LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) (17 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

J
eanette sidestepped the cotton bales cluttering the narrow aisle. What little warm air filtered into the chapel was musty. She finished counting the bales. Enough for five wagon loads. She shouldered her way back outside and blinked against the bright February sunlight. “Can you have five
campesinos
ready to leave tonight?” she asked Trinidad.

The old Mexican shrugged deeper into his poncho. Though the day was not that cold, a good thirty degrees above freezing, his old arthri
tic bones warned that those blue northerners would soon be riding in. “You cannot wait a few days more,
sobrina
?”

She shook her head and pulled her cape closer about her. “
Even if the chapel weren’t bulging its sides with cotton, we still need to make the run. The soldiers in the field need supplies.”

And not just horse blankets and saddles and rifles. If the reports in the
New Orleans Times
were accurate and not just Federal propaganda, Confederate soldiers were marching barefoot and coatless through winter blizzards. But amputations from frostbite and deaths from pneumonia were nothing in comparison to the savage fighting in the recent battle of Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. The Times reported that in that Federal victory a total of eight thousand men on both sides were killed or wounded. Eight thousand men! Their lives wasted.

“
You weel go back up the river to Rio Grande City thees time?”

“
Yes,” she said firmly, knowing that the old man did not approve the long, roundabout journey through bandit-infested territory. But neither did he approve of running the cotton across the border to Matamoros now that General Morgan’s soldiers patrolled the Texas side of the Rio Grande’s banks from its mouth up past Brownsville. Trinidad had even spotted Yankee troops as far west as Columbia’s easternmost boundary. Any day now they could wander upon the chapel. She simply had no choice but to make the run.

Trinidad reached a gnarled hand up to Jeanette
’s sun-bonnet and removed a cotton tuft that clung to the grosgrain band. “
Ay de mi
— you do not want Cristobal to see thees.”

“
I doubt if he would notice,” she said waspishly. Her husband was still in town, his longest absence yet. The nights he spent at Columbia he seemed more intent on the working on his articles in his bedroom than on the titillating conversations she was accustomed to enjoying with him.

Three weeks had passed since that night he had kissed her, and the memory of that kiss still lingered to pique her feminine vanity. Did her independent nature lessen her fem
inine appeal? And there was something else about that disturbing kiss that she could not put her finger on.

The puzzle still nagged her like a toothache when she slipped out of the house just after midnight dressed in her boy
’s disguise. She always drove the lead wagon, if for no other reason than to keep out of the dust. The wagons bumped over rough cactus-peppered hills and through tangled chaparral on dry arroyos. The first night out the northerner that Trinidad’s bones had expected hit, and Jeanette hunched around the warmth of the campfire with the rest of the
campesinos
, drinking steaming coffee out of tin cans.

These were the times when she was the happiest. The freedom in the open spaces
—the unlimited reach of the star-spangled sky over her bedroll—the cry of a lobo wolf or shriek of screech owl to break the frosty night’s silence. Other feelings, too, completed her happiness—the camaraderie of the men, the excitement of challenging a dangerous enemy, the fulfillment of doing something worthwhile.

Mor
e than once she chuckled to herself at her latest escapade. Another note for General Morgan from Lavender Blue. The day after she pulled out with the wagon train Trinidad was to leave the note in the offering box of the convent’s chapel in Brownsville:

Five hundred bales of cotton escaped your hands;

bound for blockade runners across the Rio Grande
.

And below it a drawing of the lavender-blue flower. That should cause the general to froth at the mouth for a couple of days.

Oh, to see Morgan recalled, di
sgraced, and discredited, as Grant had recalled Burnside!

Rather than pay duty on the Rio Grande City ferry, she worked alongside Xavier and Andres to rope the cotton bales across the muddy river. From the other side Lorenzo, Felix, and the one-armed Pedro
worked the ropes. Afterward the
campesinos
floated the wagons over. That night she lay a long time in the semi-trance of her physical exhaustion. Despite the fringed leather gloves, her hands were raw from tugging at the rope, and the muscles of her back and forearms ached. At last the croaking bullfrogs in the cozy river mudbank lulled her to sleep. She slept deeply, secure in the knowledge that one of the faithful
campesinos
always stood guard against possible bandit attack.

Monotonous days followed; days of leading the wagon train of cotton up one side of the river and back down the other, days of going long distances without water because sometimes it was impossible to get down to the river.

The laborious journey at least served to dissipate her preoccupation with her husband. Yet the nearer the wagons rumbled to Matamoros and Bagdad, the greater grew her apprehension. Soon she would have to deal again with the Frenchman. But it would be the last time, she swore. Once she paid the Frenchman his degrading price for the war supplies consigned at the Matamoros warehouse, she meant to seek out another avenue for her cotton; one she had just learned of earlier that week at a military tea given by the lonely Federal officers at Fort Brown.

A great many of Brownsville
’s citizens had shunned the invitation. But others came because the large Federal forces stationed there expended a considerable amount of money every payday on Brownsville merchandise (especially the saloons’ mind-bending beverages). Naturally the shop- and saloonkeepers wished to continue to receive the military’s patronage. Cristobal had escorted Jeanette and was his usual droll self. Between her charm, his repartee, and a spiked punch, they managed to entrance the guests and soldiers, who were far from home and bored with the rigors of garrison duty. In fact, at the end of a song performed by the military’s glee club she sweetly persuaded the aide-de-camp to talk more freely of his duties. He was an intense man with gray eyes that never left her face, which made her uncomfortably aware of the direction of his thoughts.

“
Despite our occupation of the lower course of the Rio Grande,” the soldier had said, “the only effect has been to change the point of entry to upper Rio Grande crossings; enough supplies are still getting through to supply the whole Rebel army.”

That she knew, but it was the rest that he divulged which gave her an idea. “
From the contraband caravans our spies have spotted coming and going out of Monterrey, it appears that Mexican city may be the new distribution point for Confederate war supplies.” He took another swig from the punch cup before adding, “And the hell of it is, Jeanette—pardon me—Mrs. Cavazos, is that our hands are tied by the Monroe Doctrine.”

“
Politics!” Jeanette simpered. “You’ll just have to explain it all to me, suh.”

The aide-de-camp was quite pleased to demonstrate his knowledge and explained, “
The Federal Government is pledged to support Juarez against French intervention into our Western Hemisphere. So—you can understand, Jeanette—these supplies of cotton and salt and other Southern goods, they could be meant for Juarez.”

Yes, she could understand the Federal Army
’s predicament very well. And she could see that her next trip would be to Monterrey!

But first there was the Frenchman to deal with.

Alejandro watched Jeanette with a cockeyed grin. Nevertheless, she detected in his gaze a gleam of admiration for the young woman he had contemptuously thought of as a frail boy with all the courage of a startled jackrabbit. Her last encounter with him was the ignominious return to shore after her near-fatal injury to his captain. By then everyone on board the
Revenge
knew she was a female; fortunately, though, her identity remained a secret.

Faci
ng into the winter wind that blew off the Gulf, facing the rapidly approaching great hull of the
Revenge
, she wondered where the courage was that had empowered her to make the dangerous runs through countryside rife with marauding bandits who would as soon kill as talk. She needed that courage now. No sweat broke out on her brow. Her stomach did not quiver like a mass of marmalade. Yet she was so terrified of the confrontation that loomed before her like the gates of Hell that at any moment she expected to swoon. And she would never forgive herself for such a lapse.

Solis waited for her when she swung her body over the ship
’s bulwarks and dropped to the deck. If she expected any recrimination from the Frenchman’s right-hand man, she found none. Rather, she saw the light of compassion in the raisin-brown eyes. Surely the Frenchman planned no revenge so long a time after his shooting?

Then she understood Solis
’s look. Twenty feet away Rubia descended the set of shallow stairs from the quarterdeck. She was dressed in a pert mulberry-blue chip hat that matched her paletot, a knee-length cape of plush trimmed with gimp cord and Spanish lace. Her preoccupied gaze vanished as it crossed that of Jeanette. Jeanette, dressed in shabby dungarees and soil-blackened cowhide jacket with her disreputable felt hat flopping over her nose, wanted to sink through the deck. First Rubia, next her— the rutting Frenchman might as well be running a brothel!

The two women nodded civilly. “
Hello,
Señora
Cavazos,” Rubia said quietly.

“
Good afternoon, Rubia,” Jeanette said. She liked the young woman and tried to keep the anger, which was really for the Frenchman, out of her voice. She watched as Solis gently, almost tenderly, lifted Rubia over the railing. Envy for the woman who was fortunate to have finished her meeting with the
Revenge's
captain battered at Jeanette. She repressed the cowardly urge to dash for the bulwarks and hurl herself over the side.

Squaring her shoulders, she waited for Solis to return. Overhead the wind whistled in
the masts, and the seagulls cried stridently. Waves slapped at the brig’s broadsides. All around her was the smell of wet ropes, tar, and damp canvas. She noticed with something akin to hope that the crew, a motley collection of nationalities dressed warmly in duck trousers, heavy woolen jackets, and various colored stocking caps, were preparing to sail. Perhaps this . . . meeting would not take long after all!

Solis tied the bandanna over her eyes and the leather thongs round her wrists, this time leaving
her hands before her—perhaps the Frenchman realized the extreme discomfort she endured at having her hands tied behind her back and was being more lenient. Lenient, perhaps; careless, no. For her wrists were bound more tightly.

She was almost afraid to ho
pe that she would be spared the further indignity of once again bartering her body. Her heart thudded in tempo with Solis’s rap on the heavy door. The door’s hinges creaked. The cabin’s warm air, pungent with the smell of tobacco, wafted over her, seeping through the bandanna that partially covered her nostrils. But her sixth sense, sheer instinct, informed her that the Frenchman stood before her. She could sense his enormous height, his solid breadth merely by the flow of air about them. Yet she would have known his proximity had they been in the vacuum of Galileo’s galaxies.

Solis
’s hand at her elbow propelled her halting steps over the cabin’s threshold. The door slammed shut on any hope of retreat. A long moment passed. Then large hands slipped under her arms, down her rib cage, over her hips. Feeling, she realized, for concealed weapons. It was a terrible indignity; worse when the hands moved up to briskly pat the inside of her thighs. She steeled her mind to a blankness. But when one hand slid beneath the jacket to cup a breast, surprise, followed by outrage, brought her to her full height, some thirteen inches short of the man who dared to touch intimately a bound and helpless woman.

She told him as much. “
You jackanapes! You have not the courage to loose my hands! You know this time I would kill you, you—you scum of the earth!”

"
Non, si vous desirez les fusils
," replied the seductive baritone voice with a hint of amusement in it.

All she understood was the word for firearms. “
Speak English, you cowardly cur!”

Rich, low laughter. And the soft but firm squeezing of her breast. The thumb and forefinger rotated the rapidly peaking nipple. She was so furious at her helplessness she wanted to cry! Instead she blindly spit in the direction of the rogue
’s face. Instantly her breast was freed. But his other hand still gripped her waist. She went rigid, expecting at any second the jarring impact of a fist slamming against her jaw. Like a frightened parakeet, her heart swooped and spiraled against her rib cage.