The Furies (3 page)

She stepped into the light, the once-elegant black silk dress rustling. “I seem to have gotten used to going to sleep to band music, Colonel.” She smiled.

“Know what you mean.” Crockett smiled too, but uneasily.

The lantern light revealed Amanda as a fairly tall woman, five feet seven, with a full, well-proportioned figure. She’d lost about ten pounds in the preceding two weeks, and it showed in hollows in her cheeks, and half-circles beneath her large, dark eyes. Her nose was a trifle too prominent for perfect beauty. But men still found her immensely attractive. She knew it, and in the past she’d occasionally capitalized on the fact.

Outside, in the chapel, a child began to fret, as though caught in a nightmare. Amanda identified the voice as belonging to Angelina Dickinson, eighteen months. The child’s mother, Susannah, was married to Captain Almeron Dickinson, in charge of the garrison’s artillery. Almeron was undoubtedly up with the chapel cannon. His eighteen-year-old wife was the only other Anglo woman in the mission. The rest were wives or sweethearts of the Mexicans such as gunner Gregorio Esparza who had sided with the Americans against Santa Anna.

Bowie’s big fingers shook as he tried to pick up the pistol Crockett had laid beside its mate and the knife.

He acknowledged Amanda’s presence with a blink of his eyes, then a labored question: “How are you, Mandy?”

“Well enough, Jim. You?”

“Passable.”

“Has Dr. Pollard looked at him tonight?” Amanda asked Crockett.

The Tennessean shook his head. “I think he’s catching a few winks like the rest of the boys.”

Sam, the black, said in a tense voice, “Santy Anny—he pretty quiet this evening.”

Amanda nodded. Crockett said, “Too blasted quiet.”

The Dickinson girl’s fretful crying faded. No doubt Angelina was sleeping wrapped in rags and her father’s Masonic apron—the warmest covering available. Bowie’s sunken eyes remained fixed on Amanda as she spoke to Crockett again.

“There must be a reason for the silence, Colonel. Do you think the troops are moving closer to the walls?”

“Can’t be certain with those clouds hiding the moon.” Crockett dug a nail against an upper gum, then spat out a bit of meat. “I’d expect so, however.” He inclined his head toward the man on the cot. “I reckon Jim feels the same way. He sent Sam to find me, so I could load his pistols.”

“You”—her voice shook now—“you think it may be tonight?”

Crockett shrugged. Gone was the ready grin that had buoyed the spirits of the defenders so often. He said, “There’s a good chance. If I was Santy Anny, I’d expect everybody to catch up on their rest when it was quiet—which is exactly what’s happened. Even Colonel Travis is asleep.”

“Tha’s right.” Sam nodded. “I seen Joe a while ago. He tol’ me the colonel was sleepin’ like the dead.”

Amanda looked at Bowie again, not certain that he was recognizing her any longer. She thought about the strange partnerships that fate often arranged. No two men could be more dissimilar than James Bowie and William Barret Travis—

Amanda was a longtime friend of the massive, forty-year-old Bowie. He was a Catholic, with a checkered history of dueling, slave-running and land speculation. Grief had brought him to Gura’s Hotel often these past couple of years.

Bowie had originally shared command at the Alamo with Travis. Suffering the first symptoms of pneumonia, he’d kept on working—until his ribs were crushed in an accident that happened while he was helping to raise a cannon to the plaza wall. Since then he’d been lying here in the chapel, with command of the garrison completely in Travis’ hands.

Neither man liked the other very much. They had height in common, and sandy hair, but little else. Travis was nominally a colonel of the lately formed Texas cavalry. Bowie led the volunteers. Most of the men at the garrison preferred him to the ambitious Baptist lawyer from San Felipe de Austin—

It was said that Travis had come to Texas after murdering a man in Alabama for trifling with his wife. Perhaps his wife hadn’t been altogether unwilling, since Travis had left her behind and had lately been courting another young woman. He was envious of Bowie’s popularity with the rank and file, and scornful of his rival’s fondness for alcohol. Yet a common love of Texas, and a common plight, had finally destroyed the barriers between them. When the accident put Bowie out of action, he ordered the men under his direct command to follow the twenty-seven-year-old Travis without question.

Crockett started out. “I expect I’d better get back to the wall and see to loading Old Betsy.” He touched Amanda’s sleeve. The sleeve’s puffy leg-of-mutton shoulder was a tatter now.

Looking at her, he added, “You know, Miz de la Gura, you’re to be admired for staying here. But you should have gotten out while there was a chance. Or never come in.”

She shook her head. “I’ve heard that from Jim too. But he needed someone to look after him—Dr. Pollard has a gun to handle. Jim and I are friends. His father-in-law helped me straighten out some deed problems when I opened the hotel with the money my husband left.”

The father-in-law she referred to was Juan Martin Veramendi, who had been vice governor of Texas and one of Bexar’s leading citizens. Bowie had wed Veramendi’s lovely yellow-haired daughter Ursula.

She, her father, her mother and the two children of her marriage had all perished in 1833 while Bowie was off in Mississippi, attending to some business. The family had been stricken at the Veramendi resort home down in Monclova by one of the tendrils of the cholera epidemic that had been spreading worldwide out of Asia for the past ten years. The same disease had carried off Amanda’s husband a year earlier.

Bowie had never recovered from the loss of his loved ones. Even the physical charms of Henriette, one of the three girls who inhabited second-floor rooms at Gura’s Hotel, failed to comfort him for long. More and more frequently during recent months, Bowie had taken to dropping by Gura’s solely to drink and talk with Amanda. But he downed four glasses of
aguardiente
, the powerful cane-based liquor, for every sip she took. There weren’t enough women, enough words or enough alcohol in the world to mitigate his pain—

Amanda’s three girls were gone now. She’d urged them to leave Bexar when the Mexican army was reported on its way. Two of the girls, mixed-blood Mexican-Comanche wenches, had probably returned to their tribes. Henriette had headed for Nacogdoches under the protection of a middle-aged customer who sold Bibles.

The Tennessee frontiersman clucked his tongue. “Well, I guess there’s nothing any of us can do about escaping now. I do sort of wish old Santy Anny would hurry up and come on. I’m tired of being hemmed in by walls. Never liked the feeling. I’d sure like to get a look at him, too. He sounds like a pompous little piece of shit—oh, I beg your pardon—”

Amanda smiled. “No need to apologize, Colonel. I’ve heard every cussword in the book, and then some. And you’re right about the president. They say he is pompous. But clever, too.”

“Just can’t believe that,” Crockett returned. “A man can’t have his head on straight if he goes around calling himself the Napoleon of the West.”

“Perhaps with justification. He’s managed to stay on the winning side through all those changes of government, remember. People are afraid of him. For one thing, they say he’s tall—several inches taller than I am, which is unusual for a Mexican. He cuts a commanding figure—”

“That may be. But I think Señor Napoleon’s going to get more than he bargained for when he tries to take this place. What’s so damn—so blasted infuriating is that we could hold out for months if we had supplies and a thousand men!”

Bowie’s hoarse voice rasped from the cot, “We’ll give ’em a run with what we’ve got. We—”

He started coughing, his face convulsed with pain.

Amanda darted to the stool Crockett had vacated. Sam crawled forward on his knees, likewise alarmed by his master’s coughing.

From the doorway, Crockett said, “Yes, we sure will. There’s only one thing I’m really sorry about. I wish I’d got here soon enough to grab me a piece of ground and farm it a while. I’m about old enough to settle down, and I’d like to see if this land’s as almighty fertile as you people say—”

Amanda laid her palm on Bowie’s sweaty left hand. The coughing stopped. The lines in his face smoothed. His blue-gray eyes sought her face, as if hunting relief from his pain. Under his plain linsey shirt, he was wrapped in bandages, Dr. Pollard’s only means of repairing the damage done to his ribs when the cannon fell from its tackle.

A moment later Bowie glanced at Crockett. “You can bet it is. Mandy, tell him what your husband used to say about the soil in Texas—”

Half-turning to Crockett, she forced a smile. “He said it was supposed to be so rich, you could plant a crowbar at night and by morning the ground would sprout ten-penny nails.”

The words were heavy, humorless. Bowie’s illness had made him forget that Amanda’s husband had usually repeated the remark with great cynicism. Crockett, though, knew almost nothing about her history. He laughed.

“My kind of country,” he said, resettling his cap. “Pity it doesn’t belong to the United States. I heard once in Washington that President Jefferson thought he bought Texas as part of the Purchase. But Spain said no. Well, I guess that doesn’t make much difference now—”

“No,” Bowie breathed, “all we can do is follow your advice, Davy.” He paraphrased a frequent remark of Crockett’s. “Be sure we’re right, then go ahead.”

That widened Crockett’s smile all the more. “Yep,” he said. Then he touched his coon cap. “Miz de la Gura—good morning to you.”

Silently, the tall frontiersman melted into the shadows of the chapel. Out there, two of the Mexican women had wakened and were talking softly. One was Señora Esparza. Ironically, her husband Gregorio, the gunner, had a brother, a sergeant, in the besieging army.

“Davy’s correct about one thing,” Bowie said. “I think an attack’s due most any time.”

“That scares me, Jim.”

“And me,” he admitted. His left arm lifted, fingertips brushing against the sun-browned, work-toughened flesh of her hand. “You’ve been a good friend, Mandy. The best anyone could want—”

It almost broke her heart to hear how weak his voice had become, to see his huge, muscular body so feeble and wasted. She clasped his hand in both of hers.

“I only wish I’d been able to bring Ursula back to you. And the children. They were good people. So was your father-in-law. He was kind and friendly even though most of the
respectable
citizens of Bexar wouldn’t deign to walk on the same side of main plaza with me.”

“Well, you weren’t”—Bowie realized he was speaking in past tense and corrected himself with a pained smile—“aren’t in the most respectable of professions.”

That roused her wrath. “I made sure the hotel was never a public nuisance! That the girls were honest—and examined by a doctor once a month. I ran a straighter place than the owners of the cantina! Their liquor was watered. Their cards were marked—”

“Yes, Mandy, I know that and you know that. But to most other people, Gura’s was still a whorehouse. Period.”

She looked crestfallen. “I don’t claim I’ve lived a perfect life. Sometimes, just to survive, I’ve done things I’m not proud of. But at least I’ve never concealed them. Which is more than you can say for a man like
el presidente.
Santa Anna twists whichever way the wind blows—”

A little more animation showed on Bowie’s face. “Here we are jabbering like a couple of old folks. Looking back. As if everything’s over.”

“It is, Jim.” She fingered one of his pistols. “Isn’t that why you asked Colonel Crockett to load your guns?”

Bowie didn’t reply. She thought he’d fallen asleep. Then, with a little wrench of his shoulders, he stirred. He asked her to help prop him against the wall at the head of the cot. As she did, she caught a glimpse of Sam staring at his master. The black saw death in Bowie’s face. Death for all of them, perhaps. But the tears in Sam’s eyes were not for himself.

“Forty—” Bowie yawned. “Forty’s plenty long enough for a man to live. But you’re young, Mandy.”

“Thanks for the compliment, but it’s not true. Thirty-three is getting on. Like Colonel Crockett, I really have only one regret. I wish one of my children had survived.”

“I forget how many there were—”

“Two.”

“Ah, that’s right. I don’t know why I can never remember.”

“Probably because they were both born before Jaimie and I ever met you.” She stared at the lantern’s flame, seeing the past. “The boy was stillborn. The girl lived six weeks. When she died, it broke Jaimie’s spirit. He didn’t want to work the farm anymore. It was almost as if our failure to have children put a curse on everything else he was doing. Blighted it—made it unbearable—” She smiled in a melancholy way. “I knew it was partly an excuse but I never said anything. It was time we tried something else. Jaimie and I weren’t good farmers—”

She realized Bowie had closed his eyes. Alarmed, Sam said, “Is he all right?”

“He’s just dozing, Sam. You rest too. I’ll watch him.”

In the ensuing silence, her mind began to drift. Away from the chapel. Away from the trap that had closed around them all. Even though much of the past had been sad, remembering it soothed her now, drained away some of her tension. She thought fondly of her husband, Jaimie de la Gura, and of her weary thankfulness when he had decided to abandon the thirty acres near the Brazos that the two of them had worked for several years, to provide a livelihood for the family that never became a reality—

They had worked that land to exhaustion. But Jaimie lacked the instinctive kinship with the earth that seemed to be a requirement for raising cash crops at a profit. Jaimie’s neighbors could produce forty to eighty bushels of corn for every acre they owned. He was fortunate if his fields yielded twenty.

In their last two years on the farm, the life had become hateful to both of them, the two-room, dog-run cabin more and more disagreeable. Even now Amanda grew queasy when she recalled the smell of the swine Jaimie tried to raise and fatten for market. Her idea of hell was a limbo without purposeful sight or sound—with nothing to torture the lost soul but the smell of pigs.