Deep Purple (3 page)

CHAPTER 5

O
ne rarely heard days, weeks, or months mentioned at Cristo Rey. There were clocks in the Stronghold, but no one bothered to wind them. If a day was referred to, it was the day Loco burned the bread or Sherrod went to Tucson.

After caring for her sickly mother for so long and then listening to the agonizing groans and cries of suffering men, of smelling the putrefying stench of rotting limbs and festering wounds for a year, that first month at Cristo Rey seemed a preview of he
aven to Catherine.

January in Baltimore would have brought subzero blizzards howling through the streets, but at Cristo Rey the sun-splashed cool days and even cooler crystalline nights slipped gently into another week, another month.

She fell easily into the routine of the Stronghold, waking at six-thirty each morning when Loco rang the bell, warning that breakfast would be served in thirty minutes. The tutoring of Brigham, who was a five-year-old fountain of curiosity, and Abigail, whose preadolescent plumpness concealed the promise of her mother's beauty, took most of Catherine’s day. From eight until noon she taught the children in the courtyard, then recessed for lunch and returned to teach from one to three.

Afterward she would sit with Lucy and, mendin
g or helping with the carding of the wool, listen to the young woman’s chatter until time for dinner.

Despite having borne two children, Lucy was at twenty-seven still a very beautiful woman, and Catherine could understand how Sherrod could have fallen in
love with her. “My parents were very much against my marrying a Mormon,” she told Catherine one afternoon. “But they soon recognized Sherrod’s honorable intentions and”—Lucy smiled—“his charming manner.”

“
Does it ever bother you," Catherine ventured, “that Sherrod could take a second—or third—wife?”

The clicking of Lucy
’s needles halted. A small nervous smile flitted across her porcelain face. “You know how it is when a woman gets married. At first you’re too much in love to care. And now . . . now another wife would be nice to help share some of the—duties of a wife to a husband.”

Catherine could not conceal the surprise on her face, and Lucy laughed. Her needles began darting back and forth in rapid flashes. “
Oh, I know what you must be thinking, Catherine. Honestly, I felt the same way when I first came to the Stronghold and watched how Dona Dominica and Elizabeth attended to Don Francisco.”

An impish voice in Catherine dared her to ask what it was like, but instead she said, “
I understand Dona Dominica was at the Stronghold to begin with—that she was a widow.”

“
Yes. Law’s father had been killed in an Indian attack several months before she met Don Francisco. Sherrod told me that his father came out here in '48 with a Mormon battalion that was on its way to fight the Mexicans in California. After the Mormons took possession of Tucson from the Mexican forces, Don Francisco decided to stay. He sent to Santa Fe for Sherrod and Elizabeth, and, as Sherrod tells me, by the time he and his mother reached Tucson his father had taken Dona Dominica as his second wife.”

Once more Lucy paused in her knitting to smile wistfully. “
You know, Catherine, Mormon wives call each other ‘sister.’ I’d love to be able to call you my sister, truly. It’s so wonderful to have you here I hate to think of your leaving one day.” Stunned at Lucy's frankness, she could say nothing. Only at that moment did she allow herself to fantasize being married to Sherrod. He would have made the kind of husband she had always dreamed of—warm, intelligent, responsible. “It pleases me that you care enough to want me as—your sister. But Lucy, I’ve waited this long to marry, so you may be sure that if I ever do, I’ll be the only wife or I simply won’t marry.”

“
But what of duty, Miss Howard?” Elizabeth’s voice asked from behind the two women.

Turning to look at Elizabeth, dressed as always in black, Catherine dryly wondered if the woman was in mourning for her lost youth. Lucy had told her that Elizabeth was forty-four. But the woman looked years older.

“From so many hours tending farm crops," Lucy had told her. "And then when the Mormon persecution began in Illinois, Elizabeth made that long walk with Don Francisco and Sherrod and the other Mormons bound for Santa Fe. And you know, Catherine, so much exposure to the sun is not good for a lady’s skin.”

"You certainly seem to be a most practical woman, Miss Howard,”
Elizabeth was saying. "You’re not silly enough to think romance is a lasting thing. If your husband took himself another wife, I’m sure you would see that it was your duty to make the best of it so that everything ran smoothly.”

The corners of Catherine
’s lips curled uncontrollably. “I’d see that it was my duty to keep my husband so happy he would not think of taking another wife in the first place.”

Elizabeth's smile was thin. “
You speak as an unmarried and inexperienced woman, Miss Howard . . . foolishly, unwisely. My daughter-in-law will tell you that a wife knows that it is not always possible to—please a husband.”

Lucy blanched and was inordinatel
y quiet after Elizabeth left the room. The woman’s words recalled a conversation Catherine had overheard the first week she was at Cristo Rey. An argument it was really, and only a few words—but revealing words. “What?” Don Francisco had thundered. “You gave Miss Howard Dominica’s room? I ordered you to leave that room untouched!”

“
Isn’t it time you stopped keeping that room as a shrine?!” Elizabeth had hissed.

Catherine had hurried on past Don Francisco
’s office. Don Francisco was still in love with his second wife!

The day after Elizabeth's stinging rebuke to Lucy and herself, Catherine went to Don Francisco's office in hopes of finding an extra dictionary for Abigail Once again she could hear the old man arguing. His diatribe was cut short when he bade he
r enter after her hesitant knock on the office door.

Law was slouched in the armchair across from Don Francisco's desk while the old man limped about the room, still raging. “
It’s all right,” Don Francisco told her. He waved his cane in Law’s direction. “I was just telling this rakehell if he'd spend less time in bordellos and saloons, he might make something of his life!”

A suppression of a smile hovered over Law
’s mouth, as if he were indulging his stepfather’s outrage. It was the first time Catherine had seen Law in more than two weeks. Out of the three months she had lived at Cristo Rey, she could count on her hand the number of times her path crossed his, which was fine with her. There was something about the mocking way the young man looked at her—as though . . . as though he found something about her amusing!

He smiled sheepishly at her now. “
Don Francisco and I can’t seem to agree just exactly what I should do with my life.”

She smiled sweetly. “
Why, I'd send the boy back to school, Don Francisco.” Before her statement could be challenged, she quickly borrowed the dictionary and retreated from the room’s verbal battleground.

When she returned to the courtyard, another battle was in progress between Abigail and Brigham. “
He does not!” Brigham shrieked. Catherine caught him just as he picked up a chinaberry to hurl at his sister.

“
What’s this all about?" Catherine demanded.

Tears spiked Brigham's long lashes. “
Abigail,” he said tremulously, pointing to his sister, who stood at the wrought-iron gate leading out into the compound, “Abigail says cowpunchers are sissies . . . that they like girls!”

Abigail turned from the gate back to Catherine. “
I did not,” she said in an adult voice. “I merely told Brig that one of the cowpunchers has been making calf eyes at you. There—see, he’s coming back to the stables again—and it’s just to get a glimpse of you, Miss Howard.”

Catherine wanted to laugh, but she smoothed the dark-brown h
air back from Brigham’s small, serious face. “You know, Brigham,” she said in a solemn tone, “just because a cowboy—”

“
Cowpuncher,” he corrected.

“—
cowpuncher likes to look at something nice doesn’t mean he’s a sissy. Don’t you like to look at tintypes of the pretty steamboats I showed you? But that doesn’t make you a sissy, does it?”

Mollified, Brigham at last returned to the letters he had been copying on his slate, and Abigail settled down to her geography.

Catherine knew that the perceptive Abigail was no doubt correct. With the stables sharing the far courtyard wall, there was ample opportunity for the Cristo Rey hands to glance through the gate. Several times she had looked up to find one of the hands standing near the gate—but always studiously engaged with tightening a saddle’s cinch or checking a horse’s shoe. If she happened to catch him spying, the hand would usually tip his hat and saunter off.

Admittedly she wanted a husband. Too quickly she would be thirty! But the hands were either all stringy,
work-hardened old men or youths with peach fuzz still on their faces. An inexperienced youth was not what she wanted. And she certainly did not want someone like Law, an aimless, willy-nilly sort of a man, with none of Sherrod’s strong-willed nature.

Sher
rod was absent from the Stronghold almost as often as Law. She knew he quite often rode the herds with his vaqueros, and when he was home he would more than likely be found drilling his guards or closeted in Don Francisco’s office.

In the evenings the enti
re family came together for dinner, presided over by Don Francisco, who always asked the Lord’s blessing. But afterward, when the family adjourned to the parlor, it would be Sherrod’s animated personality that dominated the conversation. Catherine would sit in the chair nearest the fireplace and listen to the affectionate banter between Don Francisco and his son while she sipped at the Mexican chocolate Loco served, for Don Francisco allowed neither coffee nor tea in that Mormon household.

She delighted in
these after-dinner family get-togethers, because often guests came, as there was no place in the area to stay except at the Stronghold. The first week in April Don Francisco hosted a Jonathan Stridehope. A balding but nice-looking man of perhaps forty, he was an archaeologist who was working on a dig in the nearby Canyon de Canelo.

The articulate Stridehope talked of artifacts he had discovered in the canyon
’s cave. Brigham was entranced when he learned that among the artifacts were several mummies and followed up with numerous questions.

At one point Catherine asked,
‘‘These mummies, Professor Stridehope—were they found in the same layers as the handmade rope shoes and broken pottery?”

‘‘
You’re familiar with the theory of stratigraphy?” he asked, surprise wrinkling his high brow.

‘‘
Only slightly. I’ve read some of the work of the Danish archaeologist Thomsen.”

The man
’s serious eyes came to life. He began to talk volubly with her before the two of them became embarrassingly aware they were monopolizing the conversation. She broke off to find the eyes of all the Godwins on her. Yet it was the warmth in Sherrod's that made her color. She glanced at Lucy, but the young woman seemed in a world of her own. Quickly Catherine excused herself and retired for the evening.

Sherrod was not to let her forget the incident so easily. He came to the courtyard the next day after school resumed at one. She was sitting on the bench next to Brigham, showing the boy how to write the cursive flourishes on the slate, when she heard
Abigail call out, “Papa!”

Catherine looked up to find the handsome man, dressed in shirt sleeves, coming toward her. He bent to scoop up his daughter, who had flung herself against his waist. Brushing her long pigtails behind her shoulders, he kissed her
lightly on the cheek before turning her loose. “Good afternoon. Miss Howard. I hope Abigail has been applying herself.”

“
She’s doing very well with her geography. She seems to have a knack for the European countries. If only she did as well with her French and history, I'm quite certain you would have a world traveler on your hands.”

His mouth widened in a rueful smile. “
I’m afraid she gets her love of Europe from her mother. Lucy has always wanted to visit all its capitals, and I’ve promised her as soon as the war is over and the Apache problem under control we’ll take off and tour the Continent.”

“
Is there much danger of an attack on the Stronghold?”

“
Not likely. My vaqueros ride guard constantly. Cochise seems to be concentrating more on the lone miners and defenseless settlers. We'd be more apt to be raided by a band of Mexican revolutionaries that plague some of our border ranches. ” With Catherine’s attention diverted, Abigail and Brigham escaped the routine of their studies and began to chase about the courtyard’s trees. Intending to call the children back to class, Catherine made to rise and found herself hampered by her gabardine skirts.

“
Here, let me help you,” Sherrod said. His hand caught her elbow, propelling her upward, which was a mistake, because it put her within inches of his face, so close the scent of his men’s lilac cologne reached her. Her heart seemed to flutter, as if teetering precariously on a limb, then double-beat to catch balance.