Bride of the Baja (23 page)

Man's capacity for deluding himself, Jordan thought, must be infinite.

"She'll need someone in Mexico to help her after she recovers," Thomas said. "She'll be among strangers in a foreign land thousands of miles from home."

"You aren't telling me that you intend to follow her to Mexico City, are you?"

"I'm saying exactly that. Jordan, you're probably thinking I'm deluding myself, and perhaps I am, but one thing I know beyond all doubt." He smiled as though remembering a happier time. "I love Alitha. When you love someone, you have to believe in her--you have to have complete faith in her. So, yes, as soon as I can book passage, I'll go to Mexico. I've sent word to the bishop that I won't return to the islands until I've found Alitha."

"I suppose I should envy you your faith," Jordan said. "You were surely ill named, for I've never seen a less doubting man." Even though your faith makes you something of a fool, he added to himself. "I fear I'm the one who sees men as they are," Jordan said, "not as I'd like them to be. I see beyond their facades to their weaknesses and their evil intentions."

"I like to think I see men as they are, too," Thomas said. "But if you see men as weak and evil, perhaps it's because you're looking into a mirror without realizing it."

A bit taken aback, Jordan dismissed the feeling, aware ministers thought differently than other men. ''You're tired," he said, "and I imagine hungry as well. Come with me. I'm sure Senor Navarro has enough tortillas and beans to feed a traveling missionary. And don't forget to bring the Good Book, just in case we meet some more highwaymen."

Thomas retrieved the Bible from the ground, and the two men walked side by side up the path into the hills.

The sky was beginning to darken when Jordan came down the hill from the Navarro
casa,
leaving Thomas asleep. He skirted far around the village and made his way to the beach, where he walked along the ocean listening to the surf and letting the salt air fill his lungs.

He had gone only a short distance when he sensed someone behind him. Looking back, he saw the black shapes of three men in the growing darkness. He immediately increased his pace, but when he glanced back again, he saw that the men had also increased theirs. Damn, he thought, he wasn't about to run from a fight. One hand went to his gun, the other to his knife. He turned and waited, wishing Thomas were with him. The three men drew nearer, separating as they approached. Jordan took the pistol from his belt and braced himself for their attack.

"Put aside your weapon, Captain Quinn," a voice out of the darkness told him. Jordan recognized the Southern drawl of Captain Cunningham. He thrust his pistol back into his belt.

"I'd like to have a word or two with the captain," Cunningham said, and the other two men, both naval officers, walked ahead.

"I apologize for this rather unusual meeting place," Cunningham said. "But I thought it best that we not be seen together again."

"Is my reputation that bad?"

Cunningham ignored Jordan's remark. "I have an offer to make you," he said.

"As I told you earlier, I'm not interested in the navy."

"Not the navy, sir—a special assignment." He paused. "I want you to sail to Acapulco, make your way from there to Mexico City and, while you are in the capital, do all in your power to prevent the Spaniards from fortifying California. I've learned that a Don Esteban Mendoza left here some weeks ago to plead for more troops and more arms. We can't afford to have him succeed, and you're the man to stop him. You know Spanish, you're enterprising and you're not afraid of a fight."

"You're suggesting I become a spy?"

"I'd prefer to call you a confidential agent of the United States government. Your insurance matter, by the way, would be taken care of, and—" he reached into his pocket— "you'll be paid five hundred dollars in silver now and more when you reach Mexico City."

Taking a leather pouch from his pocket, Cunningham slapped it against his open palm. The coins clinked invitingly.

If he accepted Cunningham offer, Jordan thought, he'd be on the move again and, in time, he'd have enough money for another ship of his own. Besides which, he wouldn't mind the chance to take that arrogant bastard Don Esteban down a peg or two if the opportunity offered itself.

And Alitha would be in Mexico City. Thomas Heath or no, he wanted to see her again.

"What do you say, Captain Quinn?" Cunningham asked. "Yea or nay?"

"I say aye aye, sir."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"Baja is nothing but poor shrubs, useless thorn bushes and bare rocks," Esteban said.

"But it has a certain beauty." Alitha said no more, knowing that Esteban soon became impatient when she disagreed with him. She liked Baja California—the dry clear days, the plains strewn with boulders and black lava rock, the impenetrable thickets of thorny shrubs and the small oases where date palms grew.

She was awed by the huge
cardones
, cactus with upsweeping ribbed arms extending more than thirty feet above her head. She'd seen the thick, swordlike leaves of the yucca before in the north, but here it had surprised her by sending up blooms of small, cream-colored flowers. Without the ocean, though, she might have agreed with Esteban, but the blue water was never far away on this narrow, fingerlike peninsula.

At first they had traveled along cliffs with the Pacific below them--days later, the Sea of Cortes was to their left, its shoreline indented by turquoise bays and coves whose beaches of white sand dazzled Alitha's eyes.

They camped near one of the bays beside a spring whose water trickled from between rocks to form a quiet pool under overreaching palms. That night Alitha lay with her hands behind her head, staring up at the vault of the starry sky.

"Last night I had a dream," she said to Esteban, who lay beside her on his
petate
. "I dreamed my father was waiting for me in a park of some great city, a park with green slopes and streams and willow trees whose branches trailed in the water. I wandered from place to place searching for him. At last I found him sitting alone on a bench, ramrod straight, with his hands clasped over the handle of his walking stick. I ran to him, and when he stood up to take me in his arms. I realized it wasn't my father after all. It was you, Esteban. Before either of us could speak, I woke up."

"Am I like your father, then?"

"No, not at all. He was such a stern, forbidding man while you, you're—well, you're different." She stopped, at a loss, realizing that at least in some ways Esteban was like her father. Demanding. Impatient.

"I've never told you about my father," she went on She described to Esteban how she had discovered that her father had been unfaithful to her mother and how she, Alitha, had been unable to forgive him until the day he died aboard the
Flying Yankee
, and how even now she did not understand why he had done what he did.

"You don't understand what men are like," Esteban said. "Men aren't fashioned for marriage. At least not marriage as women would have it."

"No, it's you who don't understand. I felt as though my father had betrayed not just my mother but me as well. I thought ..."

Esteban covered her mouth with his lips. After returning his kiss she drew away. "Let me tell you how I feel . . ." she began, but his hand had slid under her nightgown and along her bare leg. She sat up and pulled the gown over her head.

He entered her at once, thrusting inside her, and just as she felt her own desire beginning to grow he withdrew, turned her until she was on her stomach and entered her again. Again he withdrew after a few minutes. Finally he lay on his back with Alitha, also on her back, on top of him.

'Take that damn stone off," he said.

"I don't know what you mean."

"The charm, that pagan Indian stone you're wearing around your neck." He reached up and grasped Chia's charm stone and tried to yank it over her head, but it caught under her chin and she cried out in pain.

"You're hurting me," she told him. "Wait, I'll take it off." She lifted the cord over her head and placed the red stone on the ground nearby.

"I don't want you to wear it again, ever," Esteban said.

Alitha bit her lip to stifle an angry reply. Didn't he wear a cross of gold around his own neck? What right had he to tell her what to wear? She would never, never give up the charm stone.

Still, she could keep Chia's gift without wearing it. Wearing the stone wasn't worth quarreling about. She forced herself to relax and felt Esteban's fingers caress her breast. He touched her sex with the other hand, moving until he was within her again. She heard his hard breathing and felt the quickening of his thrusts. When he lay still beneath her, she rolled off him and huddled under the blanket with her back to him. For the first time her desire had not risen to join his. She took the stone from the ground, her fingers caressing its smoothness until she fell asleep.

The next day they rode down out of harsh, rocky hills into Loreto, the port town on the Sea of Cortes, where Esteban expected to find a ship bound for San Blas on the Mexican mainland. In front of them the sea sparkled under a hot noonday sun; they rode through groves of date palms, passed a weathered church and approached the presidio.

A soldier waved them through the gates of the fort, while another hurried ahead of them to give
Coronel
Morales word of their arrival.

"I knew Manuel Morales years ago in Mexico City," Esteban told her, "when he was a lieutenant. Now he's a
coronel.
"

Three men in blue uniforms, with shakos on their heads and swords at their sides, came out of an adobe barracks to greet them.

"Don Esteban," the taller of the men called. Esteban swung from his stallion and ran forward to embrace the coronel, while a soldier helped Alitha to the ground, where she waited a few feet behind the men.

Esteban embraced the other two men as Coronel Morales bowed to Alitha, raising her hand to his lips. "Senora Mendoza," he said as, in Spanish, he bid her welcome to Loreto.

He thinks I'm Esteban's wife, Alitha told herself. "Esteban," she said, wanting him to correct the
coronel's
mistake, but Esteban, who was still talking to the other officers, shook his head impatiently and motioned her away.

Coronel
Morales took her arm and led her along the side of the adobe building to a garden of cacti and succulents. Smiling at her, he pointed to the garden while he told her, she supposed, the names of each of the various plants. How proud he was of his tiny garden.

"I don't know much Spanish," she said in English. "And I—I'm not the wife of Don Esteban."

The
coronel
stared at her blankly. He looked past her, and in another moment she heard footsteps and Don Esteban was at her side, nodding in her direction while he talked to
Coronel
Morales. Explaining his presence here in Loreto, she guessed. Explaining that she was not his wife.

The
coronel
nodded as Esteban talked and tried to smile at her. "Senorita," she heard him say. Alitha looked away, her cheeks flaming, wanting to flee but knowing she had nowhere to go. At last Esteban took her by the arm and led her into a building next to the barracks and along a corridor to a small room containing a table, a chair and a bed covered with netting.

"Stay here." Esteban went out, closing the door firmly behind him.

She sat in the chair and stared around her at the rough gray adobe walls. A spider, black streaked with yellow, crawled slowly up one of the walls, stopped, then went on until it reached a web stretched between wall and ceiling.

What am I doing here, Alitha asked herself. She stood and went to the window with its view of the rock hills behind Loreto. From another part of the fort she heard the tattoo of a drum followed by a shouted command in Spanish. She lowered her head into her hands and cried. She was still crying when the door opened behind her. "You have brought great embarrassment to
Coronel
Morales," Esteban said.

"Damn
Coronel
Morales," Alitha sobbed. "What about my embarrassment? Don't you care about that? What did you tell him I was, Esteban? Your woman? Your mistress? Your—your whore?"

Esteban came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. "Ah, my Alitha," he said. "Forgive me, the fault was completely mine. It was my duty to explain to
Coronel
Morales when we first arrived and I neglected to do so. Humbly, I beg your forgiveness. Do not weep--you must know I suffer a thousand deaths whenever I see you in distress."

She wiped her eyes and leaned back against him, feeling his hands close tighter about her waist and his teeth nip her earlobe. He blew gently into her ear. His lips moved along her chin, and when they reached her mouth, she turned in his embrace, putting her arms about his neck and clinging to him as she kissed him.

"You mean so much to me," she said. "Esteban, you're all I have in the world."