Scandal's Daughter (22 page)

Cordelia capitulated. She kept discreetly out of the way of the masculine festivities, settling herself against the side wall of one of the huts. James brought her hunks of juicy pork with chopped onions and seasoned yoghurt for a sauce, wrapped in bread baked on hot stones. There was fresh goat’s milk to drink, the nannies thriving better than ewes or cows on the poor winter pasturage.

The men were not drinking milk, however. Muslims they might be, but no more than they scorned pork did they follow the Prophet’s dictates with regard to alcohol. Cordelia watched as the fiery anise-flavoured brandy poured down their throats like water, not least down James’s throat. Whether he’d be fit to ride in the morning remained to be seen.

The revellers grew noisier. Cordelia didn’t dare go among them to ask James to help set up the tent, but as the dusk deepened she found it impossible to keep her eyes open. Rolling up in a couple of blankets, she fell asleep to the strains of a fierce song about a long-ago battle.

She awoke to bright moonlight.

“Cordelia!” James shook her, his raki-laden breath on her face, his voice slurred. “Wake up. They insist on delivering us to the village, to prove they’re not afraid of the Montenegrin infidels. Hurry or they’ll go without us, taking our baggage with them.”

Throughout the wild ride along the valley and up the mountain track, the Albanians let off musket shots at random. When they reached the village, they fired a fusillade at the stars and yelled defiance at the moon, since not a single inhabitant showed his face to be defied.

Their impetuous escort dropped off the travellers’ belongings in a heap in the middle of the village. With a farewell salute of a second fusillade, they galloped off into the night. It was none of their concern just how the villagers would react in the morning to the hair-raising midnight arrival of strangers in their midst.

The icy night air had sobered James enough to help Cordelia hobble the animals and set up the tent, fortunately as it was bitterly cold at that height. She crawled in and settled down while he went off to relieve the pressure of vast quantities of raki. When he returned, she was already nearly asleep. She was quite unprepared to fend him off when he lay down close beside her and took her in his arms, blanket cocoon, sheepskin coat, and all.

Lying half on top of her, he pressed ardent, spirituous kisses on her mouth. She struggled in vain to free her arms to push him away, not daring to cry out lest she bring down vengeful villagers upon them. Not wanting to cry out. His lips burned her skin. He fumbled clumsily with the blankets, amorous but inept, and she was dreadfully tempted to help him.

Then he fell asleep.

His warm breath teased her ear; the weight of his body crushed one breast, his arm the other; his knee rested intimately, achingly against her private parts...

How could she have forgotten her menses! In that condition, she had been on the verge of giving herself to a drunken wastrel! Was that how her mother’s lovers had made her feel, that urgency which made everything else unimportant?

But Drusilla Courtenay had had a husband to make love to her. She’d had no excuse for wickedly running off with a lover and ruining her daughter’s life. If she had stayed properly at home, Cordelia would not now be stuck in a tent in a primitive village in the middle of nowhere, striving to evade the embraces of a good-for-nothing sot.

So far, despite the difficulties, she had succeeded in preserving her virtue intact and she was not about to give up the struggle. She tried to sit up but James’s arm moved down to her waist and tightened about her. Turning her head she stared at his face as if her gaze could pierce the pitchy darkness.

She knew that face so well, always thin, thinner now, its bronze deepened by sun reflected off snow; the square, resolute chin hidden beneath his new beard, fairer than his hair and even curlier; the dark blue eyes, laughing, teasing, serious, concerned...

This was only the second time he had been in his cups, and he was not really altogether a good-for-nothing. Whatever the outcome, she knew his foolhardy exploit with the wild boar had been an effort to save her life. If only he were respectable, if only he really wanted her for his wife, she would marry him like a shot.

Cordelia had just reached this dispiriting conclusion when the tent collapsed.

Enveloped in its heavy folds, she once again fought to sit up. Once again his strong arm tightened around her waist, and he muttered something.

“James!” she hissed furiously.

He had said himself he was half seas over when he helped her put it up. Now, instead of helping her escape from its toils, he was actually hindering her. Every time she tried to move, he held her tighter without, apparently, rising any nearer to consciousness. Wrapped up in her blankets, the tent weighing her down, she was quickly forced to concede to superior force.

Fortunately, some fortuitous arrangement of the poles kept the tent’s fabric off her face. She could breathe quite easily, but for all James cared she might be smothered to death.

She lay there fuming. She wouldn’t marry him if he went on bended knee, if he were the last man in the world!

At some point she must have fallen asleep, for she awoke to the sound of muffled laughter. James had somehow managed to roll away from her. She freed one hand and poked him in the back. He grunted.

A moment later the tent began to stir. Voices called to each other in Serbian. Serbian! They were in Montenegro, beyond the Ottoman border, safe from Mehmed Pasha, safe from the Turkish authorities’ unexplained pursuit of James.

Safe from the Montenegrins, whose peaceful sleep their rackety escort must surely have shattered?

As helpful hands folded back the fabric, grinning faces reassured her. The collapse of the strangers’ tent was a good enough joke to excuse their unmannerly midnight arrival. James’s slumbering through the rescue only added to the hilarity.

Cordelia arose with what dignity she could muster and did her best in Serbo-Polish to explain. That they were fleeing the Turks was enough to persuade the villagers to extend a warm welcome.

The hamlet was tiny, the cottages no more than windowless huts, each a single room divided by a woven willow screen into space for beasts and space for people. As usual in this harsh land, most of the flocks and most of the men were away at the winter pasture. Cordelia noticed that the remaining men were all armed; at least one always kept a wary eye on the still sleeping James, stretched out beneath the blankets she had thrown over him.

He continued to sleep while the women fed Cordelia on bread and sheep’s-milk cheese and helped her do her bit of washing. All their water came from melted snow. In fact they told her they spread straw matting over the snow and ice in early spring to preserve the supply as long as possible. James was lucky not to have arrived in midsummer, since he woke tormented with a raging thirst.

“And a splitting head,” he groaned when Cordelia arrived, tugged by the hand by an excited small boy. “What the deuce happened?”

“You remember riding the wild boar?”

“Of course I do.” He gave her a pallid, rueful grin. “It’s because we were celebrating my folly that I couldn’t refuse to swill raki with them. Wild boar, wild revelry, wild ride, but after that?”

Some of “after that” was best forgotten, Cordelia decided. “The tent fell down,” she said primly. She gestured at the villagers, gathered again in a circle around them. “These people rescued me shortly before I expired for want of air.”

“Oh lord, I’m sorry! I must have been a trifle foxed when we put the damned thing up.”

“So you informed me.” She couldn’t help laughing at his comically guilty dismay. “I wasn’t really near to expiring. Come on, come and eat and assuage your thirst or we shall cover no distance today.”

Tenderly he pressed his fingers to his temples. “I’m afraid if I try to ride, either I shall fall off Aeneas or my head will fall off my shoulders. Please, dear Cordelia, may we not take a holiday?”

“Well, I’d rather not have to try to stick your head back on, nor to recover your body from the bottom of a cliff.”

So they stayed the rest of the day and set off again early the next morning.

* * * *

Winter had well and truly set in. As the weather worsened, the mountains grew more rugged, the fertile valleys rarer, the villages sparser and poorer. The people rarely had much food or fodder to spare, even in exchange for gold, and firewood was a treasure almost more precious.

Amazed and admiring of Cordelia’s stamina, James sometimes wondered if they shouldn’t stop in one of the larger villages and wait for spring. But however hospitable, the villagers’ resources were strained by their presence and they were always relieved to see the travellers depart.

At least they had no difficulty finding youths or old men irked at being left behind with the women and happy to act as guides. With painful slowness the uncounted miles fell behind.

Wherever the track was wide enough, James and Cordelia rode side by side. As if to persuade themselves that the rest of the world still existed somewhere beyond the endless snow-covered mountains, they talked of places they knew. Cordelia spoke of Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, the forests of Germany and the sandy Baltic coast. But more often James told her about England. He described the wonders of London, highways with comfortable inns every few miles, fruitful woods and fields, provincial towns with shops and markets, pretty villages where even the poor grew flowers as well as vegetables in their gardens.

Cordelia had endless questions about England. He answered them as well as he could. However, if she was curious about his way of life or his family she restrained her curiosity, and she never mentioned her own. Though itching to learn more of her history, James tactfully followed suit.

He realized he did not even know at what age she had left her native land. To judge by her ignorance, she must have been very young—and for some reason her mother had told her next to nothing.

When places palled, they talked of food. Cordelia was explaining the differences between various German sausages when she suddenly stopped and said, “Grass. James, look, grass!”

They had just reached the crest of a pass, bare limestone crags on either side. Down in the valley, instead of the usual blanket of white—or at best white patched with ochre—a haze of green met their gaze.

Two days later, from the top of another pass, they looked down a rugged hillside speckled with fresh green growth at the Adriatic.

The indigo sea was fringed with vivid turquoise along the rocky shore and around a small, dark-green, offshore island. In startling contrast, the brick-red tile roofs of Dubrovnik lay enclosed by the ancient wall which had helped the city keep its independence from Hungarians, Venetians, Serbs, and Turks.

“Dubrovnik!” sighed Cordelia. “Now all we have to do is find a bath, and then a ship to take us to Italy.”

“A ship!” groaned James. “The very notion makes me shudder. To think I failed to appreciate ponies and snowy mountains while I had them!”

Their guide, Pero, apparently appreciated his mountain fastnesses better than the prospect of going among the Ragusans. “They are Dalmatians,” he explained, spitting eloquently on the stony track. When James and Cordelia looked blank, he elaborated: “Croats. Roman Papists. Almost as bad as Turks. Still, they have many goods for sale and you will pay me when we reach the city. I will take you all the way.”

They followed the zigzag trail downward. The gentler slopes near the sea were intensively cultivated, with apricot trees in bloom. Spring had come to the coast though not far inland harsh winter would linger on the heights for weeks yet. The midday sun was warm. Sheepskins already abandoned, Cordelia flung off her heavy cloak and fastened a simple cotton kerchief over her head.

Her blond hair, nearly shoulder-length by now but still too short to tie back, hung in lank strands around the hollow-cheeked face in which her eyes looked huge. Without the bulky clothes, she appeared painfully thin, a veritable waif, despite the diamond cloth wound about her middle. Finding it hard to believe he had ever considered her too plump, James decided the next most important thing after a bath was a good meal, or two or three.

Anything to put off going to sea.

They made their way around the outside of Dubrovnik’s white limestone ramparts. Ahead, their road joined another leading to the drawbridge approach to the arched and crenellated city gatehouse. Sentries stood guard at either end of the bridge, smart in white breeches and dark blue, gold-laced coats, with white-plumed shakos on their heads and rifles slung on their shoulders.

Pero turned and looked James and Cordelia up and down. “Better tell ‘em you’re Slovenes,” he grunted. Before James could ask why, Pero swung down from his pony and started to lead it forward.

James dismounted and turned to help Cordelia down from Dido’s back.

Her face was aghast. “James,” she gasped, “those soldiers are French!”

Chapter 21

All too well, Cordelia remembered the inexorable tide of Napoleon’s armies sweeping across Europe. By sheer chance, she and her mother had never been in the neighbourhood of a battle. Nor, as insignificant women protected by powerful men, had they ever been molested by the invaders. Yet she had grown up always aware that she was English and, whatever the gyrations of the German states, of Austria, Prussia and Russia, England was at war with France.

The years in Istanbul and the months crossing the Balkan peninsula had allowed the French peril to slip to the back of her mind. Now, after escaping the amorous pasha and surviving the journey across the mountains, here she was faced with the old enemy again.

If they asked for her papers, they would find out she was English. And her only protector was James, who had no papers at all.

As she automatically accepted his hand to help her dismount, he hissed at her, “Pretend we’re Slovenes. Pero seems to think it will help.”

Too late to discuss what to do. Already the sentries were gazing at them with obvious curiosity. Their clothes must appear odd, especially combined with her fair hair and James’s fair beard. “Slovenes,” she murmured. “What language?”