As this was palpably true, I could not suppress a smile. “Pray include a sentence to the effect that the horse has been returned to Colridge’s, as she will be in some amazement at the idea of my riding, and must divide her anxiety between myself and the mare.”
“I am shocked to hear it. Have you been very much mounted?”
“Not above a few times in my life.”
She frowned slightly. “What possessed you to take a gallop?”
“The horse possessed me, I am afraid.”
“How very unfortunate. Dr. Jarvey has been called, and declares that nothing is amiss, save a considerable bruise to my head. I shall expect to be returned to you tomor- row in Mrs. Challoner’s phaeton—”
“Indeed, that is very kind of you, but hardly necessary. I am perfectly able to walk—”
“— in Mrs. Challoner’s phaeton. Your loving daughter — should you like to affix your signature?”
I scrawled my name at the foot of the billet, and lay back upon my pillows. The scene of such a note’s reception was one I was thankful to avoid.
I never saw José Luis, but when the manservant and the mare had been despatched to Southampton, Mrs. Challoner ordered a tray of cold meat and bread to be sent up to my room. The young girl who brought it — with a fresh face and a diffident look that suggested she was little in the habit of service — I guessed to be Flora, granddaughter of Mr. Hawkins’s crony from Hound. When the maid had set the tray on a table and curtseyed in her mistress’s direction, Mrs. Challoner closed the door behind her and offered to read aloud, if it should amuse me. I had recovered strength enough to capitalize upon her willingness, though I suggested lassitude, and made a very poor picture of health.
“What of your guest, Mr. Ord?” I enquired feebly.
“I should not like to occupy all your attention.”
“Oh — as to that, the gentleman may come and go as he pleases,” she replied indifferently. “He is not actually staying in the house, but merely called a few moments after we returned from the accident, and was immensely helpful in carrying you abovestairs.”
“Was he?” The idea of myself, insensible in the arms of young Adonis, was riveting. “I am deeply grateful.”
“He is probably immersed in a great volume of sermons, or some such, in the library. Mr. Ord is a student of theology, you will observe, though he is an American. My late husband possessed an admirable collection of books, but I have hardly had occasion to look into them since my arrival at Netley.”
“My condolences, Mrs. Challoner. I should never have believed you a widow.”
“Because I do not go in black?” She surveyed me satirically. “My husband was an excellent man, Miss Austen, but a good deal older than myself. He died three years since; and though I may yet regret him, I have learned to survive him. And only consider of the library he left me! Perhaps when the cold sets in, I may establish myself by the fire and read the whole winter long. There shall be no occasion for driving out in the phaeton then. I cannot abide the cold.”
“Are you so recently come to this house?”
“I am but five days in residence.” The novel she might have read to me lay unopened in her lap; her dark eyes assumed a thoughtful expression. “I fled the Peninsula in the first week of September, when the siege of Oporto was entirely lifted and the British troops were carried off from Vimeiro.”
“Did you?” I exclaimed, as though the intelligence were news. “But that is extraordinary! My brother — Captain Frank Austen, of the St. Alban’s — was engaged in that very endeavour! Did you perhaps chance to meet him?”
“I was denied the pleasure,” she replied with a faint smile. “My family in Oporto were so good as to secure me a cabin in the Dartmoor, a fourth-rate intended for the conveyance of French prisoners. I was of infinite use, in serving as interpreter for the Captain, and thus could flatter myself I proved less of a burden than he had anticipated.”
“I am sure you were invaluable,” I told her earnestly. “French prisoners! How uncomfortable you must have found it — dealing with the Enemy!”
“Not at all. Any number were quite handsome.”
“And did you remain aboard the Dartmoor until the Lodge was ready to receive you?” I enquired innocently. A considerable period fell between the first week of September, and the last week of October. Did Lord Harold know of her whereabouts in the interval?
“I was several weeks with friends,” she said vaguely, “who are situated not far from London. Now — should you like to hear a little of this book?”
“I should rather hear of your experiences in Oporto — if you are not unwilling to share them.”
“But of course!” she cried, her eyes alight, and commenced to regale me with tales of the English colony.
She was an excellent narrator, and could bring to vivid life the smallest detail of an Oporto morning: the plumage of an exotic bird, glimpsed through an open window; the rattle of carriage wheels in a stone courtyard; the clash of steel as two partis duelled in the moonlight for the hand of a ravishing maiden. I walked with her beneath scented trees, and ate blood-red oranges fresh off the boats from Tangier; I smelled the musky odour of sherry casks drying in the dim light of warehouses, and sipped the velvet Port on my tongue. I listened with aching heart to the siren sound of a guitar, and swirled in mantilla’d company for several nights in succession — only to rise in the early sunlight, and tear like the wind along the cliffs above the sea.
“How much of the world you have seen,” I murmured, “while I have lived out my span in a series of cold English towns! We know a good deal of rain, and the occasional blooming rose in England; but nothing like your healing sun. You must feel a great longing for all that you have left!”
“There is a word in Portuguese that exactly suits my sentiments,” Sophia Challoner said slowly. “It is saudades. I have saudades for Oporto — nostalgia, homesickness, a mournful feeling of loss. No single word in English may encompass it. But even saudades may pass in time.”
“You do not intend to return?”
She glanced away from me through the leaded
window to the sea. It lay like a silver belt between the Dibden shore and Netley Cliff. “I do not think the Peninsula will be habitable for years. This battle at Vimeiro was but the first toss of English dice.” She turned back from the window, her eyes smoldering.
“Have you ever witnessed the killing of men, Miss Austen?”
What a penetrating question! I had seen enough of the dead, to be sure; but I doubted that it was this she intended. “If you would mean, am I intimate with war — then I must confess that I am not. My two dear brothers are daily thrust into the worst kind of danger, in serving His Majesty’s Navy; and for them, I feel an active anxiety. But it cannot be akin to viewing the effects of battle at close hand. I collect that you have done so, Mrs. Challoner?”
“I drove out in my carriage at the height of the French advance,” she said dreamily. “I was in the company of a friend — a Frenchman long resident in Oporto — and thus able to pass through Marshal Junot’s lines. A cannonball exploded not five feet from the carriage wheels, startling the horses, and had there not been a mass of waggons directly in front of us, and a brave coachman at the reins, I am sure we should have bolted. As it was, I observed a young lieutenant of hussars decapitated where he sat his horse. The head fell almost at my feet.”
I shuddered. That she could speak of such things with such dispassion—
“I hate this war,” she muttered viciously. “The flower of youth — sons of noble families, or of humble ones; Portuguese, French, Spanish grandees — their horses, their bright folly of uniform dress — their glittering swords as violent in the downward arc as a guillotine — all blasted to ruin, dismembered and left in torn shreds upon the ground, and the dark birds circling. To look upon such a scene as Vimeiro, Miss Austen, is to look for a while at the face of Hell.”