Fortune's Bride (Heiress, Book Four)

by Roberta Gellis

  A short while later the result Sir Arthur had foreseen came about. The overenthusiastic troopers were checked by a stone wall on the hill and simultaneously charged by two fresh regiments of French horse, which had been kept in reserve. Sir Arthur disliked and distrusted cavalry regiments, having said more than once that they were never properly disciplined and got carried away, thereby turning a victory into a defeat.

  Robert had to admit that the charge had been carried far beyond reason. The end result, which he learned about the next day, was, however, not quite disastrous, for by some miracle the overexcited troopers were not annihilated.

  Actually at the moment the action was taking place, Sir Arthur had essentially lost interest in it. He had mentally given up the Twentieth for lost. Moreover, a muted roar had come down from the slopes north of the Maceira, which could only have been produced by a full regimental volley. That meant the troops Junot had sent north to flank the British had finally come into contact with the forces Wellesley had set up to oppose them. Sir Arthur politely lifted his hat to Sir Harry, who was still contemplating the headlong rush of the Twentieth, and spurred his horse away in the direction of the new fighting, with his staff streaming along behind him.

  They splashed through the tributary of the Maceira. The small valley was noisy now and littered with dead and wounded among whom unhurt and lightly wounded moved, some looting the dead bodies and others giving what assistance they could to those hurt worse than themselves. There was, at least, a fine impartiality about both activities, the French wounded receiving as much assistance as the British and the British dead being looted about equally with the French.

  Despite the noise and confusion in the area, Robert’s eye was drawn inexorably to Jupiter’s body, and he gave it a long, regretful look as they passed. Sir Arthur rode north along the ridge where British troops were pursuing the remnants of some French columns. The troops were moving in good order, pausing periodically to fire another volley into the fleeting French. Then, near three abandoned French guns, the Seventy-first and Eighty-second halted to rest and re-form their ranks. General Nightingale, who was moving forward with the Twenty-ninth, which had been in the second line, saw Sir Arthur and rode back to him.

  “There are more French somewhere,” he said. “They came to the edge of that ravine just below my position and then went on farther north until we lost sight of them completely.”

  “Do you have any idea how large the force is?” Sir Arthur asked.

  Before Nightingale could reply, the question answered itself. From the summit of the heights above the plateau on which the Thirty-sixth and Fortieth regiments were driving the French northwest, four battalions of infantry and two squadrons of dragoons poured down. The British regiments reeled back in disorder, abandoning the captured guns. With an oath of dismay, General Nightingale charged, calling orders toward the Twenty-ninth, which had paused uncertainly. Tactfully Sir Arthur halted. He was not in the least discomposed by the setback. Bowes’s division was at hand and had not yet fired a shot. Caitlin Crawfurd and the Portuguese—for whatever good they would be—were about a mile away, near enough to lend a hand if necessary.

  It was not necessary. In a very short time the new French attack was broken. The three guns were again in British hands, together with three more that the new French battalions had carried with them. Sir Arthur did not stay to see the end of the action. He instructed Lord Burghersh to give his compliments to Generals Ferguson and Nightingale upon their handling of the situation and the behavior of their men, and rode hastily back in the direction from which he had come.

  The battle of Vimeiro was won, and Robert realized Sir Arthur believed that the French army of Portugal could be utterly destroyed if action were taken quickly, before Junot could reorganize or call in reserves. Unfortunately, Robert knew that Sir Arthur did not have the authority to initiate that action. Burrard had given his permission for Wellesley to complete the battle he had started, but that could not be stretched to include the pursuit of Junot’s broken force.

  But Sir Arthur hoped that in the first heat of real victory over the “undefeatable” French army, Sir Harry’s supine nature might be roused to action—or, at least, to permitting Sir Arthur to take action. Sir Arthur rode up to Burrard, waving his hat and crying, “Sir Harry, now is your time to advance. The enemy is completely beaten, and we shall be in Lisbon in three days.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Esmeralda had written the letter to the dying soldier’s wife, with tears streaming down her face. It was mostly of her own composition, for the man could barely summon strength to whisper the name and address. He was pathetically grateful for what he believed to be her sympathy, and poor Esmeralda was racked with guilt although, in truth, her fear for Robert gave her a poignant understanding of the sorrow of an unknown woman. She even made a note of the name and address, thinking she might be able some day to assist the widow if she were worthy and needed help. She felt futile and angry, knowing there was no way, even with the wealth that would be at her command, that she could help the womenfolk of all those who died, but the small gesture toward this one person soothed her a little.

  Soon after the letter was finished, the man lapsed into unconsciousness. Esmeralda looked about vaguely, wondering if it would be very wrong and cowardly to abandon her self-imposed duty. Before she could decide, however, she heard her name and saw a familiar face, one of the young officers of the line who had often stopped to speak to her on the march. She hurried over, anxiety making her almost forget the danger to which Robert had returned.

  Fortunately, in this case the anxiety was largely unnecessary. The young man had had a ball in the shoulder, but it had been extracted without difficulty, and his chances for recovery were excellent. In fact, he intended to return to his company in a day or two. His purpose in summoning Esmeralda had not been out of a need for assistance but to soothe her, since he had seen how distressed she was while she wrote.

  Half an hour of pleasant talk restored Esmeralda considerably, particularly since she could not resist mentioning that her husband had also been wounded but had insisted on returning to Sir Arthur. She had been assured that he would not be sent out again and that, more likely still, Sir Arthur would send him home. Thus cheered, Esmeralda went back to the less pleasant aspects of the task she had undertaken. It was disheartening, for there was so little she, or even the doctors, could do. Nonetheless, she persisted, as she assumed Robert would wish her to do, but not for long. She had barely attended to the wants of two men whose limbs had been amputated when Carlos’s voice, high and frightened, interrupted her.

  Esmeralda rose so abruptly and was so terrified by the fear Carlos was displaying that she had to catch at the wall for support. Nor could she call out to the boy, but her movement had caught his eye, and he hurried over, crying, “Come home, senhora, come home.”

  “Oh my God,” Esmeralda whispered, “is it your master?”

  “He has gone mad,” Carlos breathed, his big, black eyes wide with fright. “He shouted at me and tried to hit me, and his face was all red.”

  Esmeralda’s breath caught as she was torn between relief and a new fear. At least he was not dead, but… Fever, she thought. It was bad, but not the worst. He was young and strong, and cinchona was quite effective against fever. She tore off the bloodied sheet that had partially protected her gown and ran toward the house in which they had quarters. She could hear Robert’s voice, hoarse and angry, all the way down in the street. Just outside the door she hesitated. If he was really out of his head, she would not be strong enough to control him, and Carlos, frightened out of his wits, poor child, could be no help.

  Esmeralda had turned to send Carlos back to the hospital area to get Molly, when another voice she recognized—just as furious as Robert’s—struck her ear, and then a third. She promptly dismissed the notion of fever. It was rage she heard in all three voices. Could the battle have been lost? That notion was cast aside with her original idea
about delirium. Had the battle been lost, the French would have been flooding into Vimeiro.

  Still Esmeralda hesitated. Although she was no longer worried about needing to control Robert while he was out of his head, she had never seen her husband really angry and had no idea how he might react toward her. In general, Robert had a sunny disposition. He had occasionally displayed irritation, but it had not lasted long. If he had really tried to strike Carlos, would he relieve his feelings by beating her? Not, she decided, in the presence of his friends, and she quickly entered the house and ran up the stairs.

  “…have to do it all over again, and God knows whether it will be possible now that Junot will be better prepared.”

  Esmeralda made out the words, but they were uttered in so fury-choked a voice that she was not sure who was speaking until she was far enough up the stairs to see that it was Captain Williams. “What has happened?” she asked, but either no one heard her or all the men were too taken up with their subject to heed her interruption.

  “We won’t be able to do it again with that incompetent, lazy numbskull in charge,” Robert roared. “He’ll have us out in a flat plain all lined up like a parade to be shot to pieces.”

  “Maybe he could have an accident,” Colin Campbell snarled.

  Esmeralda shuddered. It was not unheard of for really bad officers to have “accidents” on the field, and there was a vicious, uncontrolled note in Campbell’s voice that showed he was not joking.

  “I’d help you if I thought he’d ever get close enough to any action to make it possible,” Williams said bitterly.

  “What has Sir Arthur done?” Esmeralda cried.

  This time her voice was quite loud. The three men seemed to be working themselves up to commit an atrocity, and although frightened, she knew that an interruption and the presence of a witness might induce second thoughts. For a moment she was afraid that all she had accomplished was to draw the rage onto herself, for all three turned and glared at her. Instinctively her hands came up, and she backed away. Meantime, Campbell’s eyes had fallen on her bloodstained gown, for the sheet she had used as an apron had not protected her fully, and he jumped forward with a hand out to support her. To Esmeralda the gesture seemed so threatening that she shrank back still farther, stifling a cry of fear and wavering on her feet.

  “Good God, Mrs. Moreton’s hurt,” Campbell exclaimed.

  “How could that happen?” Williams asked simultaneously.

  “Merry, what’s the matter?” Robert cried, getting an arm around her.

  The realization that she had completely misunderstood Colin Campbell’s movement and at the same time accomplished her purpose restored Esmeralda immediately, however, she did not reject Robert’s support nor disclaim faintness at once. Quick-witted as she was, she recognized that it would be best to keep the men’s attention on her for a minute or two until their tempers cooled.

  “I am all right,” she murmured. “The blood is not mine. I was in the hospital area…”

  “God damn it, Merry,” Robert said, “you haven’t the sense of a three-day-old kitten. It’s one thing to help out but quite another to get so exhausted you are ready to faint. Come and lie down.”

  But Esmeralda had no intention of leaving the three men alone. She knew that in minutes the discussion they were having would resume and there was a good possibility that they would work themselves into a rage all over again. She had no expectation of keeping them off the subject but hoped that her presence would have an ameliorating effect.

  “No,” she protested. “I’m better now, and I am dying for a cup of tea. Come downstairs with me and tell me what Sir Arthur has done to make you all so angry.”

  Actually Esmeralda now realized that it could not be Sir Arthur about whom they had been speaking. He did, quite often, infuriate his ADCs, but even in a blind rage Esmeralda could not imagine one of his staff calling him lazy, incompetent, or a numbskull. She had introduced his name as another calming red herring.

  Whether it was her presence or the soothing effect of fresh, strong, hot tea, relative rationality was maintained while Esmeralda learned how Sir Harry Burrard had managed to snatch defeat right out of the tight claws of victory. The tale was rather disjointed, since several more of the staff joined them, and the tellers periodically flew into rages and shouted at her and each other. However, no one reintroduced the subject of Sir Harry having an “accident”, so Esmeralda was satisfied.

  Actually, it was fortunate that she was not called upon to voice any opinion because emotionally she was far more in sympathy with Sir Harry than with the furious young men who castigated him for refusing, despite Sir Arthur’s lucid reasoning and clear, practical plans, to pursue Junot’s broken army. Intellectually Esmeralda knew Sir Harry was wrong. Robert said the French could have been destroyed in Portugal and the war in that country ended if Junot had been pursued, whereas letting him retreat unmolested would permit him to rearm, reorganize, and call up reinforcements. Moreover, with the inept Sir Harry at the helm, the British might be defeated in the next battle. Thus, in the long run, Sir Harry’s orders to wait until Sir John Moore arrived with another ten thousand men were stupid and dangerous to the British cause.

  Nonetheless, Esmeralda’s heart would not listen to her head. Her heart only knew that Robert was sitting safe and almost sound beside her instead of riding off to God knew where on the heels of fleeing men who would fight desperately to save their lives. In addition, there was some hope that Sir Arthur would take offense and return to England, in which case his staff would no doubt go with him and Robert would be safe.

  As this thought crossed her mind, Esmeralda sighed deeply. She knew she was deluding herself. Although he admired Sir Arthur greatly, it was the army and, to a certain extent, war itself that Robert loved. He might, indeed, go back to England with Sir Arthur, but he would stay only long enough to find a way to get back into the action—and then another thought, so horrifying that Esmeralda shuddered at it, came into her mind. If they went to England, Robert would almost certainly leave her there when he returned to the front.

  At this point Lord Burghersh came in. He was late because he had been ordered to remain on the northern slopes until the end of the action there. Although calm now, he at first had been as furious and disgusted as the others. He had seen the Thirty-sixth and Fortieth regiments of Ferguson’s command pin one of the French brigades into an angle of the hills from which there was no easy escape. Burghersh had ridden back to Sir Arthur with Ferguson’s ADC, who carried his general’s request to advance, and had seen Sir Harry absolutely forbid any further action. The ADC had been stunned speechless, and Sir Arthur had made one more attempt to convince Sir Harry that the French could not stand another attack. He pointed out that one good push would send them in a rout into the rugged spurs of the Sierra da Baragueda where starvation, hardship, and the Portuguese peasants would likely finish off those who had not yielded as prisoners.

  “Oh, I think the men have done enough for one day,” Sir Harry had replied.

  “But Hill’s division and those of Bowes and Crawfurd have not even been in action. They are quite fresh,” Sir Arthur countered, his voice even although it trembled just a little with anger.

  But Sir Harry had stuck stubbornly to his decision that there would be no further advance that day, whereupon Sir Arthur had turned his horse and said bitterly to those of his staff who were present that they all might as well go and shoot red-legged partridges.

  This report had led to a renewed discussion of the disaster that would undoubtedly follow Sir Harry’s assumption of command, at which point Esmeralda, who had hardly listened, consumed as she was by her terror at the idea of being left in England, sighed and shuddered at her own thoughts.

  “We are distressing Mrs. Moreton,” Lord Burghersh said.

  “Oh, no,” she protested, “I am not frightened, only sorry that so many men have been killed and wounded to no purpose.”

  However, the worst prognostica
tions of Sir Arthur’s angry staff were not fulfilled, though this was not immediately apparent as matters seemed to worsen the next day when Burrard was in turn superseded by Sir Hew Dalrymple. Sir Arthur had immediately approached Sir Hew with a plan to advance to Mafra, which would cut Junot off from Lisbon and the heights of Tôrres Vedras, but Sir Hew was even less accommodating than Sir Harry. Not only would he not listen to any plan for prosecuting the war, he was less polite about it.

  To add to the complications, the army was sullen and recalcitrant. They wanted, and would take orders only from, their “old general”, who had led them to victory. How far this spirit of rebellion against having their glory snatched from them would have gone was never tested, fortunately. In the afternoon of August 22, General Kellerman, who had led the French grenadiers who had fought so stubbornly on the outskirts of Vimeiro, arrived bearing a flag of truce. He had come to negotiate a total French withdrawal from Portugal.

  Again Esmeralda presided over a tea table around which furious arguments raged. The younger and less experienced ADCs maintained that Sir Arthur should enter a formal protest and refuse to have anything to do with the negotiations. Robert and Colin Campbell, although not happy with the outcome because they knew General Wellesley’s original plans would have done Bonaparte much more harm, argued that a convention of withdrawal was now the lesser of the evils they faced.

  “For, you know,” Robert said to Esmeralda in the quiet of their bedchamber after the futile meeting was over, “we have already lost our chance to cut Junot off from a safe retreat to Lisbon, and it is likely that with these bunglers in charge, any action would be delayed so long that reinforcements could be brought in from France. In any case, if we do not agree to a withdrawal, the war would be greatly protracted, which would mean heavy casualties, probably the bombardment and destruction of Lisbon and a number of other Portuguese cities, and possibly the complete ruin of Portugal.”