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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.
