A Lady in Need of an Heir
Auteur·e
Louise Allen
Lectures
19,9K
Chapitres
23
HarlequinChapter One
Early October 1815—Douro Valley, Portugal
It was the same as his memories, yet different as a dream. The river, tricky, pretending to be benign, ran wide here, below the gorges that lurked lethally upstream. The sky was blue, dotted with clouds, a roof over the valley with its tiers of intricate ancient terraces rising on either side. The harvest was over, the grapes stripped away, the leaves hinting at a change to the gold and crimson of autumn.
There were no sounds of shots or cannon fire, no victims of the fighting clogged the swirling brown waters. From the bushes on the bank a bird sang clear and pure and the scorching heat of summer was turning to something kinder.
The tranquillity was unsettling, dangerous. This was when the enemy struck, when you were lulled into relaxation, distracted by a moment’s peace, a glimpse of beauty. Gray gave himself a mental shake. There was no enemy. He was no longer Colonel Nathaniel Graystone and the war was over. Twice over, with Bonaparte finally defeated scarcely four months ago on the bloody plains of Belgium.
Portugal was free from invaders and had been so for four years now. There were no ambushes here, no snipers behind rocks, no cavalry troops to lead into a hell of gunfire and smoke and blood. He was the Earl of Leybourne and he was a civilian now. And he was here on an inconvenient errand, the kind that assuming the title and the headship of his family seemed to involve.
The two men handling the rabelo shouted something in Portuguese as the sail flapped and Gray translated without having to think about it. He ducked low among the empty barrels as the boom swung over, then tossed a line to the man at the prow.
Doubtless it was beneath his new dignity to approach the Quinta do Falcão by working boat. He should have creaked for almost a hundred miles along the hilltop road from Porto to Pinhão in one of the lumbering old-fashioned carriages to be hired in the city, then held on to his nerve, his dignity and his hat as it negotiated the hairpin bends of the track leading down to the river. But this was the fast, efficient way to make the journey and twenty months had still not instilled in him the attitudes expected of a peer of the realm. At least, not according to his godmother, Lady Orford.
It was she, and his own uncomfortable sense of duty, that Gray could blame for his present situation. He was up to his ankles in bilge water and facing a situation that, in his opinion, called for either the skills of a diplomat or those of a kidnapper. And he was neither. It did very little for his mood and even less for the condition of his new boots.
The man managing the great steering paddle shouted something and jerked his head towards the bank. There were trees and a wide flat area about ten feet above the waterline and through the foliage he could see glimpses of red-tiled rooftops and the whitewashed walls of a low, sprawling house. As the boat steered nearer, fighting against the current, he saw gardens, then a landing stage.
‘É aquele Quinta do Falcão?’ he called.
‘Sim, senhor.’
The house, the heart of the quinta or winemaking estate, came fully into sight. It was charming, he thought, something of his edgy mood softening. It was gracious, beautifully kept, radiating prosperity. A pleasant surprise, not the down-at-heel place hanging on by a thread that he had feared from his godmother’s agitation. The boat angled closer, the boatmen struggling to find slack water nearer the bank. Through a grove of trees Gray glimpsed what looked like gravestones and a woman rising from her knees in the midst of them, a flurry of garnet-red skirts against the green. It was like a fashionable sentimental picture, he thought fancifully. Beauty amidst the Sorrows or some such nonsense.
Then, with a sudden swoop, the boat was alongside the long wooden dock. One man jumped ashore, looped a rope around a bollard and gestured to Gray to throw across his baggage. Three valises hit the dock, then Gray vaulted over beside them as the boatman freed the line and was back on board with the boat slipping fast into the current.
Gray waved and they waved back, gap-toothed smiles splitting their faces under the broad-brimmed black hats they both wore.
You may well grin, he thought. The amount I paid you. But money was not the issue. Speed was.
‘Quem são você?’
It was the woman from the graveyard demanding his identity. She made a vivid sight: garnet skirts above soft black ankle boots, a white loose shirt under a tight black waistcoat. Her hands were on her hips; her expression conveyed as little welcome as her tone.
‘Good morning,’ Gray said in English as he straightened up from his bags, ignoring her question as he studied her. The scrutiny brought up a flush of angry colour over her cheekbones and the wide brown eyes narrowed.
‘This is the private landing stage for Quinta do Falcão.’ She switched easily to unaccented English. Despite the costume and her dark hair, this was the mistress of the place, not one of the staff, he realised.
‘Excellent, then I am where I intended to be. It would have been inconvenient to be dropped off ten miles adrift.’ Gray looped the strap of one bag over his shoulder and picked up the others. ‘Miss Frost, I presume?’
A narrowing of her eyes was all the confirmation she offered. ‘I ask again, sir, who you are.’
‘I am Leybourne. You should be expecting me. You should have had a letter informing you of my arrival. Your Aunt Henrietta, Lady Orford, wrote at least a month ago.’
One lock of dark brown hair slipped from its combs and fell against her cheek. Miss Frost tucked it back behind her ear without taking her hostile gaze from his face. ‘In that case it went on the fire, as do most of her communications when she is in a managing mood. You are her godson, then, and if I remember rightly, Lord Leybourne. So you know what she is like.’
‘Yes.’ Gray held on to his temper with the same control he had used when faced with damn-fool orders from superior officers and offered no opinion on the Dowager. She was an imperious and tactless old bat, true enough, but she was doubtless right about what should be done with her niece.
‘And you expect to stay here?’ Miss Frost looked at the fast disappearing stern of the boat, her lips a tight line. A rhetorical question—unless she intended to refuse him hospitality. There were no other houses within sight and the nearest village was several miles away.
Doubtless Godmama Orford’s intentions were correct, but he was beginning to wonder if marrying off this prickly female suitably was going to be as easy as she thought. Miss Frost might be lovely to look at, but her tongue had been dipped in vinegar, not honey. ‘If that would not be inconvenient. I do not believe there is any other lodging nearby.’
‘You can stay in the Gentlemen’s House.’ Miss Frost turned on her heel and walked away towards the buildings without waiting to see if he would follow. ‘It is empty at this time of year,’ she tossed back over her shoulder. ‘We use it for visitors when buyers and officials come and there are none now, just after the harvest.’
Gray discovered that he was more amused than annoyed as he followed her. The performance was impressive, the rear view enticing and he found himself in some sympathy with anyone who consigned his godmother’s missives to the flames. On the other hand, this was clearly not the life a single young woman of aristocratic family should be living.
A stocky, swarthy man in baggy breeches with a red sash around his substantial midriff hurried out of the house towards them. ‘Senhora Gabrielle?’
‘This gentleman is the Earl of Leybourne, Baltasar,’ she said in English. ‘He will spend tonight in the Casa dos Cavalheiros and take dinner with me. Please send one of the men over to make sure he has everything he needs until then. He will require the carriage in the morning to take him back to Porto.’
‘Thank you.’ Gray arrived at her side and deposited the bags in a heap on the front step. ‘However, I fear our business will take rather longer than one night, Miss Frost.’
‘Our business?’ Her eyebrows rose. Gray found himself admiring the curve of them, the length of her lashes as she gave him a very direct look. He could admire the entire effect, to be honest with himself. She had all the charm of an irritated hornet, true, but that temper brought rosy colour to her slightly olive complexion. The Frosts had married into the local gentry at some time in the past; that was clear. Then he reminded himself that he had to extract her from this place and endure the hornet stings all the way back to England, and her allure faded.
‘I can assure you I have not returned to Portugal on my own account, Miss Frost.’ He kept his voice pleasant, which appeared to make her more annoyed.
‘You mean you travelled all this way simply as the messenger boy for my dear aunt? I had no idea that earls were so easily imposed upon. I cannot believe it will take me very long to say no to whatever it is she wants, but, please, make yourself at home, Lord Leybourne.’ She made a sweeping gesture at the grounds. ‘And stay for a week if that is what it takes to convince her that I want nothing whatsoever to do with her.’
* * *
Gaby watched the earl follow Baltasar along the winding path to the little lodge where they accommodated wine buyers, shippers and gentlemen calling to view the quinta. As an unmarried lady it was sensible to keep male house guests separate for the good of her reputation, although Gabrielle Frost of Quinta do Falcão was regarded almost as an honorary man in the neighbourhood, at least in her business dealings.
This man was definitely best kept at a distance. She had never encountered her aunt’s godson that she was aware of, but then she had not been in England since she was seventeen. The war had seen to that. She turned away with a mutter of irritation when she realised she had watched him out of sight. The man was quite self-confident enough without having confirmation that his tall figure drew the female eye. He had been an officer, she recalled. That reference to returning must mean he’d been in Portugal during the war and he still moved like a soldier—upright, alert, fit. Dangerous in more ways than one. She should be on her guard.
The earl was probably well aware already that women looked at him, she thought, as she pushed open the kitchen door. He looked right back at them: she hadn’t missed the leisurely assessment he had given her on the dock.
Maria—the cook and Baltasar’s wife—looked up from the intricate pastry work she was creating at the kitchen table. ‘Maria, temos um convidado.’ She almost smiled at the word. Convidado sounded too much like convivial to translate guest in this particular case. ‘An English earl, a connection of my family. Baltasar is taking him to the Gentlemen’s House. Send over refreshments, please. He will join me for dinner.’
‘Sim, senhora.’ Maria gave a final flourish of the glaze brush over the pastry. She looked pleased, but then she enjoyed showing off her skills and Gabrielle, although appreciative, could only eat so much. As for Jane Moseley, her companion, she was a fussy eater who still, after almost ten years in Portugal, yearned for good plain English cooking.
Alfonso and Danilo were talking loudly in the scullery. From the sounds of splashing and clanking, they had been sent to fetch hot water for the earl’s bath.
Everything was under control, as was to be expected. The household ran like clockwork with rarely change or challenge to distract her from growing grapes and making and selling port. The goodwill of the staff and the calm efficiency of Miss Moseley saw to that.
Which left Gaby free to get on with managing the quinta and the business of creating fine wine. And that was what she should be doing now—keeping the record books up to date in the precious lull after the hectic and exhausting harvest time and before the routines of the autumn and winter work. She let herself into her office and sat down at the desk, which had, of course, a good view of the Gentlemen’s House to distract her.
She flipped open the inkwell, dipped her pen and continued with her notes about the terrace on the southern bank that needed clearing and replanting. Her father had once told her that in England there was a saying—you plant walnuts and pears for your heirs. It was not quite that bad with vines, but it would be many years before she saw a good return from the new planting, so best to get on with it at once.
She knew what Aunt Henrietta would ask about that: What was the good of maintaining and improving the quinta for posterity when Gaby had no one to leave it to? She asked herself the same question often enough, and the answer was that, eventually, she would find someone she thought worthy of it, even though she was the last of the Frosts.
Four dozen grafted rootstocks...
She stopped in the middle of a sentence and nibbled the end of the quill meditatively. But that was why Leybourne was here, of course. He had come to nag her into returning to England, leaving the quinta and surrendering to her aunt’s marriage plans. How her aunt had managed to persuade him to make the journey was a mystery, unless he had simply fled the country to escape her persistence, which was cowardly but understandable. Perhaps he was nostalgic for his war years in the Peninsula—she had caught his good Portuguese when he was talking to the boatmen and he had understood her first question.
Where were you in October five years ago, my lord? she wondered. Behind the lines of Torres Vedras, protecting Lisbon with Viscount Wellington, as Wellesley had just become, or skirmishing around as a riding officer seeking out intelligence on the advancing French? Perhaps he had been a friend of Major Andrew Norwood. No, best not to think of him, the shocking sounds that fists meeting flesh made, the lethal whisper of a knife blade through the twilight.
The violence that is in men’s hearts...
Gaby bent her head over her ledgers. There was work to be done, a winery did not run itself. She could not allow herself to think about Norwood or the nightmares would begin again. He was gone, dead, and she was not going to allow him to haunt her.
* * *
The clock in the hall struck six as she finished her notes and lists. She put down her pen, blotted the ledger, assembled the papers and allowed herself to look out of the window at last. And there her uninvited guest was, strolling bareheaded through the cherry orchard as though he was surveying his own acres. He was heading directly for the burial plot.
She was probably overreacting, Gaby told herself as she ran down the stairs and out through the front door. There was no reason why he should not look around the grounds—they had been laid out as a pleasure garden, after all, and she was proud of them. It was perfectly natural that he should visit the burial enclosure and pay his respects, if he was so inclined. As for what he might find there... Well, that was not his business. He was a messenger passing through and would soon be gone. What he thought of her was not of the slightest importance.
She found him standing at the foot of her parents’ graves, head slightly bowed, apparently deep in thought. She stood on just that spot almost every day, collecting her thoughts, asking questions, wrestling with difficult issues. She did not expect an answer from beyond, of course, but simply thinking about how her parents would handle any problem often gave her own ideas direction and validation. Her father had never given her firm instructions about the business, he taught by example and encouraged innovation. The only hard line either parent had laid down was, ‘Follow your conscience, always. If you are uneasy in your mind, then listen and do the right thing.’ It was a rule she attempted to live by.
‘December 1807,’ the earl said, looking up as she reached the headstone and faced him. ‘The month the French took Porto for the first time.’
‘Yes. There was an epidemic of the influenza, just to add to the general horror. I think the anxiety and stress of the invasion made my parents particularly vulnerable to the infection.’ She could say it unemotionally now. Sometimes it even seemed like a dream, or a story she had read in a book, that time when she found herself orphaned with a fourteen-year-old brother and a quinta to, somehow, protect against the armies fighting to control a country in turmoil. She missed them all every day. The pain had become easier to live with, the sense of loss never seemed to diminish.
‘And this is your brother.’ Leybourne had moved on to the next headstone, reminding her just what a bad job she had done of protecting Thomas. He crouched down to read the inscription. ‘September 1810. We were behind the lines of Torres Vedras, holding Lisbon by then. I remember those months.’ Not with any pleasure, from the tone of his voice.
‘The French killed Thomas. Not disease.’ The French and treachery.
‘Hell, I’m sorry.’ He had bent down to read the inscription, but he looked up sharply at her words, then back to the stone. He reached out one long finger to trace the dates of birth and death. ‘I had not realised he had been so young, only seventeen. What happened? Were they scavenging around here?’
‘Only just seventeen.’
Old enough to be thinking about girls and so shy that he had no idea how to talk with them, let alone anything else. Old enough to be shaving off fluff and young enough to be proud of the fact. Young enough to still kiss his big sister without reserve when he came home and old enough to resent her worrying...
‘He was with the guerrilheiros. Not all the time, only when your Major Norwood thought to...use him.’ Exploit him.
Leybourne’s head came up again at the tone of her voice. ‘Andrew Norwood, the riding officer?’
‘The spy, yes. He was happy to find an enthusiastic, idealistic lad who knew his way around the hills here.’ An inexperienced boy. One who might well get himself killed—and then how useful that would be for Major Norwood, she had realised far too late. Gaby kept her voice studiedly neutral. Norwood might well have been a friend of the earl when he had been an officer here. He might be the kind of man Norwood had been.
‘Could you not stop him?’ Leybourne stood up. ‘I’m sorry, no, of course you could not if he was bent on fighting the French, not without chaining him up. We had boys younger than that lying about their age to enlist.’
‘If I had thought chaining him would work I would have tried it, believe me,’ she said, heartsick all over again at the remembered struggle, the arguments, the rows.
We are English and Portugal is our home, Thomas had thrown at her. The French are our enemy and the enemy of Portugal. It is our duty to fight them.
‘I told him that we had a duty to try and keep the quinta going, to give work and shelter to our people, to have something to offer the economy when the fighting was over so the country could be rebuilt,’ she said now. ‘The French would go soon enough, I argued.’
While we skulk here, nothing but farmers and merchants. We are descended from earls, her brother had retorted, impassioned and idealistic. We Frosts fight.
Gaby came back to herself, furious to find her vision blurred. She blinked hard. ‘I was so proud of him and so frightened for him. He was a boy who had the heart of a man and he was betrayed in the end.’
‘By whom? Someone within the guerrilheiros? It was the same with the Spanish guerrillas, a few had been turned by the French for money or because their families were threatened.’ The earl had his hand on the headstone, the strong fingers curled around the top as though he would protect it.
‘No. But it doesn’t matter now. The person responsible is dead.’ Her voice was steady again and she had her voice and her emotions under control. She resisted the impulse to glance at the riverbank where two men had gone over, fighting to the death, into the rushing water. There was a wood stack there now, although no traces had been left to hide.
How had this man manged to lure her into revealing so much? So much emotion? Gaby found a smile and turned to lead him out of the plot, past the graves of her grandparents Thomas and Elizabeth and her great-grandparents Rufus and Maria Frost, who had first owned the quinta. Weathered now, that first stone bore the family crest the quinta was named for, a falcon grasping a vine branch, faint but defiant on the old stone.
‘Lord Leybourne, if you come this way I will show you the rose garden.’ The roses were virtually over, but it would serve to move him on to ground that held less power over her.
Or not, it seemed. ‘Call me Gray, everyone does,’ he said. The infuriating man was walking away from her towards the southern corner of the plot, not the gate. ‘What is this?’ He had stopped at the simple white slab that was tilted to face the rising sun.
L.M., he read. He glanced up, frowning at her as she came closer, then went back to the inscription. March 25, 1811. Remember. ‘That is the date of the battle of Campo Maior. Who is this stone for?’
She smiled at him, amused, despite her feelings, by the way he frowned at her. It was clear that he resented not being in total command of the facts of any situation. The impulse to shock him was too strong to resist.
‘My lover.’
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