Читать книгу Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages: Marriage Made in Rebellion / Marriage Made in Hope - Sophia James - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe 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.
