Silver Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Two Read online

  Silver Surrender

  Jarrett Family Sagas: Book Two

  Vivian Vaughan

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1992 by Jane Vaughan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition June 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-854-5

  Also by Vivian Vaughan

  A Wish to Build a Dream On

  Storms Never Last

  Sweetheart of the Rodeo

  Branded

  No Place for a Lady

  Reluctant Enemies

  The Texas Star Trilogy

  Texas Gamble

  Texas Dawn

  Texas Gold

  Silver Creek Stories

  Heart’s Desire

  Texas Twilight

  Runaway Passion

  Sweet Texas Nights

  Jarrett Family Sagas

  Sweet Autumn Surrender

  Sunrise Surrender

  Secret Surrender

  Tremaynes of Apache Wells Series

  Chance of a Lifetime

  Catch a Wild Heart

  To Raul and Blanca Macias, fellow travelers in search of Catorce

  Chapter One

  Real de Catorce, Mexico

  September 1878

  Aurelia Mazón took the stairs leading to the third floor of the Leal mansion two at a time. When she burst through the ornate double doors of the ballroom, the babble of a dozen girls ceased.

  “Aurelia, you’re late,” Pia Leal admonished.

  “I can explain.” Aurelia caught her breath, feeling guilty. Anytime Pia used her baptismal name, Aurelia knew her best friend’s patience had worn thin.

  Señora Velez, the dressmaker, shoved a bundle of yellow satin and lace into Aurelia’s arms. “Andale, niña. Hurry and get into your gown. Stand on that stool so we can finish the fittings before Vespers.”

  Around the room the other girls struggled into masses of lace in every shade of the rainbow. Most already stood on footstools, patiently awaiting the attention of the seamstresses Señora Velez had hired to help her put together the grandest wedding Catorce had ever seen. The ballroom of the Leal mansion had been converted to a sewing room for the purpose.

  Pia stood in the center of the room, wearing a white satin chemise onto which three women pinned tiers of intricate Spanish lace.

  Aurelia hurried to follow the señora’s instructions, tugging and pulling her own clothing over her head. “Oh, Pia, you’ll be the most beautiful bride in the whole world.”

  “And you will be the most beautiful maid of honor, Relie,” Pia grinned, “if we get your gown fitted.”

  Fortunately, Pia’s aggravation never lasted long. Together with Zita Tapis, they had been best friends all their lives. Aurelia moved her footstool to a position between the two girls.

  “What have you been up to, Relie?” Zita whispered.

  “Nothing.”

  “Your black eyes are dancing,” Pia accused.

  “With the devil,” Zita added. “We’re in for trouble.”

  Aurelia discarded her dress in a heap on the floor behind her, then wriggled into the yellow sheath and took her place on the stool. “Papá was home from the mine.” She smiled broadly. “So I waited to hear his plans.”

  On either side of her, Pia and Zita inhaled deep breaths, to the consternation of the seamstresses who pinned their gowns.

  “Stand still,” one commanded.

  “You don’t want to walk down the aisle with a crooked ruffle,” another admonished.

  “Don’t worry,” Aurelia assured her friends. “Everything will be fine, like I told you.”

  “Like I feared.” Zita moved a quarter turn away at the seamstress’s instructions.

  “Don’t worry,” Aurelia repeated. She lifted her chin, stretching her spine to her full height. Even without the footstool, she stood half a head taller than Zita and a full head above the petite Pia. Her additional inches always calmed her friends, instilling confidence in them. Nevertheless, when she spoke she purposefully avoided their eyes, concentrating instead on the seamstress who adjusted and pinned a ruffle of yellow lace around the scooped neckline of her yellow chemise.

  “Papá is the one who is worried. He assured us if it happens one more time, he will send Mamá and me to Guanajuato to live with Tía Guadalupe and Tío Luís until the danger is past.”

  Turning at the seamstress’s instructions, she ignored the silence that greeted her pronouncement.

  “No,” Zita mouthed.

  “My wedding is in less than two months, Relie,” Pia implored.

  “I will return for your wedding, silly. Do you think I would miss the wedding of my best friend to my own brother?”

  “What if my parents decide to do the same thing?” Zita asked. “What if—?”

  “Don’t worry,” Aurelia insisted again. “Everything will work out.” She heard additional intakes of breath from either side.

  “Like always,” Zita hissed. “You forget that I don’t want to move away from Real de Catorce. Only you are determined to escape.”

  That was true, of course. Even the mention of her determination to escape this high-mountain prison—her term for their opulent but isolated home in the eastern Sierra Madres—renewed Aurelia’s resolve to do so.

  But it would not do to upset the girls until she could get them alone and explain her plan. Adeptly, she changed the subject.

  “Santos is coming tonight, Pia. Papá sent for him to discuss ways of stopping the difficulties at the mine. Mamá expects him by Vespers.”

  Zita sighed. “At least we will have a quiet night. You wouldn’t dare drag us out when Pia wants to be with her betrothed.”

  “Will Lucinda accompany you to Vespers?” Pia asked.

  Aurelia tilted her chin at a jaunty angle. “Sí. I have made arrangements for us to ride together. Mamá can tell Santos where we are.”

  The fittings completed, Pia’s dozen bridesmaids drifted out of the converted ballroom. Under Aurelia’s watchful eye, each girl hugged Pia’s petite figure, reminding Aurelia of Pia’s own problem. Tonight she must deal with that, too. A girl could not go to her wedding night filled with the kind of fears Pia had expressed. Especially not when the solution was so simple.

  Would that the solution to her own problem were as easily accomplished! In two months her best friend would wed her brother, and he, traitor that he was, would spirit his new bride away from Real de Catorce to live at Rancho Mazón in the low country.

  “You will visit us,” Pia had assured Aurelia time and again. “Why, you can marry one of Santos’s charro compadres—Rodrigo Fraga, perhaps—and we will both live happily ever after.”

  Happily ever after? Aurelia had thought. Happily ever after did not mean isolating herself on a ranch in the low country any more than it meant remaining here in Real de Catorce, a virtual prisoner of her parents.

  Not that they were deprived in this town of over seven thousand inhabitants and five plazas. They had a cathedral and convent school and as much social life as could be fitted into a year wi
th only three hundred sixty-five days.

  Local silver mines financed a luxurious lifestyle for the owners, while the miners’ families provided an ample service pool. Incoming trains brought necessities, luxuries, and catalogues and periodicals from around the world, which described more luxuries to be sent away for.

  “We have everything right here in Catorce a girl could ever dream of wanting,” her father, Don Domingo Mazón, always replied when she begged him to let her move to Guanajuato and live with Tía Guadalupe, her mother’s sister, and Tío Luís, who was being spoken of as the next governor of the state of San Luís Potosí.

  “My dreams have wings,” Aurelia would retort. “My dreams cannot be bound by the walls of a high-mountain prison.”

  To which her father, miner and businessman, always assured her she would outgrow such foolishness. Then he established the Casa de Moneda Mazón—a duly sanctioned mint, establishing Real de Catorce as a financial center of some repute.

  Afterwards, his position became as implacable as if his brain were carved from the hard rock of the mountain itself.

  Her mother was no help, either, even though it had been the life of the young Bella Lopez that had influenced Aurelia’s dreams. Doña Isabella Mazón de Lopez, now a mother and middle-aged, apparently had forgotten her early years at the Court of Maximilian in the City of Mexico, years Aurelia learned about from Tía Guadalupe, who told wonderful stories of the Lopez girls and their troops of virile young suitors and of the lavish parties they attended. These stories had inspired Aurelia’s most romantic dreams and ambitions. Doña Bella Mazón might have forgotten the details of her romantic youth, but Tía Guadalupe kept them alive for Aurelia.

  If anything, her mother’s lack of romanticism made Aurelia even more determined to escape. She would not end up like her mother, she vowed, no matter how easy Isabella’s life was with servants and silks and charities to attend to.

  Everyone in Real de Catorce, especially the poor people from the miners’ villages, considered Doña Bella the incarnation of their own personal guardian angel. From the ten children of Nuncio Quiroz, superintendent of the Mazón mine, to the family of the lowliest miner, she appeared at precisely the right time to birth their babies, to dress their dead, and to perform countless other ministrations in between. Which was well and good. Everyone should have such a benefactress. But Aurelia herself did not intend to become one—certainly not at the tender age of twenty-two.

  Doña Bella, as always, had her own plans for Aurelia. “Don’t rock the boat, Relie. Marry Enrique and Papá will build you a villa on the hill next to ours.”

  Enrique Villasur complicated the problem. Hired by her father as the dashing young president of Casa de Moneda Mazón, he had become a regular dinner guest at the Mazón mansion. Aurelia suspected her father’s intentions in hiring Enrique went beyond the man’s position at the mint, well beyond, extending to that of intended son-in-law to the mint owner.

  That, she knew, was preposterous. Nothing was more important to Don Domingo than his mint, unless it was his mine. No, she had no illusions about her father promoting Enrique as a candidate for her husband with anything more in mind than keeping control of the mint in the family—and silencing her pleas to leave Catorce.

  Her father was right about Real de Catorce containing everything a girl could wish for. Aurelia didn’t lack one single thing—except freedom. Freedom to live her own life, freedom to see the world around her. Why, she could grow up, grow old, and die right here without ever seeing the outside world. And she would if her parents had their way.

  “Freedom?” her mother had inquired the one time Aurelia voiced that word. “You are free to breathe, Relie. You are free to live in the world our Lord God provided, but you are not free to complain about it in my house. You have visited the miners’ shacks. You have seen their women, old and worn out before their time. I will hear no more complaints from a girl who has everything her heart should desire.”

  Aurelia had known then she would be forced to take matters into her own hands. Hers and those of her two inseparable friends, Pia and Zita.

  Her method of escape had not been difficult to arrive at. Her father himself had provided the answer. She could not count the number of times she had heard him say, “Hit a man where he is most vulnerable, he will go down every time. Like in the colear at the charriada—grab the bull by the tail. That will show him who is boss.”

  She didn’t have to think twice to determine Don Domingo Mazón’s most vulnerable spot—his business. If she could find a way to put his business in jeopardy—or to make him think his business was in jeopardy—she could show him who was boss.

  Nor did it take long for her to decide how to accomplish such a feat.

  “Not again, Relie,” Pia implored. “My wedding is so close.”

  The carriage bounced along the bricked streets, carrying the two girls toward Zita’s house, from where they would go to Vespers. Aurelia had insisted on picking up Pia before Zita, even though Zita lived much closer.

  She had also persuaded Lucinda, her dueña, to ride on the box with the driver. It didn’t take much to persuade Lucinda of such things, since the chatter of three girls did nothing to soothe one’s thoughts in preparation for Vespers. Lucinda had learned from experience that stopping the chatter of these three girls was impossible short of separating them.

  “We will talk about my plan after we pick up Zita,” Aurelia told Pia. “First, we must discuss your problem.”

  Pia raised her eyebrows.

  “Your wedding night,” Aurelia reminded her. “When you see Santos at the cathedral, you must tell him.”

  Pia’s face glowed in the early evening dusk. “I don’t want to talk about this, Relie.”

  “We must. Your fears will ruin the romance of your wedding night. Santos is a giant and you…well, you are no bigger than a honeybee. You have to do it.”

  “I can’t.” Pia crossed her arms protectively over her bosom, as if that were the part of her anatomy under discussion.

  “Yes, you can. Santos will understand. And I’m sure he will be willing. All you have to do is tell him. Tonight. He is meeting us at Vespers.”

  “Relie, please. Let’s not talk about it.”

  “You don’t have much time, Pia. Santos won’t be back in town often before the wedding. Just tell him, plain and simple, that you want to try it out before the wedding.”

  “Try it out?” Pia whispered.

  Aurelia shrugged, exasperated with her friend’s modesty. The carriage rocked to a stop. “Zita is coming, Pia. Now listen to me, quick. Your wedding night is supposed to be romantic. It can’t be if you are afraid of the size of his—”

  “Relie!”

  Aurelia reached across the aisle and patted Pia’s knee in a motherly fashion. “If you can’t bring yourself to tell Santos you want to make love to him before the wedding, I’ll tell him for you.”

  “Aurelia Mazón, you do that and I will never speak to you again.”

  Zita reached the carriage before Pia finished speaking. “What are you two arguing about?”

  “Nothing,” Pia whispered.

  “Now about our next mission,” Aurelia began after the carriage had pulled into the street. “Papá said they will ship another load of coins tomorrow night. I’ll make sure Lucinda is properly worried about Señora Garcia’s dying child to stay at the cathedral for a novena. That will give us more than enough time to slip away and be back before she misses us.”

  “Find another way, Relie,” Pia pleaded.

  “There isn’t another way. This will be the last time, I promise.”

  Zita laughed, a high-pitched, nervous twitter. “If I had a centavo for every time you said that about one of your schemes, I would have as much money as your father has in his mint.”

  “Our schemes,” Aurelia corrected, undaunted.

  “The our part was when we were young,” Pia reminded her.

  “We are still young.”

  “
We aren’t children dressing up in disguise to play tricks on people,” Zita admonished. “Robbing a train is not a trick.”

  “I know,” Aurelia told them. “This is serious. But it’s the only way. I sent María with a message for Kino and Joaquín. They will meet us at Vespers so we can work out the details. Last time went so well, we shouldn’t have any trouble.”

  When Pia spoke, her voice trembled. “I don’t see how this is going to help you, Relie. And my wedding—”

  “Didn’t you hear me this afternoon? Papá said if there is one more train robbery, he will send Mamá and me to Guanajuato.” She hugged herself with excitement. “Once I get there, he can’t make me come home.” The carriage stopped before the Cathedral of San Francisco. She winked at Pia. “Or were you too busy thinking about what you and Santos are going to do tonight to listen to my plans?”

  “Relie!”

  Inside, the church was dark. The music had just begun. Leaving Lucinda in the Mazón family pew, the girls headed for the vestry to don choir robes. The dueña’s admonishment rang in their ears.

  “Behave yourselves now. I can see everything that goes on in the choir loft from this pew.”

  “Don’t worry, Lucinda. I won’t embarrass the family.”

  It was the most ingenious arrangement Aurelia had ever devised, and she continually reminded herself of its usefulness. Since their mothers preferred to attend morning services, they were only too happy to send the girls to Vespers accompanied by one or the other’s dueña. Lucinda was Aurelia’s favorite. Not that she was dim-witted or anything.

  The service of Vespers began in a darkened cathedral, and even after the office candles were lighted, the church remained dimly lit. Once the girls were encased in voluminous black choir robes with heavy cowls, their own mothers would not have been able to identify them from the family pews in the nave. Three bodies in the choir belonged to Aurelia, Pia, and Zita—or did they? Even other choir members, nuns from the convent mostly, remained unaware of the girls’ subterfuge. After all, each and every person present was supposed to be engrossed in his or her own prayers.