Bride of Thunder (23 page)

“Give yourself time,” Zane said with an edge of bitterness. “My wife loved it at first, but within six months she was calling it a prison.”

“People differ. You, for instance, are the only plantation owner anyone seems to know who tends to his own lands. And though nearly everyone else uses debt-laborers, you don't.”

“Good business in both cases.”

“Perhaps. But practice reflects attitude.”

His dark gray eyes raked over her jeeringly. “And you want me to believe that you, too, are an exception?”

The stinging jibe brought angry words crowding to her lips. She swallowed them, then waited till she could speak with dignity.

“Believe what you please.”

She pushed Castaña ahead, but Kisin soon came up even. “Are you saying that
you
could be happy at La Quinta, never long for society, shops, or the company of other women?”

“Chepa's the most interesting woman I've ever met. I doubt if I can even start to learn everything she knows.”

Zane shot Mercy a strange look. “Learning—that's important to you, isn't it? But you'll miss women of your own kind to talk to.”

“Why? I've never had them. I talked with my father.”

Zane scowled. “Oh, yes, your father.”

They rode past the corrals in silence. Boys came to take their horses. Zane, springing down easily, lifted Mercy from her saddle, holding her off the ground for just a second longer than necessary.

“The mare seems all right. Will you keep her?”

“She's wonderful. I'll very much appreciate the use of her, but, of course, Jolie should have Castaña in a few years if she still wants her.”

“Jolie will be enamored of the colt we select when she gets over her pouting. It's not good to ride a horse you don't own. I give you Castaña.”

“She's too valuable a gift for me not to feel indebted.”

His lean face broadened with a smile. “Marvelous! How many gifts will it take to mortgage you so completely that you become … grateful?”

“I already am.”

“Yet not enough.”

“What you ask has nothing to do with gratitude. You speak of loneliness! I'd die in that tower.”

His eyes smoldered over her till she felt consumed by licking, tiny flames. “Even if I came to you each night?”

Her lungs constricted and her body yearned for him so fiercely that she could barely whisper. “You expect me to trade what I can learn and be and do for existing to gratify your lust?”

“Plenty of women would be glad for the chance.” His raw laughter mocked them both. “Not for my personal charms, possibly, but I pay well.”

Mercy stared at him, angry, yet sorrowful. Why did he shut himself away from all feeling? “You pay money for whores, but a lover costs trusting and risking hurt.”

He eyed her with a sardonic curve to his lips. “You have so much experience? I had supposed the scarcely trustworthy Philip to have been the only enjoyer of your favors.”

She said nothing. He didn't want to understand, so he'd always be able to twist or evade her words. She turned toward the house, but long, hard fingers closed on her wrist, swinging her around.

“Has there been someone else?” he queried, his gaze probing her like a dark steel blade.

She tried to wrench away, could not, and threw back her head. “My life before I became your … your bondmaid is none of your business!”

“By God, it is! If I've let you withhold from me, by your pious, innocent tricks, what you've given others …” He dragged her to the wall between the great house and Macedonio's, imprisoned her with a bent arm on either side, and pried up her chin with one hand. “Have you been with other men than your spineless husband? Has your purity all been deceit?”

“If I'd loved another man … if I'd taken him, I still wouldn't think I'd deceived you!” she blazed. “Loving's different from being bought, from indulging an animal need!”

“
If
you loved—
if
you'd taken!” Zane gripped her shoulders till they ached. “Plainly! Have you had a man other than Philip?”

Trembling with outrage and the treacherous response of her body to his hands, Mercy said between her teeth, “That, Zane Falconer, is none of your business! You didn't win my past!”

He spun out and away from the wall, hustling her with him. Mercy hung back, digging in her feet. “Where … where are we going?”

“To the tower.”

“You said you wouldn't force me!”

“That was when I thought you to be chaste.”

“Why have you let one woman shape the way you judge all of us?” she cried. “My husband served me badly, too, but I hope I have enough sense to blame him personally, not every man in the world!”

“You are a prisoner of your past, too.”

“How?”

His mouth twitched. “You insist on a wedding ring, which brings us back to the question: Have you been with anyone but your husband?”

Mercy swallowed, but his grip was inexorable. “There … there was no one else,” she muttered.

He gave a harsh laugh. “How quickly your brave defiance yields to whimpering!”

“If I outweighed you by eighty pounds and was a foot taller, I might make you whimper, too!”

“Or blench.” He stopped, looking down at her.

A tear squeezed from her eye, and though she blinked angrily, he saw it and wiped it away with the ball of his thumb. “Mercy, Mercy, why are you so stubborn? We both know I can do with you whatever I will.”

“You can rape me—once.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How would you limit it, my sweet, when you can't prevent it? You're too tough-minded to kill yourself for your ‘disgrace,' and you'd find it damned hard to kill me.”

“I'd get away from here.”

“And swap me for starvation or perhaps slavery in some
batab
's hammock at Chan Santa Cruz?”

“If you break your word, whatever happens to me is on your conscience.”

“You think I have one?”

“I know you do.”

He put his hand out deliberately, fondled her breast, and watched her eyes as the nipple tautened and her body flexed involuntarily.

“That gives you the dimmest idea of what else I have,” he said, his face strained and cruel. “I want you till it sometimes crowds everything else out of me, including what you call conscience. Don't push me too far, Mercy.”

He released her so abruptly that she stumbled backward. He gave her a crooked smile. “Besides,” he finished softly, “I'm not convinced, however you protest now, that once I took you, you couldn't be resigned to some sweet bondage. Philip was your husband, but did he make you shudder with rapture, beg for more? Did he ever drive you out of that funny, sober, righteous mind of yours?”

She stared at him, shrinking. He whirled away and shouted toward the stables. In a moment a boy reappeared with Kisin. “Tell Chepa I won't be home for dinner,” Zane called over his shoulder.

Stunned, Mercy watched him vault into the saddle and go back the way they'd come. Where was he riding? Xia's village? Mercy tripped as she walked back to the house, feeling exhausted, holding her breath to try to quell the throbbing ache in her loins. The black coral he'd given her seemed to jab into her throat.

He had Xia. She had no one. How long could this go on?

She stopped in the sitting room, went around examining and praising the sewing work, and managed to explain the divided skirts she decided to have made from challis and the gray-blue poplin. These must be full enough not to cling, but they shouldn't be cumbersome, either.

One of the women had arthritic hands, and just that morning they had been bothering her so much that Mercy suggested she stop sewing. Now the woman was stitching more briskly than anybody. When Mercy asked with sign language and a few Spanish words what had happened, the woman smiled and pointed out to the veranda to where some bees hummed around a morning-glory vine. She then touched several red welts on her hands.

“Poison from bee kills poison in hands,” Chepa explained, coming in. “Ants can help, too.”

There was no doubting the cure, though it seemed extreme. Mercy told Chepa that Zane wouldn't be home for dinner, and, finding it difficult to bear the housekeeper's troubled expression, she passed on to her own room.

For a while that afternoon, she'd been happy and Zane had seemed to be, as if he felt more for her than the ready lust he'd admit to. It was as if he kept trying to persuade himself that she deserved nothing else, that no woman did. And just as she wouldn't be his unless he loved her, he wouldn't lie to cajole her into bed.

He thought, of course, that she was intent on marriage, but hurt and angered as she was by him, she didn't think he'd use that kind of deceit. If he ever said he loved her, she could believe him.

But his wife had scarred him deeply, so deeply he might never again trust enough to love. Maybe the only way he could feel safe with a woman kept over a long period of time was to lock her in the tower and share with her only his eroticism, not his life. Mercy knew frustration over her might drive him to install some woman there, and she hoped she wouldn't know about it, though a secret like that would be hard to keep quiet around La Quinta.

Changing into a dress embroidered with birds, Mercy was brushing out her hair when a reflection in the mirror made her gasp.

Turning, she stared at the jaguar on the window ledge. Blood was smeared around its carved fangs, and it was posed with its forefeet on a green-and-red object.

Mercy put down her brush and moved slowly to the window. It was real blood on the small animal, most of it coming off when she picked it up. Its prey was a bird, surely a quetzal, made from clay covered with bits of green and red feathers. There was more blood on the throat.

A grisly little charade. Jolie had gone to considerable trouble to arrange the surprise, and the ribbon with which Mercy had changed the wild cat into a pet one was wadded in the corner, also smudged with blood.

Perhaps it was childish, but Mercy felt uneasy at leaving the tableau. She washed the blood from the jaguar and newly modeled quetzal and perched the bird on the jaguar's shoulder.

Jolie made a hasty meal of it when she learned that her father wouldn't be at the table. As she reached for several honeycakes, already on her feet and mumbling excuses, Mercy lightly touched a cut on the end of the girl's finger.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

Jolie yanked her hand back, as if burned by Mercy. “It's just a scratch!”

“A jaguar scratch?”

“You'd better be careful!”

“I'm not afraid of such tricks, Jolie, but I don't like them, either. I don't want to forbid you your grandmother's room, but I shall if you keep this up.”

“It's more my room than yours!”

“In a way, perhaps, but it's where I'm living.”

“I wish you'd never come,” said Jolie with quiet hatred, her violet eyes narrowed. “You're in between my room and Papa's, and now you stole my horse!”

Whirling away, she vanished through the gate, leaving Mercy to sip hot chocolate and brood. Had it been wise to force the issue with the child? It had seemed best to get it over with while Zane was away. He was already irritated with Jolie, and his sudden attempts at discipline were likely to cause more problems than they cured.

But why, Mercy wondered, did she feel so lonely and forlorn because he wasn't there?

Zane didn't appear for breakfast, but he came to stand in the doorway during classes and listened with his dark head tilted to one side while Mercy explained that wellborn Chinese girls had their feet bound to make them tiny and admired, though the bandages had a maiming effect and virtually crippled the select victims.

“Corsets are just as bad,” Zane snorted. “How any woman whose waist has been squeezed to sixteen inches can have a healthy baby is beyond me. But the deadliest blight of all is the way we bind minds—tight, tight, no chance to think, and once all sense of proportion is warped and intelligence hugs its fetters, it doesn't matter much if the body's twisted, too.”

“It's interesting that women undergo most of their malformations in order to be more attractive to men,” observed Mercy. “At best, men have some ideal of feminine beauty, and woe to the female in that society who's too thin or too plump, too tall, short, or shaped differently from what men have decided they want!”

“I'll be my own shape,” said Jolie, protectively tucking her feet beneath her. “I'm glad you're back, Papa. I don't like for you to be away.”

“If you get nervous, you must tell Doña Mercy.”

“I'm not nervous,” she said, dismissing Mercy with a glance of veiled disdain. “It's just that the house doesn't feel right when you're gone.”

“Come, minx, don't turn an overnight trip into the voyage of Ulysses!” He tousled her shiny hair and left the room.

As he passed, Mercy saw on his muscular brown throat a small oval of tiny, regular marks, and near it was the raised welt of a scratch. Xia, or whomever he'd gone to, had given him a tumultuous night. He could now ignore Mercy till his male tensions started building again; and that thought made her so angry that she would have enjoyed scratching him herself, but not from transports of passion.

When lessons were over, Jolie lingered for a moment. “Would you like to see the old maps and genealogies of the village?” she asked. “This afternoon, the scribe is going to show them to Salvador and me. Victoriano has arranged it.”

“That would be interesting,” Mercy said, startled at the overture. “Yes, I'd like to see them, if you're sure it's all right.”

“It's arranged,” repeated Jolie. She didn't smile but wore a look of fierce determination. Had she decided, however grudgingly, that she'd better make peace with Mercy? “Salvador and I will wait for you by Macedonio's at three o'clock.”