A Lady In Need Of An Heir. Louise Allen
knife blade through the twilight.
The violence that is in men’s hearts...
Gaby bent her head over her ledgers. There was work to be done, a winery did not run itself. She could not allow herself to think about Norwood or the nightmares would begin again. He was gone, dead, and she was not going to allow him to haunt her.
* * *
The clock in the hall struck six as she finished her notes and lists. She put down her pen, blotted the ledger, assembled the papers and allowed herself to look out of the window at last. And there her uninvited guest was, strolling bareheaded through the cherry orchard as though he was surveying his own acres. He was heading directly for the burial plot.
She was probably overreacting, Gaby told herself as she ran down the stairs and out through the front door. There was no reason why he should not look around the grounds—they had been laid out as a pleasure garden, after all, and she was proud of them. It was perfectly natural that he should visit the burial enclosure and pay his respects, if he was so inclined. As for what he might find there... Well, that was not his business. He was a messenger passing through and would soon be gone. What he thought of her was not of the slightest importance.
She found him standing at the foot of her parents’ graves, head slightly bowed, apparently deep in thought. She stood on just that spot almost every day, collecting her thoughts, asking questions, wrestling with difficult issues. She did not expect an answer from beyond, of course, but simply thinking about how her parents would handle any problem often gave her own ideas direction and validation. Her father had never given her firm instructions about the business, he taught by example and encouraged innovation. The only hard line either parent had laid down was, ‘Follow your conscience, always. If you are uneasy in your mind, then listen and do the right thing.’ It was a rule she attempted to live by.
‘December 1807,’ the earl said, looking up as she reached the headstone and faced him. ‘The month the French took Porto for the first time.’
‘Yes. There was an epidemic of the influenza, just to add to the general horror. I think the anxiety and stress of the invasion made my parents particularly vulnerable to the infection.’ She could say it unemotionally now. Sometimes it even seemed like a dream, or a story she had read in a book, that time when she found herself orphaned with a fourteen-year-old brother and a quinta to, somehow, protect against the armies fighting to control a country in turmoil. She missed them all every day. The pain had become easier to live with, the sense of loss never seemed to diminish.
‘And this is your brother.’ Leybourne had moved on to the next headstone, reminding her just what a bad job she had done of protecting Thomas. He crouched down to read the inscription. ‘September 1810. We were behind the lines of Torres Vedras, holding Lisbon by then. I remember those months.’ Not with any pleasure, from the tone of his voice.
‘The French killed Thomas. Not disease.’ The French and treachery.
‘Hell, I’m sorry.’ He had bent down to read the inscription, but he looked up sharply at her words, then back to the stone. He reached out one long finger to trace the dates of birth and death. ‘I had not realised he had been so young, only seventeen. What happened? Were they scavenging around here?’
‘Only just seventeen.’
Old enough to be thinking about girls and so shy that he had no idea how to talk with them, let alone anything else. Old enough to be shaving off fluff and young enough to be proud of the fact. Young enough to still kiss his big sister without reserve when he came home and old enough to resent her worrying...
‘He was with the guerrilheiros. Not all the time, only when your Major Norwood thought to...use him.’ Exploit him.
Leybourne’s head came up again at the tone of her voice. ‘Andrew Norwood, the riding officer?’
‘The spy, yes. He was happy to find an enthusiastic, idealistic lad who knew his way around the hills here.’ An inexperienced boy. One who might well get himself killed—and then how useful that would be for Major Norwood, she had realised far too late. Gaby kept her voice studiedly neutral. Norwood might well have been a friend of the earl when he had been an officer here. He might be the kind of man Norwood had been.
‘Could you not stop him?’ Leybourne stood up. ‘I’m sorry, no, of course you could not if he was bent on fighting the French, not without chaining him up. We had boys younger than that lying about their age to enlist.’
‘If I had thought chaining him would work I would have tried it, believe me,’ she said, heartsick all over again at the remembered struggle, the arguments, the rows.
We are English and Portugal is our home, Thomas had thrown at her. The French are our enemy and the enemy of Portugal. It is our duty to fight them.
‘I told him that we had a duty to try and keep the quinta going, to give work and shelter to our people, to have something to offer the economy when the fighting was over so the country could be rebuilt,’ she said now. ‘The French would go soon enough, I argued.’
While we skulk here, nothing but farmers and merchants. We are descended from earls, her brother had retorted, impassioned and idealistic. We Frosts fight.
Gaby came back to herself, furious to find her vision blurred. She blinked hard. ‘I was so proud of him and so frightened for him. He was a boy who had the heart of a man and he was betrayed in the end.’
‘By whom? Someone within the guerrilheiros? It was the same with the Spanish guerrillas, a few had been turned by the French for money or because their families were threatened.’ The earl had his hand on the headstone, the strong fingers curled around the top as though he would protect it.
‘No. But it doesn’t matter now. The person responsible is dead.’ Her voice was steady again and she had her voice and her emotions under control. She resisted the impulse to glance at the riverbank where two men had gone over, fighting to the death, into the rushing water. There was a wood stack there now, although no traces had been left to hide.
How had this man manged to lure her into revealing so much? So much emotion? Gaby found a smile and turned to lead him out of the plot, past the graves of her grandparents Thomas and Elizabeth and her great-grandparents Rufus and Maria Frost, who had first owned the quinta. Weathered now, that first stone bore the family crest the quinta was named for, a falcon grasping a vine branch, faint but defiant on the old stone.
‘Lord Leybourne, if you come this way I will show you the rose garden.’ The roses were virtually over, but it would serve to move him on to ground that held less power over her.
Or not, it seemed. ‘Call me Gray, everyone does,’ he said. The infuriating man was walking away from her towards the southern corner of the plot, not the gate. ‘What is this?’ He had stopped at the simple white slab that was tilted to face the rising sun.
L.M., he read. He glanced up, frowning at her as she came closer, then went back to the inscription. March 25, 1811. Remember. ‘That is the date of the battle of Campo Maior. Who is this stone for?’
She smiled at him, amused, despite her feelings, by the way he frowned at her. It was clear that he resented not being in total command of the facts of any situation. The impulse to shock him was too strong to resist.
‘My lover.’
Gray straightened up, not at all certain he could believe what Gabrielle Frost had just said.
‘Your lover? Your betrothed, you mean? Which regiment was he in?’
‘No, you did hear me correctly, my lord. My lover. And, no, I am not discussing him with you.’ She bent to brush a fallen leaf from the stone, then walked away from him, seemingly unconcerned that she had just dropped a shell into his hands, its fuse still hissing.