Bound to Be a Bride

Copyright © 2013 by Megan Mulry

Cover and internal design © 2013 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

Cover design by Nicole Komasinski/Sourcebooks, Inc.

Photography by Jon Zychowski

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Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Bound to Be a Bride

Author’s Note

About the Author

An excerpt from
A Royal Pain

I sat down under his shadow with great delight,
and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

—Song of Solomon

May 1, 1808
Palace of the Dukes of Feria
Alcazaba de Badajoz, Spain

Seventeen. Finally.

I
am
Doña Isabella de Suárez de Figueroa y Córdoba, daughter of the Duke of Feria and granddaughter of the Duke of Medinaceli
, she repeated to herself, silently mouthing the words as she stood there looking into her wide brown eyes in the full-length oval mirror. The white lace of the mantilla scratched at her tender skin, but she had learned to ignore such inconsequential physical discomfort years ago. She pushed the maid away to make her cease her infernal fiddling with the already-perfect strands of raven hair that curled down her neck. Irritating woman.

“
¡Ve!
” Isabella rudely barked her dismissal.

Sol, the quiet, solid attendant who had raised Isabella since she was pulled from her dead mother’s body, looked stricken.

“Come,” Isabella said, softening her tone and forcing her nerves to quiet. She reached and pulled Sol into her arms. “I’m sorry.”

Isabella could feel Sol’s slight tremor of emotion as she hugged her back. She knew that Sol loved her as a mother would—probably better than most of the aristocratic absentee mothers of the other girls at the convent where Isabella had spent the past seven years of her sequestered adolescence. But Isabella’s days of obedience were about to come to an end. She had told no one. Not even Sol. Especially not Sol.

She had to pretend that all of her nervous jittering was a result of her wedding day, as if she had become impatient to finally meet the man to whom she was betrothed. Isabella’s father had sent a letter to the abbess nine months ago informing her that his daughter had been promised to the son of a wealthy member of the de la Mina family, and that she should be prepared. After all the years in the convent—the dire, dark, cold, dismal hours, days, weeks, and eventually years—Isabella was at last going to meet him. Or so everyone thought. It would make perfect sense for such a meeting to bring on a wave of vaporish, missish, despicably feminine swooning. Isabella could play that role one more time. And then never again.

Isabella gave Sol one final, firm pat on the back. Their roles had reversed years ago. “That’s enough, Sol. We are going to see each other every day just like when I was a girl.”

“But, my lady, after today, you will be la Condesa de la Mina—solidifying the alliance between the great families of the south and the great families of the north of Spain.”

The way Sol uttered the title with that combination of reverence and fear made Isabella want to kick the perfectly embroidered cushion on the footstool near where she stood. Instead, she released Sol and forced herself to sit back down on the silk cushion of the chair in front of her dressing table. She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. Those clenched fists of hers did double duty these days. Isabella thanked God for the hideous antiquated female fashions that her father insisted she wear, for one reason and one reason alone. While every other young woman of her class wore the flattering high-waisted Empire style, she was still constricted in the whalebone corset of her grandmother’s day. Yet, at times like this, Isabella was grateful for the yards and yards of heavy, hot, voluminous, suffocating white brocade. The passé style afforded ample room to conceal the evidence of her frustration: her fists. Her angry fists were always hidden in the folds of her old-fashioned dresses, while it appeared that her hands were clasped in that ladylike way the abbess had drilled into her from dawn until… dawn.

Isabella smiled at her little joke.

“There.” Sol smiled, wiping the last tears from the creases around her rheumy eyes. “That’s the smile everyone wants to see. Enough with your strange mood.” Sol began pattering again, flitting around Isabel in her doting way.

Four
more
hours, just four more hours
.

***

Francisco Javier de la Mina had better things to do than allow himself to be married off to some brittle, privileged girl who had been locked in a convent for the past seven years. A few months ago, on his way home from the seminary in Pamplona where he had been studying, he stopped outside of Burgos to see if he could catch a glimpse of his intended bride. He and his friend Sebastián waited in the small town near the convent and eventually saw a pale blond waif of a girl. She wore a fine hat of pale blue silk. “That is Doña Isabella,” the local innkeeper assured them. The older man, with a conviction that came from a lifetime spent within four square miles, went on to say that his daughter was the local milliner and the hat was of particular quality and beauty. Perhaps if the girl’s appearance had offered even a hint of strength or an adventurous spirit, Javi might have been more convinced of the need to obey his father’s very strict orders regarding the match, but after that glimpse into a future of endless hours in the company of an insipid girl, he was more committed than ever to pursuing his political plans far beyond the borders of Spain. When the weak female passed in front of the window of the inn where he and Sebastián had inquired about the aristocratic girls at the convent, Javi was relieved he would remain an unmarried bachelor. Being a single man meant he would not have to forego his rather unique sexual predilections and the freedom he enjoyed in their pursuit. Family obligations be damned.

He had already amassed a small army of freedom fighters. Even though he was the son of a very wealthy landowner, he knew he had the blood of Spain—the Spanish people—running through his veins, not the blood of that foolish Bonaparte brother who thought he could dismantle an entire culture under the false promise of freedom, nor the foolish king who had granted him entry. Nor would Javier let himself be woven into some aristocratic net that his father thought might restore Spain to its proper role on the international stage. He had more important things to do, and none of those plans had a place for a namby-pamby virgin hanging about. Despicable.

Of course, when Javier returned to his parents’ estate, he made every pretense of appearing grateful and attentive to the ongoing plans. He had hoped that he could save his family the embarrassment—and maybe even worse—of leaving a powerful relative of that foolish Borbón king standing alone at the altar, but there was nothing for it. He had tried every possible defense to dissuade his father from agreeing to the alliance.

His father stared at him across the huge leather desk in the vast library at the family farm. “Do not do something you will regret for the rest of your life, Javi.”

In that moment, Javier knew he would leave. If he stayed and married the insipid daughter of an arrogant aristocrat, he would regret it for the rest of his life.

***

Isabella had been summoned from the convent to her father’s castle a month ago to prepare for her upcoming marriage. She left the nuptial preparations to the servants and used the time to prepare for her escape. She had spent the intervening weeks reacquainting herself with all her childhood hiding places and secret locations. Each night for the past week, Isabella had stored little sacks of supplies in different nooks of various trees and shrubs along the path she would take from the estate. The castle in the forest outside of Badajoz was remote. She had to plan carefully how she would make her way through the forest, at what time of day, what the weather might be, where she would sleep that first night.

Despite their reputation for turning out prim, virginal, aristocratic brides-to-be, the Cistercian nuns of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas were also practical. They taught all of their pupils the same basic skills, whether the novitiates were impoverished orphans taken in to become nuns for the rest of their lives, or wealthy daughters of the ruling class, like Isabella, taken in to become… wives… for the rest of their lives. Not much difference either way, Isabella had tried to argue with her best friend one day.

“How can you compare your life as a
condesa
to my life as a… a… what? A laundress?”

Isabella laughed. Anna was a beautiful, frail girl, almost exactly the same age as Isabella. No one ever said so directly, but it was clear that Anna would
not
be doing laundry forever. Her slender, fragile looks were the height of fashion in Madrid. Anna had no less noble blood than Isabella… except for the damning fact that her parents had not been married when they’d had her. Well, technically they had been married, just not to each other.

When Anna’s mother delivered a blond-haired, blue-eyed angel of a baby with a very particular birthmark at the base of her neck, her aristocratic Moorish husband disowned the infant immediately. Anna was not supposed to know any of this, but girls who had been consigned to the convent since birth had a way of hearing things over the course of years of attentive silence. Isabella had promised Anna that she would return for her one day and they would live in a new world of freedom, where abusive, calculating men and complicit, authoritative women would no longer control their destinies.

Anna laughed, returning Isabella’s bonnet, which she had borrowed to go into town. “Isabella! Only someone like you—born in a vast castle teeming with servants, accustomed to soft carpets beneath your delicate kidskin soles, and sired by a wealthy, powerful father such as yours—could even contemplate such a strange and fantastical future.”

“No, Anna! I mean it—”

Anna smiled, but with a touch of defeat. “Stop. Please stop, Isabella. If I become a courtesan, then so be it.”

Isabella crossed her arms in front of her chest to prevent herself from pulling Anna into an encouraging hug. Anna hated that sort of emotional demonstration. Isabella stared at her friend. After a few long seconds, she added firmly, “I simply will not allow that to happen.”

The nuns were strict adherents to the Bernardine doctrine within the Cistercian order that demanded they be self-reliant. The abbey and its devotees were not to be sullied by the gifts and, some said, bribes of a sinning upper class like those duplicitous French. So the nuns and novitiates learned to work hard. Isabella never resented that. She welcomed it. The hard turn of the hoe in the garden, the biting cold of well water in February: those were reminders that she was still a human being and not just a fourth card for her ruthless father to play in his life-sized game of
monte
. When the sun reached its peak that day, she would be moving out of his game once and for all.

He might even die of shock. The thought did not move Isabella one way or another. If her freedom came at the cost of his life, then that was a fate that
he
had invited, not she. She suspected that not having a mother had made her… hard… but from what little she could wring out of Sol, Isabella thought that even if she had lived, her mother would have proven just as stubborn as herself.

On the rare occasions when Isabella craved an attachment, something that could help her understand herself, she created stories about her mother, about how she would be proud of Isabella for defying convention, that she would secretly help her escape. But then she remembered the look on her father’s face whenever Isabella asked about her mother, during her childhood, before she had gone to the convent outside of Burgos. He would almost turn to stone. He said Isabella should not speak of the dead. Then he would nod, once, in that patronizing way of his, and that meant she was dismissed.

It was nearly midday. The families of the surrounding countryside had been assembling all morning. Her affianced groom would arrive any moment. She had nothing against him. She just hoped she never had to lay eyes on him.

***

Javier loosened the shoe on his horse when they stopped to water the animals and take a short rest, making sure the nails were only tight enough to last for most of the two hours left until they neared the Duke of Feria’s castle, north and east of Badajoz. He knew the land like he knew his own feelings. Categorically. There were caves throughout this part of Spain that held supplies such as clothes, clean water, and guns. His fellow
guerrillas
(as they had started calling themselves) were becoming adept at planning for the unexpected. The war they were fighting, if you could even call it that, was no longer fought wearing stylish, matching uniforms while marching in rows and following a foolish son of a royal father, but rather in random, unexpected attacks. Preferably attacks upon foolish siblings of arrogant, self-appointed royals.

As they neared the perimeter of the forest, Javier felt the blessed shoe fall from Goliat’s front hoof. He reined him in quickly, dismounted, and waved on his accompanying entourage. Two of his closest friends knew his plan, but the remaining seventeen attendants, all draped in their finest silks and family heraldry, continued slowly past him, the crunch and clop of their hooves sounding strange to Javier’s ears now that he was leaning over his own horse’s front leg. His father’s carriage drew up alongside him.

The carriage door swung open and his father leapt out. When he understood the problem, he cast Javier a quizzical expression. “My kingdom for a horse, eh, Javi? Why don’t you ride the rest of the way with me and let Goliat walk behind us?”

Javier had anticipated his father’s helpful interference.

Marco Delgado, Javier’s closest comrade, had been a younger son of a penniless tenant farmer on de la Mina land before he had earned a place at the seminary in Pamplona, supported by Señor de la Mina, who paid for any of the children on his farm to be educated if they were able to qualify.

“Señor de la Mina, please,” Marco said, “allow me to repair the horse’s shoe. You proceed and let the lovely Doña Isabella and her parents know that we are only a few minutes behind you.”

Javier’s father looked from one young, strapping man to the other. At nineteen, he had been equally loyal and—he suspected—equally foolhardy.

Javier’s mother leaned out of the carriage, “Francisco?” She was concealed entirely in yards of black lace, her face a vague shadow behind the delicate fabric.

When his father closed the few feet between them and pulled his only son into a fierce hug, Javier suspected he was not fooling anyone. His father spoke softly: “You fix the shoe and ride to meet your destiny with honor, my son.”