A Lady In Need Of An Heir. Louise Allen

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      Everything was under control, as was to be expected. The household ran like clockwork with rarely change or challenge to distract her from growing grapes and making and selling port. The goodwill of the staff and the calm efficiency of Miss Moseley saw to that.

      Which left Gaby free to get on with managing the quinta and the business of creating fine wine. And that was what she should be doing now—keeping the record books up to date in the precious lull after the hectic and exhausting harvest time and before the routines of the autumn and winter work. She let herself into her office and sat down at the desk, which had, of course, a good view of the Gentlemen’s House to distract her.

      She flipped open the inkwell, dipped her pen and continued with her notes about the terrace on the southern bank that needed clearing and replanting. Her father had once told her that in England there was a saying—you plant walnuts and pears for your heirs. It was not quite that bad with vines, but it would be many years before she saw a good return from the new planting, so best to get on with it at once.

      She knew what Aunt Henrietta would ask about that: What was the good of maintaining and improving the quinta for posterity when Gaby had no one to leave it to? She asked herself the same question often enough, and the answer was that, eventually, she would find someone she thought worthy of it, even though she was the last of the Frosts.

       Four dozen grafted rootstocks...

      She stopped in the middle of a sentence and nibbled the end of the quill meditatively. But that was why Leybourne was here, of course. He had come to nag her into returning to England, leaving the quinta and surrendering to her aunt’s marriage plans. How her aunt had managed to persuade him to make the journey was a mystery, unless he had simply fled the country to escape her persistence, which was cowardly but understandable. Perhaps he was nostalgic for his war years in the Peninsula—she had caught his good Portuguese when he was talking to the boatmen and he had understood her first question.

      Where were you in October five years ago, my lord? she wondered. Behind the lines of Torres Vedras, protecting Lisbon with Viscount Wellington, as Wellesley had just become, or skirmishing around as a riding officer seeking out intelligence on the advancing French? Perhaps he had been a friend of Major Andrew Norwood. No, best not to think of him, the shocking sounds that fists meeting flesh made, the lethal whisper of a knife blade through the twilight.

       The violence that is in men’s hearts...

      Gaby bent her head over her ledgers. There was work to be done, a winery did not run itself. She could not allow herself to think about Norwood or the nightmares would begin again. He was gone, dead, and she was not going to allow him to haunt her.

      * * *

      The clock in the hall struck six as she finished her notes and lists. She put down her pen, blotted the ledger, assembled the papers and allowed herself to look out of the window at last. And there her uninvited guest was, strolling bareheaded through the cherry orchard as though he was surveying his own acres. He was heading directly for the burial plot.

      She was probably overreacting, Gaby told herself as she ran down the stairs and out through the front door. There was no reason why he should not look around the grounds—they had been laid out as a pleasure garden, after all, and she was proud of them. It was perfectly natural that he should visit the burial enclosure and pay his respects, if he was so inclined. As for what he might find there... Well, that was not his business. He was a messenger passing through and would soon be gone. What he thought of her was not of the slightest importance.

      She found him standing at the foot of her parents’ graves, head slightly bowed, apparently deep in thought. She stood on just that spot almost every day, collecting her thoughts, asking questions, wrestling with difficult issues. She did not expect an answer from beyond, of course, but simply thinking about how her parents would handle any problem often gave her own ideas direction and validation. Her father had never given her firm instructions about the business, he taught by example and encouraged innovation. The only hard line either parent had laid down was, ‘Follow your conscience, always. If you are uneasy in your mind, then listen and do the right thing.’ It was a rule she attempted to live by.

      ‘December 1807,’ the earl said, looking up as she reached the headstone and faced him. ‘The month the French took Porto for the first time.’

      ‘Yes. There was an epidemic of the influenza, just to add to the general horror. I think the anxiety and stress of the invasion made my parents particularly vulnerable to the infection.’ She could say it unemotionally now. Sometimes it even seemed like a dream, or a story she had read in a book, that time when she found herself orphaned with a fourteen-year-old brother and a quinta to, somehow, protect against the armies fighting to control a country in turmoil. She missed them all every day. The pain had become easier to live with, the sense of loss never seemed to diminish.

      ‘And this is your brother.’ Leybourne had moved on to the next headstone, reminding her just what a bad job she had done of protecting Thomas. He crouched down to read the inscription. ‘September 1810. We were behind the lines of Torres Vedras, holding Lisbon by then. I remember those months.’ Not with any pleasure, from the tone of his voice.

      ‘The French killed Thomas. Not disease.’ The French and treachery.

      ‘Hell, I’m sorry.’ He had bent down to read the inscription, but he looked up sharply at her words, then back to the stone. He reached out one long finger to trace the dates of birth and death. ‘I had not realised he had been so young, only seventeen. What happened? Were they scavenging around here?’

      ‘Only just seventeen.’

       Old enough to be thinking about girls and so shy that he had no idea how to talk with them, let alone anything else. Old enough to be shaving off fluff and young enough to be proud of the fact. Young enough to still kiss his big sister without reserve when he came home and old enough to resent her worrying...

      ‘He was with the guerrilheiros. Not all the time, only when your Major Norwood thought to...use him.’ Exploit him.

      Leybourne’s head came up again at the tone of her voice. ‘Andrew Norwood, the riding officer?’

      ‘The spy, yes. He was happy to find an enthusiastic, idealistic lad who knew his way around the hills here.’ An inexperienced boy. One who might well get himself killed—and then how useful that would be for Major Norwood, she had realised far too late. Gaby kept her voice studiedly neutral. Norwood might well have been a friend of the earl when he had been an officer here. He might be the kind of man Norwood had been.

      ‘Could you not stop him?’ Leybourne stood up. ‘I’m sorry, no, of course you could not if he was bent on fighting the French, not without chaining him up. We had boys younger than that lying about their age to enlist.’

      ‘If I had thought chaining him would work I would have tried it, believe me,’ she said, heartsick all over again at the remembered struggle, the arguments, the rows.

      We are English and Portugal is our home, Thomas had thrown at her. The French are our enemy and the enemy of Portugal. It is our duty to fight them.

      ‘I told him that we had a duty to try and keep the quinta going, to give work and shelter to our people, to have something to offer the economy when the fighting was over so the country could be rebuilt,’ she said now. ‘The French would go soon enough, I argued.’

      While СКАЧАТЬ