Beyond the Sunrise (15 page)

“You were magnificent, Jeanne,” he said to her as he escorted her out to her waiting carriage. “You utterly confounded him. He will try to confuse us again. He will try to discredit what you have told us. But the truth came out when he lost his temper with you. There is a saying that there is no wrath worse than that of a woman scorned. I believe it applies equally to men. I suppose he was in love with you?”

She shrugged. “Men are always being foolish and claiming to be in love with me,” she said. “I take no notice.”

“I could have slapped a glove in his face more than once,” he said. “But he is to be considered our guest, you see, now that he has given us his parole. He is not to be mistreated. However.” He laid one hand on top of hers and smoothed his fingers over hers. “If he should show you any further discourtesy, Jeanne, you must tell me and I shall see that he is properly dealt with.”

“I hope never to see him again,” she said. “But thank you, Colonel. You are kind.”

“The campaign will be over in no time at all,” he said, “now that we have our cue to start. Before the summer is out, we will all be in Lisbon. I enjoyed my stay there last time. I believe I may enjoy it more this time.” His eyes appreciated her.

“Before the summer is out?” she said. “So soon?”

“The marshal has been waiting for just such a certainty as this,” he said, “before investing Ciudad Rodrigo. The task is to be Ney's. He is just awaiting the order to move. I believe it will come within a
day or two. Once Ciudad has fallen, Almeida will not hold out long. And if Wellington brings his forces to the defense of either fort, then we will crush him. This is a great day. The beginning of the end for the English occupation of European soil.”

“And I have had a part in it,” she said, smiling dazzlingly at him. “How good that makes me feel.”

“And you have had a part in it.” They came to a stop at the door of her carriage, and he raised her hand to his lips. “A large part, Jeanne. You are to be at the general's dinner tonight?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Then suddenly it becomes an occasion to be anticipated with great pleasure,” he said, holding her hand close to his lips and looking down at her with smoldering eyes. “Until later, Jeanne.”

“You are to be there too, Marcel?” Her smile brightened. “I am so glad.”

He smiled at her, revealing even white teeth. It was the sort of smile that was guaranteed to turn feminine knees weak.

“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “Until later.”

She sat back against the cushions of her carriage and did not look out of the window again, though she knew that he stood there until the carriage moved away. It was a primary rule of flirtation, she had learned years before, to allow the gentleman to be just a little more smitten than she.

She closed her eyes and was thankful that the journey home was not a long one. She rather suspected that her stomach would have rebelled at any great distance. He had touched her and kissed her hand. She had felt his mustache as well as his lips against her flesh. And his breath had been warm. She shuddered, deeply revolted.

She was going to kill him. She had always planned that. She was not going to enlist Duarte's help, though he would be disappointed not to do it himself. She was going to do it. She was going to kill him.

But it was not a simple thing to accomplish. It would have to be
planned. She would have to choose the time and the place and the method with care. She would have to think about it.

In the meantime she was going to have to flirt with him. She could think of no other way of keeping him close enough so that she could kill him when the opportunity came. The thought of flirting with the man she had watched rape Maria and give the order for her death had her setting one cold and shaking hand over her mouth. She felt cold all over. And then she had to dip her head sharply forward to save herself from fainting.

And there was Robert. He must hate her now in all earnest. Even though she had helped his cause, supposedly without realizing it, he must still hate her. And it was all so pointless, she thought. It seemed that Captain Robert Blake was after all a fine-enough actor to have accomplished the mission without her help. He had certainly taken full advantage of her apparent misunderstanding of the situation.

She wondered who had punched him in the face and bruised his eye.

He must hate her. And if she was going to have him set free in time to take part in the summer's campaign, she was going to have to make him hate her a great deal more. But she would explain all to him later, she thought. Perhaps it would make a difference. Perhaps it would.

And she was suddenly and unwillingly reminded of the other Robert—
her
Robert—and how she had made him hate her too, though from an entirely different motive. And how she had never had a chance to explain to him.

But she could not dwell on thoughts of Robert at the moment. There was a dinner to attend that evening and some kind of a relationship to set up with Colonel Marcel Leroux. She must concentrate her mind and her energies on that.

*   *   *

She
was wearing a gown of shimmering gold, chosen to give herself courage. Finding the courage to face a roomful of people, many of them strangers, was not usually a problem for Joana. But then, it was no ordinary task she had set herself. She had had her maid style her hair in a high topknot with cascades of ringlets trailing down the back of her head and along her neck.

And yet the first person she saw when she entered the general's drawing room prior to dinner was not Colonel Leroux but someone she was equally reluctant to meet again and someone who looked just as shabby and just as awkwardly out-of-place and just as altogether more attractive than any other man present as he had been in that ballroom in Lisbon. She had not thought of his being present.

He could not be avoided. He was standing just inside the drawing room doors. A French officer and his wife were just turning away from him.

“Ah, Robert,” she said, stepping up to him before he saw her, scorning even to try avoiding him, “you are here, are you? French uniforms glitter quite as brightly as English ones, do they not?”

“I daresay you do not see much difference,” he said, “or in the men inside them. I do.”

“Ah,” she said, smiling at him, “that was a setdown, was it not? Are you very angry with me?”

“More with myself,” he said, “for having known your secret and for having thought that perhaps it was of no significance. It does not matter to you that your mother was English?”

“You know that too?” she said, laughing. “Why did you find out so much, Robert? Was it that you wished to know with whom you were in love?”

“You would like to believe that, would you not?” he said. “You would like to believe that your charms have never failed. And you did try hard. But you mistake lust for love, Joana. I lusted after you. I
wanted to lay you. I wanted to take my pleasure inside your body. Is that being in love? If it is, then I suppose I am guilty.”

His blue eyes—one still bloodshot—looked coldly down into hers.

“Ah,” she said, setting one gloved hand on his sleeve for a brief moment, “but I could make you love me if I wished, Robert. Even now. And you are not telling the entire truth. If you had wished merely to . . . lay me, as you so vulgarly put it, then you would not have pulled back from that embrace at my aunt's ball in Viseu. It was you, you know. I would not have pulled back. At least, not quite so soon. So I do not believe you. But then, spies never tell the truth, do they?”

“You should know,” he said.

“Touché.” She smiled at him and remembered that she must flirt with him too—him and Colonel Leroux both. If her plan for effecting his release was to work, she must flirt with him and force a response from him too. He did not look tonight as if he would ever respond to her again.

But she smiled for the first time that evening with something like real pleasure. There was a challenge in making Robert fall in love with her. Flirtation was almost never a challenge. But this time it was. Perhaps for once she would enjoy her work.

“I am going to do it,” she said. “I am going to make you fall in love with me. It should not be difficult. I believe you are already more than halfway there.”

“Joana,” he said, his voice and his eyes perfectly serious, “I suppose the fact that you are half-French saves you from the stigma of being called a traitor. But I see you as such nevertheless. We are on different sides of the fence. We are enemies, and as far as I am concerned, bitter enemies. You betrayed both me and my country—your mother's country—earlier today. You would be well advised not to waste your time trying the impossible. Flirt with the French officers. There are doubtless a few thousand of them who would be only too willing to fall under your spell.”

“Ah,” she said, “but it is you I want under my spell, Robert.”

“Because I am the only man who has ever resisted it?” he asked.

She smiled. “Perhaps,” she said. “You are, you know. But not for long.”

She wondered why she was giving herself such a challenge and breaking her own rule, the one she had practiced just that day. She was showing him that she was far more smitten than he was. She had told him quite openly that she was going to pursue him instead of letting him believe—as all men she had known had believed—that he was the pursuer.

It was a formidable challenge, one that it seemed she could not win. But there was excitement in it. And somehow, despite everything—despite the dangers and challenges she had already faced and those still to come—she needed this particular type of excitement.

“I believe, Joana,” he said, “that you are about to have a far more glittering beau than I. And you would do well to stay away from me while we are both here in Salamanca. I might do you harm, you know, and your loyalty might be brought into question if you are seen to hang around me.”

She smiled at him, but a hand at the small of her back caused her to turn her head. She smiled up at Colonel Leroux. “Marcel,” she said.

“I hope Captain Blake is acting the gentleman this evening, and not renewing any of the threats he made earlier,” he said, taking her hand and bowing over it.

“Oh,” she said, laughing, “Robert's temper has cooled and he was being quite civil. But he is not a gentleman, Marcel. He would be far more suited to the French army than the English. He has risen through the ranks and become a commissioned officer entirely through his own merits. Captain Blake is what is known as a hero, you see, but he is not a gentleman. He will not tell me what he was. It is most annoying. Was he a tradesman's son or a runaway apprentice or a convict?”

She laughed again, though she could see Robert's jaw tighten.
And when she glanced at Colonel Leroux, it was to see disdain on his face. Oh, yes, she thought suddenly. Of course. That was the way it must be. That was the way she must plan it. Yes. Robert and the colonel must hate each other. She must pit them against each other.

Excitement and a sense of glorious danger built in her and she smiled dazzlingly at both men.

“He is not going to answer, you see,” she said to the colonel. “He never does. And that leads me to expect that my last guess is the closest to the truth.” She linked her arm through the colonel's. “Shall we walk about, Marcel? You may introduce me to the people I do not know. There are a few. It is quite a while since I was here last.”

She threw one final smile over her shoulder at Robert, who was about to be taken under the wing of two officers, she saw. He
looked back at her with cold, steady eyes.

T
HERE
was so much freedom. So much damned freedom. He could come and go as he pleased in Salamanca, and could have had as active a social life there as he could have had in Lisbon during the winter and spring. He was treated with respect and courtesy and even liking by many of the French officers he met.

Sometimes he felt as if it would be better, more real, if he were caged up in a prison cell. Sometimes he regretted giving his parole. At least if he had not, if he were in a cell, he could dream of escape, plan for it, attempt it. At least there would be some challenge to make life worth living.

As it was, late spring passed into the sweltering heat of summer, and the summer's campaign began in earnest. He had the satisfaction—at least he had that—of seeing the French almost immediately respond to the lie of which he had somehow managed to convince them. Marshal Ney, who had been investing Ciudad Rodrigo with its Spanish force led by Governor Herrasti since May in a halfhearted way, now attacked in earnest, and the fort surrendered on July 10 after the walls had been breached.

The French officers with whom Captain Blake consorted liked to tell him of such things and to tease him good-naturedly about his attempts to deflect the attack southward and away from the easy route to Lisbon. And they liked to scorn Wellington and the English forces in his hearing for not coming to the defense of the fort.

The news about Ciudad Rodrigo he could accept quite cheerfully, since he knew that Lord Wellington was acting wisely and well and since no British forces had been involved in the engagement. The news that followed it, as the French advanced against the
Portuguese fort of Almeida, was less easy to take. The Light Division, under General Crauford, was harassing the French advance, the skirmishers worrying Marshal Ney and his soldiers by popping up always where they were least expected.

And among the skirmishers were the Rifles, the men of the Ninety-fifth. His men.

And then toward the end of July the fighting grew fierce as the Light Division became trapped on the Spanish side of the River Coa, with only one bridge at their backs, and the Rifles were again the heroes, along with the light infantrymen of the Forty-third and the Fifty-second. They held back the massive forces of the French while the guns and the cavalry retreated over the bridge and took up a position of strength beyond it.

“You are fortunate,” one French lieutenant told Captain Blake with a laugh. “Many of your men were killed in the action, monsieur. Perhaps you would have been too if you had been there. Instead, you are here living a life of ease.”

Yes. A life of ease. The captain's right hand opened and closed in his lap. He had been in captivity for a month and it seemed more like a year. Ten years. The French would attack Almeida and probably subdue it within a few weeks—it was doubtful that Wellington would advance to its defense. And then they would advance into Portugal, west to Coimbra, south to Lisbon. Probably somewhere along the way, for very pride's sake, Wellington would make a stand, choosing his spot with care, as he always did.

And if that did not hold them, there would be the retreat behind the Lines of Torres Vedras and the hope that the French army would stand and be caught and decimated by the winter and by hunger while the British passed a winter of relative comfort and prayed for reinforcements from a stingy British government, and with them the hope of waging a more aggressive war the following year—one that would take them through Portugal and through Spain, the French driven before them. One that would begin to eat away at the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte.

And all the while, Captain Blake thought, he would be a captive of the French, he would be away from his own men, away from the excitement. The soonest he could hope for an exchange, in his own estimation, was the following spring.

There were times when the need to be with his regiment, the need to be free, seemed more powerful than the need to retain his honor. There were times when he thought about escape. And it would be so easy. He was not watched at all. There were no restraints upon him, except those imposed by his own honor. He was still in possession of both his sword and his rifle.

But of course he never did make the attempt to escape. For when all was said and done, honor was everything. Honor was what made him into the person he could live with. Honor gave him his self-respect. And so he stayed and chafed at the bit.

It would not have been quite so bad, he often thought, if it had not been for Joana—the Marquesa das Minas.

They were constantly meeting. He had frequent invitations to dinners and assemblies, and found most of them difficult to refuse, much as he would have preferred to live the life of a hermit. And always, wherever he went, she was there too. It was understandable, of course. Like the British, the French army was far from home and their own women. Unlike the British, the local women were, on the whole, hostile to them. It was understandable that all the Frenchwomen who were available should be invited everywhere.

Especially when one of those women was as beautiful and fascinating as Joana.

Captain Blake watched dozens of her countrymen fall under her spell and follow her about with as much abject devotion as had her courts in Lisbon and Viseu. And sometimes his jaw clamped into a hard line as he realized how easy it would be to follow suit. Even though he knew her now to be his enemy—his country's enemy and his personal enemy—he found that his eyes followed her about a room and roamed over her slender but shapely figure and reveled in the rich colors she chose to wear in Salamanca.

And sometimes he caught himself hating Colonel Marcel Leroux and wanting to tear the man limb from limb, not so much because he had been the head of the interrogation against himself as because Joana openly favored him above all her other suitors. And it was easy to see why. The colonel was a handsome devil, and a charming one as well.

And yet she flirted with him too, Captain Blake found. Her strange and impudent claim on that first evening that she could and would make him fall in love with her had not been forgotten, it seemed. She singled him out for attention wherever he went.

“Jeanne,” Colonel Guy Radisson said during one assembly, when everyone but her appeared to be wilting from the heat of the indoors. She had stopped to talk to the Englishman while promenading about the room on the colonel's arm. His tone was good-natured. “If you persist in showing such marks of friendship for Captain Blake, there are going to be rumors that you have a divided loyalty.”

She laughed gaily. “Ah, but I feel so sorry for him, Guy,” she said. “He is a soldier, you see, as well as a spy. And he longs to be with his own regiment now that the fighting is beginning. Do you not, Robert?”

“How could I wish to be anywhere but where I am at this precise moment?” he said in tones so courtly that only she would know how false they were.

She laughed again. “And he so wishes that our army was advancing along a different route, Guy,” she said. “And it is all my fault that they are not. I feel guilty. I feel the need to prove to Captain Blake every time I see him that I am no monster.”

“Monster!” the colonel said fondly. “No one could look at you and seriously think that, Jeanne.”

She looked up at him with large smiling eyes. “Is it hot in here?” she asked. “Or is it my imagination? Be an angel, Guy, do, and fetch me a drink. Something long and cool.”

Colonel Radisson clicked his heels and was off into the crowd without further ado.

It was the way she had of getting him alone. She did it frequently.

“On second thoughts,” she said, “there would be instant coolness if we stepped outside, would there not? Take me there, Robert.”

She never asked for favors. She always demanded them. She slipped her white-gloved hand through his arm—her gown was of a deep wine color.

“The poor colonel will be left holding a long cool drink,” he said.

She shrugged. “Then he may drink it himself,” she said. “It is very hot in here.”

“Joana,” he said, “why do you do this?” He led her out into a tree-shaded courtyard, where several people were strolling. He did not elaborate on his words.

She looked up at him and smiled. “Because it is such a challenge,” she said. “Because any other man I can have at the snap of two fingers. You have seen that. I need more of a challenge in life.”

“And some of it has gone now that you are safely back with your own people again?” he asked. “Did you enjoy the danger in Portugal? Did you enjoy knowing that at any time your French background might be discovered and exposed?”

“Ah, but I have English and Portuguese connections too,” she said, “as you know, Robert. And how could a woman like me be of any danger to anyone? My life is devoted to pleasure. And what have I done that was so dangerous? I merely used my eyes on the road between Lisbon and Viseu and reported truthfully what I saw. Does that make me dangerous?”

“You did it quite deliberately,” he said. “You have been actively spying for the French, Joana. Except that this time it is the end. I can expose your game if you return to Portugal.”

She sighed. “You make it sound as if I have been a highly skilled secret agent,” she said. “I almost wish that I had. Perhaps there would have been some excitement in it. Is there, Robert? Is it wonderfully exciting?”

“There are jobs to be done,” he said, “and one does them because they must be done.”

She looked at him incredulously. “Oh, no,” she said, “that is ridiculous. That is not why you do what you do, Robert. I know just by looking into your face that you demand more of life than that. I know it. I know that in many ways you are like me. It is not enough to let the days pass by in safety and comfort. Not nearly enough. There has to be much more than that.”

His jaw set hard.

“This month has been dreadful for you, has it not?” she said. “I know it, you see. I know that it is like a living death to you. And so I do what I can for you, Robert.” She laughed lightly. “I offer you a different type of challenge. Can you resist the charms of a lady whom no one else can resist, even knowing that she is your enemy—your bitter enemy, as you once put it? Can you?”

Somehow—he did not know how it had happened—they had found a secluded part of the courtyard beyond some vine trees and she was seating herself on a low wall. The air was cool, though only just, and only in contrast with the heat of the day and the heat of the indoors.

He laughed without humor. “How pathetic you are, Joana,” he said. “You know very well that if I once fell for your charms and crowded up to you just like everyone else, panting for the privilege of holding your fan or fetching you a drink, you would lose interest in me in a moment.”

“Yes.” She smiled up at him. “How right you are. Is that why you do it, Robert? Is this your way of gaining my attention? Are you far more clever than any other man of my acquaintance?”

Her gown looked almost black in the darkness. Her skin in contrast looked translucent. His fingers itched to touch her, to rest
against her cheek, to caress her shoulder. Her eyes were dark and mysterious.

“I think I must be the most foolish of all,” he said.

She continued to smile. “Because you have not thought until now of how you might turn off my interest by feigning yours?” she said. “Perhaps it would work. Perhaps it would not. Shall we put it to the test?”

He clasped his hands behind his back and knew that he had stepped deep into flirtation and could very easily lose his way. He had never learned how to play that game with women. He had always been able to get what he wanted when he wanted it, with money and with his person and his uniform. But then, he had only ever wanted whores. Only ever the physical satisfaction to be gained from a good bedding.

It had been a long time, he thought suddenly. Almost two months since Beatriz. But then, soldiers were accustomed to going without for long stretches of time. Especially private soldiers, and he had been one for long enough. He had learned to live with celibacy.

“Are you afraid?” she asked him almost in a whisper.

He kept his hands behind his back. “Only uninterested, Joana,” he said.

“Oh, no.” She got to her feet and took the one step that separated them. She spread her hands on his chest and looked up at him. “Not that, Robert. Never that. Anything but. Perhaps you hate me or despise me. Perhaps you desire me. But you are not indifferent to me. Do you think I do not know enough about men to know that? You are not uninterested.”

Her perfume teased his nostrils. And her hands, resting lightly against his coat, burned through to his chest. Something snapped in him.

“Very well, then,” he said, and he spread his hands at her waist and drew her against him. He knew that he was holding her too roughly, and tightened his grasp further. Something sparked in her
eyes—it might have been fear—as she continued to look steadily up at him. “Let me show you what my interest in you is, Joana.”