Fortune's Bride Page 3

  In the long run, it was her father’s illness that had brought Esmeralda to this Portuguese village and to the unaccustomed task of spinning. Not that making her spin was an act of unkindness on the part of the villagers. It was an attempt to conceal from the French Esmeralda’s difference from the other girls. Henry might have been greedy and might have lacked perception about people, but he had not been stupid. When he had recovered from the seizure enough to get about, he had sold his business and possessions in India, transferred all his assets to England, and booked passage for “home”.

  But Henry’s luck had run out. Although they had waited until April when they had the best chance of good weather and a swift passage, everything possible had gone wrong with the voyage. And at last, off the coast of Portugal, the overstrained vessel had met one storm too many and had begun to sink. Esmeralda remembered very little of the terror-filled hours that followed. She was not unacquainted with danger. Because of Henry’s reluctance to spend an extra penny, she had occasionally been exposed to bandits and to mob violence, but never had she felt so helpless, so utterly afraid.

  She did remember being placed in one of the few small boats with her father, and she remembered bailing water from that fragile craft while it tossed and pitched. But when she saw the huge breakers, the wildly flung spume, the pitiless rocks and cliffs of the inhospitable shore, she gave herself up for dead and her memory held no more. When she finally regained consciousness, she found herself in a hut in the Portuguese fishing village where she now lived. How she had come there and what had happened to the sailors who had been in the boat with her father and herself she had never discovered.

  Perhaps Esmeralda could have obtained more information had she asked at once, but at first she was too exhausted and too busy caring for her father. Surprisingly, Henry had survived the actual shipwreck, but he did not survive for long. The strain had been too much. Another seizure and the hard, primitive life killed him, in spite of all the villagers could do. By the time, several weeks later, Esmeralda had asked what had happened to the sailors, the headman of the village shrugged and shook his head. They had gone south, he said, toward Oporto, but the French were there.

  Still, the villagers were kind. Although they knew that all British citizens were supposed to be given up to the French, they buried Henry with all the dignity so small a place could muster, and they hid Esmeralda when the troops came to forage. They did their best to make her indistinguishable from their own girls, but they were afraid. If it was discovered that they had been concealing an enemy, they would be harshly punished.

  Esmeralda was aware of this fear, although no one spoke of it openly. It was an important consideration in the dangerous decision she must soon make. If the French returned, someone from the village might become frightened enough to betray her. Or Pedro, headman’s son, whose advances she had rejected several times, might do it for spite. Or, even more likely, one of the village girls to whom Pedro had previously paid attention might wish to be rid of her. Esmeralda’s lips tightened as she thought of Pedro. The first time he had approached her, before her Portuguese had become as fluent as it now was, she had gone out of the village with him, not quite understanding what he wanted and thinking that perhaps one of the sailors had returned or that the French were coming and she was to be hidden.

  She had soon discovered her mistake. Fortunately, because Pedro had thought she was willing and had not been prepared for her violent reaction, she had been able to fight her way free. But Pedro was not discouraged. He took her resistance for coyness and explained that his intentions were strictly honorable. Esmeralda did not believe this. Courtship was a very formal matter among the Portuguese. She guessed that he had heard tales of the immoral behavior of the British heretics and had expected her to welcome any man who offered. His profession of honorable intentions was no surprise. It saved face for both of them, and her unwillingness gave him an easy excuse to withdraw.

  However, rather surprisingly, Pedro did not withdraw but pursued her in a more formal fashion. Esmeralda was considerably puzzled by his persistence. Surely, she thought, he could not really wish to marry her. It was ridiculous. Setting aside her own unwillingness, she would be utterly useless to him as a wife. She had none of the skills necessary to village life. She could not spin or weave, she had no idea how to wash clothes, cooking, beyond the boiling of eggs, was a mystery to her. In fact, she was learning a bit of all these skills, for she did not want to be a greater burden than necessary to her hosts, but it must be plain to everyone that it would be many, many years before she could become proficient. A man with so inept a wife would be very uncomfortable.

  If she had been very beautiful, Pedro’s interest might have been more reasonable. Some men did think beauty made up for other deficiencies. But Esmeralda knew she was not an especially attractive girl. Even in Bombay, where there were so many more Englishmen than Englishwomen that no girl ever lacked a partner at a dance, she had always been the last to be asked. Suddenly Esmeralda’s hands which had continued, no matter how clumsily, to twist the wool she was spinning, became still. It was not true that she had always been last. Twice, in India, several months apart, her ball card had been solicited as soon as that of the reigning belle, and by the most handsome man any of the women in that room had ever seen.

  Captain Robert Moreton. It was a name to be cherished in the very depths of her soul, but that was all. Esmeralda had guessed what had drawn Captain Moreton to her for the first dance of the evening. She was the worst dressed and one of the plainest girls in the room. No one could really think he favored her. He asked her to dance first both as an act of kindness and to make clear that no invitation marked any serious intentions toward the partners he chose. No girl could misconstrue a request to dance after he had invited the unlikely Esmeralda Talbot.

  Perhaps some girls would have been angry at being used that way. In fact, Esmeralda had been piqued at first and had nearly refused to give him her card, but his smile was so sweet and the furious, envious glances cast at her had been so amusing that she could not resist. Still, it had not been Captain Moreton’s beautiful face or strong body that etched his image indelibly in her mind. She had looked on those rather as one looks at an exquisite portrait, a beautiful thing but with little human reality.

  It had been Captain Moreton’s kindness that fixed him in her memory. He had used her, but not callously as some highborn young blood might have done, showing his boredom and contempt while they danced. Captain Moreton had done his best to prove that he enjoyed the company he had solicited and to give her pleasure, too. He had talked to her and done his best to make her talk also.

  Esmeralda sighed. It had not been possible for her to respond as she knew she could. If her father had heard of lively conversation and laughter—and he would have heard, for he kept close watch either by himself or through others on what his daughter did—she might not have been allowed to attend another social function for months. Henry had not wanted Esmeralda to attract men. He had no intention of allowing her to marry, thereby losing his confidential secretary-bookkeeper. In fact, Henry had disapproved violently of any strong relationship for Esmeralda. Love or friendship might induce her to speak of his affairs.

  Thus, it had been impossible for Esmeralda to offer anything beyond the normal insipidities on the weather, the decoration of the ballroom, and the food and drink provided for the delectation of the guests. Plainly, although he struggled to hide the fact, Captain Moreton had been very bored before the dance was over. Still, he had not “forgotten” that his name was on her card for two other dances. He had been at her side as soon as the music began and each time had lingered until the correct moment at which he was expected to seek his new partner. That was truly kind and beyond what many of the young men in Bombay were willing to do.

  “Ah, perhaps it is better that you sit and do nothing than that you make such a tangle.”

  Esmeralda jumped as the voice of the elderly widow with
whom she was living broke into her thoughts. “I am so sorry,” she said, laughing in response to the amused resignation of her hostess. “I’m afraid I’ve made a worse mess than usual, Tia Maria. I was thinking…”

  The courtesy title of Tia, or “aunt”, had been decided on as the safest. An orphaned niece could conceivably appear in a village where no one had ever seen her before. If later it was discovered by someone outside the village that she was not after all a relative, it would not be the villagers’ fault that they had accepted her. Custom and charity would have obliged them to do that, and there was no reason why they should suspect any deception.

  “Of Pedro?” the old woman asked, her voice now neutral.

  “No!” Esmeralda exclaimed rather mendaciously, for she had been thinking about him. Nonetheless, it was not really a lie. To answer yes to Tia Maria’s question would have implied something far different from her actual thoughts. “Why do you ask me that?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “It seems he thinks of you.”

  “But that is crazy. I am no fit wife for him.” Esmeralda then repeated aloud her earlier thoughts about her lack of wifely skills. “What I was wondering,” she finished, “was, if it is true that the French are gone, whether I should try to go to Oporto. I know that there were many English there before the French came. Perhaps some of them are still there.”

  “Why do you not think of accepting young Pedro? Then you would truly be of the village, and it would not matter if the French came again.”

  Esmeralda was shocked. The one reason she had found for Pedro to be attracted to her, despite her lack of obvious charms, was that she was different. After all, he had known all the other girls in the village since they were babies. Whatever value novelty might have for a young man, it had never occurred to Esmeralda that anyone else could possibly approve of such an impractical arrangement. Her eyes went to Tia Maria’s hands, swiftly making firm, smooth yarn out of the irregular, lumpy rope Esmeralda had produced. She pointed to what the woman was doing.

  “Is that not reason enough, Tia Maria?” she asked. “Pedro is a fine man. All of the people in this village are good people, but I do not fit here. My life was very different. I do not know the things I would need to know to make Pedro a good wife. In the beginning, perhaps he would not care, but later he would grow tired of bad food, ill-knotted fishnets, and clothes that fell apart because I could not weave them properly. He would be unhappy. I also would be unhappy when I saw that my husband was not satisfied and that others laughed at him because I was not a good wife.”

  Of course, Esmeralda would no more have considered marrying Pedro than cutting off her nose. To her he was a common creature, outside her class, totally unacceptable even if he had been as beautiful and as kind as Captain Moreton. However, if Tia Maria was speaking of marriage, apparently the villagers had not, as she had believed, noticed the difference in class—or they did not care. To speak of it then, or of her personal preference would be useless, so she tried to put the rejection in terms that Tia Maria could understand.

  “But with the money, that would not come about,” Tia Maria said. “You are rich. You could build a big house on the hill and hire others to cook your husband’s food and weave the cloth for his clothes.”

  “Money! What money?” Esmeralda’s heart leapt into her mouth.

  She knew that her father had investments in England worth well over half a million pounds, investments that brought in more than twenty thousand pounds a year in interest, and that did not include the huge sum that had been sent off just before they left India. The income would permit her to live like a queen if she could ever get to England and establish who she was. However, no one besides her father and herself, and of course her father’s English bankers, knew what Henry Talbot had made and salted away. Why should Tia Maria speak of her riches?

  “You mean you do not know?” the old woman asked. “Your father told old Pedro that he would pay well if we kept him safe from the French. Did he lie?”

  So that was it. Esmeralda was relieved. She had feared that her father might have raved of his wealth in a delirious moment when someone other than she had been attending him. That would have been dangerous, but it was reasonable that he had offered to pay for sanctuary. Now she understood why the villagers had braved the dangers of hiding her from the French. It also lightened to a considerable degree Esmeralda’s sense of obligation.

  “No, he did not lie,” Esmeralda said.

  She was more than willing to fulfill Henry’s promise, whatever it was, being certain that it was far less generous than it should have been, considering the service rendered. As she spoke she realized that she probably no longer needed to worry about being betrayed to the French out of spite should they return. Since Pedro’s attentions had been paid in the hopes of winning a rich wife… Esmeralda’s mind checked. A new danger had reared its head.

  Pedro and his father might try to force her into marrying him in an effort to obtain her entire fortune rather than whatever sum her father had promised to pay them. Of course, no one in the village could even conceive of how rich she really was, nor would they believe her if she tried to explain that it would not be possible for Pedro to use her money as other village husbands used their wives’ dowries of linens, sheep, or land.

  These simple people would not understand that Esmeralda would retain control of her fortune after she married. The usual situation, in England as well as in Portugal, was that a woman’s husband legally used her money and property as if it were his own, doling out, if he were generous, a pittance that she was free to spend as she liked. Many did not even give their wives that much freedom, insisting on having all bills sent to them so that any tendency toward extravagance in their women could be checked by argument or blows.

  However, special arrangements could be made, and Esmeralda had long ago consulted several solicitors, selected the plan that suited her best, and induced her father to make the settlement she desired. Henry proved cooperative. He could see no reason, aside from what she might be expected to inherit, that would induce any man to marry his daughter Thus, the fact that Esmeralda’s husband could not benefit from her income, except as she wished to distribute it, should, Henry believed, serve to keep her single even after his death. He thought he was playing a nasty joke on her, but Esmeralda did not care what he thought as long as she achieved her purpose. “But Tia Maria,” Esmeralda protested, “although my father did not lie and I will gladly pay if I can whatever he promised, the money is not here in Portugal. What little we had with us to pay our traveling expenses is most likely at the bottom of the sea. To obtain more I must go to England.”

  “And how will you do that without money?” the old woman asked sharply.

  “That was why I was hoping there were still some English people in Oporto,” Esmeralda answered. “It might be that my father had done business with one of them—he bought wine from Oporto, I know. If so, perhaps that person would send me to England or lend me enough to pay my passage.”

  “But then, if you had to pay back that debt, you might not have enough to pay old Pedro what your father promised.”

  Esmeralda bit her lips to prevent herself from laughing. A few hundred escudos was a large fortune to these poor people. Even if Henry had promised them a conto, a thousand escudos, that would come to less than two hundred and fifty pounds. The cost of her passage and payment of the obligation to the village were the very least of Esmeralda’s worries. Far more terrifying was the problem of identifying herself to her father’s bankers—if she could ever get to England.

  Tia Maria however took the bitten lip to be concern about the size of the debt. “You could write a letter,” she suggested.

  Esmeralda shook her head. “Would you send out so much money just because a letter said you should? And think. The letter would not be from my father. The money is mine now that he is dead, that is true, but how would he who receives the letter know that to be the truth
just from a letter? When I am there before his eyes and he knows that if I lie it will soon be discovered, then he will give me what is mine.”

  On those last words, Esmeralda’s voice trembled. It was so easy to say, and if the sum involved were small, perhaps that would indeed have been all that was necessary. But bankers do not hand over huge estates just because a strange girl comes and says Henry Bryan Talbot is dead and I am his daughter, Esmeralda Mary Louisa. How was she to prove who she was?

  “It is true that he who holds the money might not be willing to part with it if there is only a letter and from a woman, too.” Tia Maria, who had been watching Esmeralda, was aware of her uncertainty. “It would be even better,” she said, “if you had a husband who could speak for you.”

  At the thought of Pedro in the offices of her father’s bankers speaking for his wife, Esmeralda choked. It was true she had never seen those offices, but she was sure her father had chosen the oldest, most reliable, most august banking house in London. Henry did not speculate with the money sent to England. He ordered his bankers to invest it in the soundest of securities. Nonetheless, the situation was not funny. It seemed as if her fear that pressure would be applied to her to make her marry Pedro might be true.

  “But that would mean the payment of two passages to England,” Esmeralda protested, saying the first thing that came into her mind.

  “Perhaps not,” Tia Maria remarked, smiling slyly. “We in this village have no boat large enough to sail so far, but one might be found.”