Love Under Fire

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1813-2

“You cannot have War without casualties,” Juanita answered. “Don’t let us bother our heads with it. Are you quite certain that my gown is ready for tonight?”

“It is ready,” Elvina replied.

No one knew better than she did that that was the truth. She had been up half the night altering it, pressing the lace, mending the satin underskirt and sewing on new ribbons.

No woman in Lisbon had had a new gown for years.

They did the best they could with their old gowns, altering them according to the out of date reports which sometimes seeped through of the fashions in Paris or begging newly arrived Officers from England to tell them what was the vogue in St. James’s and what the Prince Regent’s many amorettas wore at Carlton House.

The ball tonight was to be given in the Palace on the waterfront and all day long the City had been in a state of excitement at the thought of such unusual festivity.

“Who is Lord Wye?” Elvina asked as she brought Juanita’s gown from a cupboard and laid it on the bed.

“A rich English Milord,” Juanita answered with a shrug of her shoulders. “The type of man I should have married had I not let myself be persuaded into the madness of giving my hand to your father.”

Elvina had nothing to say to this.

She knew only too well that her father had been Juanita’s last hope of matrimony and that she had married him at a moment’s notice before he had had time to sober up and think better of his proposal.

In fact privately Elvina was always convinced that her father’s proposal to Juanita, if indeed he had made one, had never meant a permanent alliance, but one that he had suggested to so many ladies and which, in his own words, ‘was strictly dishonourable’.

“Now fetch my mantilla, my comb and my fan. Get everything ready,” Juanita demanded imperiously.

Meekly Elvina went to obey her. She always acted as lady’s maid to Juanita and was used to being ordered about without any question of thanks.

As she crossed the room, there was a sudden noise of cheering from outside and involuntarily both women ran to the window.

The small paned window with its ornate iron grille overlooked the narrow street with a dirty gutter running down the middle. There were always a number of starving diseased beggars sitting on the doorsteps or slouching against the walls.

These were being reinforced at the moment by a lot of people running and crowding out of the houses and coming from other streets to see who was approaching.

“It must be the new visitors,” Juanita cried, bending forward.

Two horses, with a shine on their coats and in perfect condition, were being ridden down the road.

Behind them came a closed carriage followed by a detachment of soldiers obviously new arrivals from England with their red coats, bright accoutrements and white breeches.

Riding the leading horses were two gentlemen dressed in the height of fashion, one an elderly man, the other young and good-looking with a bronzed face which seemed to set off the blue of his coat and the snowy whiteness of his cravat.

“Who are they?” Elvina breathed.

“Our guests for tonight,” Juanita answered, her eyes glittering. “The elder is the Ambassador, the new Ambassador, I had heard that he was expected. And the other must be Lord Wye.”

He was certainly distinguished, Elvina thought, broad-shouldered and handsome enough to justify the sudden expression of yearning in Juanita’s face and, indeed in the faces of the other women crowding in the windows opposite and in the street below.

They were not used to such good looks or such a dandified appearance in Lisbon.

There was little pageantry now about Wellington’s Army. The men, if they were not wounded, were bronzed, tough and wiry from constant marching and even more constant fighting, but never had an Army looked less smart.

The powder, the clay pipe, the shining brass work and brilliant clothes of peacetime England had vanished.

Their jackets were faded and ragged, their breeches patched with old blankets and their shakos twisted into strange shapes and bleached by the sun.

Their Commander-in-Chief did not worry, so long as they kept their weapons in good order and brought sixty rounds of ammunition into the field.

A man might look like a scarecrow, but if he had kept his firelock bright and clean, he was a good soldier.

These gentlemen from England looked so different. Their polished boots, their snowy breeches and cravats, their gloved hands and even the way that they sat on their horses, all seemed different. No wonder the crowds were cheering.

“If only I had a new gown,” Juanita said. “Once men thought I was beautiful. But what chance do I have in this old rag?”

Elvina did not answer. She hardly heard her. She was looking at Lord Wye and thinking that here was an Englishman such as her father must once have been. A gentleman proud and independent and sure of himself.

Very different from the raw recruits who came tumbling off the ships, often green and shaken after a bad passage in the Bay of Biscay, or the old veterans who greeted them and who seemed at times almost indistinguishable from their slouching dark-skinned Portuguese allies.

That was how an Englishman should look, Elvina told herself. Sure of himself and yet kindly to those around him.

There had been nothing disdainful in Lord Wye's glance at the people thronging the streets and there was nothing condescending in his smile. And yet he had seemed as much apart from them as if he had arrived from another planet or from Mount Olympus itself.

What would he be like to talk to, Elvina wondered.

What would he say? Would his conversation be very different from that of any other man?

Her father’s cronies, the Portuguese Officials who came sometimes to the house or the members of the aristocracy whom she saw driving through the town, seeming by their very expressions to ignore the poverty and the dirt and the squalor that existed around them.

On an impulse Elvina turned towards her stepmother.

“Let me come with you tonight,” she said. “I will not be a nuisance, I promise you. And you could explain that as my father is ill I have taken his place. I could make myself a gown in the time. There is that old blue of yours that you no longer care for. I could cover it with a layer of gauze and sew on a few new ribbons. Please – let me.”

Juanita Lake stared at her in amazement.

“Have you taken leave of your senses?” she asked at length. “Do you think I want to arrive with another woman? I, who have always been escorted by men. Besides, as I have told you before, for me you don’t exist except as my servant, someone who obeys my orders. There is no place in my household for other people’s children. It is I who am important, I who am supreme in my own house. So get that into your head.”

She walked across to Elvina and, taking her by the shoulders turned, her round to face the light from the window.

“So it is Englishmen you are after, is it?” she said stormingly. “Let me tell you this. When you get a little older, I am turning you out! I am not a fool that I can see that with your fair hair and your English complexion you are going to show up the wrinkles that are coming to my face. In another year out you will go and no amount of pleading or crying will save you.”

She gave an unpleasant laugh.

“I shall not care what becomes of you. The camp up the road will welcome you doubtless or you can go and die on the nearest dunghill. So remember that when you start asking me to let you go to the ball.”

She slapped Elvina’s face with the palm of her hand and then, turning towards the dressing table, unbound her long dark hair and started to comb it.

For a moment Elvina stood staring at her, the tears starting to her eyes from the force of the blow. Slowly she put up her hands toward her burning cheek.

“Hot water, clean towels, my stockings and petticoats!” Juanita commanded.

Automatically Elvina sprang to obey the harsh order, and even as she scurried about the house, fetching first this and then that for her stepmother, her mind was all the time concerned with the threats that she had just listened to.

Juanita meant them. Elvina was not such a fool as not to know the truth when she heard it. She knew now that this was what Juanita had always intended, to be rid of her some way or another.

She wondered wildly what she could do.

To appeal to her father was hopeless.

She had only to go downstairs to see him lying on the sofa, dead drunk, an overturned wine glass on the floor beside him, to know that anything she told him would be forgotten the next time he opened a bottle.

What was she to do?

The question seemed to run through her head all the time she was helping Juanita wash and make up her face and she fastened her into her gown, arranging her hair in what they both imagined was the latest fashion and clasping round her neck the few tawdry bits of jewellery that had not been sold to pay bills or obtain wine.

“Your father was saying something the other night about a locket with diamonds in it,” Juanita said unexpectedly.

Elvina was suddenly very still.

“Do you know what he was talking about?” Juanita enquired.

“N-no, I have – no idea.”

“I suspect it was a locket that belonged to your mother. Were there diamonds round it?”

“I-I don’t – know. I – don’t – remember it.”

“If you are lying to me, I will beat you until your bones stick out of your body,” Juanita grunted.

“I will – have a search for it, if you like, and see – if I can find it,” Elvina suggested.

“You can do it tonight. Search everywhere, your father’s room and the trunks that were your mother’s. There is not much left in them, but it may still be there. It will keep you busy while I am away.”

Juanita rose to her feet. She stared at her reflection in the mirror and gave a little laugh of satisfaction.

“I have the feeling that I shall enjoy myself at the ball,” she said. “I am still good-looking. I still have the power to attract men, I am sure of it. That is all that is really necessary to be sure of oneself and of one’s own beauty.”

She turned round, looked at herself from another angle and smiled again.

“Is the carriage here?”

“I told you twenty minutes ago that it had arrived.”

“You may have the privilege of coming downstairs and handing me into it,” Juanita said. “As I have no gentleman to escort me, I must make the best use of what I have. If your father wakes, tell him he will learn what I think of his behaviour tomorrow.”

She turned towards the door.

“And as for you,” she said, her voice ominous, “If that locket is not found, you will know what to expect!”

Elvina watched the carriage drive away and then let the old man, who had served her father ever since he came to Lisbon and who was partially deaf, close the front door.

She went upstairs to her own room. It was a small attic at the very top of the house, it was hot in summer and cold in winter and was therefore not considered good enough for any of the servants.

She shut herself in and, kneeling down in one corner of the room, pulled up a loose floorboard and took a small bundle from under it.

In it were all her treasures, a lock of her mother’s hair, a locket and a bow of ribbon that had fallen from one of her gowns and which Elvina had secreted away before

Juanita had noticed its loss, a tiny gold ring that her mother had worn on her little finger, and the locket.

It was wrapped in paper, which Elvina undid with trembling fingers.

It was not large and the diamonds that surrounded it were not of great intrinsic value. But the locket itself was the most precious thing in the whole of Elvina’s life, for it contained, the only likeness she possessed of her mother.