Bride of Fortune (28 page)

      
Caesar wished he had not come with Antonio, but his brother had been so convincing. Who on Gran Sangre would miss one steer when the
patrón
had thousands? The plaintive cries of his hungry children had added great persuasion to Antonio's argument.

      
Now who would feed their families when they were crippled or dead? “Mercy,
patrón
, I beg of you.” Antonio was crying as he fell to his knees in front of the big gray stallion. Caesar remained mute, studying the haughty
criollo
. It would have gone better if he had taken Sylviana and the children and gone into the hills with the guerrillas. At least that way he could have died fighting like a man. But he would not beg like Antonio.

      
Nicholas looked at the two men, the younger one groveling while his companion stood ramrod stiff, utterly silent. They were dressed in dusty white cotton pants and loose over-blouses, frayed and filthy with age. Even the baggy clothes could not disguise the stark thinness of the peons. Their faces were seamed with deep lines, etched not by the passage of years but rather by the harshness of eking out an existence tilling the soil in this unforgiving land.

      
With no horsemen to clear irrigation ditches, the peons in the small villages had to rely wholly on rain for their crops. And this was an arid land. There had been little rain during the growing season, less last year, according to his wife, who had been forced to become a proficient farmer. The two men were ravaged by hunger. In the past fifteen years as a soldier he had ridden through hundreds of villages like the one they no doubt came from. Whether it was the Crimea or North Africa, or Mexico, hunger always wore the same face.

      
Ignoring the hysterical man, Fortune turned to his older, stoic companion. “What have you to say for yourself?” he asked in a level voice.

      
Caesar gestured to the animal, lying with its throat cut in the narrow ravine where they had by luck cornered it. The blood on his machete was ample proof of their guilt. “We killed it, yes. Our children have eaten nothing but cornmeal and water mixed with ashes from the fireplace for weeks. The drought has withered this year's crops. We were desperate. And you had so many cattle. We had nothing.” His statement was eloquent in its simplicity.

      
“You're both young enough. Why haven't you gone to fight for Juarez?” Fortune asked and was rewarded by the startled look that quickly flashed in the older man's eyes.

      
“I thought of it, yes, but a dead soldier cannot feed his children. I have four. My brother Antonio has three. His wife is expecting again.”

      
“They breed like animals,” Gomez said with a sneer.

      
Antonio, who finally realized that his brother had elicited a calm response from the don, fell silent, then got up from his knees and stood beside Caesar. “We will take our punishment,” he said quietly.

      
“And we'll be happy to give it,” one of Gomez's companions said with an ugly laugh.

      
Nicholas looked from their smirking expectant faces, avid with the promise of violence, to the two haggard wretches standing before him.
This is how Juarez recruits. We do it for him.

      
When had he begun to think of himself as a part of this land, a
criollo
, a
hacendado
? The same time he had begun to think of Mercedes as his wife? With an oath of frustration, he said, “Take the damn cow back to your village—but if I ever see you on my land again, I'll personally stake you over a clump of tuna cactus and let you bleed to death while the buzzards pick out your entrails!”

      
Giving a curt sign of dismissal to his astonished men, he wheeled Peltre around and headed back to the road. As he happened to glance over toward Hilario, he saw the gleam of a secret smile in his eyes. Then it vanished, leaving Nicholas to wonder if he had merely imagined it.

* * * *

      
The gossip about the
patrón's
bizarre behavior filtered across the
hacienda
. Don Lucero, who had fought four years for the emperor, now fed republican soldiers and misdirected French patrols. He had even freed two peons whom he could have had summarily whipped to death if he had so chosen. The war did strange things to men, they murmured. Usually they returned meaner, embittered, cynical. But the high-living, haughty young don had returned sober and industrious, working beside his people to rebuild what the old don had squandered. He was truly worthy of his lady, whom they all adored.

      
All but Innocencia, who bided her time in sullen silence, waiting and watching the mysterious transformation of her former lover. As the months had passed and he remained faithful to his pale little wife, she gave up all hope of ever luring him back to her bed. He was well and truly lost to her and so was the life of ease to which she had dreamed of returning.

      
“Lazy girl, quit your mooning and scrub the pots on the hearth,” Angelina chided her assistant.

      
Innocencia had been staring out the window at the well where Lucero stood in the blazing noonday heat. She watched as he dumped a bucket of cool water over his sweat-soaked, dust-caked body while his skinny blond woman, also sweating and dressed like a peon, joined him with that brat daughter of his. Innocencia's eyes narrowed in hate as the three of them laughed and bantered while they cooled off from their labors.

      
Angelina's voice grew more strident, forcing the serving girl to obey her commands. She walked to the hearth and seized the heavy iron cauldron, setting to work resentfully under the stern eye of her taskmistress. All the while, something niggled at the periphery of her consciousness, something about Lucero...but what?

      
Late that afternoon Lazaro interrupted the
patrón
, who was working on the
hacienda
accounts with Mercedes. Entering the study, he faced them uncertainly, saying, “A party of men has arrived, Don Lucero, and they have women and children with them.”

      
Nicholas rose from behind his father's massive oak desk, a look of curiosity on his face. “I take it they are not soldiers then.”

      
“No,
patrón
. But I do not recognize them. They are
gringo
s. ”

      
He made a small grimace of distaste that gave Nicholas an inward chuckle.
What would you say if you knew I was one, too?
“What the devil are a group of Americans doing riding through Sonora with women and children in tow?” he murmured aloud to himself. “I'll see to them, Lazaro.”

      
“We should, of course, offer hospitality,” Mercedes said as she rounded the desk, brushing the wrinkles self-consciously from her plain cotton skirt. Lord, with her hair plaited down her back, dressed in
paisana's
clothes, she was scarcely fit to greet foreign visitors, no matter how road weary they might be.

      
Nicholas watched her fuss with a few damp tendrils of hair. “As always, you look superb. Let's go greet these uninvited guests. They may be nothing more than a pack of
contre-guerrillas
with their whores in tow, in which case they won't be joining us for dinner.”

      
“But if they're American—”

      
“Lots of the men I fought with were drifters from across the border, especially disaffected Southerners whose cause was lost when the Confederacy began to go down to defeat.”

      
“I've heard of Maximilian's Imperial Commissioner of Immigration, Matthew Maury. They say he's bringing thousands of his fellow Confederates to relocate in Mexico. Maybe they're some of those people.”

      
“Maybe.” His tone was skeptical as they walked down the hallway and into the foyer where the group stood waiting, looking dusty and weary but not at all like the hardened mercenaries he had fought beside for so many years.

      
The men ranged in age widely, some in their middle years, a few younger. Their women had two small girls and a slightly older boy with them. Several of the men wore faded Confederate uniforms with gold epaulets on the shoulders. The rest were dressed in quality clothing, but well-worn and frayed. The women, in dark linen riding habits, carried themselves with the demure dignity of respectable society belles fallen on hard times, standing wilted and silent behind their men folk.

      
“Colonel Graham Fletcher, at your service, sir,” the leader of the group said in a soft west Texas drawl. Fletcher offered his hand to Nicholas. He was a big man with reddish hair and a long narrow face that indicated Scots and English antecedents. His smile was genial as he studied Nicholas with bright blue eyes that crinkled at the corners. The Texas sun had blasted his buttermilk pale complexion to a freckled ruddy tan.

      
“Welcome to Gran Sangre, Colonel. I'm Don Lucero Alvarado and this is my wife, Doña Mercedes,” Nicholas said in English, the faint traces of his New Orleans origins still identifiable.

      
Fletcher made a courtly bow to Mercedes, then asked Nicholas, “You a Southerner?” He studied the dark-skinned Hispanic-looking man with obvious puzzlement.

      
Nicholas smiled. “No, but I've fought here in Mexico beside many Southerners. They taught me to speak English.”

      
“Well, that's good, cuz most o' us cain't speak a speck o' Spanish,” another tall, cadaverously thin man with a decided border state twang interjected, identifying himself as Matt McClosky.

      
“We're on our way to meet with General Jubal Early. He was our commander in the late war,” Fletcher said, “but I'm afraid we've lost our way. We were to rendezvous with another larger party of immigrants, but somehow we've missed them.”

      
“I'm afraid that was my fault.” A man of medium build with colorless eyes and hair materialized from the cluster of people. “I'm Emory Jones, and I was supposedly the guide, but I'm afraid I misread the signs along the trail from El Paso and we ended up here.”

      
The bland-looking man was oddly familiar to Fortune, although he could not have said why. Emory Jones was unremarkable in every way. Even his Southern accent was less pronounced than that of his compatriots. Yet there was something...

      
“Emory here's a Reb from Saint Louie,” McClosky explained with a guffaw. “Ain't many o' them in that damned Yankee stronghold.”

      
“My mother's family were Virginians, resettled in southern Missouri,” Jones said smoothly as Mercedes and the sad-eyed and tired-looking women quietly became acquainted.

      
Upon hearing her precise British English, they were delighted. The
patrona
ushered them and their children into the
sala
, then went to fetch refreshments and have bedrooms made up. Hospitality was a sacred tradition among the Mexican
criollos
. If her larder was depleted, it did not matter. She would make do.

      
When Mercedes returned, the men had followed Lucero into his study for a liquid libation stronger than the cool lemonade the women were enjoying. Angelina served them as Rosario stood shyly in the doorway, clutching her doll Patricia against her chest, watching the
gringo
children with curious eyes.

      
“Rosario, come meet our guests.” Mercedes was proud of the way Lucero's daughter made her curtsy when she was introduced. Lucinda Mayfield's daughter Clarissa looked longingly at the doll Mercedes had bought Rosario while they were in Hermosillo. “Perhaps you could share Patricia with Clarissa and Beatrice for a little while?”

      
The three little girls went off to the courtyard to play, the language barrier seemingly unimportant in their newly discovered friendship.

      
“My Bea really misses her play babies,” Marian Fletcher said sadly. Her gray eyes grew flinty cold as she continued, “The Yankees burned us out. We lost everything, even her dolls. It took all we could scrape together to get a stake to relocate in Mexico.”

      
The other women chorused the same wistful sadness tempered by an underlying current of bitterness and uncertainty.

      
“Is...is all of Mexico as barren as Sonora, Doña Mercedes?” Lucinda asked timidly. She was a thin, birdlike brunette whose once luminous peaches and cream complexion had turned the wan color of parchment, now stretched tight across her delicate cheekbones.

      
“No, much of my country is lushly tropical with rich fertile valleys. Many crops grow year round,” Mercedes replied, understanding. “When I first came to Sonora as a bride, I, too, found the land forbidding, but there is a kind of stark wild beauty to it that one gets used to. If not for the war, this
hacienda
would flourish. As it is, we're irrigating nearly a hundred acres for food crops and my husband has rounded up several thousand head of beef as well as fine-blooded horses.”

      
“We were told we'd be given land—large tracts of it. Like this,” Marian said hopefully. “How do you keep up such a lovely home in this isolated area?”