Page 15 of Bride By Mistake
“But—”
“You will not be coming with me. You’re not old enoughto be married. This is only to keep you from Ramón, understand.”
She nodded. “I understand.” She glanced at the church. “We will do it here? Now?”
“If you want to.”
“I do.”
The priest took some convincing to marry them. He spoke to Isabella and Luke separately and together. Isabella’s injuries worried him greatly, but she was fervent in her wish to be married, and she swore Luke had not harmed a hair on her head. On the contrary.
And in the end, it was wartime, and better a couple united in sin—even if one was a heathen Englishman—than another young Spanish girl debauched.
They repeated the sacred words, Isabella barefoot and dressed in Luke’s shirt and drawers held up with string. Luke signed a series of documents, the priest witnessed them, and within the hour Luke and his child bride rode north to the Convent of the Angels, where he handed an exhausted young girl and a packet of documents over to her surprised aunt.
Isabella was safe.
Three
The Convent of the Broken Angel, Spain, 1819
“Idon’t want to die an old maid,” the plaintive voice began.
Isabella Mercedes Sanchez y Vaillant, known to her schoolmates as Isabella Ripton, bent over her sewing, wishing she could block out the conversation to come. She knew it by heart. It was a daily ritual, as regular as any otherritualin the convent routine. She was fed up with most of them, but particularly so with this one. It did no good at all; only rubbed their noses in their own misery.
“And I don’t want to become a nun.”
Now Paloma would interject and say something about having faith and about what a lovely bride Dolores would make. Rubbing salt in the wounds, if only she realized it, but she never did. Paloma was as thickheaded as she was kindhearted.
Bella stabbed her needle through the worn white linen. She loathed sewing. She longed to get up and leave, but she was stuck there for at least another hour. She had a pile of worn-out sheets to sew, sides to middle, to give them another lease of life. Penance for something or other. Running. Or impiety, or something like that. For breathing, probably.
“You must have faith, Dolores,” Paloma said gently. “Your father will send for you. I’m certain of it. Why would he not, such a beautiful bride you will make. Any man would be proud.”
Bella gritted her teeth. It was nothing to do with Dolores’s beauty or otherwise. It was about money. And family pride. It was the same reason all the girls were still stuck in the convent, long after their schooling was complete and years after the war was over.
Spain might be free of the French, they might have a Spanish king on the throne again, not Napoleon’s puppet or his brother, but it was not the same country it had been before the war. Many great families were on the brink of ruin, some because they’d sided with the French and the Spanish traitors, others because they’d spent their fortunes funding a private army to fight a guerrilla war, and some because they had had their homes and estates—and therefore their means of earning a living—destroyed; part of the catastrophe of war.
The blue-blooded families of the girls who remained in the convent were too poor to afford a rich dowry for their daughters and too prideful to allow them to marry below their class. Not unless the prospective husband was of enormous wealth, and even then, some families refused to sully their ancient bloodlines with the blood of some jumped-up peasant.
Rather than let their daughters suffer such a fate, they’d left them to rot in a remote mountain convent: unwanted,forgotten, abandoned.
The sons of the nobility, of course, were snapping up as brides the daughters of these same wealthy, jumped-up peasants. Their blood was unfortunate, but the noble family name must not die out, and the bride’s wealth would help rebuild the family fortunes.
Bella had explained this to Paloma a dozen times, but allPaloma did was smile and say, “We must all have faith.”
She’d make a good nun, Isabella thought. Or a saint. St. Paloma of the missing dowry. Paloma’s brother had gambled Paloma’s dowry away, and now he was refusing to let her return home. Things were different since Papa died, he’d written. There was no appropriate husband for her, and she was better off in the convent, in the tranquil environment she wasused to.
Bella picked up a well-worn bedsheet and ripped it savagely in half. Tranquil environment indeed! She’d love to lock Paloma’s brother up here, to give him a taste of tranquil environment. Endless prayers, endlessly repeated dreary, pointless conversations, and endless, endless sewing.
She started stitching the two halves of the sheet together. Bella only ever did mending. The other girls and the nuns mostly did fine embroidery. The convent was famed for it. Bishops all across Spain, and even in Rome, wore vestments and used altar cloths embroidered here in this remote mountain convent.
Before King Ferdinand had been crowned, the girls had been mainly occupied in sewing their trousseaux. Now they worked almost wholly on altar cloths and vestments. Like the nuns.
Isabella’s talents lay in other areas, Reverend Mother always said. The other girls thought she was just saying that, being Isabella’s aunt, but Bella and Reverend Mother knew better.
“I wish I had your faith, Paloma,” Dolores told her. “I think we’ll all still be sitting here when we’re old and wrinkled, snoring away the day like Sister Beatriz.”
“Speak for yourself, Dolores,” Alejandra snapped. “I, for one, will not be left rotting in a convent. Even now my father is in discussions with a noble family from Cabrera.”
