“HOLD ON A MINUTE,” Lauren said. “Are you telling me that the defenders of the Alamo weren’t wearing any underwear?”
“I’m saying it’s impossible to know,” said Alex. “Information on historical underwear is pretty sparse. People didn’t leave written accounts of their underwear, or hand it down in families like old military uniforms and ball gowns. We know that by the nineteenth century, some people wore little linen drawers, but it took a while for that to become the standard thing. Before then, it’s safe to guess that for the most part, women just wore their shifts as the bottom layer, with nothing underneath. And the men had really long shirts that they tucked down into the legs of their breeches or trousers.”
“Huh. All those old-timey people running around commando. Who’d have guessed?”
“Well, like I said, we can’t know for sure.”
“So what’s the historically accurate thing to do?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Well, what is your guess? What do you do? Are you even wearing any underwear at this moment?”
He gave her a sideways glance. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m curious. Come on, you can tell me. Which is it? Modern underwear? Reproduction linen drawers? Or a long-tailed shirt doing double duty?”
“Will this make it into your article?”
“Yes. I’m absolutely captioning a picture of you with a description of your underwear. Or lack thereof.”
“Ha ha. In that case you’ll just have to wonder.”
“Wow, your face is so smug right now. I can just feel the smugness coming off you in waves. You’re really not going to tell me?”
Alex’s face got smugger still. “Let’s just say I like to err on the side of authenticity.”
Lauren let out a shriek. “I knew it! I knew it!”
She wasn’t sure where all this hilarity was coming from. Maybe she needed to be flippant to counteract the sudden and vivid image in her mind of Alex, sans jacket, waistcoat and trousers, sans modern underwear or reproduction linen drawers, wearing just the pale linen shirt, with the hem hanging almost to his knees, and the outline of his bare legs showing through. To remind herself that this was just a friend, someone she could joke around with.
Who just happened to be a devastatingly handsome man.
Yes. She could be flippant and fun with him, both now and later today, when she met his girlfriend. She’d even give him some good-natured ribbing about the girl. There wouldn’t be any change in her attitude or behavior. No one would have any reason to think she was jealous.
“What about bathing?” she asked.
“What about it?”
“How did people handle it back in the day? How did they stay clean?”
“They changed their linen as often as they could—their shifts and shirts and such. And they bathed. Not every day, maybe, but more than most folks think. They didn’t have hot running water, and full-length bathtubs weren’t a thing until the late nineteenth century, but they had washbasins and little hip tubs. They did their best. Men sometimes bathed in streams and rivers.”
Now Lauren was imagining Alex bathing in a stream. Their first time driving anywhere together, and she couldn’t stop imagining him in various states of undress.
Though why should she think of it as the first time? It wasn’t like this was some sort of relationship, with milestones.
She was working on a story, and Alex was the friend who was helping her.
It didn’t mean anything more than that.
ALEX BACKED THE truck into the unloading area. The tension he’d felt in his stomach that night at La Escarpa, when Tony had first made his ham-fisted suggestion for Alex to take Lauren to his festival, came back with a vengeance.
The drive had been great fun, with Lauren in uproariously high spirits. He’d almost thought she was flirting with him, but that couldn’t be right. But now it was over. She was here, about to lay eyes on something precious to him.
This group was like family. These were people who shared his passion for Texas history, who weren’t content to just read about it in books, but loved it so much they had to do something about it. Restore old artillery. Cook in an iron pot over an open fire. Reproduce old clothing in exquisite detail.
Alex loved that. But Lauren loved immediacy, the moment. Things as they were right now. And then the next thing, and the next. Just parking her van in the same spot for longer than a few weeks was stifling to her. What would she think of a whole group of people fixated on the same period of history in the same small geographical area? Enacting the same battles over and over every year?
“I’m going to get my booth set up,” he said. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before opening time.”
“Okay. I’ll help you.”
“That’s all right. I’m used to setting up on my own. Why don’t you walk around and check things out? Some people are mostly set up already.”
He didn’t want to be there when she saw the scene for the first time: the old chairs and trunks and chests, kneading troughs and spinning wheels, quilts and sunbonnets, muskets and cartridge boxes, quill pens and stacks of parchment.
Would she mock? Or act polite while letting him see how silly she thought the whole thing was?
Tony teased him about his reenacting all the time, and Alex didn’t mind. But he would mind very much if Lauren looked at this thing that meant so much to him, and belittled it. Her opinion shouldn’t matter to him, but it did.
“Okay,” Lauren said.
She took the clip out of her hair, stuck it in her mouth and shook her hair loose, running her hands through the whole thick wavy mass. She did that a lot—took her hair down and rearranged it and put it up again. He loved watching the whole graceful, businesslike process. Every time she put it up, the configuration was a little different—sometimes an upside-down ponytail with the ends cascading over the top of the clip, sometimes a tight aggressive twist. This time it was a high loose knot with a few wavy tendrils at the neck.
She picked up her camera case and got out of the truck. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
LAUREN SAT DOWN on a granite slab and scrolled through the pictures in her camera. She’d been exploring the festival and taking pictures for two hours now, and she had yet to figure out the identity of Alex’s girlfriend.
Not that that had been her exclusive aim, of course. She’d gotten lots of great shots and interviewed some reenactors. But she kept finding herself looking at attractive young women, trying to figure out which ones looked like actual or potential love interests for Alex.
She’d spent a long time with a reenactor named Tamara, who seemed a likely candidate. Tamara had a spinning wheel and baskets of wool and other fibers in her tent, she lived on a farm where she raised her own sheep and llamas for their fiber, she was superknowledgeable about the Texas frontier and she looked a lot like Jenna Coleman. When Tamara asked how Lauren had found out about the festival, and Lauren told her she was a friend of Alex’s sister-in-law’s and that Alex’s brother had suggested that she go and do a story on it, Tamara smiled warmly and said, “Oh, Alex!” in such a sweet, affectionate tone that Lauren felt sure she had a winner. But then a tall man with serious gray eyes, dressed in sober black, showed up and gave Tamara a kiss. The tall man turned out to be Jay, Tamara’s husband, who portrayed a circuit-riding frontier minister and acted as the group’s chaplain. Tamara told Jay that Lauren was a friend of Alex’s, and Jay beamed at Lauren in an approving sort of way. So maybe Alex was just very popular among the reenactor crowd.
Then Lauren visited Jay’s booth and took pictures of his bookbinding equipment and reproduction early edition Bibles and other books. After that she talked to a blacksmith and an herbalist and a Mexican cavalry officer and a retired college professor from South Carolina who traveled around the country doing reenactments.
Come to think of it, there was no reason to suppose that Alex’s girlfriend was a fellow reenactor. She might just as easily be a visitor.
She stood and looked around. There were plenty of booths left to visit; she’d barely scratched the surface.
Then she saw Alex.
The day was warm for November, and as usual, he’d been shedding layers. She could see his jacket hanging from a peg in his tent, with the waistcoat over it, and the black neckcloth over that. He had his linen shirt open at the neck and the sleeves rolled up. He was doing something-or-other to a piece of wood—carving, probably—and leaning into the motion with practiced skill.
But it was the look on his face that made her stop and stare—absorbed, content, tranquil.
She looped her camera strap over her head. Time to get back to work.
ALEX WAS INTENT on a tricky bit of carving when he heard a click-whir and looked up to see Lauren’s camera focused on him.
“What are you making, sir?” she asked.
“A cradle.”
“What kind of wood are you using? It looks like oak.”
“It is. White oak.”
“That’s a hard wood. Isn’t it difficult to carve?”
“Not for those who have the patience and skill to work it.”
She glanced up from the viewfinder and smiled at him. “Do you have patience and skill?”
He smiled back. “I think my work speaks for itself.”
“I see you have an array of tools.”
“Yes. These are my gouges. And here are my chisels, and the wooden mallet I use to move them along and control the angle of the carving.”
He picked up a piece of wood.
“The cradle has a symmetrical sleigh shape, so I cut out four of these curving side pieces. I have them all in different stages so you can see the progression. This one just has the design drawn on. I’m going to secure it in my vise...and now I’ll start roughing in the cuts. It’s easy to be timid at this stage. One slip of the gouge can ruin a whole piece of wood. You can ooch along, all careful and cautious, but that’ll take forever. I like to cut boldly in the beginning. I know what I’m doing, and I’m not afraid to go deep. That way I conserve my time and energy for the detail work.”
He sounded good, he thought—knowledgeable and confident. Lauren asked intelligent questions, and they were the right questions to take him to exactly what he would want to say next. Sometimes she came close to get a shot of his hands.
“Here I’m making a running cut, creating a long channel in the wood. Then for this curved part, I’ll make a sweep cut. That’s tricky because part of the cut goes across the grain, which could make splinters if I’m not careful. But I have a good edge on my gouge so it should be fine. I keep my sharpening stone handy so I can sharpen my blades whenever they start to get dull. There’s just no point in slogging along with a dull blade at any stage of the process.”
He made the sweep cut, holding the gouge’s shaft steady and controlling the direction with his wrist. Then he made some stabbing cuts, deep and dark for hard, crisp shadows.
“How do you decide on a design?” Lauren asked.
“It’s basically just imagination plus common sense. I usually start with an actual historical piece as a model—this cradle is based on a family heirloom—and from there I make some changes, whatever I think will look good. I don’t fuss too much. If you’re a nineteenth-century woodworker and you’re making a cradle, there’s probably a baby already on the way. There’s a built-in deadline. But still, you want it to look beautiful. This is where your children will sleep, and you’re going to be looking at it for years. And I do find that people in past centuries put a surprising amount of beauty into functional things. It was a more elegant age.”
He went on for a while, answering Lauren’s questions, demonstrating techniques and talking about woodworking on the Texas frontier.
Finally Lauren shut off the camera and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome. Are you having a good time?”
“Oh, yes, lovely. Everyone is so friendly and knowledgeable, and so dedicated. I like being around people who are passionate about what they do.”
“I’m glad. I’m glad you like it.”
“Now I’m ready for a break. I’m going to go get something to eat.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Can you leave your booth?”
“Sure. Hey, Kevin,” he called to the leatherworker across the aisle, “keep an eye on my place, will you?”
Kevin nodded. “Sure thing, teniente.”
Alex followed the rich aroma of roasted meat toward the food area, Lauren at his side.
“What did that guy call you?” Lauren asked.
“Teniente,” Alex said. “Because Alejandro Ramirez was a lieutenant in Juan Seguin’s company, and that’s the character I play.”
He braced himself. If she was going to mock, this would be the time. A grown man parading around in costume, pretending to be a nineteenth-century soldier, complete with rank and backstory.
He waited for a laugh, a smirk, a snide remark.
Instead, she stopped in her tracks and laid a hand on his arm.
Her touch sent a shiver through him.
She was staring straight ahead, eyes wide, mouth open a little.
“Hold on,” she said in a hushed tone.
He followed her gaze to a man who could have stepped right out of the Texas frontier. His hair was long and grizzled, and he had a lean, stringy, weather-beaten look. Silently, invisibly, Lauren approached him and got his picture.
She’d been about as stealthy as a photographer could be, but the man turned as if on instinct and looked at her. He had narrow, knowing eyes in a creased face.
Lauren smiled and nodded as if saying “thank you”—as if he’d given her permission to take his picture. It was disarming, and it worked. The man smiled and nodded back as if to say “you’re welcome.”
They exchanged a few words. Alex couldn’t hear, but he could see that the man was charmed. Lauren got some more shots of him, focusing on details of his clothing and gear. The traps hanging at his belt. The firing mechanism of his musket, with his hand resting on the stock. The worn leather folds of his boots. The fringe on his jacket. His bowie knife. A scarred wooden canteen.
Alex watched, feet rooted to the ground, utterly captivated. Not by the sight of James, the reenactor—he was used to James—but by Lauren’s reaction. She was doing her in-the-moment thing, and it wasn’t flaky at all.
It was wonderful.
She was wonderful.
She wasn’t mocking his world. She was embracing it.
This moved him deeply with a strange stirring. He hadn’t hoped for this. The highest he’d aspired to was that she wouldn’t make fun. He’d hardly dared hope she would appreciate it on some minimal level.
He hadn’t dreamed that she would enter into it, boldly, joyfully.
As Lauren returned to Alex, James gave him a meaningful glance, a hey-your-girl-is-hot kind of glance.
Lauren looked at Alex, and smiled.
“Let’s go, teniente.”
From that moment, he was a lost man.