Georgette Heyer - The Spanish Bride

‘Yes I can.’

‘Harry, will you listen to reason? This won’t do! She’s of the true hidalgo class! What can you do with such a girl? She’s not-’

‘Do with her? I’m going to marry her!’ replied Brigade-Major Smith.

Marry her he did. He would listen to no argument; he snapped his fingers at every impediment. The same ardent spirit which sent him headlong into the thickest part of any battle drove him headlong into marriage. To look at Juana was to love her, said Kincaid, adding, years later, with his twisted, rueful smile: ‘And I did love her, but I never told my love, and in the meantime another and a more impudent fellow stepped in and won her.’ But Juana did not think Harry impudent. A kindred spirit in her had leapt to meet his. Kincaid, offering protection to her sister, had scarcely made an impression upon her; half-fainting, his pleasant voice had had no power to rouse her from her state of terror. If he was good to look at, she did not know it. Sunk in the chair he had set for her, shrinking within the shelter of her sister’s arm, she had become aware of Harry, intently watching her. Though he had not been able to see her face through the mesh of her mantilla, she had seen his, deeply tanned, with a close-gripped mouth, a masterful, aquiline nose, and bright almond-shaped eyes, tremendously alive under their rather heavy lids. He was fined down to bone and muscle; the line of his jaw stood out sharply; there were clefts running from his nose to the upward-tilting corners of his mouth. His hands seemed all sinew; his slight frame a small, tough thing, compact of energy. Not a handsome man, Harry Smith: he would improve with age, like his Commander-in-chief; not a big man, nor one to use many graces in his dealings with his fellow-men; but a vivid, vital creature, instinct with a force, far removed from mere charm, which was a strong magnetism: the quality which made him, in spite of his impetuosity, his quick temper, and his flaming impatience, a born leader of men. There was something fierce about Harry, the look of a hawk in his eyes: a similar spirit in Juana, the daughter of a long line of hidalgos, responded to it. They were made for each other, and were simple and direct enough, both of them, Kincaid reflected to know it at a glance.

After his first astonishment, he refrained from expostulation. Harry, held for those initial moments in a trance of wonder, awoke soon to a fit of whirlwind energy. Arrangements had to be made for the marriage, for the sister’s safe conduct through the lines, for Juana’s comfort, for both ladies’ lodging for the night. He might have escorted them to Elvas, but he would not let this treasure he had found out of his sight. She and her sister must be accommodated in his tent; he sent his batman, Joe Kitchen, providentially returned in a moderately sober condition from Badajos, to beg, borrow, or steal a mattress for his love. He wrested a pillow from Stewart, a blanket from Jack Molloy, and would not stay to listen to their arguments against his hasty, ruinous marriage.

The sister, blinking at Juana’s amazing lover, demurred at his autocratic decree that they should take possession of his tent. Having seen the British troops in Badajos, she placed small dependence on the protection of canvas walls. ‘Shall we be safe? Will not the soldiers break in?’ she asked nervously.

Harry stared at her in astonishment. ‘Break in?’ he repeated, even his swift brain finding it hard to assimilate the enormity of her suggestion. ‘The men break into an officer’s tent? By God, they will not!’

She seemed to be doubtful; to set her mind at rest, he called up his private groom, a stolidly respectable person who inspired even a nervous Spanish lady with confidence, and laid on him strict orders to keep his guests’ privacy inviolate.

‘Yessir,’ said English West woodenly, betraying no surprise. He took a look at the elder lady, and decided that there was nothing in it; he looked at Juana, all her alarms now ended, sitting on the edge of Harry’s bed, like an inquisitive robin, and encountered a shy smile that reminded him of an urchin detected in crime. He was visibly shaken, and retired with his head in a whirl.

Despairing of getting Harry to listen to reason, James Stewart, seeing in the marriage the ruin of his friend’s career, suggested desperately that it was not fair to pitchfork so young a girl into matrimony. Speaking to her in halting Spanish (for he could never achieve any fluency in a foreign tongue), he tried to ask her what her real wishes were, at the same time assuring her of protection in the camp.

She caught at his meaning, and smiled happily. ‘Please, I will marry Enrique,’ she said. She was quite sure, neither bashful nor coquettish. Life in the tail of an army held no terrors for her. She liked soldiers, she told Jack Molloy sunnily. Her own brother had been a soldier. Dead now, of course: killed by the French. Jack, seizing the opportunity afforded by Harry’s temporary absence, tried hard to paint for the little Spanish lady a true picture of the privations and the dangers ahead of her if she became Harry’s wife. She listened to him politely, encouraging his stumbling Spanish, occasionally supplying him with an elusive word, but she did not seem to be in the least impressed by what he said. When he described the discomforts of travelling in the rear of the army, all amongst the cumbrous baggage-train, and surrounded by camp-followers, perhaps not setting eyes on Harry for days together, she looked wise, and said with considerable decision that she thought better, perhaps, not to travel in the rear of the army

‘Much better!’ Molloy assured her. ‘You see, you did not entirely realize, señorita, what such a life would mean to a delicate female.’

‘It is very true. Besides, if I could not see my Enrique for days together I should not like it,’ said Juana.

‘How should you, indeed? And for him, consider the anxiety of being separated from you, not knowing how you fared, and unable to go to you!’

‘Yes, that is so,’ she agreed. ‘It is a very good thing that you have told me all this, for I am quite ignorant, though not, I think, stupid. I shall not go to the rear. It is not at all what I wish. I shall stay beside Enrique.”

She seemed to think that she had discovered the obvious solution to any possible difficulty in the way of her marriage. Molloy felt rather helpless. He tried to tell her that what she suggested was quite unheard of, but faltered under her candid, trustful look of inquiry, and muttered: ‘Oh, the devil!’

‘The worst of it is that she’s such a dear little soul-really, an angelic creature, Charlie!-that it makes it hellish hard to tell her the brutal truth,’ he told Eeles later. ‘Dash it, there she sits, not a bit shy, and with no more knowledge of what’s ahead of her than a baby!’ ‘Well, why couldn’t you tell her?’ demanded Eeles irritably. ‘That’s what you went to do, isn’t it?’

‘I did try. But she’s got a way of looking at one that makes it impossible for a man to go on. She says she shall stay beside Harry.’

‘Then poor Harry’s lost!’ said Eeles. ‘He, who used to be the example of a duty-officer! Damn it, he must listen to reason!’

‘Well, he won’t. He’s quite mad, and is gone off to find a decent woman to be the girl’s servant.’

‘Barnard must speak to him, then!’

‘No use. By what Kincaid tells me, the girl’s family is well-known to his lordship. Lord Fitzroy stayed with them after Talavera. Harry means to lay the whole story before Lord Wellington.’ ‘Good God, if he does, he’ll ruin himself with Wellington!’

‘So I warned him, but he will have it that his lordship has only to see his precious Juana to be won over. And when you come to think of it,’ Molloy added, reflecting on his lordship’s predilection for the fair sex, ‘he’s probably right.’

His lordship, happily for Brigade-Major Smith, was in high good-humour. He remembered the family of Los Dolores de León perfectly, and although he privately thought the careworn woman before him shockingly aged, he was delighted to meet an old acquaintance again. As for Juana, there was never any need to doubt that she would captivate his lordship. He said he had known her when she was a child (it was not quite three years since his lordship’s stay at Badajos, but possibly Juana had grown to womanhood since then, thought Colonel De Burgh, his lordship’s interested ADC); he did not suppose that she remembered him, but he claimed the privilege of a very old friend, for all that, and kissed her cheek, and called her his Juanita.

Nothing could have passed off more smoothly. The victor of Badajos was not the Wellington whose blistering tongue caused quite senior officers to come away from an interview with him chalk-white and stuttering, and with knees trembling so much that they could scarcely walk. The Wellington who stood exchanging reminiscences with Juana’s sister was a cheerful, rather loud-voiced gentleman, very plainly but neatly dressed in a blue coat, and biscuit-coloured pantaloons; a gentleman whose frequent laugh showed him to be in excellent spirits, and who was no more unapproachable now that he was a peer than he had been when he was merely Sir Arthur Wellesley. A most unaffected creature, Viscount Wellington of Talavera (but they would make him an Earl after his brilliant successes at Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos); none of the airs of your consciously great man about him. He could be a little stiff sometimes, to be sure; and he had a way of looking down his high-boned nose which made strong men shake in their shoes; but if nothing had occurred to make him irritable he was excellent company: very easy and natural, no airs and graces at all, in fact; and hugely enjoying a good joke.