by Mary Balogh
* * *
Joana da Fonte, the Marquesa das Minas, tapped Colonel Lord Wyman on the arm with her fan.
“Another glass of champagne, if you please, Duncan,” she said. She turned to another of her admirers as the colonel hurried away to do her bidding. “You may dance the next set with me, Michael.”
There was a chorus of protests from a half dozen male voices.
“Unfair, Joana,” one young man said. “I made a point of being at the door in order to be the first to ask you.”
“You must wait your turn, William,” she said. “Michael had the forethought to call upon me this afternoon.”
The protests receded to grumbles and reproachful glances at the wily lieutenant who had given himself an unfair advantage in a manner they all wished they had thought of.
He would come, Joana thought. He had appeared unexpectedly reluctant, it was true, and she would wager on it that at that particular moment he was convinced that he would not come. But he would. She knew enough about men to have recognized that particular look in his eyes.
He was not at all as she had expected, although she had been warned that he was a soldier rather than an officer—sometimes there was quite a distinction between the two terms, she knew. But even so she had expected a gentleman soldier, not a tough-looking man with a hard war- and weather-beaten face and very direct blue—startingly blue—eyes. He had seemed totally unconcerned by the near-shabbiness of his green jacket.
And yet, she thought, tapping one foot in time to the music and allowing her mind to wander—as it frequently did—away from the shallow and somewhat foolish conversation flowing about her, gentlemen and soldiers aside, Captain Robert Blake had looked all man.
She had not met many men in her life, she thought, although she was surrounded now, as she usually was when she was out in society, by males. Of course, there were Duarte and his band, but they were a different matter.
She had had the feeling on her first close look at Captain Robert Blake that she had met him before. It would not have been surprising. She had met a large number of British officers before. But she would not have forgotten such a man, she thought. She would not have forgotten either the shabbiness of his appearance or the toughness of his face and figure. Or the battered attractiveness of his face. No, she had not met him before.
She wafted a careless hand toward the colonel as he returned with her champagne. “You may hold it for me, if you please, Duncan,” she said, “while I dance with Michael.”
“What?” he said. “Young Bristow has solicited your hand when I was not here to argue, Joana? I shall call him out at dawn tomorrow.”
“Duelists are forever banished from my presence,” she said carelessly, laying one gloved hand lightly along the lieutenant’s scarlet sleeve. “Have a care, do, Duncan.”
“It will be my pleasure and my privilege to hold your glass until you return,” Colonel Lord Wyman said, bowing elegantly without spilling a drop of the liquid.
He had moved up from the ranks, she had learned since arriving in Lisbon. She had not been told that before. He must indeed be a brave man. Not many enlisted men ever became officers. It was fortunate that she had met him so easily without having to make any overt move to do so. She had been looking for green jackets for three days. There were not many in Lisbon, most of the riflemen being stationed with the rest of the Light Division on the Coa River close to the border between Spain and central Portugal, protecting the army from sudden attack and preventing the French from obtaining any information about what was happening in Portugal.
It was fortunate that he had been at the ball. Her attention had been drawn first to the green jacket and then to the man inside it. He had looked an unlikely candidate at first. But perhaps not. A man with a facility with languages was not necessarily a thin, ascetic-looking scholar—certainly not if he was a captain with the famed Ninety-fifth Rifles. And this man, she knew, had done reconnaissance work before. He must be a man of some daring.
Yes, she had thought, he could quite possibly be her man. And discreet inquiries had drawn the information she had hoped for from Jack Hanbridge.
He would come, she thought again, smiling at Michael Bristow as they began to dance. She remembered the rough awkwardness of his manners, the faint hostility in his voice, the overwhelming masculinity of his person.
And she remembered his eyes—his blue eyes—and the look of awareness in them. An unwilling awareness, she was sure. He had not looked at her with open appreciation. He had made no attempt to flirt with her, and never would, she suspected. But the awareness had been there nonetheless. And she had been more intrigued by it than she had been by all the flattery and adulation of his more elegant peers.
Yes, he would come.
4
JOANA da Fonte, the Marquesa das Minas, had no particular business in Lisbon apart from the opportunity being there gave her to become acquainted with Captain Robert Blake more at her leisure than would have been the case if she had stayed at Viseu until he came. And when she had suggested her plan to Arthur Wellesley, Viscount Wellington, he had thought it a good idea.
“You will of course meet him here eventually, Joana,” he had said when she had talked with him in Viseu. “I shall see to that. But it will be important that you get to know him fairly well.”
“But getting to know him here would take time, Arthur,” she had said. “And time is a commodity of which there is not an abundance?”
She had phrased her words as a question. But she might as well have saved her breath, she had thought philosophically. Viscount Wellington was always flatteringly attentive and gallant to ladies, as he was apparently not to the men under his command, but he kept his own counsel more than any other man she had known. He might of necessity have to divulge secret information to the numerous spies and reconnaissance officers who were essential to the success of his campaigns in Portugal and Spain, but he would not divulge one iota of one secret if he did not have to do so or before he had to do so.
So although Joana knew that soon she was going to be working with Captain Blake, without his knowing it, in Salamanca, Spain—behind enemy lines, at the present headquarters of the French army—she had no idea what exactly her task was to be, or his either. It was most annoying—and intriguing.
“You see, Joana,” Viscount Wellington had said, smiling at her apologetically, “perhaps after all Captain Blake will prove unsuitable or unwilling for the task I have in mind for him. Or perhaps his wounds have not healed well enough yet, though he has spent a whole winter and spring in the hospital at Lisbon. And perhaps you will change your mind about going back into the danger of Salamanca.”
She had opened her mouth to protest, but he had held up a staying hand.
“Let me put that a different way,” he had said with another smile. “Perhaps this time I will succeed in persuading you not to go back.”
“You know that I would go even if you had no use for me,” she had said.
“I hear Wyman is seriously courting you.” He had looked at her keenly.
She had waved a careless hand. “And half a dozen other men too if I gave them the slightest encouragement,” she had said. “Wartime conditions are just too flattering to a woman’s esteem, Arthur. So many starved men and so few eligible women.”
“You are being too modest, Joana,” he had said. “Too modest by half.”
And so she had come all the way to Lisbon to meet Captain Blake and had met him once, very briefly, at the Count of Angeja’s ball. And she had known that he had found her attractive and that he had not enjoyed the feeling and had resolved not to see her again. She knew quite enough about men to know exactly what had gone through his mind during their short encounter.
And the man appeared to stay off the streets of Lisbon, she thought with a sigh of frustration as she strolled beside the river the following afternoon, twirling a white
parasol above her head with a white-gloved hand and hoping the dust would not sully the hem of her white dress too noticeably. Her free hand rested lightly on the arm of Colonel Lord Wyman and she laughed merrily at some remark a lieutenant had made. Five officers accompanied her on her walk.
But there was not a sight of Captain Blake all afternoon. It was very tiresome, Joana thought. She might as well have stayed in Viseu. But he would come to her reception the following evening. Of that she was sure.
“Shall I send them all packing, Joana?” Lord Wyman asked her, his voice a murmur against her ear. “Shall I have you to myself for a while?”
She smiled at him. “But I cannot bear to be rude, Duncan,” she said. “Or to have anyone be rude on my behalf. And it is such a pleasant afternoon for a stroll in company.” She twirled her parasol again. The colonel had proposed marriage to her for the second time the evening before. And she was inclined to accept. Oh, yes, she wanted to accept, all right. The thought of being in England where her mother had grown up and where she had spent many happy years—despite her father’s protectiveness—was like the thought of heaven. It would be the pinnacle of joy to marry an English lord and to spend the rest of her life where she belonged.
Joana smiled and unwittingly drew a blush to the cheeks of a young ensign who had stepped off the path to allow her and her entourage to pass, staring at her the whole while and only just remembering to salute his superior officers. She was a strange one to talk about belonging. She belonged nowhere.
Her mother had been English and had been married to a Portuguese nobleman before being widowed and remarried. Joana had two half-brothers and a half-sister in Portugal—had had, rather, she corrected herself. Only Duarte was left. Her father was French and was currently back in favor in France and a diplomat again—in Vienna at that particular time. He had been sent back to Portugal after their return from England. It had been a brief stay, but during it Joana had been married to Luis, the Marques das Minas. It had been a political marriage—he had been forty-eight to her own nineteen and they had never particularly liked each other. But he had thought it wise to ally himself to a citizen of powerful France and her father had thought it wise that she have ties with some country other than France and that France show itself to be magnanimous to its friends. He had never encouraged her ties with England and her grandparents there. Joana suspected that her parents had not parted on the best of terms.
She and her husband had gone more or less their separate ways until they had done so entirely in 1807, when he had fled Portugal with the royal family on the approach of an invading French army led by Marshal Junot. He had died of a fever during the passage to Brazil and left Joana free. She might have been with him if she had not been away from Lisbon at the time, as she so often was, visiting friends in Coimbra.
And so where did she belong? Joana asked herself as she talked and flirted with four British officers and one Portuguese all at once and yet gave some preferential glances and smiles to the colonel, to whom she might be married one day if fate smiled on her. In France? But her father was not there himself and was not really happy even when he was, it being now a country he hardly recognized and one of which he secretly disapproved. In England? But both her grandparents were now dead and she had never met her aunt and uncle, her mother’s sister and brother. In Portugal? But her husband was dead, as well as the elder of her half-brothers and Maria, her half-sister. Only Duarte was left and she was able to see him only rarely. Not nearly as often as she would have wished.
Besides, Portugal was a dangerous country in which to be at that particular time. The French had been there and the British had driven them out. But the French would be back again, and soon too. Despite the great victory at Talavera the summer before, no one had any great hope that the British would be able to put up another fight this year. It was only a matter of time before the French invaded and drove them back and back until the remnant of their army was driven right into the sea. The fate of the Portuguese was not to be thought of when that happened.
Her very wisest move, despite her French identity, Joana thought, would be to accept Duncan’s proposal and to have him send her to safety in England without delay.
Except that she could not go to England—yet. She belonged in Portugual until certain matters had been settled. Very few people even knew that she was half English. It was assumed that she was Portuguese. And she fostered the belief. Even her name—the name her mother had given her and her father had later changed to the French Jeanne—she spelled the Portuguese way. And fortunately she looked almost Portuguese, though her hair could be darker and her eyes could be a different color.
Yes, she belonged in Portugal. Because it was in Portugal during the French invasion, when she had been staying with her brother and sister and her brother’s wife and son, that she had been the horrified and terrified witness of the arrival of the French army at the village and the large home of her family. She had been in the attic, looking for a pair of shoes more suited to walks in the country than the ones she had brought with her. And she had looked down through a slit in the ill-fitting trapdoor as soldiers smashed with their bayonets and destroyed everything that was not edible or otherwise worth stuffing in their packs. And as four of them took turns raping Maria before one of them ran her through with his bayonet at a signal from an officer. And as another shot Miguel at point-blank range as he rushed into the house to defend his family. She had not witnessed the slaughter, in another room, of Miguel’s wife and son.
Duarte had been away from the village at the time. He had found Joana still cowering in the attic six hours after the French had passed on.
Yes, she belonged in Portugal. For she had seen the French soldiers and in particular the officer who had taken the first turn with Maria and had stood at the door watching all that happened afterward, a half-smile on his lips. Joana had seen him. His face was burned on some part of her brain just behind her eyes. She would know him anywhere, anytime, and in any guise.
She could not leave Portugal or Spain until she had seen that face again. Until she had killed the man to whom it belonged. He would do the killing, Duarte had always assured her. She could do the identifying, and he would do the killing. They had, after all, been his full brother and sister and his brother’s family. And Duarte was now the leader of a band of Ordenanza, the semimilitary organization of partisan fighters who harassed the French from every hill and along every lonely road. Killing wherever and whenever they could.
Duarte would kill the French officer, and perhaps it was only fair that she allow him to do so. But she would not, for all that. It was something she would do herself. Something she had to do herself. She only hoped that the man would not die in battle before she could find him. But she refused to think of such a depressing possibility. She would see him again one day.
And she had an advantage that Duarte did not have. An advantage that almost no one else in Portugal had. She was half-French. She had made a political marriage with a Portuguese nobleman, now unfortunately deceased. As far as any Frenchman knew, she was a loyal daughter of the Revolution, a loyal subject of the Emperor Napoleon.
Hence her not infrequent visits to Spain—wherever the French happened to be—to visit “aunts.” Lately the visits had been to Salamanca. And hence her usefulness to Viscount Wellington and his willingness to trust her despite the fact that she was half-French. And hence her refusal ever to let him talk her out of doing anything as dangerous as going behind enemy lines in order to spy for him.
And hence her willingness to go there again and to act, not alone this time, as she usually did, but in some mysterious conjunction with Captain Robert Blake—who was to know nothing about her except that she was the rather fragile and flirtatious and helpless Marquesa das Minas. One of her disguises.
Not only was it not clear where she belonged, Joana thought ruefully. It was not even clear just who she was. Sometimes she was not
quite sure herself.
“You are unusually quiet and serious, Joana,” the colonel said, looking down into her face.
She smiled up at him and tapped his arm with her gloved hand. “I was merely thinking,” she said, “how sad it is that the afternoon must come to an end. Such beautiful weather and such delightful company. Yes, thank you,” she said to a pleased and surprised young lieutenant, handing him her parasol and watching him close it with clumsy fingers. “The sun is no longer as strong as it was. I wish to feel it against my face.”
Rather than feeling foolish to be carrying such a feminine confection as a lady’s parasol on a public footpath, the lieutenant looked about him with some pity on his companions, whose hands were empty of such a sign of the lady’s favor.
* * *
During the morning of that same day, the surgeon told Captain Blake that he could return to his regiment in one more week if he absolutely insisted. It would be better, of course, he advised his patient, to convalesce through the summer and forget about that year’s campaign. After all, he had been severely wounded and had hovered at death’s door for several months, what with the effects of the wound and the killing fever that had set in soon afterward.
“Of course,” he added, looking at the war-hardened face of the tall veteran standing before him, “I might as well save my breath to cool my tea with, might I not?”
The captain grinned unexpectedly. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Well, one more week,” the surgeon said abruptly. “Come to see me then and I shall discharge you, provided there is no relapse in the meanwhile.”
But Captain Blake was released sooner than that, much to his relief. The next day a staff officer from Viseu, in central Portugal, brought him a verbal message from headquarters there.
“Captain Blake?” he said when he was joined in the reception room of the hospital. “Yes, of course. I have seen you before, have I not? I trust you have recovered from your wounds?”