LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

T
he cawing of a blackbird announced that soon blood-red bars of sunlight would finger out from the Gulf’s eastern horizon. The denuded branches of a nearby salt-cedar mott, grotesquely bent by the prevailing winds, all pointed toward the west. Concealed within that mott, Felix, Xavier, and two other
campesinos
huddled about a hay-mounded, high-slatted wagon for protection against the chilly March dawn. They waited for their mistress’s signal. Every few minutes another type of signal came from the tall, brick tower shrouded in the Gulfs ghostly fog.

Jeanette
’s eyes strained through that thick fog. She timed the intervals between the lighthouse’s signals through the heavy gray curtain. Two and a half to three minutes or thereabouts. Enough time to overpower the pickets on the entrance side. Another three minutes to disassemble the lighthouse’s lens—if the keeper offered no resistance—and get away.

Colonel Ford, who only that week had retaken from the Federals the Ringgold Barracks farther up the Rio Grande, had thought the plan sugges
ted by her, or rather the boy she disguised herself, a good one. The same night she heard of the fort’s capture, she had ridden the four score miles out to Ringgold Barracks.

“
A darkened lighthouse,” she told Ford in simulated broken Spanish thirty-six hours later, “will make it easy-like for
los
blockade runners to put in
por la costa
.”

In the poor lantern light, Ford
’s sharp blue eyes, eyes of a born marksman, squinted at her. For one long uneasy moment she feared he had guessed her masquerade. But he shook his head and rubbed those eyes with a gunpowder-stained hand, saying, “I’ll approve your daring attempt with the stipulation that you hand the lens over to us for safekeeping.”

Getting that lens safely away from the lighthouse presented a much more diff
icult task than simply smashing it in its frame. But she would worry about that problem once she made it to the lantern room. The beam passed over her. She raised her hand, silently beckoning the campesinos to follow. Her worn boots sank into the sand, but the smashing of the breakers against the distant shore muffled the crunching noise. The picket, a shadowy blue figure, paced regularly before the lighthouse’s wooden door. “What—hey!” the man exclaimed when she jammed the revolver’s muzzle against his backbone.

“
Not another word!” she snarled. At once her
campesinos
surrounded her. With soundless efficiency they bound and gagged the picket, whose eyes bulged with fright at the specters who had appeared out of the soupy fog.

She left two on guard and took t
wo with her. Quickly, quietly, they climbed the stairs that wound through a series of rooms to the lantern room at the top. The grating of the lens swiveling above them in its frame covered their shuffling footsteps. They paused at the open door of the glass-sheltered room. In the room’s center on a railed gallery around the lanterns, a crusty-looking sailor half knelt, puffing at a corncob pipe. Turned three-quarters away, he rotated the crank that set the revolution of the lens in motion. Perhaps his peripheral vision alerted him to the intruders, for he wheeled to his feet. The pipe dropped from his weather-seamed lips. His hand grabbed for a flat-edged bar to his right, and at once Xavier and Felix hurtled toward him.

They wrestled the keeper to the floo
r and knotted the hemp rope about his hands, while he abused them with a variety of colorful oaths. “You lubberly sons of a sea cook!” he managed to hurl at them before they at last stuffed the handkerchief in his open mouth.

Jeanette spun away and put her
effort to the lens. It was barrel-shaped, some four feet high and three feet in diameter. How to remove it from its frame without shattering it? And quickly! She studied the old wooden screws and determined that once they were loosened it was simply a matter of raising the thick, multi-prismed lens that encircled the lanterns.

“
Señora
,” Felix said and handed her the flattened edge of the bar with which the keeper had attacked them.

Swiftly she loosened the screws. It took Felix and X
avier to help her raise the immensely heavy lens drum. The keeper twisted and rolled on the floor while the three carefully edged their way down what seemed to her a mile of steps. The lens’s metal-rimmed base cut into her fingers, and her spine ached from descending the stairs at a stooped angle.

Once they reached the bottom, the other two
campesinos
stepped out of the dawn’s semi-light and relieved her of the burden. She massaged her numbed fingers, took a last look at the trussed-up picket, and followed her men into the salt-cedar thicket. They buried the lens in the wagon’s depth of hay, both to cushion it against the jarring from potted roads and to conceal it against the prying eyes of possible Federal troops.

The precaution turned out to be a necessar
y one, for as she drove the wagon toward the outskirts of Brownsville a detachment of cavalry could be seen against the horizon. She rapped an order to her
campesinos
, and they immediately pitched face forward in the hay.

Within minutes the detachment surr
ounded the wagon. Each of the soldiers, who all sported flowing beards, trained their bayonets on the five Mexicans. Fear prickled her neck, and she experienced an immediate need to relieve her bladder. The urge was followed by a rolling feeling in her stomach.

“
Que pasa
?" she asked the lieutenant who rode forward.

“
Speak English, boy,” he commanded. He twisted in the saddle and ordered the eight waiting soldiers, “Search the wagon for firearms.”

She watched in horror as the soldiers moved their horses forw
ard and their bayonets came up to prod the hay. “My brothers,” she jerked out, “they are seeck. I take them to the doctor. Yellow jack.”

She vividly remembered her mother
’s last day—the black vomit, it was a sure sign of imminent death from yellow fever. The churning in her abdomen—she felt like throwing up again. She clung to the side of the wagon, waiting for the stomach spasm to pass.

The bayonets halted. The soldiers looked from one to the other in apprehension. The lieutenant reined his mount back shar
ply. He jerked his chin over his shoulder. “Get a move on it, greaser!”

When the wagon was safely away from the patrol, she laughed weakly, releasing the tension that had steadily built since she set out for the Point Isabel lighthouse. Wait till General M
organ found his next note!

Word of the daring escapade reached Brownsville citizens in the
Weekly Ranchero
two days later.

The Gulf Coast shores will be dark this year,

now that the lighthouse lens has disappeared
.

Cristobal paused in reading aloud the couplet and looked over the top of the newspaper. His honey-brown eyes fixed on Jeanette across the breakfast table. “It’s signed, of course, Lavender Blue.”

“
Lavender Blue!” squawked Washington from his cage and jabbed his hooked beak at Jeanette. “Help! Rape! Lavender Blue!”

She wrinkled her nose in disgust at the macaw. Now wherever did the cursed bird learn the words Lavender Blue? Shrugging her shoulders, she said firmly, “
I’m tired of listening to anything to do with the war, Cristobal.” She wished she could tire of him. Beneath the concealing shadow of lashes her eyes flicked to her husband. Dressed in
his robe de chambre
of black-and-silver-printed cashmere, he disregarded her statement and continued to read aloud the news. His swarthy face was arresting with its arrogant nose, high slashing cheekbones, and thickly lashed eyes. Yet her contempt for what he was bordered on sheer revulsion; then, why did she find herself seeking her husband in the midst of a crowded room?

And she knew the an
swer. Because everyone else bored her. Everyone but Kitt. Oh, hell and damnation! Neither man was worth Armand’s little finger. Yet, damn their black souls, each appealed to her in a different way. Kitt, through her body; Cristobal, through her intellect. Disgusted with her inconsistencies, she dug her spoon into her grapefruit. The grapefruit’s bitter taste prompted her as usual to reach for another pinch of sugar.

“‘
. . . and with the discovery of the ribbon in the lantern room, it is believed that Lavender Blue could possibly have a female accomplice, though neither the picket nor the keeper sighted a woman.’ ”

Shock sucked in Jeanette
’s breath, and the wedge of grapefruit lodged in her throat. “A ribbon?” she choked. She had been unable to find a leather thong to bind her braid and had hastily substituted the blue velvet ribbon. Later, when she helped unload and hide the lens at the chapel, she realized she had lost the ribbon. How careless of her!

“
A blue velvet ribbon, General Morgan’s aide-de-camp states,” Cristobal added. Over the shallow Dresden bowl of swollen hot-pink roses that Tia Juana had picked that morning his sleepy eyes watched her. “Perhaps Lavender Blue’s accomplice is Annabel. She did sing a song with those words that evening, Jen.”

“
Oh, surely not!” As little as she liked Annabel, she did not wish to see her end up being questioned in “Monster” Morgan’s office. Jeanette shuddered at the thought. The general would not be a pleasant man to deal with.

“
Perhaps Lavender Blue is even a woman.”

Too swiftly she inhaled and the sweet, heavy scent of the roses filled her nostrils. She glanced up sharply, but Cristobal was already lost behind the pages of the newspaper. “
What makes you say that?”

“
What, hmm?” He lowered the newspaper to sip at the Mexican chocolate.

“
What makes you think Lavender Blue could possibly be a woman?”

“
Merely an idle comment, Jen.”

Her husband
’s blatantly sensual gaze dropped to the low V-neck of her pale-ivory, satin
deshabille
and flagrantly lingered there despite the way her hand moved to nervously finger the lacy border. She felt the hot flush of color creep up over her collarbones toward her neck and face. The kiss Cristobal had last bestowed upon her leapt unbidden to her mind. She had actually enjoyed it, though to this moment she had been unable to acknowledge the fact. What kind of woman was she that she could take pleasure in a kiss from a man she so utterly loathed?

What kind of woman was she that she could take pleasure in the act of copulation with an unknow
n man? But that was not completely accurate. She knew every sheath of smooth muscle and every area of roughly textured skin of that unknown man. She knew his scent, masculine, musky with salt spray and sweat, not tainted with the cologne Cristobal wore. She knew his rich baritone voice, with none of Cristobal’s affectations.

Still, shyly, in an almost virginal manner, her gaze went to her husband
’s bronzed hands. What would it be like for those supple fingers to trace the patterns of love on her naked body?

She must be utterly mad!

Above the roses her gaze locked with Cristobal’s. Did he see the sudden yearning that possessed her? Oh, how she hated this new side of her! She had never been like this before she took up the damnable farce. But she had been like those roses—a bud, swollen with life contained too long. The Frenchman had picked the bud, had kissed it with his lovemaking so that it bloomed into a full-blown rose. She had opened herself to his sunlight—to the sunlight of everything. Of life. Would she truly want to fold up her petals with the night and deny life’s excitement that was as heady as the roses’ heavily sensuous odor?

“
Jen . . .” Cristobal began.

She missed the pleading in those dark eyes but heard the odd tone in his voice. There was somet
hing about that voice. For one crazy moment she could have sworn it sounded like the Frenchman’s. How absurd! She really must be losing her mind!

She put the back of her hand across her eyes. “
I—the early morning heat. I think I’ll go back to bed for a while, Cristobal.” In truth she really did not feel that well; as Tia Juana lectured, she was running herself ragged.

With brooding eyes Cristobal watched his wife leave the breakfast room. Jen was treading on dangerous ground. The fatigue of carrying on her
own masquerade was making her careless. He let the newspaper drop on the table. Listlessly he rose and, stretching his massive frame, turned to the bay window where the macaw’s cage was suspended. ‘‘Lavender Blue . . . you must be careful,” he mused aloud.

“
Lavender Blue!” Washington echoed. “Lavender Blue!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

P
laster showered the floor. A second fusillade of bullets zinged erratically about La Fonda del Olvido’s stucco walls. Rubia flung herself back from the window where she had been watching the fighting since dawn—this time too late. Dazed, she looked down at the crimson streak where the stray bullet had burrowed along her arm.

A French bullet most likely, she thought, as she rummaged in the chest of drawers for something to
staunch the copious bleeding. Under the Mexican Imperialist general, Tomas Mejia, the French had taken Monterrey and were besieging Bagdad. The fighting was nothing new to the Mexican towns. They had known revolutions and guerrilla attacks throughout their unstable histories. Only the men fighting that morning were different. Not just Mexicans this time. On the streets below the motley clothing identified the other nations—Polish, Austrian, and Hungarian mercenaries. But the French Foreign Legion troops predominated. Those
Régiments Étrangers
stood out in their brilliant blue and red uniforms and the kepi hats with the white suncloths that shaded their necks.

Rubia located a lace-edged handkerchief, one her Castilian grandmother had crocheted. She sat down
on the edge of the bed and tried unsuccessfully to wrap it about her arm. Blood was everywhere now—splattered on the royal-blue velvet draperies, dribbled across the muslin sheets, smeared across one breast and her stomach. With a detached interest born of the shock from the wound her hand touched her stomach, still flat but penciled with stretch marks. The marks left from pregnancy. But would anything erase the marks left on her soul and imprinted on her mind? The image of her infant daughter, scarcely eighteen months, raped in the same room even as she was raped, flashed before her eyes.

She shuddered and was surprised to find tears spilling off her cheeks. Never had she cried. Not then, or later when her blue-blooded husband shunned her as dirt beneath hi
s feet. Oh, how wrong her grandmother had been to insist that she marry nobility. And Don Bartolome Hinojosa had been the only gentleman there in the wilderness of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas whose family was of noble Spanish birth, untainted by Indian blood. Yes, her husband was noble, noble enough to keep her as his wife, despite her soiled body.

Another battery of gunfire ripped through the room, yanking her back from her reverie. Somewhere a cannon boomed, and the walls and floor vibrated. More plas
ter flakes drifted down around her, incongruously like the peaceful snow that fell on Spain’s mountains. Behind her the door burst open, as if blown by the powerful blast of a hurricane. The French? The Juaristas? The fear arrowed through Rubia’s mind in the second that she whirled, pulling the sheets up about her nudity.