Fortune's Bride (Heiress, Book Four)

by Roberta Gellis

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Robert was relieved when Major Colborne showed no inclination to return to the subject of his relationship with Merry. He did not believe he needed any more advice. Once the initial shock of feeling an absolute fool was over, he began to perceive the reasons for his blindness and to understand them. Understanding brought relief. He no longer felt such an insensitive ass, and he was able to apply his brains to the realities of the situation.

  His first instinct was to rush to their quarters and tell Merry about the revelation that had come to him. He now thought it very possible that Colborne had been right and Merry had been guarding her heart against future hurt. Robert was well aware of the frequency with which husbands found women more to their taste than those they had married for money or family. Thus, if he told Merry he loved her, she would surely drop her defenses and love him. However, an ADC could not leave until dismissed, and once Sir John woke, Robert was fully employed until it was time to dress for dinner.

  Naturally, since most of his employment required physical rather than mental activity, Robert continued to think of his own affairs while he carried out his superior officer’s orders. It soon occurred to him that to make the announcement he had been considering would be more likely to induce contempt than love in Merry. What would she think of a man who did not even know when he was in love? And with his own wife, at that. Even Colborne had laughed despite the fact that he understood that Robert had more important things on his mind than love. And to say that to Merry was impossible. It would more likely make her very angry than make her love him. Robert did not know much about women, but he knew that the majority of them regarded love as the most important thing in life.

  This conclusion left him momentarily discouraged, but once Robert started to use his brains, they worked very well. Besides, he soon found a military analogy to help him. If you can’t take a place by assault and it is imperative that you take it, you besiege it. Since it was too dangerous simply to tell Merry he already loved her and win her by shock tactics, he could show her he was falling in love with her and break down her resistance.

  Robert was satisfied with this decision because it not only provided for all eventualities but also because he could foresee a period of relative inactivity during which he would have leisure to court his wife. Once the divisions that had accompanied Sir John were settled—a matter of a few days, he thought—there would be about a week or ten days more to wait for Hope’s and Baird’s contingents. During that time, he could ask for a few days’ leave and devote himself completely to Merry. The idea was extremely pleasant, but when he began to plan how to court her, he realized he had a new problem.

  Although he’d never used them in the past, Robert did know the correct moves. In addition to a distinguishing attention, one made little gifts, flowers, for example, at first, then trinkets like a pretty brooch or jeweled hair combs. But this was not London, where he could order nosegays. Nor could he purchase jewels. There might be a jeweler or two in Salamanca, but Robert doubted they would be willing to give him credit or take English paper money in exchange for gold and gems.

  Now Robert blamed himself for accepting Merry’s filled ball cards so tamely. As her husband, he had a right to as many dances as he wanted. In fact, if there were to be another ball, he would be sure to write his name across the whole card at once. That would be a clear way to demonstrate his feelings. However, there were not likely to be any more balls.

  Sir John, although sweeter tempered than Sir Arthur, was not gregarious in the same way. Sir John was more prone to excellent dinners in a select male company, followed by good talk over fine wine. In any case, Sir John was scarcely in the mood for balls. Thus, Robert was puzzled as to just how to go about showing Merry what he felt, but it was a pleasant subject to ponder. Moreover, Merry seemed even more than usually cheerful and content, so he was not impatient about getting on with his wooing—after all, he was not being denied the physical pleasures that accrued to an accepted lover. But those physical pleasures proved to Robert that he must, indeed, make an effort. Alert now to more than Merry’s overt pleasure, he discovered that among all her sighs and little cries there was no word of love, at least not while he was in a condition to listen. However, it was just as well that he was able to contain his eagerness to win Merry’s love without real anguish because the military situation did not resolve itself as quickly as Robert had expected.

  First, General Anstruther misunderstood his orders and detained some of the troops at Almeida. Then, General Baird, who had finally managed to get the head of his columns as far as Astorga, received the unpleasant news that there was no Spanish army between his mere nine thousand men and the tens of thousands of French under Soult and Lefebvre. To continue his march toward Salamanca would bring him right across the front of the French forces. Baird sent word of his situation to Moore and halted at Astorga, preparing to retreat to Corunna if Soult or Lefebvre moved in his direction.

  Then, in the middle of the night of November 15, Sir John was wakened with an urgent message from General Pignatelli, the governor of the province. His hasty letter informed Sir John that the French army had entered Valladolid. Worse yet, Pignatelli had fled the province, leaving the people without leadership or even authority to resist the French. Nor could Sir John obtain any intelligence about the numbers or positions of the French in the vicinity.

  Under the circumstances, Sir John felt he had no recourse but to warn the junta of Salamanca that if the French pushed forward, he would be forced to retreat to Ciudad Rodrigo. However, Sir John’s staff and general officers protested these plans hotly. Encouraged by this support, Sir John sent out the senior members of his staff—Robert among them—with strong patrols to try to obtain some reliable information.

  The result of these investigations set to rest the immediate alarm. It was not a French army that had entered Valladolid but only one corps of Lefebvre’s hussars, and they had withdrawn to Palencia the very next day. This fact did not really diminish the seriousness of the situation, nonetheless, Moore sent orders to Hope to hurry forward if he could do so without danger and instructed Baird to assemble all his troops at Astorga while an attempt was made to find out more surely where the French were and what they intended.

  By November 23 all the troops directly under Moore’s command were assembled in and around Salamanca, Hope’s men were moving with all the speed they could make, and Sir John had written to Baird to urge him also to combine forces at Salamanca. At the moment, there was little for the staff to do but run errands, and the weather suddenly turned clear and unseasonably warm. On the morning of the twenty-fourth Robert asked for five days’ leave. Not only was his request granted but, to his surprise, he was told he had better start that very day.

  Robert had been racking his brains for a method of courtship that did not require balls to show distinguishing attention—or gifts to show the attentions were serious. He had once or twice found a free hour to spend with his wife and tried to change his ordinary manner to one that he considered romantic. But when he sighed, Merry had disconcertingly looked up from the accounts she was doing and asked what disaster had now befallen them; and when he had managed to catch her in an infrequent idle moment—actually she was mending his socks—and attempted to look soulful, she had made him laugh by asking whether she was undone somewhere.

  It was also very difficult, Robert found, to be romantic when he expected a knock on the door at any moment to call him to duty and where the small apartment that had been assigned to them was full of military paraphernalia, which somehow made him feel silly and a little guilty when he tried to act like a lover. These minor irritations brought to his mind the fact that, aside from the few days on the road from Oporto to Figueira, he and Merry had never really been alone. There had always been the pressure of his duties and the casual interruptions of his fellow ADCs.

  Suddenly Robert realized that what he needed to do was to go back to the beginning. The ideal situa
tion in which to court Merry was one that would recall their first meeting, but this time he would display his admiration for her instead of treating her like a scarcely endurable burden. On his leave, they could stay in country inns, where he and Merry would have only each other for company and entertainment. They could picnic by the roadside as they did before, except that now he would not be exhausted by his responsibilities. So when he was told he could go, he rushed back to their quarters and asked Esmeralda if she would like to spend five days exploring the attractive mountain areas not far to the south of Salamanca.

  “Oh, yes,” Esmeralda cried. “I didn’t think any country could be as dull as the plains in India, but really this part of Spain is.”

  “And do you think we could just forget the army for a while and pretend we’re ordinary people doing a tour?” Robert asked.

  This question astonished Esmeralda so much that she was incapable of replying to it aside from stammering a simple yes.

  It was inconceivable to Esmeralda that Robert should deliberately put aside military concerns, and her amazement held her immovable for a little while after he advised her to provide a picnic lunch and pack only a few changes of clothing because they would be staying at very simple places. She racked her brains for a reason, but nothing logical came to mind, and she was forced back to her old device of enjoying while she could whatever came. Nor, after they were mounted, could she determine anything from Robert’s manner when she asked where they were going.

  “I don’t know,” he said lightly. “There aren’t any French to the west or south, so we can take any road in those directions. Aside from Ciudad Rodrigo and Béjar, there’s nothing but villages on the order of small, smaller, and minuscule. Maybe they aren’t even large enough to have an inn, but I think Tamames might. Anyway, any big farm will give us supper and a bed, although there might be more than straw in the mattress.”

  Esmeralda laughed dutifully, acknowledging that the fleas in Spain were just as lively as those in Portugal. “As long as we don’t go to Ciudad Rodrigo,” she said. “It seems a shame to waste our time on a place we’ve already seen.”

  “Good,” Robert acceded cheerfully. “I didn’t intend to go there unless you wanted to particularly.” He was delighted with Esmeralda’s caveat, for he had wondered a little whether she might want to spend the time at an army base where there would be other officers to pay her attention. “Then let’s ride toward Tamames.”

  Since Esmeralda had no idea where that village was, she agreed, and they set out on a road that ran almost due south of Salamanca. At first they talked about the countryside, which was obviously grazing land, but the land soon began to rise toward the mountains. Eventually they came to a village, but it was a poor tumbledown place, and they did not stop except to ask about the road, for it divided into two tracks ahead. The right-hand fork, a woman told them, went to Tamames; the left ran along the base of a long spur of the mountains, climbed a pass, and eventually joined the road that ran from Tamames to Guijuelo. There was a small village at the meeting of the roads, she said, and perhaps they could stay there.

  “Shall we be sensible or adventurous?” Robert asked, laughing.

  “Oh, adventurous,” Esmeralda replied. “At the very worst, we have food enough for supper and sheets and blankets. I thought about the fleas, you see.”

  At which, Robert caught her hand and kissed it, saying, “You are a woman after my own heart, I think the only woman in the world I could ever live with in comfort.”

  For the second time in only a few hours, Esmeralda was rendered speechless by surprise. It was not so much the actual words Robert had spoken or the gesture— he had kissed her hand before and praised her before— but there was an intensity and deliberateness in his manner that added a deeper meaning. Was it possible, Esmeralda wondered, that Robert had begun to feel more than she had permitted herself to hope for? Her heart leapt, and she checked the emotion fiercely. Do not hope too hard, she cautioned herself, or you will assume too much and startle or disgust him.

  For a mile or two the track they had chosen was clear enough. After that, however, it began to look as if, despite what the woman said, the way might become impassable. They began to climb right up the mountain, and the road, which had been little more than a rutted cart track to begin with, degenerated until there was no significant difference between it and the sheep or goat trails that meandered over the mountainside. Esmeralda glanced nervously at Robert, but he grinned at her cheerfully.

  “We won’t get lost, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he assured her. “All we have to do is keep going up. At the top, we go down, keeping the main ridge to our right. The road—such as it is—will improve once we come to the valley.” Then he laughed. “I cheated, you know. Sir John has fairly good maps of this area because we had patrols riding all over it for the past ten days.”

  “I can see that there are enormous advantages to being married to a staff officer,” Esmeralda replied, laughing also.

  “Do you mean that?” Robert asked.

  This time Esmeralda was not so unprepared. “Indeed I do. I always—” But at that inconvenient moment Boa Viagem stumbled, and Esmeralda’s full attention was taken up for a moment in steadying her mount.

  She would gladly have finished her remark, but Robert had moved ahead, turning briefly to advise that they go single file and not talk until the path was less dangerous. The advice was too good to ignore. They were well up toward the crest now, and the track wound back and forth, sometimes threading its way between the shoulder of the mountain and a precipitous drop. More than once Esmeralda bitterly regretted choosing adventure over safety, but it was too late to change her mind. The way back—supposing they could find a place to turn back—was as bad as the way forward.

  All Esmeralda could do was keep her eyes fixed on the path itself, praying that she would not disgrace herself by giving way to panic. Her endurance was not strained to the uttermost, fortunately, before long they came out on the crest, which was not, as she had feared, a sharp peak. The area was broad, and the down-slope seemed to be more gentle. As she caught her breath she thanked God she had not complained. When Robert turned to gesture her forward and point out the magnificence of the scene, his eyes were glowing with pleasure. Not for the world would Esmeralda have dampened that enjoyment. If it killed her, she resolved, she would follow wherever he led.

  Almost as if she were being rewarded for her resolution, Robert pointed downward and said, “Look. Isn’t that lovely? Shall we eat there?”

  Below them, the hillside became wooded, but at some time in the past either a tremor of the earth or a natural fault had caused part of the mountain to fall. The result was a small, flat valley, sheltered to the east and west by the remaining lower rises of the hillside. Catching the full force of the southern sun, the area was obviously warmer than its surroundings. The trees and brush on the nearby hillsides had not yet lost their leaves, while the valley, treeless itself except for a few saplings, was covered by a lush carpet of grasses studded with autumn wildflowers and watered by a sparkling stream that tumbled from the cliff behind it.

  Esmeralda gasped with pleasure and agreed eagerly to Robert’s suggestion. She was so delighted with the prospect that the downward path, which was in some ways more dangerous than the climb they had completed, held no terror for her. They found a place not far from the stream, where several upstanding boulders would serve as backrests to complete their comfort while they ate.

  Robert released the food hamper and the blankets from their fastenings on the saddles. Then while Esmeralda spread the blanket and laid out the meal, he loosened the girths on Hermes and Boa Viagem and fastened them lightly to some bushes nearby, where they could graze. He was not much concerned about the horses even if they should get loose. Both were well trained and would usually come if called.

  Robert seated himself on the blanket and examined the luncheon Esmeralda had laid out. He had a passing thought that this was the mo
ment to continue the “distinguishing attentions” he meant to pay his wife, but the ride had made him very hungry, and it seemed to him that romantic compliments were better paid when one’s mouth was free of food. Thus, he addressed himself to eating and those brief comments, such as “Please pass the salt” and “This is excellent ham”, natural to a picnic. He noted with pleasure and amusement that Esmeralda, sensible and delightful woman that she was, was also reserving her attention to what was on her plate.

  Before they had finished, both heard a rustling in the wooded area of the eastern hillside. Robert turned at once to look at the horses, but they were where he had left them, innocently engaged with the nearby herbage. Relieved of his concern that one of the animals had wandered away, he took a sip of his wine and began to consider how to introduce the subject of his growing admiration for his wife.

  He did not give any conscious thought to the sound he had heard. The immediate area was sparsely populated because it was unsuitable for farming, but all around it was countryside that had been cultivated and used as grazing land for many generations. At the back of Robert’s mind was the conviction that any large predators would have been exterminated long ago. He assumed the rustling was caused by deer that had been startled by their voices or scent.

  Before he had put down his glass or really completed his thought, the gentle rustling was replaced by a much louder disturbance—and the sound was coming toward them, not moving away. Robert leapt to his feet, suddenly remembering that it was not only sheep and goats that were grazed in this region but also the fighting bulls of Spain. Four long strides took him to Hermes, and he seized his pistol from the saddle holster. The horse, startled by his rapid movement, threw up his head and whinnied. Behind Robert a snuffling grunt came in reply.