Bride of Fortune (65 page)

      
Another muffled gasp of pain issued from inside the room where his wife lay on their big bed. “I promised her I'd be by her side, custom be damned!” He shoved past the old cook and rushed over to Mercedes.

      
She lay sweating, tangled amid the covers where Angelina and Lupe had just placed her after what seemed endless hours of walking up and down the long hallway. Nicholas had held her arm and walked with her, stopping each time a contraction seized her and she doubled up with the pain. While Angelina timed them with some infernal inbred female clock, he had stood rigidly still, feeling the agony lance through him with the impact of a saber slash to his guts. No, worse than any wound he had ever received in any war.

      
When the cook, who was also Gran Sangre's resident midwife, pronounced it time to put the
patrona
in bed for her delivery, she had closed the door in Nick's startled face.

      
Now, dressed in a fresh night rail, her hair braided in a fat plait lying across the pillow, Mercedes gritted her teeth in concentration, breathing in soft shallow pants as Angelina had instructed her.

      
“You will only be in the way, Don Nicholas,” the midwife remonstrated.

      
“I've been through a dozen wars, Angelina, I don't faint at the sight of blood,” he replied grimly, not at all certain that Mercedes’ blood would not be quite a different matter than his own.

      
Doggedly he pulled a stool up to the side of the bed and took his wife's hand.

      
Mercedes dug her nails into his palm, clutching the warm assurance of his strong, callused hand in her own smaller one. As the contraction eased, she smiled at him and said, “It really isn't that bad, you know.”

      
“And you really are a terrible liar,” he replied with tenderness.

      
Angelina applied a cool cloth to her forehead and nodded with satisfaction at how matters were progressing. “If you would be of some use, sponge her forehead with cool water between the pains,” she instructed him. “It will not be much longer now.” She turned to the door and called for Lupe. “Where is that girl with the things I told her to fetch?”

      
Nicholas and Mercedes exchanged a look of grave sweetness. “Father Salvador will be scandalized when he learns you were in here during the birth,” she said.

      
“I may be of no use at this point, but at least I feel better if I can be with you.”

      
“Your being with me is a great deal of use,” she replied as another contraction began to build.

      
Nicholas held Mercedes’ hand, bathed her perspiration-sheened face and refrained—with great difficulty—from asking Angelina how much longer it would be each time she checked his wife's progress.

      
“Ah, now, I think the little rascal is moving into place,” the midwife said with satisfaction as her gnarled hands kneaded Mercedes’ belly.

      
“It feels as if the whole Prussian army is moving into place,” Mercedes gritted out, then looked at her husband's face, a stone mask behind which, she was certain, lay stark terror.

      
As the contraction ebbed, she said, “Father Salvador did a very useful and timely job, marrying us a scant three days before our child comes into the world.”

      
“He kept saying the petition would come through in time, but I didn't believe him,” Nicholas confessed.

      
“It's a miracle, but is it enough of one for you to let him baptize you?”

      
“I'm still thinking on that one. I had enough of religion when I lived with Pap.”

      
Just then Mercedes arched up from the mattress as another sudden stab of white-hot numbing pain crashed down on her.

      
“Hold her,
patrón,
yes, that way,” Angelina instructed as Nicholas wrapped his arms around his panting wife. The midwife barked terse orders at Lupe, then reached down to pull the squalling red bundle of fury into the light of day. “It is a boy!”

      
“See, I told you it would be. Bartólome Nicholas Alvarado,” Mercedes breathed in utter contentment. “Rosario will be so pleased.”

      
“Now this
is
a miracle,” Nicholas said reverently with tears in his eyes as Angelina placed his firstborn son, the heir of Gran Sangre, into his arms.

Author’s Note with a Special Addendum

      
Ever since I saw
Sommersby
, I wanted to write
Bride of Fortune
. This story is for everyone who hated the ending of that movie or its earlier film
noir
incarnation,
The Return of Martin Guerre
. The writers of those screenplays viewed the theme of assumed identity in terms of honor and retribution. I viewed it in terms of love and redemption. Thus the relationship between Nicholas Fortune and Mercedes Alvarado took hold of my imagination.

      
In this story war is the crucible which refines my protagonists. But which war? What setting? Neither World War I nor the American Civil War met my needs. I wanted Nicholas to lay claim to a title and a great estate where his noble lady was sworn to provide their dynasty with an heir. The vision seemed almost medieval but not the characters as I conceived them. That's when the idea of nineteenth century Mexico came to me—the splendid feudal Mexico of Maximilian and Juarez where the rigidity of an Old World caste system clashed head-on with the revolutionary ideals of democracy.

      
Although the Vargas conspiracy in this story is fictionalized, the intense class hatred directed against Benito Juarez by many of the
hacendados
was very real. The Man of Law was in real life much as I have portrayed him in fiction, tenacious, shrewd and utterly incorruptible. The parallels between his life and that of Abraham Lincoln are remarkable: both were attorneys; both rose from humble origins to their countries' highest offices; both were reviled as ugly and unprepossessing by their “betters”; and both were the driving forces which held together their nations during cataclysmic civil war. Juarez's wife and children spent the war years in exile in New York City. Mrs. Juarez actually addressed a joint session of the United States Congress in 1866 and received a standing ovation. Like Lincoln, Juarez died in office, although of natural causes.

      
After President Juarez's death in 1872, what Nicholas Fortune feared did happen. General Porfirio Díaz took over the presidency and Mexico became a dictatorship until his overthrow and exile in 1911. But the seeds of constitutional democracy had been planted in Mexico's fertile soil by Benito Juarez. It was left for his heirs to nurture them in coming centuries.

      
Regarding the other historical characters in
Bride of Fortune
, Prince Salm-Salm and his daring American wife, Agnes, both remained loyal to Maximilian of Hapsburg until the bitter end. In exchange for her “darling Max's” life, Agnes even went so far as to offer her voluptuous charms to the young republican officer who held their emperor prisoner in the final days. Colonel Palacio honorably resisted temptation. On June 19, 1867, the “Austrian dreamer” along with two of his Mexican generals, the sanguine schemer Miramón and the honorable idealist Mejia, died before a firing squad.

      
Virtually every government of Europe, as well as the Americas, protested Maximilian's execution, but Juarez held fast to the principle of law. The generals who deserted the army of the republic to follow a foreign usurper were clearly guilty of treason. In addition, European blue blood running red on New World soil was, in Juarez's eyes, not a bad deterrent to further Old World designs on Mexican sovereignty. Much has been made of the fact that Maximilian died well. Better for Mexico that he should have lived well. As for Prince Salm-Salm and his lady, they fade into history after surviving the Mexican adventure.

      
The ruthless butcher Leonardo Marquez was an actual historical figure who did abscond with millions in imperial loot. However, one of the most fascinating questions in Mexican history is what happened to that fortune. A highly ahistorical but entertaining answer is given in the film classic
Vera Cruz
. The Tiger of Tacubaya lived out his life as a pawnbroker in Havana and was finally allowed to return to his homeland, where he died an impoverished old man.

      
As for the American players, Confederates did immigrate to imperial Mexico, hoping to reestablish their antebellum social order. Matthew Maury, a brilliant scientist and embittered Southerner, actually served as Maximilian's Commissioner of Immigration. For him, as for most of the American settlers such as those depicted in
Bride of Fortune
, the adventure ended badly and they returned to the United States disillusioned.

      
Secretary of State Seward, who served both Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, recognized Juarez's government but went to great lengths to placate Napoleon III during the time the United States was rent by its own civil strife. Both administrations saw French recognition of the Confederacy as a more immediate threat than European encroachments in the New World. After the tide of victory turned for the Union, aid from north of the Rio Grande for the Juaristas increased dramatically. Spymaster Bart McQueen is fictional, but American agents like him were present in Mexico. Generals Grant, Sherman and Sheridan were outspoken in their support of the Mexican Republic as early as 1864. The latter two actually traveled into Mexico for talks with Juarez after our civil war ended. For the purposes of my story, I took the liberty of shifting the date when fifty thousand Union troops were deployed along the border from 1865 to 1866.

      
The civil war that raged during the French Intervention provided a glamorous backdrop, perfect for my embittered American mercenary and his half-English lady. The era was filled with elegance and violence.
Hacendados
lived in fabulous wealth like feudal monarchs while war raged on with savage intensity all around them.

      
Nicholas stepped into Don Lucero's life thinking to leave the fighting behind him and enjoy the privileges which he had long been denied because of his bastardy. He had not reckoned on falling in love with his brother's wife or being drawn to the Juarista cause. In spite of Mercedes’ royalist sympathies, it was Nicholas’ love for her that forced him to join the republicans. Their story is not merely about honor, it is about what ultimately makes men and women honorable: the source from which they can trace their blood is not so fine a measure of their worth as is the cause for which they are willing to spend it.

      
In researching the rich tapestry of Mexican history I relied on the eyewitness accounts of Sara York Stevenson's
Maximilian In Mexico
for political events and Fanny Calderón de la Barca's
Life in Mexico
for social history and commentary on how the nineteenth century dons lived.
Maximilian and Carlotta
by Gene Smith and
Napoleon III and Mexico
by Alfred Jackson Hanna and Kathryn Abbey Hanna were superb secondary sources.

      
To capture the lyric, almost mystical beauty of the
hacendados
' way of life, Paul Alexander Bartlett's
Haciendas of Mexico
is unsurpassed for visuals and descriptive prose about the magnificent estates. On the other side of the coin, to learn about the earthy humor and richly textured lives of Mexico's lower classes, no one writes with more authority, insight or sympathy than J. Frank Dobie in virtually any of his works. I relied especially on
Tongues of the Monte
. For a first person account of nineteenth century travel in the northern states of Mexico, A. B. Clarke's
Travels in Mexico
is a cornucopia of authentic details and commentary.

      
Nicholas and Mercedes’ love proved stronger than the divisive forces of civil war, betrayal and death and even provided the impetus for Lucero's surprising redemption. I felt our protagonists earned their happy ending.
 

* * * *

      
When
Bride of Fortune
was first released, Maryann Anderson, a reader from Tennessee, wrote me a very unusual letter that planted a seed. She felt that Luce was redeemable after his sacrifice for his brother. At the time, I did not see a way to do that. After thanking her for the most excellent idea, I filed away the letter and…life happened. I simply forgot about resurrecting Luce.

      
Then when I prepared the novel for its ebook debut, I started to thinking about Maryann’s idea again. Luce had grown up in an incredibly pernicious environment. His life was every bit as harsh and his family as uncaring as his brother’s had been. The more I read, the more I saw the merit in Maryann’s fascinating suggestions.

      
By the time I had finished going through the whole manuscript, I was convinced that she was right. Now I have figured out how to give Luce a second chance, as well as have Nicholas and Mercedes appear in the tale, since I know how readers like to “peek” in on well-loved characters from earlier books.