Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages: Marriage Made in Rebellion / Marriage Made in Hope
Sophia James
No matter the cost they’ll say ‘I do’!Marriage Made in Rebellion by Sophia JamesSeverely wounded Captain Lucien Howard, Earl of Ross, has a boat waiting to take him home but this means parting ways with the woman he’s given his heart too. He can’t stay in war-torn Spain. Yet neither can he stop his arms from tightening about Alejandra as he breathes her in…Marriage Made in Hope by Sophia JamesLady Sephora Connaught knows there is another, more reckless side to her. When she’s rescued by the wild and dangerous Francis St Cartmail, Earl of Douglas, suddenly her confined world bursts into vibrant life. She offers him hope, but only time will tell if their fragile marriage is enough to banish his demons for ever!
SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay, on Auckland New Zealand’s North Shore, with her husband who is an artist. She has a degree in English and History from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed by reading Georgette Heyer in the holidays at her grandmother’s house. Sophia enjoys getting feedback at www.sophiajames.co (http://www.sophiajames.co).
Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages
Marriage Made in Rebellion
Sophia James
Marriage Made in Hope
Sophia James
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-08568-7
REGENCY SURRENDER: PASSIONATE MARRIAGES
Marriage Made in Rebellion © 2016 Sophia James Marriage Made in Hope © 2016 Sophia James
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
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Table of Contents
Cover (#u9aa419c6-476c-5395-9736-fd3ce8d9fcfa)
About the Author (#ucfc978ba-a906-5ea9-8c6e-4789f903b222)
Title Page (#u2479da3a-36af-508d-8cbb-c8665d529282)
Copyright (#ub5a1199d-7c4a-5c64-bd70-6267d12fdfa9)
Marriage Made in Rebellion (#ucdd79926-dd1d-571b-b597-ab29915bfe8b)
Chapter One (#u67c68654-7ffe-5150-8000-bdcc2f635004)
Chapter Two (#u93663e77-2720-5199-a887-2d334039ae5f)
Chapter Three (#u9fe640d1-76f8-5002-99de-4636edbddd49)
Chapter Four (#u687340b7-248f-59b1-9008-be3bb1573130)
Chapter Five (#u7bb77369-eb82-578f-9d73-b7d1243373de)
Chapter Six (#u874491eb-6b69-5602-b81e-0285b7660beb)
Chapter Seven (#u7d4852b7-d115-54eb-bcda-ba401305794c)
Chapter Eight (#u4920a30f-57d2-5f40-934d-5bce653d7af9)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Marriage Made in Hope (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Marriage Made in Rebellion (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
Sophia James
Chapter One (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
The English declare they will no longer respect neutrals on the sea; I will no longer recognise them on land.
Napoleon Bonaparte
A Coruña, Spain—January 16th, 1809
Captain Lucien Howard, the Earl of Ross, thought his nose was broken. His neck, too, probably, because he couldn’t move it at all. His horse lay upon him, her head bent sideways and liquid-brown eyes empty of life. A good mare she was, one that had brought him up the hard road from Lisboa through the snows of the Cantabrian Mountains and the slippery passways of mud and sleet. He swore silently and looked away.
It hurt to breathe, a worrying thought that, given the distance from any medical help. Another day and Napoleon and his generals would be all over the harbour. It was finished and the British had lost, the harsh winter eating into what was left of resistance and a mix-up with the ocean transports in from the southern port of Vigo.
God, if he wasn’t so badly hurt, he might have laughed, but the movement would have most likely killed him. It was so damn cold, his breath fogging as he fought for what little air he could drag in, but a mist had come up from the sea to mingle with the smoke of battle hanging thick across the valley.
Lucien was not afraid of death. It was the dying that worried him, the length and the breadth of it and the helplessness.
Lying back, he looked up into the heavens, hoping that it would be quick. He couldn’t pray; that sort of hope was long since past and had been for a while now. He could not even find the words to ask for forgiveness or penance. He had killed men, good and bad, in the name of king and country, but once one saw the whites of an enemy’s eyes, the old troths and promises held less sway than they once had.
A man was a man whatever language he spoke and more often than not a family would be waiting at home for their return. As his was. That thought sent a shaft of pain through the greater ache, but, resolving not to die with tears in his eyes, Lucien willed it away.
It was late, that much he did know, the sun deep on the horizon and only a little left of the day. He could see the lights of resin torches further away along the lines of the olive trees and the aloe hedges, searching for those who still lived. He could not summon the strength to call out as he lay there, a rough stone wall to one side and an old garden of sorts on the other.
Lucien imagined he could smell orange blossoms and wild flowers, but that was surely wrong. He wondered about the warmth that he felt as the peace of a contrition he long since should have made came unexpectedly.
‘Forgive me, Jesus, for I have sinned.’ Not so hard now in the final moments of his life. He smiled. No, not so hard at all.
* * *
The English soldier was covered in the blood of his horse, the residual warmth left in the large animal’s pelt saving him, allowing him life in the frigid cold dark dawn of a Galician January winter.
But not for long; his blond hair was pinked in a puddle of blood beneath his head and a wound at his neck wept more. The daybreak was sending its first light across the sky and as far as the eye could see there were bodies. English and French, she thought, entwined in death like friends. Only the generals could have imagined that such a sacrifice was worth it, the prime of each country gone before they had ever had the chance to live. She cursed out loud against the futility of war and removed the gold signet ring from the soldier’s finger to give to her father.
When his eyes flicked open the pale in them was startling in the early-morning light, almost see-through.
‘Not...dead...yet?’ There was disappointment and resignation in the broken question phrased in Spanish.
‘What hurts?’
He smiled. ‘What...does...not?’
The wide planes of his cheeks were bruised and his lip was badly cut, but even with the marks of war drawn from one end of him to the other he was beautiful; too beautiful to just die here unheralded and forgotten. Anger fortified resolve and she slashed at the gorse to one side of him, using the cleared ground to stand upon.
With space she pried a broken stake from a fence under his mount’s neck and managed to lift it up enough, twisting the carcass so that it fell away from him, swirls of mud staining the air.
He groaned, the noise one makes involuntarily when great pain breaks through a consciousness that cannot quite contain it.
‘Scream away, Ingles, if you will,’ she told him. ‘I most certainly would. Your friends have been evacuated by way of the sea and the French are in charge of the township itself, so nobody at all should hear you.’
My God, how tired she was of iron wills and masculine stoicism. Death was a for ever thing and if men taking their last breaths in a land far from their own could not weep for the sacrifice, then who else should?
Not her. Not her father. Not the officers safe with their horses on the transports home across a wild and stormy Biscay Bay. Other steeds roamed the streets of A Coruña, looking for succour, their more numerous and unluckier counterparts dead beneath the cliffs overhanging the beach, throats cut in clumsy acts of kindness.
Better dead than at the mercy of the enemy. Once she might have even believed that truism. Now she failed to trust in anything or anyone. The fury within alarmed her at times, but mostly she did not think on it. Adan and Bartolomeu had joined her now, their canvas stretcher pulled in.
‘You want us to take him back?’
She nodded. ‘Careful how you lift him.’
As Tomeu crouched down he scratched at a muddied epaulette. ‘He’s a capitán.’ The tinged gold was undeniable and her heart sank. Her father had begun to be uncertain of a Spanish triumph and was distancing himself from the politics of the region. An officer would be less welcome than a simple soldier to Enrique. More complex. Harder to explain.
‘Then we need to make sure he recovers to fight again for our cause.’
For some reason the man before her was beginning to mean something. A portent to victory or a prophecy of failure? She could not tell. All she did know was that the damaged fingers of his left hand had curled into her own, seeking comfort, and that despite all intentions to do otherwise she held them close, trying to bring warmth to his freezing skin.
He groaned again when they rolled him on to the canvas and she got the first glimpse of the wounds on his upper back, the fabric of his shirt shredded into slivers and the flesh hanging off him between it.
More than one sword had been used, she thought, and there had been a good deal of hatred in the action. The blood loss was making him shake, so she shrugged off her woollen poncho and laid it across him, tucking it in beneath his chin.
Tomeu looked up with a frown. ‘Why bother? He will die anyway.’ The hard words of truth that she did not want, though there was anger in his tone, too. ‘They come and they go. In the end it’s all the same. Death eats them up.’
‘Padre Nuestro que estás en los cielos...’ She recited the Lord’s Prayer beneath her breath and draped the ornate rosary across him in protection as they started for home.
* * *
The same lad on the fields was beside him again, sitting asleep on a chair, a hat pulled down over his face. Lucien shook his head against the chills that were consuming him and wondered where the hell he was. Not on the battlefields, not on the transports home, either, and this certainly was not hell given the crisp cotton sheets and warm woollen blanket.
Tipping his head, he tried to listen to the cadence of someone speaking far away outside. Spanish. He was certain of it. The heavy beams and whitewashed walls told him this house was also somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula and that whoever owned it was more than wealthy.
His eyes flicked back to the lad. Young. Thin. A working boy. Lucien could not quite understand what he would be doing here. Why was he not labouring somewhere or helping with one of the many things that would need attention on a large and busy hacienda? What master would allow him simply to sit in a sickroom whiling away the hours?
His glance caught the skin of an ankle above a weathered and scuffed boot, though at that very moment deep green eyes opened, a look of interest within them.
‘You are awake?’
A dialect of León, but with an inflection that he didn’t recognise.
‘Where am I?’ He answered in the same way and saw surprise on the lad’s brow.
‘Safe.’ Uttered after a few seconds of thought.
‘How long...here?’
‘Three days. You were found on the battlefield above A Coruña the morning after the English had departed by way of the sea.’
‘And the French?’
‘Most assuredly are enjoying the spoils of war. Soult has come into the town with his army under Napoleon’s orders, I suppose. There are many of them.’
‘God.’
At that the lad crossed himself, the small movement caught by the candlelight a direct result of his profanity.
‘Who are you?’ This question was almost whispered.
‘Captain Howard of the Eighteenth Light Dragoons. Do you have any news of the English general Sir John Moore?’
‘They buried him at night on the high ground close to the ramparts of the Citadel. It is told he died well with his officers around him. A cannon shot to the chest.’
Pain laced through Lucien. ‘How do you know this?’
‘This is our land, Capitán. The town is situated less than three miles from where we are and there is little that happens in the region that we are not aware of.’
‘We.’
The silence was telling.
‘You are part of the guerrilla movement? One of El Vengador’s minions? This is his area of jurisdiction, is it not?’
The boy ignored that and gave a question of his own. ‘Where did you learn your Spanish?’
‘Five months in Spain brings its rewards.’
‘But not such fluency.’ The inflection of disbelief was audible.
‘I listen well.’
In the shadows of a slender throat Lucien saw the pulse quicken and a hand curl to a fist. A broken nail and the remains of a wound across the thumb. Old injuries. Fragile fingers. Delicate. Tentative. Left-handed. There was always so much to learn from the small movements.
She was scared of him.
The pronoun leapt into a life of its own. It was the ankles, he was to think later, and the utter thinness of her arms.
‘Who are you, señorita?’
She stood at that, widening one palm across the skin on his neck and pressing down. ‘If you say one word of these thoughts to anyone else, you will be dead, desconocido, before you have the chance to finish your sentence. Do you understand?’
He looked around. The door was closed and the walls were thick. ‘You did not...save my life...to kill me...now.’
He hoped he was right, because there was no more breath left. When she let him go he hated the relief he felt as air filled his lungs. To care so much about living made him vulnerable.
‘The others will not be so lenient of your conjectures were you to utter them carelessly and everybody here would protect me with their life.’
He nodded and looked away from the uneasy depths of green.
‘I take it, then, that you are the daughter of this house.’ He had changed his accent now into a courtly High Castilian and saw her stiffen, but she did not answer and was gone before he could say another word.
* * *
Who the hell was he, this stranger with the pale blue eyes that saw everything, his hair like spun gold silk and a body marked by war?
No simple soldier, that much was certain. The Light Dragoons had fought with Paget out of San Cristobel and yet he had been found east of Piedralonga, a good two miles away under Hope’s jurisdiction. She frowned in uncertainty.
Captain Howard had spoken in the León dialect and then in the Castilian, easily switching. A changeling who could be dangerous to them all and it was she who had brought him here. She should say something of the worrying contradictions to her father and the others. She should order him removed and left far from the hacienda to fend for himself. But instead...
Instead she walked to the windows of her room and looked out across the darkness to the sea beyond. There was something about this capitán that she recognised in herself. An interloper isolated from others and surrounded by danger. He did not show fear, either, for when she had taken the air from his windpipe with her hands he had not fought her. But waited. As if he had known she would let go.
Cursing, she pulled the shutters in closed against the night.
* * *
Lucien lay awake and listened. To the gentle swish of a servant’s skirt and then the harder steps of someone dousing the lights outside. A corridor by the sounds of it and open to the sea. When his rescuer passed without he had smelt the salt and heard the waves crashing against the shore. Three miles she had said to A Coruña and yet here the sea was closer, a mile at the most and less if the wind drew from the north as it had done three days ago. Now the breeze was lighter for there was no sound at all against the wood of the shutters. Heavy locks pulled the coverings together in three places and with a patina of age Lucien knew these to be old bindings. To one side of the thick lintels of double-sashed windows he saw scratches in the limewash over stone, lines carefully kept in groups. Days of the week? Hours of a day? Months of a year? He could not quite make them out from this distance.
Why had these been left there? A servant could have been ordered to cover them in the matter of a few moments; a quick swish of thick plaster and they would have been gone.
A Bible sat on a small wooden table next to his bed under an ornate golden cross and beside a bronze statue of Jesus with his crown of thorns.
Catholic and devout.
Lucien felt akin to the battered Christ, as his neck ached and sharp pains raked up his back. The sword wounds from the French as he had tried to ride in behind the ranks of General Hope. He was hot now, the pins and needles of fever in his hands, and his front tooth ached badly, but he was too tired to bring his arm up enough to touch the damage. He wished the thin girl would come back to give him some more water and sit near him, but only the silence held court.
* * *
She returned in the morning, before the silver dawn had changed to day, and this time she brought others.
The man beside her was nearing fifty, Lucien imagined, a big man wearing the flaring scarlet-and-light-blue jacket of an Estramaduran hussar. Two younger men accompanied him.
‘I am Señor Enrique Fernandez y Castro, otherwise known as El Vengador, Capitán. It seems you have heard of me?’
Lucien sized up the hard dark eyes and the generous moustache of the guerrilla leader. A man of consequence in these parts and feared because of it. He looked nothing at all like his daughter.
‘If the English soldiers do not return, there will be little hope for the Spanish cause, Capitán.’ High Castilian. There was no undercurrent of any lesser dialect in his speech but the pure and arrogant notes of aristocracy.
Lucien was honest in his own appraisal of the situation. ‘Well, the Spanish generals have done themselves no favour, señor, and it’s lucky the French are in such disorder. If Napoleon himself had taken the trouble to be in the Iberian Peninsula, instead of leaving it to his brother, I doubt anything would be left.’
The older man swore. ‘Spain has no use for men who usurp a crown and the royal Bourbons are powerless to fight back. It is only the likes of the partisans that will throw the French from España, for the army, too, is useless in its fractured purpose.’
Privately Lucien agreed, but he did not say so. The juntas were splintered and largely ineffective. John Moore and the British expeditionary force had found that out the hard way, the promise of a Spanish force of men never eventuating, but sliding away into quarrel.
The girl was listening intently, her eyes wary beneath the rim of the same cap she had worn each time he had seen her. Today the jacket was different, though. Something stolen from an English foot soldier, he guessed, the scarlet suiting her tone of skin. He flipped his glance from her as quickly as it settled. She had given him her warnings already and he owed her that much.
The older man moved back, the glint of metal in his leather belt. ‘Soult and Ney are trampling over the north as we speak, but the south is still free.’
‘Because the British expeditionary forces dragged any opposition up here with them as they came.’
‘Perhaps,’ the other man agreed, dark eyes thoughtful. ‘How is it you know our language so well?’
‘I was in Dominica for a number of years before coming to Madeira.’
‘The dialects would be different.’ The room was still, waiting, a sense of menace and distrust covering politeness.
For the first time in days Lucien smiled. ‘Every tutor I had said I was gifted in hearing the cadence of words and I have been in Spain for a while.’
‘Why were you found behind the English lines? The Eighteenth Dragoons were miles away. Why were you not there with them?’
‘I was scouting the ocean for the British transports under the direction of General Moore. They were late coming into the harbour and he was worried.’
‘A spy, then.’
‘I myself prefer the title of intelligence officer.’
‘Semantics.’ The older man laughed, though, and the tension lessened.
When Lucien chanced a look at the girl he saw she watched him with a frown across her brow. Today there was a bruise on her left cheek that was darkening into purple. It had not been there yesterday.
Undercurrents.
The older man was not pleased by Lucien’s presence in the house and the Catalan escopeta in his cartouche belt was close. One wrong word could decide Lucien’s fate. He stayed silent whilst he tried to weigh up his options and he listened as the other man spoke.
‘Every man and woman in Spain is armed with a flask of poison, a garrotting cord or a knife. Napoleon is not the liberator here and his troops will not triumph. The Treaty of Tilsit was his star as its zenith, but now the power and the glory have begun to fade. C’est le commencement de la fin, Capitán, and the French know it.’
‘Something Talleyrand said, I think? Hopefully prophetic.’ Lucien had heard rumours that the crafty French bishop was seeking to negotiate a secure peace behind his emperor’s back so as to perpetuate and solidify the gains made during the French revolution.
El Vengador stepped forward. ‘You are well informed. But our channels of intelligence are healthy, too, and one must watch what one utters to a stranger, would you not agree, Capitán? Best to hold your secrets close.’
And your enemies closer? A warning masked beneath the cloth of politics? Simple. Intimidating. Lucien resisted any urge to once again glance at his rescuer in the corner.
He nodded without candour and was relieved as the other man moved back.
‘You will be sent by boat to England. Tomeu will take you. But I would ask something of you before you leave us. Your rank will allow you access to the higher echelons of the English military and we need to know the intentions of the British parliament’s actions against the French here in Spain. Someone will contact you wearing this.’ He brought a ruby brooch out of his pocket to show him, the gem substantial and the gold catching the light. ‘Any information you can gather would be helpful. Sometimes it is the very smallest of facts that can make a difference.’
And with that he was gone, leaving his daughter behind as the others departed with him.
‘He trusts you.’ Her words came quietly. ‘He would not have let this meeting run on for as long as it has if he did not.’
‘He knows I know about...?’ One hand gestured towards her.
‘That I am a girl? Indeed. Did you not hear his warning?’
‘Then why did he leave you here? Now?’
At that she laughed. ‘You cannot guess, Capitán?’ Her green eyes glittered with the look of one who knew her worth. To the cause. To her father. To the machinations of a guerrilla movement whose very lifeblood depended on good information and loyal carriers.
‘Hell. It is you he will send?’
‘A woman can move in many circles that a man cannot.’ There was challenge in her words as she lifted her chin and the swollen mark on her cheek was easier to see.
‘Who hit you?’
‘In a place of war, emotions can run high.’
For the first time in his company she blushed and he caught her left hand. The softness of her skin wound around his warmth.
‘How old are you?’
‘Nearly twenty-three.’
‘Old enough to know the dangers of subterfuge, then? Old enough to realise that men might not all be...kind?’
‘You warn me of the masculine appetite?’
‘That is one way of putting it, I suppose.’
‘This is Spain, Capitán, and I am hardly a green girl.’
‘You are married?’
She did not answer.
‘You were married, but he is dead.’
Horror marked her face. ‘How could you possibly know that?’
With care he extended her palm and pointed to her third finger. ‘The skin is paler where you once wore a ring. Just here.’
* * *
She felt the lump at the back of her throat hitch up into fear. She felt other things, too, things she had no mandate to as she wrenched away from his touch and went to stand by the window, the blood that throbbed at her temples making her feel slightly sick.
‘How are you called? By your friends?’
‘Lucien.’
‘My mother named me Anna-Maria, but my father never took to it. He changed it when I was five and I became Alejandra, the defender of mankind. He did not have another child, you see.’
‘So the boy he had always wanted was lost to him and you would have to do?’
She was shocked by his insight. ‘You can see such a truth in my father’s face just by looking at him?’
The pale eyes narrowed as he shook his head. ‘He allows you to dress as a boy and roam the dangerous killing fields of armies. He will have trained you, no doubt, in marksmanship and in the using of a knife, but you are small and thin and this is a perilous time and place for any woman.’
‘What if I told you that such patronage works to my advantage, Capitán? What if I said you think like all the others and dismiss the mouse against the lion?’
His glance went to her cheek.
‘I broke his wrist.’ When he smiled the wound on his lip stretched and blood blossomed.
‘Why did he hurt you?’
‘He felt the English should be left to rot in the arms of the enemy because of the way they betrayed us by departing in such an unseemly haste.’
‘A harsh sentiment.’
‘My father believes it, too, but then every war comes with a cost that you of all people should know of. The doctor said your back will be marked for good.’
‘Are you suggesting that I will survive?’
‘You thought you wouldn’t?’
‘Without you I am certain of it.’
‘There is still time to die, Capitán. The sea trip won’t be comfortable and inflammation and fever are always possibilities with such deep lacerations.’
‘Your bedside manner is lacking, señorita. One usually offers more hope when tending a helpless patient.’
‘You do not seem vulnerable in any way to me, Capitán Howard.’
‘With my back cut to ribbons...?’
‘Even with that. And you have been hurt before. Madeira or Dominica were dangerous places, then?’
‘Hardly. Our regiment was left to flounder and rot in the Indies because no politician ever thought to abandon the rich islands.’
‘For who in power should be brave enough to risk money for justice?’
He laughed. ‘Who indeed?’
Alejandra turned away from his smile. He surely must know how beautiful he was, even with his ruined lip and swollen eye. He should have been weeping with the pain from the wounds at his neck and back and yet here he lay, scanning the room and its every occupant for clues and for the answers to questions she could see in his pale blue eyes. What would a man like this be like when he was well?
As unbeatable and dangerous as her father.
The answer almost had her turning away, but she made herself stand still.
‘My father believes that the war here in the Peninsula will drag on for enough years to kill many more good men. He says it is Spain that will determine the outcome of the emperor’s greed and this is the reason he has fashioned himself into the man he has become. El Vengador. The Avenger. He no longer believes in the precise and polite assignations of armies. He is certain that triumph lies in darker things; things like the collation of gathered information and night-time raids.’
‘And you believe this, too? It is why you would come to England wearing your ruby brooch?’
‘Once upon a time I was another person, Capitán. Then the French murdered my mother and I joined my father’s cause. Revenge is what shapes us all here now and you would be wise to keep that in mind.’
‘When did she die?’
‘Nearly two years ago, but it seems like a lifetime. My father adored her to the exclusion of all else.’
‘Even you?’
Again that flash of anger, buried quickly.
He turned away, the ache of his own loss in his thoughts. Were his group of army guides safe or had they been left behind in the scramble for transports?
He had climbed the lighthouse called the Tower of Hercules a dozen times or more to watch for the squadron to appear across the grey and cold Atlantic Ocean. But the transports and their escorts had not come until the eleventh hour, all his intelligence suggesting that French general Soult was advancing and that the main body of their army was not far behind.
He thought of John and Philippe and Hans and Giuseppe and all the others in his ragtag bag of deserters and ne’er-do-wells; a group chosen for their skill in languages and for their intuition. He had trained them and honed them well, every small shred of intelligence placed into the fabric of a whole, to be deciphered and collated and acted upon.
Communication was the lifeblood of an army and it had been his job to see that each message was delivered and every order and report was followed up. Sometimes there was more. An intercepted cache from the French, a dispatch that had fallen into hands it should not have or a personal letter of inestimable value.
His band of guides was an exotic mix of nationalities only vaguely associated with the English army and he was afraid of what might happen to them if they had been left behind.
‘Were there many dead on the field where you found me?’
‘There were. French and English alike. But there would have been more if the boats had not come into the harbour. The inhabitants of A Coruña sheltered the British well as they scampered in ragged bands to the safety of the sea.’
Then that was that. Every man would have to take their chance at life or death because he could do nothing for any of them and his own future, as it was, was hanging in the balance.
He could feel the heat in him and the tightness, the sensation of nothingness across his shoulders and back worrying. His left hand was cursed again with a ferocious case of pins and needles and his stomach felt...hollow.
He smiled and the girl opposite frowned, seeing through him perhaps, understanding the pretence of it.
He hadn’t been hungry, any slight thought of food making him want to throw up. He had been drinking, though, small sips of water that wet his mouth and burnt the sores he could feel stretched over his lips.
A sorry sight, probably. He only wished he could be sick and then, at least, the gall of loss might be dislodged. Or not.
‘You have family?’
A different question, almost feminine.
‘My mother and four siblings. There were eight of us before my father and youngest brother were drowned.’
‘A big number, then. Sometimes I wish...’ She stopped at that and Lucien could see a muscle under her jaw grinding from the echo of words.
Nothing personal. Nothing particular. It was how this aftermath of war and captivity worked, for anything could be used against anyone in the easy pickings of torture. His own voluntary admissions of family worked in another way, a shared communion, a bond of humanness. Encourage dialogue with a captor and foster friendship. The enemy was much less likely to kill you then.
Fortunes turned on an instant and any thinking man or woman in this corner of a volatile Spain would know that. Battles were won and then lost and won again. It was only time that counted and with three hundred thousand fighting men of France poised at your borders and under the control of Napoleon Bonaparte himself there was no doubt of the outcome.
Unless England and its forces returned and soon, Spain would go the way of nearly every other free land in Europe.
His head ached at the thought.
* * *
The girl came back to read to him the next afternoon and the one after that, her voice rising and falling over the words of the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’s tale Don Quixote.
Lucien had perused this work a number of times and he thought she had, too, for there were moments when she looked up and read from memory.
He liked listening to her voice and he liked watching her, the exploits of the eccentric and hapless Knight of La Mancha bringing deep dimples to both of her cheeks. She used her free hand a lot, too, he saw, in exclamation and in emphasis, and when the edge of her jacket dipped he saw a number of white scars drawn across the dark blue of her blood line at her wrist.
As she finished the book she snapped the covers together and leant back against the wide leather chair, watching him. ‘The pen is the language of the soul, would you not agree, Capitán?’
He could not help but nod. ‘Cervantes, as a soldier, was seized for five years. All good fodder for his captive’s tale, I suppose.’
‘I did not know that.’
‘Perhaps that is where he first conjured up the madness of his hero. The uncertainty of captivity forces questions and makes one re-evaluate priorities.’
‘Is it thus with you?’
‘Indeed. A prisoner always wonders whether today is the day he holds no further use alive to those who keep him bound.’
‘You are not a prisoner. You are here because you are sick. Too sick to move.’
‘My door is locked, Alejandra. From the outside.’
That disconcerted her, a frown appearing on her brow as she glanced away. ‘Things are not always as they seem,’ she returned and stood. ‘My father isn’t a man who would kill you for no reason at all.’
‘Is expedience enough of a reason? Or plain simple frustration? He wants me gone. I am a nuisance he wishes he did not have.’ Lifting his hand, he watched it shake. Violently.
‘Then get better, damn you.’ Her words were threaded with the force of anger. ‘If you can walk to the door, you can get to the porch. And if you can manage that, then you can go further and further again. Then you can leave.’
In answer he reached for the Bible by his bed and handed it to her. ‘Like this man did?’
Puzzled, she opened the book to the page indicated by the plaited golden thread of a bookmark.
Help me. I forgive you.
Written shakily in charcoal, the dust of it blurred in time and use and mirrored on the opposite page. When her eyes went to the lines etched in the whitewash beneath the window on the opposite wall Lucien knew exactly what the marks represented.
‘He was a prisoner in this room, too?’
She crossed herself, her face frozen in pain and shock and deathly white.
‘You know nothing, Capitán. Nothing at all. And if you ever mention this to my father even once, he will kill you and I won’t be able to stop him.’
‘You would try?’
The air about them stilled into silence, the dust motes from the old fabric on the Bible twirling in the light, a moment caught for ever. And he fell into the green of her unease without resistance, like a moth might to flame in the darkest of nights.
She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but it was not that which drew him. It was her strength of emotion, the anger in her the same as that in him. She balanced books and a blade with an equal dexterity, the secrets in her eyes wound into both sadness and knowledge.
They were knights tilting at windmills in the greater pageant of a Continental war, the small hope of believing they might make a difference lost under the larger one of nationalistic madness.
Spain. France. England.
For the first time in his life Lucien questioned the wisdom of soldiering and the consequences of battle, for them all, and came up wanting.
Alejandra had known the man who had written this message, he was sure of it, and it had shocked her. The pulse in her throat was still heightened as she licked her lips against the dryness of fear.
He watched as she ripped the page from the Bible before giving the tome back to him, tearing the age-thin paper into small pieces and pocketing them.
The weight of the book in his fist was heavy as she turned and left the room.
God. In the ensuing silence he flicked through the pages and his eyes again found a further passage marked in charcoal amongst the teachings of the Old Testament. Matthew 6:14. ‘For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you.’
Clearly Alejandra, daughter of El Vengador, sought neither forgiveness nor absolution. Lucien wondered why.
* * *
He woke much later, startled into consciousness by great pain, and she was there again, sitting on the chair near the bed and watching him. The Bible had been removed altogether now, he noted as he chanced a glance at the table by the bed.
‘The doctor said you had to drink.’
He tried to smile. ‘Brandy?’
Her lips pursed as she raised a glass of orange-and-mint syrup. ‘This is sweetened and the honey will help you to heal.’
‘Thank you.’ Sipping at the liquid, he enjoyed the coolness as it slid down his throat.
‘Don’t take too much,’ she admonished. ‘You will not be used to much yet.’
He frowned as he lay back, the dizziness disconcerting. If he did lose the contents of his stomach, he was almost certain it would not be Alejandra who would be offering to clean it up. He swallowed heavily and counted to fifty.
After a few moments she spoke again. ‘Are you a religious man, Capitán Howard?’
A different question from what he had expected. ‘I was brought up in the Anglican faith, but it’s been a while since I was in any church.’
‘When faith is stretched the body suffers.’ She gave him this as though she had read it somewhere, a sage piece of advice that she had never forgotten.
‘I think it is the French who have more to do with my suffering, señorita.’
‘Ignoring the power of God’s healing in your position could be dangerous. A priest could give you absolution should you wish it.’ There was anger in her words.
‘No.’ He had not meant it to sound so final. ‘If I die, I die. If I don’t, I don’t.’
‘Fate, you mean? You believe in such?’
‘I do believe in a fate that falls on men unless they act. The prophet Buddha said something like that a very long time ago.’
She smiled. ‘Your religion is eclectic, then? You take bits from this deity and then from that one? To suit your situation?’
He looked away from her because he could tell she thought his answer important and he didn’t have the strength to explain that it had been a while since he had believed in anything at all.
The shutters hadn’t been closed tonight at his request and the first light of a coming dawn was low on the horizon. He was gladdened to see the beginning of another day. ‘Do you not sleep well? To be here at this time?’
‘Once, I did. Once, it was hard to wake me from a night’s slumber, but since...’ She stopped. ‘No. I do not sleep well any more.’
‘Is there family in other places, safer places than here?’
‘For my father to send me to, you mean?’ She stood and blew out the candle near his bed. ‘I need no looking after, señor. I am quite able to see to myself.’
Shadowed against the dying night she looked smaller than usual, as if in the finding of the words in the Bible earlier some part of her had been lost.
‘Fate can also be a kind thing, señor. There is a certain grace in believing that nothing one does will in the end make any difference to what finally happens.’
‘Responsibility, you mean?’
‘Do not discount it completely, Capitán. Guilt can eat a soul up with barely a whisper.’
‘So you are saying fate is like a pardon because all free will is gone?’
Even in the dim light he could see her frown.
‘I am saying that every truth has shades of lies within and one would be indeed foolish to think it different.’
‘Like the words you tore from the Bible? The ones written in charcoal?’
‘Especially those ones,’ she replied, a strength in the answer that had not been there a moment ago. ‘Those words were a message he knew I would find.’
With that she was gone, out into the early coming dawn, the shawl at her shoulders tucked close around her chin.
Chapter Two (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
Alejandra watched Captain Lucien Howard out amongst the shadow of trees on the pathway behind the hacienda: one step and then falling, another and falling again. He had insisted on being brought outside each day, one of the servants carrying him to the grove so that he could practise walking.
She could see frustration, rage and pain in every line of his body from this distance and the will to try to stand unaided, even as the dust had barely settled from the previous unsuccessful attempt. His hands would be bleeding, she knew that without even looking, for the bark of the olive was rough and he had needed traction to pull his whole weight up in order to stand each time. Sickness and fever had left him wasted and thin. The man they had brought up from the battlefields of A Coruña had been twice the one he was now.
Another Englishman who had shed his blood on the fleshless bones of this land, a land made bare by war and hate and greed. She turned her rosary in her palm, reciting the names of those who had died already. Rosalie. Pedro. Even Juan with his cryptic and unwanted whine of forgiveness written in a Bible he knew she would find.
Each bead was smooth beneath her fingers, a hundred years of incantations ingrained in the shining jet. Making the sign of the cross, she kept her voice quiet as she prayed. ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth and...’
Salvation came in many forms and this was one of them, the memory of those gone kept for ever present within the timeless words. After the Apostles’ Creed she started on the Our Father, following it with three Hail Marys, a Glory Be and the Fatima Prayer.
She always used the Sorrowful Mysteries now as a way to end her penance, the Joyful and the Glorious ones sticking in her throat; the Agony in the Garden and the Crowning of the Thorns were more relevant to her life these days. Even the Scourging of the Pillars appealed.
When she had finished she placed the beads in her left pocket, easily reached, and drew out a knife from the leather pouch at her ankle, the edge of it honed so that it gleamed almost blue.
A small branch of an aloe hedge lay beside her and she lifted the wood against the blade, sliding the knife so that shavings fell in a pile around her boots.
Her life was like this point of sharp, balanced on a small edge of living. Turning the stick, she drew it down against her forearm, where the skin held it at bay for a moment in a fleeting concave show of resistance.
With only the smallest of pressure she allowed the wood to break through, taking the sudden pain inside her, not allowing even a piece of it to show.
Help me. I forgive you. A betrayal written in charcoal.
Blood welled and ran in a single small stream across her hands and on to her fingertips, where it fell marking the soil.
Sometimes pain was all she had left to feel with, numbness taking everything else. If she were honest, she welcomed the ache of life and the flow of blood because in such quickness she knew she was still here. Still living. Just.
Lucien Howard had almost fallen again and she removed the point from her arm, staunching the wound with pressure, setting blood.
He was like her in his stubbornness, this captain. Never quite giving up. Resheathing the blade, she simply leant back and shut her eyes, feeling the thin morning sun against her lids and the cold wind off the Atlantic across her hair.
Her land. For ever.
She would never leave it. The souls of those long departed walked beside her here. Already mud was reclaiming her blood. She liked to think it was her mother, Rosalie, there in the whorls of wind, drinking her in, caressing the little that was left, understanding her need for aloneness and hurt.
Her eyes caught a faster movement. Now the Englishman had gone down awkwardly and this time he stayed there. She counted the seconds under her breath. One. Two. Three. Four.
Then a quickening. A hand against the tree. The pull of muscle and the strain of flesh. Her fingers lifted to find the rosary, but she stopped them. Not again. She would not help.
He was as alone as she was in this part of a war. His back still oozed and the wounds on his neck had become reinfected. She would get Constanza to look at the damage again and then he would be gone. It was all she could do for him.
* * *
The daughter of El Vengador sat and observed him from a distance, propped against a warm ochre wall out of the breeze. Still. Silent. Barely moving.
He almost hated her for her easy insolence and her unnamed fury. She would not help him. He knew that. She would only watch him fall again and again until he could no longer pull himself up. Then she would go and another would come to lift him back to the kapok bed in the room with its gauzy curtains, half-light and sickness.
Almost six weeks since A Coruña. Almost forty-two days since he had last eaten well. His bones looked stark and drawn against thin skin and big feet. He’d seen himself in the mirror a few days before as the man designated to tend to his needs had lifted him, eyes too large in his face, cheeks sunken.
She had stopped visiting him in his room three weeks ago, when the priest had been called to give him the last rites. He remembered the man through a fog of fever, the holy water comforting even if the sentiment lay jumbled in his mind.
‘Through this holy anointing may the Lord...’
Death came on soft words and cool water. It was a part of the life of a soldier, ever present and close.
But he had not died. He had pulled himself through the heat and come out into the chill. And when he had insisted on being brought to the pathway of trees, she had come, too. Watching. Always from a distance. She would leave soon, he knew. He had fallen too many times for her to stay. His hands bled and his knee, too, caught against a root, tearing. There was no resistance left in him any more and no strength.
He hoped Daniel Wylde had got home safely. He hoped the storms he had heard about had not flung the boat his friend travelled in to the murky bottom of the Bay of Biscay. ‘Jesus, help him,’ he murmured. ‘And let me be remembered.’
A foolish prayer. A vain prayer. His family would miss him. His mother particularly and then life would move on. New babies. Other events until he would be like the memories he carried of his father and his youngest brother, gone before their time into the shifting mists of after.
‘Hell,’ he swore with the first beginnings of anger. A new feeling, this. All-encompassing. Strengthening. Only wrath in it. He reached out for the fortitude and with one last push grabbed the rough bark of the scrawny olive and pulled with all his fury, up this time into a standing position, up again into the world of the living.
He did not let go, did not allow his legs to buckle, did not think of falling or failing or yielding. Nay, he held on through sharp pain and a heartbeat that raked through his ears as a drum thumping in all the parts of his body, his breath hoarse and shaking.
And then she was there with her wide green knowing eyes and her hair stuffed under the hat.
‘I knew that you could do it.’
He could not help but smile.
‘Tomorrow you will take more steps and the next day more again and the day after that you will walk from this path to that one. And then you will go home.’
Her face was fierce and sharp. There was blood on her sleeve and on her fingers. New blood. Fresh blood. He wondered why. She saw where he looked and lifted her chin.
‘The French have taken A Coruña and Ferrol. A resounding defeat with Soult now walking the streets of the towns unfettered. Soon the whole of the north will be theirs.’
‘War...has its...losers.’
‘And its cowards,’ she tossed back. ‘Better to have not come here at all if after the smallest of fights you turn tail and leave.’
He felt the anger and pushed it down. His back ached and his vision blurred and the cold that had hounded the British force through the passes of a Cantabrian winter still hovered close.
Cowards. The word seared into vehemence. So many soldiers lost in the retreat. So much bravery discovered as they had turned their backs against the sea and fought off the might of France. All he could remember was death, blood and courage.
‘You need to sit down.’ These new words were softer, more generous, and in one of the few times since she had found him on the fields above A Coruña, she touched him. A hand cupped beneath his elbow and another across his back. A chain lay around her neck, dipping into the collar of her unbuttoned shirt. He wondered what lay on the end of it; the thought swept away as she angled the garden chair beneath him and helped him to sit.
His breath shook as much as his hands did when he lifted them up across his knees.
‘Thank...you.’ And he meant it. If she had not been behind him seeing to his balance, he knew he would have fallen and the wooden seat felt good and steady and safe. Shutting his eyes against the glare of the morning, he allowed his mind to run across his body, accepting the injury, embracing the pain. The witch doctors in Jamaica had shown him this trick once when he had taken a sickness there. He had used such mesmerising faithfully ever since.
* * *
The Englishman had gone from here somehow, his body still and his heartbeat slowing to a fraction of what it had been only a moment before. Even his skin cooled.
Uneasiness crept in. She could not understand who he was, what he was. A soldier. A fighter. A spy. A man who spoke both the high and low dialects of Spain as well as any native and one who knew at every turn and at every moment exactly what was happening about him. Alejandra could see this in his stance as well as in his eyes now opened, the blue today paler than it had ever looked; alert and all-knowing.
She had never seen another like him. Even worn down to exhaustion she caught the quick glance he chanced behind to where a line of her father’s men were coming in from the south. Gauging danger, measuring response.
‘Where will I be sent...on from?’ His gaze narrowed.
It was seldom she told anyone of plans that did not include the next hour, for it gave the asker too much room to wriggle free of any constraints. With him she was honest.
‘Not from here. It is too dangerous in A Coruña now. You will leave from the west.’
‘From one of the small ports in the Rias Altas, then?’
So Captain Lucien Howard knew his geography, but not his local politics.
‘No, that area harbours too many enemies of my father. It shall not be there.’ She turned and looked up at the sky, frowning. ‘There is a storm coming in with the wind from the ocean.’
The clouds had amassed and darkened across the horizon, a thick band of leaden grey just above the waterline.
My father needs to find out who you are first before he lets you go. He needs to understand your people and your character and the danger you might pose to us should you not be the man you say you are. And if you are not...
These thoughts she kept to herself.
‘I am not your enemy, Alejandra.’ He seldom called her by her given name, but she liked it. Soft. Almost whispered. Her heart beat a little faster, surprising her, annoying her, and she looked away, making much of watching those who had come in from Betanzos. Tomeu was amongst them, shading his face and peering at them, the bandage on his wrist white in the light even at this distance.
‘But neither are you my friend, Ingles, for all your sacrifice and devotion to the cause of Spain.’
He laughed, the edges of his eyes creasing, and she took in breath. What was it about him that made her more normal indifference shatter? She even imagined she might have blushed.
‘I am here, señorita, because of a mistake.’
Now, this was new. A piece of personal information that he offered without asking.
‘A mistake?’
‘I spent too long in the Hercules Tower looking for the British transports. They had not arrived and the French were circling.’
‘So they found you there?’
‘Hardly.’ This time there was nothing but cold ice in his glance. ‘They had taken one of my men and I thought to save him.’
‘And did you?’
‘No.’
The wind could be heard above their silence. Strengthening and changing direction. Soon the sun would be gone and it would rain. The beating pulse in a vein of his throat below his left ear was the only sign of great emotion and greater fury. So very easy to miss.
‘He was a spy, like you?’
He nodded. ‘There are weaknesses that are found out only under great duress. Jealousy. Greed. Fear. For Guy the weakness was cowardice, but he ran in the wrong direction.’
‘So you left him there? As a punishment?’
‘No. I tried to bring him safely through the lines of the French. I failed.’
For some men, Alejandra thought, the rigours of war brought forward cowardice. For others it highlighted a sheer and bloody-minded bravery. She imagined what it must have cost Captain Lucien Howard in pain to try to rescue his friend. She doubted anyone or anything could push him into doing that he did not wish to, but still, most men held a limit of what was sacred and worth dying for and a well-aimed hurt usually brought results.
Her father was the master of it.
But this Englishman’s strength, even in the lines of his wasted and marked body, was obvious. Unbreakable and stalwart. She imagined, given the choice, that he would choose death over dishonour and pain across betrayal.
She wondered if she could manage the same.
The blood from his torn hands stained his white shirt and the sweat from his exertions had darkened the linen.
But he was beautiful with his pale eyes and his gold hair, longer now after weeks of sickness and fallen from the leather tie he more normally sported. She wanted to run her fingers through the length of it just to see it against the dark of her own skin.
Contrasts.
Inside and out.
Lucien. The name suited him with its silky vowels. Almost the name of one of the three archangels in the Bible, the covering angel, the fallen one. Alejandra shook her head and cleared her thoughts.
‘I will send Constanza to you again tonight with her herbs. She has a great prowess in the healing arts.’
When he brushed back his hair the sun flinted in the colour. ‘If she leaves the ointment in my room, I can tend to it myself.’
‘As you wish, then.’
Kicking at the mud beneath her feet, once and then another time, she left him to the coming rain and the wind and the rising tides of fortune, and when she reached the hacienda’s stables she turned once to see the shadow of him watching her.
Chapter Three (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
Lucien woke in the night to a small and quiet noise. He had been trained well to know the difference in sounds and knew that the louder ones were those less likely to kill you.
This one was soft and muffled. He tensed into readiness.
The door opened and a candle flared as Alejandra’s father came to sit on the small stool near the bed, stretching his long legs out before him and grimacing as though in pain.
‘You sleep lightly, Capitán.’
‘Years of practice, señor,’ Lucien returned.
‘Put the knife away. I am only here to talk.’
Lucien slipped the blade beneath his pillow, angling it so that it might be taken up quickly again if needed. He did not think the man opposite missed the inherent threat.
Alejandra had brought him the weapon on his second evening here, a quiet offering in the heat of his fever.
‘For protection,’ she had said in warning. ‘I am presuming you know how to use it. If not, it is probably better...’ He’d simply reached out and taken it from her, the insult smarting given the wounds on his back.
Tonight her father looked weary and he took his time in forming the message before he spoke.
‘It has come to my notice that you are a peer of the English aristocracy, Capitán Howard.’ The ring Lucien had been wearing lay in the older man’s hand when he opened his fingers, the Ross family coat of arms shining in the candlelight. He thought it had been lost for ever. ‘Lord Lucien Howard, the sixth Earl of Ross. The title sits on your shoulders as the head of your household and you wield a good deal of power in English society.’
Lucien remained silent for he was certain that there would be more to come.
‘But your family seat is bankrupt by all accounts. Poor investments by your father and his father, it is said, and now there is very little in the Howard coffers. Soon there will be nothing.’
Well, that was not a secret, Lucien thought bitterly. The penury of the earldom of Ross was well known. Anyone could have told him of it.
But his attention was taken by a sheaf of papers the other man lifted into view. He saw his own face on the front cover of The Times, a black-and-white copy of a likeness his mother had once commissioned of him, smiling as if he meant it. My God, it seemed an age since he had done so with any sincerity.
‘You have a good number of brothers and sisters and a mother who is heartbroken because you are presumed dead.’
Lucien imagined her grief. The Countess was neither a big woman nor a particularly robust one. If this killed her before he managed to get back...
‘So I have a further proposition for you, my lord.’ The last two words were coated with a violent dislike. ‘I could slice your throat open here and now and no one would ever know what had happened to you, or...’ He stopped.
El Vengador was a man who used theatrics to the full extent, Lucien thought and humoured him. ‘Or...’
‘Or as an earl you are well placed to offer us even more.’
Lucien closed his eyes momentarily. This guerrilla leader was a dangerous adversary and a man who would not make an easy ally. He was also holding all the cards as far as Lucien’s life was concerned. Oh, granted, he knew that he might take a good handful of men with him if he were to fight his way out of here, but he was weak and he was also, to some extent, in debt to the man for his life.
But there were things that were not being said. Lucien was sure of it. He looked the other man straight on.
‘Why me? Why not someone integrated into the fabric of English society, someone from here? It seems you have agents there already. Why not use them?’ Lucien’s eyes turned to the papers and the ring.
‘But we could not access the places you do, my lord. We could never hope to be within earshot of a king.’
‘Society and the monarch do not write the law. England has a democracy and a parliament to do that.’
‘And one of the Houses of Parliament consists of peers of the realm. Your name is included in that representation, is it not, Lord Ross?’
Finally he was gathering the sense of this assignment. If he had not been titled, he would probably have been disposed of by now and this conversation was a warning of it.
El Vengador held men in London, dangerous men, men with dreams of a Spanish free land in their hearts and the means to ensure it had the best chance of fruition.
England and Spain might be on the same side of the fight against Napoleon, but each had their own reasons for victory and the milksop version of democracy held by the Spanish army and the splintered juntas was a very different one from that offered by the guerrilla leaders. ‘The little war’ was the translation, but Lucien had heard tales of the French being killed in their hundreds by the partisan bands roaming the rough and isolated passes of the northern countryside, and many of those deaths had not been a pretty sight.
‘The guerrilla movement might strike terror into the hearts of the French troops, but you also frighten much of the Spanish population with your forced conscription and looting.’ He refrained from adding savagery and barbarousness to the list. ‘What makes you think I would want to help you? I do not wish to be the person who facilitates the death of my countrymen should a battle be badly lost and you have all the personal details of each commanding officer.’
A movement of the door had both of them turning. Alejandra came in. She had been asleep. He could see the remains of slumber in the flush on her cheeks and in the tangle of her hair.
God. She slept fully clothed and with a knife as close as his. The silver of her dagger glimmered in the candlelight. He was surprised she had not sheathed it when she saw her father in the room.
‘I am not here to kill him, hija.’
An explanation of intention that underlined her presence. Lucien frowned. Did she sleep near? To protect him? Her eyes did not meet his own as they took in the papers and his ring sitting on the table to one side of the bed, giving him the notion that she had known of her father’s quest. And of the danger.
‘You will take him to the boat in a week, Alejandra. No later.’
‘Very well.’ Her answer held the same edge of hardness as her father’s.
‘Find another to travel with you. Tomeu, perhaps?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I shall take Adan. He has people to the west and good contacts.’
‘Then it is decided.’ El Vengador’s fingers drummed against his thigh as he stood. ‘I do not expect you to do this work for Spain without reward, Lord Ross. A sum of money shall be deposited into a bank of your choice as soon as any business between us is conducted and I am satisfied with the intelligence.’
A fait accompli. Perhaps El Vengador was not used to having men turn down his offers of assistance. Still, he was in the lair of the tiger, so to speak, and it would be unwise to annoy him.
‘I will think carefully on what you have proposed.’
A hand came forward, grasping his own in a surprisingly firm and warm way.
‘For freedom,’ the older man said as Lucien watched him. ‘And victory.’
Then he was gone. Alejandra stood against the wall to the left of the window, one foot bent so that it rested against the peeling ochre. Ready to flee.
‘You knew about this?’ He gestured to the paper and the ring. ‘You knew what your father might ask?’
‘Or of what he might not,’ she returned and crossed the room to stand beside him, lifting The Times in her hands.
‘You look younger when you smile.’
‘It’s an old likeness.’
This time she laughed and the sound filled the room like warm honey, low and smooth.
‘I think, Lord Lucien Howard, sixth Earl of Ross, that even my father could not kill you if he wanted to.’
‘I hope, Alejandra, only daughter of El Vengador, that you are right.’
She placed the paper down with as much care as she had used to pick it up. No extra movements. No uncertain qualms. Death could have been in the room when she entered as easily as life and yet there was not one expression on her face that told him of either relief or disappointment.
But she had come and her knife was sheathed now, back in the soft leather at her left ankle. Would she have fought her father for him? The thought knocked the breath from his lungs.
‘Thank you.’ He offered the words, no sentiment in them but truth, and by the look on her face he knew she understood exactly what such gratitude was for.
She was gone as quietly as her father had left, one moment there and the next just the breeze of her going. He heard the door close with a scrape of the latch.
* * *
He dreamt of Linden Park, the Howard seat at Tunbridge Wells, with the sun on its windows and the banks of the River Teise lined with weeping willows, soft green in the coat of early spring. His father was there and his brother. The bridge had not collapsed yet and he had not had to try to save them as they turned over and over in the cold current, dragged down by heavy clothing, late rains and panic.
His mind found other happier moments—his sister, Christine, and he as they had ridden across the surrounding valleys, as fast as the wind, the sound of starlings and wrens and the first gambolling lambs in the fields.
He thought of Daniel Wylde, too, and of Francis St Cartmail, and them all as young boys constructing huts in the woods and hunting rabbits with his father’s guns. Gabriel Hughes had come sometime later, on horseback, less talkative than the others, but interesting. Gabe had taught Lucien the trick of holding one’s own counsel and understanding the hidden meaning of words that were not quite being said.
And then Alejandra was there in his thoughts, her long hair down her back and her skin lustrous in candlelight, full lips red and eyes dark. In his dream she wore a thin and flowing nightgown, the shape of her lithe body seen easily through it. He felt himself harden as the breath in him tightened. She came against him like molten fire, acquiescent and searching, her mouth across his own as her head tipped up, taking all that he offered; sweet heat and an unhidden desire before she plunged a knife deep through the naked and exposed gap in his ribs.
‘Hell.’ He came awake in a second, panting, shocked, his member rock solid and ready, the stupidity in him reeling. For the first time in all the weeks of pain and terror and exhaustion he felt like crying; for him and for her and for a war that held death as nothing more than a debt of sacrifice on its laboured way to victory.
Alejandra was her father’s daughter. She had told him that again and again in every way that counted. In her distance and her disdain. In her sharpened blade held at the ready and the rosary she often played with, bead by bead of entreaty and Catholic confession.
Yet still the taste of her lingered in his mouth, and the feel of her flesh on his skin had him pushing back the sheets, a heat all-encompassing even in the cold of winter.
What would happen on the road west, he wondered, the thought of long nights in her company when the moon was high and shadow clothed the landscape? How many days was the journey? How many miles? If he was not to be taken out of Spain by way of the Rias Altas, was it the more southern Rias Baixas they meant to use? Or even the busy seaport of Vigo?
The dream had changed him somehow, made him both less certain and more foolish, the unreality of it sharpened by a hope he hated.
He wished there was brandy left at his bedside or some Spanish equivalent of a strong and alcoholic brew, but there was only the water infused with oranges, honey and mint. He took up the carafe and drank deeply, the quickened beat of his heart finally slowing.
Reaching over to the table, he slipped the signet ring on his finger where it had been for all of the years of his adult life and was glad to have it back. Then he lifted up the paper to see the date.
February the first. His mother’s birthday. He could only guess how she had celebrated such a milestone with this news crammed on to the front page of the broadsheet.
He had always known it might come to this, lost behind the enemy lines and struggling to survive, but he had not imagined a thin and distant girl offering him protection even as she swore she did not. Taking his blade from beneath his pillow, he tucked it into the leather he had found in one of the drawers in this room before placing it back on the bedside table and glancing at the pendulum clock on the far wall.
Almost four, the heavy tick and tock of it filling silence. He would not sleep again.
He tried recalling the maps of Spain he had held in his saddlebag on the long road north to the sea. He and his group of guides had drawn many images, measuring the distances and topography, the ravines and the crossable passes, the rivers and the bridges and the levels of water. Much of what they transcribed he had determined himself as they had traversed across into the mountains, the margins of each impression filled with comments and personal observations.
When he had encountered the French soldiers the folder had been lost, for he had not seen it since lying wounded on the field above the town. He could probably redraw much of it from memory, but the loss of such intelligence was immense. Without knowledge of the local landscape the British army was caught in the out-of-date information that allowed only poor and dangerous passage.
A noise brought him around to the door once again and this time it was the one named Tomeu who stood watching him.
‘May I speak with you, Ingles?’
Up close the man who had helped him from the battleground was younger than he remembered him to be. His right wrist was encased in a dirty bandage.
He closed the door carefully behind himself and stood there for a moment as if listening. ‘I am sorry to come so late, Capitán, but I leave in an hour for the south and I wanted to catch you before I went. I saw your candle still burnt in the gap beneath the door and took the chance to see if you were awake.’
Lucien nodded and the small upwards pull of the newcomer’s lips changed a sullen lad into a more handsome one.
‘My name is Bartolomeu Diego y Betancourt, señor, and I am a friend of Alejandra’s.’ He waited after delivering this piece of news, eyes alert.
‘I recognise you. You are the one who got me on the canvas stretcher behind the horse the morning after I was hurt.’
‘I did not wish to. I thought you would have been better off dead. It was Alejandra who insisted we bring you here. If it had been left to me, I would have plunged my blade straight through your heart and finished it.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you, señor? Do you really understand how unsafe it is for Alejandra at the hacienda now that you are here and what your rescue might have cost her? El Vengador has his own demons and he is ruthless if anyone at all gets in his way.’
‘Even his daughter?’
That brought forth a torrent of swearing in Spanish, a bawdy long-winded curse. ‘Enrique Fernandez will end his life here in bitterness and hate. And if Alejandra stays with him, so will she, for her stubbornness is as strong as his own. Fernandez has enemies who will pounce when he is least expecting it and a host of others who are jealous of his power.’
‘Like you?’
The young man turned away.
‘She said you were clever and that you could see into thoughts that should remain private. She said you were more dangerous than even her father and that if you stay here much longer, El Vengador would know it to be such and have you murdered.’
‘Alejandra said this?’
‘Yes. She wants you gone.’
‘I know.’
‘But she wants you safe, too.’
He stayed quiet as Tomeu went on.
‘She is like a sister to me. If you ever hurt her...’
‘I will not.’
‘I believe you, Capitán, and that is one of the reasons I am here. You, too, are powerful in your own right, powerful enough to protect her, perhaps?’
‘You think Alejandra would accept my protection?’ He might have laughed out loud if the other man had not looked both so very serious and so very young.
‘Her husband was killed less than one year ago, a matter of months after their marriage.’
‘I see.’ And Lucien did. It was the personal losses that made a man or a woman fervent and Alejandra was certainly that.
‘Are there other relatives?’
‘An uncle down south somewhere, but they are not close.’
‘Friends, then, apart from you?’
‘This is a fighting unit, ranging across this northern part of Spain with the express purpose of causing chaos and mayhem. Most of the women are gone either to safety or to God. It is a dangerous place to inhabit.’
‘Here today and gone tomorrow?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Was it Alejandra who hurt your wrist?’
‘It was. I asked her to be my wife and she refused.’
Lucien smiled. ‘A comprehensive no, then.’
‘The bruise on her face was an accident. I dragged her down the stairs with me after losing my footing. She said she would never marry anyone again and even the asking of it was an insult. To her. She never listens, you see, never takes the time to understand her own and ever-present danger.’
‘She loved her husband, then?’
The other man laughed. ‘You will need to ask her that, señor.’
‘I will. So you think her father would harm her?’
‘El Vengador? Not intentionally. But your presence here is difficult for them both. Alejandra wants you well enough to travel, but Enrique only wants you gone. The title you hold has swung opinion in your favour a little, but with the slightest of pushes it could go the other way and split us all asunder. Better not to care too much about the health and welfare of others in this compound, I think. Better, too, to have you bundled up and heading for home.’
A safer topic, this one. But every word that Tomeu had spoken told Lucien something of his authority. A man like El Vengador would not be generous in his fact sharing, yet this young man had a good knowledge of the conversation he had just had with Alejandra’s father. Lucien had seen him glance at the signet ring back on his finger and in the slight flare of his eyes he had understood just what Tomeu did not say.
He was a lieutenant perhaps, or at least one who participated in the decision-making for the group. The young face full of smiles and politeness almost certainly masking danger, for the lifeblood of the guerrilla movement was brutality and menace.
Had Alejandra’s father sent Tomeu to sound him out? Had Alejandra herself? Or was this simply a visit born from expediency and warning?
Thirty-two years of living had made Lucien question everything and in doing so he was still alive.
‘What of her groom’s family? Could she go there to safety?’
‘My cousin, señor, and they want the blood of the Fernandez family more than anyone else in Spain. More than the French, even, and that is saying something.’
This was what war did.
It tore apart the fabric and bindings of society and replaced them with nothing. He thought of his own immediate family in England and then of his large extended one of aunts, uncles and cousins. Napoleon and the French had a lot to answer for the wreckage that was the new Europe. He suddenly wished he was home.
‘I am sorry...’ Lucien left the words dangling. Sorry for them all. It was no answer, he knew, but he could promise nothing else. As if the young man understood, he, too, turned for the door.
‘Do not trust anyone on your trip to the west.’
‘I won’t.’
‘And watch over Alejandra.’
With that he was gone, out into the fading night of a new-coming dawn, for already Lucien could hear the first chorus of birdsong in the misty air.
Chapter Four (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
The anger in Alejandra was a red stream of wrath, filling her body from head to foot, making her hot and cold and sick.
Tomeu had left, travelling south into more danger, and the Englishman was in his usual place on the pathway between the olive trees, struggling to walk.
Up and down. Slowly. He was not content with a small time of it, either, but had been there for most of the morning, sweat everywhere despite the cold of the day.
He was getting better, that much she could tell. He did not limp any more or lean over his injuries like a snail in a shell, cradling his hurt. No, straight as any soldier, he picked his way from this tree to that one and then back again, using the seat on every third foray now to stop and find breath.
Stubborn.
Like her.
She smiled at that thought and the tension released a little. She knew he must have his knife upon him for she had been into his room whilst he was out there and checked; a poor choice that, an act of thieves and sneaks. It was who she had become here, in this war of Spain. Her mother would have castigated her severely for such a lapse of decorum, but now no one cared. She had become part of the campaign to please her father, dressing as a boy and assembling intelligence because he was all she had left of family.
Lucien Howard suddenly saw her for he raised his hand in greeting. So very English. Someone like him, no doubt, would keep his manners intact even upon his deathbed. It was why his country did so well in the world, she reasoned, this conduct of decency and rectitude even in the face of extreme provocation.
‘I had a visit from your friend Tomeu last night.’
Shocked, she could only stare at him.
‘Well, that answers my first question,’ he returned and sat down. ‘I thought you might have known.’
‘What did he say?’ A thousand things ran around in her head, things that she sincerely hoped he had not told this Englishman.
‘That you were married to his cousin. For a month.’
‘A short relationship,’ she gave back, hating the way her voice shook with the saying of it.
‘Tomeu also confided that he himself had asked you to be his wife, but you had refused.’
All of the secrets that were better hidden. ‘He was talkative, then.’
‘Unlike you. He implied you were in danger here.’
At that she laughed. ‘Implied? It surrounds us, Capitán. Three hundred thousand enemy troops with their bloodthirsty generals and an emperor who easily rules Europe.’
‘I think he might have meant danger on a more personal level.’
‘To me?’
When he nodded she knew exactly what Tomeu had said, for he had used the same arguments on her when she had broken his wrist.
‘He talks too much and I did not ask for your help. It was you who needed mine.’
He ignored that sarcasm. ‘He said the trip west might be difficult. The power your father holds has aggravated those who would take it from him, it seems. Including Tomeu.’
At that she smiled. ‘When my father asks you again to aid the effort for Spanish independence, say yes, even if you have no intention of doing so.’
‘Because he will kill me if I don’t?’
‘He is a man with little time to accomplish all he feels he must. To him you are either the means to an end or the end. Your life depends on how much honour you accord to your word, Capitán. My advice would be to allot it none.’
‘A promise here means nothing?’
‘Less than nothing. Integrity is one of the first casualties of war.’ Alejandra held her mouth in the grim edge of a scowl she had become so good at affecting and did not waver. She was pleased when he nodded.
‘When your mother was alive...’
She did not let him finish.
‘We will leave here in a few days and head west. There will be two others who travel with us and my father will provide you with a warm coat and sturdy boots.’
His own were cracking at the soles, she thought, the poorly made footwear of the English army was a disgrace. What manufacturer would cut corners for profit when the lives of its fighting men were at stake?
Honour. The word slid into the space between them like a serpent, pulled this way and then that, unravelled by pragmatism and greed.
‘We will travel into the mountains first, so you will need to have the strength to climb.’ Despite meaning not to, her eyes glanced around at the flat small space that lay between the olives. Hardly the foothills of the mountains. The questionable wisdom of her plan made her take in a breath.
She did not want Captain Lucien Howard to die in the wastes of the alpine scrub, made stiff by ice and cold by rain. She could help him a little, but with Adan and Manolo tagging along she understood they would not countenance anything that endangered safety.
He would have to manage or he would die.
She knew he saw that thought in her eyes because he suddenly smiled.
Beautiful. Like the picture in his English newspaper, the sides of his mouth and eyes creasing into humour. She wished he had been ugly or old or scarred. But he was not. He was all sapped strength, wasted brawn and outrageous beauty. And cleverness. That was the worst of it, she suddenly thought, a man who might work out the thoughts and motivations of others and set it to work for his advantage.
‘I will be fit for the journey. Already I feel stronger.’
When he leant forward Alejandra saw the bandage at his neck had slipped and the red-raw skin was exposed. It would scar badly, a permanent reminder of this place and this time.
* * *
Lucien knew Alejandra worried about the wound on his neck, though she smoothed her face in that particular habit she had so that all thoughts were masked.
He imagined getting home to the safe and unscathed world of the ton, with war written on him beneath superfine wool. The hidden history on his back in skin and sinew would need to be concealed from all those about him, for who would be able to understand the cost of it and how many would pity him?
A further distance. Another layer. Sometimes he felt he was building them up like children’s blocks, the balance of who he was left in danger of tipping completely.
Except here with Alejandra in the light of a Spanish winter morning, the grey-green of olive branches sending dappled shadows across them.
Here he did not have to pretend who he was or wasn’t and he was glad.
Without her watching from a distance he might not have found the mental strength to try again and again and again to get up and move when everything ached and stung and hurt. She challenged him and egged him on. No sorrow in it or compassion. Both would have broken him.
Breathing out, he rose from the seat and stood. He was always surprised just how much taller he was than her.
‘Tomorrow I will walk to the house.’
‘It is more than two hundred yards away, señor,’ she said back, the flat tone desultory.
‘And back,’ he continued and smiled.
Unexpectedly she did, too, green eyes dancing with humour and the dimples in both cheeks deep.
He imagined her in a ballroom in London, hair dressed and well-clothed. Red, he thought. The colour of her gown would need to be bold. She would be unmatched.
‘If you walk that far, Ingles, I will bring you a bottle of the best aguardiente de orujo.’
‘Firewater?’ he returned. ‘I have heard of this but have not tried it.’
‘Drink too much and the next day you will be in bed till the sundown, especially if you are not used to the strength of it. But drink just enough and the power fills you.’
‘Would you join me in the celebration?’
She tipped her head up and looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Perhaps.’
* * *
Lucien spent the evening on the floor of his room exercising and trying to get some strength into his upper body. He could feel the muscles remembering what they had once been like, but he was a couple of stone lighter with his sickness and the shaking that overtook him after heavy exertion was more than frustrating.
So he lay there on the polished tiled floor and watched the ceiling whilst his heart rate slowed and the anger cooled. Just two months ago he could have so easily managed all that he now could not.
He cleared his mind and imagined the walk from the trees to the outhouse and back. He’d walk past the first olive tree and then on to the sheltered path with lavender on each edge. The hedges were clipped there and could not be used for balance and after that there were three steps that came up to the covered porch. Two hundred yards there and another two hundred back and flat save for the stairs.
Of course he could manage such a distance. He only had to believe it.
The marks drawn into the plaster beneath the windows caught his attention again. Closer up he could see they formed a pattern different from the one he had first thought.
There were many more indents than he had originally imagined, smaller scrawlings caught in between the larger strokes. Twenty-nine. Thirty-one. Fifteen. Days of the months, perhaps? His mind quickly ran across the year. February and March was a sequence that worked and 1808 had been a leap year. But why would anybody keep such a track of time?
A noise through the inside wall then also caught his attention, quiet and muffled. Plainly it was the sound of someone crying and he knew without a doubt that it was Alejandra. Her room was next to his, the thickness of a stone block away.
Rising, he stood and tipped his head to the stone. One moment turned into two and then there was silence. It was as if on the other side of the wall she knew he was there, too, listening and knowing. He barely allowed himself breath.
* * *
She could feel him there, a foot away through the plaster and stone, knew that he stood where she had stood for all of the months at the end of Juan’s life; he a prisoner of her father’s, a man who had betrayed the cause.
She could not save Captain Lucien Howard should Papa decide that he was expendable, so she needed to take him out of here to the west. The evening light drew in on itself, watchful, the last bird calls and then the quiet. Juan had lost his speech and his left arm, but he had lingered for two of the months of winter and into the first weeks of spring. She had prayed each day that it would be the end and marked the wall when it was not.
Her marks were still there, the indents of time drawn into the plaster, one next to the other near the base of the wall, and left there when he passed away as a message and a warning.
Betray El Vengador and no one is safe, not even the one married to his only daughter. Juan had died with a rosary in his hands. Her father had, at least, allowed him that.
A year ago now, before the worst of the war. She wondered how many more men would be gone by the same time next year and, crossing her room, took out the maps of the northern mountains that Lucien Howard had upon him when he was captured. Precise and detailed. With such drawings the passage through the Cantabrians for a marauding army would be an easy thing to follow. She wondered why the French had not thought to search his saddlebags and take the treasure after leaving him for dead on the field.
Probably the rush of war had allowed the mistake. Not torture, but battle. Certainly the swords drawn against the Englishman had not been carefully administered, but made in the hurried flurry of panic.
She ought to deliver these maps into the hands of her father, but something stopped her. Papa did not need information to make his killings easier, no matter what she thought of the French. These were English maps, any military advantage gained belonged to them. On the road west she would give them back to the captain to take home and say nothing of them to her father. Perhaps they might be some recompense for Lucien Howard coming into Spain with an army that had been far too small and an apology, too, for his substantial injuries.
She felt tired out from her worrying, shattered by her father’s reactions to the Englishman. She had hardly slept in weeks for the dread of finding him with his throat cut or simply not there when she hovered outside his chamber just to see that he still breathed.
She did not want to be this person, this worrier. But no matter how the day started and how many hours she could stretch it out between making sure he was neither dead nor gone, she also couldn’t truly relax until the continued health and welfare of Captain Lucien Howard had been established.
A knock on the door had her standing very still and she glanced at herself in the mirror opposite. She looked as if she had been crying, her eyes red and swollen. The knock came again.
‘Who is it?’ Her tone was strong.
‘Your father, Alejandra. Can I come in?’
Concealing the maps in a drawer, she wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket and rubbed her cheeks. If the skin there was a little redder, her eyes would not show up quite so much. Then she flicked the lock.
Enrique Fernandez y Castro strode in and shut the door behind him. Slowly. She knew the exact second he recognised she had been upset.
‘If your mother were here...’ he began, but she shook that train of thought away and he remained silent.
Rosalie Santo Domingo y Giminez stood between them in memory and sometimes this was the only thing they still had in common, their love for a woman who had been good and brave and was gone. Both of them had dealt with her death in different ways, her father with his anger and his wars and her with a sense of distance that sometimes threatened to overcome her completely. But they seldom spoke of Rosalie now. To lessen the anguish, she surmised, and to try to survive life with the centre of their world missing.
‘The English earl is gaining his strength back.’ This was not phrased as a question. ‘I have heard he is a man of intellect and intuition. What do you make of him?’
‘A good man, I think, Papa. A man who might do your bidding in London well if you let him.’
‘He could be dangerous. To you on the way west. Others could take him.’
Alejandra knew enough of her father to feign indifference, for if she insisted on accompanying Lucien Howard she also knew that he would surely change his plans, so she stayed silent.
‘Tomeu says he can read minds.’
At that she laughed. ‘And you believe him?’
‘I believe there might be more to him than we can imagine, Alejandra, and we need to take care that he knows only so much about us.’
‘The house, you mean. The security of this place and the manpower?’
‘Take him out blindfolded. I do not wish for him to see the gates or the bridges. Or the huts down by the river.’
‘Very well.’
‘And leave him in Corcubion, no further. You should be able to find him a boat to England from there and it is a lot closer.’
‘Adan has family in Pontevedra.’
‘Almost a week away by the mountain paths. I want you back sooner.’
‘Very well.’ Her mind reeled with the implications of sending him from a town that did not have the protections of the others.
‘Here is a purse.’ The leather bag was tied with plaited rope and it was heavy. ‘He costs me much, this British spy. If you feel at any time he is not worth the danger, then kill him. I have instructed Adan and Manolo to do the same. Anything at all that might bring trouble. You will leave here three days from now.’
‘But he is not well enough, Papa.’
‘If he can’t walk out of here by then, he will never do anything else. Do you understand me, daughter? No more.’
‘Indeed.’ Her father wanted the English captive gone and if it could not be done with any sense of decorum, then he would simply get rid of the problem altogether. ‘But we will leave when it is dark for it will be safer that way.’ She needed to give Captain Howard time to acclimatise and the night-time would help. If they went late, it would mean only a few hours of walking.
‘Good. I shall not see him before he goes for I am off to Betanzos before dawn on the morrow and will be there for a week. Give him my promise that someone will be contacting him. Soon.’
‘I shall.’
He smiled at that, a quiet movement that made him look more like the handsome and kind father of old. It seemed so long since she had felt such kinship.
‘Go with God, Alejandra.’ He tipped his head and left the room, the sound of his steps on the tiles outside fading.
She had three days to prepare the English captain for the gruelling walk, though now they would not go into the mountains, it seemed, but along the coast. That might be easier for him, but harder for them with the lack of cover. Juan’s family, the Diego y Betancourts, inhabited this part of the land and they would need to take care to avoid notice.
Swearing softly, she thought of the difficult steps the captain had managed today. No more than a few hundred hard-fought yards till he needed to rest.
In three days he would not have that luxury. Extracting her rosary from her top pocket, she prayed to the Lord for strength, courage and perseverance. For both of them.
* * *
Lucien took in breath.
The new day was cloudless but cold and Alejandra stood beside him watching. Further afield he saw a group of others turn and stare.
‘Don’t come with me,’ he instructed as she took the first step when he did. ‘Wait here and I will be back.’
‘The orujo will warm you, señor.’ No ‘good luck’ or whispered encouragement. He was glad for it.
He was neither dizzy today nor light-headed and he had eaten a substantial breakfast for the first time in weeks. He was also aware of the heavy shadows beneath Alejandra’s eyes.
Taking the first step, he kept on going. The hedges of lavender were at each side of him now, he could smell the scent of the leaves, heady and pungent. Then the small space of chipped stones and the three rising steps.
He stopped before them and redrew in breath. He was sweating and the bravado that he had started with had waned a little, the stairway requiring a lot more in effort than the flatness of the path.
There was no handrail, nothing to hold on to as he raised one foot and transferred his weight. One. Two. Three. The deck welcomed him and shaded him, another flower he had no notion of sending a pungent odour into the air all around.
When he turned he saw her, standing still against the olives in the distance, her hands knotted before her as if she had been certain he might fall.
He smiled and she smiled back, the journey now easier in its return.
He could do it, the steps, the pathway, the lavender hedges and then back to the trees where he had left her. He did not even need to sit down when he reached the olives, but stood there, snatching the hat from his head and taking the ornate glass cup that she had filled from her hand.
‘Salud.’
‘Good health,’ Lucien gave back in English and their beakers touched, the cold of the tipple drawing trails across glass. He was elated with his progress and far less exhausted than he imagined he might have been. Tomorrow he would try for a longer distance and the next day more again.
‘We leave in two nights for the west.’
That soon? The liquor burnt down his throat and touched the nausea that roiled in his stomach, but he would not let her see that as he took another sip.
Despite his success this morning he could not even imagine climbing into the foothills of the Cantabrians or the Galicians and pretending energy and health for hours and hours on end.
‘If you lag behind, you will be shot. My father’s orders.’
Finishing his drink, he held out his glass for more. ‘Then I hope the firewater is all that you say it is.’
‘Papa has enemies here and the French have not withdrawn. But we know this place like the back of our hands, the secret trails, the hidden paths, and we will be armed.’
‘We?’
‘Adan, Manolo and I.’ She looked around as if to check no one else was close. ‘You have your knife, Capitán. Make certain it is within easy reach and keep it hidden. If anyone threatens you, use it.’
‘Anyone?’ His eyes scanned her dark ones.
‘Anyone at all,’ she returned and finished the last of her orujo.
‘Clothes will be brought to your room for the journey. And hair dye. The pale of your hair would give you away completely. Constanza will come and do it.’
‘A disguise, then?’
He saw how she hesitated, the stories of men captured without their uniform and hanged perfunctorily so much a part of folklore. With a cloak over blue and white he might be safer, but those travelling with him would not.
‘You speak Spanish like a native of this part. It will have to be enough.’
‘Do you expect trouble?’
She only laughed.
The pleasure of completing the walk had receded a little, but Lucien did not want her to see it. Even the orujo was warring against his stomach, a strong dram that scoured his digestive system after six weeks of bland gruel.
‘Can I ask you a question, Alejandra?’ She nodded. ‘What happened to your husband?’
The deep green of her eyes sharpened, bruising in memory. ‘He betrayed us, so he died.’
The shock of her answer left him reeling. ‘How?’
‘The betrayal or the death?’
‘Both.’
‘It was almost a year ago now and it was winter and cold. There was a fight and my husband lost. He died slowly, though.’
‘Three months’ worth of slowly? It is his room I am in.’
‘How could you possibly know that?’ She had stepped back now and her voice shook.
‘The marks on my wall. February had twenty-nine days in the last year only and March has thirty-one. I am presuming he died on April the fifteenth. I think you placed the marks there. To remember.’
‘I did.’ This time she held nothing back in the quiet fury. ‘I drew them into the plaster every night I stood in his room and wished him dead. It was for money he betrayed us. Did you figure that out, too? For the princely sum of pesos and guns, enough to start his own army and replace my father. And me.’
‘He confessed?’
‘No. A shot through the head was not conducive to any sort of explanation. Papa only let him live so that he might understand his reasoning and to see who else was implicated in the plot.’
‘Did El Vengador find others?’
‘He died without speaking again.’ Her answer came back with fierceness and Lucien could see in her eyes the truth of hurt. ‘Though it seems he could still write. I had not known that.’
A minute later she was gone.
The words in the Bible had been her late husband’s handiwork, then? Lucien wondered what he had done to Alejandra to make her hate him so very much.
Chapter Five (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
Sometimes the weather in Spain, even in winter, could be windless and dry.
But on this night, early in the first week of March, the gales howled from the north in a single blowing force, enough pressure in it to make Lucien lean forward to find balance. The rains came behind, drenching, icy and cold.
His clothes at least were keeping the wet out and the warmth in. He was surprised how comfortable his new boots were and pleased the hat he had been given had a wide and angled brim. He had long since lost the feeling in his bare fingers, though.
They had been walking for a good two hours and he’d managed to keep up. Just. Alejandra hovered behind him, Adan and the other man, Manolo, cutting through the bushes ahead.
‘We will stop soon.’ Her words were muffled by the rain.
‘And make camp?’
‘More like sleep,’ she returned. ‘It is too dangerous to risk a fire, but the trees there will allow us at least shelter.’
He looked up. A moon was caught behind the heavy cloud, but he could see the dark shape of a line of pines about a quarter of a mile away.
He was glad for it, for although he carried very little in the bag on his back, his body ached with the prolonged exercise after such a sickness. He had not eaten much, either, his stomach still recovering from the effects of the orujo.
He knew Alejandra had slowed to match his pace and was thankful for it, the blunt warning she had given him still present.
Adan suddenly tipped his head. Alarmed, Lucien did the same and the sound of far-off voices came on the wind. A group of men, he determined, and ones who thought they were alone in these passes. A hand gesture had him dropping down and Alejandra crawled up beside him.
‘They are about a quarter of a mile away, but heading north. Nine or ten of them, I think, with horses.’
She pulled the brown coat she wore across her head and dug into the cavity of dirt on the edge of their track.
Further ahead there was no sign at all of the others. He guessed they, too, had blended in with the undergrowth, staying put as the foreign party passed.
His eyes went to the leaves above them. Downwind. If there were dogs, they would stay safe.
Alejandra held her pistol out and her knife lay in her lap. He removed his own blade and fitted it into his fist, wishing he had been given a gun as well and rueing the loss of the fine weapons he had marched up to A Coruña with.
The rain had lightened now, beads of it across Alejandra’s cheeks and in the long dark strands of hair that had escaped from the fastening beneath her hat.
He wondered if she had killed before. The faces of the many men he had consigned to the afterlife rose up in memory, numerous ghostly spectres wrapped about the heart of battle. He had long since ceased to mourn them.
The enforced rest had allowed his heartbeat to slow and the breath in him to return. Even the tiredness was held temporarily at bay by this new alertness. They were not French, he was sure of that; too few and too knowledgeable of the pathway through the foothills. A band of men of the same ilk as El Vengador, then? Guerrillas roaming the countryside. He could hear a few words of Spanish in the wind.
‘It’s the Belasio family,’ Alejandra explained as he looked up. ‘On their way back to their lands.’
‘You saw them?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘I smelt them.’ When her nose sniffed the air he smiled, for the rain and wind had left only wetness across the scent of winter and earth and she was teasing. Still, the small humour in the middle of danger was comforting.
‘They are armed partisans, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then surely we would hardly be enemies?’
‘There are no hard and fast rules to this kind of warfare. We have guns they want and your presence here would have been noted.’
‘Me?’
‘There is money in the exchange of prisoners. Good money, too, and it is difficult to hide the blue of your eyes. You do not look Spanish even though you speak the language well.’
He swore. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Corcubion. It is a small harbour two days away.’
‘I thought I had heard Muros?’
She shook her head and stood. ‘My father and Adan are insistent on the closer port given your condition. Come, the Belasios are gone now and the trees are not far.’
* * *
Thirty minutes later they stopped beneath the pines. It was full dark and the rain had gone, though the intermittent drips from drenched boughs above were heavy.
‘We will leave again at first light.’ Adan, the older of the two men, stated this as he bedded down in the lee of a medium-sized bush and the other man joined him. A good twenty yards away Alejandra stayed at Lucien’s side.
He knew there was bread in his bag and he pulled out the crust of it and began to eat. Any sustenance would see him through the next day and he needed all the energy he could muster. He wished he still had his silver flask filled with good English brandy, but it had gone with the rest of his things. The French, probably, when they had first caught him.
He did have a skin of Spanish red wine and he drank this thankfully. Alejandra simply sat there, neither eating nor drinking. She looked tired through the gloom and he handed her the skin.
Surprisingly she took it, wiping the mouth of the vessel with her sleeve when she had finished before giving it back.
‘Do you want bread, too?’
She shook her head and arranged her bag as a pillow, fastening the cloak she wore about her and curling into sleep.
Overhead a bird called once. He had heard very few on the march up with the British in the lower valleys of the Cantabrians. But outside Lugo he had shot a substantial owl and sucked the warm blood from its body, because there was neither wood nor safety to cook it and he had not eaten for three days. Then he had plucked the breast and stuffed the feathers in his ruined boots to try to ward off frostbite.
He breathed out. Hard. It was relatively warm here under the trees and he had food, drink and a soft bed. The pine needles formed a sort of mattress as he lay down on his back and looked up. His knife he placed within easy reach, just outside the folds of his jacket.
‘You are a careful man.’ Alejandra’s words were whispered.
‘I have learnt that it pays to expect trouble.’
‘It is my opinion that we will be safe tonight. The noise of the eagle owl, the birds you heard cry out before, is why we stop here. They roost in the trees above and are like sentries. If anything moves within a thousand yards of us, they will all be silent.’
‘A comforting warning,’ he returned softly, and her white teeth flashed in the darkness.
* * *
‘Spain is like a lover, Señor Howard, known and giving to those who are born here. The bird sounds, the berries, the many streams and the pine needles beneath us. It is the strangers that come who change the balance of the place, the ones with greed in their eyes and the want of power.’
She saw the way he stretched out, his knife close and a sense of alertness that even sickness and a long walk had not dimmed.
She knew it had been hard for him, this climb. She had seen it in the gritted lines of his face and in the heavy beat of his pulse. His silence had told her of it, as well. It was as if every single bit of his will was used in putting one foot in front of the other and trudging on. The wine might dim the pain a little. She hoped it would.
He had removed his hat just before the light had fallen and the newly dyed darkness of his hair changed the colour of his eyes to a brighter blue. If anyone at all looked at him closely, they would know him as a stranger, a foreigner, a man to be watched.
‘It is mostly downhill tomorrow.’ The words came even as she meant not to say them, but there was some poignancy in one who had been so very sick and whose strength was held only by the threads of pure and utter will. He would not complain and she was thankful for it.
On her part all she wanted to do was sleep. His presence at the hacienda had left her fretting for his safety, mindful of her father’s propensity to do away with problems and so for many nights she had barely slumbered.
Here at least Manolo and Adan were a good way off and Lucien Howard’s knife was sharp. There was some ease in being next to him as well and she had made sure to place her blanket roll between the captain and the others. It was as much as she could do.
The birds above called and insects buzzed about them, zinging in the night. The music of a quiet forest unthreatened by advancing armies or groups of the enemy.
She felt the warmth of Lucien Howard’s shoulder as she turned away and slept.
* * *
Lucien woke as the first chorus of general birdsong sounded. Alejandra was still asleep, her arm across his as if the warmth had brought it there in a mind all of its own. One finger was badly scarred and another had lost a nail altogether. The hand of a girl who had seen hardship and pain. The lines he had noticed before on her right wrist showed up as multiple white slashes in the dullness.
He remembered all the other hands of the women of the ton with their painted nails and smoothness and he wanted to reach out and take her fingers in his own with a desperateness that surprised him. In sleep she looked younger, the tip tilt of her nose strangely innocent and freckles on the velvet of her cheeks.
A wood nymph and a warrior. When a spider crawled up the run of her arm he carefully brushed it away. Still, she came awake on the tiniest of touches, from slumber to complete wakefulness in less than a blink.
‘Good morning.’
She did not answer him as she sat, her hair falling in a long tousled curtain to her waist, the darkness in it threaded with deeper reds and black.
He saw her glance at the sky. Determining time, he supposed, and marking the hour of dawn. The steel in her knife’s hilt had left deepened ridges on the skin of her forearm, so close had she held it as she slept. When her glance took in the empty clearing she looked around.
‘Where are the others?’
‘They went to the stream we can hear running, about ten minutes ago. I should imagine they will be back soon.’
Standing she packed her things away and kicked at the pine needles with her feet.
‘It is better no one knows we were here. A good tracker could tell, of course, but someone merely passing by...’ She left the rest unsaid, but the green in her eyes was wary as she turned to him. ‘Spain is not a soft country, Capitán Howard. It is a land with its heart ripped out.’
‘Yet you stay here. You do not leave.’
‘It’s home,’ she said simply and handed him a hard cooked biscuit, the top of which was brushed in a sugar syrup. ‘For walking,’ she explained when he looked at it without much appetite. ‘If you do not eat, you will be slower.’
He felt better now that it was morning, the old sense of energy and purpose returning; perhaps it was the change of scenery or the hope of getting back to England soon that did it. His companion’s smile was also a part of the equation. Without the scowl or the anger Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo was beautiful. Breathtakingly so, he supposed, if she were to be seen in a gown that fitted and a face that was not always filthy.
Where the hell was this train of thought going? He pulled his mind back to their more immediate problems.
‘Do you have any idea on the movements of the French?’
‘Marshal Soult has taken Oporto and Marshal Victor and Joseph Bonaparte hold the centre and Madrid. They seldom travel in small groups in this part of the country anyway.’
‘Because they are afraid of being picked off by the guerrillas?’
‘Would you not be, too, Capitán?’
Their travelling companions were back now and Alejandra gestured to them to give her a moment as she disappeared into the bushes in the direction of the stream. Left alone with the two men, Lucien was suddenly tense. Something was wrong; he felt it in his bones and he was too much of a soldier not to take notice. He had his knife out instantly as he turned to find the threat.
‘Someone’s close,’ he said, ‘to the east.’ Manolo and Adan also drew their weapons and moved up beside him.
They came out of nowhere, a group of men dressed in a similar fashion as they were, the first discharging gun slamming straight into the gut of Adan. He fell like a stone, dead as he hit the ground, eyes wide to the heavens above in surprise. Lucien had his knife at the assailant’s throat before the man could powder up again, slicing the artery in a quick and simple task of death. Then he did the same to the next one. Alejandra was in the clearing now, her knife out and her breathing loud. He stepped in front of her, keeping her out of the line of fire. Two more men, he counted. Manolo disposed of one and then fell against flashing steel. As Lucien advanced the last man simply turned tail and ran. Stooping to pick up a stone, he threw it as hard as he could and was pleased to hear a yelp further away. He’d have liked to have sent his blade, too, but he did not want to lose it.
The quiet returned as quickly as it had left, the shock in Alejandra’s voice vibrating as she kneeled first beside Adan and then Manolo.
‘Dios mio. Dios mio. Dios mio.’
Manolo clutched her hand and tried to say something, but the words were shallow and indistinct. In return she simply held his fingers stained in blood and dirt and waited until the final breath was wrenched from him. Folding his arms across his stomach and closing his eyes, she swore roundly and stood to see to Adan. With him she arranged the cloth of his jacket across the oozing wound at his stomach before covering his eyes with her handkerchief. The small piece of fabric was embroidered with purple and blue flowers, Lucien saw, a delicate example of fine stitchery from her past.
‘It was the Betancourts. I recognised them from before, but we will revenge them. It is what my father is good at.’
With a deft movement she collected the discarded weapons and water bottles and covered the bodies of her fellow partisans with pine needles, reciting some sort of prayer over them with her rosary. Then she indicated a direction. He could see tears on her cheeks, though she brushed them away with the coarse fabric of her jacket as she noticed his observation.
‘We have no time to bury them properly. Those who did this will be back as soon as the others are informed and they will be baying for revenge. Adan and Manolo would not wish to die for nothing, so now we will have to use the mountain tracks to go west and see you safe.’
She struck out inland, away from the sea, the breeze behind them. As they traversed along a river, making sure to place their feet only in the rocky centre of it for a good quarter of a mile, they saw the first scree slopes of the mountains.
She listened, too, every three or four minutes stopping and turning her head into the wind so that sounds might pass down to her, in warning.
Lucien knew inside that no one followed them. Always when he had tracked for Moore across the front of a moving army he had held the knowledge of others. Here, the desolate cold and open quiet contained only safety.
The Betancourts might try to follow them, but he and Alejandra had been careful to leave no trace of themselves as they had walked and the rains had begun again, the water washing away footfalls.
* * *
‘You have done this before?’ he finally asked when Alejandra indicated a stop.
‘As many times as you have, Capitán. Who taught you to fight with a knife like that?’
‘A rum maker in Kingston Town. I was a young green officer with all the arrogance associated with it. A man by the name of Sheldon Williams took the shine off such cockiness by challenging me to a fight.’
When he saw she was interested he continued.
‘It was hot, too, mid-July and no breeze, the greasy smell of the sea in the air and a good number of ships in. He could have killed me twenty times or more, but he didn’t. Instead he showed me how to live.’
‘You fight like my father.’
‘Is that a compliment?’
She shook away his question with a frown.
* * *
She couldn’t take him home now, not with Manolo and Adan dead and a father who would place the blame on the Englishman’s presence for it and kill him. The horror of their deaths hit her anew as a great wave of grief broke inside.
No. She would have to take him on over the Galician Mountains and down into Pontevedra in the hope that Adan’s family might help them. A longer walk and one she had done only a few times before and always under guidance. Her whole body ached with the grief of more death, so senseless and quick.
She was on edge, too. The way Lucien Howard had slit the throats of those who had attacked them was so gracefully brutal and deceptively practised that she was wary. A man like this would make a dangerous enemy and alone with him she would need to be careful.
Still, she could not just leave him. Another thought occurred. He wore the sickness of exhaustion on his face and she noticed blood seeping again through the fabric of his jacket. From the wound on his neck, she supposed, the one that had not yet healed.
An Englishman alone in Spain would have no chance of escaping through any of the harbours on the east side of A Coruña. People here would be naturally suspicious, the scourge of the French having left a residual hatred for anyone new and different.
He spoke the language well, she would give him that, but his eyes were the light blue of a foreigner and the dye in his hair was already weakening. When she noticed the pale gold in the roots of his parting that small false truth of him firmed up resolve.
Rifling in her bag, she drew out the maps she had found concealed under the last blanket of his dead horse.
‘These are yours.’
He wiped his hands against his jacket before he reached out and took the offered documents, spreading the pages wide to ascertain they were all there.
‘I thought them lost.’ Puzzlement lay on his brow.
‘They were trapped beneath your horse and I saw them as we lifted it off you. Did you draw them?’
‘Partly. I had a group of guides and the information was collated over several months of travel. Maps like this have enormous value.’
‘To those who would pillage Spain? The secrets of the mountains exposed to those who would want to rape it more quickly.’
‘Or protect it.’
She laughed then because she could not help it. Once, she might have believed in the noble pursuits of soldiers. ‘Good or bad? There is a fine line between each, Capitán. People die here because of armies. Innocent people, and a land in winter has a limit on the succour it can manage to harvest before starvation settles in. In the north we have reached that limit. Another season of battle and there will be nothing left in Galicia save for the freedom to starve.’
She had not meant to say as much, to give a man as clever as the one before her the true slant of her opinion. But she had ceased many months ago to believe in the easy spoils of war or the glory in it.
‘Liberty and safety always come at a price, I’ll give you that.’ His eyes were threaded with weariness.
‘And today Adan and Manolo paid for it dearly. The French will come and then they will go because there is no way they can stay here and live and people like the Betancourts will be swallowed up by bitterness and hate until there is nothing left of them, either. That, Capitán, is the true cost of valour. No one ever wins. Not for ever. Not even for a little while.’
‘But is not simply accepting subjugation the true meaning of surrender?’ The planes on his cheeks held the light and his eyelashes were the darkest of blacks against the pale of his skin.
Once, she had thought the same, Alejandra conceded. Once, before her mother and her husband and friends had all been consigned to the afterlife she might have imagined resistance to be worth it, to be honourable, even, and right. But no more. Her heart had been lost to the other side of caring months and months ago, before Juan even, before he had betrayed her and her father for the heady lure of gold and power.
A mishmash of promises had left her grappling for even one honest hope for Spain. All she wished for was peace and a rest from the war and blood that surrounded them. The face of Adan surprised by his death came to mind and she turned it away, unable to bear the image. It could have so easily been her. Or Lucien Howard. It could have been them tonight lying stiff on the cold earth with the pine needles across their faces.
‘England is a soft country, Capitán, and far from battle. If I were a woman of Britain, I should never leave it.’
‘Come with me, then, when I go. You could be safe there.’
She was intrigued by his words. ‘A large promise, señor. Too large to believe in, I am afraid, and if it is a choice between battle here or homesickness there, then I think I should always choose the former.’
Unexpectedly he reached out and took her hand and she wished that her nails had been cleaner or her skin softer. Stupid foolish wishes here out in the mountains with the scent of Adan’s and Manolo’s blood between them and a hundred hard miles to go.
‘I appreciate that you are helping me to get home.’ His words were quiet and for the first time she could hear a hint of foreignness within them.
It had been so long since someone had touched her with gratitude and kindness that she was overcome with a kind of dizzying unbalance. For a second she wanted to wind her fingers into his strength and follow him to England. The absurdity of that thought made her pull away and place a good distance between them.
‘I would have done it for anyone.’ But she knew it was not true, that small dishonesty. Right from the first second of seeing Lucien Howard on the battlefield above A Coruña, his long pale hair pinked in blood, she had felt a...sameness, a connection. Unexplainable. Unsettling.
The edges of his lips turned up into humour as he pushed a length of hair away from his eyes.
He held his maps in the other hand with a careful deliberateness and scanned the trees behind. A noise had caught his attention, perhaps, or a bird frightened from its perch. They were too high up for any true danger and the nights without cover were cold. Already the snowdrifts could be seen and if it rained again the ice would form. His breath clouded with the condensation and she felt a momentary panic about exposure. If it darkened and they could not find shelter...
‘We have at least five hours before the night settles.’ She wondered how he did that, reading her mind without warning and taking the words she was about to say.
A guide, he had said, for General Moore. Penning maps and alone before the main body of the English army as it ran before the worst storm in decades across the Cantabrian Mountains. Even looking at him she could see he fitted into this landscape with an astounding ease and mastery; a chameleon, hurt and exhausted, but as dangerous as they came.
He had bent to lift a dried acorn now, peeling off the husks to let them blow in the breeze. ‘’Tis nor-nor-west. Another day and there will be heavier rain in it. Sleet, too, if the temperatures keep dropping. Do you know the way?’
Alejandra did not answer. If she got her bearings wrong, then they were both dead. There was very little civilisation between here and Pontevedra and already she was shaking.
Not all from cold, either, she thought to herself. Anger was a part of it, too, that she should allow her worry for this man to override sense.
She could easily slip into the forest around them and disappear, leaving him with his wits to follow and the pine needles and oak leaves to bed down in. But she saw the fever in his eyes even as he held her glance, daring her not to comment, and turned to stride out before her. The bloodstain across his shoulders had widened and every so often a drip of crimson lay on the earth and bracken as he walked.
Chapter Six (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
An hour later Lucien knew he needed to stop, needed to lie down and reassemble his balance and his energy. His neck ached and the wound had reopened; the warmth of blood had held the cold at bay for a time until it could do so for no longer. Now he felt the shivers even across the soles of his feet.
‘We can camp here.’ Alejandra’s voice cut through his thoughts and he looked around. The clearing was undisturbed by civilisation, with a view wide down across the way they had just come. But most surprising of all was the tall tree tucked just before the overhang, the roots of it providing a shelter of sorts.
‘Like a house—’ she smiled ‘—with walls and a ceiling. I have used them before.’
‘An oak?’ The leaves and structure of the tree were not quite familiar.
She nodded. ‘Spanish sessile oak. Different from English oak, I think.’
Lucien put down his rucksack and sat against it. If he had been alone, he would have closed his eyes and tried to regroup, but he could see from the expression on her face that she was already worried by the tenuous nature of his health and he did not wish to add to her concerns. The hardness of the bark hurt and he leant forward a little. He needed to get his jacket off and some water on to the heat of the wound, but in the descending dusk and cold there would be little chance of such doctoring.
‘You are shivering.’
He simply looked up at her, unable to hide the reaction of his body further. It was finished, this pretence. He couldn’t have moved had his life depended on it, not even if a bunch of marauding partisans were to have charged at that moment through the trees.
‘Leave me and go home. You’d have a better chance of surviving if—’ She did not let him finish.
‘I didn’t take you for a quitter, Capitán.’
He smiled because that was what he might have said to her had the tables been turned.
‘Besides, you have been hurt before just as badly. I saw the scars on your body when we brought you from the battlefields of A Coruña and if you can survive once, you can do so twice, or a thousand times.’
Her words rattled him. Had it been her who had stripped off his ruined uniform after the battle? He’d been nude beneath the covers when he had awoken in the quiet room that first time, a bandage the only thing covering him.
‘Who undressed me?’
‘Oh, I forget that you English have such a large dollop of prudishness. War has changed things like that here.’ She was rummaging through her bag, so Lucien was unable to determine her expression, though he could hear the humour in her voice. ‘Take off both your shirt and jacket so I can see to you.’
He made no move whatsoever to do as she asked.
‘Salve,’ she explained as she found what she’d been searching for. ‘Constanza gave this to me before we left. She said if the wound bled again and you had a fever, I was to make certain to use it.’
For just one moment Lucien thought to simply ignore her and lie down, but the throb in his neck was making his temples ache badly and he knew slumber would be hard to come by in such a state.
Hating the way his fingers fumbled, he unbuttoned the heavy jacket and then the shirt, the fabric of the latter sticking to his skin. When he tugged harder the coppery smell of fresh blood filled the air around them and he thought for an instant he might be sick.
The cold was helping, though, the breath of the mountains soothing and smooth. When Alejandra walked behind and laid her fingers against his shoulder to draw the last piece of fabric away, he started.
‘It is off,’ she said after a moment, ‘and the bleeding has slowed.’ Drawing a picture with her forefinger on his skin, she gave him words, as well. ‘The cuts are deeper in the middle here than at each side and it is only those ones above your spine that have festered and still bleed.’
He’d been taken from the back. Lucien remembered the first pain as Guy had fallen.
Turning on his horse to fight, he’d drawn his sword quickly, but there had been too many and at too close a range. He had no true recollection of what had happened next save for a vague recall of place. The first true memory was on the field above A Coruña, waking to find Alejandra kneeling beside him and his steed’s heavy head across his abdomen.
She washed the injury with cool water and blotted the blood with something soft. The salve held the smell of garlic, lavender and camphor and was cooling. Then she gave him a cup with herbs infused in water taken from a glass container within her rucksack. Its lid was of red wax.
‘Stay still while I wrap your wound for protection.’ Careful hands went beneath his armpits and then met at the middle. Her breath at his nape was warm and soft and he clung to the touch of it as she pulled the bandage tight.
‘You are lucky this was not a few inches higher, Capitán. Nobody could survive a wound that severed the vein there and it was a near thing indeed.’
Close up the green in her eyes held other colours, brown, gold and yellow, and her lashes were long and dark. He had never had these sorts of conversations with a woman before, full of challenge and debate. He suddenly wished that they could sit here and simply talk for ever. The medicine, he supposed, the concoction of some drug that scattered his mind into foolishness and maudlin hope.
He stood unsteadily and put his clothes back on, watching as she arched up, her bag at her feet. A much more sizeable sack than the one he held, Lucien noted, angered by his weakness.
With her hat removed the long thick length of dark hair fell across one shoulder and down towards the curve of her waist. He glanced away. He would be gone in a matter of days and she would not be interested in his admiration. But the green eyes had held his with the sort of look that on any other woman might be deemed as flirtatious.
After a few moments she sat down opposite to him. When she gave him a strip of dried meat to chew he took it thankfully.
‘The rain has stopped, at least, but even in good weather it will take us two more days to reach the port town of Pontevedra. More if you become sicker.’ The impatience in her words told him she had little time for illness.
‘Will your father not wonder where you are?’
‘Papa has gone down to Betanzos for a week. I shall be home soon after, using the coastal route.’
‘A quicker option when I am not with you, holding you back?’
Frowning, she observed him more closely. ‘Are you very rich, Capitán Howard?’
Her question surprised him. Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo did not strike him as a woman who would be so much enchanted with the size of one’s purse.
‘Your query reminds me of the debutantes in the court of London who weigh up the fortune of each suitor before they choose the most wealthy.’
At that she smiled. ‘I was only wondering whether offering you up for a bounty would be more beneficial to our cause than the other option of sending you home. The rebel movement has a great deal of need for money.’
‘I have an ancient pile in Kent and a town house in London. Expensive in their own right, I suppose, but not ready cash, you understand, and all entailed. Other than that...’ He spread his hands out palm upwards.
‘You are penniless?’
He did not mean to, but he laughed and the sound echoed around the clearing. ‘Not quite, but certainly heading that way.’
‘In truth, you are blessed by such a state, then. My fortune was what led me into marriage in the first place.’ Her teeth pulled at the dry piece of meat. ‘Papa chose Juan for me as a husband because he was older and a man of means and power.’ Her words held a flat tone of indifference.
‘And what happened?’
‘I married him in the middle of winter and he was dead before the spring.’
‘Because he betrayed your father?’
‘And because he betrayed me.’
Her glance held his across the darkening space and Lucien saw all that was more usually hidden.
‘So El Vengador dealt with him and you made the marks in the limewash to record his death?’
She nodded. ‘I struck them off one by one by one. To remember what marriage was like.’
‘And never do it again?’
Tipping her chin, she faced him directly. ‘You may not believe this, but in my life men have liked me, Capitán. Many men. Even since Juan I have had offers of marriage and protection. And more.’
In the dusk he could so easily believe this, the deep dimples on her cheeks showing as shadow and her dark eyes flashing.
‘But they also know I am my father’s daughter and so they are wary.’
‘A lonely place to be, that? Caught in the middle.’
‘More so than you might imagine, Capitán.’
God. Such an admission would normally have sent his masculine urges into overdrive, but the sickness had weakened him and she knew it.
The moon had risen now, a quarter moon that held only a little light in the oncoming darkness. The noises of birdsong had dimmed, too, and it was as if they sat on top of a still and unmoving world, the tones of sepia and green and grey overwhelming. Far, far away north through the clouds and the mist would be the sea and England. Sitting here seemed like a very long way from home, though he felt better with the rest and the medicines, his strength returning in a surprising amount.
* * *
Lucien Howard was watching her closely and had been ever since leaving the hacienda, the roots of his hair in the rising night filled with the pale of moonlight.
If he had not been so sick, she might have simply moved forward and wrapped herself about him just to satisfy her curiosity about what he might truly feel like. Juan had been the sort of man who spoke first and thought about things later, but this army captain, this English earl, was different. Every single thing he said was measured by logic and observation and there was something in the careful cut-edged words he used that appealed.
‘Are you married?’ She had not meant to ask this so baldly and was glad when he smiled.
‘No?’ The small inflection he used lifted the word into question.
‘Have you ever been?’ She caught the quick shake of his head and breathed out.
‘You are wise, then. Marriage takes large pieces of one away.’ Alejandra was glad that he could not see her hands fisting at this confession. ‘With the wrong person it is both a trap and a horror.’
She’d never told anyone this. She wondered why she was speaking of it now out here in the silence of night. She frowned, thinking that she did know, of course. It was the residue of shame and wrath that still sat in her throat as a constant reminder of humiliation. And it was also because of Lucien Howard’s courage.
Her fingers found the cross she wore at her neck, the gold warming in her hands.
‘A few people seem to manage the state of holy matrimony quite well.’ He gave her this very quietly.
‘A fortuitous happenstance that in my experience is not often repeated.’
The deep rumble of his laughter was comforting. She wished she could build a fire to see him better but did not dare to risk the flame. Her stomach rumbled after eating the dried meat and she longed for heartier fare, especially now they would be traversing the high passes instead of the faster and easier coastal roads.
She saw him abruptly turn his head, tipping it to one side and listening as he pushed himself up. Then his knife was thrown, a single flash in the almost dark, the metal catching moonlight as it rifled across the space in the clearing to fall in a heavy thump.
He was back in a moment with a large rabbit skewered by steel, his eyes going to the dark empty space before them. ‘I will build a fire to cook it, but not here.’
Gathering dried sticks, he dug a hole in the ground a good ten yards away behind the trunk of the oak and bent to the task of finding flame.
Alejandra was astonished. She had never seen anyone kill prey with such ease. Even she, who was used to these woods and this clime, would not have aimed with such a precision through the dark. And now they would have a decent meal and warmth.
He was making her look like a woman without skill. Leaning forward, she took the rabbit and brought out her own blade, skinning it in a few deft swipes and laying it back down on a wide clean oak leaf that was browned but whole.
‘Thank you.’ His words as he threaded the carcass on a stick and balanced it across other branches he had fashioned into carriers. The flames danced around the fare, blackening the outer skin before dying down.
‘Will you be pleased to return home, Capitán?’
She caught the quick nod as he rolled the meat above the embers. The smell of the cooking made her stomach rumble further and, hoping he would not hear it, she shifted in her hard seat of earth.
‘Did your dead husband ever hurt you?’
The question came without any preamble and the shock of it held her numb.
‘Physically, I mean,’ he continued when she did not answer.
‘No.’ Her anger was so intense she could barely grind the lie out.
‘Truly?’
He turned the rabbit again, fat making the fire flare and smoke rise.
‘Truly what?’
‘I am trained to know when people do not tell the truth and I don’t think that you are.’
In the firelight his eyes were fathomless. She had never seen a man more beautiful than him or more menacing.
Just her luck to be marooned in the mountains with a dangerous and clever spy-soldier. She should tell him it all, spit it out and see the pity mark his face. Even her father had failed to hide his reaction when he had found her there, hurt and bound in the locked back bedroom at Juan’s family house, a prisoner to his demands.
‘I think you should mind your own business, Capitán.’
After this the silence between them was absolute and it magnified every other sound present in a busy forest at night.
* * *
Finally, after a good half hour’s quiet, he spoke.
‘Perhaps conversation will be easier again if you eat.’
Taking a small offering from the flame, he split it with his knife, laying it out on another leaf to protect it from the dirt.
Despite herself she smiled. Not a man to give up, she surmised, and not a man to be ignored, either. The rabbit was succulent and well-cooked, but his gaze was upon her, waiting.
‘Do you ever think, Capitán, that if you had your life again you would do some things very differently?’
He took his time to answer, but she waited. Patience was a virtue she had long since perfected.
‘My father and youngest brother drowned in an accident on our estate. It was late winter, almost spring, you understand, and it was cold and the river was running fast.’ He looked at her over the flames and she could see anger etched upon his brow. ‘I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t run fast enough to reach them at the bridge.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Fifteen, so old enough, but I made a mistake with the distance. There was a bend a little further upstream. I could have reached them there if I had thought of it sooner.’
Precision and logic. Everything he ever said or did was underpinned by his mastery of both. He had failed his family according to his own high standards, something that was the core of her shame, as well.
‘If I could go back, I would have killed my husband the first time he ever hit me. I had my knife hidden in my boot.’ She hated the way her voice shook as fury made speech difficult, but still she went on. ‘“Thou shalt not kill” is repeated in the Bible many times. In Matthew and Exodus. In Deuteronomy and Romans. I tried to take heed of the words, but then...’ Her heart beat fierce with memory. ‘The second death of hell is not the worst thing that can happen after all, Capitán. It’s the day-to-day living that does it.’
He nodded and the empathy ingrained in the small gesture almost undid her. ‘You are not the first to think it and you most certainly won’t be the last. But you were made stronger? Afterwards?’
‘Yes.’ No need for thought or contemplation. She knew it to the very marrow of her bones.
‘Then that itself is a gift.’
It was strange but his explanation suddenly eased her terror and the truth of the realisation almost made her cry. She had failed to be a dutiful wife. She had failed in her strict observance of the Bible. She had failed in bearing the heavy stick and fists of a man who was brutal in teaching marital obedience and subservience, but she had survived. And God had made her stronger.
For the first time in a long while she breathed easier. It was a gift.
‘How long have you been here in Spain, Capitán?’
‘Since August of 1808. After a few skirmishes on the way north we ran for the mountains, but the snow beat us.’
‘It was thick this year in the Cordillera Cantabrica. It is a wonder anyone survived such a journey.’
‘Many didn’t. They lay there on the side of the steep passes and never moved again. Those behind stripped them of shoes and coats.’
She had heard the stories of the English dead. The tales of the march had long been fodder for conversations about the fires at the hacienda. ‘Papa said a gypsy had told him once that the French will triumph three times before they are repelled. This is the first, perhaps?’
He only laughed.
‘You do not believe in such prophesy, Capitán?’
‘Generals decide the movements of armies, Alejandra, not sages or soothsayers.’
‘Do you think they will return? The British, I mean. Will they come back to help again, in your opinion?’
‘Yes.’
She smiled. ‘You are always so very certain. It must be comforting that, to believe in yourself so forcibly, to trust in all you say.’
‘You don’t?’
She swallowed. Once she had, before all this had happened, before a war had cut down her family and left her in the heart of chaos.
Now she was not sure of exactly who or what she was. The fabric in her trousers was dirty and ripped and the jacket she wore had come off the dead body of a headless Hussar in the field above A Coruña. It still held the dark stains of blood within the hemline for she had neither the time nor the inclination to wash it. A life lost, nameless and vanished. It was as if she functioned in a place without past or future.
Shimmying across to sit beside him, she took his hand, opening the palm so that she might see the lines in the flame. If he was wary, he did not show it, not in one singular tiny way.
‘There are some here who might read your life by mapping out the junctures and the missing gaps. Juan, my husband, was told he would meet his Maker in remorse and before his time.’ She smiled. ‘At least that came true.
‘Pepe, the gypsy, said that I would travel and become a hidden woman.’ She frowned. ‘He said that I should be the purveyor of all secrets and help those who were oppressed. Juan was not well pleased by this reading. His life ending and mine opening out into another form. I do remember how much I wanted it to be true, though. A separation, the hope of something else, something better.’
His fingers were warm and hard calloused. She wished they might curl around her own and signal more, but they did not.
She couldn’t ever remember talking to another as she had to him, the hours of evening passing in confidences long held close. But it was getting colder and they needed to sleep. It would be tough in the morning with the rain on the mountains and still a thousand feet to climb.
As if sensing her tiredness he let go of her hand and stood.
‘The dugout might be the best place for slumber. At least it is out of the wind.’
But small, she thought, and cosy. There would be no room between them in the close confines of the tree roots. He had already taken his coat off and laid it down on the dirt after shifting clumps of pine needles in. His bag acted as a pillow and a length of wool she recognised from the hacienda completed the bed.
‘I...am not...sure.’
‘We can freeze alone tonight or survive together.’ His breath clouded white in the last light of the burning embers. ‘Tomorrow we will hew out a pathway to the west and take our chances in finding a direction to the coast. It is too dangerous to keep climbing.’
He was right. Already the chills of cold made her stiffen and if the earlier rain returned...
Finding her own blanket, she placed it on top of his. Then, removing her boots, she got in, bundling the other two pieces of clothing from her bag on top of the blankets.
Lucien Howard scooped up more oak leaves and these added another buffer to the layers already in place. Alejandra was surprised by how warm she felt when he burrowed in beside her and spooned around her back.
When she breathed in she could smell him, too, a masculine pungent scent interwoven with the herbs she had used on his back.
Juan had smelt of tobacco and bad wine, but she shook away that memory and concentrated on making this new one. He wasn’t asleep, but he was very still. Listening probably to the far-off sounds and the nearer ones. Always careful. She chanced a question.
‘Are you ever surprised by anyone or anything, Capitán?’
‘I try not to be.’ There was humour in his answer.
‘You sleep lightly, then?’
‘Very.’
Her own lips curled into a smile.
* * *
She finally slept. Lucien was tired of lying so still and even the cold did not dissuade him from rising from the warmth of this makeshift bed and stretching his body out in the darkness.
His neck hurt like hell and he crossed to her sack. The salve was in here somewhere, he knew it was. Perhaps if he slathered himself with the cooling camphor he might gain a little rest.
The rosary caught him by surprise as did the small stone statue of the resurrected Jesus. She carried these with her at all times? He’d often seen her fingering something in her pocket as they walked, her lips moving in a soundless entreaty.
A prayer or a confession. Her husband would be in there somewhere, he imagined, as would her father. Spain, too, would hold a place in her Hail Marys. He looked across at her lying in the bed of pine needles and old blankets. She slept curled around herself, her fist snuggled beneath her neck, smaller again in sleep and much less fierce.
Alejandra, daughter of El Vengador. Brave and different, damaged and surviving. One foot poked out from under the coverings, the darned stockings she had worn to bed sagging around a shapely ankle.
She was thin. Too thin. What would happen to her when he left? She’d have to make her own way home through the coastal route as she had said, but even that was dangerous alone. What was it she had said of the Betancourts? They hated her family more even than they hated the French. He should insist she go back from here and press on by himself, but he knew he would not ask it.
He liked her with him, her voice, her smell, her truths. He’d have been dead on the high hills above A Coruña if any one of the others had found him, an Englishman who was nothing but a nuisance given the departed British forces. But she’d bundled him up and brought him home, the same rosary in her bag cradled against his chest and her fingers warm within his own.
She’d stood as a sentry, too, at the hacienda when danger had threatened, his sickness relegating him to a world of weakness.
Jesus, help me, he prayed into the cold and dark March night, and help her, too, he added as the moon came through the banks of clouds and landed upon them, ungainly moths breaking shadows through the light.
Chapter Seven (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
They saw no one all the next morning as they walked west.
Lucien would have taken her hand if he thought she’d have allowed it, but he did not make the suggestion and she did not ask for any help. Rather they picked their way down, a slow and tedious process, the rain around midday making it worse.
If he had been alone, he would have stopped, simply dug into the hillside and waited for better conditions.
But Alejandra kept on going, a gnarled stick in her hand to aid in balance and a grim look across her face. She stood still often now, to listen and watch, the frown between her eyes deep.
‘Are you expecting someone?’ He asked the question finally because it was so obvious that she was. Tipping his head out of the northerly wind, he tried to gain the full quotient of sound.
‘I hope not. But we are close here to the lands of the Betancourts.’
‘And the fracas yesterday will have set them after us yet again?’
‘That, too.’ This time she smiled and all Lucien could think of was how fragile she looked against the backdrop of craggy mountains and steep pathways. Gone was the girl from the hacienda who had dared and defied him, the gleam of challenge egging him on and dismissing any weaker misgivings he might have felt with his neck and back on fire and a fever raging. This woman could have held each and every dainty beauty in the English court to ransom, with her dimples and her high cheekbones and the velvet green of her eyes. Beautiful she might be, but there was so much more than just that.
Men have loved me, she had said. Many men, she had qualified, and he could well believe in such a truth. Angry at his ruminations, he spoke more harshly than he meant to.
‘Surely they know it was your father who shot your husband?’
‘Well, Capitán, it was not quite that simple,’ she replied and turned away, the flush of skin at her nape telling.
‘It was you?’
‘Yes.’ One word barked against silence, echoing back in a series of sounds. ‘But when he came back from the brink of death it was Papa who made certain he should not survive it.’
‘Repayment for his acts of brutality as a husband?’
‘You understand too much, Capitán. No wonder Moore named you as his spy.’
He ignored that and delved into the other unsaid. ‘But someone else knew that it was you who had fired the first shot?’
‘In a land at war there are ears and eyes everywhere. On that day it was a cousin of Juan’s, a priest, who gave word of my violence. No one was inclined to disbelieve a man of God, you understand, even if what he said was questionable. I was younger and small against the hulk of my husband and he was well lauded for his prowess with both gun and knife.’
‘A lucky shot, then?’
She turned at that to look at him straight and her glance was not soft at all. ‘He was practised, but I am better. The shot went exactly where I had intended it.’
‘Good for you.’
A second’s puzzlement was replaced by an emotion that he could only describe as relief. The rosary was out, too, he saw it in her hands, the beads slipping through her fingers in a counted liturgy.
‘You have killed people before, too, Capitán?’
‘Many times.’
‘Did it ever become easier?’
‘No.’ Such a truth came with surprising honesty and one he had not thought of much before.
‘“And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death.” Leviticus, Chapter Twenty-Four, Verse Seventeen.’ Her voice shook.
‘You know the Bible by heart?’
‘Just the parts in it that pertain to me.’
‘You truly think that God in his wisdom would punish you for fighting back?’
‘He was my husband. We were married in the Lord’s house.’
‘He was a brute and any God worth his salt would not say otherwise.’
She crossed herself at the blasphemy as he went on.
‘Looking too far back can be as dangerous as looking too far forward in life. In my experience it is best to understand this moment, this hour, this day and live it.’
‘It’s what got you through, then? Such a belief?’
‘I’m a soldier. If I made it my mantra not to kill the enemy, I would have been dead long before we left the safety of Mondego Bay, near Lisboa. No, what gets me through is knowing who I am and what I stand for.’
‘England?’
He laughed. ‘Much more than that, I hope.’
He looked across at the land spread out before him, its valleys and its peaks, its beauty and its danger. ‘Democracy and the chance of freedom might be a closer guess. Spain is in your blood as England is in mine, yet who can say what draws us to fight to the death for them? Is it the soil or the air or the colours of home?’ Picking up a clump of leaves, he let them run through his fingers, where they caught the rising wind and spun unstopped across the edge of the pathway into nothingness.
‘We are like these pine needles, small in the scheme of things, but together...’ His hand now lay against the trunk of the giant tree on the side of the track, its roots binding what little was left of the soil into a steady platform.
* * *
‘Together there is strength?’ Alejandra understood him exactly. This war was not about Juan or her father or her. It was about democracy and choice and other things worth the blood that spilled into death to defend such freedoms. And was not personal liberty the base stone of it all? Papa had never taken the time to understand this, the residual guilt of her mother’s murder overriding everything and allowing only the bitterness to survive.
The waste of it made her stumble, but a strong hand reached out.
‘Careful. We are high up and the edge is close.’
She wound her fingers through his and kept them there, wishing she might move every part of her body against his to feel the honour within him. Could life be like this, she thought, could one person be simply lost in the goodness of the other for ever, not knowing where one began and the other ended?
This was a kind of music and the sort that took your breath and held it there around your heart with an ache of heaviness and disbelief. Hope lay in the knowledge of a man who had not given up his integrity despite every hardship.
Such foolish longings made her frown. Her clothes were dirty and the knife that she carried in the sleeve of her jacket was sharp. This was who she was. A woman honed by war and loss and lessened by marriage and regret; a woman whose truths had long since been shaved away by the difficulty of living from one day to the next.
He could only be disappointed in her, should he understand the parts that made her whole. Carefully she pulled away.
‘We should go on.’ Her voice was rough and she did not wait for him as she followed the path down the steep incline above the mist of cloud.
* * *
She barely spoke to him as they laid out their blankets that night under the stars and the warmer winds of the lower country. She hadn’t looked at him all afternoon, either, as the mountain pastures had turned to coastal fields and the narrow tracks had widened into proper pathways.
They had met with a sailor who was a cousin of Adan’s and he had promised to take Lucien across to England on the morrow. He’d also offered them a room for the night, but Alejandra had refused it, leading them back into the hills behind the beach where the cover of vegetation was thicker.
‘Is Luis Alvarez trustworthy?’ Lucien had seen the gold she had pulled from her pocket for the payment and it was substantial, but he had also seen the pain on the old man’s face when Alejandra had told him of Adan’s death.
‘Papa says that those who make money from a war hold no scruples, but I doubt he will push you overboard in the middle of the Channel. You are too big, for one, but as Adan’s kin he also owes the dead some sort of retribution.’
‘That is comforting.’
She laughed and he thought he should like to hear her do it more, her throaty humour catching. Tomorrow he would be gone, away from Spain, away from these nights of talk and quiet closeness.
‘Being happy suits you, Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo.’ Lucien would have liked to add that her name suited her, too, with its soft syllables and music. Her left wrist with the sleeve of the jacket pulled back was dainty, a silver band he had not noticed before encircling the thinness.
‘There has been little cause for joy here, Capitán. You said you survived as a soldier by living in the moment and not thinking about tomorrow or yesterday?’ She waited as he nodded, the question hanging there.
‘There is a certain lure to that. For a woman, you understand.’
‘Lure?’ Were the connotations of the word in Spanish different from what they were in English?
‘Addiction. Compulsion even. The art of throwing caution to the wind and taking what you desire because the consequences are distant.’
Her dark eyes held his without any sense of embarrassment; a woman who was well aware of her worth and her attraction to the opposite sex.
Lucien felt the stirring in his groin, rushing past the sickness and the lethargy into a fully formed hard ache of want.
Was she saying what he thought she was, here on their last night together? Was she asking him to bed her?
‘I will be gone in the morning.’ He tried for logic.
‘Which is a great part of your attraction. I am practical, Capitán, and a realist. We only know each other in small ways, but...it would be enough for me. It isn’t commitment I am after and I certainly do not expect promises.’
‘What is it you do want, then?’
She breathed out and her eyes in the moonlight were sultry.
‘I want to survive, Capitán. You said you did this best by not thinking about the past or the future. I want the same. Just this moment. Only now.’
His words, his way of getting through, but she had turned the message in on itself and this was the result.
He should have stood and shaken his head, should have told her that the decisions made in the present did affect the future and in a way that was sometimes impossibly difficult. If he had been a better man, he might have turned and walked into the undergrowth, away from temptation. But it had been almost a year since he had slept with a woman and the need in him was great.
‘You are not promised to another in England? I should not wish to harm that.’ Her question came quietly and he shook his head. ‘Then let me give you this gift of a memory, for my sake as well as your own.’
Her fingers went to the buttons on her shirt and she simply undid them, one by one, parting the cloth. Then she leant forward and took his hand, placing his palm across the generous swell of her breast beneath the chemise. The heat there simply claimed him.
She smelt of flowers and sweetness, and the silk of her undergarment against his hand was soft. Her hair had fallen, too, over her shoulder, unlinked purposefully from the leather tie she more normally fastened it with, the dark of it binding them into the shadows of night.
Her nipple was hard peaked, risen into feeling, and the white column of her throat was limber and exposed, a holy cross in gold hanging on the thin chain. He could just take her, like this, Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo with all her beauty and her demons, offering herself to him without demand of more.
‘Hell.’ His curse had her smiling as she brought the blanket around them, a cocoon against the winter cold.
Her hands were on his neck and his chest, feeling her way. He hated how his breath shook and how the certainty that was always with him was breached with the feel of closeness.
She filled him up with hope and heat, and even the ache of his wounds were lessened by her touch. For so very long he had been sore and sick and lonely and yet here, for this moment above the sea and in the company of a woman he liked, he felt...complete.
Such recognition astonished him as his thumb nudged across her nipple on its own accord in a rhythm that was ancient. He felt her stiffen, felt her fingers tighten on his arms, the nails sharp points to his skin.
‘You are beautiful, Alejandra.’ His member pushed against the thick fabric of his trousers.
Lifting up, he steadied her against the trunk of a pine, the blanket behind them a shield against the roughness of bark and a buffer of warmth. There was no time now, no dragging moments, no hesitation or waiting. Undoing the fastening of her trousers, he had them down around her knees before she could take a further breath and then his fingers were inside her, sheathed in warmth and wetness, the muscles there holding him in, asking for more.
‘Lucien?’ Her voice. Whispered. ‘What is happening? What is this that you are doing to me?’
‘Love as we make it, sweetheart. Open wider.’ When she did as he asked he found the hard bud of her centre and pressed in close.
Her shaking was quiet at first, a small rumble and tightening, and then growing. He held her there in the night air and the moonlight and brought her to the place where the music played, languid and true, a rolling sensation of both muscle and flesh.
She was not quiet as she called his name, or gentle as she held his hand there hard inside, wanting all that he would give her, the last edge of reason gone in the final flush of orgasm.
He smiled, his gift to her new philosophy of living for the now and one that would make it easier come the morning. He wished it could have been different. He wished he could simply follow where his hand had been. But there was danger in such abandonment, the least of which was an unwanted pregnancy.
As she slid down the trunk of the tree to sit at the base of it, her knees wide open, he thought she had never looked more beautiful or more content. The smell of her sex was there, too, and he breathed in and savoured it.
‘That has never happened before. To me.’ Her words, quiet and tearful. Her eyes were full of unshed moisture as he moved his forefinger and the clench of her muscles echoed in answer.
‘This?’
‘Yes. It was exactly right.’
She was asleep before he had the blanket about them, her head cushioned against his chest. Uncoupling his hand, he sat there and tried to work out what the hell had just changed inside.
Usually sex to him was a quick thing associated with relief and little else and he left afterwards with a small but definite guilt.
But here tonight, when he had not even found his own completion, the tight want in his being was unquenched.
He prayed that this might never stop, this now, here in Spain with Alejandra in his arms. Above them in the gap of cloud a shooting star spun across the sky and he wished upon it with a fervour that shook him.
‘Lord, help us.’
It was as much as he could do in this arena of war with a boat waiting to take him home on the morrow and a back full of wounds that were worsening.
Left in his company, she would be compromised and tomorrow when she woke he knew there would be difficulties. In the harsh light of dawn reality would send each of them their different ways and back into lives promised elsewhere. It was how life worked.
Lucien thought of his friends at home and his family and the ancient crumbling estate of Ross that would need a careful guidance if it were not to fail completely.
He could not stay in Spain. He could not live here. But his arms tightened about Alejandra and he breathed her in.
* * *
She came awake so abruptly she jolted and felt him there beside her, lying in the warmth of their blanket fast asleep.
In the early spread of dawn his hair looked lighter again. It was as if more of the darkness had been rubbed away, leaving large swathes of the pale that were caught now in the new morning.
She swallowed back the heaviness in her throat and stayed perfectly still. In sleep Lucien Howard looked vulnerable, younger, the lines of his face relaxed into smoothness. The heavier shadow of a day-old beard sat around his jaw, a play of red upon fair bristles.
She had never lain with a man like him. Juan had been dark and hairy and thick. This English captain was all honed muscle and lithe beauty, reminding her of the statues she had seen once years ago when her mother and father had taken her to Madrid, the marble burnished smooth by time and touch.
She had been astonished at the way he had made her feel last night—still felt, she amended, as the memory lifted her stomach to a tight ache and she moved against him. She wanted again to feel like that, tossed into passion and ecstasy and living in the blinding moment of joy.
He stirred and turned towards her, his hands coming around her in protection, and her fingers found the buttons of his trousers and slipped inside. His flesh was warm and smooth and for a moment she wondered if what she did was right, this plundering, without his consent. Still, as her hands fastened about him the flesh grew, filling the space with promise.
No small measly man, either. No quiet polite erection. Already her hips were moving and her legs opened at the same time as his eyes.
Pale and watchful, the very opposite of his vibrant quickened appendage. The surprise came next, creeping in with a heavy frown.
‘You are sure?’
In answer she simply drew him over her and tilted her hips and the largeness of Lucien filled her completely, stretched to the edge of flesh, pinning her there as he waited.
‘Love me, Alejandra,’ he said and drove in further.
‘I do,’ she replied, and it was only much later when he was gone from her that she understood exactly what such a truth meant.
He was not gentle or tentative or hesitant. He was pure raw man with the red roar of sex in his blood and a given compliance to take her. She had never felt more of a woman, more beautiful, more cherished, more connected, more completely full.
The way he made love was unlike anything. He used his hands and his mouth and his body wholeheartedly and joyously, as if in the very act he sacrificed his reserve in real life, nothing held back, nothing hidden.
And this time he came with her to the golden place far above, the place where their hearts were melded into one, cleaved by breath and flesh, joined in the sole pursuit of rapture and escape and fantasy. Delivered into euphoria. Like a dream.
The shaking started as quietly as it had done before, at first in the very pit of her stomach and then radiating out, clenching and tight, her breath simply stopping as it spread so that her back arched and she took what he offered with the spirit that it was given, with honesty and pleasure and something else that was more unnameable.
And then the tautness dissolved into lethargy and the tears came running down her cheeks in the comprehension of all that had just occurred and never might again.
She could not ask him to stay, there was no place safe here for him, and she knew she would not fit into the polite and structured world of an English earl.
This small now was all the time they would have together, close and real, yet transitory. She found his hand. She liked the way he linked their fingers.
‘I will come back for you. Wait for me.’ His words whispered into the light, the promise within both gratifying and impossible.
‘I will.’
She did not think that either of them truly believed it.
Chapter Eight (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
She was there and not there in the ether of pain and sickness, close beside him in memory and in loss.
‘Alejandra?’ Her name. Strangely sounded. There was something wrong with his voice and he was burning up.
‘It is me, Luce. It’s Daniel.’ The feel of a cloth pressed so cold it made him shake, first across his brow and then under his arms when they were lifted. Gentle. Patient. Kind. ‘You are back in England now. You are safe. The doctor says that if you rest...’ The words stopped and Lucien opened his eyes to see the familiar pale green orbs of his oldest friend, Daniel Wylde, slashed in worry.
‘I...am...dying?’ His question held no emotion within it. He did not care any more. It was too painful and he was too weak, the wounds on his neck making breath come shallow.
‘No. Have some of this. It will help.’
A bitter drink was placed between his lips and his head raised. One sip and then two. Lucien could not remember how he knew this taste, but he did, from somewhere else, some dangerous place, some other time.
‘You need to fight, Lucien. If you give up...’ The rest was left unsaid but already the dark was coming, threading inside the day, like crows in a swarm before the sun. Wretched and unexpected.
‘You have been in England for six weeks. I brought you up to Montcliffe three days ago. For the air and the springtime. The doctor said that it might help. He stopped the laudanum five days ago.’
‘My mother...?’
‘Is in Bath visiting her sister. Christine made her take a break from nursing you.’
Lucien began to remember bits and pieces of things now, his family gathered around and looking down on him as though the next breath he took would be his last one. He remembered a doctor, too, the Howard family physician, a good man and well regarded. He’d been bled more than once. A bandage still lay on his left wrist. He wished he might remove it because it was tight and sore and because for a moment he would like to look at himself as he had been, unbound and well.
Alejandra.
The name came through the fog with a stinging dreadful clarity.
The hacienda and the Spanish countryside tumbled back as did the journey across the Galician Mountains. He shut his eyes against more because he did not wish to relive all that came next.
‘I thought you’d been killed, Luce, when you did not arrive on the battlements by the sea to get on to the transports home. Someone said they had seen you fall on the high fields, before Hope’s regiment. I could not get back to look for you because of my leg—’
Daniel broke off and swallowed before continuing.
‘We’d always sworn we’d die together. When you didn’t come I thought...’
Lucien could only nod because it was too hard to lift his arm and take Daniel’s hand to reassure him and because the truth of battle was nothing as they had expected it to be. So very quick the final end, so brutal and incapacitating. No room in it for premade plans and strategy.
* * *
He came awake again later, three candles on the bedside table and a myriad of other bottles beside them.
Daniel was still there, his collar loosened and eyes tired.
‘The doctor has been by again. He will come back in the morning to change your bandages as he has taken a room in the village with his brother. He said that I was to keep you awake and talking for as long as I could tonight and he wants you up more. Better for the drainage, he said. I have the same instructions.’
‘You do?’
‘I took a bullet through the thigh as we left A Coruña. It seems it is too close to the artery to be safely excised, so I have to strengthen the muscle there instead if I am to have any chance of ever walking again without a limp.’
‘Hell.’
‘My thoughts exactly. But we are both at least half alive and that is better than many of the others left in the frozen wastes of the Cantabrians.’
‘Moore is there, too. A cannonball in Penasqueda. He died well.’
‘You heard of that. I wondered. Who saved you, Luce? Who dressed your wounds?’
‘The partisans under El Vengador.’ His resolve slipped on the words.
‘Then who is Alejandra? You have called for her many times.’
The slice of pain hit him full on, her name said aloud here in the English night, unexpected.
‘She is mine.’
* * *
They had come down in the morning across the white swathe of a winter sun, warmer than it had been and clearer. Alejandra walked in front, a lilt in her step.
‘You thought what...?’ she said, turning to him, the smile in her eyes lightened by humour. Girlish. Coquettish even.
‘I thought you would be regretful in the morning.’
‘Of making love?’
‘With a stranger. With me. So soon...’
The more he said the worse it sounded. He was a man who had always been careful with his words and yet here they fell from his mouth unpractised and gauche. Alejandra made him incautious. It was a great surprise that.
She waited until he had reached her and simply placed her arms about his neck.
‘Kiss me again and tell me we are strangers, Capitán.’
And he did, his lips on hers even before he had time to question the wisdom of such a capitulation here in the middle of the morning. She tasted like hope and home. And of something else entirely.
Tristesse.
The French word for sadness came from nowhere, bathed in its own truth, but it was too soon to pay good mind to it and too late to want it different.
‘Only now, Lucien,’ she whispered. ‘I know it is all that each of us can promise, but it is enough.’
He looked around, his meaning plain, and she took his hand and led him off the track and into a dense planting of aloes.
‘It will have to be quick. I am not sure how safe...’
He didn’t let her finish, his fingers at her belt and the trousers down. His own fall was loosened in the next seconds and he lifted her on to his erection, easily, filling her warmth and plunging deeper into the living soul of delight.
Nothing compared to this. Nothing had prepared him for it, either, the response of her flesh around him, keeping him within her, quivering and clenching.
He had always held a healthy appetite for the women he had coupled with, not too numerous, but not a puny number, either. Always before he stayed in charge and detached, as though at any moment he had the capacity to pull away and leave. Only momentary. Only casual. He never lingered to hear the inevitable tears or pleadings, preferring instead to depart on his terms, before closeness settled.
Until here and now in the shifting allegiances of war when it was both impossible to stay and dangerous to leave.
His hand cupped Alejandra’s chin and he slanted his mouth across the fine lines of her. He wanted to mark her as his, in a primal demarcation of possession. Just as he wished to plant his seed in a place where the quickness might take and grow and be.
The very thought made him come, hot into her, the pulse of desire, the sating of want. He pumped the heart of himself into her womb and held her still so that there might be a chance that part of him would live in her and she might remember. Him.
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