Tarleton's Wife

by Blair Bancroft

  “I have practiced the words I wish to say to you, Mrs. Tarleton,” Violante began in her soft charmingly accented English. “Your language is not easy for me. I beg you will allow me to say all I have prepared before you speak, or I fear I will forget what I must tell you.”

  Julia could not help but be touched by the girl’s earnestness. “I speak passable Spanish, Doña Violante. It is not necessary for you to speak English.”

  “Oh but I must!” the girl cried, lapsing into Spanish. “Your soldiers have died for my country. Your country has given me a home. It is important that I speak English. Ah, bah! And so soon I forget. I am an idiot!”

  As was her habit in times of stress, Julia clasped her hands together so tightly the knuckles turned white. The worst of it was, she was in danger of liking this devastatingly dangerous rival. She swallowed convulsively, found her voice and politely encouraged Violante to say what she wished to say.

  For a moment the younger girl shut her eyes, willing the awkward English words to mind. Her lashes seemed to reach halfway down her cheeks. Julia ground her teeth, her charity short-lived.

  “I wish to say this, señora,” Violante announced in slow, careful English. “In my country seventeen years is past the age when a girl should be married. I was betrothed almost at birth to a young man of good family but he went to Madrid when the monster Bonaparte turned on us and made his brother king. Ricardo died there in the early days of the riots. I was only fifteen and did not know him well—we had met only a few times—but I was very sad for him. And Carlos—my brother Carlos—was also greatly affected by what was happening in our country.” Violante paused, her dark eyes fixed on the past. “Only a few weeks after Ricardo’s death, Carlos left home to join the guerrillero bands which were forming in the mountains.”

  Violante seemed to find her gloved hands of great interest, studying them minutely before lifting her eyes to Julia. “Those were very bad times, señora. My foolish country had thought the little Corsican a friend and now his soldiers marched over our land taking anything, everything, they wanted. When Nicholas was ill and Carlos brought him to us, it was impossible for me not to love him. The friend of my beloved brother, a handsome major who nearly gave his life for my country. And for him, for Nicholas—you must understand, señora—for him it was also very easy to love where he found comfort and peace after so much war.”

  And such great beauty and charm, Julia conceded, her heart aching. She opened her mouth to speak but Violante forestalled her with a wave of her white-gloved hand. “No, allow me to finish, please, señora.

  “When Carlos died, there was no time to think. We left our home and country and will be eternally grateful to Nicholas for saving us and bringing us here. But the truth of the matter, when there was time to reflect, was that a marriage with the major was no longer a good match for me. Oh, I was infinitely jealous of you, señora. I was so angry you would not believe! And hurt. But those were the reactions of a child and I can no longer afford to be a child.”

  Julia, astonished as she was, began to catch a glimmer of what Violante was trying to say. With great forbearance she bit her tongue and kept silent.

  “You see,” said Violante with increasing confidence and determination, “I am the only heir now. An hidalga of very ancient family and I must marry a man of my own country, someone who will live on our land and guard the honor of Santiago de Compostela and the people who depend on us for their lives. I am not unhappy about this obligation. I consider it a great privilege and am pleased I have finally grown up enough to understand that my heart must lie with the land of my ancestors. You can understand this, I think, señora.”

  In her overwhelming relief Julia was almost unable to speak at all. “Yes,” she breathed. “And I-I am so very grateful you have told me this.”

  “Bueno,” Violante approved. “I am glad I came, although Papa will be furious.” Her eyes sparkled with mischief. From woman of the world she had suddenly returned to being the seventeen-year-old she actually was.

  Julia decided that Violante’s candor was deserving of equal honesty in return. “I was exceedingly jealous of you too,” she admitted. Sparkling blue eyes met liquid brown and matching smiles dawned in mutual empathy.

  The two young women settled down to tea and an additional half-hour’s conversation—in Spanish—while a surprising number of servants found excuses to hover anxiously outside. Meg Runyon dispatched Daniel to find out what was going on. Even Sophy Upton and Pamela Tarleton were not above several casual passages through the hallway to discover if any news was forthcoming. The obvious cordiality between the two young women as Doña Violante took her leave was enough to put the entire household in a twitter.

  When the door closed behind the intrepid young visitor, Julia gave a few words of smiling reassurance to her mother-in-law, then swept Sophy off to Meg’s room where the three old friends indulged in a few moments of unadulterated triumph. For the first time since those terrible days in Spain it appeared that true happiness might be returning to their lives.

  Later, Julia would think of burning rose petals and wonder if a hint of Hallowe’en magic accounted for the triumph in love while leaving the rest of their problems unresolved.

  Growing worse, in fact.

  * * * * *

  Long after dark, when Nicholas returned from Nottingham, he brought Jack and Terence O’Rourke with him, slipping into the secret room through the ivy covered outside door. All three were grateful for a warm fire, hot punch and generous leftovers Julia provided from The Willow’s well-stocked larder. When their appetites were assuaged, talk turned to the problems at hand.

  “I hear there are an astonishing number of poisonous beasties in the Antipodes,” Jack announced glumly. Once again, he was seated backward on the ladder-back chair which had miraculously survived his fight with Nicholas.

  “And you deserve to meet them all, you damn fool idiot,” Nicholas retorted. “What the hell did you expect? Preach anarchy and that’s what you’ll get!”

  “What he expected,” Terence O’Rourke interjected with dripping sarcasm, “was that he could control the mob. And no man can. He was the earl’s own bastard boyo, cock of the walk. He thought he was God. The mighty Captain Hood could stir the masses to do what he wanted, when he wanted. And now, he’s had a fine surprise, finding the sheep have minds of their own. Is that not the way of it, Captain?”

  “But he wasn’t anywhere near them,” Julia protested. “He was sitting in Buck’s Tavern talking to you when the trouble began.”

  “Julia,” said Nicholas, drawing out her name with long-suffering patience, “you know as well as I who stirred the workers to rebellion. It doesn’t matter a whit whether he was actually there or not.”

  “But if he’d been there, I’m sure he would have tried to stop them.”

  Jack groaned. “But I wasn’t there, my Jule and it’s just as O’Rourke says—I was arrogant enough to think they’d do nothing without me. I thought the men in the mills as loyal to me as our own farm workers. More the fool, I.”

  Julia turned to O’Rourke, her blue eyes wide in blatant feminine appeal. “Surely you would not have Jack transported if he wasn’t even there?”

  “Transportation was once a possibility. Not now.” O’Rourke raised one black brow. The rest of his face remained immobile, although Julia thought she detected a gleam far back in eyes as blue as her own. “If Mr. Harding helps quell the troubles,” Terence O’Rourke decreed, his Irish brogue giving way to crisp London merchant’s English. “If he gives us ample reason to believe he recalls his promise to retire from rabble-rousing, it is just possible he may not be hanged. But after last night his chance of survival seems considerably less than it did a day ago.”

  “You’d hang him?” Julia’s voice was a hoarse whisper.

  “Not I,” said O’Rourke. “But, earl’s son or no, they’ll find someone to do it. Men are transported for stealing a loaf of bread. For what happened last night, men hang.”
/>
  Julia and Jack exchanged a swift look. For once there was no sign of nonchalance, no slightest quirk of humor in his green eyes.

  “I’ve faced worse odds,” Nicholas said. “We’ve only to keep the workers from more violence and at the same time prevent the militia from massacring the whole lot of them. I admit I find the idea of keeping people alive rather than killing them a fine switch from the usual soldiering.”

  “And a damn sight harder to do,” O’Rourke declared.

  “Ellington controls the militia,” said Nicholas. “It’s plain he’s protected Jack for quite some time. I can’t believe he’d stop now, though he and every other ‘aristo’ are convinced the rabble is sharpening their guillotines. That the Terror has already begun.”

  “One night of rioting,” Jack scoffed. “Men not yet sober from Hallowe’en and anticipating Guy Fawkes. ’Tis not a Revolution.”

  “But it could be,” O’Rourke stated flatly. “All revolutions begin somewhere. And here’s as good as any.”

  “So it stops now,” said Nicholas. “It’s not going to be said that anarchy and mass murder started here. Can you control the cottagers, Jack?”

  Jack hesitated before replying, his pride considerably shaken by what had happened in Nottingham. “Yes, I’m nearly certain of it. Though I would have said the same of the mill workers before last night.”

  “Did the militia capture many of those who caused the trouble?” Julia inquired.

  “Nary a one,” said Nicholas. “Every man of them was long home in bed by the time the militia was called out. The two dead men were guards overrun by the mob. The troops have been marching up and back in front of the mills all day, trying to look ferocious when I doubt any of them have ever shot at anything more menacing than a rabbit.”

  O’Rourke snorted. Jack shook his head. “I know at least half of the workers personally. I’ve no wish to see them hurt.”

  “Is it possible to cancel the Guy Fawkes celebration?” Julia asked.

  “That might help,” Terence said, glancing at Nicholas and Jack for their opinion.

  “It would only make everyone angry,” Jack stated firmly. “The tradition is too strong.”

  “They’d burn the Guy in secret or, more likely, choose something considerably larger than the Guy to burn,” Nicholas concurred.

  Like a barn. Or stables. A cottage. Ellington Park. Or The Willows.

  They were an oddly assorted group of conspirators, Julia thought. A soldier who had inherited knitting mills, the bastard leader of the rebellious workers, an equally illegitimate Irishman backed by great wealth and power and a strong-minded woman torn between her sense of justice and her abhorrence of violence and death.

  When had she changed? Julia wondered. She had lived in the starkly realistic and violent world of the soldier all her life. And now…now she could not accept what was happening. Was it that terrible trek through Spain? The horror of Nicholas lying on a stone-cold floor in La Coruña covered in blood? Or had she been softened by the simple joy of living nearly two years in the quiet security of the English countryside? By the hope born with Meg’s babe? The tiny new life who suckled at his mother’s breast giving promise of renewal, of new life blossoming from the tragedy of the past.

  These were her people. All of them. Death was not an acceptable solution.

  When Julia and Nicholas bade their visitors farewell in the wee hours of the morning, all four were cautiously optimistic the plans they had made would go a long way toward ending the violence.

  But on the morrow the Earl of Ellington announced the cancellation of all Guy Fawkes activities.

  * * * * *

  Julia sat on the edge of her bed and gazed in awe at the mounds of colorful clothing completely surrounding her, while still more garments spilled out of the huge trunk that had finally arrived from London. Nicholas, an indulgent smile softening his harsh features, had come into his wife’s room to watch while Julia and young Tess, the housemaid, unpacked the treasures from London. He turned his gaze from the latest item the maid retrieved from the trunk in time to catch the look on his wife’s face as she traced her fingers down the front of a rose satin ball gown trimmed in diamanté and pearls. Her face was crumpled, a tear glistening on her cheek.

  “What now?” Nicholas demanded. “Don’t you like them?”

  “They’re b-beautiful,” Julia quavered. “But I know you ordered them to ease your conscience.”

  “Conscience be damned! I ordered them because I don’t care for my wife to look like a crow.” With a savage gesture, Nicholas sent young Tess scurrying from the room.

  “When you ordered them, you still planned to marry Violante.”

  “Like hell I did!”

  “You didn’t talk to Miles Bannister until after you ordered the clothes.”

  “Miles Bannister be hanged. He had nothing to do with it.”

  Julia caught her husband’s eyes in a long look of disbelief.

  “Very well,” Nicholas conceded grudgingly. “Bannister made me realize I had no choice in the matter but I had made up my mind while chasing you to London. When I heard the whole tale from Daniel, I never doubted his word. I knew you and I were well and truly married.”

  “You wanted an annulment.” Julia had the bit between her teeth and could not let it go.

  “Only if you were willing,” Nicholas muttered, well aware the ground beneath his feet was trembling. “If you preferred to marry Jack.”

  Reason reared its anxious head. The woman who took Nicholas to her bed last night had fought the good fight with pride. And lost. If she had to put her humbling into words, so be it. She loved him. They were together. It was enough. Had to be enough.

  “I adore Jack,” Julia told him, her voice fading to the soft tones of reminiscence. “As a friend, as my strong helper and defender. But, truly, I never loved him as I love you.”

  Nicholas took a deep breath, staring at his wife, who was surrounded by a barricade of precious silks, satins and lace. “I don’t suppose you would believe me if I said I loved you too?”

  Julia shook her head but her lips curled into a soft smile. “It may be true, Nicholas but I think the idea comes hard to you. I’m not foolish enough to demand empty words. I can wait.”

  “Then I’ll keep saying them until you believe me,” Nicholas vowed.

  Tears dripped onto the sea of elegant new clothes as Julia’s heart overflowed. Nicholas being kind was almost harder to deal with than a Nicholas barking orders.

  “Damn these clothes,” he muttered.

  Then again, Julia conceded, it was foolish to see mountains where none existed. “They all have to be ironed anyway,” she responded. Helpfully.

  Nicholas turned on his heel, strode to the door, locked it. He returned in time to help toss the lovely new wardrobe back into the trunk before topping the colorful pile with his own clothes. Julia’s day gown and undergarments soon followed.

  “Ah!” Nicholas breathed with satisfaction, “one should always make love by daylight. The view is so much more…revealing.” His smile creased into a wicked grin. “I believe ‘stimulating’ is the word I want.”

  He proceeded to occupy myself with activities which his wife found very stimulating indeed. Julia only had time for a fleeting qualm that she had not yet told him about Violante’s visit before all rational thought was driven from her mind. Perhaps forgiveness was, after all, as much a part of love as caring and giving and…making love. After all they had endured, fate seemed to be smiling on them at last.

  * * * * *

  Later that day, the messenger arrived from the Earl of Ellington with the order to cancel all Guy Fawkes celebrations. Nicholas, who was about to set out on a round of his tenants and farm workers, swore fluently, crumpled the message into a ball and flung it across the drawing room. He would have to expand his plans for defense of the house and outbuildings. And then he would have to face the impossible task of doing the same for his tenant farmers and the cottagers who w
orked for them.

  He had not thought it would come to this. Guy Fawkes was a legitimate outlet for surly tempers, something that might have defused the situation. Then again, possibly Ellington was right. At this point in time the gathering of any mob, sanctioned or not, was dangerous. À bas les aristos! Hell and the devil, surely rebellion wouldn’t go that far. These were Englishmen. The sturdy yeomen who kept their country well fed, well clothed, fought the brave fight in war. There would be no revolution here. Nicholas had not survived the war in Spain only to die at the hands of his own people.

  Or…was this, perhaps, why he had survived? To die here in this quiet corner of the English countryside so that war and death would not consume his own land? Slowly Nicholas shook his head. He had been too long among the monks. He was a soldier, a man of action. Philosophy, predestination, fate could not be part of his life. This new battle would be the most bitter he had fought. For it would be against Englishmen. Englishmen with honest grievances. Englishmen fighting the only way they could against an armed militia, blissfully unaware of the deeper issues involved.

  Nicholas’ mouth flattened into a grim line. Compared to this, fighting the French was a mere bagatelle. For how could he win this battle without killing? Yet how could he kill people whose cause was as just as his own?

  * * * * *

  The mists drifted sluggishly through the void, curling tendrils swaying in the icy stillness. Silence. Nothingness. The world had ceased to exist. The swirling mists surrounded her, enveloped her. Threatened her. She was so cold. So terribly cold. The fear that shook her was primitive, formless, as ancient as life itself. With a sudden flare tendrils of red infiltrated the mists. Reflected flickers of fire—blood?—turned the void to glowing red. Yet there was no warmth.