Читать книгу San Antone - V. J. Banis - Страница 9

Chapter Three

Lewis had not forgotten his scheme, nor changed his mind about it. On the contrary, he had acted with a resolution and dispatch rare for him.

Carts, drays, wagons—every possible type of vehicle that could be used for transporting their belongings—were purchased or ordered built, and an incredible herd of horses and oxen to pull them rounded up in makeshift stables at Eaton Hall.

Within a fortnight, Joanna had watched their fine china, their elegant crystal and porcelain carefully packed into barrels filled with sawdust. Chandeliers were taken down and packed, furniture was crated. Even the elaborately carved mantelpieces, the doors, the inlaid floors went, until there was nothing left but the empty shell of what had once been their splendid home.

As nearly as possible, Eaton Hall was to be lifted up from one place and set down in another, virtually intact.

Such a move was not accomplished overnight. It was nearly a year later that Joanna stood on the deck of the schooner Nancy and watched a cutter approaching from the port of Galveston. The city itself, on its sandy island, lay in the distance, shimmering in the afternoon heat.

The immense caravan that had been assembled to transport their home and furnishings was traveling overland under the management of their overseer, Campbell. The family, with their personal belongings and the household slaves, had made the trip by sea, sailing from Charleston through the Florida keys and up the Gulf of Mexico.

A long trip. Joanna, eager to be on land again, was impatient with the delays. The children, even the enthusiastic Jay Jay, had grown quarrelsome. The slaves, when they weren’t moaning and retching from seasickness, sang hymns and prayed loudly for safe delivery.

As for Lewis, he had astonished Joanna with the industry he had displayed in arranging their move. He had remained sober for weeks at a time and, charged with the thrill of his vision, had seemed altogether a changed man.

It had made Joanna view what lay before them with more optimism. Perhaps after all a new life, a new land were the cure not only for her husband’s dissolution but for their marriage as well, and she had primed herself to put the best face on things. She had begun to think perhaps she had judged him unfairly.

The transformation in him had lasted until they were at sea. Inactivity had undone it. Bored and restless, he had soon begun relieving his impatience in drink. It was no time at all before he was making nightly visits to the open deck where the slaves slept. In the past week, that had been very nearly the only effort he made to rouse himself from the hammock in which he slept and drank.

There was a bumping and scraping as the cutter came alongside. From the quarterdeck, Joanna watched a trio of men come aboard. Two of them had the air of bureaucracy about them: the harbormaster and the customs officer, she supposed; the captain had explained that they would be coming aboard.

It was the third man, however, who captured her attention, and not only because he was in the uniform of the U.S. Army.

He was tall, so tall that he dwarfed the others. He removed his hat to run his fingers through a shock of dark, wavy hair. The hat’s brim had thrown his face in shadow; now Joanna could see the sharply chiseled features, high cheekbones, ridged brows.

He spoke to the ship’s captain, then turned in her direction.

Even at the distance, Joanna felt the intensity of his gaze, though it was on her for only a moment.

He spoke to the captain again; then the two of them came toward her.

“Mrs. Harte, may I present Lieutenant Webb Price of the United States Army,” the captain introduced them.

“Lieutenant Price,” Joanna murmured. She glanced once into eyes of an astonishingly soft blue shade, and then quickly away, looking over the rail at the water below—as if she hadn’t been seeing it for weeks on end.

“Is your husband about, Mrs. Harte?” the lieutenant asked.

Joanna saw the captain’s lips tighten involuntarily in a gesture of disapproval. Lewis’s behavior had hardly escaped the notice of the crew, and it was evident to her, if not to Lewis, what they thought of it.

“He’s in our cabin,” Joanna said. “I can fetch him for you, if you like.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll send one of the sailors,” the captain said. He barked an order that sent one of the crew scurrying below, then turned back to Joanna. “Lieutenant Price will be providing you with an escort to San Antonio.”

“Really? That’s very generous of you, lieutenant.” She allowed herself a smile; the lieutenant did not return it.

“Your husband has influential friends,” he said. His tone made it clear that the generosity of the gesture had not been his idea.

Though she had known nothing about a planned escort, Joanna was not surprised. The Hartes had been a prominent fixture in South Carolina society for several generations. With Lewis, the name had lost some of the respect in which it had once been held, but not all; even with the tensions that had mounted steadily these last few years between the North and the South, Lewis could still wield a certain amount of influence in Washington, as he had over the question of their land grant.

She wondered if that would still be true in the future. Texas was a great deal farther from Washington than South Carolina had been, and not only in miles.

It occurred to her suddenly that they had gone from being the landed gentry, the establishment, to being “settlers,” newcomers. Perhaps they would be resented by the local people, as the southern aristocracy had resented and disdained the more recent arrivals to their states.

Certainly Lieutenant Price looked none too pleased with their arrival. “We shall try not to be a bother to you,” Joanna said.

“I don’t see how a three-hundred-mile journey through a desert infested with unfriendly savages could be anything but a bother,” he replied.

Joanna blinked. “Three hundred...but, I thought we were practically there?” None of the books she had had at Eaton Hall had contained maps, nor more than the sketchiest accounts of the new state.

“Texas,” the lieutenant said, “is a large state, Mrs. Harte.”

“Ah, here comes Mr. Harte now,” the captain said.

Despite her feelings for her husband, Joanna could not help having a certain perverse admiration for him. Watching him now make his way along the deck, you would hardly know that when she’d last seen him, he had been in a drunken stupor. His rigidly controlled gait might have been nothing more than a landlubber’s adjustment to the motion of the ship’s deck.

Could the lieutenant tell? she wondered. She glanced briefly sideways at him, but it was impossible to read those expressionless features.

The captain made the introductions. “Excellent,” Lewis said, shaking the other’s hand. “We should be ready to leave in a day or so—no sense hanging around. I ordered a carriage before we left South Carolina. In the meantime, we’ll be staying with the Montgomerys, on Broadway. Maybe you know them.”

“I’m afraid you’ll find a carriage ill-suited for the journey to San Antonio,” Lieutenant Price said. “A wagon would be far better. A covered one, of course; you’ll want protection from the elements. The trip is a rugged one, and Texas weather can be a trial for those not used to it.”

“But surely it can’t take that long—a day or two....”

“Two months. A little longer.”

There was an awkward silence.

“I should add,” the lieutenant said, “there are certain dangers as well. Though of course we’ll do all we can to minimize those.”

Lewis had the look of a bewildered child—a bleary-eyed child; his face looked puffy and his hands, Joanna saw now, could not quite be kept from trembling.

She realized belatedly that her husband had caught her staring at him, and she braced herself for one of his outbursts of temper.

Instead, he said in a strained voice, “I must think of my family, of course. My wife, and my children. If you could apprise me more fully of the situation—I seem to have come ill-prepared....”

His voice trailed off. Joanna felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for him. She knew he had made an effort; she could see the effort he was making now. If it weren’t for his sickness—and it was a sickness, to her way of thinking, a sickness of the spirit; she felt that Lewis was genuinely unable to control his drinking for any length of time and, once he’d begun to drink, unable to control his other actions as well.

She had an uncomfortable thought: How much was she to blame for all that was wrong—with her husband, with their marriage, with their lives? She had done much that, surely, had driven him from her. Had she driven him from South Carolina as well?

“I think there’s a great deal we need to discuss,” Lieutenant Price was saying. “If the captain will let us use his cabin?”

“Of course,” the captain said; he hesitated briefly. “Perhaps you’d care to join us, Mrs. Harte?”

It was none too subtle, and barely short of a slap at Lewis’s competence. She would have liked very much to join them. The truth was, ignorant as she was of conditions in Texas, she was likely to be the one to have to cope with them. She knew what happened when Lewis faced disappointment, unexpected difficulties; she’d seen him run his tongue over his lips just then, as if they were parched.

But she’d seen something else as well, in his eyes, something unfamiliar and yet immediately recognizable; it had been a long time since her husband had asked anything without demanding it.

And a woman did owe her husband loyalty, didn’t she? The more so, surely, if she could not love him.

Unbidden, an image of the lieutenant’s blue eyes, like a splash of water on a warm day, came to her; she had avoided meeting them since that first, worrisome glance.

“I think not,” she said aloud. “I prefer to leave those matters in my husband’s hands. I’ll just go get the children ready. We will be going ashore soon, won’t we, captain?”

“In about an hour.” His tone was curt.

Joanna watched them go, Lewis already talking in a voice a shade too hearty, clapping the lieutenant on the back as if they were old friends.

Rugged journey. Texas weather. Dangers. It occurred to her that she was going to become, after all, one of those “pioneer women” she had admired so much. Traveling by covered wagon across a harsh wilderness, with three children to worry about....

No, she amended, trying not to succumb to the despair that suddenly threatened to engulf her—four children. And one of them was a drunkard.