Beyond the Sunrise Page 6

  “Well enough to be climbing walls and marching across ceilings for exercise,” the captain said. “Is there any action at the front yet?”

  The officer ignored the question. “You are to present yourself at headquarters within the week for further instructions,” he said. “Provided you are well enough, of course.”

  “Well enough!” The captain made the words an exclamation. “I could fight two duels before breakfast and wonder as I ate why the morning was so dull. Who wants to see me at headquarters?”

  The staff officer looked at him uncomprehendingly. “Who ever wants to see anyone at headquarters?” he said.

  Captain Blake raised his eyebrows. “The Beau?” he said. “Wellington?”

  “Within the week,” the officer said. “You must know very well, Captain, that when the commander in chief expresses a wish to speak with a person as soon as possible, he means yesterday or preferably the day before.”

  “I shall leave at first light tomorrow.” The captain grinned.

  “Probably not quite so early.” The staff officer frowned. “You are to escort the Marquesa das Minas. Do you know her? It is bound to slow you down to have a lady to escort, and his lordship wants you at Viseu without delay. But both orders come from him, so make your own interpretation.”

  Captain Blake stared blankly at the other man. “I am to escort the marquesa to Viseu?” he said. “Into danger and not out? But why me? Why would the Beau order such a thing? Have the Portuguese put some pressure on him to act nursemaid to all their grandest and most helpless ladies?”

  The staff officer shrugged. “It is not for me to ask why,” he said. “Just make sure you show your face within the week, Captain, and that the lady is safely delivered to Viseu. I have other errands to run.”

  Captain Blake stood alone in the room frowning after he had been left alone. What the devil? He was wanted at headquarters? Not at the front, where the Light Division was keeping watch along the line of the Coa? Was there some special job for him to do? His mood quickened at the possibility. He had been used for occasional reconnaissance or special-mission work over the years, both in India and in Portugal. His talent with languages was largely responsible. He had always been able to pick up a language easily, even as a boy when his mother had taught him French and Italian. He hated to be in a country and not know the language. And so after ten years of travel with the British armies, he was multilingual.

  More than once he had been offered a permanent position with Wellesley’s—now Lord Wellington’s—reconnaissance team, with those men who penetrated enemy territory and brought or sent back information about troop placements and movements. He had been tempted. The sheer excitement and danger involved had attracted him. But he belonged with his regiment. He was never so much at home as when he was leading his own rifle company in the skirmish line ahead of the infantry.

  But occasionally he enjoyed a special mission. He would especially welcome one now after months of pain and weakness and sheer boredom in a Lisbon hospital, far from the men whom he had come to think of almost as his own family. Perhaps his return to active duty was to be more exciting even than he had anticipated.

  But his frown deepened as he remembered his other order. At the request of Viscount Wellington he was to escort the Marquesa das Minas to Viseu. Just at a time when he had convinced himself that he would resist the temptation to attend her reception that evening. Just when he had hoped that he could leave and never have to see or think of her again.

  Jeanne Morisette. He could no longer feel any of the hurt and pain of the boy he had been almost eleven years before. It would be foolish to hate her because of cruel and heartless words she had spoken as a girl of fifteen. He did not hate her. But he had glimpsed again during his brief encounter with her at the ball the beauty and the charm and the something else he would not put a name to that drew men to her like bees to flowers. And he had sensed the tease in her that enabled her to keep all those men dangling and panting for just one smile or one mark of favor.

  And he had known that he could easily become one of those men if he did not watch himself. What more demeaning fate could there be in life than to become the lapdog of a beautiful and heartless tease?

  He would not do it. He would not see her again, he had decided.

  And of course there was the fact that she was French. He wondered if anyone knew. Lord Ravenhill had been able to tell him only that she had been married to the Marques das Minas, a courtier highly favored by the Portuguese royal family and one who had fled with them.

  Was the fact that she was French of any significance? he wondered. Her father had after all been a royalist émigré in England. Perhaps he had never returned to France. Captain Blake did not know. Besides, her mother had been English, if he remembered correctly. Her nationality might be of no importance whatsoever. But she had changed her name. She was now Joana, not Jeanne. In order to disguise a truth she preferred to hide?

  And yet the Beau had decreed that Captain Blake escort the woman to Viseu, a journey of several days—for a woman traveling by carriage anyway.

  Hell and damnation! Captain Blake thought with sudden anger. He filled the empty room with a few other more satisfying oaths. But they changed nothing. He was to spend the next few days dancing attendance on a woman he would rather never see again. For several days he was to be subjected to her beauty and her charm and that something else that he was very much afraid he might not be able to resist if she decided to unleash it on him.

  He had better put in an appearance at her reception after all, he supposed, in order to make some arrangements for the following day. He wondered if she had yet been informed of the glad tidings and how she would feel about having to accept his escort.

  Probably nothing at all. Probably she would treat him, as she treated any man, as her servant who owed her service and homage as her right. It angered him that his escort would probably mean nothing more than that to her.

  And it angered him even more that it mattered to him.

  Bloody hell!

  * * *

  Yes, he would certainly come to her reception now, Joana thought with some satisfaction. Though there was a little annoyance too after Lord Wellington’s messenger had left her. She would have liked to discover if he would have come anyway—she was almost convinced that he would. And she had looked forward to persuading him herself to escort her back to Viseu. It would have been a challenge she could have enjoyed.

  But Arthur had not left anything to chance—or to a woman’s wiles. He had simply sent an order to Captain Blake.

  Well, at least, Joana thought, he would come. And she paused in the act of dabbing perfume behind one ear. She had had a purpose in making his acquaintance, a purpose in inviting him to her reception—indeed, he was the reason for the reception—and a reason for wishing to spend a few days in company with him on the road to Viseu. It surely did not matter how he was persuaded to fall in with her plans. Did it?

  He was not, after all, one of her numerous flirts. Anything but. The man as she remembered him—tall, almost shabby in his dress, awkward in his manners, his face marred by the scars of battle, his blue eyes direct and almost hostile, his blond hair cropped close to his head—was not the sort of man with whom she would think of dallying.

  And yet his very differentness from her usual type of suitor, his total differentness from Luis, was in itself a challenge. She shrugged and got to her feet. That was not a thought to be pursued.

  And yet she looked forward to the evening, she thought as she glanced at herself critically in the looking glass one more time. She was not especially fond of the Marquesa das Minas. She found her rather insipid, rather a bore. Rather like her clothes—all white, always white. She was not sure quite why she had decided to dress the marquesa in unrelieved white after her year of mourning had come to an end. Perhaps the contrast with black? Perhaps the image of helpl
ess fragility that she wished the marquesa to project?

  However it was, she always wore white as the marquesa. It was perhaps a blessing, she thought with a private smile shared only with the looking glass, that she was not only or always the Marquesa das Minas.

  But perhaps the boredom of her life was not entirely her fault either, Joana thought. Perhaps all the men who worshiped her were more to blame. What challenge was there in worship? What pleasure was there to be derived from compliments that were always so constant and so lavish? What pride was there to be gained from accepting homage, always homage?

  Sometimes she longed for more. Her eyes glazed, and she gazed into the looking glass without seeing herself. What was it she longed for? Love? Love was for youth, for young persons who knew nothing of life. Love was for memory and bittersweet nostalgia. Love could not live on into adulthood, just as young lovers sometimes did not. And so she must make do with what remained—with homage that frequently bored her.

  She looked guiltily at her image. There must surely be thousands of women who would think heaven had come if they knew just one small fraction of the worship that the marquesa found tedious. But sometimes she longed for a man who would not treat her like a fragile doll, like an angel escaped from heaven.

  Perhaps Captain Robert Blake would prove to be such a man, she thought hopefully. Perhaps he would not succumb to her charms. Perhaps he would look on her with dislike and even contempt. Perhaps he would be totally indifferent to her despite that look that had been in his eyes at the count’s ball.

  Perhaps there would be some challenge in the days or perhaps weeks ahead while she was trapped in the disguise of the Marquesa das Minas.

  Joana turned away from the looking glass and descended the stairs to face her reception with a renewed spring in her step.

  5

  HE came late. She had laughed and talked and drunk and eaten with her guests, outwardly as gay as she ever was in company. The level and quality of the noise about her assured her that her reception was a great success and would be talked about for days to come. And yet inside she seethed. How dare he be late! And perhaps after all he did not mean to come at all, but would merely arrive at some time the next morning expecting her to be standing in the gateway of her courtyard surrounded by her baggage, meekly awaiting his arrival and escort.

  How dare he! She was furious with him and tapped an artillery captain on the arm with her white fan and told him, smiling up at him from beneath lowered lashes, not to be impertinent. The man flushed and was pleased. It was so easy to please men.

  And then he was there, standing in the doorway of her salon, looking tall and uncomfortable and rather as if he were attending his own funeral. Even across the room she could see the shabby jacket, the hair even shorter than she remembered, the crooked nose, the scar slashing across it and one cheek. And she wondered why she had thought so much about him in the past two days. He was not a handsome man. Perhaps before war had taken its toll on his face he might have been, but no longer. But then, of course, he probably had not been such an overwhelmingly attractive man before his years as a soldier, either.

  The marquesa turned her head away before their eyes could meet and informed the amazed and delighted artillery captain that he might escort her to the tables and fill her plate for her. She smiled at him and set a white-gloved hand on his arm. Captain Robert Blake, she thought, might seek her out. She would not seek him.

  And yet when an hour had passed and he still stood close to the door, having spoken only briefly with a few of his brother officers, Joana was forced to find an excuse to be strolling past him on the arm of Colonel Lord Wyman and to notice him with a lifting of the eyebrows.

  “Ah, Captain Blake,” she said, drawing the colonel to a halt. “You came. I am pleased.”

  He bowed his head to her curtly and she wondered if he knew anything at all about courtly manners. Probably not. He had risen from the ranks. Perhaps he had been a tradesman’s son in England or a vagabond or a prisoner. Perhaps he was from the slums of some city and had enlisted merely for the sake of survival—or a survival of sorts. Enlisting as a private soldier hardly brought an assurance of security with it. At all events, he could be no gentleman.

  And she smiled inwardly at his discomfort and wished she could add to it. She wished there were dancing so that she could lure him out onto the floor to reveal his awkwardness and his ignorance of the steps. And at the same time she marveled at the spitefulness of her own thoughts. What had the man done to her to make her want to humiliate him?

  Perhaps it was that he looked at her very directly with those blue eyes, which were not quite hostile but not quite friendly either. Or perhaps it was that she was ashamed of the fact that he stirred her senses as no man—certainly not Luis—had ever done before.

  She was ashamed of the fact that she found a man who had come up from the ranks—a nobody—sexually attractive.

  “Duncan.” She released the colonel’s arm and patted it. “I must leave you for a while. I have business to discuss with Captain Blake.”

  “Business, Joana?” The colonel looked from her to the rifleman in some surprise.

  “Captain Blake has been assigned to escort me to Viseu,” she said. “We will be leaving tomorrow. Did I forget to tell you?”

  “Tomorrow?” he said. “But you have been here less than a week, Joana.”

  “My aunt is sick again,” she said with a sigh, “and has summoned me. It is tiresome, but she is my aunt, you know, and has been kind to me in the past.”

  The colonel looked as if he would cheerfully dump her aunt in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean if he could.

  “But why Captain Blake?” he asked. “You know that you had but to say the word, Joana, and I would have arranged to take you myself.”

  “I know.” She patted his arm again. And she felt guilty at the knowledge that she was glad it would be the captain and not Duncan who would be escorting her to Viseu. Duncan was, after all, her ticket to heaven, her passport to a life in England. And she was fond of him. “But you have your duties here and Captain Blake is going to Viseu anyway. Besides, Arthur has arranged it all.”

  “Wellington?” The colonel frowned.

  “And who is going to countermand his orders?” she said with a shrug. “It is all very tiresome, but I shall return as soon as I may—to Lisbon and to this room. Have some champagne waiting for me?”

  He bowed and looked with some hostility at Captain Blake, who had stood silently watching them the whole time.

  “Captain? Shall we go somewhere quieter?” She might have swept past him, led the way to her private writing room. He would, of course, have followed, and would perhaps have been more comfortable to be treated almost like a servant. But she could not resist embarrassing him. She looked at him with slightly raised eyebrows, waited just long enough to see him stiffen with uncertainty, and then lifted her hand. “Your arm?”

  He raised it jerkily so that she might place her hand lightly along it. She was surprised by the rock hardness of his muscles, which she could feel even though she put little pressure on his sleeve. One might have expected them to be wasted by injury and long convalescence and soft living. His sleeve, she noticed, was not quite frayed at the wrist.

  She led him to her writing room and closed the door behind her. She did not ring for a chaperone. Matilda would be angry with her but would know better than to scold too loudly or too long. The room opened into a small private courtyard, lit by an almost full moon. But the glass doors were closed, it being a chilly evening for late June.

  “I came to ask when you will be ready to leave in the morning, ma’am,” he said. Nothing about her convenience or doing himself the honor. No courtly bows or appreciative smiles. Only that look far back in his eyes that she had seen there two nights before at the ball.

  But as she looked at him, she had the feeling again of having met hi
m before. Except that it was not that, she realized with a jolt. It was that he reminded her . . . No, it must be the blond hair, the blue eyes, something else indefinable, because really he was nothing like him at all. But perhaps there would have been a real resemblance if the other had lived, if he had not died before his eighteenth birthday.

  “Only for that reason?” she asked him. “Not because I invited you to come and because this is the social occasion to be attending this evening? There are many disappointed British and Portuguese officers who did not receive an invitation.”

  He looked back at her silently, his expression unsoftened.

  “What may I offer you to drink, Captain?” she asked, crossing the room to a sideboard.

  “Nothing, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you,” he added almost as an afterthought.

  “Lemonade?” Her eyes mocked him.

  “No, thank you, ma’am.”

  She walked away from the sideboard. She poured nothing for herself.

  “As early as you wish, Captain,” she said. “Dawn?”

  “It will not be too early for you?” he asked.

  She smiled fleetingly. “It will probably be late,” she said. “I shall doubtless leave directly from my party. Anything after that, after I had taken some rest, would doubtless be too late. Dawn will be suitable, Captain.”

  He bowed and looked as if he would take his leave if he could just find a way of doing so gracefully. But she was not ready to dismiss him yet.

  “You have a knowledge of many languages, Captain?” she said.

  He looked surprised. “I like to be able to communicate with the people about me when in a foreign country,” he said. “How did you know that?”

  “I make a practice, Captain,” she said, “of knowing something of my servants . . . and my escorts. Your knowledge of Indian languages enabled you to do some spying work for the British government in India, and you did some here too two years ago when Lord Wellington was first in Portugal. It must be a fascinating life.”