Читать книгу The Return of Lord Conistone - Lucy Ashford - Страница 9

May 1810—Portugal

His four men huddled round a meagre fire and played cards for escudos. But Lucas Conistone stood apart, his hooded grey eyes scanning the peaks like a hawk’s as the fiery sun set over the mountains, the iron wind tugging at his tousled black hair and his travel-worn clothes.

Here, he’d been told. Here was the meeting place. If it was a trap, he was ready. His hand went to the pistol in his pocket and softly caressed the cold metal.

And then he turned round quickly, and his men also were on their feet, because someone was hurrying along the rocky path to this isolated mountain pass, a silhouette against the blood-red sun.

Lucas gestured to his men to sit again as he recognised the small, sinewy figure coming straight for him. ‘Como vai, Miguel?’ he said softly in fluent Portuguese. ‘I hear you have news’.

The man called Miguel grasped his hand, his dark head barely up to Lucas’s powerful shoulder, and said in the accent of the Portuguese mountain people, ‘News, yes, meu amigo. The body of the Englishman has been found at last’.

After nearly a year and a half of searching. ‘Where?’

‘He must have been swept downstream by the flood waters of the River Vouga. His body was trapped under rocks, and rotted in the water as the months went by—a suitable end, nao? And—this was found on him’. Miguel handed Lucas a small package; something saved, miraculously, from the water by the oilskin in which it was tightly wrapped.

Swiftly Lucas tore the package open.

A compact, leather-bound journal. And the first entry was dated—September 1808.

No. He wanted to shout his protest across the mountains. No. Where was the old one, the previous one?

He flicked through it—two, three pages only, of hurried notes. The rest was blank. A blow indeed.

Wild Jack, I have followed you to hell and back for this.

Curtly he held out silver coins to the man Miguel. ‘Where is the body now?’

‘We buried what was left of it, Inglês. For the spies of Napoleon Bonaparte are on the trail’. He looked up at Lucas slyly. ‘And they offer our people rewards also’.

Lucas clenched his teeth. ‘And what exactly have your people told them, Miguel?’

The man gave a crooked smile. ‘Why, we babbled of treasure. The old, old legend of gold buried somewhere in the steep hills high above Coimbra. Isn’t that, after all, what the English traveller you call Wild Jack died for?’

Let the French believe that, thought Lucas swiftly. Let the Portuguese, like Miguel, believe it. He was scanning the diary’s sparse contents: ramblings of a sea voyage from England, of a swift ascent into the mountains. The writings of a man knowing he was being pursued, and that the end was near.…

Already he was turning to his waiting men. ‘Get your things together. We’re heading homewards’. They moved instantly to roll up their thin blankets and tie them to their packs.

But the man Miguel pointed suddenly at the blood that stained Lucas’s shirt, all too visible where his long coat had fallen open. ‘You have been wounded, Inglês. Stay with us in the mountains for one night at least! We have food we can share’. Miguel’s black eyes gleamed mischievously. ‘And our girls—pretty girls, eh?—will be only too happy to make a man as handsome as you forget the perils of war!’

‘Obrigado, meu amigo, but it’s nothing’. Grimly Lucas pulled at his coat to hide the bloodstain.

‘An ambush?’

‘Of sorts. We had a run in with some French outriders on our way up here’.

‘Did they live to tell the tale?’

Lucas was already turning to go, but he swung round one last time. ‘What do you think?’

Miguel grinned. ‘They did not. You’ll be back soon with the key to the treasure, Inglês?’

‘I hope so,’ Lucas breathed. ‘For if others get it first, we are lost indeed’.

So Lucas Conistone and his companions set off down the barren slope, each of them as lithe and hard-muscled as any of the Portuguese who herded goats on the sparse spring grass of these high mountains. Lucas’s men were intent on their route, sometimes cursing softly under their breath at the difficulty of the terrain.

But their leader was thinking of another time. Another place.

Of the Hampshire countryside in early autumn. Of the English sun, warming a flower-scented garden whose acres of lawns swept down to the cliff’s edge, where the azure sea gleamed far below. Of a time when he’d thought he’d found love, and a purpose to his life.

But then the vision was gone, the dream over. And he was back in this foreign land, clambering down a treacherous path in the knife-sharp night air, with an almost impossible task facing him.

He was remembering, too, the last words spoken by a man about to die. Look after her for me, will you, Lucas? Tell her I did it for Wycherley. For all of them.… For God’s sake, look after Verena.