Love Under Fire

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1813“No! No! – Please don’t hit me again – spare me! – spare me!” The girl’s voice ended in a shriek of pain as the whip descended with an even greater force and she collapsed on the floor sobbing bitterly. One last lash and then the woman holding the whip flung it with all her strength against the wall. “That will teach you, you little fool,” she stormed, “to let your father get into such a state.” “It w-was not m-my fault,” the girl sobbed. “He sent me – away when his friends called – to s-see him.” “Excuses! Always excuses,” the woman standing over her muttered. “What am I to do now? How can I go to the ball without him?” Seeing that the tempest had abated a little, the girl lying on the floor raised herself cautiously. Tears were streaming down her small pointed face. The hazel eyes she regarded her persecutor with held no enmity and no bitterness. She was used to such beatings for her stepmother’s temper was proverbially turbulent and when things went wrong she always had to take it out on someone. Elvina was the nearest and easiest person to wreak her anger on and invariably the girl received the full brunt of it ‘What can I do? What can I do?’ Mistress Lake asked. She moved across the room to the window to stand looking out with a frown between her dark eyes while she drummed her long thin fingers on the windowsill. The daughter of a Portuguese father and a French mother, Juanita, the second wife of Major George Lake, late of the fifth Regiment, had been a beauty when she first married. But the privations of war, her husband’s ill health since his leg had been amputated and his incessant bouts of drinking had left her lined and querulous with a disgruntled down-turned mouth and frantic bursts of ill-temper that at times seemed to bring her almost to the verge of madness. Elvina was terrified of her stepmother. At the same time she had learned with a certain philosophical common sense to accept the beatings that she received all too frequently as something that must be endured for no other reason than that she could not escape them. Very small and thin owing to the lack of nourishment over these past formative and growing years, she looked little more than a child who should be in the nursery when, in reality, she had just passed her seventeenth birthday. Now, as she gathered herself up from the floor and smoothed down the skirts of her faded and worn gown, she gave a little murmur of pain from the soreness of her back and shoulders and saw that a weal on her arm was bleeding where the whip had broken the skin. “What am I to do?” Mistress Lake asked from the window. “I cannot think,” Elvina answered, “unless you go without him.” The frown between her stepmother’s eyes lightened for a moment. “Dare I? What would people think? What would they say?” “I hardly think they would notice,” Elvina pointed out. “I could say he was ill,” Mistress Lake said. “That is true enough. Or I could tell the truth,” she added bitterly, “and say that he is lying in a drunken sodden stupor from which nothing, not even the arrival of the French, would awaken him.” “I wish I could come with you,” Elvina said a little wistfully. Her stepmother laughed unpleasantly. “That would indeed be to invite comment. A nice scarecrow you would look in your old clothes. Besides you have not been invited and I have told you often enough that you never will be asked to any of these parties so long as I can prevent it. I did not bargain, when I married your father, for having to chaperone a girl almost as old as I am myself.” This was a palpable lie and they both knew it. Juanita Lake was over thirty, but she always spoke of herself as if she was a mere girl. Tactfully ignored was the fact that she had only married an Englishman because no one in Lisbon wished to espouse a girl who had not only no dowry but a French mother to boot. She slammed her hand down with a sudden crash on the windowsill. “I shall go alone,” she declared. “It is decided! I shall throw myself on the mercy of the first good-looking man I see and ask him to be my escort into the ballroom. Who knows? Lord Wye himself might see fit to befriend me.” “It will be a wonderful ball,” Elvina said wistfully, rubbing her arms, which had begun to ache intolerably. “The finest ball ever seen in Lisbon,” Juanita Lake answered. “And why not? When a messenger arrived with the news that the Duke of Wellington had defeated the French at Vitoria and gained a famous victory, I declare my heart almost stopped beating for joy.” Juanita always exaggerated her patriotism for fear that people should remember her French blood. Half her ill-temper came from her embarrassment in bearing enemy blood and her fears that people would constantly be talking about her. She made few friends and when, by any chance, her overtures to new acquaintances were disregarded or misunderstood, she beat Elvina to relieve her feelings. Then, as often as not, she wept wild, bitter hysterical tears, declaring that she hated everybody and everything in this accursed war-ridden country. Food had been very short for years, but now, with the British continually landing new consignments of troops in Lisbon and with the hope and excitement engendered by the Duke of Wellington's recent victories, things were better. The peasants no longer hoarded everything for themselves. There were vegetables, fruit and game for sale in the market and fresh bread was baked every day. Elvina could remember when it was not a question of having no money, but of being unable to buy anything with it. Now money was the only difficulty. Unfortunately, as far as the household was concerned, Juanita took everything that was available, for Major Lake was too drunk or too indolent to care what happened to his pension. As long as he had enough to drink that was all that mattered to him and, as his credit was good and he had innumerable friends in the town, he at least was content to drink and forget his domestic troubles. It was becoming obvious to Elvina that he forgot her too. “What is going to happen to me, Papa?” she had asked him only a week earlier. He had been more sober than usual, but he stared at her, puckering his brow as if he was not only trying to understand what she was saying but also to remember who she was. “I cannot stay like this for ever,” she went on. “I am growing up and yet I am never allowed to go out to meet anyone. I have no friends. I am only a servant to Juanita, as you well know.” For a moment Major George Lake had the grace to look ashamed. “Things have been difficult owing to the War,” he muttered. “Your stepmother gets overwrought.” “Yes, I know,” Elvina said patiently. “But the news is better. People talk of the War being over before the end of the year.” “With Napoleon still the conqueror of Europe?” Major Lake asked derisively. “There is not a chance.” “Well, perhaps next year then,” Elvina persisted. “But I am seventeen, Father, and I feel that I should be thinking of other things besides housework and mending Juanita’s clothes. She will not even allow me to have a new gown for myself.” “I will speak to her,” Major Lake replied hastily. But he averted his eyes as he spoke so that his daughter knew that he would do nothing of the sort. He was afraid of his second wife and indeed they both were. “I do not think it is for Juanita to decide my future,” Elvina went on. “That is for you, Papa. When the War is over, would it be possible for me to go back to England? Surely some of my mother’s relations must still be alive.” “If they are, they have made no effort to get in touch with me,” Major Lake said angrily. “I was not good enough for their daughter. Oh, no! They wanted somebody better for her. ‘Who is this fellow, Lake?’ they asked, looking down their long noses. Well I would rot in Hell before I would ask them for a penny piece.” He was not as sober as Elvina had thought. As he grew angry, his voice thickened and now lurching towards the door, he passed through it, slamming it behind him. Elvina sank down on a chair and covered her face with her hands. What was to be the end of it all? Sometimes, remembering her mother, she felt that she could go on no longer. Then the house had been clean and pretty, filled with flowers, sunshine and happiness. They had moved here five years ago in 1808 from Gibraltar where her father had been stationed ever since he married. Elvina could remember their home there, but her most vivid memories were of Lisbon. She could see her mother now, coming through the door, her fair hair like a halo around her pretty face and Elvina would run to meet her. “Elvina, my darling!” she would say and clasp her close to her heart. Elvina felt the tears drop from her eyes onto her fingers. Why, she asked in her heart, could she not have died as well of the cholera that, brought by the wounded and dying back from the front line where the French were driving their enemies irresistibly before them, had swept the City. She could remember her father going off with his Regiment, looking tall and handsome and in the best of spirits. “Don’t cry, my pretty,” he had said to her mother. “We will beat Boney and I will be back with you before you realise I have gone.” But he had returned to a house empty of his wife and to lie himself between life and death for several months. “The French are invincible! We will never beat them. It’s hopeless to try,” he would say despondently. This depressed the new recruits as they came out from England and cast such a gloom over the dinner parties that many of his old cronies ceased to entertain him. It was then, to regain his spirits and relieve his pain, that he took to drink. And during one of his more drunken bouts he brought home his new wife. If Elvina had been quite unprepared to be presented with a stepmother, it had been no consolation to find that Juanita was just as unpleasantly surprised. “You told me you had a child, but I thought it was only a few years old,” she said to her husband. She looked distastefully at Elvina, aged fourteen, who stood awkwardly staring at the dark-eyed and over-dressed woman her father had just announced to her as a new mother. “Come, you must be friends,” Major Lake said jovially. He had reached the stage in his drinking when the entire world seemed glorious and everyone was his friend. “Kiss each other. You will enjoy each other’s company,” he urged, while Elvina, looking fearfully into the new Mistress Lake’s eyes, saw that there only scorn and hatred. Yet however much she might dislike another female in the house and however much she might beat and persecute her wretched stepdaughter, there were times when Juanita must talk to Elvina because there was no one else. This was one of them. “I will go alone!” she said. “But, supposing, just supposing, no one speaks to me.” “But they will,” Elvina insisted. She knew all too well these moments of depression and false humility when her stepmother believed that the whole world was against her. “You know so many people,” she went on. “Besides, everyone will be in good spirits. There is so much to celebrate.” Juanita smiled and for a moment the darkness fled from her eyes. “There is, indeed,” she said. “I hear today that after the battle on the road to Pamplona they captured the treasure wagons and carriages that King Joseph was fleeing from Madrid in.” “The treasure wagons!” Elvina exclaimed. “Was there much in them?” “There was money, jewellery, pictures and furniture and fine clothes!” Juanita answered. “The Army feasted on food and wine that King Joseph and the women of the Court had provided themselves with for their journey. How I wish I could have been there. I should not have come away empty handed.” “I hear a lot of men were slain in the battle,” Elvina commented quietly.