Page 44 of Sweet Savage Love

44

T he Condesa de Valmes sent a messenger, who conveniently managed to lose his way first, to the Frenchmen and the rest of the guards at the railhead. Such a terrible, terrible thing had happened! She was quite prostrated with shock—fancy these miserable convicts turning on their guards to murder them, and then daring to take her hostage!

“I can’t see anyone—I’m still far too upset!” she told the servant who came to announce a visitor the following day.

“Of course she’ll see me—I’m a member of the family, am I not?”

Colonel Miguel Lopez, looking extremely smart in his uniform, strode into the room and bent to kiss the condesa’s cheek.

“ Tia —you always contrive to look beautiful—even when you are prostrated with shock!”

The servant had left, tactfully closing the door behind him, and Soledad looked weakly at her smiling nephew.

“Really Miguel, you’re so unsympathetic! You can’t think…”

“Come, Tia Soledad! Let’s not have any pretence between ourselves, eh? They escaped—how very convenient! I’m only surprised you did not keep the blue-eyed gringo behind here when the others rode away on their—um, stolen

horses! Are you sure you haven’t got him hidden away in the cellar?”

“Miguel! How dare you talk like that? And in any case,” she added a trifle sulkily, turning her face away from his mocking look, “there was no gringo among them.”

To her growing dismay, Miguel had seated himself on the arm of her chair and had taken her hand.

“Indeed? Well in that case dear tia, you must tell me all about it—every little detail, yes?”

For Ginny, the nightmare that had begun when Miguel Lopez had first informed her so offhandedly that her husband was still alive grew even more nightmarish following Miguel’s return from the home of his relative, the Condesa de Valmes.

Ever since he had told her that Steve, her Steve, had actually been one of the men on the chain gang they had passed on their way here, she had been in an agony. To have passed so close to him, without even seeing him! All she had seen from a distance was a collection of ragged, dirty men, chained together like animals, and she had turned her head away to look into Miguel’s eyes instead. No wonder he had given her such a peculiarly intent gaze—no wonder he had dropped so many hints, asked so many questions. He had known—all the time, while she was so sure that Steve had died, that her capacity for love had died, Miguel had somehow known the truth!

“I hate you, I despise you!” she had screamed at him that night. “How could you have been so cruel? Why did you let him suffer and continue to suffer?”

“But my dear,” he had responded, quite unperturbed by her hysterical rage and grief, “I really thought you wanted him to suffer! How was I to know you didn’t have him sent to prison for some devious reason of your own?”

She raised tragic, streaming eyes to his face, everything leaving her but grief.

“Do you really think me such a good actress? Oh God, Miguel, why did this have to happen? Why didn’t I know? ” Suddenly she was clutching his shoulders, clinging to him in a frenzy. “Miguel! Miguel, please! You can do something—you must save him! I’ll do anything you want, I swear it, anything at all! But I beg you, I beg you!”

Gently, he disengaged her frantic clasp, his eyes looking down at her with rather a strange expression.

“So you really do love him!” he said in a thoughtful, wondering kind of voice. “You’d do anything you said—and yes, I believe you at last! I believe you would do anything. Poor little Ginette! Poor little cortesana —so warm to touch, so frozen with grief inside! I’m really developing quite a softness towards you, you know! It’s seldom I’ve encountered a woman who has done everything you have and still continues to love one man. You’re really to be admired for that!”

“Miguel—Miguel, please help me!”

It was a wail of grief, of pleading, of despair.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said shortly. And for the moment she had to be content with that.

She was in an agony of impatience when he returned from his visit to the condesa. And the news he brought threw her into a frenzy of despair.

“He’s gone? He escaped? But where is he then? Oh God, where has he gone? How will I ever find him now?”

“But, querida, I thought you would be glad of the news.” Miguel smiled down at her with his twisted, sarcastic smile. “After all, he’s a free man now, he’s no longer in chains—although, of course,” he added thoughtfully, “he won’t dare show his face around here again—he’s a murderer, along with those other wretches. They all have a price on their heads now.”

She looked at him wildly, and he put his arms around her, drawing her rigid, unresisting body against his.

“You mustn’t worry, chica. If he had enough presence of mind to kill a guard and seize his chance to escape, I’m sure he’ll know where to go. My guess is that he’s gone to find Díaz. Yes, I’m almost sure of it, now I recall that my Tia the condesa is a distant family connection of Don Porfirio. Perhaps that’s where she sent him.”

She felt so numb. The effects of the shock she had received, and the even worse shock of knowing that having been so close to her, Steve had disappeared again, made Ginny move through the days that followed like a somnambulist. She felt so empty inside—so drained of everything, even the pride and stubbornness that had enabled her to survive all that she had gone through up to this point. She had finally learned to accept the fact that Steve was dead, that she would never see him again, and then suddenly she was informed that he hadn’t died, that he was alive; only to have him snatched away once more.

There was also the frightening realization that he might not want to see her again. He must hate her of course, after the rotten trick that Colonel Devereaux had played on them both. He probably blamed her for everything—perhaps he had even forgotten about her, if he hadn’t seen her that day…and if he had, then he must think the worst.

It was agony to know all this, and to have to go on existing, pretending to everyone but Miguel that nothing had changed, that she was still the same lighthearted, flirtatious young woman they all thought her to be.

Strangely enough, she was more than ever in Miguel Lopez’s company these days. She felt that in his own peculiar way he was the only person who knew her real self, and understood her pain. He was the only person she could talk to honestly—there were no more pretences between them, and so therefore, an almost grudging friendship, if one could call it that, grew up between them. She had almost forgotten about Michel, except when Agnes, or some other catty woman would ask about him.

Ginny knew very well that they all whispered that she was Miguel’s mistress—he her latest lover. Not a few of the other women hoped secretly to be the one to comfort the poor young Captain Remy when he found out how his fiancée had been behaving. But by now Ginny didn’t even care.

Colonel Lopez seemed to take a peculiar pleasure in parading the lovely Madame du Plessis as his latest mistress. She was one of the most beautiful and sought-after women in Orizaba, as she had been in Mexico City, and he had conquered her citadel. He had made her his, even though it was widely known that the Comte d’Arlingen had actually asked her to marry him! Women whispered to each other that Miguel Lopez must be an exceptionally charming and virile man to make a lovely woman jeopardize the prospect of an extremely good marriage and in fact her very reputation, just to be seen with him everywhere.

They did in fact go everywhere together, with Miguel playing the assiduous gallant. They went riding alone and did not return for hours—it was a well-known scandal that Colonel Lopez was more often in the bedroom of Madame du Plessis than he was in his own—and in the emperor’s own hacienda, under his very nose in fact, the gossips whispered. Miguel took all kinds of public liberties with her—he kissed her boldly on the lips when they danced, or let his fingers brush across her breasts when he leaned close to whisper something in her ear. And Ginny still did not care, even when Agnes warned her that she was being foolish to allow her reputation to be ruined.

“But Agnes, what is my reputation after all?” Ginny said wearily when Agnes taxed her with it. “You know what they all said when Michel first produced me as his mistress—why should I care now?”

“Michel, at least, was a gentleman about it! You know how unexceptionally he behaved towards you in public, never showing anything but the greatest respect. But Miguel—he’s a show-off! He wants to make sure everyone knows when a woman has given herself to him. He may be—what is the word they use?—yes, ‘macho,’ but basically he’s not a gentleman, at least where women are concerned.”

“But you were all for my taking him as a lover! You encouraged it, don’t you remember?”

“Of course I did!” Agnes said impatiently, “but I didn’t expect you to lose your head! Every woman needs a lover, especially when she has a fiancé who’s not around. But for God’s sake, you should be more discreet about it! What will happen when Michel finds out?”

Ginny had been wondering, in a passive kind of way, why she had heard nothing from Michel. She had imagined that perhaps he had heard all the stories that were circulating about her, and had decided he did not want to see her again. And she began to think that perhaps that was best—she could not possibly marry Michel now, knowing that Steve still lived; but still, she could not bear the thought of hurting Michel, who had been so good to her. Yes, it was best this way—and there was always Miguel, and their strange, almost unnatural alliance.

Then she received word, by a special messenger sent by Marshal Bazaine himself, that Michel had been wounded during the siege of Durango, when the French had been forced to retreat, leaving the fortress to the victorious Juaristas. His wound was not serious, but it was bad enough to put him in the hospital in Mexico City.

When Ginny left Orizaba, early in November, Miguel Lopez went with her. The emperor had decided to stay in Mexico and fight for his crumbling empire. He was talking of coming back to the city himself, and Colonel Lopez was to see that the old palace was prepared for his arrival.

“He says he can’t bear to live at Chapultepec again. It has too many memories of Carlotta.” Miguel, riding beside her open carriage, bent his handsome blond head to Ginny’s pale, upturned face. “But you, querida —what will you do now? So you’ve decided to run back to your handsome, wounded hero to nurse him back to health. No doubt he’ll carry his arm in a sling and have an interesting pallor in his cheeks for a while. But what are you going to do about him?

Will you throw yourself at him and confess everything? Will you sacrifice your one great love to his need?”

Miguel’s drawling, sarcastic words grated on her nerves, and she started chewing her lip angrily.

“Must you always sound so callous? Of course I’m going to see Michel. And the very least I owe him is honesty! I feel so guilty as it is.”

Miguel groaned dramatically.

“Dear God—the sentimentality of women! First you’re half-dead with frustrated passion for your long-lost husband, and then you feel guilty because you can’t have your comte as well! Make up your mind, chica —or better still, play your cards right and you might have both in the end!”

“Oh you! You’re really insufferable, do you know that? You’re the one man I’ve met who is absolutely devoid of principle!”

“How very cruel and unfair you are, querida! ” Miguel picked up her hand and held it to his lips. “Here I travel all the way to the city with you, and all I hear is reproaches. What would you have me do to prove my devotion to principle? Shall I make a clean breast of everything to Captain Remy and fight a duel with him? But of course—I’d forgotten his wound. That’s too bad. Think what a buzz of gossip we could create!”

Because she had learned that the best way to combat Miguel’s constant barbs was to ignore them, Ginny forced herself to shrug lightly.

“Please Miguel! At least let me see poor Michel before we decide what to do with him!”

He gave a delighted laugh. “You’re learning, chica, you’re learning! We’ll make a good pair, you and I.”

She was to think of that later, when she moved into Miguel’s little apartment—the one where he always kept his current mistresses.

Yes, she thought bitterly, we really do make a fine pair! Both opportunists—using whatever weapons we have to gain our ends. Miguel is right, I’m almost as heartless and as calculating as he is!

The thought of her last, painful meeting with Michel still twisted like a knife-blade in her heart. He had been so hurt! So angry! Try as she would, she could not forget the bitter, hurtful words he had flung at her.

“To think that I loved you and respected you enough to offer you marriage! And then the minute my back is turned you embark on a flagrant affair with Miguel Lopez—that rake! That roué! You knew his reputation, and yet you had to make a public show of your affair with him, and drag my honor in the dust along with your own! Don’t come running back to me when he throws you over—I’ve done with you forever!”

I deserve it—I deserve everything he says about me, she kept thinking while he continued to flay her with his caustic words.

“I really loved you, Ginette! And God knows how much I tried to make you love me back. I thought of you as the beautiful and unworldly girl that I had known—even though you had been dragged through the dust, I continued to think of you as a heroine, a degraded angel who was capable of rising above anything! But now I’m beginning to believe that you are past redemption, that you actually enjoy degradation and the kind of life that can only lead you from once vice to another.”

“Oh stop, Michel!” she had entreated him at last, “please stop—please don’t upset yourself so! I know I deserve your scorn and your anger as well, but you have to admit that I never pretended, with you, to be what I was not! Didn’t you enjoy the art of lovemaking that I had been forced to learn? Wasn’t that what obsessed you in the first place? You never would have dared to make the old Ginette your mistress, but you enjoyed the new me, didn’t you? You asked me to marry you because that was the only way you could be sure of me—because deep inside you felt you could not trust me, isn’t that true?”

“What a glib tongue you’ve developed!” he sneered at her. “How easily you’ve learned to twist everything, so that you can avoid believing the truth about yourself! You never loved me—all you could offer me was gratitude! Good God— gratitude, when I worshipped you, I adored you, and wanted only your true affection in return! What does Lopez give you? What kind of satisfaction do you get from being his public plaything, his little poule of the moment?”

“He can help me to find my husband!” At last, goaded beyond endurance, she had almost shrieked the words at him. “Would you have preferred me to enter into a bigamous marriage with you, Michel? Heavens, what a juicy scandal that would have created! But I couldn’t do that to you, nor to myself either, and as for Miguel Lopez, he is about the only man who understands—who is willing to accept me as I am. You see, he knows that I still love my husband—in a way, he saved him for me!”

She saw Michel’s pale, suddenly tortured look, but even that could not stop her now. “Michel, Michel—you knew that I still loved Steve! How many times have you accused me of yearning for a ghost? Well, he’s not a ghost, he’s alive, somewhere, and I’m going to find him. No matter what it takes, no matter what I have to do, to what depths I might have to sink, I’ll do it!”

“So when Lopez has had enough of your rather publicly advertised charms he will find your husband and push you off into his arms—is that how it’s supposed to be? In a way, I almost pity this husband of yours—I wonder how he will feel to get his rather used wife back!”

She paled as if he had struck her. “Yes, I’ve thought of that too,” she said in a whisper. “But that is a chance I must take.” She had turned and fled from him then, unable to face any more. And had gone to Miguel, just as he had expected.