused himself when Titus started to speak of how the railroad barons were making money hand over fist, and what a grand thing it was, to see that sort of progress being made.
Eventually, the men of the ranch said their good-nights and turned in, leaving Kings alone to burn down his cigar. After just a few hours, he was already beginning to feel better. Looking out into the darkness, coat buttoned to the collar, he allowed his mind to empty and his spirit to become saturated with the lovely peace of the late hour.
Wind blew in gently from the south, carrying with it the smell of the Frio. A bat fluttered by, chasing insects. In the outlying darkness, Kings heard corralled horses moving. He imagined the ghosts of Stuart’s magnificent cavalry racing across the moonlit plain, galloping toward an unseen enemy.
Inevitably, painfully, that conjured charge into a fantastical field of glory came up short against the memory of Yellow Tavern. Then Yellow Tavern melded like blood and water with Agave Seco, and Kings saw Johnny Blake’s sparsely whiskered face graying by the second all over again.
It was not an image he wished to cling to, but neither did it grieve him beyond bearing. He simply saw the dead boy’s face, clearer than the gnarls in the wood of the railing before him, and made no effort to force it from his mind.
Who knows how long it would have stayed there had Belle Jackson not crept onto the veranda shortly after midnight, gentling the cloth-screened door shut behind her so as not to wake the house. She had a patchwork quilt about her shoulders, the edges of which trailed down to shapely white ankles that disappeared into lavender slippers. By contrast, her heart-shaped face and slender neck were flushed from the girlish thrill that came with biting the apple, and her bright-blue eyes—chinablue, to be exact, with flecks of brown ringing the pupil—were a dazzling, mystifying mosaic.
“Good evening, Miss Jackson,” he said. It was the second time he’d addressed her directly since his arrival.
“Good evening, Mr. Kings.”
With what her mother would have scorned as shameless audacity, she went and allowed him to take her onto his lap. She felt a tremendous security there, a greater ease than she had felt in over a year and could never experience anywhere else.
Their affair was almost a strain, the kind that makes both lovers, at their weakest, regret ever speaking to one another. It brought pain when miles separated them, but perhaps an even greater pain when they were as close as they were now.
Belle had a smart head on her shoulders. She knew the major would never approve of her taking the name of Kings, and when she let herself dream, she realized that, if by some miracle she and Gabriel ever did enter into holy matrimony, she would be forced to live as no loving wife should. He himself had told her that more than once. She would exist with the constant dread of assassins peeking through the cracked doors of her own home and pace the floor with worry if he ever stayed out later than usual. After a time, their children would take notice. And, of course, those children would never truly know their father.
And so this was all they had, this intimacy on the sly. They creaked back and forth in each other’s arms, pushing reality from their minds and listening to the sound of each other’s breathing, wishing they had met before the war.
As a young girl, she’d not heard of his endeavors down in Dixie. Or in Texas, for that matter. She never put much stock in reputations anyway, and his was
no different. Instead, Belle chose to unearth the real Kings firsthand, and, in spite of herself, she liked what she found. She was intrigued, but she let him do most of the work. In the years that followed, it had taken him many a compliment, countless tips of his hat, a private chat if he was lucky, and, eventually, a secret walk down by the river to change her first impression of him—that he was an aloof, haughty young man, invested in his own small legend.
The U.S. government had had a harder time finding a chink in Kings’s armor than this woman. In the face of death, he might have been cold, unflinching, and totally fearless. Staring into the eyes of Belle Jackson, he was shy and reticent, all the while living out the definition of a gentleman.
After more than a quarter of an hour, it was Belle who broke the silence, though half-whispers have never broken anything. “I dreamt on you, Gabriel,” she said. “A few nights ago, I saw you in my sleep.”
She nuzzled deeper into him, her hand suddenly a clamp on his upper arm, and he was surprised at the strength of her grip. He stopped rocking. “That a fact?”
“Didn’t like what I saw,” she went on. “I was outside of myself, watchin’ it all happen before my eyes. Like a play. I saw myself dressed all in black and standin’ in the middle of this crowd. Must’ve been hundreds of folks gathered about, and it was the strangest thing. They all seemed to be . . . swayin’. Like wheat in the wind, like they wasn’t even alive.
“I couldn’t quite make out any of their faces, but they were all lookin’ in the same direction—lookin’ up, as though struck by a vision. The ‘me’ that I saw turned to see, and I turned with her, and that’s when I saw you, hangin’ from a scaffold. I saw the other me open her mouth to scream but”—she seemed to choke, took a moment, then resumed—“no sound come out. I understood it then, the black. I woke up sweatin’ like a winded pony.”
“Belle—”
The Avenging Angels Page 13