Beyond the Sunrise Read online

  Dear Reader,

  Beyond the Sunrise, first published in 1992, is very special to me. I had already written almost thirty Regency romances, character-driven comedies of manners, all set in England. I was comfortable in the genre. But then I had an idea for something a bit different, something that would involve the Napoleonic Wars. I had been doing research into the Peninsular Wars in Spain and Portugal, and I was hooked.

  The story is set in the same era as most of my others, and it begins in England when the hero and heroine first meet as young teenagers and enjoy a sweet romance before they are forced apart—she is the daughter of an exiled French count while he is the illegitimate son of an earl. But the story then moves to Portugal a number of years later. Robert Blake is now a tough, seasoned captain of an infantry regiment and an occasional spy under direct orders from the future Duke of Wellington. Joana da Fonte (formerly Jeanne Morisette) is the widow of a Portuguese nobleman and also a spy—something for which her French background makes her a prime candidate.

  The story involves spying, intrigue, revenge, and betrayal, and it is the most action-packed of my books. I absolutely loved writing it, even though it took me well outside my comfort zone. It is character-driven and tells a passionate love story, just as all my books do, but it is a great deal more than just that, and I am delighted to see it being published again so many years later.

  I do hope you will enjoy reading it in this lovely new edition, whether it be for the first time or as a reread from many years ago.

  Mary Balogh

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF MARY BALOGH

  Beyond the Sunrise

  “Thoroughly enjoyable.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Janelle Taylor

  “Balogh’s . . . epic love story is a winner . . . absorbing reading right up until the end.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “High intrigue, daring exploits, a passionate love affair, what more could you want in a romance? Balogh gives us a humdinger of a tale set during the Napoleonic Wars. Great fun. Highly recommended.”

  —Manderley Magazine

  “Beyond the Sunrise is an utterly absorbing, powerful tale of a love that was once doomed and yet blooms again amidst the intrigue and ordeal of war. With infinite care and deft plotting, Ms. Balogh spins an intricate tale with the skill of a master weaver. She draws you into the era by evoking the aura of the war and the passionate emotions of her characters. If you have never read another book by Mary Balogh, then Beyond the Sunrise will be your introduction to a writer of remarkable talents.”

  —RT Reviews

  Longing

  “Balogh capture[s] the allure of the land and the culture of the proud people of Wales . . . a very different sort of historical romance. Ms. Balogh’s writing has a very lyrical quality to it, which draws out the feelings of yearning so that the reader can palpably sense them . . . pretty powerful.”

  —The Hope Chest Reviews

  “A particular favorite of mine.”

  —The Romance Reader

  FURTHER PRAISE FOR AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR MARY BALOGH

  “Once you start a Mary Balogh book, you won’t be able to stop reading.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  “Mary Balogh has the gift of making a relationship seem utterly real and utterly compelling.”

  —Mary Jo Putney

  “Winning, witty, and engaging . . . fulfilled all of my romantic fantasies.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Teresa Medeiros

  “Mary Balogh just keeps getting better and better . . . interesting characters and great stories to tell . . . well worth your time.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Mary Balogh is a superb author whose narrative voice comments on the characters and events of her novel in an ironic tone reminiscent of Jane Austen.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Mary Balogh reaches deep and touches the heart.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Joan Johnston

  “A writer whose books belong on every romance shelf.”

  —RT Reviews

  ALSO BY MARY BALOGH

  THE SURVIVORS’ CLUB SERIES

  The Proposal

  The Arrangement

  The Escape

  Only Enchanting

  THE HUXTABLE SERIES

  First Comes Marriage

  Then Comes Seduction

  At Last Comes Love

  Seducing an Angel

  A Secret Affair

  THE SIMPLY SERIES

  Simply Unforgettable

  Simply Love

  Simply Magic

  Simply Perfect

  THE BEDWYN SAGA

  Slightly Married

  Slightly Wicked

  Slightly Scandalous

  Slightly Tempted

  Slightly Sinful

  Slightly Dangerous

  THE BEDWYN PREQUELS

  One Night for Love

  A Summer to Remember

  THE MISTRESS TRILOGY

  More Than a Mistress

  No Man’s Mistress

  The Secret Mistress

  THE WEB SERIES

  The Gilded Web

  Web of Love

  The Devil’s Web

  CLASSICS

  The Ideal Wife

  The Secret Pearl

  A Precious Jewel

  A Christmas Promise

  Dark Angel/

  Lord Carew’s Bride

  The Famous Heroine/

  The Plumed Bonnet

  A Christmas Bride/

  Christmas Beau

  The Temporary Wife/

  A Promise of Spring

  A Counterfeit Betrothal/

  The Notorious Rake

  Irresistible

  A Matter of Class

  Under the Mistletoe

  Longing

  Signet Eclipse

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Published by Signet Eclipse, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Previously published in an Onyx edition.

  First Signet Eclipse Printing, February 2015

  Copyright © Mary Balogh, 1992

  Map copyright © Meighan Cavanaugh, 2014

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  SIGNET ECLIPSE and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Balogh, Mary.

  Beyond the sunrise/Mary Balogh.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15611-1

  1. First loves—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6052.A465B49 2015

  823'.914—dc23 2014035061

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents either are 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.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Letter to the Readers

  Praise

  Also by MARY BALOGH

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Map

  ENGLAND, 1799

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  PORTUGAL AND SPAIN, 1810

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Historical Note

  Excerpt from Only a Promise

  About the Author

  ENGLAND,

  1799

  1

  THE entertainment in progress at Haddington Hall in Sussex, country seat of the Marquess of Quesnay, could not exactly be dignified by the name of ball, though there was dancing, and the sounds of music and gaiety were wafting from the open windows of the main drawing room. It was a country entertainment and the numbers not large, there being only two guests staying at the house at that particular time to swell the ranks of the local gentry.

  It was not a ball, but the boy sitting out of sight of the house on the seat surrounding the great marble fountain below the terrace wished that he was inside and a part of it all. He wished that reality could be suspended and that he could be there dancing with her, the dark-haired, dark-eyed young daughter of his father’s guest. Or at least looking at her and perhaps talking with her. Perhaps fetching her a glass of lemonade. He wished . . . oh, he wished for the moon, as he always did. A dreamer—that was what his mother had often called him.

  But there were two insurmountable reasons for his exclusion from the assembly: he was only seventeen years old, and he was the marquess’s illegitimate son. That last fact had had particular meaning to him only during the past year and a half, since the sudden death of his mother. Through his childhood and much of his boyhood, it had seemed a normal way of life to have a father who visited him and his mother frequently but did not live with them, and a father who had a wife in the big house though no other children but him.

  It was only in the year and a half since his mother’s death that the reality of his situation had become fully apparent to him. He had been a fifteen-year-old boy without a home and with a father who had financed his mother’s home but had never been a permanent part of it. His father had taken him to live in the big house. But he had felt all the awkwardness of his situation since moving there. He was not a member of the family—his father’s wife, the marchioness, hated him and ignored his presence whenever she was forced to be in it. But he was not one of the servants either, of course.

  It was only in the past year and a half that his father had begun to talk about his future and that the boy had realized that his illegitimacy made of that future a tricky business. The marquess would buy him a commission in the army when he was eighteen, he had decided, but it would have to be with a line regiment and not with the cavalry—certainly not with the Guards. That would never do when the ranks of the Guards were filled with the sons of the nobility and upper gentry. The legitimate sons, that was.

  He was his father’s only son, but illegitimate.

  “You are not at the ball?” a soft little voice asked him suddenly, and he looked up to see the very reason why he had so wished to be in the drawing room—Jeanne Morisette, daughter of the Comte de Levisse, a royalist émigré who had fled from France during the Reign of Terror and lived in England ever since.

  He felt his heart thump. He had never been close to her before, had never exchanged a word with her. He shrugged. “I don’t want to be,” he said. “It is not a ball anyway.”

  She sat down beside him, slender in a light-colored flimsy gown—he could not see the exact color in the darkness—her hair in myriad ringlets about her head, her eyes large and luminous in the moonlight. “But I wish I could be there even so,” she said. “I thought I might be allowed to attend since it is just a country entertainment. But Papa said no. He said that fifteen is too young to be dancing with gentlemen. It is tiresome being young, is it not?”

  Ah. So she had not been with the company after all. He had tortured himself for nothing. He shrugged again. “I am not so young,” he said. “I am seventeen.”

  She sighed. “When I am seventeen,” she said, “I shall dance every night and go to the theater and on picnics. I shall do just whatever I please when I am grown up.”

  Her face was bright and eager and she was prettier than any other girl he had seen. He had taken every opportunity during the past week to catch glimpses of her. She was like a bright little jewel, quite beyond his reach, of course, but lovely to look at and to dream of.

  “Papa is going to take me back to France as soon as it is safe to go,” she said with a sigh. “Everything seems to be settling down under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte. If it continues so, perhaps we will be able to return, Papa says. He says there is no point in continuing to dream of the return of a king.”

  “So you may do your dancing in Paris,” he said.

  “Yes.” Her eyes were dreamy. “But I would just as soon stay in London. I know England better than I know France. I even speak English better than I speak French. I would prefer to belong here.”

  But there was a trace of a French accent in her voice. It was one more attractive feature about her. He liked to listen to her talk.

  “You are the marquess’s son, are you not?” she asked him. “But you do not have his name?”

  “I have my mother’s name,” he said. “She died the winter before last.”

  “Ah,” she said, “that is sad. My mother is dead too, but I do not remember her. I have always been with Papa for as long as I recall. What is your name?”

  “Robert,” he said.

  “Robert.” She gave his name its French intonation and then smiled and said it again with its English pronunciation. “Robert, dance with me. Do you dance?”

  “My mother taught me,” he said. “Out here? How can we dance out here?”

  “Easily,” she said, jumping lightly to her feet and stretching out a slim hand to him. “The music is quite loud enough.”

  “But you will hurt your feet on the stones,” he said, looking down at her thin silk slippers as she led the way up onto the terrace.

  She laughed. “I think, Robert, that you are looking for excuses,” she said. “I think that your mother did not teach you at all, or that if she did, you were unteachable. I think perhaps you have two left feet.” She laughed again.

  “That is not so,” he said indignantly. “If you wish to dance, then dance we will.”

  “That is a very grudging acceptance,” she said. “You are supposed to be thrilled to dance with me. You are supposed to make me feel that there is nothing you wish for more in life than to dance with me. But no matter. Let us dance.”

  He knew very little about women’s teasing. It was true that Mollie Lumsden, one of his father’s undermaids, frequently put herself in his way and showed herself to him in provocative poses, most frequen
tly bent over his bed as she made it up in the mornings. It was true too that on the one occasion when he had tried to steal a kiss she had whisked herself off with a toss of the head and an assurance that her favors did not come free. But there was a world of difference between the buxom Mollie and Jeanne Morisette.

  They danced a minuet, the moon bathing the cobbles of the terrace in a mellow light, both of them silent and concentrating on the distant music and their steps—although his attention was not entirely on just those two things either. His eyes were on the slender moonlit form of the girl with whom he danced. Her hand in his was warm and slim and soft. He thought that life might never have a finer moment to offer him.

  “You are very tall,” she said as the music drew to an end.

  He was close to six feet in height. Unfortunately his growing had all been done upward. To say that he was thin would be to understate the case. He hated to look at himself in a looking glass. He longed to be a handsome, muscular man and wondered if he ever would be anything more than gangly and ugly.

  “And you have lovely blond hair,” she said. “I have noticed you all week and wished that I had hair that waved like yours.” She laughed lightly. “I am glad you do not wear it short. It would be such a waste.”

  He was dazzled. He was still holding her soft little hand in his.

  “I am supposed to be in my room,” she said. “Papa would have forty fits if he knew I was out here.”

  “You are quite safe,” he said. “I shall see that no harm comes to you.”

  She looked up at him from beneath her lashes, an imp of mischief in her eyes. “You may kiss me if you wish,” she said.

  His eyes widened. What Mollie had denied, Jeanne Morisette would grant? But how could he kiss her? He knew nothing about kissing.

  “Of course,” she said, “if you do not wish to, I shall return to the house. Perhaps you are afraid.”

  He was. Mortally afraid. “Of course I am not afraid,” he said scornfully. And he set his hands at her waist— they almost met about it—and lowered his head and kissed her. He kissed her as he had always kissed his mother on the cheek—though he kissed Jeanne on the lips—briefly and with a smacking sound.