Deep Purple (2 page)

She was well aware of the physical aspects of the male body through her work at the hospital, but of man
’s baser needs she was totally ignorant. She quickened her steps around the amorous couple only to find a hand suddenly at her wrist. Her bowed head jerked up to encounter dark, slumberous eyes in a beard-stubbled, mustached face. The disgusting fumes of alcohol and a woman’s cheap cologne washed over her.

“
Hey!” the slurred voice demanded, “You that spinster teacher I’m supposed to haul back to Cristo Rey?” The eyes blinked in an effort to focus, and she shrank as far away as the young man’s grip permitted. “Coward—-no, Howard, that’s it, isn’t it!” He executed a clumsy half-bow. “Be with you in a minute, Miss Coward—er. Miss Howard.”

“
Please, there’s no hurry," she managed to reply and sped down the hall toward the bathroom with the couple’s intimate laughter echoing in her ears.

CHAPTER 3

“
S
orry 'bout this morning, ma’am,” Lorenzo Davalos said, keeping his gaze trained on the greasewood-stunted terrain that was crisscrossed by wagon tracks.

Catherine lifted one dubious brow, wondering if the man was sorry for his drunken behavior before her that morning or the aftereffects of the carousing night. She could a
lmost believe Don Francisco’s stepson was referring to the latter, for his bloodshot eyes looked out of a bronzed face made a temporary pasty-white. She had to smile despite her vexation with the young man. “It must be a magnificent hangover.”

The man, who
m she estimated to be about five years younger than she, maybe twenty-one or so, winced as the buckboard he drove jarred over lava rock. “Murderous is more like it.”

After the two-day journey on the stage and no sleep, she decided she probably felt little
better than her escort, certainly as stiff as the giant saguaro cacti that stood against the rim of mountains—the Santa Ritas, Dragoons, and Huachucas, names that made a beautiful litany.

She realized she no doubt looked every inch the spinsterish schoolma
rm the young man had so ungallantly labeled her . . . the starched white linen waist and somber navy-blue alpaca jacket and skirt, the bland little bonnet that perched like some drab wren on her tightly bound hair.

However, Lorenzo Davalos looked none too
appealing either. For a man of so few years, he appeared to already be squint-eyed and saddle-hardened. Muffled in a serape that petty much hid his long wiry figure, he hunched over the wagon’s lines, saying as little as possible. A sweat-stained sombrero with a snake of silver bullion about its crown slouched low on his head, shading lazy eyes the color of molasses in a rough-cut face that resembled a relief map. An aristocratic nose—the one redeemable feature about the disreputable-looking man—jutted over the drooping mustache.

With his butter-colored hair that curled riotously beneath the sombrero it was almost impossible for her to accept that he was a Mexican of pure Spanish lineage
—and heir to the much coveted Cristo Rey.

“
Don’t have too much to recommend me to a proper Easterner, do I?” he said, flicking her an amused glance.

He had caught her studying him! She blushed and quickly looked away. “
I suppose I am more accustomed to a different mode of people, but then that is why I came west.”

“
Why?” he asked between teeth clamped on a noxious cigarette butt as his eyes squinted against the glare of the late afternoon sun. “Why did you come west?”

To find a husband? To live? One simply did not confess such preposterous reasons. “
Why, I suppose like everyone else who comes to the territory, Mr. Davalos—for adventure.”

The young man
’s laughter was short. His gaze now appraised her, swiftly and, she was sure, accurately. Once again color flooded her face, for she knew he had stripped her bare with those eyes that did not seem to miss a thing just as surely as if he had actually removed her clothing piece by piece. And he had no doubt found her lacking—certainly in comparison to the voluptuous woman whose charms he had most likely sampled the night before.

“
You’ll find it different out here, all right, ma’am. Can’t say as how adventuresome you might call it. Lucy, my sister-in-law, finds the territory . . . ‘crude and boring,’ I think she puts it.”

Was he challenging her? “
I’m quite flexible, Mr. Davalos. I assure you I will adjust.”

He only nodded his head, and she had the suspicion he doubted her. When he returned his attention to the mules, she felt like a pinned butterfly suddenly released
—or moth, to be more appropriate, she thought dryly.

She tried to c
oncentrate on the route they were taking, but there seemed to be no clearly defined road. The first and only landmark she noted after leaving Tucson was the abandoned Butterfield Overland Stage station at a place Lorenzo Davalos called Cienega Springs. The station’s adobe walls were in ruins and the exposed ceiling timbers had been charred and scorched by flaming arrows.

They stopped long enough at the springs to water the mules. Her escort knelt before the brackish-looking water and dipped his sombrero int
o it. Rising, he came to stand over her. “Want some?”

She saw the sparkle in the brown eyes and knew once again he was testing her mettle. She took the proffered dirt-stained sombrero. "Most certainly, Mr. Davalos.”

“Law,” he said, smiling wickedly. “Call me Law. Lawrence or Lorenzo is too much of a mouthful.”

“
Law,” she said, trying the name of her lips. "I can’t say that I have ever heard of a more inappropriate name.”

A full, genuine laugh tumbled out of the raffish-looking young man. She felt him studyi
ng her as she sipped the water, which was surprisingly cool and sweet, from the sombrero’s crown. “You know, Miss Howard, you’re not so bad for a bluestocking,” he said in what was almost a compliment.

The respite over, she once again joined Law at the wag
on, avoiding his proffered hand to help her mount.  “As you will,” he chuckled.

He turned due south then, following the Cienega Wash through the lava-chopped Empire foothills. It was difficult for Catherine to imagine that somewhere in the craggy, barren b
lack hills beyond lay the lush pastoral valley of Cristo Rey. But then she had learned that beneath the clear bright-white sky distances could be deceptive.

Just as deceptive as the tranquility of the late afternoon, for she had heard too many tales from O
gilvee of the fierce warriors, the Chiricahua Apaches, who terrorized the area. She found it inconceivable that citizens actually did walk around armed twenty- hour hours a day against the Indians. Yet slung low on Law’s hips were a brace of Navy Colts, and balanced against the wooden seat was a lethal-looking carbine rifle.

After a while she discovered that the quiet of the landscape was deceptive also. For with the man obviously disinclined to conversation, she began to pick up sounds peculiar to the area
— the sighing of the heated breeze through the eroded
bajadas
and the rustle of the horse-high chaparral as a black chuckwalla lizard scampered beneath its thorny branches for shelter. And once there came the deadly rattle of the diamondback when the wagon’s mules passed too closely.

Then, almost abruptly it seemed, there was a dramatic shift in scenery, from bone-dry cholla wasteland to a sea of knee-high sacaton grass, brown and withered from the shortened winter days. Gradually, as the wash deepened, thi
ckly wooded forests of willow and cottonwoods rose to border it. Mountains, the Whetstones on the left and the Santa Ritas on the right, marched closer now.

When the road suddenly emerged from a narrow shady pass, the sun poured down upon the far reaches o
f a gigantic basin undulating with hills and enclosed by a ring of lofty peaks. This circular basin with its grassy meadows and oak-clad slopes that concealed canyon after canyon contained the core of Cristo Rey’s fifty thousand acres.

After traveling acro
ss the raw creosote desert and then the jagged ugly lava hills for five hours—five hours of being impressed by nature’s dominance that made mere man seem inconsequential—Catherine was not prepared for her first sight of the Stronghold, nor was she ever able to forget it.

The fortress stood alone in the great basin, competing against the mountains for magnificence. Even at that distance the Stronghold was enormous. Surrounded by walls that bastioned a grassy rise, the house itself, an adobe built in the flat
-roof Mexican territorial style, looked impregnable. Atop the roof tiny figures paced a parapet—guards, she later learned they were.

Clustered about the great house, like petals about a stem, were the corrals and outbuildings. Outside the big fortress wall
s a
rancheria
of adobe huts nestled among feathery tamarisk and black locusts that fanned out from the Cienega—from Catherine’s viewpoint, a thin blue thread that laced the grassy valley.

“
After the disappointment of Tucson, I was half dreading the sight of Cristo Rey,” she said slowly. “But your stepfather’s description hasn’t disappointed me.”

“
Cristo Rey isn’t the largest land grant in the territory,” Law answered, the reins slack in his hands as he paused to let Catherine survey the view. “But it’s the richest. It’s watered by two great rivers, the San Pedro and the Santa Cruz. And its soil is veined with gold and silver.”

She looked up into the young man
’s face that was shadowed by the hat brim. “It sounds as if you love it—Cristo Rey.”

“
No, ma’am. I leave that to my stepbrother. I just have great respect for the land.”

He flicked the reins, and the mules began the gradual, twisting descent down into the basin, passing herds of black-horned cattle
—remnants, he explained to her, of the herds brought up from Mexico by the Jesuit missionary Father Kino. “But Sherrod’s trying to persuade the old man to bring in the white-faced Herefords.”

“
Sherrod?”

“
My stepbrother.”

Yes, now she recalled name.

“It’s his children you’ll be tutoring.”

“
Oh, then you don’t have any?”

“
Not that I am aware of, ma’am, seeing how I’m not hitched and all.” Had one comer of his mouth not tilted in a crooked smile, she would never have known he was toying with her. “We’re two of a kind, aren’t we, ma'am?”

“
Misfits, Mr. Davalos?” she retorted, smiling.

“
Law,” he reminded her.

The clanging of a bell reached them, and he informed her that the lookouts posted had marked their arrival. They passed orchards of pomegranate and peach trees now. “
Incredible,” she murmured. “After the desert, all the vegetation seems a mirage.”

“
It’s real enough. Sherrod’s peons put in too much backbreaking labor digging the
acequia
s—irrigation ditches,” he translated in a deep lazy drawl that she decided was most pleasant and so did not bother to correct his misconception that she knew no Spanish.

As the wagon bumped down the rutted road through the
rancheria
, terra-cotta children halted their play in the dirt before curtained doorways and scrawny chickens scurried from the wagon’s wheels. A leather-aproned Mexican stepped out of the smithy, and a wizened brown woman looked up from her washboard to watch the wagon’s progress. The men in the fields who carried rifles slung on their plow handles halted their work as the wagon passed by.

Law drove the mules betw
een the fortress’s two great wooden doors, and Catherine inspected the place where she would live for a year. The dusty yard was bustling with men practicing with firearms – Indian drills. Law told her – and vaqueros working about the nearer of several adobe corrals.

Up close the adobe building was even more formidable, and the rifle-toting guards circling the roofs perimeter intensified the imagery of a bastion. Near the large, hand-carved door a cast-iron bell hung from a wooden frame. Unpainted, the hous
e stood alone with no veranda, no large windows to adorn it—unless the small wood-spindled apertures could be counted as such. Yet there was about the great house, she decided, an aura of strength. It imparted the illusion of having triumphed over the elements, over man and nature.

Could it triumph over the ravages of time and loneliness?

CHAPTER 4

A
t the same time a Mexican youth ran forward to take the reins Law tossed him, a woman appeared in the doorway of the house, then turned back to call out to someone inside. “Lucy,” Law informed Catherine. “She’s been anxious to talk with a real Easterner. You’ll meet the rest of the clan soon enough.”

His reference to the clan reminded her of the rumored Mormon background. “
I understand Don Francisco is of the Mormon faith,” she said, attempting to keep her tone noncommittal.

“
You understand right—two wives and the whole bit, though my mother’s been dead for some years now.”

His voice was coldly emotionless, and she cast a quick but scrutinizing glance at the man as he came around to her side of the wagon. The swarthy complexion
—and definitely the drooping sand-colored mustache—lent the young man a feral appearance. A renegade, Margaret would have called him with a sniff.

“
That’s Sherrod’s mother, Elizabeth, at the door with Lucy,” he said with an easy drawl that had the soft resonance of the Spanish tongue.

Cather
ine’s gaze went back to the two women. The younger woman with cornsilk hair bound in fashionable waves about her oval face lifted her hoopless skirts and hurried toward them. “Law,” she cried out in a kewpie-doll voice, “you really did bring her!”

Law
’s rangy leanness was deceiving, and he lifted Catherine effortlessly from the wagon and delivered her a ‘got you’ glance while Lucy rambled on. “Gracious, we were so afraid you wouldn’t accept Don Francisco’s offer, Miss Howard. Your reply didn’t come until four days ago.”

“
I mailed it back in August,” Catherine said as Law released her and picked up her carpetbag.

“
The mail service in the territory has been almost shut down,” he explained, “what with Fort Buchanan’s troops withdrawn to serve in the war’s Eastern campaigns and Cochise’s Apaches thinking they’ve won some sort of victory.”

A stiff-backed woman in black now approached them. “
Law, let the young woman get out of the sun.” Her stone-gray eyes turned on Catherine. “The men forget their manners, living out here away from civilization like we do.”

Illogically, the diminutive older woman seemed to Catherine as formidable as the Stronghold. Her iron-gray hair was pulled severely back in a bun, and her leathery face wore the look of granite . . . surely
the type of pioneer woman Walt Whitman had written about. Yet she moved with all the regal stateliness her Elizabethan name implied. A queen in her castle, Catherine thought.

Law called out an order in Spanish, and two Mexican urchins ran out of the house
to heft her heavy camelback trunk. Elizabeth led her through the house’s wooden-linteled door past the
zaguán
, the breeze way, into the main room on the left.

Catherine
’s first impression of the interior was one of cool shadows—three-foot-thick walls and high ceilings braced by hand-carved
vigas
of pine darkened by smoke and age and crossed at right angles by
savinas
made of ocotillo stalks A smooth, hard floor that she learned was mud mixed with ox blood and cactus juice was covered with several Axminster carpets, and the walls, plastered with laundry bluing, were sparsely decorated with Indian baskets.

A caliche fireplace dominated the room and seemed to be courted by the simple but sturdy furniture grouped about it. The framed painting above the fireplac
e caught her eye. A fair-eyed, golden-complected woman of Madonna-like beauty looked down out of the canvas, her lips forming a gentle smile. Jewelry sparkled at her ears and throat and in the comb that piled high her golden tresses. “Law’s mother,” Elizabeth said, her voice dry like the crackling of autumn leaves.

Law was already striding from the room with Catherine
’s carpetbag, and children’s shouts rang out from the rooms beyond. “Uncle Law’s back!” a boyish voice squealed. And Catherine heard something about candy, then Law’s patient drawl, “Yes, I brought the licorice.”

“
You’ll probably want to wash up and rest,” Elizabeth said, “then my husband will want to talk with you.”

“
I’ll show Miss Howard to her room,” Lucy volunteered. “I’m sure it’s nothing like what you must be used to,” she said as she led Catherine through the
zaguán
and out into a walled, tree-shaded courtyard paved with uneven cobblestones and surrounded on three sides by tiers of open corridors. “Why, it took me years to get used to rooms that were              almost windowless! In Virginia we              had such big bay windows.              Finally, I badgered Sherrod so, he promised me he would have glass panes, not mica mind you, but real glass, freighted in from Kansas City this coming year.”

They passed along the stucco-covered portico that had a number of bedrooms opening off it. Lucy prattled on, hesitating only long enough for Catherine to assure her that the cage crinoline was still in fashion.

“I do so miss following the modes,” she continued. “I’ve heard that the women in the States are wearing—Zouave jackets, isn’t it? And Balmoral mantles. As soon as you get settled, you must tell me all the society gossip. I’m so tired of listening to talk of the war and Indian raids!”

At
last Catherine stood alone in her own room. Actually Dona Dominica’s room, Lucy told her. Slowly she stripped off her gloves as she surveyed the furnishings. Austere was the word that came to mind. And scrubbed cleanliness. A substantial bed stood in one comer with a neat patchwork counterpane. Tacked from the ceiling over the bed, as if it had been a four-poster, were manta curtains. Tin
retablos
, religious paintings, adorned the walls. A pine washstand and bureau and hardback cane chair were the only other pieces of furniture in the spacious room.

Yet there was a peacefulness about the room
—and it was her room, as Don Francisco had promised. Too exhausted to remove her kid boots, she settled for discarding her hat and jacket before she fell across the bed. Later she would hang up the clothes she had packed away in camphor in her trunk.

A strange loneliness kept her awake. She had deliberately cut herself off from all family and friends. She was wholly alone in the world with her way to make. A terrible sens
e of uncertainty lapped like cold ripples at her feet. At last her lids closed, but voices, that were not so loud as they were harsh, awoke her. She opened her eyes to find that only a faint light now streamed through the foot-square aperture that served as a window.

Afraid she was late, she quickly poured the pitcher
’s tepid water in the porcelain basin and washed her dusty face, then tucked the wisps of hair into the heavy knot at the nape of her neck. She was fastening her jacket’s buttons as she hurried outside and not really looking where she was going when the door of the room next to hers opened and slammed shut and she collided with the man who emerged from the room.

She staggered, and firm hands reached out to steady her. “
I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking—” they both began in unison and broke off, smiling.

“
You must be Miss Howard,” he said, releasing her.

“
And you are—”

'“
Sherrod—Sherrod Godwin,” he finished for her.

Though not as tall as his stepbrother, he still topped Catherine
’s five-foot-three-inch frame by almost a foot. Even in the dimming daylight his darkly handsome looks were evident, with deep-brown hair and sideburns and a well-trimmed mustache only a shade lighter.

“
I can’t tell you how much Lucy”— he looked awkwardly toward the door—“how excited she is that another woman her age is here. She’s getting ready for dinner, but come on with me. The children are asking all sorts of questions about you—and Father, of course, is demanding to see you.”

As he led her inside, he recounted the reactions
of the children to the idea of a woman tutor—from seven-year-old Abigail’s certainty that Catherine would wear men’s trousers to five-year- old Brigham’s disgust that the tutor had to be a woman.

Yet Catherine only half listened to Sherrod
’s voice. The voice in her head drummed much louder. She was much too intelligent, her mind warned, to let herself become attracted to the handsome man—and indeed he was handsome, dressed in nankeens and buff waistcoat. She had half expected him to dress with the same negligence as his stepbrother.

He ushered her past the large dining room and through the enormous kitchen that had copper utensils and clay
ollas
strung from the ceiling’s beams. An old Papago Indian looked up from the bread he kneaded and nodded when Sherrod made the introduction, telling her Loco had been at Cristo Rey for over twenty years.

Sherrod paused before his father
’s office, his hand on the door handle. “I don’t suppose my father told you anything about himself?”

She shook her head. “
No. He told me very little about anything. ’’

He sighed. “
That’s like my father. He suffered a stroke last year, and it has left him weakened. As a result he's rather edgy, but don’t let his gruffness frighten you.”

“
There’s very little that frightens me any more, Mr. Godwin, and certainly not mortal man."

He cocked his head. His warm blue eyes quietly appraised her. “
I can believe that," he said at last. He smiled then and opened the door but did not enter, leaving her on her own.

She paused with h
er back to the closed door, while her gaze sought out the old man clad in black. He sat in a cushioned rocker with a book spread on his lap and a cane hooked over the chair’s arm. He raised his head and fixed her with an equally studious gaze. Whatever she expected from the narrow face framed by a long bone-white beard, it was certainly not the torment that stared out of the shadowed eyes.

“
Come in and sit down,” Don Francisco rasped and indicated the scrolled hard-backed chair near the secretarial desk.

Sh
e took a seat on the chair’s edge, arranging her voluminous skirts as best she could. After a moment the old man said, “Your face possesses the same character your letter indicated.”

“
I hope that is a compliment, Don Francisco.”

“
It’s a sigh of relief, Miss Howard.”

She raised a questioning brow, but he did not elaborate further. He closed the heavy book. “
The Mormon’s Doctrine and Covenant
,” he said, catching her interested glance at the tome. For the first time he smiled, a bitter smile. “In my more robust days I often strayed from Joseph Smith’s revelations, and I suppose a brush with death has brought me back into the fold again.”

Was he speaking of his stroke, or the death that had claimed his second wife? “
A brush with death cannot help but affect one’s outlook on life,” she said, fully appreciating the man’s situation. “Tell me how else I can be of help.”

The door opened, and Elizabeth came in, closing it behind her. “
I was just beginning to tell Miss Howard of her duties here, Elizabeth.”

He struggled
to lay the book on the desk, and the woman took it and placed it there for him. Locking her hands before her, she turned to Catherine. “What my husband probably has not told you is that we brought you out here to be more than just a tutor.”

“
Oh?”

“
First there’s Abigail and Brigham. Sherrod’s wife has had a smattering of education, if you consider those silly finishing schools that teach music and needlepoint an education. But the woman doesn’t have a lick of common sense. I wouldn’t trust her to teach Brigham what he will need to know to run Cristo Rey.”

“
Of course, when he's older,” Don Francisco said tiredly, “he'll be sent off to St. Michael's boarding school in St. Louis, as were Sherrod and Law.”

Catherine relaxed a little. So far the objectives did no
t seem beyond her capabilities. “Then there’s Sherrod," Elizabeth continued crisply. “He’s carrying a heavy burden running Cristo Rey since my husband’s stroke. Sherrod needs to devote his total attention to the place—and Lucy doesn’t understand.”

“
Elizabeth, you’re being unnecessarily harsh on Lucy,” Don Francisco rebuked. “She’s lonely and misses civilization.”

Elizabeth
’s lips folded thin. “She doesn’t have the stamina— the strength—to live out here. A crying, whining woman is a millstone my son doesn’t need. Lucy has to have another woman to talk to—about the finer things of life. I want you to be her companion, Miss Howard.”

“
I see. That takes care of everyone but Law-—Lorenzo—then, doesn’t it?”

“
Law,” Elizabeth said grimly, “can take care of himself.”