by Mary Balogh
Yet he had to admit to himself that he had been selfish. He had not been able to bear the thought of a long, drawn-out good-bye and so had thought of a way of cutting it short. He had assumed that she too would be relieved once it was over. And yet it seemed that she needed a more definite end to their relationship.
And so he was angry partly at himself. He should have given her her ending when they were still together. He should have allowed her to go to Arruda with him and leave after a night of private good-byes. He should have put himself through that agony in order to satisfy her that their affair had reached its term. It would all have been over now, and he could hardly have suffered more than he had anyway.
But now it was all to go through again. And he was angry, partly with her, partly with himself.
“You look as grim as you looked on the morning of the Battle of Bussaco,” she said, smiling up at him.
“Do I?” He looked straight ahead. “Strange. I feel grimmer.”
“Oh, dear,” she said, “this does not bode well. We had better get out of this hallway, Robert. It is too public.”
“Is it?” he said. “The ballroom was too public, so we must move here. Now this is too public. What next, Joana? Do you have a cozy bedchamber handy? Is that the sort of good-bye you want?”
“Let us find a private room first,” she said, “and then I shall tell you what kind of good-bye I want.” She tried a door in the hallway, but it was locked.
The third door was not locked. It opened onto a darkened room that looked like a workroom. There was a large desk in the middle of it, and several upright chairs. He picked up a branch of candles from a table outside the door and set it on the mantelpiece while Joana closed the door. He turned to face her.
“Well?” he said.
She leaned back against the door and smiled. “It could not be like that, Robert,” she said. “There was so much I needed to tell you, so much I wanted to hear. I needed your arms about me so that I would have the courage to leave.”
And I wanted it over with, he wanted to tell her. I could not bear to prolong the agony. But he did not say the words aloud. Really both of them would have been meaning the same thing. They just had different ways of coping with pain. And yet, though he understood and even sympathized, he could not get rid of his anger.
“Say it, then,” he said curtly. “And I shall tell you that I love you and that leaving you hurts like hell. And then I shall hug you and kiss you and it can be over with at last. Come on, Joana, speak your piece and then come here.”
She continued to lean back against the door as she looked at him. “I have been selfish, haven’t I?” she said. “You do not want this at all. But I gave you time in the ballroom, Robert. I took forever promenading about the room with Duncan. I wanted you to have plenty of time to escape if you wished. But you stayed. You must have seen me coming.”
He watched her silently. And it was true. He could have left. He had wanted to leave, had been on the verge of doing so. But his legs had not been willing to obey his will.
“Yes,” he said, “I saw you coming.”
“And stayed,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Robert,” she said, and she paused for so long that he thought she had changed her mind about continuing. “I am a widow and you are unmarried.”
“No, Joana,” he said.
She smiled.
“I always knew there were certain things beyond my grasp,” he said. “At least I knew soon after my mother’s death. There are certain things, certain people, a certain way of life that the bastard son of a marquess cannot aspire to. And I accepted that. I have built my adult life around the knowledge. And I have been happy.”
“But you are not happy now,” she said.
“Because for a while I forgot,” he said, “or at least ignored the knowledge. And you, Joana. There is a certain life that you have been born to and raised to, a certain life that you married into and have lived since being widowed.”
“Except when I escape into the hills as Duarte’s sister,” she said.
“But those days are over,” he said. “You have no further reason to be Joana Ribeiro.”
She smiled at him again. “Except perhaps for a little fun,” she said.
“There is no bridge long enough to connect our lives, Joana,” he said. “Not permanently. Neither of us would be happy in the other’s world once the first gloss had worn off our passion for each other.”
She was looking at the floor in front of her, apparently deep in thought.
“Am I not right?” he asked after a lengthy silence.
She looked up at him and there was an imp of a smile lurking at the back of her serious expression. “You must be,” she said. “You are a man. Men are always right.”
“Well, then,” he said.
“Well, then.” She took a few steps toward him and stopped again. “I suppose there is nothing left, Robert, except that hug and kiss. It is rather a shame that this is not a bedchamber, isn’t it? But I don’t think I would fancy making love on the top of that desk, and there has always seemed something a little sordid about making love on the floor, though why that should be, I don’t know, when we have made love many times on the ground outdoors. We have had some good times.”
“Yes.” He had expected her to be in tears. But when she came toward him and set her hands flat against his chest and raised her face for his kiss, it was glowing. She had the look in her eyes that experience had taught him to be wary of, the look that spelled trouble—for him. But it was merely her way of protecting herself from an emotional scene.
“This is good-bye, then,” she said.
“Yes.” He framed her face with his hands and moved his thumbs gently over her cheeks and lips. His anger had evaporated, leaving in its place a tightness in his chest, an ache in his throat and up behind his nose. “This is good-bye. I love you.” And her face blurred before his vision.
“Oh, Robert.” She threw her arms up about his neck and drew his cheek down to rest against hers. “You idiot and imbecile and fool. Men are such foolish creatures. Don’t cry. I am not worth tears, am I? I have been nothing but trouble to you. You will live a far more peaceful existence without me.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Well, then.” Her fingers were ruffling his short hair. “You will be well rid of me.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to agree with everything I say, you know,” she said. “Kiss me, Robert. Let us do this thing right.”
“Yes.” He did not realize how much he was trembling until he tried to find her mouth with his. His eyes were tightly closed, the hot tears finding their way past the lids anyway.
She held his head and kissed him and he groaned and wrapped her in his arms and folded her against him, tried to fold her into himself. It was a desperate kiss, one that brought no joy at all.
“Christ!” he said long moments later. “Let this be enough. Leave, Joana, or let me leave.” He swallowed convulsively. “Just tell me once more.”
“That I love you?” she said. “I love you, and will until I am eighty and you are eighty-two. No, amend that. I plan to live a long time and you seem to have a gift for dodging bullets. Make it ninety and ninety-two. A hundred and a hundred and two.”
“Go!” he said harshly. “Goddammit, woman, get out of here. I can’t leave looking like this. Get out of here.”
She touched his face with soft fingertips. “Men are so foolish,” she said. “And I love this most foolish man of all more than I can find words to express. I love you, Robert.”
And she was gone.
He had always found the notion of a broken heart rather amusing. But he was not amused as he crossed the distance to the desk and leaned both hands on it, bending forward with closed eyes. Not the slightest bit amused.
* * *
There were several things to be done, an irksome fact for someone who liked to act on impulse. But this was not an impulsive move, though the realization and its consequences had come upon her like a flash of lightning. And because it was not impulsive, then everything had to be done just so.
There were letters to write, several of them, in particular one to Matilda with an amount of money enclosed equivalent to two years’ salary. And there were clothes to obtain. Her Portuguese marquesa’s garments were totally unsuitable, but she was not displeased, she thought, looking at them—a row of unrelieved white—in the wardrobe, to have to abandon them forever. And Joana Ribeiro’s dress would no longer do. It was past looking even shabby. Indeed the housekeeper had looked dubious when offered it to use for cleaning rags. Besides, there was only one of it. A woman needed more than one dress.
The problem was not a particularly difficult one to solve. The friend at whose house she was living was only slightly larger than she was, and Sophia always wore pretty, serviceable clothes. Joana chose a number of them and began to take in seams and shorten hems. She had not been handy with a needle for a number of years, and soon enlisted the aid of a skilled servant. In the meanwhile, she wrote to Sophia and enclosed what seemed generous payment for the clothes.
And there was Duncan to talk with. She summoned him the day after the ball and told him of her decision almost before he had got himself quite through the door. She did not wish to raise any false hopes in him.
“I am sorry, Duncan,” she told him. “I cannot marry you. I would not be able to make you happy because I would not be happy with the sort of life I would be living.”
“But, Joana,” he said, “I thought you said that you had always dreamed of an English husband and a home in England.”
“Yes,” she said, “I did, and I have had those dreams—for as long as I can remember. Sometimes we can be very blind, can’t we? I would not be happy with such a life, or at least not with just that.”
And it was true. Of course it was true. She had known it in a flash at the ball when Robert had uttered his foolish words. Except that to him they were not foolish and to her they would not have seemed so if there had not been that flash of insight.
Neither of us would be happy in the other’s world once the first gloss had worn off our passion for each other.
She could hear the words as clearly as when he had been speaking them. Words that at first she had taken for granted were true. Certainly he would never be happy in her world. He was uncomfortable to the point of misery when he merely had to attend some social function. And she would never be happy in his. She was the daughter of a French count and the widow of a Portuguese marquess. She had always lived a life of wealth and privilege. She was a lady.
And then had come the flash of insight. Was she happy? Had she ever been happy? She found her normal day-to-day life tedious in the extreme, and useless and meaningless. There was nothing to add challenge and excitement to her life beyond flirting. And she did not really enjoy that. Life on a quiet English country estate? With Duncan’s mother and sisters until he came home? She would go insane!
Had she never been happy, then? Oh, yes, she had. She had known happiness. It had come whenever she had put off the Marquesa das Minas and lived with Duarte and his band of Ordenanza for a while. And it had come and lasted during those weeks with Robert between Salamanca and Bussaco. Incredible, total happiness—not only because she had been with him but also because she had been free of the trappings of her own world, free to meet the dangers and the challenges and the wonders of life in another world.
And was she to give up that life in order to live the one she had been born into? Was she to give up Robert for Duncan? The idea was absurd. Totally mad.
She had realized it as soon as he had spoken. And she had almost told him her thoughts right there. She was almost always impulsive. It was not her way to think first before acting. But she had done it on that occasion nonetheless. It was too big a decision in her life to be made impulsively. What if she had found afterward, on more careful consideration, that it was just her reluctance to say good-bye to him that had prompted her thoughts? She had known that she had to give herself time to know beyond any doubt that only one kind of life could bring her happiness.
And now she really was about to do it. She had not been mistaken. The man she loved lived in the only world that could challenge her and ultimately make her happy. There was only one sensible thing to do.
So for once in her life, Joana thought with a smile, she was going to do the sensible thing.
* * *
He had been billeted in a small house in Arruda, one that he had shared with Captain Davies for a short while until that gentleman had had to leave for Lisbon to have a festering wound sustained at Bussaco attended to. Now he was there alone—very much alone since the house had been abandoned by its tenants, who did not quite believe that the French army would be held back.
But it did not bother him to be alone. In fact he welcomed the opportunity of a place to which he could retire and be away from everyone. It was a luxury not often attained in the army. And he needed to be alone for certain stretches of time, until he had learned to cope with his emotions and not take out his own unhappiness on men who were at the mercy of his moods.
One of the women from the train of the army, the widow of a private soldier killed earlier in the year who bad not yet remarried, came in the evenings to cook for him. She had indicated a few times, without the medium of words, that she would be willing to stay to offer other services too, but he had always sent her away as soon as he sat down to his meal. She was a good cook but he did not need her in any other capacity.
He was tired. Sometimes drilling his men and watching them as they did their part to keep careful guard over the Lines was as taxing on the time and energy as moving into battle was. It had been a long day, and there had seemed to be no time at all for relaxation. It was good to be home. And yet his nose wrinkled in some distaste as he lowered his head to pass through the low doorway into the house. Mrs. Reilly had burned his dinner?
He walked through the small living room to stand in the archway that led through to the kitchen. And he came to a stop there, feet apart, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked quietly.
“Burning your food,” she said, throwing him a glance over her shoulder to reveal a flushed, bright face. Her hair was tied back loosely at the neck. She was wearing a neat and serviceable green dress. “I put only one more stick of wood on the stove, but now it is burning like a furnace in hell. And what sort of a welcome home was that?”
He strode across to the stove, lifted the pot with its offensive mess of burned stew, and set it down away from the heat. He took her by the upper arm and swung her to face him.
“What the hell are you doing here, Joana?” he asked again. He was feeling furious enough to commit murder.
“Apart from burning your dinner?” she asked, raising her hands to play with one button on his coat. “I came here to marry you, Robert.”
“I don’t remember asking you,” he said roughly. “I shall find someone to escort you to Lisbon. And then you will stay the hell out of my life.”
“How lovely,” she said, smiling. “I love you too, Robert. That is why I have come to marry you. Though if you do not wish to marry me, it does not matter. I shall just live in sin with you as I did before.”
“Joana,” he said, “we have talked about this before. You know it is madness.”
“And you know that I am mad,” she said. “If you will not allow me either to marry you or to live in sin with you, then I shall attach myself to the camp followers and become a cook or a laundrywoman. And when you find out how poorly I cook—have you already guessed it?—and how poorly I wash clothes, you will put me in your bed, where I can do less harm.” She smiled up at
him from beneath her lashes.
“When did you get this mad idea?” he asked. Despite himself he could feel his fury ebbing away and a desperate longing taking its place. And a certain suspicion that he was wasting his time arguing with her.
“At Lord Wellington’s ball,” she said. “You said that neither of us could be happy in the other’s world, and of course it was the sensible thing to say and ought to be true. But it was not true, for all that, and I realized it there. But I wanted to be quite sure. I did not want to rationalize merely because I did not want to part from you. I have never been happy in the world I am supposed to be happy in, Robert. You cannot know how tedious my life has been, how empty and meaningless. How stupid. And what a dreadful waste of my life it would be to spend the rest of it in that world.”
“And yet you have everything you could possibly want,” he said.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Only material things and a stupid title, Robert. Of what value are they? I want freedom and challenge and excitement—and even a little danger now and then. Those things I can never find in my own world, where I might as well be wrapped tightly and safely in cotton wool. Sometimes I think I should have been a man, but not always, for I like being a woman. I would hate to be a man and not be able to love you without creating the most dreadful scandal. But there must be something to make life meaningful for women too, otherwise life is even more unfair than I have always thought it. I can find meaning with you in the world I have lived in with you.”
“Joana,” he said. “You have no idea . . .”
“Don’t I?” She leaned forward until her breasts touched his coat, and looked up into his face. “Don’t I, Robert? I think I do. I have never been more happy than I was after we left Salamanca—until we reached Torres Vedras. I was so very happy being with you, not just because we were lovers, but because . . . oh, because at last life was alive.”
“And lived on the verge of death,” he said. “Either one of us could have died at any time, Joana. Did you not realize what danger we were in? And how could I let you stay with me now and share my life? I am a soldier. A soldier’s business is to fight—with real weapons. I could be killed at any moment.”
