Fortune's Bride (3 page)

“They’ll get their victory if they’ll give Sir Arthur a free
hand.” Robert stared at his brother. “That’s what I’ve been asking you all
along. What are the chances of his keeping the command? They couldn’t have
gotten at him in South America, but in Spain… The damned Horse Guards can be
sending messages every week, and he’s way down the list.”

“What do you want me to say?” Perce asked, his voice
sharpened by frustration. “You know the situation as well as I do. Castlereagh
got the appointment for South America for Sir Arthur because no one else wanted
it. Europe is another matter. Castlereagh will fight for Sir Arthur. They’re
old friends. They served together in the Irish Parliament, and Castlereagh has
a real appreciation for Wellesley’s abilities. He understands what Sir Arthur
accomplished in India. But there’s a limit to what Castlereagh can do. Oh, I’ll
ask around, but the best you can hope for is that so
many
favorites will
be trying to get the appointment that there will be some delay in deciding
where to drop the plum.”

A good deal of information flowed from the official embassy
in Spain to England during the month of June. There were, indeed, popular
uprisings all over the country. Although the riot in Madrid had been put down
at the cost of more than three hundred Spanish lives, Cartagena rose against
the French at the end of May. During the next few days, Valencia declared they
would accept no king but Ferdinand, and the district of Asturias declared war
on Napoleon, as did Seville and Santander. Granada, Corunna, and Badajoz took
up arms. In Valencia every Frenchman seen on the streets was killed, and in
Valladolid a gibbet was erected in front of the residence of the governor of
Léon, who was given the choice of rejecting the French or being hanged.

At Cadiz and Vigo the French warships in the harbor were
seized. The Spanish who had been besieging Gibraltar marched away to confront
the French at Madrid, and the Spanish troops, which had made up two-thirds of
the army with which the French general Junot was holding Portugal, deserted to
return and defend their own country against their erstwhile allies. Then, when
the Portuguese also rose, the beleaguered Junot withdrew his remaining troops
to a limited area around Lisbon.

The news arrived in England and was believed. However, in
the primitive countryside of Portugal, the rumors that the French had been
driven out did not drift into the small villages until July, and they roused
uneasiness rather than rejoicing. It was not that the Portuguese people had any
fondness for the French. Indeed, they hated them with more reason than the
Spanish because Portugal was considered a conquered country. Thus, the French
soldiers had been authorized to seize food and animals for transport, and their
officers made no attempt to prevent them from taking anything else that
appealed to them as well. Nor had the officers objected to the misuse of anyone
who protested. What the people of the tiny rural hamlets feared was that the
French would return, more ferocious than before owing to the opposition they
had met.

In a small fishing village about fifteen miles north of Oporto,
a young woman was trying clumsily, and somewhat inattentively, to spin. All the
other girls in the village, practiced in twisting the carded wool into yarn
from earliest childhood, did not need to think about what they were doing to
produce perfect results. But Esmeralda had only recently learned. Of course,
the village girls rarely had thoughts as frightening or as painful as
Esmeralda’s were that afternoon in July. News of the French retreat had raised
hopes and fears in everyone. For Esmeralda the news had also presented an
agonizing opportunity to make a choice.

Esmeralda had not been born in the village and had no
intention of dying there. She had been born in Bombay, India, but she was no
more a native of that land than of Portugal. She was an English gentlewoman.
Her father, Henry Bryan Talbot, was a distant relation, through a collateral
Irish branch, of the Earls of Shrewsbury, Talbot, and Waterford. It was an
ancient and honorable family, but unfortunately Henry had not been one of its
shining lights. Actually, he had been so unsatisfactory a young man that after
an attempt to improve him by marriage had failed, he and his poor wife,
guiltless but condemned by association, had been shipped off to India.

In a sense the exile had been of the greatest advantage to
Henry. It had not made him more pleasant or honest, but it had given him great
satisfaction by making him very, very rich. Nonetheless, he had never forgiven
his family nor that of his wife, Mary Louisa. The Connors had done their best
to induce their daughter to stay with them and let Henry be sent off alone.
They even suggested that hopefully the climate would kill him. But Mary, though
gentle and yielding of manner and sweet of disposition, had a strong and rigid
sense of duty. She had sworn to take Henry for better or for worse until death
did them part, and she kept her oath.

Despite the unpleasant aspects of his character, Henry had
not been unappreciative of his wife’s loyalty. He was neither generous nor
affectionate, but he never mistreated Mary, either. His only real unkindness
was related to his obsessive spite. He would not permit her to communicate with
her family in Ireland, not even to announce the births—or, sadly, the deaths—of
her children.

This spite increased rather than faded with Henry’s
acquisition of wealth, as did his parsimony. He intended, when he was rich
enough, to return to his native land, to ruin and then buy out all those who
had earlier scorned him. To forward this purpose, everything beyond what was
necessary to run his various ventures and live with great simplicity was sent
back to England to be safely invested. But to a man of Henry’s temperament it
is impossible to become “rich enough”.

The years passed, and the climate and diseases of India took
their toll. Of the eight children born to Henry and Mary, seven died. Worn out
with grief and with labor—for as well as being housewife, hostess, and mother,
Mary had often been pressed into acting as clerk, bookkeeper, and secretary to
her husband—she, too, succumbed. All that remained to Henry was a
thirteen-year-old daughter, Esmeralda Mary Louisa Talbot.

Until her mother’s death, Esmeralda had lived a pleasant
life. One advantage of Henry’s niggardliness was that no one in the English
community in Bombay had any idea how rich he was. Thus, no spite or envy was
directed against Merry, as she was called by her friends for the liveliness of
her disposition and the quickness of her wit. Unfortunately, her vitality and
humor were not valued by her father, although they did testify to Esmeralda’s
considerable intelligence, a characteristic he noted just as he took note of
any asset that might hold value in the future.

That future became the present soon after Esmeralda’s mother
died, for her childhood ended as soon as those who came to offer sympathy were
gone. Henry immediately began to teach Esmeralda to take her mother’s place,
attending to the many aspects of his business that he would not trust to native
clerks. The sudden change produced rebellion and rebellion produced
retribution. Henry was not a sadist, but he could be cruel in order to get his
way.

To facilitate the grooming of his daughter, Henry moved from
Bombay to Goa, the Portuguese community in India. The move was temporarily
convenient for his business, but Henry’s main purpose was to isolate Esmeralda,
for in Bombay the families of her many friends offered an easy escape when her
father was otherwise occupied. Besides, he did not want her complaining to
others of his unkindness or more important to him exposing his business
dealings by accident or for spite.

Esmeralda soon learned to obey her father, at least overtly,
but fortunately this was not because Henry had succeeded in breaking her
spirit. Once the initial shock of grief and change was past—and really she had
no time to grieve—she found the tasks her father was asking her to do quite
fascinating. Her willing application soon satisfied Henry, who was clever about
money but not about people and did not realize that, young as she was, his
daughter had already discovered how to circumvent him.

By the time they moved back to Bombay, however, Merry was
long buried under the outer shell of Miss Esmeralda Talbot, a quiet, insipid
girl, whose rather unsuccessful father could not afford a proper carriage for
her, so that she rode everywhere on a small, ugly, but very sturdy, mare. This
constant exposure to the Indian sun wreaked havoc with her complexion, which
was much darkened, and with her hair, which was dulled and bleached. What might
have been her saving graces, a pair of enormous, beautiful, dark blue eyes and
a perfectly enchanting smile, were rarely in evidence. She kept the lovely eyes
lowered, and in her father’s presence she did not smile.

But Esmeralda knew she had only to wait, and not for very
long. She was her father’s heiress, and Henry was not the man he had been.
Although she did not like her father, she suggested more than once that the
climate was growing too much for him and that they should retire to England. In
Henry’s own opinion, however, he was not yet “rich enough”. Then, in 1806, he
had a violent seizure and very nearly died. Esmeralda nursed him carefully. She
did not lie to herself; she hoped he
would
die, but she had her mother’s
strong sense of honor and duty and she could not live with the knowledge that
she had not done everything in her power to save another human being, no matter
how unlikable.

In the long run, it was her father’s illness that had
brought Esmeralda to this Portuguese village and to the unaccustomed task of
spinning. Not that making her spin was an act of unkindness on the part of the
villagers. It was an attempt to conceal from the French Esmeralda’s difference
from the other girls. Henry might have been greedy and might have lacked
perception about people, but he had not been stupid. When he had recovered from
the seizure enough to get about, he had sold his business and possessions in
India, transferred all his assets to England, and booked passage for “home”.

But Henry’s luck had run out. Although they had waited until
April when they had the best chance of good weather and a swift passage,
everything possible had gone wrong with the voyage. And at last, off the coast
of Portugal, the overstrained vessel had met one storm too many and had begun
to sink. Esmeralda remembered very little of the terror-filled hours that
followed. She was not unacquainted with danger. Because of Henry’s reluctance
to spend an extra penny, she had occasionally been exposed to bandits and to
mob violence, but never had she felt so helpless, so utterly afraid.

She did remember being placed in one of the few small boats
with her father, and she remembered bailing water from that fragile craft while
it tossed and pitched. But when she saw the huge breakers, the wildly flung
spume, the pitiless rocks and cliffs of the inhospitable shore, she gave
herself up for dead and her memory held no more. When she finally regained
consciousness, she found herself in a hut in the Portuguese fishing village
where she now lived. How she had come there and what had happened to the
sailors who had been in the boat with her father and herself she had never
discovered.

Perhaps Esmeralda could have obtained more information had
she asked at once, but at first she was too exhausted and too busy caring for
her father. Surprisingly, Henry had survived the actual shipwreck, but he did
not survive for long. The strain had been too much. Another seizure and the
hard, primitive life killed him, in spite of all the villagers could do. By the
time, several weeks later, Esmeralda had asked what had happened to the
sailors, the headman of the village shrugged and shook his head. They had gone
south, he said, toward Oporto, but the French were there.

Still, the villagers were kind. Although they knew that all
British citizens were supposed to be given up to the French, they buried Henry
with all the dignity so small a place could muster, and they hid Esmeralda when
the troops came to forage. They did their best to make her indistinguishable
from their own girls, but they were afraid. If it was discovered that they had
been concealing an enemy, they would be harshly punished.

Esmeralda was aware of this fear, although no one spoke of
it openly. It was an important consideration in the dangerous decision she must
soon make. If the French returned, someone from the village might become
frightened enough to betray her. Or Pedro, headman’s son, whose advances she
had rejected several times, might do it for spite. Or, even more likely, one of
the village girls to whom Pedro had previously paid attention might wish to be
rid of her. Esmeralda’s lips tightened as she thought of Pedro. The first time
he had approached her, before her Portuguese had become as fluent as it now
was, she had gone out of the village with him, not quite understanding what he
wanted and thinking that perhaps one of the sailors had returned or that the
French were coming and she was to be hidden.

She had soon discovered her mistake. Fortunately, because
Pedro had thought she was willing and had not been prepared for her violent
reaction, she had been able to fight her way free. But Pedro was not
discouraged. He took her resistance for coyness and explained that his
intentions were strictly honorable. Esmeralda did not believe this. Courtship
was a very formal matter among the Portuguese. She guessed that he had heard
tales of the immoral behavior of the British heretics and had expected her to
welcome any man who offered. His profession of honorable intentions was no
surprise. It saved face for both of them, and her unwillingness gave him an
easy excuse to withdraw.

However, rather surprisingly, Pedro did not withdraw but
pursued her in a more formal fashion. Esmeralda was considerably puzzled by his
persistence. Surely, she thought, he could not really wish to marry her. It was
ridiculous. Setting aside her own unwillingness, she would be utterly useless
to him as a wife. She had none of the skills necessary to village life. She
could not spin or weave, she had no idea how to wash clothes, cooking, beyond
the boiling of eggs, was a mystery to her. In fact, she was learning a bit of
all these skills, for she did not want to be a greater burden than necessary to
her hosts, but it must be plain to everyone that it would be many, many years
before she could become proficient. A man with so inept a wife would be very
uncomfortable.

If she had been very beautiful, Pedro’s interest might have
been more reasonable. Some men did think beauty made up for other deficiencies.
But Esmeralda knew she was not an especially attractive girl. Even in Bombay,
where there were so many more Englishmen than Englishwomen that no girl ever
lacked a partner at a dance, she had always been the last to be asked. Suddenly
Esmeralda’s hands which had continued, no matter how clumsily, to twist the wool
she was spinning, became still. It was not true that she had
always
been
last. Twice, in India, several months apart, her ball card had been solicited
as soon as that of the reigning belle, and by the most handsome man any of the
women in that room had ever seen.