“Certainly not! You require every man. I have ridden about the country without an escort for months. Shall I ride to General Morecambe’s encampment and tell him you require reinforcements?”
“No! You are to find a safe place, and wait there until I come for you.”
“Madre de Dios!” Carmen pulled her leather jacket out of her trunk and thrust her arms into the sleeves, glaring at him all the while. “I will not hide! I cannot play the coward now. I will ride for reinforcements.”
“Carmen! Be sensible!”
“You be sensible, Peter! I have been doing this sort of thing for a long time.”
“But you were not my wife then!” he shouted.
“Ah. So that is it.” Carmen left off loading her pistol to go to him, and framed his handsome, beloved face in her hands. “I cannot give up what I am doing to become a fine, frail, sheltered lady again, simply because I am now your wife. No more than you can stay safely here in camp because you are now my husband.”
He turned his head to kiss her palm. “No. Even though I wish it so, you are quite right.”
“We shall have many, many years to sit calmly by the fire, querido.”
He smiled against her skin. “And will you long for your grand adventures, Carmen, when you are chasing babies about Clifton Manor?”
“Never!”
Peter caught her against him and kissed her mouth, hard, desperate. “I will see you at supper, then, Lady Clifton.”
“Yes.” Carmen clung to him for an instant, an eternal moment, then stepped away. “Promise me you will fight very, very carefully today, Peter.”
“Of course, my love.” He grinned at her, the white, crooked grin that had won her heart. “I never fight any other way.”
Then he was gone.
The men had been gone for almost a half hour when Carmen rode out for the hills, set on her task.
She did not even see the glint of the sun on the rifle barrel as it aimed through the trees. She heard nothing, until the bullet shot from the barrel and landed in her shoulder.
The force of the shot knocked her from her horse, and she lay there in the dust, too stunned to feel pain.
She reached her fingers slowly to touch her shoulder. They came away a bright, sticky red.
“Is this it, then?” she whispered. “Madre de Dios, how can I die now?”
Her vision was very blurred when a face swam into view. A broad, sun-burned face, with drooping mustaches and deceptively merry blue eyes. A face she recognized from balls and receptions in Seville, where she danced with French officers and sometimes ferreted secrets from them.
“Well, well, señora!” he said. “Or should I say, Madame la Condesa? You must allow me to offer my best wishes on your nuptials.”
“Chauvin,” she whispered.
“Ah, so you are conscious? Très bein! You have been plaguing my regiment for weeks, you and your friends the so-called partisans. Now it is my turn, Madame la Condesa. There are some small questions I would like to ask you.”
“I won’t ... tell you anything,” she managed to croak through her parched throat.
“Au contraire, ma belle chère. I think you will. But back at my lodgings, where we can speak—comfortably. After I have a glimpse of the little battle that is taking shape. Perhaps we will even see your new husband there!”
Major Chauvin slid his arms none too gently beneath Carmen and pulled her to her feet.
Not surprisingly, she fainted quite away.
“Nicholas!” Peter shouted out, unheard over the infernal din of battle, as he watched his friend fall beneath a rifle shot, facedown in the mud and muck.
He fought his way to him, slashing out like a mad-man at any who dared get in his way. When he at last reached Nicholas, Peter hoisted him onto his shoulder and dragged him out of the very thick of the fighting.
“Hot fighting today, eh, Peter?” Nicholas gasped, choking blood onto the sleeve of Peter’s already ruined uniform.
“For God’s sake, man, don’t talk!”
“Am I ... done for?”
“Not if I can help it.” Peter squinted through the smoke and dust. “Where is the damned field hospital?”
“North of here.” Robert Means had appeared beside them, his red hair quite black with gunpowder and mud. “Is he badly off?”
“Bad enough.” Peter looked down at Nicholas, who was now slumped in a stupor. “But he can live if I get him to a surgeon soon.”
“I’ll help you.” Robert slipped Nicholas’s other arm over his shoulder, and looked about to take their direction. “Bloody hell!”
“What now?”
“Look!”
Peter followed the line of Robert’s pointing finger, and saw Major Francois Chauvin, the French leader they had been parrying with and retreating from for months. He was mounted, and his horse was climbing swiftly into the hills above the heat of the fighting. Perched before him, cradled in his arms, lover-like, was a woman.
Even from this distance, Peter could recognize the banner of black satin hair. The hair that had been spread across his pillows only that morning.
It was Carmen in the Frenchman’s arms, Peter’s one-day wife.
“Ah, ma chère. How very thirsty you look, how very much in pain,” Chauvin cooed. He poured himself a glass of water from an earthenware pitcher and sipped at it, his cool, hawk-like eyes never leaving Carmen. “It would be so very much easier on you and me if you would simply tell me what I must know. Then I could summon the physician, who could give you laudanum. Please, ma belle, let me help you.”
Carmen, slumped in a straight-backed wooden chair, was almost unconscious from the burning, sticky pain that shot from her shoulder down her entire body. She tasted blood from where Chauvin had struck her repeatedly across the face. She ached for water.
Still, she shook her head.
Chauvin clicked his tongue chidingly. “I was so very afraid you would do that. You Spanish are so very stubborn.” He reached for her hand, cradling it on his soft, repulsively moist palm.
One of his fingers trailed over her ring, the emerald Peter had placed there only the night before.
The night before? It seemed a lifetime, an eternity ago.
“Ah,” said Chauvin, his hand tightening on hers until she heard the bones grind. “It is the English major who is causing these silly scruples, is it not?”
Carmen just stared at him.
“Yes. Well, ma chère, there is no need. The English, he is surely dead by now, and if he is not, he will soon hear of his bride’s dreadful perfidy. The jealous one will take care of that for me.” He slid the ring onto his own smallest finger. “You will not be needing this anymore, ma belle. Madame Chauvin in Paris will be amused by it when I send it to her.”
The pain, the gnawing pain, of her wound grew faint as she looked at her wedding ring, Peter’s mother’s ring, on the fat finger of that French pig. Instead, a rage flared in her heart unlike any she had ever known. Now strength flowed through her, fueled by this white-hot anger. She sat up straighter, her arm cradled against her abdomen.
Then Chauvin made his great mistake.
He half turned away from her to pour another glass of water. His gaze was cast down to the pitcher.
And his sidearm was toward her.
Without thought, Carmen lunged forward and seized the pistol. In one quick, smooth movement, she pulled it up out of the holster, cocked it, and fired it into his heart.
Chauvin fell at her feet, only able to gasp once, his eyes sightless even as they found her pale face, the gun in her hand.
Then he was dead.
She stared down at him for one endless instant, at the blood trickling from his mouth, seeping from his wound. She knelt beside him carefully, and yanked her ring off his finger.
Only when it was safely back where Peter had placed it did all the pain and the fear rush back onto her. She fell back heavily against the chair leg, gasping for breath.
Chauvin was dead, but
her troubles were only beginning. Surely someone else in the French encampment had heard the shot; any moment now they would burst through the door, and she would be dead.
Never to see Peter, or hear his voice, or feel his kisses on her skin again.
Still clutching the pistol, Carmen hauled herself to her feet and made her way across the room to the single, high window. It was large enough for her to fit through, if she could only pull herself up to it.
Her shirt was soaked through with sweat and blood by the time she managed to drag a chair beneath the window, climb up on it, and pull herself through the casement. She collapsed from the intense pain when she hit the hard-packed ground, but soon revived.
And began to make her slow, painful way down the hill ...
A month after the battle, Peter was set to becoming very foxed indeed.
But not quite foxed enough yet. He still saw Carmen in his mind, beautiful and radiant at their wedding; leaning limp against the shoulder of that French pig Chauvin.
He still heard the voice of the Spanish partisan, telling him what he had heard of Carmen’s death.
Peter reached for the half-empty bottle of cheap, raw whiskey and, ignoring the rather dingy glass, poured a measure of it straight from the bottle down his throat.
He threw back his head and closed his eyes against the sharp sting of the alcohol. It seemed to him, in his hazy state, that perhaps when he opened his eyes she would be there, sitting across from him, her booted feet propped on the scarred table. Laughing at him, for believing she, the most alive person he had ever seen, could be dead.
But when he opened them, there was only the dank taverna, crowded with English soldiers waiting for their passage home, rough Spanish sailors, and dark tavern maids in low-cut blouses.
A few of them had already expressed interest in Peter, but he had rebuffed them. There could be solace in the sex act, of course, but now he preferred to find it in a bottle. None of these women had Carmen’s elegance, the sharp intelligence that lit her dark eyes, the fine grain of her skin.
None of them were Carmen.
He took another pull on the whiskey bottle, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. When he looked up, he saw Robert Means, his arm in a sling, standing in the doorway, looking about the crowded room.
Peter feared he knew what Robert was looking for, and he was right. When Robert’s eyes lit on Peter’s corner table, he nodded and crossed the room. It took him quite a while, as he had to thread his way through the packed masses of people. Peter debated fleeing while he had the chance, ducking out of the back door; he had no desire to see or speak to anyone.
But he feared his reflexes were too dulled by the whiskey, and he could only sit and watch as Robert reached his table and sat down in the chair across from him. The chair where Peter had imagined Carmen sitting.
“You were meant to be aboard ship an hour ago. We sail at dawn,” said Robert. “I said that I would find you before then and bring you back.”
Peter shrugged. “Why don’t you just sail without me?”
“Are you saying you do not want to return to England?” Robert’s tone was deeply shocked. “You wish to stay here?”
“Why not? Here is good. Here is fine. Better than England, anyway. I can’t face them there, their pitying glances and their curious questions.”
“What would I tell Lady Elizabeth? That I abandoned you in some dockside taverna?”
“Tell my sister any damn thing you want. She’s better off without me, in this sorry condition.” He took another long drink from the bottle, and held it out to Robert. “D’you want some?”
Robert shook his head, but he took the bottle out of Peter’s hand and examined it. “Did you drink all of this yourself?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, Peter. I have never known you to lose control in such a manner,” Robert placed the bottle at the edge of the table, away from the reach of Peter’s grasp. “She is not worth it.”
“What? My wife is dead, and it is not worth my becoming disguised?”
“You saw her, Peter! With Chauvin.”
Peter shrugged. “What does that signify? It could have been any number of things. Chauvin could have raided our camp ...”
Robert shook his head and looked away. A faint blush stained the sun-weathered skin of his cheeks. “Oh, my friend.”
“What are you shaking your head dolefully about?”
“I did not want to tell you this, not with all that has happened.” Robert’s voice was low and mournful. “A friend would not add to your grief so.”
A cold pit of ice formed low in Peter’s stomach; an ice that not even cheap whiskey could melt. “What do you mean, Robert? I could scarce be any lower than I am now. So tell me whatever it is. You are plainly longing to unburden yourself.”
Robert nervously licked his lower lip; his hands folded and unfolded on the table. “I did hear, when I was in Seville, that—that ...”
Peter had never been a patient man. In his cups, he was even less so. He slapped the flat of his hand against the table. “By damn, Robert, say it this instant or shut up!”
Robert looked directly at Peter then, his eyes wide, sad, and guileless. “I heard in Seville that Carmen and Chauvin had been—lovers.”
The ice spread at those words, touching Peter’s heart. When he was able to speak, the words came out thick and strangled. “What nonsense! I am sure that she gave the impression of flirtatiousness with him at the balls there. That was part of her work. But she would never have shared his bed.”
Robert’s gaze dropped. “I fear she shared more than his bed.”
“What do you mean?”
“She shared secrets. Our secrets, English secrets. That is why Chauvin knew of our troop movements at Alvaro.”
Without warning, a fire flickered through Peter, melting the numbness of the ice and leaving a blinding fury. Peter lunged across the table and caught Robert by the front of his coat, half pulling him from the chair. “By God, man, if you are lying to me ...”
Robert shook his head fiercely. “I vow to you, Peter, on my mother’s life, I am not lying! I heard it from Carmen’s best friend, Elena Granjero. She has known Carmen since she was a child. She vowed to me that this was the truth, that she could no longer conceal it now that—that Carmen is gone. Carmen was a French spy!”
Peter slowly released Robert and fell back into his chair. Then, all at once, the grief, the whiskey, the betrayal were all far too much for him. He buried his face in his hands and wept.
It was a pale, thin wraith of a man who stepped from the ship at Dover. His uniform sagged off his shoulders, and his overlong golden hair flopped across his brow and over his collar.
His sister Elizabeth, though, did not hesitate for a moment. She raced along the dock, her blue cloak flying behind her, and flung her arms around his neck.
“Peter!” she sobbed, her tears wet against his neck. “Oh, Peter, I feared I would never see you again! It has been so very long, and you have not written me in ages.”
“So very long.” Peter held her to him very tightly, his cheek against the dark swirls of her hair. Then he set her gently aside. “Oh, don’t fuss so, Lizzie! I am here now, am I not? Whatever passed before is of little moment.”
He turned away from her, and walked away to where their carriage waited, the Everdean crest gleaming gilt-edged in the sunlight. He climbed inside without a backward glance.
Elizabeth turned her bewildered gaze to Peter’s companion. Robert Means shook his head sadly, and smiled at her.
“I fear, Lady Elizabeth,” he said quietly, “that your brother has had quite a dreadful shock.”
Far away, a baby was taking her first breath, filling her tiny lungs and sending a piercing shriek out into the world.
“It is a girl, Condesa!” The midwife placed the squirming new bundle of humanity on her mother’s chest. “A beautiful girl.”
Esperanza Martinez, Carmen’s duenna since her childhood, le
aned over to peer into the baby’s face, now as wrinkled as her own. “What shall you name her, Carmencita?”
Carmen, exhausted and exultant, wrapped her arms about her new daughter’s slippery body and held her against her breast. “I shall call her Isabella. After my mother.”
Esperanza nodded. “That is a very good name.”
Carmen looked down at Isabella. She could see that her features, though rather squashed at the moment, were fine and lovely. The fingers that curled around her own were long and elegant.
Just like her father’s.
Carmen began to cry then, great, large tears that spilled from her cheeks and splashed onto the baby. “Oh!” she sobbed. “If only her papa could see her.”
Esperanza’s thin mouth twisted. “Yes. If only.”
Chapter One
England—Six years later
“Shall we see London very soon, Carmencita?”
The Condesa Carmen Pilar Maria de Santiago y Montero smiled across the carriage at her companion. Esperanza Martinez appeared distinctly green about the edges after all the miles of rough roads they had been obliged to endure. Carmen herself was completely convinced that her bruised nether regions would never be quite the same again.
“Very soon, I am sure,” she answered. “You will see the fabled golden spires of London, never fear, Esperanza!”
“Really, Mama?” Isabella de Santiago, who had been very quiet for a six-year-old on their grueling journey, looked up from her doll with a glint in her dark eyes. “Are the spires really golden?”
“No doubt, Bella. And streets paved with rubies, just like that book about England we have been reading,” Carmen said with a laugh.
Esperanza briefly lowered her handkerchief from her mouth and said, “Your mother is telling you what these English call a ‘Banbury tale,’ Isabella nina. London is no more paved with rubies than Seville or Vienna or Paris was. And it is probably a good deal dirtier.”
Carmen shrugged. “Where did you hear such a phrase as ‘Banbury tale,’ Esperanza? I vow you have been reading those Minerva Press novels again. I knew that those packages from your friend Señora Benitez in London were horrid novels!”
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