Beyond the Sunrise

by Mary Balogh

Genres: Romance; Historical Romance; Regency Romance

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Survivor’s Club novels comes “an epic love story” (Publishers Weekly) of intrigue and deception and the promises that can break a heart.…“I will love you all my life and even beyond that.”
Even at fifteen, Jeanne, the privileged daughter of a royalist EmigrE, knew what she liked: Englishman Robert Blake, bastard son of a marquess. Yet his questionable birth rendered him forbidden. Forced to part, they were still young enough to believe in tomorrow. But as time passed, that brief ephemeral flirtation at Haddington Hall faded into memory.
Eleven years later in Portugal, during the Peninsular Wars, they meet again, both of them spies, and destined to be working on opposing sides. He is now a captain with the British army. She is the widowed Marquesa das Minas—sometimes going by the name Joana da Fonte. However for only one of them does the flicker of recognition still burn.
Amid the fury of war and in the shadow of secrets, passion flares once again. But for Joana and Robert, each entrusted to a dangerous mission that demands deception, falling in love could be the most dangerous risk of all.

Release date: February 3, 2015

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 432

Sample

 

Dear Reader,

 

Beyond the Sunrise, first published in 1992, is very special to me. I had already written almost thirty Regency romances, character-driven comedies of manners, all set in England. I was comfortable in the genre. But then I had an idea for something a bit different, something that would involve the Napoleonic Wars. I had been doing research into the Peninsular Wars in Spain and Portugal, and I was hooked.

The story is set in the same era as most of my others, and it begins in England when the hero and heroine first meet as young teenagers and enjoy a sweet romance before they are forced apart—she is the daughter of an exiled French count while he is the illegitimate son of an earl. But the story then moves to Portugal a number of years later. Robert Blake is now a tough, seasoned captain of an infantry regiment and an occasional spy under direct orders from the future Duke of Wellington. Joana da Fonte (formerly Jeanne Morisette) is the widow of a Portuguese nobleman and also a spy—something for which her French background makes her a prime candidate.

The story involves spying, intrigue, revenge, and betrayal, and it is the most action-packed of my books. I absolutely loved writing it, even though it took me well outside my comfort zone. It is character-driven and tells a passionate love story, just as all my books do, but it is a great deal more than just that, and I am delighted to see it being published again so many years later.

I do hope you will enjoy reading it in this lovely new edition, whether it be for the first time or as a reread from many years ago.

Mary Balogh

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF MARY BALOGH

ALSO BY MARY BALOGH

 

 

ENGLAND,
1799

1

THE entertainment in progress at Haddington Hall in Sussex, country seat of the Marquess of Quesnay, could not exactly be dignified by the name of ball, though there was dancing, and the sounds of music and gaiety were wafting from the open windows of the main drawing room. It was a country entertainment and the numbers not large, there being only two guests staying at the house at that particular time to swell the ranks of the local gentry.

It was not a ball, but the boy sitting out of sight of the house on the seat surrounding the great marble fountain below the terrace wished that he was inside and a part of it all. He wished that reality could be suspended and that he could be there dancing with her, the dark-haired, dark-eyed young daughter of his father’s guest. Or at least looking at her and perhaps talking with her. Perhaps fetching her a glass of lemonade. He wished . . . oh, he wished for the moon, as he always did. A dreamer—that was what his mother had often called him.

But there were two insurmountable reasons for his exclusion from the assembly: he was only seventeen years old, and he was the marquess’s illegitimate son. That last fact had had particular meaning to him only during the past year and a half, since the sudden death of his mother. Through his childhood and much of his boyhood, it had seemed a normal way of life to have a father who visited him and his mother frequently but did not live with them, and a father who had a wife in the big house though no other children but him.

It was only in the year and a half since his mother’s death that the reality of his situation had become fully apparent to him. He had been a fifteen-year-old boy without a home and with a father who had financed his mother’s home but had never been a permanent part of it. His father had taken him to live in the big house. But he had felt all the awkwardness of his situation since moving there. He was not a member of the family—his father’s wife, the marchioness, hated him and ignored his presence whenever she was forced to be in it. But he was not one of the servants either, of course.

It was only in the past year and a half that his father had begun to talk about his future and that the boy had realized that his illegitimacy made of that future a tricky business. The marquess would buy him a commission in the army when he was eighteen, he had decided, but it would have to be with a line regiment and not with the cavalry—certainly not with the Guards. That would never do when the ranks of the Guards were filled with the sons of the nobility and upper gentry. The legitimate sons, that was.

He was his father’s only son, but illegitimate.

“You are not at the ball?” a soft little voice asked him suddenly, and he looked up to see the very reason why he had so wished to be in the drawing room—Jeanne Morisette, daughter of the Comte de Levisse, a royalist émigré who had fled from France during the Reign of Terror and lived in England ever since.

He felt his heart thump. He had never been close to her before, had never exchanged a word with her. He shrugged. “I don’t want to be,” he said. “It is not a ball anyway.”

She sat down beside him, slender in a light-colored flimsy gown—he could not see the exact color in the darkness—her hair in myriad ringlets about her head, her eyes large and luminous in the moonlight. “But I wish I could be there even so,” she said. “I thought I might be allowed to attend since it is just a country entertainment. But Papa said no. He said that fifteen is too young to be dancing with gentlemen. It is tiresome being young, is it not?”

Ah. So she had not been with the company after all. He had tortured himself for nothing. He shrugged again. “I am not so young,” he said. “I am seventeen.”

She sighed. “When I am seventeen,” she said, “I shall dance every night and go to the theater and on picnics. I shall do just whatever I please when I am grown up.”

Her face was bright and eager and she was prettier than any other girl he had seen. He had taken every opportunity during the past week to catch glimpses of her. She was like a bright little jewel, quite beyond his reach, of course, but lovely to look at and to dream of.

“Papa is going to take me back to France as soon as it is safe to go,” she said with a sigh. “Everything seems to be settling down under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte. If it continues so, perhaps we will be able to return, Papa says. He says there is no point in continuing to dream of the return of a king.”

“So you may do your dancing in Paris,” he said.

“Yes.” Her eyes were dreamy. “But I would just as soon stay in London. I know England better than I know France. I even speak English better than I speak French. I would prefer to belong here.”

But there was a trace of a French accent in her voice. It was one more attractive feature about her. He liked to listen to her talk.

“You are the marquess’s son, are you not?” she asked him. “But you do not have his name?”

“I have my mother’s name,” he said. “She died the winter before last.”

“Ah,” she said, “that is sad. My mother is dead too, but I do not remember her. I have always been with Papa for as long as I recall. What is your name?”

“Robert,” he said.

“Robert.” She gave his name its French intonation and then smiled and said it again with its English pronunciation. “Robert, dance with me. Do you dance?”

“My mother taught me,” he said. “Out here? How can we dance out here?”

“Easily,” she said, jumping lightly to her feet and stretching out a slim hand to him. “The music is quite loud enough.”

“But you will hurt your feet on the stones,” he said, looking down at her thin silk slippers as she led the way up onto the terrace.

She laughed. “I think, Robert, that you are looking for excuses,” she said. “I think that your mother did not teach you at all, or that if she did, you were unteachable. I think perhaps you have two left feet.” She laughed again.

“That is not so,” he said indignantly. “If you wish to dance, then dance we will.”

“That is a very grudging acceptance,” she said. “You are supposed to be thrilled to dance with me. You are supposed to make me feel that there is nothing you wish for more in life than to dance with me. But no matter. Let us dance.”

He knew very little about women’s teasing. It was true that Mollie Lumsden, one of his father’s undermaids, frequently put herself in his way and showed herself to him in provocative poses, most frequently bent over his bed as she made it up in the mornings. It was true too that on the one occasion when he had tried to steal a kiss she had whisked herself off with a toss of the head and an assurance that her favors did not come free. But there was a world of difference between the buxom Mollie and Jeanne Morisette.

They danced a minuet, the moon bathing the cobbles of the terrace in a mellow light, both of them silent and concentrating on the distant music and their steps—although his attention was not entirely on just those two things either. His eyes were on the slender moonlit form of the girl with whom he danced. Her hand in his was warm and slim and soft. He thought that life might never have a finer moment to offer him.

“You are very tall,” she said as the music drew to an end.

He was close to six feet in height. Unfortunately his growing had all been done upward. To say that he was thin would be to understate the case. He hated to look at himself in a looking glass. He longed to be a handsome, muscular man and wondered if he ever would be anything more than gangly and ugly.

“And you have lovely blond hair,” she said. “I have noticed you all week and wished that I had hair that waved like yours.” She laughed lightly. “I am glad you do not wear it short. It would be such a waste.”

He was dazzled. He was still holding her soft little hand in his.

“I am supposed to be in my room,” she said. “Papa would have forty fits if he knew I was out here.”

“You are quite safe,” he said. “I shall see that no harm comes to you.”

She looked up at him from beneath her lashes, an imp of mischief in her eyes. “You may kiss me if you wish,” she said.

His eyes widened. What Mollie had denied, Jeanne Morisette would grant? But how could he kiss her? He knew nothing about kissing.

“Of course,” she said, “if you do not wish to, I shall return to the house. Perhaps you are afraid.”

He was. Mortally afraid. “Of course I am not afraid,” he said scornfully. And he set his hands at her waist— they almost met about it—and lowered his head and kissed her. He kissed her as he had always kissed his mother on the cheek—though he kissed Jeanne on the lips—briefly and with a smacking sound.

She was all softness and subtle fragrance. And her hands were on his shoulders, her thumbs against the skin of his neck. Her dark eyes looked inquiringly into his. He swallowed and knew that his bobbing Adam’s apple would reveal his nervousness.

“And of course I wish to,” he said, and he lowered his head and laid his lips against hers again, keeping them there for a few self-indulgent moments and noting with shock the unfamiliar effects of the embrace on his body— the breathlessness, the rush of heat, the tightening in his groin. He lifted his head.

“Oh, Robert,” she said with a sigh, “you can have no idea how tiresome it is to be fifteen. Or can you? Do you remember what it was like? Though it is entirely different for a boy, of course. I am still expected to behave like a child, when I am not a child. I must be quiet and prim, and welcome the company of your father and mother—no, the marchioness is not your mother, is she?—and of my own papa. And I am to be denied the company of the young people who are at present dancing and enjoying themselves in the drawing room. How will I endure it here for another whole week?”

He wished he could pluck some stars from the sky and lay them at her feet. He wished that the music would continue for a week so that he could dance with her and kiss her and help see her to the end of the boredom of an unwelcome visit to the country.

“I will be here too,” he said with a shrug,

She looked up at him eagerly—the top of her head reached barely to his shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “I shall steal away and spend time with you, Robert. It will be fun and my maid is very easy to escape. She is lazy, but I never complain to Papa because sometimes it is an advantage to have a lazy maid.” She laughed her light infectious laugh. “You are very handsome. Will you take me to the ruins tomorrow? We went there two days ago, but the marchioness would not let me explore them lest I hurt myself. All I could do was look and listen to your father tell the history of the old castle.”

“I will take you,” he said. But he noted the fact that she had spoken of stealing away to be with him. And of course she was right. It was not at all the thing for the two of them even to have met. They certainly should never have talked or danced. Or kissed. There would be all hell to pay if he were caught taking her to the ruins. He should explain that to her more clearly. But he was seventeen years old, and the realities of life were new to him. He still thought it possible to fight against them, or at least to ignore them.

“Will you?” she asked eagerly, clasping her hands to her slender, budding bosom. “After luncheon? I shall go to my room for a rest, as the marchioness is always urging me to do. Where shall I meet you?”

“The other side of the stables,” he said, pointing. “It is almost a mile to the ruins. Will you be able to walk that far?”

“Of course I can walk there,” she said scornfully. “And climb. I want to climb up the tower.”

“It is dangerous,” he said. “Some of the stairs have crumbled away.”

“But you have climbed it, have you not?” she said.

“Of course.”

“Then I shall climb it too,” she said. “Is there a good view from the top?”

“You can see to the village and beyond,” he said.

The music was playing a quadrille in the drawing room.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “After luncheon. At last there will be a day to look forward to. Good night, Robert.”

She held out one slim hand to him. He took it and realized in some confusion that she meant him to kiss it. He raised it to his lips and felt foolish and flattered and wonderful.

“Good night, Miss Morisette,” he said.

She laughed up at him. “You are a courtier after all,” she said. “You have just made me feel at least eighteen years old. It is Jeanne, Robert. Jeanne the French way and Robert the English way.”

“Good night, Jeanne,” he said, and he was glad of the darkness, which hid his blushes.

She turned and tripped lightly over the cobbles of the terrace and around to the side of the house. She had, he realized, come out through the servants’ entrance and was returning the same way. He wondered if she had come out merely for the fresh air or if she had seen him from an upstairs window. The window of her bedchamber overlooked the terrace and the fountain.

He liked to believe that it was his presence out there that had drawn her. She had called him tall. She had not commented on his thinness, only on his height. And she had called the blondness of his hair lovely and had approved of the fact that he liked to wear it overlong. She had called him handsome—very handsome. And she had asked him to kiss her. She had asked him to take her to the ruins the next day. She had said that at last there would be a day to look forward to.

He was no longer merely attracted to her slim dark beauty, he realized, the sounds of music and gaiety from the drawing room forgotten. He was deeply, irrevocably in love with Jeanne Morisette.

*   *   *

She had caught sight of him several times since her arrival at Haddington Hall, though she had not been formally introduced to him, of course. Her father had explained to her that he was the bastard son of the marquess and that really it was not at all respectable for him to be living at the house. It must be very distressing for the marchioness, her papa had said, especially since the poor woman was apparently barren and had been unable to present the marquess with any legitimate heirs or even any daughters.

Jeanne did not care about the fact that he should not be there at the house. She was glad that he was, and only sorry that it was not possible to be openly friendly with him. She had not met many boys or young men during her life, having had a sheltered upbringing with her father and having been sent to a school where she and her fellow pupils were kept strictly from the wicked male world beyond their walls.

In her boredom and loneliness at Haddington Hall, she had watched him covertly whenever she had had a chance, most notably from the window of her bedchamber. And she had quite fallen in love with his lean and boyish figure and his longish blond hair.

On the night of the ball—though both her father and the marchioness had tried to console her by assuring her that it was not really a ball—she had stood moodily at the window of her room and seen him, at first on the terrace and then disappearing to the far side of the fountain and not reappearing. He must be sitting on the seat there. She had already dismissed her maid for the night. Her breath had come fast and excitement had bubbled in her as she felt the temptation to slip downstairs and outdoors unseen to talk with him.

She had given in to temptation.

She had been dazzled. She had not realized quite how tall he was or how handsome his face with its aquiline nose and firm jaw and very direct eyes. He was seventeen years old, a young man, not the boy she had at first taken him for.

He was the first man she had danced with apart from her dancing master at school, and he was the first man to kiss her, not just that first time in the way her father might have kissed her, but the second time, when his lips had lingered on hers and she had felt delightfully wicked right down to her toes.

She was in love with him before she had finished running lightly upstairs to her room and before she had closed her door behind her and leaned back against it, her eyes closed, and tried to remember just exactly how his mouth had felt. And then she opened her eyes and raced to the window and drew back again half behind the heavy velvet curtains so that she could watch him wander up and down the terrace without herself being seen. But she need not have worried—he did not look up.

She was in love with him—with a tall and slender blond god who was all of seventeen years old. And who had the added attraction of being forbidden fruit.

They had four days together—four afternoons when she was dutifully resting in her room as far as her father and the marquess and marchioness knew. They went to the ruined castle on the first day and he climbed the winding stone stairs of the tower ahead of her, turning frequently to point out to her a chipped or crumbled stair where she would have to set her feet carefully. She was more frightened than she would admit and almost squealed with terror when they came out into daylight at the top and she discovered that the parapet had quite fallen away so that there was nothing to protect them from the seemingly endless drop to the grass and ruins below. But she merely shook out her hair—she had disdained to wear a bonnet—and looked boldly about her.

“It is magnificent,” she said, stretching out her arms to the sides. “How wonderful it must have been, Robert, to be the lady of such a castle and to have watched from the battlements for her knight to come riding home.”

“After an absence of seven years or more, doubtless,” he said.

She laughed. “What an unromantic thing to say,” she said. “Anyway, I would not have let him go alone. I would have ridden with him and shared all the discomforts and dangers of the military life with him.”

“You would not have been able to do it,” he said. “You are a woman.”

“Because it would not have been allowed?” she said. “Or because I would not be able to stand the hardships? I would too. I would not care about having to sleep on the hard ground and all that. And as to not being allowed, I should cut off my hair and ride out as my knight’s squire. No one would even know that I was a woman. I would not complain, you see.”

He laughed and she discovered that white teeth and merry blue eyes made him even more handsome in the daylight than he had been in the moonlight the evening before.

She invited him to kiss her again when they reached the bottom. Indeed, she had found coming down to be a far greater ordeal than going up had been. She was glad of an excuse to lean back against a solid wall and to rest her arms along his reassuringly sturdy shoulders. He felt strong despite his leanness.

His arms slid about her waist as his lips rested against hers and her arms wrapped themselves about his neck. She tried pouting her lips against his and felt their pressure increase. She was being kissed by a man, she told herself, by a tall and handsome young man. And she was in love with him. It felt wonderful to be in love.

“I will have to go back,” she said, “or they will be sending up to my room to see why I am sleeping so long.”

“Yes,” he said making no attempt to delay her. “I will take you back as far as the stables.”

For the three afternoons following, they walked—across fields, among the woods, beside the lake a mile distant from the house in the opposite direction from the old castle. The weather was their friend. The sun shone each day from a blue sky, and if there were any clouds, they were small and white and fluffy and merely brought brief moments of welcome shade. They walked with fingers entwined and they talked to each other, sharing thoughts and dreams they had confided to no one before.

His father wanted to buy him a commission in the army when he was eighteen, he told her. But it was not a life he looked forward to. For as long as he had lived with his mother he had assumed that he would always live quietly in the country. It was the kind of life he loved. But he must do something. He realized that. He could not continue to live at Haddington Hall indefinitely, and he was not, of course, his father’s heir.

“But I have no wish to be an officer,” he told her. “I don’t think I could stomach killing anyone.”

She told him that her mother had been English, that her grandparents, the Viscount and Viscountess Kingsley, still lived in Yorkshire. But her papa had allowed her to visit them only twice in all the years they had been in England. Her father wanted her to be French and to live in France. But she wanted to be English and to live in England, she told Robert with a sigh. She wished she did not belong to two countries. It made life complicated.

She told him again of her dream of being old enough to attend balls and theater parties, of meeting and mingling with other young people. Except that the dream did not seem quite so important during those days. She was living a dream more wonderful than any she had ever imagined.

They lay side by side on a shaded bank of the lake during the fourth afternoon, their arms about each other, kissing, smiling at each other, gazing into each other’s eyes. He touched her small breasts lightly and she felt her cheeks flaming, though she did not withdraw her eyes from his or make any protest. His hand felt good there, and right. And then he rested his hand against her waist. It felt warm through the cotton of her chess.

“Robert,” she said, “I love you.”

And she loved the way he had of smiling with his eyes before the smile touched his lips.

“Do you love me?” she asked him. “Tell me that you do.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I am going to marry you,” she said. “Papa will not like it, I know, but if he will not give his consent, I will elope with you.”

He smiled slowly again. “It can never be, Jeanne. You know that,” he said gently. “Let’s not spoil these few days by dreaming of the impossible. Let’s enjoy them.”

“It can be,” she said, wrapping her arm about his lean waist and moving closer against him. “Oh, not yet, of course. I am too young. But when I am seventeen or eighteen and have not changed my mind, Papa will see that I can be happy with no one but you and he will give his consent. And if he does not, then I shall follow the drum with you. I shall ride to war with my knight.”

“Jeanne,” he said, kissing her mouth and her eyes one by one. “Jeanne.”

“Say you will marry me,” she said. “Say you want to. You do want to marry me, Robert?”

“I will love you all my life and even beyond that,” he said. “You will always be my only love.”

“But that is not what I asked you,” she said.

“Sh.” He kissed her again. “We must go back home. We have been away longer than usual. I don’t want you to be missed.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, smiling at him as he got to his feet and reached down a hand to help her up. “Tomorrow I shall get you to admit it, Robert. I always get what I want, you know.”

“Always?” he said.

“Always.” She brushed the grass from her dress and peeped up at him from beneath her eyelashes. He looked adorably handsome with his hair disheveled from the ground.

“I shall come for you on a white charger on your eighteenth birthday, then,” he said, “and we will ride off into the sunset—no, the sunrise; the sunrise would be better—and marry and have a dozen children and live happily ever after. Are you satisfied now?”

She stood on tiptoe, kissed his cheek, and smiled dazzlingly at him. “Utterly,” she said. “I have heard what I want to hear. I told you that I always get what I want, you see.” She laughed merrily. She thought that she had never been so happy in her life, though she knew it was a happiness for the present only. She knew as well as he that they would never marry, that after that particular week was past they would probably never meet again.

But she would always love him, she believed with all the passion of her fifteen years. He was her first love and he would be her last. She would never love another man as she loved Robert.

2

JEANNE’S happiness lasted for an even shorter time than she had expected. She had hoped for three more days. Three more brief days out of eternity. But she was granted only half an hour longer. Her father was waiting for her in her bedchamber when she returned.

“Jeanne? Where have you been?” he asked her in the French he always spoke when they were alone.

She switched to his language. “Out walking,” she said, smiling at him. “It is such a beautiful afternoon.”

“Alone?” he asked.

Her smile broadened. “Madge does not like walking,” she said. “I did not insist that she accompany me.”

“Three would have been a crowd,” he said, not returning her smile.

She looked at him warily.

“He is a bastard, Jeanne,” her father said sternly. “He should not even be housed beneath the same roof as decent people. I would have thought twice about accepting the marquess’s invitation here had I known that you would be subjected to such an indignity. I believe he keeps the boy here only to taunt his wife with her barrenness. You have been meeting him every afternoon while you have been ‘resting’?”

“Yes,” she admitted defiantly. “He is fun to be with, Papa, and there are no other young people here for me. You would not allow me to attend the assembly although I am fifteen years old.”

“Has he touched you?” the count asked, his voice cold and tight.

Jeanne could feel the color drain from her cheeks as she remembered the kisses she had shared with Robert on several occasions and his touching her breasts that afternoon.

“Has he t