Beyond the Sunrise (24 page)

“Where did you learn your language?” he asked her. “You must have made a few trips to the gutter, Joana.”

“I wish I knew more,” she said. “My repertoire of foul words is lamentably small. I need more to hurl at your head. If we cannot fight, let us make love, then. But don't you dare try to do it quickly or gently, Robert. I want it rough. And I don't want you asking if the ground is hard. I want to fight you—for pleasure.”

It was madness. There was a war to be fought and orders to be carried out. There was an explosion to investigate and a whole company of French soldiers not far off, all looking for him so that their colonel might have the pleasure of parting him first from his uniform and then from his skin and finally from his life.

It was madness. And yet all he could think of for the next several minutes—he had no idea how many passed—was rolling and panting and growling on the ground, giving and receiving pleasure and pain in equal portions, making love with his bitterest enemy. Making love for the fifth time in little more than twenty-four hours—and trying to convince himself that it was merely a physical thing, that it was just sex, that there were no feelings involved at all.

He wondered if he was fooling her as poorly as he was fooling himself.

“Oh, Robert,” she said, flat on her back on the ground a few minutes after it was all over, turning her head to look at him, “you do that most awfully well, you know. I must be bruises all over, inside and out. I feel wonderful.”

“And better?” he said. “The anger worked off?”

“He will find me,” she said. “And in the meantime I have you to give me pleasure. I must go and wash. Permission to absent myself for five minutes, sir?”

“I'll come with you,” he said, sitting up and wishing for a bath or at least for a bathe. But alas, there was not enough water—or enough time. The day was going to be a tricky one now that they would be pursuing their pursuers.

“I was planning to take my clothes off,” she said, smiling archly at him. “You will not be embarrassed, Robert?”

He snorted and she laughed lightly before turning to run down to the stream. Like a faun. Like a light-footed beautiful faun, without a care in the world, perfectly in tune with her surroundings.

God, she was a strange woman, he thought, going after her. A strange and wonderful woman. Equally at home as the refined and exquisite Marquesa das Minas and as the earthy and wild Joana Ribeiro, as she liked to call herself. A lifetime would not be long enough even to begin to know her. And all he had was a few days. Well, he would make the most of those days. He would pack a lifetime of experience into them.

He frowned as he caught the direction of his thoughts.

*   *   *

They
had not gone far before they could hear the steady booming of guns. Almeida was being bombarded with a constant shelling. Only one hill had stood between them and the sound, faint at first, felt more than heard, and then quite distinct to the ear.

“Is it like this in battle?” Joana asked, hurrying up beside Captain Blake. “Someone told me that the sound of the guns is the most frightening part.”

“Especially when they are directed right at you,” he said, “and you cannot step out of the way because if you do the line will break and the enemy infantry will be through it and will win the day. You have to stand—like a sitting duck.”

“But at least there is the line,” she said. “Other men to either side of you for a sort of protection. But you go out in front of the line, do you not? You and your riflemen are skirmishers? That must be far more terrifying.”

“No,” he said. “At least we have something to do instead of just
standing waiting for the enemy column to come up so that the guns will stop and the real killing begin.”

“It is madness,” she said. “War is madness.”

“But a necessary one,” he said. “There is no point in saying, as so many people do, especially ladies who spend their days in perfumed drawing rooms, that we should all love one another and learn to get along with one another. Life is not like that.”

“And would it not be dull,” she said, “if it were? We would not have had that delicious fight this morning, Robert. I did enjoy it, though I did not enjoy what provoked it. I have no taste for being bound and gagged. Have you ever struck a woman before?”

“No,” he said. “And don't expect me to apologize, Joana.”

She chuckled and fell back a few paces again. Her foot was hurting like the devil, but she would not allow herself the luxury of limping while she was in his sight.

They saw no sign of Colonel Leroux and his company of horsemen, though they approached the crest of every hill with caution. The Frenchmen must have galloped straight to Almeida and joined Marshal Ney's forces, he told her.

“Perhaps they imagine you are inside, Joana,” he said. “He will be preparing to rescue you.”

“Those poor women who are inside,” she said, “if the fortress is taken and does not surrender. It will be sacked and they will all be raped before they are killed.” She shuddered.

“Perhaps Cox will surrender,” he said. “Though I doubt it. He has a reputation for stubbornness.”

“And Marcel will be in there with the rest,” she said, “raping them and then ordering them killed. You should have shot him this morning, Robert.”

“And offered my body to the rest of the company for target practice?” he said. “He'll not harm any woman, Joana. He is an officer and bound to try to impose discipline on his men, not lead the way into savagery. Besides, he has a mission. He is looking for you.”

“Yes.” She shuddered again and was once more glad that she was behind him.

They approached the crest of one more hill cautiously. The sound of the guns was almost deafening. Joana felt a deep, knee-weakening terror, though she would not have admitted as much for worlds. Captain Blake reached back a hand and drew her down to the ground. And they edged up side by side and found themselves looking down on hell.

The plain before the fortress was thick with the blue uniforms of the French, just beyond the reach of the guns on the walls—what was left of them. A good half of the city was either in flames or in smoking, blackened ruins. No simple shelling could possibly have done such damage, surely. But something had happened. Something that had woken them that morning, even though they had been out of earshot of the guns.

“Jesus!” Captain Blake said beside her. “The main magazine must have blown. The bloody fools must have had the ammunition in a place where a French shell could set it all off. It must have been the grandest fireworks display the world has witnessed.”

“They must all be dead,” she said, gazing at the ruins and at the gaping breaches in the walls with mingled horror and fascination. “And yet some are alive and fighting on. Why do they not surrender?”

“At a guess, because Cox is one of the survivors,” he said. “Bloody magnificent fool. But it cannot hold out long. Hours, probably. A day perhaps. No longer. So much for the Beau's hope that Almeida would hold up your countrymen until the autumn rains. August is not even quite out yet, and the rains are at least a month off.”

She was gripping the scrubby grass on either side of her. “Do you think there were children inside there?” she asked. “Or would they have been evacuated? There are dead children in there, Robert.”

He turned his head sharply to look at her. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Put your head down. Stop looking.”

“And that will make everything all right?” she said. “It will not matter that there are dead children down there as long as I do not look? I live a frivolous and pampered life, Robert. I have never been this close to death on a large scale before.”

She scrambled down behind the hill suddenly on all fours and retched onto the ground. And humiliation took the place of horror and grief. She could not seem to stop her stomach from heaving.

“Go away!” she said sharply when she heard him come up behind her. “Leave me alone.”

“Joana.” One broad hand came to rest against her back. “It is all right to vomit. There is nothing shameful about it. I don't know a soldier, myself included, who did not chuck up his last meal at his first encounter with death. Some do it routinely at every battle. There is nothing unmanly—or unwomanly—about it.”

“It is just disgusting,” she said, her face cold and clammy. “Go away.”

He was sitting just below the top of the rise, facing away from her, when she had cleaned herself up as well as she could and felt that the moment of facing him again could be avoided no longer.

“You were stupid to turn your back,” she said. “How did you know I would not be running down the slope toward the army?”

“It did cross my mind,” he said, turning to look at her. “Except that I don't think you could run if hounds were at your heels, Joana. Let me see that foot.”

“It is all right,” she said with a shrug. “Don't fuss, Robert, like an old nanny.”

“I think I would prefer ‘bastard' and ‘imbecile,'” he said, “and even ‘coward.' And ‘eunuch,' I believe it was once? Your foot.” He held out a hand that was not to be denied. She placed her foot next to it and he lifted it and clucked his tongue. “So you
were
limping. I thought you were, but I knew I would have a fight on my hands if I commented on the fact.”

Her strap had kept slipping up all day so that the inside of her
heel, from ankle to sole, was red and raw. He drew his handkerchief out of his pocket.

“It is clean,” he said, “unless you spat on it this morning.” He bound it snugly about her foot as if he were used to administering such services—and he probably was, she thought. “It will not help a great deal, but it will prevent any more rubbing or any more dust getting at it. Perhaps the woman at the farm where we stopped for a meal earlier—a pity you could not keep that meal down, Joana, considering the fact that it was our one and only today—perhaps she will have some ointment. And perhaps we can stay there for the night.”

“We just walk away?” she asked, looking to the top of the hill and marveling at how one quickly became almost accustomed to the booming of the guns.

“There is nothing we can do for those poor bastards down there,” he said. “There is no point in wasting energies where they can do no good, Joana. In the meantime we have work to do—
I
have work to do. And there is no time for delay. By tomorrow Almeida will either fall or surrender. Perhaps even today or tonight. I have to make sure that the people between here and Lisbon get safely away and destroy the supply lines ahead of the French. They will be on their way soon—once they have done some suitable rejoicing over the fall of Almeida. The gates into Portugal are wide open. We can hardly expect them not to come pouring in, can we?”

“And Marcel too,” she said. “He will come.”

“Doubtless,” he said.

“Good,” she said. And then her tone sharpened. “What are you doing? Put me down at once!”

“If I do,” he said as she kicked her legs in the air, “it will be to give you a sharp slap where it most hurts, Joana. Now that I have started, I will not find it nearly so difficult the next time.”

“Oh, I wish you would,” she said. “I feel so humiliated, what with one thing and another, Robert, that I would like nothing better than
the chance to smash your nose. I would feel loads better if I could break it for you again. That farm must be two miles away at the very least. Is it not amazing that those people had not even ventured out to discover what the explosion was all about? It must have been deafening at the farmhouse. They were frightened, I suppose. Put me down.”

“When I collapse beneath your weight,” he said, “you may pick yourself up off the ground, Joana, and walk the rest of the way. In the meantime, save your breath. And keep your hand away from those guns.”

“Damn you,” she said. “Where am I supposed to put it?”

“Try about my neck,” he said.

“Oh,” she said after a few minutes of silence, “this is humiliating. I have never lived through a more humiliating day.”

“It's good for you,” he said. “Prisoners are supposed to feel humiliated.”

“Go to the devil,” she said.

S
OMEHOW
,
Joana found, everything happened much more slowly than she had expected. She had expected that they would rush westward toward Coimbra within a few days, warning as many people as they could to evacuate and burn all behind them. She had expected that the French armies would hasten along at their heels. She had only hoped that in all the rush and confusion Colonel Leroux would find her and she could complete the task that had obsessed her for three years.

Things did not turn out that way at all. Governor Cox in Almeida surrendered the day after losing almost the whole of his ammunition supplies and half of his fortress and the people within it in the process. But the French did not immediately sweep through the open gate into Portugal. Marshal Massena and the main French forces had to come up from Salamanca. He had to consult with advisers and guides on the best route by which to advance on Lisbon, although the route he would take was a foregone conclusion. There was only one good road west to Coimbra, the one that followed the Mondego River toward the sea.

Their own retreat westward, Joana found, took them weeks rather than days, weeks that she shamelessly enjoyed despite everything. Yet they were not easy weeks. Every day they trudged from farm to farm, from village to village, Robert talking and persuading endlessly. It was not easy. How did one persuade men and women with homes and families to leave for an unknown part of the country with only what they could carry with them, and to burn everything that was left behind, including their homes and the crops that were still in the field?

The peasants were heroic. They accepted the arguments given them with stoic calm and followed orders with dogged determination and lack of complaint. On more than one occasion Joana watched them with a lump in her throat, their packs heavy on their backs, their children gathered about them, trudging away from the burning remains of all that was home to them. Very often the burning building was the one in which she and Robert had lain and loved the night before. It was as if their love was to have no roots, no past, just as it was to have no future.

Not that they ever called it love, of course. It was pleasure that they took together. But even their pleasure was burning up behind them, and destined to end soon, as soon as they came up with the bulk of the British army and Robert could rejoin his regiment.

She tried not to think of the future.

The wealthier people of the towns, particularly the merchants, were harder to persuade. They were angry at the incompetence of their government and the armies, which could not protect their property as well as their lives. They were defiant. Sometimes it took longer than one day to convince them that starving the advancing French, who always lived off the land over which they marched, was the surest way to their eventual defeat.

Captain Blake and Joana were not alone. They met a surprising number of British officers during their travels, some of them on the same errand as Robert's, some of them scouting officers whose job it was to estimate enemy forces and watch their movements and constantly report back to headquarters.

They heard news from these officers, sometimes confused and out-of-date, but nevertheless received eagerly by two people starved of news for a long time. Headquarters was no longer at Viseu.
Wellington had moved first to Celorico, closer to the border, and more recently back to Gouveia.

There was unrest in Lisbon, they heard, and loud grumblings in England. The governments of both countries were being blamed for the imminent disaster of all their expensive hopes. Viscount Wellington, in particular, was being called incompetent. There were loud clamors for his removal from the command.

As a result, they were told, Wellington was planning to silence his critics with one last final battle during the retreat to Lisbon. He had chosen a strong position on the southern bank of the Mondego at the Ponte Murcella on the road to Coimbra.

Robert ached to hurry there to rejoin his beloved riflemen, Joana knew. And the thought saddened her. What would she do when that time came? Return to Lisbon? Become the Marquesa das Minas again? She supposed she would do both. And in the meantime, would she see Colonel Leroux? Had she been mad to assume that he would search for her and find her? It seemed madness during those weeks. Finding her would be like finding the proverbial needle in the proverbial haystack.

She tried not to give in to such depressing thoughts.

Occasionally they came across small bands of the Ordenanza, and those men—and some women—were excited by the prospect of action at last. It seemed almost as if they welcomed the approach of the hated French, even though it meant invasion of their country. Once Joana and Captain Blake even met Duarte briefly, when they had strayed north of the road to call at a village in the hills. He found them there.

“Rumor had it that there was a stray rifleman roaming the hills,” he said with a grin, extending his right hand to Captain Blake before setting an arm about Joana's shoulders and kissing her cheek. “How goes the battle?”

He was elated because the French advance had finally begun. “We will not attack their main forces,” he explained. “We will let
them pass on in peace to the burned and barren countryside, and then attack their supply trains. We will catch them in a giant nutcracker. And their advance will be slowed while they release large detachments to try to catch us.” He grinned. “How is Joana? Still in the path of danger? You should come with me perhaps and let me send you to safety.” He still had an arm about her shoulders.

Robert, she saw with some satisfaction, was scowling.

“Let's talk about it,” she said, and she walked off a short distance with Duarte while two of his companions exchanged news with the captain. “How are Carlota and Miguel? Have you heard from them?”

“I sent to let them know we had got safely out of Spain,” he said. “Carlota is doubtless grinding her teeth with frustration at the inaction, but she is safe and far to the north of the advance. You are looking about as unlike the marquesa as you possibly could.”

“Yes.” She looked down ruefully at the dress, which was even more faded after its weeks of wear and several washes.

“I did not mean just the clothes,” he said. He looked at her critically for several silent seconds and then frowned. “Where are your knife and gun?”

“I am a prisoner,” she said. “They have been confiscated. This is the farthest from his person he has allowed me since we reentered Portugal.”

His frown deepened and then he chuckled. “You are serious?” he said.

“He will not believe my story,” she said. “Not that I begged and pleaded with him to do so. I would not so demean myself. He does not believe you are my brother. He thinks we became lovers the morning after you rescued us from Salamanca. He even gave me a scold about coming between you and Carlota and Miguel. He is taking me to Arthur to have me imprisoned as a French spy until the end of the wars.”

He chuckled again. “Well, that is all easily remedied,” he said. “I shall have a word with him, Joana.”

“No, you will not,” she said firmly. “Either he must believe me or he can believe what he wishes for the rest of his life. I do not care.”

“Joana.” He looked at her closely again. “Yes, now I know what it is. It is neither the clothes nor the absence of weapons. It is you. Your face—what is in it and what is behind it. You love him?”

She snorted. “Oh, certainly,” she said, “I am going to love a man who thinks me a liar and a slut.”

“Does he?” he said. “He has not fallen for your famous charm, then?”

“He actually tied me and gagged me once when Colonel Leroux and his men came close to us,” she said indignantly.

He laughed. “Ah, yes,” he said. “He is just the man you would fall for, Joana. I approve, by the way.”

“How foolish,” she said. “There is no possible future, Duarte. I am Luis's widow and the Comte de Levisse's daughter and he is a nobody who enlisted in the ranks of the English army. His life is the life of a soldier.”

“You would like there to be a future, then?” he said, squeezing her shoulder. “Poor Joana.”

“What nonsense you talk,” she said. “Kiss me. On the lips. He will be incensed.”

He kissed her on the lips and smiled at her. “You are sure you don't want me to explain?” he said.

“Captain Robert Blake can go to hell with my blessing,” she said. “Don't you dare tell him anything, Duarte.”

They strolled back to join the others, Duarte's arm still about her. He kissed her again when he and his companions took their leave a few minutes later.

It was evening already. She retired almost immediately with Robert to the small and none-too-clean inn room they had taken for the night—and had a thoroughly satisfactory quarrel even though it had to be conducted in lowered voices.

“I want one thing understood, Joana,” he said, taking her by the upper arm and turning her to face him as soon as the door closed
behind them. “For as long as you are my woman, you will remain faithful to me. There will be no flirting with other men or old lovers, and no kissing them. Your behavior was disgusting.”

She shrugged. “In England perhaps it is not the thing for brothers to kiss their sisters,” she said. “In Portugal it is.”

He shook her roughly by the arm. “It is no joking matter,” he said. “Perhaps it seems not greatly distasteful to you to kiss another man and allow him to keep his arm about you for all of twenty minutes while your current lover looks on. But it is distasteful to think of that woman and child awaiting his safe return in the mountains.”

“You are jealous,” she said, making a kissing gesture with her mouth. “Poor Robert. I think you love me just a little.”

“You disgust me,” he said. “You have no morals at all.”

“But I stayed with you,” she said, daring his wrath by reaching out one finger to run down his sleeve. “I might have gone with him, Robert. He wanted me to go.”

“I would like to have seen you try,” he said.

“He wanted to tell you the truth,” she said. “He wanted to tell you that he is my brother and that everything else I have told you is the truth.”

“You would not know the truth if it formed a fist and punched you in the nose,” he said.

“I don't think you would either,” she said, stung at last. “You are a pompous, opinionated ass, Robert. You enjoy the image of yourself as the wronged man and the jailer. It gives you a feeling of power to walk about loaded down with your own weapons and mine. You are afraid of losing that power if you believe me.”

“It stings, does it not,” he said, his voice icy, “to know one man, and that man your jailer as you so rightly put it, who will not hang on your every word and believe every foolish piece of nonsense you speak? It angers you to have one man who can resist you.”

“Resist me?” She raised her eyebrows and looked at him haughtily. “What you have been doing to me every night and day for weeks
except for those four days when nature forced you to stay away from me has not seemed much like resistance, Robert. If that is resistance, I wonder what capitulation would feel like. It might be interesting.”

“You confuse respect with lust,” he said. “I have no respect for you whatsoever, Joana, and no liking. I would not trust you if my life depended on it—especially then—or believe a word that came from your mouth. All I feel for you is lust. I have never made a secret of that fact.”

“And I for you,” she said. “How could I like or respect someone so inflexible and so humorless? How could I like an Englishman, and one who came out of the gutter? How could I respect someone who sneers at every word I speak? But you have a body to die for and you know what to do with it in bed, and so I lust after you. Do you think I will even deign to look at you once I have been restored to civilization? You will be beneath my notice.”

“You will be a prisoner and beneath mine,” he said.

“I will be the Marquesa das Minas,” she said, “and you will be remarkably foolish. I shall have all of Lisbon and the whole of the British army laughing at you.”

“Lie down,” he said, his face set into angry lines as he unbuckled his sword belt. “I have had enough of you for one day.”

“Have you?” she said. “Do I take it that I may sleep peacefully throughout the night, then? A night of rest? That will make a change.”

“Hush, Joana,” he said. “You have an answer for everything.”

“Would you like it if I did not?” she asked him, pulling her dress off over her head before lying down on the narrow lumpy bed. “Would you not be bored if I were a meek mute? Yes, sir, and no, sir, and if you please, sir, and if I can be of service, sir?” She batted her eyelids at him.

“Hush, Joana,” he said, removing his coat and his shirt and his boots before lying down beside her. “I grow mortally tired of your taunting.”