LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

El Valle de los Gigantes
. The Valley of the Giants. The giants were the 7,800-foot-high
Cerro de la Mitra
and the 5,800-foot-high crests of the
Cerro de la Celia
, or Saddle Mountain, which totally surrounded the provincial city of Monterrey, Mexico.

When the first scattered
jacales
of Monterrey’s outskirts came into sight, wavering in the hot blast of the summer sun, Jeanette halted her wagon along a rocky arroyo that barely trickled with water. She relaxed her grip on the British Enfield for what seemed like the first time since she left Columbia. For more than five days she and her
campesinos
had traversed the 135 miles of savanna, wind-whipped desert, and fertile valley, constantly on guard against Mexican renegades, French troops, and Juarista bands.

Several times a day they passed other caravans laden
with contraband—long files of trotting, jingling pack mules, broken-down hay carts, and ox drivers who whipped their bony animals ahead of them. Because of the scarcity of water, Trinidad had exhorted her to look for water holes rimmed by animal tracks, but unpolluted by their corpses.

Sand gritted in her eyes and abraded her tongue. Despite her hat, the sun baked her skin. How would she explain her burned skin to Cristobal? That she and her latest lover had spent days frolicking in the sun? But then he nev
er bothered to ask about her absences, as she kept quiet about his.

Merely to share the same house with the cruel, worthless representative of the human race was often more than she could endure. If only for that reason she had sacrificed attending the sta
rvation party. One more week in the house with Cristobal and Rubia would have been too much. Instead she had elected finally to make the cotton run to Monterrey.

More than once she wondered if the journey to Monterrey was worth the agony. The excitement sh
e always experienced before departure paled beneath the hot sun, evaporated like the countryside’s dry water holes. But she had only to remember Armand—the Confederacy—Robert E. Lee—Morgan. Mere words, yet they carried emotional weight for her. She could—and would—do no less than the thousands of gallant men. When the war was over, perhaps she would return to the staid life of a woman.

The idea appalled her.

She flexed her stiff fingers, then took off her sweat-stained hat. Her braid tumbled free to bounce against the small of her back. She leaned against a cotton bale and fanned herself while she waited with the
campesinos
for Juan to return from his scouting of Monterrey. The Old World city’s cathedral spires glinted in the distance like beckoning fingers of gold. Why then did cold ripples of foreboding lap at her feet? Surely the danger of dealing with the mercantile houses of Monterrey could not be as bad as the horror of debasing her own body and mind that she had undergone in dealing with the Frenchman.

“
Señora
!” At Pedro’s call, her gaze swung in the direction he pointed. Wisps of dust smoked the air between them and the city. Not enough dust for a band of horses to kick up. And drifting too slowly even for one horse. A relieved sigh escaped her cracked lips. Most likely the burro Juan had taken. In the twenty-odd minutes more she waited for Juan she made up her mind that once the negotiations were finished she would rent a hotel room, take a long, leisurely bath, and consume a heaping plate of Monterrey’s spiciest enchiladas. And she would sleep off the replete evening while her
campesinos
made their rounds of the cantinas. Tomorrow would be soon enough to start back with the supply of firearms and medicines.

Juan
’s handlebar mustache drooped with a heavy coating of sweat and dust when he slid off the burro and crossed to her wagon. Respectfully he doffed the sombrero, though she doubted she resembled a woman in any way at that moment. “French Legionnaires—they corral at every street corner, senora.”

“
But what about the British firm—Knight & Knight?” she prompted, curbing her impatience.

“
The
Ingles
—they have no firearms, no one does. The firearms go out as quickly as they come in. But the
Ingles
, they have gunpowder. They will sell us the gunpowder for the cotton.”

She rifled through her memory and recalled that two powder mills operated out of San Antonio. Not that much out of the way from the Brownsville
—Alleyton run. “Let’s dump the bales on Knight & Knight.”

Jeanette led her caravan into Monterrey t
oward Plaza Zaragoza, the center of town. The facades of the centuries-old homes they passed faced shyly backward, toward their patios. She shifted uneasily on the wagon seat. Even the burros seemed restive and tossed their heads nervously as they plodded past the Baroque cathedral and down one of Monterrey’s narrow old streets bordered by the two-story colonial Spanish homes that blocked the sunlight. Once Jeanette had to rein the wagon flat against a time-darkened, gray stucco house in order to allow a diligence to edge past.

Just beyond the residential section mercantile warehouses crowded both sides of the wider cobblestone streets. She and Juan went inside the corrugated-roofed establishment of Knight & Knight, of Charleston and Liverpool. Heat suffused
the warehouse piled high with crates, boxes, and barrels labeled misleadingly with contents such as dry goods, combustibles, and lard, which she had learned was usually packed with Boston pistols.

She was grateful for the dim interior as she approached th
e desk stacked with ledgers and sheaths of letters. A balding man looked up over the wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his little nose. “Yes?” he asked in a clipped accent.

Resorting to broken Spanish, she quickly negotiated the deal. A Mexican cle
rk, small and as impeccably dressed as the Brit, hovered in the background, recording the transaction into Spanish for the government’s records. Jeanette should have been pleased that she had obtained the astronomical price of ninety-five cents per pound of cotton against the gunpowder, but something in the way the Mexican clerk’s nut-brown eyes studied her made her even more uneasy—uneasy enough to postpone that thought of a hot bath and dinner and a restful night at the Gran Ancira Hotel. She sensed she would sleep better that night on the desert with the howling of the
lobos
, the great Mexican gray wolves, for company than in one of Monterrey’s sheeted beds.

The sun was rocking over the western peaks when she snapped the whip over the burros
’ backs and headed the wagons out on the dusty road north to Matamoros and Brownsville. Even after dusk descended across the alkaline desert, she drove steadily onward. A silly feminine notion, she told herself, that uneasy feeling that had grown steadily worse in the Knight & Knight warehouse in Monterrey. The British speculator was faultless in his negotiations with her, regardless of whether he believed her to be a dirty Mexican boy representing a substantial American firm or a young
bandido
who stole the contraband. Yes, it was a silly feminine notion.

A sliver of a moon lit the camp that night. Jeanette ate little of the tinned jelly with biscuits and highly salted smoked bacon. Neither did her
campesinos
. They sat around the orange tongues of the campfire, talking desultorily. “Ahh, she was a flashing-eyed dark beauty,” Emilio said of the maiden he had glimpsed in a Monterrey doorway.

“
I tell you the Monterrey cantinas offer the highest monte stakes,” Xavier proclaimed knowledgeably, though the young Mexican had yet to enter one.

She sat off by herself, leaning against a wagon wheel, and half-listened to the yarns they spun. For once she did not want to join in their camaraderie. Instead she cradled the Enfield in her arms and peered into the darkness beyond the comfo
rtable perimeter of firelight. She still could not shake the feeling of foreboding. When it came time for the men to turn into their bedrolls, she stationed two more guards about the camp and elected to share the first watch herself.

But it had been a long
, arduous trek from Brownsville with no layover for rest. The physical and mental strain dropped each guard’s chin against his chest in slumber. Her own lids slid closed, and her hand dropped from the rifle stock. The Enfield’s barrel dangerously nosed the sand when the ping of the first shot creased the air.

She snapped to her feet. Her knees almost buckled from the numbness of sitting in one position so long. Too late she swung the rifle up to her shoulder, her gaze sweeping rapidly about her. Even as she
encountered the glittering eyes of a hundred or so shadowy forms encircling the camp, a hand jerked the Enfield from her hands. Arms encircled her waist. Then shouts of confusion, oaths, and commands broke out all around her. She screeched her ire and kicked and flailed her arms and legs at the two men who sought to constrain her.

“
Hijole una mujer!
” shouted one when her hat tumbled off and her braid swung loose—at the same instant another’s fist clipped her jaw. Blues and reds and greens splintered kaleidoscopically behind her eyes. The stabbing pain vanished with her consciousness.

Wild gusts of wind, carrying sharp grains of sand, pelted the men and animals that straggled across the desert. Tumbleweed bounced against the wagon wheels. Jeanette pulled the cork from her canteen. When she turned the canvas-covered container upside down, a few drops watered the rim. The Mexican, who had been put in charge of her wagon, sniggered. His yellow teeth gleaming against the bristly beard, he hauled in on the reins and offered her his canteen. She shook her head in repulsion.

“
You no wanna drink after stinking Mexican, eh?” he grinned. “But tonight—you lay beneath one.” He snorted again. “You lay beneath many. Well, you stink, too. So it will not be so bad, eh, woman?”

It would be unbearable. But she had borne one man
’s rape, though she doubted the Frenchman would call it that. Could she not bear several? She wondered. She had heard of women hemorrhaging after multiple rape. She shivered despite the full blaze of the sun that left her head pounding and a fever running through her body.

She avoided the leering man beside her and kept her gaze trained on the motley line of Mexican gunmen strung out ahead of her wagon. She knew she was safe, even through the nig
ht, until the caravan reached the
Sierra Madre
Mountains and the
Huasteca
Canyon of which the
pistolero
had spoken. Before then the band of Juaristas could not afford to halt for fear of running into other depredators who wanted gunpowder as badly as they—namely the insidious revolutionary bands or the French troops who scoured the countryside looking for Juarez’s government, which was in hiding somewhere in the desolation of northern Mexico. And soon she would know where.

She had been right about her foreb
oding. She knew now the Mexican clerk must have tipped off the Juarista band about her caravan of gunpowder leaving Monterrey. The Juarista who now drove her wagon told her as much. “He is our—
intelligencia, entiendesl
"

Yes, she understood. The man took
mordida
, a bribe, to notify the Juaristas whenever wagon loads of supplies that the Juaristas needed left Monterrey. The Juaristas had given her teamsters the choice of joining the band or crossing the barren desert on foot. The memory of sun-bleached bones along the desert route had quickly decided the teamsters. Her, they had given no choice. She was to provide their amusement.

The approach of nightfall did not halt the Juaristas. But the
Sierra Madres
loomed dangerously closer for Jeanette. Just in front of her a Juarista’s horse stumbled and would not rise. The Mexican driving her wagon swerved the large wooden wheels around the prone animal, and a few seconds later she heard the crack of a pistol shot. She shuddered and squinched her eyes, but behind her lids her imagination conjured up too vividly what must have happened. She feared she was going to be humiliatingly ill again.

Although the sun had long since dropped behind western peaks, heat still shimmered up off the desert. Overhead even the stars seem
ed to bum hot. Now she wished she had drunk from the Juarista’s canteen. The tip of her tongue darted out to moisten her cracked lips. “Water— please.” The words whispered from her parched throat.

“
Ah, maybe now you will be good to me, eh?” He threw an arm around her shoulder and his hand groped among the ties of her buckskin shirt, seeking entrance. His callused fingers found her breast.

What did it matter? Another man had touched her, and she had survived. What was one more
—or ten more—as long as her lungs continued to expand with the precious breath of life? Then she pitched forward.

Cursing, the Mexican maneuvered the wagon’s reins with one hand while he shifted her back against the seat. He had felt the heat rising off her breast. Sunstroke. Awkwardly he flipped the cork from his canteen and held its lip against her mouth. She really wasn’t that pretty. Burned skin, matted hair, blistered lips. Except for the eyes. Whenever the
puta
lowered herself to glance at him. Unusual color. She coughed, choking on the brackish water. He grinned. She would live. Long enough at least for him to empty himself into her later that night.

During the long night the caravan of wagons snaked upward through the canyons of the Sierra Madres fil
led with straggly pine trees. Every so often the Juarista peered through the dark at the woman who slumped against him. Her soft moans and shallow breathing informed him that she continued to live. But when they reached the Juarista camp high in the pine-shrouded mountains and he lifted her from the wagon, her skin scalded his hands. She muttered deliriously. English words he wasn’t sure he understood.

“
Kitt . . . the Frenchman . . . our baby . . .”