San Antone. V. J. Banis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ