Her grandfather had survived the American rebellion and died of natural causes in 1801, two years before her own birth. Yet because her father, Gilbert, had told her so much about Grandfather Philip—whose rather stern portrait she remembered from the library of the house in the east—he remained a very real presence. So real that she often thought of him as if he still lived and breathed.
I wouldn’t want him to be ashamed of how I die. I would never want him to be ashamed that I belong to the Kent family.
That she was probably the family’s last surviving member was perhaps the saddest part.
iii
The Alamo chapel dated from the 1750s. Franciscan friars from Spain had built it, as part of a doomed effort to win Christian converts among the predatory Indian tribes. Unfortunately, the tribe the fathers chose as their chief target was notorious for a lack of belief in higher powers. Of all the Indians Amanda was familiar with, the Comanches came the closest to uniform atheism.
The chapel was located on the southeast corner of the sprawling complex of stone and adobe buildings that had grown to cover almost three acres. Invisible beyond the chapel’s stout doors was the two-story long barracks, which ran roughly northeast to southwest. The barracks formed one wall of the great open rectangle known as the Alamo main plaza.
On the plaza’s ramparts and in the rooms below, the defenders were awaiting the inevitable final assault by several thousand Mexican foot soldiers and cavalry. Some said there were a hundred and eighty-two men in the mission. Others put the number at one more than that. It included thirty-two who had ridden in from Gonzales knowing there was almost no chance of escape.
On Friday, Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis had called them all together in the main plaza and given permission for any man who wished to leave to do so. Only one had accepted the offer.
Strangely, hardly anyone called the man a coward. Perhaps it was because gnarled little Louis Rose was a friend of Colonel Bowie’s. Or perhaps it was because he had long ago proved himself in combat. Rose had fought with Napoleon in Russia before taking ship to the Americas. He was no longer young, he explained, and he’d faced death too often. Once more would be pushing his luck too far.
Clearly the little soldier had no innate loyalty to the cause that held the rest of them together. Travis told him to collect his belongings and go over the wall while there was still time. By first light, Rose had vanished.
Amanda paused to glance into the sacristy, one of the few rooms adjoining the chapel that still had a roof. The sacristy, where most of the women and children slept, was dark and still.
She moved on, her expression pensive. How would the president treat the wives and youngsters after the battle? That the rebels would lose the battle hardly seemed in doubt any longer. Almost miraculously, not a man had been seriously injured during the thirteen-day siege. But things would be entirely different when the enemy launched a direct attack on the walls. The Mexicans had rifles with bayonets and, presumably, ample ammunition. The personal armament of the Americans consisted of squirrel guns, pistols, tomahawks and knives. And powder and shot were running low inside the mission. Some of the Alamo cannons had fired rocks and hacked-up horseshoes in the past couple of days—
Given all that, the Americans remained in reasonably good spirits. They managed to act contemptuous of Santa Anna’s nightly artillery bombardment, and made bawdy jests about the midnight band music. It struck her that, with Louis Rose gone, there wasn’t one man who could truly be called a professional soldier.
She knew of four lawyers among the hundred and eighty. There was a physician—Dr. Pollard, who attended Bowie. Bill Garnett, only twenty-four, was an ordained Baptist minister. Micajah Autry, one of the Tennesseans whom Crockett had brought in, wrote passable poetry. There were several men from England and Ireland, even another Rose—first name James—who claimed he was ex-President Madison’s nephew. Most had been lured to the southwest by the promise of new land, a second chance. In the border states, it was said, many a man simply shut his cabin door, carved or chalked G.T.T.—Gone to Texas—on it, and walked away.
Some of the more recent arrivals, though, had come in direct response to appeals by the Texans for help in resisting the Mexican dictator. Crockett was one of those. He’d marched into Bexar in February, with a dozen sharpshooters tramping along behind him. There was not only the promise of a fight here, he said, but maybe a new start afterward—and that he needed. His anti-Jacksonian politics had caused his defeat in his most recent run for Congress. In a fury, Crockett had told his constituents, “You can go to hell—I’m going to Texas.” In the Alamo, he joked about getting the worst end of the bargain.
She saw him now as she approached the entrance to the baptistry at the chapel’s southwest corner. A lean man, Crockett was seated on a stool beside the cot where Bowie lay, his pneumonia-wasted face lit by a lantern on the floor. The tail of Crockett’s coon cap hung down over the back of his sweat-blackened hide shirt. His shoulders moved, but Amanda couldn’t see what he was doing.
Bowie didn’t hear her approach. His bleary eyes were fixed on Crockett’s hands, which finally became visible to Amanda from the doorway. The Tennessean was ramming a charge into one of the relatively new percussion-cap pistols. Another, matching pistol lay in Bowie’s lap, alongside the nine-inch hilted knife that had given the big, sandy-haired Colonel of Volunteers the reputation as a dangerous man, a killer. Jim Bowie hardly fitted that description now, she thought sadly.
Crockett turned. So did Bowie’s black slave, Sam, who squatted in a corner, his young face showing strain. In a moment Crockett stood up. Like Bowie, he was exceptionally tall. Not bad-looking, in a raw-boned way. He pretended to be a rustic, but Amanda had talked to him often enough to know that he was widely read, and had constantly worked at educating himself during most of his fifty years. The tales about his prowess as a frontiersman—spread throughout the United States in campaign biographies—had been craftily designed, often by Crockett himself, to help him win his races for Congress.
Now Crockett touched the muzzle of the pistol to his cap. “Miz de la Gura. You’re up early.”
She stepped into the light, the once-elegant black silk dress rustling. “I seem to have gotten used to going to sleep to band music, Colonel.” She smiled.
“Know what you mean.” Crockett smiled too, but uneasily.
The lantern light revealed Amanda as a fairly tall woman, five feet seven, with a full, well-proportioned figure. She’d lost about ten pounds in the preceding two weeks, and it showed in hollows in her cheeks, and half-circles beneath her large, dark eyes. Her nose was a trifle too prominent for perfect beauty. But men still found her immensely attractive. She knew it, and in the past she’d occasionally capitalized on the fact.
Outside, in the chapel, a child began to fret, as though caught in a nightmare. Amanda identified the voice as belonging to Angelina Dickinson, eighteen months. The child’s mother, Susannah, was married to Captain Almeron Dickinson, in charge of the garrison’s artillery. Almeron was undoubtedly up with the chapel cannon. His eighteen-year-old wife was the only other Anglo woman in the mission. The rest were wives or sweethearts of the Mexicans such as gunner Gregorio Esparza who had sided with the Americans against Santa Anna.
Bowie’s big fingers shook as he tried to pick up the pistol Crockett had laid beside its mate and the knife.
He acknowledged Amanda’s presence with a blink of his eyes, then a labored question: “How are you, Mandy?”
“Well enough, Jim. You?”
“Passable.”
“Has Dr. Pollard looked at him tonight?” Amanda asked Crockett.
The Tennessean shook his head. “I think he’s catching a few winks like the rest of the boys.”
Sam, the black, said in a tense voice, “Santy Anny—he pretty quiet this evening.”
Amanda nodded. Crockett said, “Too blasted quiet.”
The Dickinson girl’s fretful crying faded. No doubt Angel
ina was sleeping wrapped in rags and her father’s Masonic apron—the warmest covering available. Bowie’s sunken eyes remained fixed on Amanda as she spoke to Crockett again.
“There must be a reason for the silence, Colonel. Do you think the troops are moving closer to the walls?”
“Can’t be certain with those clouds hiding the moon.” Crockett dug a nail against an upper gum, then spat out a bit of meat. “I’d expect so, however.” He inclined his head toward the man on the cot. “I reckon Jim feels the same way. He sent Sam to find me, so I could load his pistols.”
“You”—her voice shook now—“you think it may be tonight?”
Crockett shrugged. Gone was the ready grin that had buoyed the spirits of the defenders so often. He said, “There’s a good chance. If I was Santy Anny, I’d expect everybody to catch up on their rest when it was quiet—which is exactly what’s happened. Even Colonel Travis is asleep.”
“Tha’s right.” Sam nodded. “I seen Joe a while ago. He tol’ me the colonel was sleepin’ like the dead.”
Amanda looked at Bowie again, not certain that he was recognizing her any longer. She thought about the strange partnerships that fate often arranged. No two men could be more dissimilar than James Bowie and William Barret Travis—
Amanda was a longtime friend of the massive, forty-year-old Bowie. He was a Catholic, with a checkered history of dueling, slave-running and land speculation. Grief had brought him to Gura’s Hotel often these past couple of years.
Bowie had originally shared command at the Alamo with Travis. Suffering the first symptoms of pneumonia, he’d kept on working—until his ribs were crushed in an accident that happened while he was helping to raise a cannon to the plaza wall. Since then he’d been lying here in the chapel, with command of the garrison completely in Travis’ hands.
Neither man liked the other very much. They had height in common, and sandy hair, but little else. Travis was nominally a colonel of the lately formed Texas cavalry. Bowie led the volunteers. Most of the men at the garrison preferred him to the ambitious Baptist lawyer from San Felipe de Austin—
It was said that Travis had come to Texas after murdering a man in Alabama for trifling with his wife. Perhaps his wife hadn’t been altogether unwilling, since Travis had left her behind and had lately been courting another young woman. He was envious of Bowie’s popularity with the rank and file, and scornful of his rival’s fondness for alcohol. Yet a common love of Texas, and a common plight, had finally destroyed the barriers between them. When the accident put Bowie out of action, he ordered the men under his direct command to follow the twenty-seven-year-old Travis without question.
Crockett started out. “I expect I’d better get back to the wall and see to loading Old Betsy.” He touched Amanda’s sleeve. The sleeve’s puffy leg-of-mutton shoulder was a tatter now.
Looking at her, he added, “You know, Miz de la Gura, you’re to be admired for staying here. But you should have gotten out while there was a chance. Or never come in.”
She shook her head. “I’ve heard that from Jim too. But he needed someone to look after him—Dr. Pollard has a gun to handle. Jim and I are friends. His father-in-law helped me straighten out some deed problems when I opened the hotel with the money my husband left.”
The father-in-law she referred to was Juan Martin Veramendi, who had been vice governor of Texas and one of Bexar’s leading citizens. Bowie had wed Veramendi’s lovely yellow-haired daughter Ursula.
She, her father, her mother and the two children of her marriage had all perished in 1833 while Bowie was off in Mississippi, attending to some business. The family had been stricken at the Veramendi resort home down in Monclova by one of the tendrils of the cholera epidemic that had been spreading worldwide out of Asia for the past ten years. The same disease had carried off Amanda’s husband a year earlier.
Bowie had never recovered from the loss of his loved ones. Even the physical charms of Henriette, one of the three girls who inhabited second-floor rooms at Gura’s Hotel, failed to comfort him for long. More and more frequently during recent months, Bowie had taken to dropping by Gura’s solely to drink and talk with Amanda. But he downed four glasses of aguardiente, the powerful cane-based liquor, for every sip she took. There weren’t enough women, enough words or enough alcohol in the world to mitigate his pain—
Amanda’s three girls were gone now. She’d urged them to leave Bexar when the Mexican army was reported on its way. Two of the girls, mixed-blood Mexican-Comanche wenches, had probably returned to their tribes. Henriette had headed for Nacogdoches under the protection of a middle-aged customer who sold Bibles.
The Tennessee frontiersman clucked his tongue. “Well, I guess there’s nothing any of us can do about escaping now. I do sort of wish old Santy Anny would hurry up and come on. I’m tired of being hemmed in by walls. Never liked the feeling. I’d sure like to get a look at him, too. He sounds like a pompous little piece of shit—oh, I beg your pardon—”
Amanda smiled. “No need to apologize, Colonel. I’ve heard every cussword in the book, and then some. And you’re right about the president. They say he is pompous. But clever, too.”
“Just can’t believe that,” Crockett returned. “A man can’t have his head on straight if he goes around calling himself the Napoleon of the West.”
“Perhaps with justification. He’s managed to stay on the winning side through all those changes of government, remember. People are afraid of him. For one thing, they say he’s tall—several inches taller than I am, which is unusual for a Mexican. He cuts a commanding figure—”
“That may be. But I think Señor Napoleon’s going to get more than he bargained for when he tries to take this place. What’s so damn—so blasted infuriating is that we could hold out for months if we had supplies and a thousand men!”
Bowie’s hoarse voice rasped from the cot, “We’ll give ’em a run with what we’ve got. We—”
He started coughing, his face convulsed with pain.
Amanda darted to the stool Crockett had vacated. Sam crawled forward on his knees, likewise alarmed by his master’s coughing.
From the doorway, Crockett said, “Yes, we sure will. There’s only one thing I’m really sorry about. I wish I’d got here soon enough to grab me a piece of ground and farm it a while. I’m about old enough to settle down, and I’d like to see if this land’s as almighty fertile as you people say—”
Amanda laid her palm on Bowie’s sweaty left hand. The coughing stopped. The lines in his face smoothed. His blue-gray eyes sought her face, as if hunting relief from his pain. Under his plain linsey shirt, he was wrapped in bandages, Dr. Pollard’s only means of repairing the damage done to his ribs when the cannon fell from its tackle.
A moment later Bowie glanced at Crockett. “You can bet it is. Mandy, tell him what your husband used to say about the soil in Texas—”
Half-turning to Crockett, she forced a smile. “He said it was supposed to be so rich, you could plant a crowbar at night and by morning the ground would sprout ten-penny nails.”
The words were heavy, humorless. Bowie’s illness had made him forget that Amanda’s husband had usually repeated the remark with great cynicism. Crockett, though, knew almost nothing about her history. He laughed.
“My kind of country,” he said, resettling his cap. “Pity it doesn’t belong to the United States. I heard once in Washington that President Jefferson thought he bought Texas as part of the Purchase. But Spain said no. Well, I guess that doesn’t make much difference now—”
“No,” Bowie breathed, “all we can do is follow your advice, Davy.” He paraphrased a frequent remark of Crockett’s. “Be sure we’re right, then go ahead.”
That widened Crockett’s smile all the more. “Yep,” he said. Then he touched his coon cap. “Miz de la Gura—good morning to you.”
Silently, the tall frontiersman melted into the shadows of the chapel. Out there, two of the Mexican women had wakened and were talking softly. One
was Señora Esparza. Ironically, her husband Gregorio, the gunner, had a brother, a sergeant, in the besieging army.
“Davy’s correct about one thing,” Bowie said. “I think an attack’s due most any time.”
“That scares me, Jim.”
“And me,” he admitted. His left arm lifted, fingertips brushing against the sun-browned, work-toughened flesh of her hand. “You’ve been a good friend, Mandy. The best anyone could want—”
It almost broke her heart to hear how weak his voice had become, to see his huge, muscular body so feeble and wasted. She clasped his hand in both of hers.
“I only wish I’d been able to bring Ursula back to you. And the children. They were good people. So was your father-in-law. He was kind and friendly even though most of the respectable citizens of Bexar wouldn’t deign to walk on the same side of main plaza with me.”
“Well, you weren’t”—Bowie realized he was speaking in past tense and corrected himself with a pained smile—“aren’t in the most respectable of professions.”
That roused her wrath. “I made sure the hotel was never a public nuisance! That the girls were honest—and examined by a doctor once a month. I ran a straighter place than the owners of the cantina! Their liquor was watered. Their cards were marked—”
“Yes, Mandy, I know that and you know that. But to most other people, Gura’s was still a whorehouse. Period.”
She looked crestfallen. “I don’t claim I’ve lived a perfect life. Sometimes, just to survive, I’ve done things I’m not proud of. But at least I’ve never concealed them. Which is more than you can say for a man like el presidente. Santa Anna twists whichever way the wind blows—”
A little more animation showed on Bowie’s face. “Here we are jabbering like a couple of old folks. Looking back. As if everything’s over.”
“It is, Jim.” She fingered one of his pistols. “Isn’t that why you asked Colonel Crockett to load your guns?”
Bowie didn’t reply. She thought he’d fallen asleep. Then, with a little wrench of his shoulders, he stirred. He asked her to help prop him against the wall at the head of the cot. As she did, she caught a glimpse of Sam staring at his master. The black saw death in Bowie’s face. Death for all of them, perhaps. But the tears in Sam’s eyes were not for himself.