by Mary Balogh
“A lady!” The captain’s tone was scathing. “A woman who would betray her adopted country must be called a lady? I could think of other words that would better describe her.”
“You have failed,” Colonel Leroux said crisply. “This is war, Captain. We all fail sometimes. Real men learn to take their losses with their gains.”
“If I could just get my hands on you for one minute,” Captain Blake told Joana, his eyes narrowed to slits.
“Really, Robert.” She looked up into his eyes and laughed at him, her foot swinging nonchalantly. “Do you think I would ever have allowed your hands to touch me if there had not been the possibility of information to be had from you?”
“If I could just have that minute,” he said, “I would make sure that no other man would ever wish to touch you. Without you I would have succeeded. Do you realize how much destruction you are wreaking? A whole country to fall to the French again, and my own army destroyed? Do you realize? Your husband was Portuguese.”
“Luis?” she said. “Luis was a bore and a coward.”
“And perhaps you will not win after all,” he said. “Perhaps these men will begin to doubt your testimony. What would a woman be expected to see, after all, during a journey? And perhaps they will conclude that what I am doing now is all an act.”
“Are there any defenses of Lisbon, Jeanne?” the colonel asked.
“Of course.” She shrugged. “My friend Colonel Lord Wyman of the dragoons took me to see the defenses south of the city. Until recently it seemed to the English the only sensible way for you to come. Only recently has it struck them that you would be mad enough to come through the hills to the north. They are desperate to divert you again. Or this is what Duncan said, anyway.”
“And you told me earlier that nothing of importance had happened during your visit to Lisbon,” the general said, looking fondly at Joana and shaking his head.
“Yes,” she said, smiling ruefully. “I suppose what Duncan said and showed me does have some importance in retrospect, does it not? And my very tedious journey back to Viseu. Must I stay longer, General? I am to go shopping with my aunt, but all morning there were visitors—so many kind gentlemen, you know—and now this visit has lasted longer than I expected.”
“No, no, Jeanne,” the general said. “You have been very helpful, my dear. Very helpful indeed. It may even be no exaggeration to say that you have saved the empire by your observations and by your courage in being willing to confront Captain Blake face-to-face.”
Joana flushed with pleasure at the praise and got to her feet. Colonel Leroux rushed forward to offer her his arm.
“I shall escort you to your carriage, Jeanne,” he said. “I shall return within a few minutes, General.”
General Valéry inclined his head.
Captain Blake had to move finally so that Joana could pass him to reach the door. He stepped to one side, his eyes narrowed on her.
“I am so sorry, Robert,” she said, pausing for a moment as she passed. “But war is war and I have an emperor to serve in any way I can.”
He said nothing. But he felt a violent dislike for her, for a woman without a conscience, for one who could flirt with all and sundry merely to serve her own ends. And he disliked her for the fool she had made of him. She had always mocked him. He had known it, and yet he had allowed an unwilling attraction for her to grow into almost an obsession. He had allowed himself to touch her, to be aroused by her. He had even allowed himself to believe on that last night in Viseu that perhaps she felt some affection for him. And all the time her sole purpose had been to try to worm information—any useful information—out of him.
He hated her. Even though it seemed that unwittingly she had helped his cause that morning, he hated her. In fact, she could hardly have done better if she were his accomplice. He felt that his interrogators would now believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the Lines of Torres Vedras were imaginary, that in reality there were no defenses between Almeida and Lisbon except the armies of Lord Wellington.
She had helped him. She had unwittingly done what he had hoped to do himself but had not known how to accomplish. How chagrined she would be when she discovered the truth eventually. And how popular she would be with the French!
But she did not yet know she had helped him. She had wanted to betray both her adopted country of Portugal and her mother’s country. And intentions were more important than actual performance.
He hated her.
She left the room on the arm of the colonel, and he was dismissed immediately afterward.
“I shall summon you again if you can be of further help to us, Captain,” General Valéry said. “In the meantime, I trust that your quarters are comfortable and that your needs are being adequately attended to?”
Captain Blake inclined his head curtly.
“And I trust that you will still be my guest this evening?” the general asked. “You must allow me to show you hospitality. Such scenes as this are merely the distasteful but necessary business of war, Captain.”
“I shall be there, sir,” Captain Blake said before turning on his heel and leaving the room, not sure if his elation over the apparent success of his mission despite the switching of the papers and the unexpected appearance of the marquesa was quite sufficient to outweigh his depression over an indefinite captivity, and over the discovery he had just made about Joana.
The Marquesa das Minas. Jeanne Morisette. He did not want to think of her as Joana.
* * *
Joana was an occasional spy for the French. She did not believe she was considered of particular importance by them and did not expect to be taken into anyone’s confidence in a major way. But Colonel Leroux, clearly pleased by what had happened in General Valéry’s room, did confide one thing.
“You were magnificent, Jeanne,” he said to her as he escorted her out to her waiting carriage. “You utterly confounded him. He will try to confuse us again. He will try to discredit what you have told us. But the truth came out when he lost his temper with you. There is a saying that there is no wrath worse than that of a woman scorned. I believe it applies equally to men. I suppose he was in love with you?”
She shrugged. “Men are always being foolish and claiming to be in love with me,” she said. “I take no notice.”
“I could have slapped a glove in his face more than once,” he said. “But he is to be considered our guest, you see, now that he has given us his parole. He is not to be mistreated. However.” He laid one hand on top of hers and smoothed his fingers over hers. “If he should show you any further discourtesy, Jeanne, you must tell me and I shall see that he is properly dealt with.”
“I hope never to see him again,” she said. “But thank you, Colonel. You are kind.”
“The campaign will be over in no time at all,” he said, “now that we have our cue to start. Before the summer is out, we will all be in Lisbon. I enjoyed my stay there last time. I believe I may enjoy it more this time.” His eyes appreciated her.
“Before the summer is out?” she said. “So soon?”
“The marshal has been waiting for just such a certainty as this,” he said, “before investing Ciudad Rodrigo. The task is to be Ney’s. He is just awaiting the order to move. I believe it will come within a day or two. Once Ciudad has fallen, Almeida will not hold out long. And if Wellington brings his forces to the defense of either fort, then we will crush him. This is a great day. The beginning of the end for the English occupation of European soil.”
“And I have had a part in it,” she said, smiling dazzlingly at him. “How good that makes me feel.”
“And you have had a part in it.” They came to a stop at the door of her carriage, and he raised her hand to his lips. “A large part, Jeanne. You are to be at the general’s dinner tonight?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Then suddenly it beco
mes an occasion to be anticipated with great pleasure,” he said, holding her hand close to his lips and looking down at her with smoldering eyes. “Until later, Jeanne.”
“You are to be there too, Marcel?” Her smile brightened. “I am so glad.”
He smiled at her, revealing even white teeth. It was the sort of smile that was guaranteed to turn feminine knees weak.
“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “Until later.”
She sat back against the cushions of her carriage and did not look out of the window again, though she knew that he stood there until the carriage moved away. It was a primary rule of flirtation, she had learned years before, to allow the gentleman to be just a little more smitten than she.
She closed her eyes and was thankful that the journey home was not a long one. She rather suspected that her stomach would have rebelled at any great distance. He had touched her and kissed her hand. She had felt his mustache as well as his lips against her flesh. And his breath had been warm. She shuddered, deeply revolted.
She was going to kill him. She had always planned that. She was not going to enlist Duarte’s help, though he would be disappointed not to do it himself. She was going to do it. She was going to kill him.
But it was not a simple thing to accomplish. It would have to be planned. She would have to choose the time and the place and the method with care. She would have to think about it.
In the meantime she was going to have to flirt with him. She could think of no other way of keeping him close enough so that she could kill him when the opportunity came. The thought of flirting with the man she had watched rape Maria and give the order for her death had her setting one cold and shaking hand over her mouth. She felt cold all over. And then she had to dip her head sharply forward to save herself from fainting.
And there was Robert. He must hate her now in all earnest. Even though she had helped his cause, supposedly without realizing it, he must still hate her. And it was all so pointless, she thought. It seemed that Captain Robert Blake was after all a fine-enough actor to have accomplished the mission without her help. He had certainly taken full advantage of her apparent misunderstanding of the situation.
She wondered who had punched him in the face and bruised his eye.
He must hate her. And if she was going to have him set free in time to take part in the summer’s campaign, she was going to have to make him hate her a great deal more. But she would explain all to him later, she thought. Perhaps it would make a difference. Perhaps it would.
And she was suddenly and unwillingly reminded of the other Robert—her Robert—and how she had made him hate her too, though from an entirely different motive. And how she had never had a chance to explain to him.
But she could not dwell on thoughts of Robert at the moment. There was a dinner to attend that evening and some kind of a relationship to set up with Colonel Marcel Leroux. She must concentrate her mind and her energies on that.
* * *
She was wearing a gown of shimmering gold, chosen to give herself courage. Finding the courage to face a roomful of people, many of them strangers, was not usually a problem for Joana. But then, it was no ordinary task she had set herself. She had had her maid style her hair in a high topknot with cascades of ringlets trailing down the back of her head and along her neck.
And yet the first person she saw when she entered the general’s drawing room prior to dinner was not Colonel Leroux but someone she was equally reluctant to meet again and someone who looked just as shabby and just as awkwardly out-of-place and just as altogether more attractive than any other man present as he had been in that ballroom in Lisbon. She had not thought of his being present.
He could not be avoided. He was standing just inside the drawing room doors. A French officer and his wife were just turning away from him.
“Ah, Robert,” she said, stepping up to him before he saw her, scorning even to try avoiding him, “you are here, are you? French uniforms glitter quite as brightly as English ones, do they not?”
“I daresay you do not see much difference,” he said, “or in the men inside them. I do.”
“Ah,” she said, smiling at him, “that was a setdown, was it not? Are you very angry with me?”
“More with myself,” he said, “for having known your secret and for having thought that perhaps it was of no significance. It does not matter to you that your mother was English?”
“You know that too?” she said, laughing. “Why did you find out so much, Robert? Was it that you wished to know with whom you were in love?”
“You would like to believe that, would you not?” he said. “You would like to believe that your charms have never failed. And you did try hard. But you mistake lust for love, Joana. I lusted after you. I wanted to lay you. I wanted to take my pleasure inside your body. Is that being in love? If it is, then I suppose I am guilty.”
His blue eyes—one still bloodshot—looked coldly down into hers.
“Ah,” she said, setting one gloved hand on his sleeve for a brief moment, “but I could make you love me if I wished, Robert. Even now. And you are not telling the entire truth. If you had wished merely to . . . lay me, as you so vulgarly put it, then you would not have pulled back from that embrace at my aunt’s ball in Viseu. It was you, you know. I would not have pulled back. At least, not quite so soon. So I do not believe you. But then, spies never tell the truth, do they?”
“You should know,” he said.
“Touché.” She smiled at him and remembered that she must flirt with him too—him and Colonel Leroux both. If her plan for effecting his release was to work, she must flirt with him and force a response from him too. He did not look tonight as if he would ever respond to her again.
But she smiled for the first time that evening with something like real pleasure. There was a challenge in making Robert fall in love with her. Flirtation was almost never a challenge. But this time it was. Perhaps for once she would enjoy her work.
“I am going to do it,” she said. “I am going to make you fall in love with me. It should not be difficult. I believe you are already more than halfway there.”
“Joana,” he said, his voice and his eyes perfectly serious, “I suppose the fact that you are half-French saves you from the stigma of being called a traitor. But I see you as such nevertheless. We are on different sides of the fence. We are enemies, and as far as I am concerned, bitter enemies. You betrayed both me and my country—your mother’s country—earlier today. You would be well advised not to waste your time trying the impossible. Flirt with the French officers. There are doubtless a few thousand of them who would be only too willing to fall under your spell.”
“Ah,” she said, “but it is you I want under my spell, Robert.”
“Because I am the only man who has ever resisted it?” he asked.
She smiled. “Perhaps,” she said. “You are, you know. But not for long.”
She wondered why she was giving herself such a challenge and breaking her own rule, the one she had practiced just that day. She was showing him that she was far more smitten than he was. She had told him quite openly that she was going to pursue him instead of letting him believe—as all men she had known had believed—that he was the pursuer.
It was a formidable challenge, one that it seemed she could not win. But there was excitement in it. And somehow, despite everything—despite the dangers and challenges she had already faced and those still to come—she needed this particular type of excitement.
“I believe, Joana,” he said, “that you are about to have a far more glittering beau than I. And you would do well to stay away from me while we are both here in Salamanca. I might do you harm, you know, and your loyalty might be brought into question if you are seen to hang around me.”
She smiled at him, but a hand at the small of her back caused her to turn her head. She smiled up at Colonel Leroux. “Marcel,
” she said.
“I hope Captain Blake is acting the gentleman this evening, and not renewing any of the threats he made earlier,” he said, taking her hand and bowing over it.
“Oh,” she said, laughing, “Robert’s temper has cooled and he was being quite civil. But he is not a gentleman, Marcel. He would be far more suited to the French army than the English. He has risen through the ranks and become a commissioned officer entirely through his own merits. Captain Blake is what is known as a hero, you see, but he is not a gentleman. He will not tell me what he was. It is most annoying. Was he a tradesman’s son or a runaway apprentice or a convict?”
She laughed again, though she could see Robert’s jaw tighten. And when she glanced at Colonel Leroux, it was to see disdain on his face. Oh, yes, she thought suddenly. Of course. That was the way it must be. That was the way she must plan it. Yes. Robert and the colonel must hate each other. She must pit them against each other.
Excitement and a sense of glorious danger built in her and she smiled dazzlingly at both men.
“He is not going to answer, you see,” she said to the colonel. “He never does. And that leads me to expect that my last guess is the closest to the truth.” She linked her arm through the colonel’s. “Shall we walk about, Marcel? You may introduce me to the people I do not know. There are a few. It is quite a while since I was here last.”
She threw one final smile over her shoulder at Robert, who was about to be taken under the wing of two officers, she saw. He looked back at her with cold, steady eyes.
14
THERE was so much freedom. So much damned freedom. He could come and go as he pleased in Salamanca, and could have had as active a social life there as he could have had in Lisbon during the winter and spring. He was treated with respect and courtesy and even liking by many of the French officers he met.
Sometimes he felt as if it would be better, more real, if he were caged up in a prison cell. Sometimes he regretted giving his parole. At least if he had not, if he were in a cell, he could dream of escape, plan for it, attempt it. At least there would be some challenge to make life worth living.