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‘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.’
