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‘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.
