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“I don’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.”

Dolores huffed and threaded her needle. “The only eligible man left in Cabrera—of noble blood, I mean—is the old vizconde , who is past sixty, twice widowed, and desperate to get an heir. If it is him your brother is courting, I pity you.”

Alejandra shrugged. “I would rather wed an old man than be forced to become a nun.” The girls glanced at Sister Beatriz, but the elderly nun snored gently on, oblivious. “Besides,” Alejandra continued, “as my father said, he is rich, and old men die. Then I will be free to do as I want.”

Another girl spoke up. “They say the old vizconde is poxed and that is why he could not get a son on either of his wives.”

The girls exchanged glances.

“That cannot be true. My father would not marry me to a poxed man,” Alejandra said into the silence. “He would not.”

The others nodded, murmuring reassurance. But they had all heard the tales that lying with a virgin could cure a man of the pox…

“Papa would not do such a thing,” Alejandra repeated. “He is too fond of me, I’m certain.” But her confidence was clearly shaken, and it was more a prayer than a certainty.

It would be her father’s decision and the vizconde ’s, not hers. She was just a daughter, to be given where it would do her family the most good. And times in Spain these days were desperate.

“If he does, you must refuse,” Bella told her.

“Refuse?” Alejandra gasped. “Disobey my father ? Are you mad ? I couldn’t!”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” Alejandra repeated. “Because I couldn’t.” She added, after a moment, “I have never disobeyed him in anything. Never .”

Bella knotted her thread. “Then it would be good for him to experience something new.”

All the girls stared at her, shocked.

“How do you think he would react?” she asked Alejandra.

“He would kill me!” she said with a shudder.

“Kill you, or merely beat you?”

“Merely? He would thrash me to within an inch of my life!”

“One recovers from a beating. A poxed old vizconde , though…” Bella let that thought sink in. “Has your father ever beaten you before?”

“Never,” Alejandra said proudly.

“Then why do you think he would beat you now?”

Alejandra looked surprised, then thoughtful. “It’s my duty to my family to marry well.”

“It’s a father’s duty to find you a decent husband,” Bella countered.

Alejandra bit her lip. “I don’t know… Papa would be so disappointed in me.”

Bella snorted. “He will survive his disappointment. He might also come to respect you.” She shrugged again. “It’s not my business what you do, but if it was me, I’d refuse.”

“Which is why you’re always in trouble,” Alejandra retorted.

Sister Beatriz snorted and sat up. “What’s that? Tongues wagging? Sewing, girls! Sewing!” She clapped her hands in a brisk manner, and the girls bent over their sewing. Needles flashed in silence, and in a short while the elderly nun dozed off peacefully again.

“Isabella’s husband might come for her soon,” Paloma said on a bright, let’s-change-the-subject note, and Bella groaned silently. She knew what would come next.

Alejandra gave a scornful snort. “Who, the imaginary one?”

“He’s not imaginary, is he, Isabella?” Paloma turned to Bella.

Bella didn’t answer. They’d been over this a hundred, a thousand times.

At first she’d fought the accusation tooth and nail, but now, after all these years, she was half inclined to think she’d dreamed it, dreamed him.

But Reverend Mother had the marriage papers in her desk, and his signature was on them, firm and black and clear. Lucien Alexander Ripton, Lieutenant.

“Of course he is,” Alejandra insisted. “Her tall English lieutenant, with his broad shoulders and his so-beautiful face just like an angel!” she said in a mocking voice. “An angel , wed to Isabella Ripton ?” All the girls laughed.

Bella doggedly sewed on. She understood why they pecked at her. She might attack someone, too, if she was about to be married to an old, poxed vizconde .

Besides, it was her own fault. She shouldn’t have told them in the first place.

After the hasty marriage, Lieutenant Ripton and her aunt had decided to place her in the convent under the name of Ripton, Bella taking his name in the manner of English wives instead of keeping her own name, as Spanish women did.

Her aunt had instructed Bella not to tell anyone she was married—not the Mother Superior of the time, nor the other nuns, nor any of the girls.

Then, she said, if Cousin Ramón came looking for Isabella Mercedes Sanchez y Vaillant, daughter of the Conde de Castillejo, Mother Superior could truthfully tell him that no such girl was in the convent; only the sister of an English lieutenant.

It was strange, but exciting, having a new name.

And sure enough, Cousin Ramón had come, and Reverend Mother had assured him no girl of that name was in the convent.

Sweet, elderly Reverend Mother, so patently truthful and innocent, and so obviously distressed by his tale of a young girl who’d fled her home to cross Spain in such terrible times—anything could have happened to her, the poor, young innocent.

Dreadful, dreadful! She’d offered immediate prayers for the lost girl’s safe recovery, and even Cousin Ramón had to believe her.