The Furies (11 page)

Amanda grabbed Manuela’s forearm with both hands, jerked it to her mouth and bit. Manuela squealed. Amanda shoved her backward. The stone almost slipped from the younger woman’s grasp, but she caught it.

Soaked and moving slowly because of it, Amanda still managed to get behind the girl and use her own tactic—a yank of the hair. But Manuela was strong, strong enough to slither free and spin, hacking at Amanda’s face with the rock.

Amanda dodged again, laced her hands together, kicked Manuela’s leg. The girl doubled over. Amanda’s locked hands came down on Manuela’s exposed neck with terrific force.

Crying out in real pain, Manuela sprawled face first in the shallows. The stone flew from her fingers, splashed and disappeared under the water. Amanda thought about calling a halt. But if she did, she’d never be safe in the encampment. She had to defeat the Mexican girl completely, decisively—

She gazed around for a weapon. Something Manuela had said came to mind. She darted for the bank, grabbed one of Cordoba’s shirts, dipped it in the water and lashed Manuela’s cheek.

Floundering in the shallows, Manuela cried out. She tried to grab Amanda’s leg. Amanda whipped the girl’s face again. Again. Her eyes were red with the glare of the sunset as she struck—

She laid ten, twelve, fifteen strokes on Manuela’s face, neck and shoulders. When the shirt showed blood, she stopped. Whimpering, Manuela crawled away in the water—

Amanda was shaking. She stumbled up the bank. The boys and Manuela’s companions stared at her in amazement.

She wiped her brow with a soaked sleeve, then stared at the blood from the cut over her eye. She dropped the shirt she’d used as a whip, retrieved the rest of Cordoba’s laundry. Manuela was still on her knees in the water, shaking her head in a groggy way. Amanda hooked a toe beneath the bloody, ruined garment, and kicked it toward Manuela’s three companions.

“Clean her up. And tell her the major has a lot of other shirts.”

Walking as steadily as she could, she moved on down the bank in the stillness.

“God above, what happened to you?” Cordoba exclaimed when she entered the marquee sometime later, the clean laundry bundled under one arm.

She put the laundry on the washstand, her hand none too steady. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m all right.”

Cordoba was bare chested. The black hair below his throat showed glints of sweat in the light of the hanging lantern. At the waist of his trousers, his stomach bulged. He laid a palm over the roll of fat, as if ashamed to have her see.

She sank down on the cot. “I’m afraid I lost one of your best shirts, though.”

Cordoba seemed not to hear. “How did you cut your forehead?”

“It isn’t important.”

“I insist that you answer.” She didn’t. “At least let me find some alcohol—”

“No, I only need to rest a minute.”

“Damn you, woman! Tell me who hurt you and I’ll see him flogged!”

If she hadn’t been so spent, she would have laughed. The major looked furious.

“Not
he,
” she said. “It was one of the
soldaderas.
She won’t bother me again.” Her generous mouth curved in a wry smile. “She had designs on you. She lost her own man, and—well, let’s just say she wasn’t thinking very clearly.”

She lay back. Closed her eyes. She sensed Cordoba crouching down beside her.

“I still want to know the woman’s name. I intend to see her punished.”

“It’s not necessary, Luis—I took care of it.”

“You might have been killed!”

“I wasn’t.”

She studied him. His deep-set eyes seemed unusually dark in the shadows beneath his brows. Teasing, she added, “Maybe you would have preferred her. She claimed she could please a man better than I do.”

Cordoba gathered both her hands in his. She felt the weight of his forearm against her left breast. She was touched by the almost childlike tenderness of his expression.

“You have pleased me more than any woman I have ever known, Amanda. You have made this filthy campaign bearable. Brought me comfort just with your presence. You know I’m poor at talking like a romantic—I am a soldier. I’m trying to say you are the dearest—”

Swallowing, he stopped. The familiar redness tinted his cheeks again.

She smiled. “But I don’t seem very good at giving a man what he wants most from a
soldadera
—” She was only partly teasing now. His closeness—the warmth and hardness of his arm—stirred something in her that was part passion, part hunger for reassurance. “I’ve really wondered why you never touch me.”

“Because”—his eyes brimmed with pain—“because I have a wife.”

He bowed his head.

She reached her right hand across her breast, ran the palm down the faint stubble on his face.

“I know that, Luis.”

He jerked back. “You
know
?”

“Well, I guessed. One night, in your sleep, you spoke a woman’s name several times. I decided it was the name of a sweetheart or, more likely, your wife.”

Each word cost him effort. “I have wanted you very much, Amanda. But I dared not ask—”

“Always so honorable—” Gently, she touched his forehead. “That’s a terrible burden to bear in a dishonorable world.”

“I told you before—I can’t help what I am. I know I must go home to my wife in the capital one day—”

“That could be a long time in the future.”

He said nothing.

“Do you have children?”

“Alas, no.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want you to do anything that would make you feel ashamed later—”

“Stop!” he exclaimed. “It’s only on your account that I’ve held back. You’re a beautiful woman—and a decent one. If you were just a camp whore, I’d have taken you and thought nothing of it. Well—almost nothing. You deserve better. I could never dishonor you with lies. False promises—”

“I don’t need promises, Luis. I just need you.”

Again he averted his head. “Sometimes I wish I’d never seen you. But I did. And I have come to—to love you with all my being. More than I have ever loved any woman.” He raised his head. “Any woman.”

“If that’s how you feel, nothing else is necessary. Blow out the lamp and lie down with me—”

She saw the dawning wonder in his eyes. Wonder mingled with suffering. He was still agonized by what he had revealed about himself. She tried to relieve his conscience with a light tone.

“It is about time you treated me as a proper camp follower! Besides, I’m too sore to sleep on the ground one more night.”

Slowly, slowly, a smile forced itself across his mouth. A tentative smile that turned to joy as he reached upward for the lantern.

In the darkness, he cursed, then apologized. He’d tangled his feet in his breeches as he pulled them off.

He lowered himself beside her on the narrow cot, touching her cheek almost hesitantly. She circled his neck with her arms, turning her head to the proper angle for a kiss.

When their lips touched, much of Cordoba’s restraint disappeared. He pressed his mouth hard against hers. She felt his yearning in the sudden clasp of his arms beneath her back—

He murmured her name over and over as they embraced. He spoke lovely, courtly Spanish as he caressed her body. She sighed with pleasure when his hands closed on her bare breasts.

A moment later, she maneuvered beneath him, guiding him and laughing when he gasped at her boldness. He entered her gently, although his breathing roared loud as a storm in her ear. When she urged him to speed, he complied, and with each quickening movement of his body, she understood again that this was no weak man, only one who was tender and humane in a world that sometimes derided those virtues. With the straining of her own flesh, the movement of her hands, the press of her mouth, she tried to show him that she admired and prized what he was.

He was quicker than she, bursting into apologies afterward. She stilled them with a kiss, then drew him into the curve of her arm. Holding him close, she murmured that, before the night ended, there would be another time. A better one—

“Oh,” he said, alarmed, “I don’t know if that’s possible for me—”

“It is. You’ll see.”

She caught the sound of a boot scraping in the dirt street outside. Another eavesdropper?

She felt sorry for him, whoever he was. Skulking in the April dark, he could only hear the sounds of love-making. He would never imagine the sense of completion and peace and—yes, admit it—affection that warmed her soul after long, long months of privation.

After that night, Manuela never bothered her again. An even happier result was the change in her relationship with Cordoba.

Before, their conversations had been largely superficial: the events of the day’s march; the suspected position of Sam Houston’s little army; the latest example of incompetence or dishonesty on the senior staff. But once they had shared each other’s embraces, she and the major wanted to share the whole sum of themselves as well—their hopes and histories, their dreams and disappointments.

As the army worked its way south toward Thompson’s Ferry, their evening lovemaking usually ended not in languorous slumber but in quiet conversation. Nights when they were both too tired, conversation sufficed.

The only subject Cordoba wouldn’t discuss was his wife. Otherwise, he held nothing back. What he had said about himself was true: his background—his world—was limited to soldiering.

He had been born in Veracruz, the fourth of his father’s children, and the only son. He was a young subaltern in the army when the political upheavals began in the 1820s. His father, a prosperous importer, remained loyal to Spain. After much painful deliberation, Luis Cordoba put himself on the side of independence, helping to overthrow the Spanish government, then that of the professed revolutionary Iturbide, who had turned on his separatist followers and maneuvered himself into the role of emperor.

Iturbide had been deposed in 1823. A year later, a revised, democratic Mexican constitution began luring the Anglo-American
empresarios
to Texas. Through it all, Cordoba said, he had remained loyal to Mexico first and the army second.

“When the separatist movement developed, I had the highest of hopes. I thought that, at last, I could fight for something other than simple military victory. For principle. Over the years I’ve learned how easily principle can be crushed by those with ambition. Now I’m virtually back where I started—obeying orders. Hoping to win if there’s an engagement. Not daring to look too deeply into why we’re fighting. A man can die in many ways, you know. Death in battle is perhaps the most final, but the least grievous. It’s much worse to struggle for a cause, then perceive that you’ve struggled for nothing. I felt that way—cheated, dead—when His Excellency jettisoned the constitution.”

“There’s no hope of unseating Santa Anna?”

“Next to none. He’s firmly entrenched. God—what a poltroon he is! In its short history, your country has been fortunate to escape his kind, Amanda.”

“Oh, we’ve had our share of poltroons, I think—” She shook her head. “I get such an odd feeling when you speak about the United States.”

“Odd? What do you mean?”

“It
is
my country. Yet sometimes it doesn’t seem so any longer. My grandfather did fight in the Revolution—”

“Did he! And survived?”

“Yes, though he was wounded. He limped for the rest of his life.”

“The Americans have a positive passion for rebellion! Even more so than those of us south of the Rio Grande, I think.”

“That isn’t always a good thing, Luis. Do you know that when we fought Britain again, twenty-five years ago, several of the northern states wanted to secede because they hated the war? And four years ago—I remember being shocked when I read it in the papers—South Carolina nearly left the union because of Nullification.”

“I don’t know the term.”

“It means a state placing itself above the law of the country. South Carolina didn’t like one of the government’s tariffs. So the state legislature nullified it. Said it didn’t apply to South Carolina. Old Hickory—”

“The president, Jackson?”

“Yes. He said it did, because no state could declare itself separate from the union. He promised to send in troops if South Carolina continued to disagree. The state gave in. I suppose that was proper. I remember hearing my father say that once the country was formed, no one could tear it apart. I didn’t understand—I imagined huge ditches in the earth. Now I know what he meant—and how serious the question is.”

“Your country is still divided on at least one great issue.”

“You mean slavery?”

He nodded.

“That’s where our passion for rebellion as you call it could prove our undoing,” she said in a somber way. “There are people in the east—mainly in New York and Boston—who call themselves abolitionists. They want to do away with slavery completely. The south can’t afford that. There’s trouble coming—you can tell even by reading the papers out here.”

Boston, Amanda revealed, was the city in which she’d grown up. She had lived in a splendid house owned by Gilbert Kent, her father, a well-to-do printer of books and newspapers.

Gilbert Kent had died at a relatively young age, leaving Amanda in the care of her pretentious and somewhat unstable mother, Harriet. Gilbert’s widow had made a poor choice of a second husband—a wastrel named Piggott. He had succeeded in gambling away most of the family’s assets, including the printing house, Kent and Son.

“The loss was probably no accident, I learned later. My cousin Jared—the son of my father’s half brother Abraham—served in the navy in the 1812 war. There was an officer aboard Jared’s ship—Stovall, his name was—who fancied boys and men in preference to women—”

Cordoba snorted in disgust.

“Jared got in a scrape with Stovall. Injured Stovall’s face—scarred it. Permanently. The man never forgot. After the war, he came to Boston in secret. He was the one to whom my stepfather lost Kent’s.”

“You think this Stovall planned it? Maneuvered your stepfather into a game and cheated him?”

“I’m almost certain of it. Anyway, my cousin had a terrible temper in those days. He set fire to the printing house and shot and killed Stovall’s general manager, a man called Waltham—Walpole—something like that.”