An Outlaw to Protect Her
Page 24
‘December 1807,’ the earl said, looking up as she reached the headstone and faced him. ‘The month the French took Porto for the first time.’
‘Yes. There was an epidemic of the influenza, just to add to the general horror. I think the anxiety and stress of the invasion made my parents particularly vulnerable to the infection.’ She could say it unemotionally now. Sometimes it even seemed like a dream, or a story she had read in a book, that time when she found herself orphaned with a fourteen-year-old brother and a quinta to, somehow, protect against the armies fighting to control a country in turmoil. She missed them all every day. The pain had become easier to live with, the sense of loss never seemed to diminish.
‘And this is your brother.’ Leybourne had moved on to the next headstone, reminding her just what a bad job she had done of protecting Thomas. He crouched down to read the inscription. ‘September 1810. We were behind the lines of Torres Vedras, holding Lisbon by then. I remember those months.’ Not with any pleasure, from the tone of his voice.
‘The French killed Thomas. Not disease.’ The French and treachery.
‘Hell, I’m sorry.’ He had bent down to read the inscription, but he looked up sharply at her words, then back to the stone. He reached out one long finger to trace the dates of birth and death. ‘I had not realised he had been so young, only seventeen. What happened? Were they scavenging around here?’
‘Only just seventeen.’
Old enough to be thinking about girls and so shy that he had no idea how to talk with them, let alone anything else. Old enough to be shaving off fluff and young enough to be proud of the fact. Young enough to still kiss his big sister without reserve when he came home and old enough to resent her worrying...
‘He was with the guerrilheiros. Not all the time, only when your Major Norwood thought to...use him.’ Exploit him.
Leybourne’s head came up again at the tone of her voice. ‘Andrew Norwood, the riding officer?’
‘The spy, yes. He was happy to find an enthusiastic, idealistic lad who knew his way around the hills here.’ An inexperienced boy. One who might well get himself killed—and then how useful that would be for Major Norwood, she had realised far too late. Gaby kept her voice studiedly neutral. Norwood might well have been a friend of the earl when he had been an officer here. He might be the kind of man Norwood had been.
‘Could you not stop him?’ Leybourne stood up. ‘I’m sorry, no, of course you could not if he was bent on fighting the French, not without chaining him up. We had boys younger than that lying about their age to enlist.’
‘If I had thought chaining him would work I would have tried it, believe me,’ she said, heartsick all over again at the remembered struggle, the arguments, the rows.
We are English and Portugal is our home, Thomas had thrown at her. The French are our enemy and the enemy of Portugal. It is our duty to fight them.
‘I told him that we had a duty to try and keep the quinta going, to give work and shelter to our people, to have something to offer the economy when the fighting was over so the country could be rebuilt,’ she said now. ‘The French would go soon enough, I argued.’
While we skulk here, nothing but farmers and merchants. We are descended from earls, her brother had retorted, impassioned and idealistic. We Frosts fight.
Gaby came back to herself, furious to find her vision blurred. She blinked hard. ‘I was so proud of him and so frightened for him. He was a boy who had the heart of a man and he was betrayed in the end.’
‘By whom? Someone within the guerrilheiros? It was the same with the Spanish guerrillas, a few had been turned by the French for money or because their families were threatened.’ The earl had his hand on the headstone, the strong fingers curled around the top as though he would protect it.
‘No. But it doesn’t matter now. The person responsible is dead.’ Her voice was steady again and she had her voice and her emotions under control. She resisted the impulse to glance at the riverbank where two men had gone over, fighting to the death, into the rushing water. There was a wood stack there now, although no traces had been left to hide.
How had this man manged to lure her into revealing so much? So much emotion? Gaby found a smile and turned to lead him out of the plot, past the graves of her grandparents Thomas and Elizabeth and her great-grandparents Rufus and Maria Frost, who had first owned the quinta. Weathered now, that first stone bore the family crest the quinta was named for, a falcon grasping a vine branch, faint but defiant on the old stone.
‘Lord Leybourne, if you come this way I will show you the rose garden.’ The roses were virtually over, but it would serve to move him on to ground that held less power over her.
Or not, it seemed. ‘Call me Gray, everyone does,’ he said. The infuriating man was walking away from her towards the southern corner of the plot, not the gate. ‘What is this?’ He had stopped at the simple white slab that was tilted to face the rising sun.
L.M., he read. He glanced up, frowning at her as she came closer, then went back to the inscription. March 25, 1811. Remember. ‘That is the date of the battle of Campo Maior. Who is this stone for?’
She smiled at him, amused, despite her feelings, by the way he frowned at her. It was clear that he resented not being in total command of the facts of any situation. The impulse to shock him was too strong to resist.
‘My lover.’
Copyright © 2018 by Melanie Hilton
ISBN-13: 9781488086908
An Outlaw to Protect Her
Copyright © 2018 by Harper St. George
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5H 4E3, Canada.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com