Fortune's Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

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,”