By Jack Woodville London
This is a brief excerpt from Dangerous Latitudes, a new novel from Stoney Creek Publishing. “Set in the violent Republic of Texas of the early 1840s, Dangerous Latitudes is the story of an unlikely spy, two bumbling horse thieves, and a bewildering Black woman, all trapped between Sam Houston and a Mexican army that freely invades across the Rio Grande.”
Chapter 1 excerpt:
The wall was stained at about the level of a man’s chest.
Alexandre waited in the cramped cell where Colonel Canales had shoved him at sundown and tried to not think about the wall. He shivered in the cold, hunched over, his back pressed against adobe at one end and his feet jammed against the thick wooden door opposite. The only thing he heard during the long night was a harsh laugh outside the wooden door.
“Here, spy,” Canales’ rough voice hissed from the courtyard. “For you to write to who you loves. Is tradition.” There was a rustle near Alexandre’s feet as some paper was shoved underneath the door. Then, “Maybe you write your horse thieves,” Canales taunted him, and another laugh.
“I am not a spy,” Alexandre answered. Canales had walked away. Alexandre picked up the sheet of paper and stared at it.
His first thought was to write a letter as told. He smiled, not happily, but because writing a letter might settle his mind against the image of the bloody wall that waited for him. He found his pencil, held it above the sheet of paper, and had his second thought: there was no one to whom he could write such a letter.
He considered writing to the men he had known in San Antonio, Sam Maverick and John Twohig and Jack C. Hays. Indeed, Alexandre thought, Hays should carry this last message to those who ought to be held to account for his present circumstances. But to put their names on paper would relieve Colonel Canales of any doubt that Alexandre was their agent. If Canales did know, he would shoot me sooner. As it stood, Canales could not prove whether Alexandre had even known any of them, much less spied for them.
Canales did know Alexandre’s horse thieves. They’re not my horse thieves, Alexandre thought. Well, perhaps they were his horse thieves, but they’d been Canales’s first. More to the point, if he did write a letter to them, he wasn’t sure they’d be able to read it. He and the horse thieves hadn’t passed their time together reading. Mostly, they had argued.
There was someone else. He could write to her, of course, but he didn’t know how to form the words to tell her what he wanted to say. Instead, he thought about the times they had together, not many times, not enough. He remembered each word that she had said to him, and he regretted not having told her the things he had wanted to say, his mistakes and imaginings and regrets. But no, he would not write to her or even say her name out loud, for fear Canales was listening. Canales didn’t even know she existed.
Alexandre concluded that even to put so much as a single word on paper would risk telling Canales something more than he already knew. He wadded up the page, tossed it at the door, then waited in the dark with his back against the wall, listening for the cock’s crow to signal that first light was creeping above the mountains of Saltillo.
There was one person he should write, he realized. He reached for the paper, straightened it, and by the faint moonlight, began.
“Father, this is my last letter. I will be very brief, as my present circumstances require it. I call to your mind our last meeting and remind you of your words to me. I write to relieve your concerns by saying that I have found my purpose in life. I know exactly my prospects. By the time this letter reaches you, you probably will have been told what they are.”
Alexandre stopped writing. He wanted his last hour to be spent reliving the past year, not writing a bitter letter. He instead wanted to think about Noeme and Pennant and Alonzo, not his father. He wanted to remember gazing with them across the Texas hills, walking through abandoned missions and riding along hidden trails, swimming in cold streams and sketching the land as no one had ever done before. He loved them and wanted no better memory for the end of his life.
An hour later he heard men outside, soldiers, marching, the sounds of muted commands. They stopped outside his door. A crack of light entered his cell.
“Is time,” Canales barked. The cell door opened. “Outside, spy!”
Rough hands pulled Alexandre out by his boots. Another hand took possession of his letter. Someone lifted him to his feet and pushed him toward the wall. There was Colonel Canales, standing in the courtyard, erect, smirking, puffed up with command.
“¡Detener!” Canales barked at the soldiers. They halted. The hands turned Alexandre to face the firing squad.
“¡Attención!” Canales ordered. The soldiers stood at attention.
Alexandre stared at them. The firing squad were miserable soldiers, some barefoot, all shivering, their hands shaking to hold the old muskets they carried. He thought they looked unhappy, like servile men forced to do things they didn’t want to do, Mexican versions of his father’s Black slaves. Then, in an instant, he realized how he came to be standing against a wall facing a Mexican firing squad, how everything that had happened in the last year could be traced back to one particular evening in Louisiana when he had walked out into his father’s sugarcane fields to consider the problem of the slave cabins. Now, as he faced Colonel Canales, and saw how that one thing had led to another and eventually to this, Alexandre LaBranche could not suppress a last smile.