The Sometime Bride (29 page)

He stepped back, letting his artist’s hands fall to his sides. “Marcio, I thank you. We’ll talk in the morning.”

The young Portuguese studied the shuttered face before him, regretting the loss of the hero he had expected to find at the end of his journey. With a slight shake of his head Marcio bid Blas goodnight and walked, with a guilty feeling of relief, into the outer room. He welcomed the wood smoke, leather, damp wool, the unwashed bodies, the lingering scent of roast mutton which permeated the air. The murmuring voices, bursts of laughter and general bonhomie which made the shepherd’s hut a universe apart from the man now alone in the chill little room set against the side of the mountain.

Blas folded the map with elaborate care, stowing it in oiled paper inside a leather saddlebag, his mind spinning with old memories. From the same bag he fished out a letter-sized sheet of parchment, dipped his quill in ink and began to write, words spilling from his pen as a pent-up river rushes through a broken dam. Half way down the back of the paper, a roar of laughter penetrated from the adjoining room, and he paused, gazing blankly at what he had written. He sat for some moments with his head in his hands, then picked up the letter and held it to the candle flame. He watched with deliberate detachment as it disintegrated into ash.

Blas read his wife’s letter once again, brushing his hands across the neat feminine writing, as if to feel some essence of the woman who wrote it. Then that, too, was consigned to the flame. He ground the last tiny scraps of the two letters into the rocky floor with the toe of his well-worn black boot.

It was as if no message had ever come to this rocky refuge on the edge of a high pass through the northern Pyrenees.

P A R T II

Chapter Fifteen

“
Immediately the fairy gave a stroke with her wand, and in an instant all in the hall were transported into the prince’s own land. His subjects received him with joy. He married Beauty, and lived with her many years, and their happiness was compleat.
”

Steadfastly ignoring the pain of the classic fairy-tale ending, Cat translated into French the final sentences from the well-worn book which was one of her childhood treasures. She held up an elaborate drawing of Beauty hugging the great rat-like beast. “See,” she said in English to the small fair-haired boy sitting on her lap. “
La Belle, la Beauté
. Beauty.
Et la
bête.
The Beast. Dutifully, as if trying to please her, the little boy reached out a chubby finger and touched the picture.

“
The Beast is a Prince,” said Cat slowly and clearly. “He and Beauty are married. And very happy. Forever.” The little boy turned his thin face to hers, blue eyes wide in anxious inquiry. Abruptly, Cat closed the book and laid it aside, sweeping the solemn child into a warm embrace.

Perhaps it was wrong to try to teach the boy English. No one was sure of his age—probably somewhere between three and four—and he had already had more grief than any child should bear. And a surfeit of languages. French, Spanish, Portuguese, and now English. Was it better to leave him alone, Cat wondered. Love was perhaps the only thing that could help him, and of that, she had more than enough to give. Catarina kissed the child’s cheek, told him he was a
very
good boy (in French), then allowed his nurse Rosalía Santos to carry him off for the lunch which the ship’s cook had prepared with great care for the vessel’s youngest passenger.

Unlike Cat’s maid Juana who did not wish to leave her association with one of the Casa’s footmen, the plump, middle-aged Rosalía Santos had agreed to uproot her life to accompany a young French boy into a foreign land. She might be able to speak only Portuguese, but her heart made up for what she lacked in words.

With the child gone, Catarina was once again overwhelmed by the enormity of what she was doing. The well-appointed ship’s saloon was suddenly stifling. She threw on the chinchilla-trimmed cloak Blas had given her so many years before and went out on deck. Overhead, the slap of the sails beat a rippling tattoo under sunshine which became steadily weaker and less warming as they traveled north. The October wind was brisk and chill. And welcome, for it cut through the miasma of grief, the pain of losing everything she loved. Father. Lover. Friends. Home. All that was customary, familiar. The very fabric of her life.

Think about the child. The child was all she had left.

“
He was just sitting there,” Blas had said as they looked down at the small fair head sticking out of the blanket roll on Cat’s carpet. “Like a little statue in his blue jacket and big white collar. His
bonne
was lying dead at his side.”

“
Are you sure the woman was not his mother?” Cat asked automatically, still unable to credit the sight revealed by the pale morning light filtering into her bedroom.

“
She was dressed as a nanny. In black with a neat little cap still in place on her head. I doubt she’d been raped,” Blas added hastily. I think she was trampled. You can’t imagine the chaos, Cat. The French were so confident of victory, they even set up seats so their women could watch. When we routed them and cut off the road to San Sebastian, the soldiers dropped everything and ran down the track to Pamplona, their women and children following as best they could. Among the everything they left behind was all the treasure they’d looted from Spain. Gold, silver, jewelry, great works of art. Just lying there, spilling out of every wagon and carriage. Our soldiers went mad. Wellington could scarcely put together enough men to chase the French down the road to Pamplona.

“
I only found him,” Blas continued, “because one of our
guerrillero
scouts was missing.” I was searching the field for anyone not in uniform. And there he was, Cat, clutching his
bonne
’s crucifix, too shocked and frightened even to cry.” Blas’s eyes darkened. “There’s no way of knowing exactly how the nanny died—she could have been trampled by either side—but I believe she threw herself on top of the child to protect him. I couldn’t very well leave him there, now could I?” Blas added defensively.

The question was not worthy of a reply. “And he couldn’t tell you who he was?” Cat asked, wondering why she was so sure Blas was telling the truth. A fleeting cynical whisper noted that the small blond boy bore absolutely no resemblance to Blas. And somehow Cat was quite certain any children of his would be a butterstamp of himself.

Blas glanced down at the child who was still sleeping soundly. “I made inquiries among the French prisoners. There was an infantry lieutenant who thought he might be the child of a colonel of
chasseurs
whose name he didn’t know, but he’d seen the boy up before a colonel on a horse.”

“
And the mother?”

“
That was all the lieutenant knew.” Blas raised his amber eyes in the helpless male appeal which had melted hearts from London to Lisbon to Madrid. “Don’t be angry, Cat. I couldn’t leave him with the camp followers. He seemed so fragile, so alone. I just picked him up and brought him home.”

“
Angry? How could I be angry?” She looked down at the small sleeping child and swallowed hard. Until that moment she had not realized just how much she wanted a child of her own. “What is his name?”

“
That’s just it.” Blas shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“
Surely he’s old enough to know his own name.”

“
He doesn’t talk.”

“
O quê?
” Startled, Cat lapsed into Portuguese.

“
Shock, I would think. He hasn’t said a word since I found him. Just looks at me with those big solemn eyes. I haven’t even managed to get a smile out of him. And believe me, I’ve tried. All I know is that he understands when I speak to him in French, so he certainly isn’t deaf. And his
bonne
must have called him ‘
petit chou
’ because that’s what he answers to.”

“
I refuse to call a child a cabbage,” Cat declared indignantly.

“
In France it’s a term of endearment. If that’s what he’s used to, I suggest you not be so stubborn.”

“
I shall call him Pierre,” she declared. “Anything is better than cabbage.”

“
He likes to be called a little cabbage,” Blas assured her. “Just wait, you’ll find out.”

But Cat’s attention had somersaulted into a look of horror. “He was here last night. All night,” she accused. “How could you . . . how could we? . . . Blas, how could you leave him there like that?”

“
He was perfectly comfortable. That’s the softest bed he’s had since we left Vitoria.”

“
You know what I mean!” Cat hissed.

Blas frowned, genuinely puzzled. “Oh . . .
that
,” he said at last. “Believe me, I’ve spent two weeks on the road with him. He sleeps like the dead. Which reminds me . . .,” he added with a leer, falling on top of his wife and pushing her back into the soft mattress, his mouth hovering over hers.

She kicked him. Hard. But not where it would hurt the most.

Cat’s lips tilted in reminiscence as the cold Atlantic wind whipped her hair, the salt spray stinging her face. Only Blas himself would she treasure as much as the gift he had brought her from the battlefield at Vitoria.

A gift she might not be able to keep.

When Blas returned to Spain he carried four identical letters, each with a different address. The letters would be passed across the French lines in one of the not uncommon exchanges between French and English pickets. With luck, one or more of the letters would find the man they sought. And one day . . . one day Pierre would go home.

If there was no one left to claim him, however, then he was hers. Something . . . someone to love.

Later that evening, after dining at the captain’s table, Sir Giles Everingham and his party made themselves comfortable in the ship’s well-appointed saloon. Still on the right side of fifty, Sir Giles was a quietly attractive man. His straight brown hair was not yet thinning, his love of good food and excellent wine had thickened his waistline by only a few pounds. When working, he covered his penetrating gray eyes with a pair of spectacles. No stranger would ever take him for anything other than a typical English gentleman, except to speculate that he might be more given to his books than to his hounds.

Sir Giles Everingham was, in fact, the spymaster’s master, the man who had just inherited the spymaster’s only child. He had come to Lisbon to wind up Thomas Audley’s affairs, both business and personal, and to escort his new responsibility back to England. He had not expected the supposed widow to be accompanied by a companion, a child and a nurse but, long accustomed to surprises, Sir Giles had adjusted with grace and aplomb.

A low, musical laugh drifted above the murmured conversations in the saloon. Sir Giles turned his deceptively mild eyes toward Catherine, who was sitting on a sofa with one of the younger ship’s officers, her face tilted up to his in apparently rapt attention. Her shining hair was swept into a chignon under a very proper black lace cap which, on her, merely managed to look provocative. Wisps of golden red curls strayed onto her cheeks and forehead, swaying seductively as she continued her animated conversation. She was the epitome of a young widow totally at home in a world of men.

So like her mother. Whose great beauty had been expected to bring wealth and prominence to her border family. And who, instead, had run off with the youngest son of an English vicar. Sir Giles had first seen Thomas and Elspeth Audley when he had been sent to assess the situation in Lisbon in the early days of the French Revolution. The two expatriots were managing quite well on Thomas’s extraordinary skill with cards and his genius for organization. Thomas Audley was already well known as a talented middleman in dealings with the English who, as all Portuguese knew, were quite mad.

Sir Giles, recognizing a kindred spirit and appreciating Thomas’s brilliant mind, his flair for meticulous planning as well as daring exploits, had recruited him on the spot. Their long collaboration eventually grew into the Casa Audley and a spy network rivaling Napoleon’s own. And now, more than twenty years later, he had been given the responsibility for all that was left of his friends’ many lives. And somewhere out there was a young man, following in the same tradition, on whose actions young Cat’s life hinged.

It was the one subject Sir Giles had not yet brought up with his new ward, sensing that the topic was delicate. Being named guardian for a young woman who had been married, in truth or in fiction, for six years was one of his more interesting challenges. Thomas might have solved the irregularities of the matter by arbitrarily removing Don Alexis Perez de Leon from the ranks of the living. But as matters stood at the moment, the girl was not truly widowed unless Sir Giles’s most independent, strong-willed and secretive spy chose to stay dead.

Sir Giles stood with a glass of brandy idly listening to the First Officer reassure an anxious English banker that the Atlantic, except for a few annoying Americans, was an English sea since Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar in 1805. “Letting the Portuguese fleet slip off to Brazil completely ended the Frogs’ chances for renewing their navy,” the ship’s officer added. “Boney hasn’t had a navy for years.”