Bride of Fortune Read Free

to rear children and oversee the great house, not the patrón to ride out with coarse vaqueros, hobnob with common merchants in Hermosillo—even defy the army.”
           His eyebrows rose. “Meek little Mercedes? My little mouse?” He chuckled wryly. “She has certainly changed, but then since my father's death, I imagine a great deal has fallen on her shoulders.”
           “Long before your father's death. I do not entirely blame her, although her behavior has been most unseemly,” the priest added righteously. “Even when he was alive and well, Don Anselmo attended to matters of running Gran Sangre most indifferently. He was always off pursuing carnal pleasures.”
           “There is much to be said for carnal pleasures, Father Salvador. And surely they make confessions ever so much more interesting, don't they?” There was a silky insult lurking beneath the words.
           The priest stiffened. It was apparent he wished Lucero a small boy once more so that he might give him another good caning. He swallowed his bile and crossed himself, offering up a small prayer for patience. “Gran Sangre is doomed if the Alvarados must depend on you to preserve their heritage.”
           “Perhaps I may just surprise you all.”
     
    * * * *
     
           As he sat soaking in a tub of steamy water, his eyes drifted closed while he remembered his long journey to Sonora. Riding northeast from Tamaulipas he had seen so much senseless destruction of a land once rich and beautiful that it made his stomach turn. The thick adobe walls of pueblo churches were scorched black and desolate, lesser buildings reduced to utter rubble. Dry ocotillo grew in clumps up and down streets where once small gardens had been lovingly tended.
           Wherever the Emperor Maximilian's armies rode, they exacted a terrible vengeance on the populace who overwhelmingly supported President Benito Juarez and his republic. Imperial forces burned out rebel villages and poisoned the water supplies so no one could inhabit an area. After they departed, the peons returned, grimly struggling to reclaim a meager existence amid ruins.
           The most brutal of all Maximilian's soldiers were the contre-guerrillas , small bands composed mainly of foreign mercenaries along with a smattering of Mexican imperialists. He was all too familiar with the way the contre-guerrillas did their work. He had ridden with them until the summons arrived and his days as a soldier had come to an end.
           As he had ridden toward Gran Sangre, he had wondered what he would find at journey's end. The vast hacienda was a feudal kingdom carved out of the splendid isolation of southern Sonora, four million acres of prime grazing and timberlands. Five generations of Alvarados had been the patróns of noble blood for which it was named. That noble blood of royal Spain flowed in their veins...in his veins.
           The Alvarado hacienda was a land that had first belonged to deer and wolves, panthers and jaguars. It was wild and mountainous, grooved with lush valley meadows that gave way to slopes studded with deep stands of walnuts, sycamores and pine. Fierce Mayo Indians roamed the interior, raiding the outlying herds of cattle and more especially the blooded horses raised by the wealthy hacendados . But nothing the Indians could do equaled the destructive fury of the civil war.
           Twilight had approached when the great house finally lay spread before him, gilded by the last rays from the setting sun. It stood, still intact, an immense adobe structure two stories high, hundreds of feet across with a large courtyard in the center. A silvery arc of water from the fountain sparkled in the dying light. Elaborate wrought-iron grillwork covered large, high windows, softening the fortress like effect of the thick outer walls.
           He had guided his great pewter stallion Peltre down the twisting rocky trail to the valley