The Furies (7 page)

“Would the young woman’s name be Señorita Armendariz?”

“That’s it, I believe. Quite a beauty.”

“I have a different word for her.” The Armendariz girl and her mother were two of those who had refused to speak to Amanda on the streets of Bexar. Señora Armendariz had even urged the
alcalde
to close Gura’s Hotel. “I’m not surprised that little bitch advanced herself with the general—”

Cordoba almost smiled. “Alas, I don’t believe he had marriage in mind. But the señorita’s mother insisted.”

“Who married them? Don Refugio?”

“The parish priest? No, I’m afraid he would have considered such a ceremony—shall we say—irregular? The ‘priest’ was actually one of Colonel Minion’s aides. A lad who’s quite an actor. His Excellency is already blessed with a wife in Mexico City.”

“You mean Santa Anna deceived the girl?”

“
And
her mother. Evidently his desire got the better of him.”

“You don’t sound as if you approve.”

Expressionless suddenly, Cordoba shrugged. “Whatever my personal feelings concerning His Excellency, I am a soldier. I serve him without question.”

“Is that right?” Amanda studied him as they approached the gate. “Would you have served him without question if you’d been assigned another kind of duty? If you’d been required to kill Texans?”

“I would have obeyed orders.”

“If they included wholesale brutality?”

“I see no purpose to such a discussion,” Cordoba said quickly. “It’s purely theoretical.”

But Amanda realized she’d touched a sensitive spot. Her earlier suspicion was confirmed. It was Cordoba’s curse to be afflicted with a conscience.

“Then answer a question that isn’t. What do you honestly think Santa Anna will do with Susannah and me?”

“Señora, it is impossible for me to guess. He might be in an expansive mood as a result of the victory. He might parole you at once.”

Amanda halted in the gateway, turning to gaze back at the dead in the plaza.

“Major, how many men did you lose this morning?”

“Ten for every one of yours—at minimum. By the end of the third charge against the walls, for example, the Tolucca battalion under General Morales had little more than a hundred men remaining. Its original strength was almost eight hundred and fifty.”

“I doubt His Excellency will be in a mood to forgive that kind of loss.”

As if to confirm her fear, Cordoba didn’t answer.

The stench of the dead and wounded was even worse outside the Alamo than it had been within. Bodies of Mexican soldiers lay along the base of the wall. Here and there the wreckage of scaling ladders testified to the difficulty of breaching the mission defenses.

Details of men were already moving across the shell-scarred ground, dragging corpses toward the bank of the San Antonio. Overhead, buzzards were gathering.

As she walked, Amanda was conscious of Major Cordoba dropping behind. She didn’t see the frankly admiring way he continued to watch her. She was pondering what might befall her in the next few hours. Surely it couldn’t be any worse than the horror just concluded. Surely—

Something about the light interrupted the thought. She studied the angle of the sun and realized it couldn’t be much later than eight o’clock. The day had hardly begun. Sunday. God’s day. And so many had died—

But His Excellency was wrong if he believed cruelty would destroy the Texans’ will to resist. As Señora Esparza had promised, it would probably have the opposite effect. It did on her.

She turned again, gazing past Cordoba to the mission’s shot-pitted walls. The tricolor and eagle of Centralist Mexico had been raised above the long barracks. Hate welled within Amanda at the sight of the flag flapping in the sun.

Tired as she was, the hate would give her strength, sustain her through whatever might come before this day ended. She wouldn’t grovel in front of the self-styled Napoleon of the West, that much she promised herself.

Shoulders lifting a little, she trudged on toward the river. Her shoes left faint red traces on the hard ground.

A
MANDA CROSSED THE SAN ANTONIO
on one of the plank bridges erected by the Mexicans. It seemed to her that she was returning not to a familiar town but to one that was alien…alien and not a little frightening.

Northward, the low hills were covered with tents and wagon parks. Units of cavalry and infantry were reassembling noisily, raising huge clouds of dust.

Cordoba’s men soon encountered difficulty moving ahead toward the main plaza. The narrow streets of Bexar, so drowsy and pleasant only a few months ago, swarmed with soldiers and poorly dressed Mexican women. Many of the women were dragging children whose clothing was equally dirty and ragged.

The women were hurrying in the opposite direction, toward the mission. Band music drifted from the river now—music celebrating the victory. The women jeered at the captives. Amanda was glad Susannah couldn’t understand Spanish.

Some stones were flung. One struck Señora Esparza. Cordoba drew his sword and ordered his men to close up around the prisoners. After that, the
soldaderas
—the camp followers—had to content themselves with verbal attacks.

Despite her determination not to succumb to despair, Amanda found her spirits sinking with every step. Her mouth felt parched. Her head hurt. Her arms and legs ached. She wished for the peace and privacy of the tiny walled garden behind the hotel. There, whenever she was lonely or depressed, she had always found solace in simple physical labor. She yearned for the garden now. She imagined the sight of her tomato vines bursting with heavy red fruit in the mellow Texas sunlight. She savored the remembered aroma of strings of onions and yellow and red peppers drying in the shadow of the wall—

Gone. It was all gone. The sense of defeat swept through her like a poison. It seemed that every time she put her life back onto a stable course, something disrupted it. That had been the case for almost as long as she could remember—

She thought of her mother, dying in the street outside the Kent house in Boston. She thought of the terrible morning in Tennessee, when the man who claimed to be a preacher had beaten her cousin Jared, then raped her and carried her off to St. Louis, where he sold her to trappers traveling up the Missouri. She thought of her first night in the tepee of the young Sioux warrior who had bought her from the trappers—

She had endured all of it, calling on an inner strength bequeathed to her in some mystical chemistry of birth by her frail father, Gilbert Kent. She had endured hunger and pain and near-paralyzing fear, buoyed by her will to survive. In an hour, a month, or a year, she told herself, she would find an end to the suffering. And so she had—

But there always seemed to be more waiting.

Grief had nearly destroyed her after Jaimie’s death. She had fought with it like an enemy who wanted her life. She had fought, and she’d won another reprieve. Opened the hotel. Fussed over the three girls. Taken comfort from the feel of the garden earth against her hands whenever doubt and sadness threatened her—

And now, because she’d decided she had no choice but to go into the mission, she was forced to begin still one more time—as a stranger in a town of enemies. She wondered whether she could do it.

She noticed a party of officers approaching on foot. Among them was a stout, mustachioed civilian wearing flared trousers, a tight-fitting velvet jacket and a sombrero. The
alcalde
, Don Francisco Ruiz.

Though never her close friend, Don Francisco had always been cordial. He realized that Gura’s Hotel fulfilled a need in Bexar, and he had resisted pressure from the Armendariz family and others when they wanted it closed. Don Francisco glanced at Amanda as he passed. One of the officers said something to him and he looked away quickly, without so much as a nod of greeting.

There had been shame in his eyes, Amanda thought. But the shame wasn’t powerful enough to make him speak to her. The
alcalde
understood very well who controlled Bexar now. Later, she learned that he had been sent to the mission by Santa Anna himself. He was to search through the bodies of the Texans and confirm to His Excellency that William Travis, David Crockett and James Bowie were indeed dead.

Don Francisco’s rebuff brought tears to Amanda’s eyes. She was ashamed of herself, yet she couldn’t hold the tears back. A
soldadera
—a young, coarse-faced woman with immense breasts and a large mole near the point of her chin—saw her crying, snatched up a stone and lobbed it between two soldiers.

The stone struck Amanda’s forehead. The pain jolted her from her self-pity. Eyes flashing, she closed her hands into fists and started after the Mexican girl.

Cordoba was quicker. He brandished his sword and cursed. The young woman laughed and hurried on as soldiers kept Amanda from pursuing her.

The major reached for Amanda’s arm. “Are you all right, señora?”

She avoided his hand. “Yes. And I told you before—I don’t need any help from you.”

Cordoba stared at her for a moment. “Don’t be too sure.”

Furious, she gathered her skirt in both hands and walked on. In an instant, her eyes were dry.

She’d show him how strong she was. She’d show them all.

The prisoners were taken to the spacious, airy house of Bexar’s second-ranking political official,
jefe
Don Ramon Musquiz. Servants carried Angelina Dickinson to a bedroom while the others—Amanda, Susannah and the two blacks—were led to the don’s comfortable office overlooking an ornamental garden.

Susannah grew distraught when she wasn’t permitted to accompany her daughter. But Cordoba assured her the child was not seriously hurt. After absenting himself briefly, he returned to say that Santa Anna’s personal doctor had already been summoned to dress the little girl’s wound.

Susannah’s dirty, bedraggled appearance showed Amanda what she herself must look like. She sank into a chair, her attention caught by the paper-littered desk. She had been in Musquiz’s office before. She recognized a number of articles that didn’t belong there: an ornate silver tea service, a liquor decanter with a fat silver stopper, a silver spittoon.

A sandaled servant, an elderly Mexican, entered with a tray. On the tray were cups, a wine bottle and a plate of hardtack. The servant knew Amanda. But, like Don Francisco, he thought it prudent not to acknowledge the fact. He concentrated on putting the tray on the desk without disturbing the papers.

Avoiding Amanda’s eyes, the old man addressed Cordoba. “His Excellency is inspecting the mission. He will return shortly. He ordered that the prisoners were to be given refreshments.”

“How kind of him,” Susannah said in a bitter voice. “Is it our last meal?”

“Very good, thank you,” Cordoba said to the servant. As the old man left quietly, Amanda rose and walked to the younger woman.

“A little wine might make you feel better, Susannah.”

“Nothing will make me feel better.” Almeron Dickinson’s widow clenched her hands. “Nothing. Nothing.”

Major Cordoba acted embarrassed. The four soldiers who had accompanied him into the office appeared to be engrossed by
el jefe
’s fig tree just outside.

Amanda realized she was incredibly hungry. She saw no reason to refrain from eating the enemy’s food. She picked up the plate and walked to the two blacks to serve them.

Sam took a piece of hardtack. Joe shook his head, still looking utterly miserable. Amanda returned to the desk. She poured half a cup of wine, drank it, then picked up two pieces of hardtack and sat down again.

The office was cool and still. With an annoyed expression, Cordoba began wiping the buttons of his uniform with his cuff. He polished off some of the dirt, but not enough, apparently, to satisfy himself. He kept frowning.

Amanda finished the first piece of hardtack. She was raising the second to her lips when she remembered something. Cordoba saw her wry, sad smile, gave her a quizzical look.

She held up the hardtack, explaining, “Jim Bowie said there’d be an attack sooner than we expected. He heard that the bakeries in the border towns were working night and day, making this. He said only an army would require that much hardtack.”

“If you had that kind of advance warning, señora, why were there not more men in the mission?”

“Travis thought Jim was crazy. He said your army would never march in the winter. Not until the grass grew and the horses could forage. Jim told him we were fighting Mexicans, not Comanches. Travis laughed it off. If he’d listened to Jim, he might have sent for reinforcements sooner—”

She stopped, following Cordoba’s tense glance toward the corridor. Boots clicked out there. She heard men speaking. Then one of the soldiers in the office pointed toward the garden wall.

“They’ve started burning them.” Amanda looked. A black plume of smoke was climbing into the sky. Her hand closed, crumbling the hardtack—

A party of several officers and one civilian appeared at the far end of the hall. One of the men was noticeably taller than the others. He was perhaps forty years old, and not bad looking. His uniform overflowed with silver frogging, buttons, epaulettes.

Moving briskly, the man led the others toward the office doorway. Just as he entered, he touched his middle, belched, then winced. Amanda’s last question about the man’s identity vanished. Santa Anna was known to suffer perpetual dysentery.

Cordoba snapped to attention, saluted. “These are the prisoners, Excellency.”

General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna nodded. “Very good. Take your ease, Major.”

But Cordoba remained rigid. The general turned to the civilian member of the group, a willowy fellow carrying a sheet of foolscap.

“Read me the first line again, Ramon.”

The secretary cleared his throat. “ ‘Victory belongs to the army, which at this very moment, eight o’clock a.m., achieved a complete triumph that will render its memory imperishable—’ ”

Santa Anna touched the paper. “Amend that. A complete and glorious triumph.” The secretary’s head bobbed. “Have it inscribed and return it to me for signature. I want it dispatched to the minister of war in Mexico City by noon, understand?”