Stronger Than Passion (24 page)

It was after they had crossed the Rio Grande at a shallow point and were in legal Mexican territory that Manzanal’s more cautious possessiveness erupted into something truly aggressive.

He insisted, one clear night, that he and Christina go for a walk. Alone. And after only five minutes of strolling - just long enough to get them out of sight - he kissed her.

Revolted but not startled - she’d expected something like this - Christina shoved Manzanal
backwards, and put on her most affronted air. Angel’s black eyes were narrowed and feverish, and even though he begged her pardon and swore his respect and admiration, she knew his gaze was still darting up and down her body as though she were a feast and he a starving man. Then he proposed.

The mention of marriage shocked her much more than any attempted seduction ever could. Why, she was unsure. She knew she would never marry again, not him or Luis Arredondo. Something vulnerable and secretly hurting deep inside her had formed a resistant core against it. She wanted no joining of any kind with any man, period.

Manzanal talked during her brief stillness. He mentioned the terror and the suffering she had been through, and that she shouldn’t remain alone and unprotected anymore in case something similar should happen again. In wartime, with vicious Yanquis overrunning the countryside, anything was possible! And there was also her reputation to consider. Mexican society being what it was, everyone would naturally expect the worse about her abduction. Americanos were violent and unprincipled; no insane act was beyond them. Although he believed her protestations that she had not been harmed, who else in Mexico would?

He tried to threaten her, more or less, with social disgrace - unless she arrived in Mexico City a married woman.

Christina’s lips curved upward in a contemptuous smile. Her eyes had gone cold and mocking, in unconscious imitation of Michael Brett’s most insufferable gaze. Her head was held high and her chin level. She spoke in her most precise Castilian Spanish.

“Señor Manzanal, surely you do not think that I would concern myself with the opinion of a few Mexican provincials? My family has weathered criticism before, even from the highest nobles in Spain; and we have learned that public approval or disapproval of our actions means nothing. Integrity must remain its own defense, Señor. I will not bow before whispers and innuendos.”

Manzanal stared at her, enraptured by her aristocratic bearing in the warm moonlight. In his thoughts, fantasies played . . . he imagined Christina standing before him as she was now, proud and untouchable, a true noblewoman - then he saw her nude and humbled, offering herself to him in the dry dust, legs spread, arms reaching upward . . . reaching for him . . . .

Her cool voice continued, shattering his dreams.

“I thank you for your generous offer, Señor. However, you need make no sacrifice on my account. I assure you I shall be in no danger once we reach my estate. My father-in-law will probably insist on visiting me for the duration of the war
- or he will kidnap me himself and bring me to his own estancia. I will be as carefully guarded as though I were in prison.” She gestured dismissively, almost in the manner of a royal wave. “But I am afraid, Señor, that for my reputation’s sake - since you are so distressed by the lack of propriety in my past - we must refrain from walking together unchaperoned in the future. I should so regret any gossip about us, as well. Therefore, goodnight.”

She made her way back to camp. Manzanal stared after her. His intense frustration was tempered by admiration. Yes, she was superior to him by breeding, by culture, by her wealth and beauty . . . by everything. By right he was no more than a peasant, in comparison. And he liked it that way, liked feeling inferior - a feudal subject to a Queen. But sometimes, the Queen called her serf into her bed. Sometimes, the peasant became the ruler, and the ruler the peasant.

His blood pounded in his head, in other parts of his body. He sank to the ground. His imagination took over, and he experienced every detail of his possession of the Spanish Queen. Everything. Only reality could have been more explicit.

But reality might exist for him, sometime soon. It would exist. He had a few weeks still, before he must give her up. If he gave her up, even . . . he had won her, stolen her away from the Yanqui. He had claimed her. By right, she was his.

*

Their little cavalcade was careful to skirt Matamoros, still held by the Americans, even though most of their troops were now days away in Monterey. But it wasn’t only the Americans that they had to fear. Bandits still roamed the countryside, preying on any small group of travelers passing their way; although many of them had reformed into lawless, pro-Mexico guerilla forces, supposedly on the lookout for American scouts and American sympathizers, but frequently only out for their own profit. There were also tales of American guerilla bands operating, too. These men were more low-key and secretive, but reportedly extremely dangerous. And added to these worries were the usual fears of savage Indian attacks. All in all, traveling in Mexico was both risky and terrifying, and not many decent citizens were willing to attempt it. Outside of a few distant, wary groups that were probably merchants or straggling camp-followers, they encountered no one on their lonely trek across the scrub lands.

Boredom was the most common complaint of the hired men. They joked or sang on horseback, by day; they gambled and drank by night. One or two of them went hunting, returning with some poor animal that provided the designated cook with fresh meat. Constantly, someone had a story going, a tale about Indians or Santa Anna or about Sam Houston and Texas. Everyone listened with respect and then added his own experiences on the subject. To Christina and Penny, these tales were an education. To the men, they were an entertaining way of whiling the time.

The sheer desolation of the countryside was both overwhelming and a little magnificent. For miles, there was nothing to see but low-lying brush and an occasional tree, with the high, jagged mountain peaks of the Sierra Madrés visible in the distance. The sun burned with molten heat overhead, scorching everything on the ground for hour after hour; and then twilight would fall with a heart-stopping sunset, followed by a cold evening. Since man-made structures were so rare, and judiciously avoided, nights were spent either lazing around a fire in the open, or tucked away inside a tent. There were no sounds to disturb sleep except the howl of a coyote or the staccato snores of the men.

If only there were something, anything, in this land to capture and hold her attention. The vastness of the span around her wasn’t enough. The bigness of it only added to the sense of unreality she lived with, every minute and every hour, ever mile she traveled. The stillness and the quiet of this part of Mexico was only a reinforcement of the barrenness within her. The shocked emptiness. The protesting, hurting something which both numbed her to the people she rode with and refused her any peace. She almost wished for a hostile attack of some kind, which would galvanize her lost senses and force them to function again. This desert was defeating her with its loneliness and inevitability.

She had grown used to the aching and stiffness in her body caused by hours on horseback. That discomfort, and exposure to the sun and the wind and, por Dios, the insects - all of them became easier to endure as the days passed. Only her own thoughts never seemed to give in, to let go. Her memories never relented in their endless, nagging replays, to give her any ease. Instead of forgetting the past months and all that had happened to her as she journeyed home, time and distance separating her with every step taken and every second elapsed - she seemed instead to remember everything with even greater clarity.

Michael, or his memory-ghost, now rode along, all the way.

He was with her more vividly than perhaps ever in reality. She saw him, materializing in a distant dust cloud, mounted and coming toward her. She heard him, voice sarcastic and mocking, at the evening campfire, talking amongst the men. And she felt him. Oh, God, every night, she knew his touch, as she slept . . . as she lay drowsing in her tent beside Penny. Michael came to her and took her, with the same tender force that he had exerted that last night - the last time she was ever to see him. Only, in her dreams, he remained with her in his bed in Washington, holding her until the morning so that she would never have to get up and meet Manzanal, outside. And in her dreams he had never left her, first.

She’d hated him, oh, Dios, how she’d hated him that dawn, when she’d come awake to find him gone. She’d aroused Antoinette on a terrible suspicion, and had heard that suspicion confirmed. Yes, Michael was off to Mexico, and she was almost glad because he would be able to keep an eye on Rowan. He had not forgotten his Aunt and his almost-fiancée - they were to travel to Texas and await him there. It was all arranged. But how despicable of him not to have informed Christina of his plans, last night, as he had promised he would! She had a right to be angry!

And anger was a mild word for the rage Christina felt.

Not wanting to understand anything else, unwilling to force a single unpleasant revelation, however true, about herself and her own terrible pain, or about why he had made love to her and departed the country, she suppressed her obscene longing to obey him and stay. Functioning coldly and blindly, she had left Antoinette’s room to go to her own and dress. Then she walked downstairs and out the door, where Manzanal waited.

So she and Michael had escaped each other, in a way. After that one night of love, which would haunt her until she discovered some way to obliterate its memory. To extinguish his memory; and all the terrible emotions that accompanied it . . . and all the questions that could never be answered. She knew well enough that she would never see him again, as long as she lived.

She grew increasingly silent.

Penny, noticing but ignoring her mistress’s distant, obtuse stares and vacant replies, continued to chatter to her anyway as they rode along. She saw to it that Christina ate; she remained by her side every possible minute, protecting her from Manzanal ’s obsessed presence. She affected an air of normalcy in what began to be a very strained journey.

And Penny waited, bracing herself for something she sensed was about to happen.

*

The scout for their group discovered the first tracks.

They were being followed.

It was now a week since they had left corpus Christi, and he couldn’t tell for certain how long the lone man had trailed them. He had never seen the man, only the prints of his horse, heavy and unshod.

It could be a renegade Indian. Or anyone else.

The news turned what had been a laughing, bantering group into a wary, hard-eyed alliance. They all knew it might mean nothing. Then again, the man could be spying on them for any number of unwelcome parties.

The hired men grew serious about their job, priming weapons and scanning the horizon. Christina and Penny were ordered to ride in the center of the troop. Manzanal insisted they all pick up their pace, to cover more miles in each day in their circular race for the coast. By nightfall, although everyone was more exhausted than usual, guard duty was even stricter, and now involved all the men. The talk around the campfire grew more subdued and more graphically violent, as the men enjoyed frightening each other with every atrocious tale in memory.

Christina still existed in a strange, unreal place peopled on the one hand with unfamiliar men who talked of death, and on the other with only-too-recognizable faces which enacted the same scenes over and over again. Only Penny remained a constant in both worlds.

Angel Manzanal was sinking into despair. What if an attack came, and they were defeated? Who would then gain possession of the treasure he guarded - a wild Indian, a stinking bandit or yet another barbaric American? Would he be dead then, or would he be forced to watch them take her, right in front of him? Would she call out his name - would she beg him to help her? Madré de Dios, what could he do?

He should have hired more men. He should have waited to hire better men. He should have taken Christiana to Havana, and married her there, and sat out the war with her.

He should take her himself, right now, before anyone else had a chance to do it. He deserved to have her; he should die with memory of taking her fresh on his mind. He would die happily then, if only he had pleasured her hand before. And she . . . would have her memories of him to sustain her, no matter what occurred next.

If only, by the grace of God, his dear mother would have lived to have been presented to Christina, her new daughter-in-law . . . if only Santa Anna had ever once presumed to call him “cousin” . . .

Angel’s thoughts grew so hysterical he was forced to nurse his flask of tequila as he rode, eyes fixed on an oblivious, erect Christina. Hid mind began to lay plans.

*

Angel’s men asked questions at a small village which had grown up around a trickling creek oasis.

Si, some men were here recently. They stayed two nights and bought six chickens. No, they were not American soldiers, although one or two of them probably were American. There were Indians among them, too, probably half-breeds. Si, they carried many guns. No, they could not be identified. When they left they rode south.

The news was dismaying. A party of bandits, then. Or guerillas, of either side, little more than bandits. And where were they now?

Camped near the village, eating three purchased chickens and a quantity of tortillas with spicy chili, Manzanal conferred with the men. The big question concerned which direction to move in next. South was out. Should they head west for a while, gradually turning south, and finally east, toward the coast? But Cerralvo and Monterey were west, both towns crawling with Americans. That was far too risky. And to go east now would put them too close to Matamoros. To move backwards was foolish. To stay here, for a few days . . . perhaps that was the answer. Prepare a defense, just in case the bandits turned around. Surprise them with a hot welcome should they return.