Marry in Haste

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  It was too much. Camilla, who had been fighting for consciousness with every breath she took, slid once more into a faint. When she came to herself again, she was lying on a hard bed, with Chloe once more anxiously beside her. “Was it a nightmare?” she asked.

  “No,” Chloe said. “It is all true, and all my fault. But if it has not killed you, Camilla, perhaps there is some hope for us yet.”

  “Hope?” Camilla asked sardonically. Then, looking around the darkening room, “But at least we are alone.”

  “Yes. That is why I dare speak of hope. When we reached this house—and God knows where it is, for I certainly do not—there was a messenger waiting for Charles, an urgent summons to join Junot on the march. I am glad you taught me some French, Camilla, for Charles thinks I do not understand it. He has left us here, with only two of his men on guard. We are locked in, of course, and they think us safe till morning. I heard them say so. They are downstairs, in the servants’ quarters, with a cask of wine. We are at the very top of the house; they think we cannot possibly escape.”

  “Well,” Camilla said reasonably, “how can we?”

  “By climbing down the vine that grows up this side of the house. You should just see it, Camilla, it has branches as big as your arm. It will be a ladder for us—a ladder to freedom. Camilla, say you can do it.”

  But Camilla, all too evidently, could not. When she tried to rise to her feet, it was only to fall back, half fainting, on the hard bed. “It’s no use,” she said. “I cannot do it. Chloe, you must go alone. If you cannot get to Lavenham, go to Dom Fernando. He will help us, I am sure.”

  “But, Camilla, how can I leave you?”

  “You must. It’s our only chance. And besides, consider. Charles can only hold me to ransom, but he means to marry you.”

  It was a clincher. Chloe kissed Camilla, asked her once more for her forgiveness, pinned her skirts up carefully around her knees, and disappeared, with one last near-smile, out of the window. Camilla, listening desperately, heard a continued rustling, then silence. No sound of a fall; no sound of pursuit. Perhaps there really was hope. Amazingly, she slept.

  She woke to morning light and the sounds of altercation downstairs. And also to an almost forgotten feeling She was actually hungry. I must be better, she thought, and then suspended even thinking in her effort to make out what was going on below. A few more anxious moments and she heard voices on the stairs. Chloe burst into the room, followed by Dom Fernando. “Thank God,” she said, “you are still here. We are safe, Camilla.”

  “But Lavenham?”

  Chloe’s face fell. “You must be brave, Camilla. He was gone when I reached the house. And—the wind has changed; the fleet is putting out of the harbour. Listen!” A volley of gunfire sent her running to the window. “It is the British and Portuguese fleets saluting each other,” she said, “and, oh, Camilla, I fear Lavenham must be aboard. He must have believed that lying note Charles left. Though how he could leave us so passes my imagining.”

  “I collect he could not help himself.” As always, Camilla rallied to her husband’s defence. “He has his duty, after all.”

  “Duty! And leave us to the mercy of the French! Were it not for Dom Fernando we would be in their hands tonight.”

  “And may be yet,” interposed Dom Fernando himself, “if we lose more time talking here. I am told that Junot’s advance guard is already on the hills above the town.”

  “Oh.” Camilla sank back despairingly on the bed. “Then how can we be safe? Lavenham gone ... Junot coming ... what hope have we?”

  Chloe took her hand. “Do not despair, Camilla. It is bad, I know, but not so bad as it might be. Dom Fernando has an admirable plan for us: we are to pose as his two mad nieces, who used to live on his estate south of the Tagus. It is but to row across the river—and vanish. Charles will think we succeeded in rejoining Lavenham and have sailed with the fleet. Besides, the French will be occupied enough for some time in taking over Lisbon. By the time they get south to Almada, we will be perfect in our disguise; I promise you, they will never find us.”

  “And then what?” Camilla asked.

  “Why, then,” Dom Fernando said, “as always, we must trust in God.”

  CHAPTER 10

  While Camilla and Chloe were being hurriedly rowed across the Tagus by Dom Fernando’s servants, Lavenham was pacing up and down the deck of the Marlborough in an agony of indecision. The combined British and Portuguese fleets were clear of the harbour now, all except one frigate that had had difficulty in crossing the bar, and as Lavenham stood, looking longingly back towards Lisbon, he saw a puff of smoke from the cannon in the fort of St. Julian. The French advance guard must have taken the fort already and had lost no time in turning its guns on the last straggler from the fleet. But their shot fell short, and the frigate crossed the bar at last and joined the rest of the squadron.

  Realisation that the French were already on the outskirts of Lisbon gave the final twist to Lavenham’s anguish. He had not been quite a reasonable man since he had found Charles Boutet’s note pinned to the door of his house the night before. His sense of duty had made him return to the Hibernia after his fruitless search of the house and garden and even of the deserted Marvila palace next door. Of the servants there was no sign, and everything he found in Camilla’s and Chloe’s rooms seemed to indicate that they had indeed left of their own free will. Searching almost frantically among their possessions he had found that each had taken her jewels and, he thought, a few personal necessities. Camilla’s enamelled hairbrushes, a wedding present from Lady Leominster, which she had particularly treasured, were missing, and various other things that he remembered. And yet—how could Charles Boutet’s message be true? How could Camilla have left him voluntarily, when she was not even conscious? It was at this point that he had heard movement in Chloe s room and, throwing open the door, discovered the maid, Rosa, who had come back to collect her possessions. What she told him merely confirmed his despair, although he found himself oddly comforted by the news that Camilla had recovered her senses. But what was that to the purpose when the first use she had made of them was to leave him? For Rosa insisted that she had hidden in the bushes and watched Camilla and Chloe go. They had not been forced, she said. Milady was carried, it was true, but Dona Chloe had walked beside her freely enough and had seen to it that she was comfortably settled in the carriage. Throughout, the Frenchmen had behaved with the greatest possible courtesy, brutes though, of course, they were. At this point, something in Lavenham’s face had frightened her, and she had taken flight, not even pausing long enough to remove a few coveted trifles of Chloe’s that had been the real reason for her return.

  And Lavenham had gone, almost mechanically, back to the Hibernia, to be greeted with the news that the wind had changed and they were to sail at dawn. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he had accompanied Lord Strangford and Sir Sidney Smith when they went to pay their respects to the Prince Regent on the Principe Real and only returned to full consciousness when he heard the Prince request once more that he be detailed to accompany the Court to the Brazils. He had had no chance to tell Strangford of the disaster that had befallen him, and his training forbade him to breach Court etiquette with an instant protest. There would be time enough later, he told himself, to explain his predicament to Strangford and ask for an exchange from the Marlborough, which was to accompany the Court to the Brazils, to one of the ships that were to continue the blockade of Lisbon. It had been a blow when Lord Strangford had accompanied Sir Sidney Smith back to the Hibernia without giving him a chance for a private word, but he had reassured himself that the fleets would be sailing together for some time yet. Now, with the wind rising, and Lisbon dwindling in the distance, he cursed himself for a vacillating fool. He should have spoken up roundly at once, royal presence or no royal presence. But it was still not too late. Determined to lose no more time, he hurried to the captain of the ship to ask for a boat to take him over to the Hibernia. The captain’s an
swer was short and brutally to the point. They were in for a storm—a hurricane perhaps. The very idea of launching a boat was madness. He had no time for landsmen’s idiocy. When they had survived the storm would be time enough to talk of boats. He turned from Lavenham to shout an order against the roar of the wind, then turned back, for he was a kind man at heart, to answer Lavenham’s last question. “When will it blow out? God knows. Best ask Him.”

  The storm raged for four days. The fleet was scattered and the Marlborough alone in a hell of wind and green water. For Lavenham, the private hell was worse. The captain, pitying his evident distraction, had told him that their only hope was to run before the wind. With luck, they would reunite with the rest of the Brazil-bound fleet when the storm was over. But for better or worse, they were committed to the long journey to the New World. How much of the fleet ever reached it was, he said, another question. The Portuguese ships had been unready and ill-equipped; they were grievously overloaded; only the hand of God could bring them safe to shore. “And trust you in Him, too,” said the captain, who had heard something of Lavenham’s story.

  But Lavenham was beyond trust, beyond hope. Alternately, he blamed, with desperate rage, himself, Chloe, Camilla. He could not sleep; he could not eat; he was not even granted the distraction of sea-sickness, but prowled about the boat, a Jonah, the sailors whispered to each other, if ever there was one. And yet, though he sometimes half hoped it would, the ship did not sink. On the fourth evening the wind began to fall, and on the fifth morning they woke, those of them who had contrived to sleep at last, to a brilliant sunrise, and sight of the Principe Real on the horizon. Gradually, in the course of the next calm days, the little fleet reassembled and exchanged bad news. Surprisingly, no ship had sunk, but the sufferings of the refugees, crammed into the ill-equipped Portuguese fleet, had been frightful and there had been many deaths, including that of the aged Duke of Cadaval. Lavenham, harvesting what news he could, learned that his old enemy, Araujo, was on board the Medusa and, with relief, that Dom Fernando had remained behind in Lisbon. If Camilla and Chloe should need a friend, he told himself, they would find one in him. And then, in one of his fits of bitter rage, he told himself to quit his folly: Camilla and Chloe were very likely in Paris now, feted by the Emperor. But he could not imagine Camilla curtsying to Bonaparte, could not help remembering her voice the first night they met: “I am as English as you, sir, perhaps more so, because I know how lucky I am.” Had he not been mad to believe Boutet’s note? And yet, what else had there been to think? Camilla and Chloe had gone willingly enough, the girl, Rosa, had said. He was back, once more, on the round of doubt and self-blame, half realising that his very rage at Camilla and Chloe as renegades was an attempt to ease his own conscience. Had he failed them, or they him? Would he ever know? The voyage, in calmer waters now, was an eternity of wretchedness, his only comfort the knowledge that his application for recall was already written and sealed, waiting only the chance of despatch.

  This came at last at the end of January, when they sighted land and the tattered little fleet sailed into Bahia where the once proud Portuguese Court tottered to shore, thin, emaciated, and dirty. Dom John’s estranged wife, the Spanish Princess Carlota Joaquina, who had travelled with her children on the Affonso D’Albuquerque, came ashore, like them, in a white muslin cap to hide her head, shaven in the endless unavailing battle against lice and infestation on board. The exhausted Court decided to rest for a while at Bahia before sailing on to a formal welcome at Rio de Janeiro, and Captain Moore seized the opportunity to send a ship home with the news of their safe arrival. By this ship, too, went Lavenham’s impassioned plea for recall, and then there was nothing for it but to settle down to count the days and, as the kind captain had suggested, to pray.

  Meanwhile, in Portugal, Camilla and Chloe had had their share of terror and of prayer. They had hardly landed on the south bank of the Tagus when the storm broke, and their first few days in the little house Dom Fernando had given them were made horrible by the lashing of wind and rain against the shutters and by their fears for Lavenham at sea. In Lisbon, they were told, the storm had been so fierce that even in the sheltered harbour boats were thrown up on the steps of Corpo Santo. Was it possible that Lavenham could have survived? And, if he had, what must he be thinking of them? Could he really have believed Charles Boutet’s note? But if not, how could he possibly have sailed without them? These speculations were as painful as they were useless, and they soon abandoned them by tacit consent. Chloe could see that the mere mention of Lavenham’s name was calculated to renew the hectic flush in Camilla’s cheek and start once more that restless, anxious movement of her hands. And Camilla, for her part, felt too truly sorry for Chloe to wish to remind her of the part she had played in their disaster. Besides, maternal instinct was at work in her now, warning her that agitation was bad for the child she carried. The only way not to be agitated was not to think, and she was amazed how successfully she managed.

  Of course, they had enough of a practical kind to do and think of. Dom Fernando had not dared accompany them himself to their new home, but had sent his steward with them and had given them a letter to his cousin, the Prioress of the convent in whose grounds their house was situated. Its two previous tenants, his mentally defective illegitimate nieces, had lived there, inconspicuously, most of their lives and had recently died there just as quietly, of typhoid. The Prioress, who received Camilla and Chloe with the greatest kindness, told them she thought they would be perfectly safe. Dom Fernando’s nieces had hardly stirred from their house except to visit the convent, whence they had obtained all their supplies. The nearest village was some miles away and its inhabitants had thought the two women witches and had given their cottage a wide berth when they visited the convent. Their superstitious terrors could be relied on to keep them away from it now. Like them, Camilla and Chloe would receive all their supplies from the convent and should be safe enough so long as they did not stray beyond its grounds. Only—here the Prioress looked doubtfully at Chloe—perhaps they had best assume the habit of lay sisters. It was unusual for a Portuguese young lady to be conspicuously blond and at all costs they must avoid drawing attention to themselves. In gowns and hoods, they might walk safely where they pleased. Chloe pulled a face but had to admit the sense of the Prioress’s argument and in fact she and Camilla found the voluminous robes surprisingly comfortable and a great blessing in their cold little house. As the slow months passed Camilla was increasingly grateful for their robes’ lavish, concealing folds. She had told the Prioress of her condition and had been amused, despite herself, at the worldly calm with which the reverend lady took it. “Admirable,” was all she had said. “If questions should be asked, I shall put it about that you are a young lady of family saving her good name by a timely retirement—it happens often enough, I can tell you.” She urged Camilla robustly not to worry about anything: when her time came, the sister who cared for sick nuns would come to her. “And she is not without experience, I promise you.”

  Amazingly enough, Camilla found that she was not worrying. As the days passed, and she and Chloe settled into their almost primitive daily round, her strength and spirits improved. “Take no thought to the morrow” might have been her motto, so successfully did she live from day to day, while her colour crept back, her quivering fingers relaxed, and her child stirred to life within her.

  “Chloe, he kicked me!” she exclaimed, one mild morning in earliest spring when she and Chloe were out together working in their little garden.

  Chloe straightened up and laughed. “He?” she asked.

  “Of course. How shall I face Lady Leominster, if it is not an heir.”

  “Well,” Chloe said reflectively, “it is true that, in our family, the first child always is a boy. First Maurice, then Edward, then Maurice, then Edward and so on, back to William the Conqueror and forward—who knows, till kingdom come, I suppose. Oh, Camilla, I wish I might see Lavenham’s face when he hears the news.” For they
had heard, at last, that none of the fleet had been lost, and felt themselves safe in assuming that Lavenham was alive and, probably, in the Brazils. If they both, in their different ways, found this knowledge of his distance rather restful, they did not discuss the matter.

  There was something that Camilla had been waiting a chance to ask. “Chloe,” she said now, after a moment’s consideration of her sister’s brown and cheerful face.

  “Yes?” Chloe dropped her primitive spade and ran earthy hands through her tangled hair. How would they ever be young ladies again?

  “Chloe, tell me, do you still think of Charles?”

  “Think of him!” Chloe exclaimed. “I should rather think I do. I have guillotined him, and boiled him in oil, and—oh, a thousand torments, but it is all no use: it still exasperates me, just to think of him. Camilla, how could I have been such a fool? To imagine I loved him! It makes me mad, merely to think of it.”

  “You do not mind any more?”

  “Mind? You mean, do I still love him? Camilla, I don’t think I ever did. Is it not shameful? To have made all this trouble for you, just out of a whim, out of liking flattery, wanting to be important ... when I think of it, I am so ashamed ...”

  “Then do not think of it,” Camilla said. “What’s the use? And, besides, it is foolish to talk of making trouble for me—the misfortune is just as much yours as mine, and you have made up for it a thousand times in all you have done for me since ... After all, he is my brother. I am only grateful to learn you are not suffering too much.”

  “Suffering? Do you know, Camilla, I do not think I have ever been so happy before, in my life. Does that surprise you very much?”