Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan

Author:Stephen Harrigan [Harrigan, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

“WHAT IS the true purpose of this rebellion?” Don Osbaldo Espinosa droned on rhetorically as he filled his wineglass yet again. He then seized a nearby taper and held the flame to the end of his cigar, working his thin cheeks like a bellows until the air around him was thoroughly beclouded. Edmund knew Don Osbaldo well enough by now to understand that the filling of his wineglass and the lighting of his cigar were calculated pauses meant to arouse suspense in his guests’ minds as to what his next glittering pronouncement might be. But the pronouncements were never brilliant, the guests were in reality prisoners, and with each interminable evening their imprisonment was growing more and more tiresome.

“At first the rebels proclaimed that they merely wanted to restore the Constitution of 1824,” Espinosa said, settling back gravely in his chair. “That was transparent nonsense, of course. The real object is to break away from Mexico and perhaps to take two or three Mexican states with them. Then they will join the United States, or create their own slave-holding republic. Because that is what these sons of Jefferson, these supposed believers in the rights of man, truly desire: an empire for slavery.”

Don Osbaldo went on, as he did almost every night, reminding his dinner guests that slavery had not been necessary to either himself or his forebears, who for many generations had devoted their toil and blood—their blood, not that of some innocent and uncomprehending negro—to the safety and prosperity of this land.

Edmund cast a glance across the table at Mary. She was listening to Espinosa’s harangue with an alert interest that had nothing to do with what he was saying and everything to do with a desire to improve her Spanish. During the month they had spent as hostages at Espinosa’s rancho, Mary’s grasp of the language had grown far more assured, her accent and vocabulary both impressive, though she had as yet no real command of the verbs and spoke in an eternal present tense.

Espinosa was a widower. He was in his late fifties, Edmund guessed, his body still powerful and taut from ceaseless ranch work but his face starting to collapse like an old man’s. His young wife, like Mary’s daughter, had been carried away by the cholera, leaving behind two mute and glowering children, a boy and a girl, who were required to sit at dinner every night with their spines in rigid conformance with the hard, straight backs of their Spanish chairs. Besides Edmund and Mary, the other perpetual guest was the dragoon officer who had abducted them, Lieutenant Arechiga. Arechiga was still frightfully thin and frail, but it was a testament to Mary’s remarkable healing skills that he was alive at all. He had almost died several times during the four days it took for the dragoon patrol and their prisoners to reach the Espinosa ranch. Upon opening the officer’s tunic that first afternoon, Mary had discovered a wad of congealed blood large

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