Marrying the Royal Marine (15 page)

‘Let me assure you, Sergeant Cadotte, I have no love for you at all,’ Hugh said. ‘Not one scrap of affection. But somewhere near Angoulême there are a woman and two children who think you are worth saving. I did it for them.’

With some effort, the Sergeant managed that twitch that passed for a smile. ‘You could have saved yourself some money,’ he countered, still stubborn.

‘I told you I am an officer and a gentleman. Why won’t you believe it?’ Hugh said patiently, as though he spoke to a child. ‘Polly, dear, are you and our little one all right?’

Drat the man. Why did he have to embarrass her? ‘Yes,’ she replied, her voice steely.

He patted her leg, then rested his hand on her thigh, giving her a roguish grin and daring her to take exception to his fond, husbandly gesture. He glanced at Cadotte. ‘I dare you to submit her name for one of Napoleon’s new Legions d’Honneur.’

The Sergeant’s lips twitched again and he let out a bark of laughter this time that quickly turned into a coughing fit.

‘Lord, you are droll, Colonel,’ he said, after his Corporal raised him into a sitting position. ‘I will give her something better. You two can ride without your hands tied now.’

The Sergeant surprised her again. He reached across the short space that separated them, took Hugh’s hand in his and kissed it, then reached for Polly’s and did the same.

There was daylight left, but no one questioned the Sergeant’s decision to backtrack to the bridge and move east just far enough to be among the trees and out of sight. There was even shelter of sorts—a gutted stone farmhouse with interior walls remaining, but no roof. Rendered stupid by exhaustion, Hugh allowed Polly to help him from the horse. Her efforts embarrassed him, but all he wanted to do was lie down and never cross a river again.

‘If I see so much as a tin bathtub in the next four or five years, I swear it will unman me,’ he told her as she helped him into the wholly inadequate shelter of the tumbled stones.

‘You’re the one who told me adventures really weren’t much fun,’ she reminded him.

She was as wet as he was, but he let her help him from his shirt and trousers and wrap him in a blanket smelling strongly of horse. Not until he was lying beside a bonfire, built by one of the troopers, did she think of herself. His men were taking care of Cadotte in much the same fashion on the other side of the interior wall, in what must have been the hut’s great room in better days. She cajoled another blanket, looked around to make sure none of the troopers were in sight, and took off her dress.

His eyes could barely stay open, but he watched her stand there in her chemise for a long moment, then sigh and lift it over her head, until she was naked.

‘Not a word out of you, Colonel,’ she murmured, as she sidled in next to his bare body and pulled both blankets over them. With a sigh, she pillowed her head on his arm, closed her eyes, and slept.

He couldn’t help himself. He reached across her body and gently touched her breast. Knowing he deserved a slap to his face, he smoothed his thumb across her nipple, which only elicited a small sigh from her as she burrowed into his warmth. He reminded himself he was an officer and a gentleman as he ran his hand along her rounded hip and stopped there—the spirit as unwilling now as the flesh was weak. He just wanted to sleep until the war ended and he was home again in Kirkcudbright, with his father and sister there to fuss over him.

When he woke several hours later it was dark and Polly was whimpering. Careful to keep the blankets around them both, he propped himself up on his elbow, the better to see her. He watched her expressive face a moment in the faint glow of the bonfire, which had worked its way down to glowing coals, and carefully removed her spectacles. One of the lenses was cracked in the corner now. He set the spectacles on a niche in the wall behind them, a place where a
paisano
’s wife had probably kept her favourite saint.

Polly stirred and cried out, but she still slept. He lay back again, enjoying the feel of her body against his, warm for the first time since he had dived into the river after the Sergeant. As his eyes closed in weariness, he was sure of nothing, except that he relished this woman. How odd it was that in all of his thirty-seven years, he had finally found the woman he wanted like no other, and they were smack in the middle of a war, prisoners, even.

Hugh woke later when Polly stirred in his arms, weeping this time, but still asleep. In his years in both barracks and the fleet, he had heard many a young Marine, newly scoured by battle, do precisely that. His reaction had always been to pat them on the shoulder, so he did that now.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, as she woke. ‘What must you think of me?’

‘I think you’re magnificent and braver than lions,’ he whispered back.

Wordlessly, she turned over to face him and put her arms tight around him, drawing him close as she muffled her sobs against his chest. ‘It’s too much,’ she managed to gasp out, when she could speak. ‘Just too much. Is this ever going to end?’

He held her close, cherishing the feel of her breasts against his chest, her hips so close to his. His lust turned to tenderness; all he wanted to do now was touch her shoulder again, as he did his young Marines, and send her back to sleep as he watched over her. It wasn’t too much to ask, and God was kind for a moment. She sighed, relaxed, and slept.

He thought she would sleep for the night, but she woke a few minutes later, patting his cheek to rouse him. He looked around in alarm, then settled down when she put her hands on both sides of his face and her forehead against his.

‘Hugh, you need to know something,’ she told him, her eyes earnest, but with another emotion visible. ‘I don’t know how you feel about this, but I have to be honest, don’t I?’

Mystified, he nodded.

‘You may not like it, but I suppose that doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘How do I say this? Don’t let me die without making me a woman.’ She put her hands over her face. ‘I am so ashamed to say that.’

He took her hands away. ‘Don’t be. There aren’t enough honest people in the world.’

Her words came out in a rush then. ‘I know I am probably asking too much. I swear it won’t go any further. I mean, here you are, a Lieutenant Colonel, someone of importance, and we know who I am.’ She faltered. ‘I just wanted you to know.’

She looked ready to apologise further, but he put his fingers on her lips. ‘Stop right there, Brandon,’ he whispered.

Her face clouded over, but only until he grasped her shoulders and pulled her close for a kiss. She clung to him, her face against his chest, so he kissed her hair this time.

‘Brandon, you’re not asking too much. Not at all.’

She raised her head to look at him, and he saw her shyness. ‘Hugh, I’m just not sure what to do.’

‘Nor am I,’ he replied, ‘except that everyone thinks we’re already married.’

‘We look like we are right now,’ she pointed out, ever the practical one, which he had decided weeks ago was only one of her many charms. ‘My goodness.’

‘You’re not afraid to give up your virginity to me?’

She shook her head, and her humour came back like a brief candle. ‘This sort of thing wasn’t covered at Miss Pym’s, but I have no intention of going to my death without even a memory of a man’s love. I refuse to just take the words of poets and sonnets, even Shakespeare’s.’

He doubted he had ever heard a more honest admission in his entire life, even as Polly Brandon’s eyes closed. She struggled to open them. ‘Drat,’ she muttered softly. ‘Heroines in novels don’t fall asleep at times like this.’

Laughing softly, Hugh cradled her in his arms and watched in amusement and love as she sighed and slept. Exhausted, he did the same.

Chapter Fifteen

A
t peace with himself after Brandon’s declaration, Hugh waited until she slept, then left the warmth of her body, careful to tuck the blankets around her. He found his clothes—still damp—and put them on. At least his thorough dousing in one of Portugal’s nameless rivers had cleansed his skin and made his smallclothes less objectionable. He smiled in the dark to think of what his Colonel Commandant in Plymouth would think of his filthy state.

I used to be a bit of a military fop
, Hugh thought as he buttoned his trousers, which hung loose on him now. Amazing what three weeks on short rations and then no rations could do. He glanced at Polly. He decided that, as much as he admired her, he preferred the Brandon with more meat clinging to her.

He put his gorget around his neck again, always feeling a relief at having it hanging there, as it had for twenty years now. He knew he should wear it outside his uniform tunic, but there was some comfort from feeling the cold metal gradually warm against his skin, as it reminded him who he was. He glanced at Polly again, as unexpected emotion welled up in him.
I wish I had a ring for your finger right now
, he told himself.
Maybe you are not my actual wife; maybe there never will be one, but you should have a ring. Something eye-popping to impress our lovable Sergeant Cadotte.

He stood a moment looking down at her, suddenly indecisive. If she should wake up while he was gone, what would she do? He chanced it, because he smelled something cooking in the next ruined stone room. Something told him he and Brandon had nothing to fear now from the Frenchmen. Their Sergeant was alive because he and Polly had acted.

Squatting by the fire, Sergeant Cadotte looked up when he came around the corner. ‘You see before you a miracle, Colonel Junnit. I do not refer to myself, although I remain in your debt,’ he said.

Food. Hugh felt his stomach contract and then release its grip on his spine, where he was certain it had cowered and clung for the last week. ‘May I have some?’ he asked, squatting beside his enemy.

After a glance at his Sergeant, the Corporal ladled what looked like porridge into a tin cup. Hugh took it from him with no preliminaries, scooping up a spoonful and blowing on it.

‘One of my troopers went to take a piss by the sheep-fold and noticed the stones,’ Cadotte said.

‘I don’t understand,’ Hugh said, after he swallowed a glorious mouthful of the bland mixture. It was wheat, probably cracked with the butt of someone’s musket and boiled in river water. He knew he would never eat anything so delicious ever again, not if he lived to be a dribbling old man in a kilt in Kirkcudbright.

Cadotte raised his eyebrows. ‘I know Portugal better than you. When they do not feel confident enough to build granaries such as you are already familiar with, the farmers dig grain pits and mark them with a cross of stones.’ He finished his cupful. ‘I cannot imagine how this was overlooked.’ He nodded to his Corporal, who ladled out another cupful of wheat porridge. ‘This is for your wife.’

Hugh finished his cup. He wanted to ask for more; for a second, he even wanted to eat the small share meant for Polly. ‘Delicious,’ he said, taking a swipe inside the cup with his finger and then handing it back to the Corporal.

Before he could take the cup for Polly, he heard an un-earthly wail from the other side of the wall and leaped to his feet. He ran around the tumbling wall, the Sergeant just behind him, to see Polly sitting up, keening like an old woman from his home parish who had lost her whole family.

She burst into tears when she saw him. Hugh slid on his knees by her, careful to cover her again, and then hold her close. ‘Polly, I was just around the corner! Oh, damn my eyes, Sergeant!’

She held herself off from him for a small second, then burrowed into his embrace with more tears. ‘You were gone!’ she managed to gasp. Hugh doubted any accusation at the eternal bar of God on judgement day would have even one-tenth the terror for him as her plaintive sentence.

He feared he couldn’t hold her any tighter without cutting off her breathing, but she kept pressing closer, her tears spilling down her face until he could not help but cry, too, trying to shield himself from the Sergeant so his enemy would not have cause to gloat over his anguish at leaving Polly alone for even a moment.

He did manage a look at Cadotte, when Polly’s tears turned into hiccups. What he saw brought tears to his own eyes again. The Sergeant sat cross-legged, elbows on his knees, his hands covering his face. Hugh kissed Polly’s head, looked up at the dark sky. The matter had borne itself home to him more forcefully than any emotion of his life that no matter what happened, Polly was his wife. He had vowed at São Jobim to protect her, and he had just failed her miserably.

Finally she lay silent in his arms, worn out and staring at nothing. His face a study in calm, Sergeant Cadotte leaned across the small space separating them and touched her shoulder. ‘Madame Junnit, let your husband help you with your clothes and come to our fire. We have food. He had only left you to get you some, too.’

She nodded, but said nothing. The Sergeant got up and returned to the other side of the wall.

‘Can you forgive me for leaving you?’ Hugh asked, feeling more wretched than the rawest recruit caught sleeping on duty.

‘It’s…it’s the dream I wake up with every night. I was afraid you had left me to the troopers,’ she whispered. ‘You would never do that. I
know
you would never do that, but I was still afraid. I’m sorry.’

If she had ripped open his back with pincers and poured lime juice inside, he could not have felt worse, but there was only remorse in her voice, and no accusation. He didn’t deserve such kindness.

‘I’m the one to apologise, Polly,’ he whispered back. ‘I will never do that again.’

‘Brandon, please,’ she told him, with a trace of her former sass.

‘Brandon only and always, except in company,’ he said. ‘Polly, dear.’

She tried to chuckle, but it came out in a sob instead. All he could do was hold her until she pulled away from him and let loose of the blanket. Without a word, she raised her arms so he could pull on her chemise, then let him help her to her feet so he could drop her dress over her head in the same way. He hadn’t even needed to unbutton it in the first place, because it hung on her. With her hand on his shoulder, she let him help her into her stockings and shoes again. She stood still, a dutiful woman, as he carefully hooked the curved bows of her spectacles around her ears again.

They stood so close together that when her stomach growled, he wasn’t sure if it was her or him. ‘That is so unladylike,’ she said. ‘What a relief that I am not a lady.’

Hugh thought to himself that he would some day like to throttle this Miss Pym, who had been so careful to instruct this dear person in the reality of her illegitimate life, and what little she could possibly hope for. Suddenly, he wanted to consult Philemon Brittle, and meet Captain Worthy, and ask them how they managed their wives, these sisters who were unique in all the world.

‘You’re lady enough for me, Brandon,’ he said gruffly, and kissed her.

Her arms were soft around his neck, then her fingers were in his hair, pulling at it, which he savoured more than he would have thought possible, considering his typical fastidiousness. Neatness be damned, he thought, knowing he reeked and his hair was greasy and he hadn’t shaved in weeks. All he wanted to do was kiss Polly Brandon, like a brainless schoolboy.

‘And for all intents and purposes, we are married,’ he whispered to her, his lips still practically on hers.

She didn’t hesitate, but what she said had the power to turn him to jelly. Amazing creatures, women. ‘Don’t you forget that and leave me alone again, Hugh Junot.’

As she sat close to her beloved, warm by the fire and honestly full of wheat porridge that had nothing whatever to recommend it except that it was hot and filled her stomach, Polly felt something incredibly close to happiness. There was no reason she should feel that way, not with the rain starting again, and sitting across from Sergeant Cadotte, the Corporal, and nine troopers—no, eight now, after the fall this morning. Hugh’s arm was around her, and she felt safer than she knew she had any right to.

She looked down at her hands in her lap, wondering if the Frenchmen were sound sleepers, because she intended to give herself to Colonel Junot, that orderly, dignified, maybe a little vain, Marine who had become the man she needed now. For nearly two weeks now, they had lived every day as though it was their last on earth. Something burning deep in her body told her she would not willingly surrender her life in the middle of a war without knowing his love. If they only had one night together, it wouldn’t be enough, but it might have to do.

Jesting aside, they weren’t married and there was no way they could be right now. Maybe she was her mother’s daughter, after all, because she didn’t care about the niceties, the banns, the seals, the signatures. She wanted the man beside her. What made the matter so sweet was that she thought he wanted her, too. Outwardly, nothing had changed. He held her as close as he ever did, keeping up their subterfuge with the enemy. He called her ‘Polly,
chère
,’ as he always did around the Sergeant. Maybe it was the way he looked at her now.

She looked at Hugh and smiled, happy to see the relief in his eyes, and a little embarrassed she had frightened him so badly when she had called out and he had come running. So be it. She had been terrified to wake and find him gone. She would make it up to him. She could do no more right then except turn her face into his shoulder and kiss it, which made him swallow a few times and raise his face to the dark sky.

Maybe he knew what she was thinking. Hugh kissed the palm of her hand and tucked her fingers inside his tunic, which almost gave her the giggles, because it reminded her of a portrait of Napoleon she had seen once. When she patted his chest and withdrew her fingers, he got to his feet with a wince and a groan and tugged her up after him.

He released her and held out his hands, wrists together, to the Sergeant. ‘No more, Colonel,’ Cadotte said in a quiet voice, one that would not carry to his men, who were starting to bed down on the other side of the fire. ‘If I cannot trust you after what happened at the river crossing, then I know nothing about character.’

‘Merci,’
Hugh said, inclining his head in what Polly thought could pass for deference—they were, after all, prisoners. Not even a river rescue had changed that. He turned to her then, and put his hand against her back. ‘Come, my dear, let us go to bed.’

Sergeant Cadotte wasn’t quite through. He held another blanket. ‘The nights are getting colder,’ was all he said, as if daring them to thank him.

She knew what she was going to do that night, but was too inexperienced to even frame a declaration. Tomorrow they would probably be joining the main body of the French regiment, and all chance at either privacy or life would be over. When the Colonel handed her the extra blanket, then walked away—keeping himself in her sight—to finish his private preparations for sleep, she spread out the blanket close to the wall. There was little privacy there, but she felt a certain security in the embrace of old stones and rubble.

Hugh stood on the perimeter of their ruined chamber, his back still to her, just looking into the darkness. He must know what she was going to do; it wouldn’t have surprised her. By the time he turned around, she had removed her dress and was kneeling on the blanket, lifting off her chemise.

He watched her, a slight smile on his face. After a quick look around, he was kneeling on the blanket, too, removing his clothing. She could have sighed with relief. She was grateful he did not tell her what a supremely stupid idea this was, because giving away her virginity was a serious matter. She was only going to do it once, and thank God it was going to the man she trusted, to initiate her into an experience that might be brief.

When she was naked and unspeakably vulnerable, he helped her tuck the other blanket over her, his face more serious than she could remember, even after these weeks when little had been remotely amusing. Looking into that middle distance again, he removed his trousers and small-clothes and then lay down with her under the flimsy protection of the blanket.

Wordlessly, Polly moved into his embrace. For a long moment, he just held her close to him, running his hand along her arm, which was prickled with gooseflesh from the cool of early autumn in the mountains. With his other hand, he gently touched her body, seeming to find the most enjoyment in tracing the womanly swoop from her hip to her waist, and then to her breast, as she lay sideways, facing him.

The rhythmic motion of his hand relaxed her, then began to frustrate her as she began to grow almost too warm for the thin blanket. Working up her courage, she took his hand and placed it on her breast.

‘Touch me wherever you want,’ she told him. ‘May I do the same?’

When he removed her hand, and raised up on one elbow, she was struck dumb with mortification until he took the moment to remove her spectacles, reach over her body, and place them in the little niche. He put her hand around his still-peaceful member. ‘Share and share alike, sweetheart. It’s not that I don’t want you to see everything clearly, Brandon—oh, you know what a peacock I am! You wouldn’t be disappointed,’ he whispered. ‘I would hate for your spectacles to fall victim to passion, when they have survived everything else.’

She chuckled, disarmed and relaxed. Tentatively, she began to stroke him, enjoying the feeling, but equally amazed by what was happening to her own body, as she touched his. All the blood in her core seemed to be rushing towards her loins as she stroked Hugh Junot—not a Colonel, not a Marine, not a fellow prisoner, but a man with her best interest at heart—and felt him begin to grow under her delicate touch. It was a power she could never have imagined. For a tiny, delicious moment, as though the thought came from another galaxy, she remembered telling him how much she enjoyed making plants grow.