“But the politics in Spain may make it very hard for Sir Arthur to accomplish anything,” Sabrina pointed out gently. “And I’m terribly afraid that this may be our last chance to fight Bonaparte outside of England.”
“The navy will keep him off,” Robert said, more to comfort Sabrina than because he had any doubts about the success of any campaign Sir Arthur led.
“For a while.” Perce’s voice was so grim that Robert looked at him in surprise. “The whole problem is tied up with Boney’s fixed idea that he has to beat Britain and his realization in 1805 that he couldn’t build enough ships to make an invasion possible.”
“You can’t mean that he fought Austria, Prussia, and Russia to beat us,” Robert protested.
“No, of course not. I’m sure Bonaparte intended to be emperor of all Europe from the beginning, but he wanted to put us down first. Since he couldn’t do it, part of every victory has been to pick up another weapon to use against us. Every treaty he’s made includes stoppage of trade with Britain because he hopes to ruin us so completely that we can’t fight him or encourage others to fight him.”
“That’s true,” Sabrina put in. “There were a number of reasons why Tsar Alexander went to war, but one of them was the subsidy that Pitt offered to pay, a quarter of a million pounds for every hundred thousand men.”
Perce nodded agreement and continued, “Another part of Boney’s plan was to grab a ready-built navy. He didn’t dare demand too much from Russia or Austria, and Prussia doesn’t have a navy worth the name. But he insists that the small countries that can’t resist give up their navies to the French. If he had succeeded in grabbing the Danish and Portuguese fleets as well as the Dutch and Spanish, he would have had about two ships to every one of ours. I know our men and officers are better, but at two to one, he might have managed so great concentration of vessels as to pull off an invasion.”
“We would have beaten him,” Robert said.
“Yes.” Perce closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them his face was bleak. “We would have beaten him because the farmers would have fought in the fields with pitchforks and the cobblers in the streets with hammers, but what it would have cost in lives…”
They were all silent for a moment, and Sabrina shuddered, remembering Perce’s physical condition after the battle of Eylau. “That’s what must be happening in Spain now,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Robert said briskly, “and if the Spanish are that determined, surely they’ll cooperate right down the line, especially once Sir Arthur shows them he can beat the French.”
“I wish it were that simple.” Perce sighed.
Robert looked a bit rebellious, but he said nothing.
“The trouble is,” Sabrina said, “that the Spanish probably don’t realize what they’re up against. They’ve never fought the French. Remember that Boney didn’t conquer Spain. He took it by a trick. And it’s useless to say that the Spanish should understand that if Boney beat Austria and Russia—” She stopped abruptly as the door opened and a footman stepped in.
Sabrina began to order drinks and then realized it was past noon. She asked Robert if he was free and he assured her he had no duties until that evening when he was due to appear at a dinner-dance with Sir Arthur. One of the attractions of serving General Wellesley was that he was a most social person and expected the young officers of his “family” to attend functions with him and make themselves agreeable. It had been said, perhaps only half in jest, that the general chose his staff for their ability and indefatigability on the dance floor.
However, when this unkind remark came to the general’s ears—for the truth was that Sir Arthur’s staff was mostly forced upon him by “recommendations” he could not reject as Robert originally had been—he uttered his typical, loud whooping “haw, haw” laugh and said it was an excellent notion. He pointed out, smiling, that grace in dancing indicated good timing, coordination, and balance, which were also the marks of a fine horseman. Ability to deal with ladies showed courage and high spirit, and any man who had the strength to stand up to a full night’s cavorting on the dance floor would certainly be strong enough for army service.
Robert’s face had lighted as he mentioned the engagement. He loved to dance and enjoyed social functions as much as Sir Arthur, particularly when he attended as a member of the general’s staff. Such attendance could arouse no speculations in any young lady or her matchmaking mama. When he was with Sir Arthur, any attentions he bestowed must be taken as merely his duty, since the general’s opinion on the behavior of his young staff officers was already known.
Sabrina suppressed another urge to sigh over her future brother-in-law’s fitness for married life and instead merely instructed the footman to serve luncheon in the small breakfast parlor. On the way down to eat, Perce reminded Robert that since Bonaparte had beaten Prussia, Austria, and Russia, the only ports that were still officially open to British goods were those of Portugal, and he pointed out that because the French navy was still inadequate, the only way for Boney to close off Portugal was to invade by land. But that meant marching through Spain.
“I can’t imagine Boney is worried about the Spanish after wiping up the Russians,” Robert remarked as they seated themselves.
“No, but whatever else Boney is, he’s no fool. Why should he waste men fighting his way through the Pyrenees when he could trick the Spanish into welcoming him? The Spanish have always resented the fact that Portugal defeated them back in the seventeenth century and has managed to remain independent ever since. Boney got the Spanish to let in his army by promising to hand Portugal back to Spain.”
“And he didn’t. The more fools they were to think Boney would keep a promise.”
“They were worse fools than that,” Perce remarked. “I’m not going to go into the crosscurrents in the Spanish government—”
“Thank God for that,” Robert muttered.
Perce gave him a sardonic look but continued without comment, “but because they all hated each other and thought they were smarter than an ‘upstart Corsican’, the king—although you can’t blame him, poor thing, he’s nearly an idiot—the queen, her chief minister—who’s probably her lover—and the crown prince all walked right into a trap Bonaparte laid and were forced to abdicate. Then Boney thought the way was clear to establish another puppet throne with his brother Joseph on it.”
“It wasn’t unreasonable,” Sabrina commented. “It had worked in Holland and Italy and other places.”
“But Boney had beaten the Dutch and Italians first,” Perce reminded her. “He hadn’t beaten the Spanish. He had tricked them. Apparently as soon as news of the abdication spread, rioting broke out spontaneously all over the country. By the end of May, Sir Hew Dalrymple, the governor of Gibraltar, had received an appeal for money and arms from the revolutionary junta of Seville. But the point is, they seem to think they can beat the French on their own, and in my book that means trouble for Sir Arthur or whoever else commands the expeditionary force.”
“If they think they can beat Boney when the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians couldn’t,” Robert remarked, “they’re plain mad. But don’t worry about Sir Arthur. He’s used to native allies with swollen heads.”
“I hope so.” Perce looked worried. “The trouble is…” He allowed the sentence to hang in the air for a moment, then went on, “Canning at the Foreign Office is a clever devil, but I can’t say I like him much, and he does have a tendency to jump at opportunities without investigating them sufficiently.”
“You can’t investigate military opportunities too closely or for too long, or they disappear,” Robert pointed out.
Perce shrugged, but his voice was bitter when he spoke. “It’s true, but it works both ways. Maybe if General Bennigsen had taken the time to investigate a little more closely what he thought was an opportunity, there wouldn’t have been that bloodbath at Friedland. Maybe Russia would still have been in the war against Boney. Maybe t
he Russians could even have defeated the French. They came damned close a couple of times.”
Robert glanced at his brother with considerable sympathy. He, too, had been in bloody, hopeless battles, but he had always felt he was tougher than Perce and that his elder brother should be shielded from such horrors and employ his considerable brains in seeing that the government supported the army properly. All he said, however, was “Castlereagh wouldn’t jump just because Canning did, and Castlereagh is no fool.”
“No, no, he isn’t,” Perce agreed, “but the whole government is getting pretty desperate for a victory of some kind. The pressure on Castlereagh at the War Office must be very high. Between trade being badly hit by the blockade so that the cloth manufactories are closing or turning away workers, and the bad harvests which have nearly doubled the price of wheat, the Midlands are in an uproar. There were riots in Manchester—”
“They’ll get their victory if they’ll give Sir Arthur a free hand.” Robert stared at his brother. “That’s what I’ve been asking you all along. What are the chances of his keeping the command? They couldn’t have gotten at him in South America, but in Spain… The damned Horse Guards can be sending messages every week, and he’s way down the list.”
“What do you want me to say?” Perce asked, his voice sharpened by frustration. “You know the situation as well as I do. Castlereagh got the appointment for South America for Sir Arthur because no one else wanted it. Europe is another matter. Castlereagh will fight for Sir Arthur. They’re old friends. They served together in the Irish Parliament, and Castlereagh has a real appreciation for Wellesley’s abilities. He understands what Sir Arthur accomplished in India. But there’s a limit to what Castlereagh can do. Oh, I’ll ask around, but the best you can hope for is that so many favorites will be trying to get the appointment that there will be some delay in deciding where to drop the plum.”
Chapter Two
A good deal of information flowed from the official embassy in Spain to England during the month of June. There were, indeed, popular uprisings all over the country. Although the riot in Madrid had been put down at the cost of more than three hundred Spanish lives, Cartagena rose against the French at the end of May. During the next few days, Valencia declared they would accept no king but Ferdinand, and the district of Asturias declared war on Napoleon, as did Seville and Santander. Granada, Corunna, and Badajoz took up arms. In Valencia every Frenchman seen on the streets was killed, and in Valladolid a gibbet was erected in front of the residence of the governor of Léon, who was given the choice of rejecting the French or being hanged.
At Cadiz and Vigo the French warships in the harbor were seized. The Spanish who had been besieging Gibraltar marched away to confront the French at Madrid, and the Spanish troops, which had made up two-thirds of the army with which the French general Junot was holding Portugal, deserted to return and defend their own country against their erstwhile allies. Then, when the Portuguese also rose, the beleaguered Junot withdrew his remaining troops to a limited area around Lisbon.
The news arrived in England and was believed. However, in the primitive countryside of Portugal, the rumors that the French had been driven out did not drift into the small villages until July, and they roused uneasiness rather than rejoicing. It was not that the Portuguese people had any fondness for the French. Indeed, they hated them with more reason than the Spanish because Portugal was considered a conquered country. Thus, the French soldiers had been authorized to seize food and animals for transport, and their officers made no attempt to prevent them from taking anything else that appealed to them as well. Nor had the officers objected to the misuse of anyone who protested. What the people of the tiny rural hamlets feared was that the French would return, more ferocious than before owing to the opposition they had met.
In a small fishing village about fifteen miles north of Oporto, a young woman was trying clumsily, and somewhat inattentively, to spin. All the other girls in the village, practiced in twisting the carded wool into yarn from earliest childhood, did not need to think about what they were doing to produce perfect results. But Esmeralda had only recently learned. Of course, the village girls rarely had thoughts as frightening or as painful as Esmeralda’s were that afternoon in July. News of the French retreat had raised hopes and fears in everyone. For Esmeralda the news had also presented an agonizing opportunity to make a choice.
Esmeralda had not been born in the village and had no intention of dying there. She had been born in Bombay, India, but she was no more a native of that land than of Portugal. She was an English gentlewoman. Her father, Henry Bryan Talbot, was a distant relation, through a collateral Irish branch, of the Earls of Shrewsbury, Talbot, and Waterford. It was an ancient and honorable family, but unfortunately Henry had not been one of its shining lights. Actually, he had been so unsatisfactory a young man that after an attempt to improve him by marriage had failed, he and his poor wife, guiltless but condemned by association, had been shipped off to India.
In a sense the exile had been of the greatest advantage to Henry. It had not made him more pleasant or honest, but it had given him great satisfaction by making him very, very rich. Nonetheless, he had never forgiven his family nor that of his wife, Mary Louisa. The Connors had done their best to induce their daughter to stay with them and let Henry be sent off alone. They even suggested that hopefully the climate would kill him. But Mary, though gentle and yielding of manner and sweet of disposition, had a strong and rigid sense of duty. She had sworn to take Henry for better or for worse until death did them part, and she kept her oath.
Despite the unpleasant aspects of his character, Henry had not been unappreciative of his wife’s loyalty. He was neither generous nor affectionate, but he never mistreated Mary, either. His only real unkindness was related to his obsessive spite. He would not permit her to communicate with her family in Ireland, not even to announce the births—or, sadly, the deaths—of her children.
This spite increased rather than faded with Henry’s acquisition of wealth, as did his parsimony. He intended, when he was rich enough, to return to his native land, to ruin and then buy out all those who had earlier scorned him. To forward this purpose, everything beyond what was necessary to run his various ventures and live with great simplicity was sent back to England to be safely invested. But to a man of Henry’s temperament it is impossible to become “rich enough”.
The years passed, and the climate and diseases of India took their toll. Of the eight children born to Henry and Mary, seven died. Worn out with grief and with labor—for as well as being housewife, hostess, and mother, Mary had often been pressed into acting as clerk, bookkeeper, and secretary to her husband—she, too, succumbed. All that remained to Henry was a thirteen-year-old daughter, Esmeralda Mary Louisa Talbot.
Until her mother’s death, Esmeralda had lived a pleasant life. One advantage of Henry’s niggardliness was that no one in the English community in Bombay had any idea how rich he was. Thus, no spite or envy was directed against Merry, as she was called by her friends for the liveliness of her disposition and the quickness of her wit. Unfortunately, her vitality and humor were not valued by her father, although they did testify to Esmeralda’s considerable intelligence, a characteristic he noted just as he took note of any asset that might hold value in the future.
That future became the present soon after Esmeralda’s mother died, for her childhood ended as soon as those who came to offer sympathy were gone. Henry immediately began to teach Esmeralda to take her mother’s place, attending to the many aspects of his business that he would not trust to native clerks. The sudden change produced rebellion and rebellion produced retribution. Henry was not a sadist, but he could be cruel in order to get his way.
To facilitate the grooming of his daughter, Henry moved from Bombay to Goa, the Portuguese community in India. The move was temporarily convenient for his business, but Henry’s main purpose was to isolate Esmeralda, for in Bombay the families of her many frie
nds offered an easy escape when her father was otherwise occupied. Besides, he did not want her complaining to others of his unkindness or more important to him exposing his business dealings by accident or for spite.
Esmeralda soon learned to obey her father, at least overtly, but fortunately this was not because Henry had succeeded in breaking her spirit. Once the initial shock of grief and change was past—and really she had no time to grieve—she found the tasks her father was asking her to do quite fascinating. Her willing application soon satisfied Henry, who was clever about money but not about people and did not realize that, young as she was, his daughter had already discovered how to circumvent him.
By the time they moved back to Bombay, however, Merry was long buried under the outer shell of Miss Esmeralda Talbot, a quiet, insipid girl, whose rather unsuccessful father could not afford a proper carriage for her, so that she rode everywhere on a small, ugly, but very sturdy, mare. This constant exposure to the Indian sun wreaked havoc with her complexion, which was much darkened, and with her hair, which was dulled and bleached. What might have been her saving graces, a pair of enormous, beautiful, dark blue eyes and a perfectly enchanting smile, were rarely in evidence. She kept the lovely eyes lowered, and in her father’s presence she did not smile.
But Esmeralda knew she had only to wait, and not for very long. She was her father’s heiress, and Henry was not the man he had been. Although she did not like her father, she suggested more than once that the climate was growing too much for him and that they should retire to England. In Henry’s own opinion, however, he was not yet “rich enough”. Then, in 1806, he had a violent seizure and very nearly died. Esmeralda nursed him carefully. She did not lie to herself; she hoped he would die, but she had her mother’s strong sense of honor and duty and she could not live with the knowledge that she had not done everything in her power to save another human being, no matter how unlikable.
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