Fortune's Bride Read Free Page B

he was
with Sir Arthur, any attentions he bestowed must be taken as merely his duty,
since the general’s opinion on the behavior of his young staff officers was
already known.
    Sabrina suppressed another urge to sigh over her future
brother-in-law’s fitness for married life and instead merely instructed the footman
to serve luncheon in the small breakfast parlor. On the way down to eat, Perce
reminded Robert that since Bonaparte had beaten Prussia, Austria, and Russia,
the only ports that were still officially open to British goods were those of
Portugal, and he pointed out that because the French navy was still inadequate,
the only way for Boney to close off Portugal was to invade by land. But that
meant marching through Spain.
    “I can’t imagine Boney is worried about the Spanish after
wiping up the Russians,” Robert remarked as they seated themselves.
    “No, but whatever else Boney is, he’s no fool. Why should he
waste men fighting his way through the Pyrenees when he could trick the Spanish
into welcoming him? The Spanish have always resented the fact that Portugal
defeated them back in the seventeenth century and has managed to remain
independent ever since. Boney got the Spanish to let in his army by promising
to hand Portugal back to Spain.”
    “And he didn’t. The more fools they were to think Boney
would keep a promise.”
    “They were worse fools than that,” Perce remarked. “I’m not
going to go into the crosscurrents in the Spanish government—”
    “Thank God for that,” Robert muttered.
    Perce gave him a sardonic look but continued without
comment, “but because they all hated each other and thought they were smarter
than an ‘upstart Corsican’, the king—although you can’t blame him, poor thing,
he’s nearly an idiot—the queen, her chief minister—who’s probably her lover—and
the crown prince all walked right into a trap Bonaparte laid and were forced to
abdicate. Then Boney thought the way was clear to establish another puppet
throne with his brother Joseph on it.”
    “It wasn’t unreasonable,” Sabrina commented. “It had worked
in Holland and Italy and other places.”
    “But Boney had beaten the Dutch and Italians first,” Perce
reminded her. “He hadn’t beaten the Spanish. He had tricked them. Apparently as
soon as news of the abdication spread, rioting broke out spontaneously all over
the country. By the end of May, Sir Hew Dalrymple, the governor of Gibraltar,
had received an appeal for money and arms from the revolutionary junta of
Seville. But the point is, they seem to think they can beat the French on their
own, and in my book that means trouble for Sir Arthur or whoever else commands
the expeditionary force.”
    “If they think they can beat Boney when the Austrians,
Prussians, and Russians couldn’t,” Robert remarked, “they’re plain mad. But
don’t worry about Sir Arthur. He’s used to native allies with swollen heads.”
    “I hope so.” Perce looked worried. “The trouble is…” He
allowed the sentence to hang in the air for a moment, then went on, “Canning at
the Foreign Office is a clever devil, but I can’t say I like him much, and he
does have a tendency to jump at opportunities without investigating them
sufficiently.”
    “You can’t investigate military opportunities too closely or
for too long, or they disappear,” Robert pointed out.
    Perce shrugged, but his voice was bitter when he spoke.
“It’s true, but it works both ways. Maybe if General Bennigsen had taken the
time to investigate a little more closely what he thought was an opportunity,
there wouldn’t have been that bloodbath at Friedland. Maybe Russia would still
have been in the war against Boney. Maybe the Russians could even have defeated
the French. They came damned close a couple of times.”
    Robert glanced at his brother with considerable sympathy.
He, too, had been in bloody, hopeless battles, but he had always felt he was
tougher than Perce and that