Free LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) by Parris Afton Bonds Page B

know that what she was doing for the South was right.
     
     
    Cristobal flipped the coins on the table and led Jeanette out of the coffeehouse. No doubt a lot of tongues would waggle the next day about her outing with Cristobal. Which was just what she hoped for. A frivolous, flirtatious young woman would scarcely be suspected of running cotton.
    They stopped by Portilla Pena ’s Book Shop to pick up a volume of Poe’s poetry for Aunt Hermione. But when they were ready to leave, she impulsively said, “Let’s ride out to Boca Chica. They say oysters can be had by wading knee deep in the ocean and picking them up.”
    “ What?” he quipped. “You’d bare your feet like a child?”
    The idea sounded wonderful. “ No. But you could.”
    “ But, Jen,” he drawled, “why go to the effort of searching for the cursed clams—”
    “ Oysters.”
    “— when you can purchase them at Market Hall for little or nothing?”
    She flashed him a withering look and mounted her bay without waiting for his assistance. She rode sidesaddle this time, properly dressed in her sable-brown riding habit — veil, gloves, and all. Cristobal was no less costumed in a camel-colored riding jacket with britches of Bedford cord and Napoleon boots.
    The two of them cantered out of the city along the River Road. It was a mistake. As they came to the outskirts, soldiers could be seen bathing in the river. Every so often, caught in the unsuspected underc urrents, someone drowned. She hurried her bay on past the patches of brush and palmetto and did not slow the mount down until the Palo Alto Prairie, a vast, level grass-covered plain, came into view. Here and there they passed small ranchos with fences made of brush, for there was no timber.
    The muted slap of water against sand and salted breeze warned of the ocean ’s proximity. Then the wide sweep of the ocean suddenly lay before the two riders. Cristobal helped Jeanette dismount. “Let’s walk,” he said.
    She fell into step beside him. They strolled in comfortable silence, the only sound the swashing of the surf and the crunching of their boots on the hard-packed sand. She wondered what went on behind Cristobal’s mild eyes. What did a vacuous person such as he think about? Armand would have told—
    As if picking up on her thoughts, Cristobal said, “ You’ve never talked about Armand, Jen. Are you over his death?”
    How callous. “ No.” The sun was hot, and she longed to remove her jacket and hat, her gloves and shoes. To let the salty wind tangle her hair and to dig her toes in the warm sand. But etiquette forbade it.
    Cristobal bent and picked up a smoothly worn seashell. “ You don’t like to think about it, then?”
    “ There is nothing to think about.” Except her bitter sense of wrong. How did one tell a person that he was occupying space, breathing air better meant for someone else?
    “ Will you remove that deuced top hat, Jen? The veil keeps flapping in my face like a swarm of angry mosquitoes.”
    She laughed then and gladly acc ommodated his request. At least Cristobal never conformed to convention.
    The sand was washed smooth by the tide, which occasionally cast upon the beach pieces of boxes, barrels, and bones of ships. Near the white rim of the surf a Portuguese man-of-war lay like a shriveled, phosphorescent bladder, and Jeanette knelt to marvel over it. Which was the second mistake of the day. For when she removed her sand-coated gloves, Cristobal said, “Your wedding ring, Jen . . . it’s the first time I’ve noticed you without it.”
    She looked up guiltily to meet his inquisitive gaze. “ I— I misplaced it.”
    He eyed her narrowly. “ A wedding ring is hard to misplace. Columbia isn’t hard up for money, is it, Jen?”
    “ No. I’m not having to pawn my jewelry like some of the South’s women.”
    If only the ring were pawned. Then she could find a way to retrieve it. But it was stolen. The Frenchman had stolen not only her wedding ring but