LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) (8 page)

Cristobal flipped the coins on the table and led Jeanette out of the coffeehouse. No doubt a lot of tongues would waggle the next day about her outing with Cristobal. Which was just what she hoped for. A frivolous, flirtatious young woman would scarcely be suspected of running cotton.

They stopped by Portilla Pena
’s Book Shop to pick up a volume of Poe’s poetry for Aunt Hermione. But when they were ready to leave, she impulsively said, “Let’s ride out to Boca Chica. They say oysters can be had by wading knee deep in the ocean and picking them up.”

“
What?” he quipped. “You’d bare your feet like a child?”

The idea sounded wonderful. “
No. But you could.”

“
But, Jen,” he drawled, “why go to the effort of searching for the cursed clams—”

“
Oysters.”

“—
when you can purchase them at Market Hall for little or nothing?”

She flashed him a withering look and mounted her bay without waiting for his assistance. She rode sidesaddle this time, properly dressed in her sable-brown riding habit
— veil, gloves, and all. Cristobal was no less costumed in a camel-colored riding jacket with britches of Bedford cord and Napoleon boots.

The two of them cantered out of the city along the River Road. It was a mistake. As they came to the outskirts, soldiers could be seen bathing in the river. Every so often, caught in the unsuspected underc
urrents, someone drowned. She hurried her bay on past the patches of brush and palmetto and did not slow the mount down until the Palo Alto Prairie, a vast, level grass-covered plain, came into view. Here and there they passed small
ranchos
with fences made of brush, for there was no timber.

The muted slap of water against sand and salted breeze warned of the ocean
’s proximity. Then the wide sweep of the ocean suddenly lay before the two riders. Cristobal helped Jeanette dismount. “Let’s walk,” he said.

She
fell into step beside him. They strolled in comfortable silence, the only sound the swashing of the surf and the crunching of their boots on the hard-packed sand. She wondered what went on behind Cristobal’s mild eyes. What did a vacuous person such as he think about? Armand would have told—

As if picking up on her thoughts, Cristobal said, “
You’ve never talked about Armand, Jen. Are you over his death?”

How callous. “
No.” The sun was hot, and she longed to remove her jacket and hat, her gloves and shoes. To let the salty wind tangle her hair and to dig her toes in the warm sand. But etiquette forbade it.

Cristobal bent and picked up a smoothly worn seashell. “
You don’t like to think about it, then?”

“
There is nothing to think about.” Except her bitter sense of wrong. How did one tell a person that he was occupying space, breathing air better meant for someone else?

“
Will you remove that deuced top hat, Jen? The veil keeps flapping in my face like a swarm of angry mosquitoes.”

She laughed then and gladly acc
ommodated his request. At least Cristobal never conformed to convention.

The sand was washed smooth by the tide, which occasionally cast upon the beach pieces of boxes, barrels, and bones of ships. Near the white rim of the surf a Portuguese man-of-war lay
like a shriveled, phosphorescent bladder, and Jeanette knelt to marvel over it. Which was the second mistake of the day. For when she removed her sand-coated gloves, Cristobal said, “Your wedding ring, Jen . . . it’s the first time I’ve noticed you without it.”

She looked up guiltily to meet his inquisitive gaze. “
I— I misplaced it.”

He eyed her narrowly. “
A wedding ring is hard to misplace. Columbia isn’t hard up for money, is it, Jen?”

“
No. I’m not having to pawn my jewelry like some of the South’s women.”

If only the ring were pawned. Then she could find a way to retrieve it. But it was stolen. The Frenchman had stolen not only her wedding ring but the innocence that had belonged to Armand. And she grieved more for the latter than the former.

She rose to her feet and gave Cristobal a sadly whimsical little smile. “You were right. Hunting for oysters wasn’t that good an idea.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

J
eanette rubbed the bay’s foam-flecked barrel and tossed the blanket over the stall’s wall. The musty scent of hay and manure filled her nostrils as she led the horse out to walk around and cool off. The night was still star-studded; dawn was some hours away. And she was still exhilarated with the feeling of having accomplished something really worthwhile—all on her own.

She had made that first trip running cotton. True, it was Columbia
’s cotton, the last of it. And she had been gone only overnight—long enough to haul the cotton downstream, ferry it across to the Mexican side, and from there transport it to the Bagdad warehouse the Frenchman had specified was to be used in his absence.

Trinidad had grumbled about her making the run with only his son Felix and a few other
campesinos
to accompany her. But she had to feel she was doing something for the Confederate Cause. And she told herself she would feel even better when she had munitions and medical supplies to deliver to the Confederacy purchasing agents in Alleyton.

How she would later arrange the two-week round trip by wagon to Alleyton without her aunt gue
ssing what she was about was something that plagued her. As it was, until the Frenchman’s sloop returned to take on another cotton shipment, she would have to store the cotton she brought back from Alleyton in Columbia’s old Santa Maria Chapel. It was nothing like the Convent of the Immaculate Conception with its three stories and cloistered archways and lichen-covered surrounding wall. But the Santa Maria Chapel, founded by the Oblate Fathers, had a charm of its own.

The abandoned a
dobe building with its ochre-brown walls fronted a bluff overlooking the sluggish El Rio Grande del Norte and the old Military Road. The chapel was perfect for hiding the cotton until it could be ferried over to the Mexican side of the river. But suppose the Frenchman did not return for another cotton shipment? Suppose he kept the proceeds from its sale?

She knew that a steamer with an average capacity of 800 bales earned as much as $420,000 on a round trip. A shipowner could shrug off the loss of a vessel
after two safe round trips through the blockade of gunboats that cruised restlessly in search of prey. It was something she had fretted about over the past week, for the Frenchman’s sloop should have put into Bagdad by now. Of course, there was bad weather to consider, the lack of coal at a harbor, or the moon—for no steamer wanted to make the run in bright moonlight through the cordon of Federal revenue cutters that prowled the seas.

After Jeanette led the bay to the water trough and penned him up, she mad
e her way to the cluster of
jacales
. An oil lamp burned in Tia Juana and Trinidad’s. She knocked on the rickety corncrib door and at Trinidad’s “
Pasale
, ” entered. The old man sat alone on the cornhusk mattress. Apparently Tia Juana had already gone up to the house to start the kitchen fires.

A rank cigarro perched on Trinidad
’s seamed lips as his pocketknife whittled away at a child’s whistle. “
Como se va
?” he asked, squinting up at her through the haze of smoke.

“
Excelente
.” She took the dusty hat from her head and began to unplait the heavy braid that hung down the center of her back. “I passed two other wagon trains of cotton on the Mexican side of the river. It seems all of a sudden everyone is anxious to cash in on the white gold. Do you know, Trinidad, they’re saying now you can almost follow a trial of lint all the way from Alleyton?”

Her hand paused at its task of unraveling the braid. She tilted her head to one side. “
You’re quiet. Has something happened?” She came alert. “Did Aunt—”

The old man sho
ok his head. “No.” His hands stopped their whittling, and he fixed a rheumy eye on her. “I saw the
aguatero
yesterday. He had a message. The Frenchman’s sloop ees een. Your supplies—they are ready. Alejandro says you are to come by for the invoice.”

Her ni
mble fingers returned to unplaiting her hair. She bit her lower lip. Wasn’t this what she was working for, ammunition and firearms for freighting to the Confederacy’s battle zones? And, of course, she could keep Columbia operating. Was it really such a high price to pay?

“
You do not want to see the Frenchman, eh? That one, he gives you trouble, sobrina?"

She looked sharply at Trinidad. She could not afford for his avuncular protectiveness to interfere with her mission. She smiled wanly. “
Sometimes I wish he would. I told you I am a romantic at heart. But the Frenchman—he has only a profit in mind. He thinks of me as nothing more than a dirty urchin like our
aguatero
, Alejandro.”

“
I do not like eet that you go alone to him. What if he should discover you are not a boy?”

She managed to laugh lightly. “
You saw Rubia, Trinidad. Dressed as I am, I would not hold the attraction for him she does.”

“
Then you have not seen yourself,
sobrina
."

She slept late that morning, until past noon, then went down to the parlor t
o tell her aunt that her sick headache seemed to be passing.

“
Those headaches are bothering you more and more often, dear,” Aunt Hermione said. Her knitting needles never stopped clicking as she continued: “It’s a wonder mine aren’t any worse with the way things are—the French armies swarming against the Juaristas on the other side of the Rio Grande, that Mexican bandit Carbajal ravaging the Valley, and Union gunboats patrolling the Rio Grande’s mouth.”

“
War!” Washington squawked. “Help! Run!”

Jeanette igno
red the macaw. Over the cup of Mexican chocolate Tia Juana had brought her, she said, “You sound as if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Rebel, Aunt Hermione.”

Aunt Hermione
’s lashless eyes blinked wide. “For land’s sake, no. But soldiers are soldiers, dear, whether they’re French, Confederate, or Federal. And it’s not safe for a woman in times like this. We should thank our lucky stars we’re so far from the battlefront.”

Jeanette swallowed the words on the tip of her tongue along with the hot chocolate. No need to
alarm her aunt by telling her that with the increase in contraband flowing out of Bagdad Federal troops might at any moment decide to close off the Mexican trade by invading Brownsville. Fort Brown’s four hundred soldiers would be defenseless against any concerted Federal effort.

Fortunately the Union Admiral Farragut felt that such an invasion was not worth the heavy losses of soldiers he would suffer due to yellow fever. Every summer the peal of the funeral toll signaled yellow fever
’s presence.

When her
aunt informed her she would be attending a quilting bee that afternoon, a sigh of relief flooded over Jeanette. There would be no need to fabricate a lie for her absence. Surely she could make the . . . payment . . . on the war stores within an hour. She simply had to abstain from drinking anything potent. Besides, meeting with the Frenchman during the day appealed to her for other reasons. There was something about doing what she would have to do in the dark, at night; something that seemed to compound her guilt, though she could not put her finger on it. Perhaps meeting the Frenchman in the daylight hours seemed more a business arrangement and less like a—a clandestine affair.

And, of course, it was less dangerous to traverse Bagdad
’s streets in the daylight, even though she did not plan to bring Trinidad with her. He must never suspect the price she was paying. Her shame was great enough without guilt she would feel over involving the loyal overseer in a defense of her virtue.

She wore the boy
’s disguise again, hoping that her miserable appearance might dampen the Frenchman’s ardent appetite. The foul-smelling, dirt-stained garments certainly put off the people with whom she shared the Matamoros-Bagdad stage. It was the first time in six weeks she had returned to Bagdad, and she was amazed at the forest of masts in the waters. Where before she had counted maybe a dozen ships, there now had to be sixty or seventy vessels, from schooners and sloops weighing twenty tons to brigs weighing two hundred. They were from every nation, eager to capitalize on the cotton trade which was so vast that control of even a part of it could mean millions.

The narrow, winding streets swarmed with Confederate deserters and Union sympathizers; with German, Danish, Dutch, Spanish,
and French seamen; and with peddlers, gamblers, swindlers, and smugglers. She almost despaired of ever locating Alejandro among that backwash of the world. She swaggered up and down the length of the harbor, afraid of being approached by some drunken jack-tar. The September afternoon was hot and muggy with not a breath of wind to evaporate the perspiration that beaded around her hatband and beneath the heavy buckskin shirt. Alas, she could not discard either the hat or the shirt, as some of the sailors coiling ropes or mending nets had done.

It was Alejandro who found her. “
I have been waiting for you,” he told her in Spanish without removing the cigarette butt from between his lips.

So, the French blockade runner was not about to let her take the war store
s and leave; not without his commission. She shrugged off her misplaced optimism and followed Alejandro to the lighter used for ferrying freight from the shore to the ships at anchor. This time he did not blindfold her. She would finally see the scurvy scoundrel.

She and Alejandro rode the long steady roll of white-capped waves, neither of them speaking. Without the blindfold, she found the sloshing of the small vessel on the immense body of blue-green water much more frightening. No doubt her complexion wa
s the same shade of green.

Mai de mer
. Seasickness. She knew her father had suffered great disappointment that she had been a girl, the only child. There were no sons to follow him to the sea. Perhaps that was why she always tried to do whatever sons did. Climb trees, read, ride bareback. And yet her efforts had gained her nothing. Only her father’s disgust that she could not fit into the disciplined life he knew as a sea captain. But at that moment she wasn’t just seasick. She was scared witless.

In the occasional glance Alejandro shot in her direction she detected contempt for the puny boy she presented.
Yet she suspected he also resented that another “boy” could so easily obtain the time and attention of the privateer whom Alejandro obviously held in such high esteem. Oh, if she could change places with Alejandro. If she were only a boy; no, a man who could move so easily within his world, unhampered by the restrictions of society.

She repressed the urge to reach out and run her fingers through the urchin
’s windblown hair. Instead, she steeled herself for the approaching meeting with the Frenchman. She sorely missed Trinidad’s comforting presence. Alejandro pulled the lighter alongside a long, low, lead-colored steamer. The extreme rake of her masts and three funnels gave her a fast look. With crisp and graceful lines, she was obviously built for speed. Her short mast flew the French flag and bore the name
Revenge
.

With a bravado she did not feel Jeanette climbed the swaying rope ladder on the steamer
’s starboard side and swung up over the railing onto the white deck. Scored by brass tracks for gun carriages and dotted with piles of solid shot standing handily in racks near each piece, it glittered in the hot sun.

Four or five seamen were scrubbing the planks with vinegar and holystone and hosing down the decks. One of them, a weather-beaten sailor, bare-che
sted and in white trousers rolled to his calves, ambled toward her on bandy sea legs. Before she could ask directions to the captain’s cabin, he produced a red handkerchief from his hip pocket and proceeded to blindfold her. “Sorry, son—captain’s orders,” he explained.

If that was not indignity enough, he caught both her wrists and bound them behind her with hemp. Once again she faced a world of darkness as the sailor propelled her forward, saying once. “
Watch your step.” For what, she did not know. Apparently she navigated the deck safely, for a few seconds later he halted her and she heard his rap against the solid door. And then that marvelous, deep voice: "
Entrez
.”

The door closed behind her. She knew she was alone with the Frenchman. His soft laughter i
nfuriated her, and through gritted teeth she said, “Are you so brave a privateer that before you face a female you need to have her trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey?”

She heard the creak of chair leather and then his soft tread coming toward her. Her
lungs ceased to function.

“
'Non,” he replied in that same laughing tone and added something—she wasn’t quite sure what—about a woman and a man. Most likely about a woman pretending to be a man. For the umpteenth time, she wished she remembered more of Armand’s language.

“
Where is my ring?”

The Frenchman spoke, softly. So close was he, his breath fanned her face.

Exasperated, she stomped her foot. “I can’t understand you. Where’s your friend, your translator?”