Bride By Mistake by Anne Gracíe Page A

Isabella’s secrets to another girl, and soon it was all through the convent, and of course, nobody had believed her. Skinny, plain Isabella Ripton, secretly married to a handsome Englishman? As if anyone would believe that.
    Her name? Pshaw! So she had an English surname—many Spaniards had English surnames. It proved nothing.
    “Has he seen a picture of you—a truthful one?”
    “Why would he want to marry a girl who looks like a boy?”
    “He knows what I look like. He
chose
me,” Bella used to tell them proudly, hoping her pimples would be gone and her breasts would grow by the time he came for her. “Nobody had to arrange it.”
    “So you know nothing about him. For all you know of his family, he could be some peasant!”
    “He was an officer, so of course he’s not a peasant. And he’s tall, strong, and fearless; the most beautiful man I ever saw in my life!”
    “
Beautiful?
” The other girls laughed.
    “Beautiful like an archangel,” Bella insisted. “Beautiful and terrible. A warrior angel! Just wait till he comes. You will see.”
    And some girls would continue to scoff, and some would sigh and secretly envy her.
    At night, in her small stone room on her hard, narrow bed, Bella would spin dreams of Lieutenant Ripton…
    Lieutenant Ripton lay mortally wounded, and Isabella would find him and care for him, and he would be miraculously cured by her tender solicitude, and fall madly in love with her.
    Lieutenant Ripton would be attacked by the enemy, and Bella would stand by him, and together they would fight them off, and as the enemy fled, he would turn to her and say, “Isabella, without you my life would be over. I love you.”
    Many and varied were the deeds of bravery and daring sheperformed in her dreams, and at the end of each one, Lieutenant Ripton would say, “Isabella, I love you.”
    Lieutenant Ripton would know Isabella as nobody in the world would know her. And he would love her. Truly love her. And she would love him back with all her heart. And they would be happy forever and ever after.
    Day after day, week after week, Bella had prayed for Lieutenant Ripton to come—even to write, but there was no word, no sign.
    Still, she would rage and defend herself, defend him—he
was
as beautiful as an angel, he was busy fighting, he was a hero, he was too important to be able to come just now, but he would come for her, he
would
!
    Gradually her skin cleared up. Her breasts remained disappointingly small, and she learned from a smuggled-in looking glass that she would never be a beauty, not even pretty. “Interesting” was the most charitable assessment of her features.
    Still, Lieutenant Ripton did not come, and as the years passed, the dream of the handsome husband who would love her—
must
love her—slowly began to wither on the vine.
    The truth was there, staring her in the face. Like the fathers and brothers of the other girls who remained in the convent, Lieutenant Ripton had taken her money and abandoned her. He was not much better than Ramón. He’d done it more kindly than Ramón, perhaps, but in the long run, the result was the same.
    Some nights, lying in her hard, narrow bed, Bella secretly wept for her broken dreams. But tears did nothing, so she scrubbed them away. She would look up through her high, barred window and gaze at the stars outside.
    There was a world out there, and she wanted to be part of it.
    The other girls continued to taunt her, teasing her about her imaginary husband. And Bella still defended him, still stubbornly claimed there was an important reason why he couldn’t come—one had one’s pride, after all—but nobody believed her; not even Bella herself. It was a routine like everything that happened in the convent.
    She said to Alejandra, “You could come with me, if you wanted.”
    “Come where?”
    “I’m leaving the convent.” Her announcement was followed by a stunned silence.
    “Is he comi—” Paloma began.
    “No. Nobody is coming for