Fortune's Bride (4 page)

Captain Robert Moreton. It was a name to be cherished in the
very depths of her soul, but that was all. Esmeralda had guessed what had drawn
Captain Moreton to her for the first dance of the evening. She was the worst
dressed and one of the plainest girls in the room. No one could really think he
favored her. He asked her to dance first both as an act of kindness and to make
clear that no invitation marked any serious intentions toward the partners he
chose. No girl could misconstrue a request to dance after he had invited the
unlikely Esmeralda Talbot.

Perhaps some girls would have been angry at being used that
way. In fact, Esmeralda
had
been piqued at first and had nearly refused
to give him her card, but his smile was so sweet and the furious, envious
glances cast at her had been so amusing that she could not resist. Still, it
had not been Captain Moreton’s beautiful face or strong body that etched his
image indelibly in her mind. She had looked on those rather as one looks at an
exquisite portrait, a beautiful thing but with little human reality.

It had been Captain Moreton’s kindness that fixed him in her
memory. He had used her, but not callously as some highborn young blood might
have done, showing his boredom and contempt while they danced. Captain Moreton
had done his best to prove that he enjoyed the company he had solicited and to
give her pleasure, too. He had talked to her and done his best to make her talk
also.

Esmeralda sighed. It had not been possible for her to
respond as she knew she could. If her father had heard of lively conversation
and laughter—and he would have heard, for he kept close watch either by himself
or through others on what his daughter did—she might not have been allowed to
attend another social function for months. Henry had not wanted Esmeralda to
attract men. He had no intention of allowing her to marry, thereby losing his
confidential secretary-bookkeeper. In fact, Henry had disapproved violently of
any strong relationship for Esmeralda. Love or friendship might induce her to
speak of his affairs.

Thus, it had been impossible for Esmeralda to offer anything
beyond the normal insipidities on the weather, the decoration of the ballroom,
and the food and drink provided for the delectation of the guests. Plainly, although
he struggled to hide the fact, Captain Moreton had been very bored before the
dance was over. Still, he had not “forgotten” that his name was on her card for
two other dances. He had been at her side as soon as the music began and each
time had lingered until the correct moment at which he was expected to seek his
new partner. That was truly kind and beyond what many of the young men in
Bombay were willing to do.

“Ah, perhaps it is better that you sit and do nothing than
that you make such a tangle.”

Esmeralda jumped as the voice of the elderly widow with whom
she was living broke into her thoughts. “I am so sorry,” she said, laughing in
response to the amused resignation of her hostess. “I’m afraid I’ve made a
worse mess than usual,
Tia
Maria. I was thinking…”

The courtesy title of
Tia
, or “aunt”, had been
decided on as the safest. An orphaned niece could conceivably appear in a
village where no one had ever seen her before. If later it was discovered by
someone outside the village that she was not after all a relative, it would not
be the villagers’ fault that they had accepted her. Custom and charity would
have obliged them to do that, and there was no reason why they should suspect
any deception.

“Of Pedro?” the old woman asked, her voice now neutral.

“No!” Esmeralda exclaimed rather mendaciously, for she had
been thinking about him. Nonetheless, it was not really a lie. To answer yes to
Tia
Maria’s question would have implied something far different from her
actual thoughts. “Why do you ask me that?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

“It seems he thinks of you.”

“But that is crazy. I am no fit wife for him.” Esmeralda
then repeated aloud her earlier thoughts about her lack of wifely skills. “What
I was wondering,” she finished, “was, if it is true that the French are gone,
whether I should try to go to Oporto. I know that there were many English there
before the French came. Perhaps some of them are still there.”

“Why do you not think of accepting young Pedro? Then you
would truly be of the village, and it would not matter if the French came
again.”

Esmeralda was shocked. The one reason she had found for
Pedro to be attracted to her, despite her lack of obvious charms, was that she
was different. After all, he had known all the other girls in the village since
they were babies. Whatever value novelty might have for a young man, it had
never occurred to Esmeralda that anyone else could possibly approve of such an
impractical arrangement. Her eyes went to
Tia
Maria’s hands, swiftly
making firm, smooth yarn out of the irregular, lumpy rope Esmeralda had
produced. She pointed to what the woman was doing.

“Is that not reason enough,
Tia
Maria?” she asked.
“Pedro is a fine man. All of the people in this village are good people, but I
do not fit here. My life was very different. I do not know the things I would
need to know to make Pedro a good wife. In the beginning, perhaps he would not
care, but later he would grow tired of bad food, ill-knotted fishnets, and
clothes that fell apart because I could not weave them properly. He would be
unhappy. I also would be unhappy when I saw that my husband was not satisfied
and that others laughed at him because I was not a good wife.”

Of course, Esmeralda would no more have considered marrying
Pedro than cutting off her nose. To her he was a common creature, outside her
class, totally unacceptable even if he had been as beautiful and as kind as
Captain Moreton. However, if
Tia
Maria was speaking of marriage,
apparently the villagers had not, as she had believed, noticed the difference
in class—or they did not care. To speak of it then, or of her personal
preference would be useless, so she tried to put the rejection in terms that
Tia
Maria could understand.

“But with the money, that would not come about,”
Tia
Maria said. “You are rich. You could build a big house on the hill and hire
others to cook your husband’s food and weave the cloth for his clothes.”

“Money! What money?” Esmeralda’s heart leapt into her mouth.

She knew that her father had investments in England worth well
over half a million pounds, investments that brought in more than twenty
thousand pounds a year in interest, and that did not include the huge sum that
had been sent off just before they left India. The income would permit her to
live like a queen if she could ever get to England and establish who she was.
However, no one besides her father and herself, and of course her father’s
English bankers, knew what Henry Talbot had made and salted away. Why should
Tia
Maria speak of her riches?

“You mean you do not know?” the old woman asked. “Your
father told old Pedro that he would pay well if we kept him safe from the
French. Did he lie?”

So that was it. Esmeralda was relieved. She had feared that
her father might have raved of his wealth in a delirious moment when someone
other than she had been attending him. That would have been dangerous, but it
was reasonable that he had offered to pay for sanctuary. Now she understood why
the villagers had braved the dangers of hiding her from the French. It also
lightened to a considerable degree Esmeralda’s sense of obligation.

“No, he did not lie,” Esmeralda said.

She was more than willing to fulfill Henry’s promise,
whatever it was, being certain that it was far less generous than it should
have been, considering the service rendered. As she spoke she realized that she
probably no longer needed to worry about being betrayed to the French out of
spite should they return. Since Pedro’s attentions had been paid in the hopes
of winning a rich wife… Esmeralda’s mind checked. A new danger had reared its
head.

Pedro and his father might try to force her into marrying
him in an effort to obtain her entire fortune rather than whatever sum her
father had promised to pay them. Of course, no one in the village could even
conceive of how rich she really was, nor would they believe her if she tried to
explain that it would not be possible for Pedro to use her money as other
village husbands used their wives’ dowries of linens, sheep, or land.

These simple people would not understand that Esmeralda
would retain control of her fortune after she married. The usual situation, in
England as well as in Portugal, was that a woman’s husband legally used her
money and property as if it were his own, doling out, if he were generous, a
pittance that she was free to spend as she liked. Many did not even give their
wives that much freedom, insisting on having all bills sent to them so that any
tendency toward extravagance in their women could be checked by argument or
blows.

However, special arrangements could be made, and Esmeralda
had long ago consulted several solicitors, selected the plan that suited her
best, and induced her father to make the settlement she desired. Henry proved
cooperative. He could see no reason, aside from what she might be expected to
inherit, that would induce any man to marry his daughter Thus, the fact that
Esmeralda’s husband could not benefit from her income, except as she wished to
distribute it, should, Henry believed, serve to keep her single even after his
death. He thought he was playing a nasty joke on her, but Esmeralda did not
care what he thought as long as she achieved her purpose. “But
Tia
Maria,” Esmeralda protested, “although my father did not lie and I will gladly
pay if I can whatever he promised, the money is not here in Portugal. What
little we had with us to pay our traveling expenses is most likely at the
bottom of the sea. To obtain more I must go to England.”

“And how will you do that without money?” the old woman
asked sharply.

“That was why I was hoping there were still some English
people in Oporto,” Esmeralda answered. “It might be that my father had done
business with one of them—he bought wine from Oporto, I know. If so, perhaps
that person would send me to England or lend me enough to pay my passage.”

“But then, if you had to pay back that debt, you might not
have enough to pay old Pedro what your father promised.”

Esmeralda bit her lips to prevent herself from laughing. A
few hundred escudos was a large fortune to these poor people. Even if Henry had
promised them a
conto
, a thousand
escudos
, that would come to
less than two hundred and fifty pounds. The cost of her passage and payment of
the obligation to the village were the very least of Esmeralda’s worries. Far
more terrifying was the problem of identifying herself to her father’s
bankers—if she could ever get to England.

Tia
Maria however took the bitten lip to be concern
about the size of the debt. “You could write a letter,” she suggested.

Esmeralda shook her head. “Would you send out so much money
just because a letter said you should? And think. The letter would not be from
my father. The money is mine now that he is dead, that is true, but how would
he who receives the letter know that to be the truth just from a letter? When I
am there before his eyes and he knows that if I lie it will soon be discovered,
then he will give me what is mine.”

On those last words, Esmeralda’s voice trembled. It was so
easy to say, and if the sum involved were small, perhaps that would indeed have
been all that was necessary. But bankers do not hand over huge estates just
because a strange girl comes and says Henry Bryan Talbot is dead and I am his
daughter, Esmeralda Mary Louisa. How was she to prove who she was?

“It is true that he who holds the money might not be willing
to part with it if there is only a letter and from a woman, too.”
Tia
Maria, who had been watching Esmeralda, was aware of her uncertainty. “It would
be even better,” she said, “if you had a husband who could speak for you.”

At the thought of Pedro in the offices of her father’s
bankers speaking for his wife, Esmeralda choked. It was true she had never seen
those offices, but she was sure her father had chosen the oldest, most
reliable, most august banking house in London. Henry did not speculate with the
money sent to England. He ordered his bankers to invest it in the soundest of
securities. Nonetheless, the situation was not funny. It seemed as if her fear
that pressure would be applied to her to make her marry Pedro might be true.

“But that would mean the payment of two passages to
England,” Esmeralda protested, saying the first thing that came into her mind.

“Perhaps not,”
Tia
Maria remarked, smiling slyly. “We
in this village have no boat large enough to sail so far, but one might be
found.”

Esmeralda was growing frightened. “No,” she said. “I do not
wish to marry Pedro. I am English. I wish to live in my own country among my
own people. You have all been very kind to me, but I am homesick.”

“Ah, and so was I when I came from my village to this one,
but it passes quickly. A strong, young husband and a few babies, and one thinks
no more of such things. Besides, all the English are rich. There you will be
nothing. Here you will be a great lady.”

“No!” Esmeralda exclaimed. “No! I will not marry Pedro!”

“No? But I tell you, no one will help you get to Oporto. And
even if you should be mad enough to try to go alone, without money or a man to
speak for you, you will starve in the street. Think it over. It will be good
for you to be married. You should be glad Pedro will take you, even with the
money, for you are not so young or so pretty that many would offer. Pedro will
do his duty by you, for he has the interest of the village at heart. Think it
over.”