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She could feel him there, a foot away through the plaster and stone, knew that he stood where she had stood for all of the months at the end of Juan’s life; he a prisoner of her father’s, a man who had betrayed the cause.
She could not save Captain Lucien Howard should Papa decide that he was expendable, so she needed to take him out of here to the west. The evening light drew in on itself, watchful, the last bird calls and then the quiet. Juan had lost his speech and his left arm, but he had lingered for two of the months of winter and into the first weeks of spring. She had prayed each day that it would be the end and marked the wall when it was not.
Her marks were still there, the indents of time drawn into the plaster, one next to the other near the base of the wall, and left there when he passed away as a message and a warning.
Betray El Vengador and no one is safe, not even the one married to his only daughter. Juan had died with a rosary in his hands. Her father had, at least, allowed him that.
A year ago now, before the worst of the war. She wondered how many more men would be gone by the same time next year and, crossing her room, took out the maps of the northern mountains that Lucien Howard had upon him when he was captured. Precise and detailed. With such drawings the passage through the Cantabrians for a marauding army would be an easy thing to follow. She wondered why the French had not thought to search his saddlebags and take the treasure after leaving him for dead on the field.
Probably the rush of war had allowed the mistake. Not torture, but battle. Certainly the swords drawn against the Englishman had not been carefully administered, but made in the hurried flurry of panic.
She ought to deliver these maps into the hands of her father, but something stopped her. Papa did not need information to make his killings easier, no matter what she thought of the French. These were English maps, any military advantage gained belonged to them. On the road west she would give them back to the captain to take home and say nothing of them to her father. Perhaps they might be some recompense for Lucien Howard coming into Spain with an army that had been far too small and an apology, too, for his substantial injuries.
She felt tired out from her worrying, shattered by her father’s reactions to the Englishman. She had hardly slept in weeks for the dread of finding him with his throat cut or simply not there when she hovered outside his chamber just to see that he still breathed.
She did not want to be this person, this worrier. But no matter how the day started and how many hours she could stretch it out between making sure he was neither dead nor gone, she also couldn’t truly relax until the continued health and welfare of Captain Lucien Howard had been established.
A knock on the door had her standing very still and she glanced at herself in the mirror opposite. She looked as if she had been crying, her eyes red and swollen. The knock came again.
‘Who is it?’ Her tone was strong.
‘Your father, Alejandra. Can I come in?’
Concealing the maps in a drawer, she wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket and rubbed her cheeks. If the skin there was a little redder, her eyes would not show up quite so much. Then she flicked the lock.
Enrique Fernandez y Castro strode in and shut the door behind him. Slowly. She knew the exact second he recognised she had been upset.
‘If your mother were here...’ he began, but she shook that train of thought away and he remained silent.
Rosalie Santo Domingo y Giminez stood between them in memory and sometimes this was the only thing they still had in common, their love for a woman who had been good and brave and was gone. Both of them had dealt with her death in different ways, her father with his anger and his wars and her with a sense of distance that sometimes threatened to overcome her completely. But they seldom spoke of Rosalie now. To lessen the anguish, she surmised, and to try to survive life with the centre of their world missing.
‘The English earl is gaining his strength back.’ This was not phrased as a question. ‘I have heard he is a man of intellect and intuition. What do you make of him?’
‘A good man, I think, Papa. A man who might do your bidding in London well if you let him.’
‘He could be dangerous. To you on the way west. Others could take him.’
Alejandra knew enough of her father to feign indifference, for if she insisted on accompanying Lucien Howard she also knew that he would surely change his plans, so she stayed silent.
‘Tomeu says he can read minds.’
At that she laughed. ‘And you believe him?’
‘I believe there might be more to him than we can imagine, Alejandra, and we need to take care that he knows only so much about us.’
‘The house, you mean. The security of this place and the manpower?’
‘Take him out blindfolded. I do not wish for him to see the gates or the bridges. Or the huts down by the river.’
‘Very well.’
‘And leave him in Corcubion, no further. You should be able to find him a boat to England from there and it is a lot closer.’
‘Adan has family in Pontevedra.’
‘Almost a week away by the mountain paths. I want you back sooner.’
‘Very well.’ Her mind reeled with the implications of sending him from a town that did not have the protections of the others.
‘Here is a purse.’ The leather bag was tied with plaited rope and it was heavy. ‘He costs me much, this British spy. If you feel at any time he is not worth the danger, then kill him. I have instructed Adan and Manolo to do the same. Anything at all that might bring trouble. You will leave here three days from now.’
‘But he is not well enough, Papa.’
‘If he can’t walk out of here by then, he will never do anything else. Do you understand me, daughter? No more.’
‘Indeed.’ Her father wanted the English captive gone and if it could not be done with any sense of decorum, then he would simply get rid of the problem altogether. ‘But we will leave when it is dark for it will be safer that way.’ She needed to give Captain Howard time to acclimatise and the night-time would help. If they went late, it would mean only a few hours of walking.
‘Good. I shall not see him before he goes for I am off to Betanzos before dawn on the morrow and will be there for a week. Give him my promise that someone will be contacting him. Soon.’
‘I shall.’
He smiled at that, a quiet movement that made him look more like the handsome and kind father of old. It seemed so long since she had felt such kinship.
‘Go with God, Alejandra.’ He tipped his head and left the room, the sound of his steps on the tiles outside fading.
She had three days to prepare the English captain for the gruelling walk, though now they would not go into the mountains, it seemed, but along the coast. That might be easier for him, but harder for them with the lack of cover. Juan’s family, the Diego y Betancourts, inhabited this part of the land and they would need to take care to avoid notice.
Swearing softly, she thought of the difficult steps the captain had managed today. No more than a few hundred hard-fought yards till he needed to rest.
In three days he would not have that luxury. Extracting her rosary from her top pocket, she prayed to the Lord for strength, courage and perseverance. For both of them.
* * *
Lucien took in breath.
The new day was cloudless but cold and Alejandra stood beside him watching. Further afield he saw a group of others turn and stare.
‘Don’t come with me,’ he instructed as she took the first step when he did. ‘Wait here and I will be back.’
‘The orujo will warm you, señor.’ No ‘good luck’ or whispered encouragement. He was glad for it.
He was neither dizzy today nor light-headed and he had eaten a substantial breakfast for the first time in weeks. He was also aware of the heavy shadows beneath Alejandra’s eyes.
Taking the first step, he kept on going. The hedges of lavender were at each side of him now, he could smell the scent of the leaves, heady and pungent. Then the small space of chipped stones and the three rising steps.
He stopped before them and redrew in breath. He was sweating and the bravado that he had started with had waned a little, the stairway requiring a lot more in effort than the flatness of the path.
There was no handrail, nothing to hold on to as he raised one foot and transferred his weight. One. Two. Three. The deck welcomed him and shaded him, another flower he had no notion of sending a pungent odour into the air all around.
When he turned he saw her, standing still against the olives in the distance, her hands knotted before her as if she had been certain he might fall.
He smiled and she smiled back, the journey now easier in its return.
He could do it, the steps, the pathway, the lavender hedges and then back to the trees where he had left her. He did not even need to sit down when he reached the olives, but stood there, snatching the hat from his head and taking the ornate glass cup that she had filled from her hand.
‘Salud.’
‘Good health,’ Lucien gave back in English and their beakers touched, the cold of the tipple drawing trails across glass. He was elated with his progress and far less exhausted than he imagined he might have been. Tomorrow he would try for a longer distance and the next day more again.
‘We leave in two nights for the west.’
That soon? The liquor burnt down his throat and touched the nausea that roiled in his stomach, but he would not let her see that as he took another sip.
Despite his success this morning he could not even imagine climbing into the foothills of the Cantabrians or the Galicians and pretending energy and health for hours and hours on end.
‘If you lag behind, you will be shot. My father’s orders.’
Finishing his drink, he held out his glass for more. ‘Then I hope the firewater is all that you say it is.’
‘Papa has enemies here and the French have not withdrawn. But we know this place like the back of our hands, the secret trails, the hidden paths, and we will be armed.’
‘We?’
‘Adan, Manolo and I.’ She looked around as if to check no one else was close. ‘You have your knife, Capitán. Make certain it is within easy reach and keep it hidden. If anyone threatens you, use it.’
‘Anyone?’ His eyes scanned her dark ones.
‘Anyone at all,’ she returned and finished the last of her orujo.
‘Clothes will be brought to your room for the journey. And hair dye. The pale of your hair would give you away completely. Constanza will come and do it.’
‘A disguise, then?’
He saw how she hesitated, the stories of men captured without their uniform and hanged perfunctorily so much a part of folklore. With a cloak over blue and white he might be safer, but those travelling with him would not.
‘You speak Spanish like a native of this part. It will have to be enough.’
‘Do you expect trouble?’
She only laughed.
The pleasure of completing the walk had receded a little, but Lucien did not want her to see it. Even the orujo was warring against his stomach, a strong dram that scoured his digestive system after six weeks of bland gruel.
‘Can I ask you a question, Alejandra?’ She nodded. ‘What happened to your husband?’
The deep green of her eyes sharpened, bruising in memory. ‘He betrayed us, so he died.’
The shock of her answer left him reeling. ‘How?’
‘The betrayal or the death?’
‘Both.’
‘It was almost a year ago now and it was winter and cold. There was a fight and my husband lost. He died slowly, though.’
‘Three months’ worth of slowly? It is his room I am in.’
‘How could you possibly know that?’ She had stepped back now and her voice shook.
‘The marks on my wall. February had twenty-nine days in the last year only and March has thirty-one. I am presuming he died on April the fifteenth. I think you placed the marks there. To remember.’
‘I did.’ This time she held nothing back in the quiet fury. ‘I drew them into the plaster every night I stood in his room and wished him dead. It was for money he betrayed us. Did you figure that out, too? For the princely sum of pesos and guns, enough to start his own army and replace my father. And me.’
‘He confessed?’
‘No. A shot through the head was not conducive to any sort of explanation. Papa only let him live so that he might understand his reasoning and to see who else was implicated in the plot.’
‘Did El Vengador find others?’
‘He died without speaking again.’ Her answer came back with fierceness and Lucien could see in her eyes the truth of hurt. ‘Though it seems he could still write. I had not known that.’
A minute later she was gone.
The words in the Bible had been her late husband’s handiwork, then? Lucien wondered what he had done to Alejandra to make her hate him so very much.
Chapter Five (#ue0078acd-e382-54c6-bc04-14f077daa1e0)
Sometimes the weather in Spain, even in winter, could be windless and dry.
But on this night, early in the first week of March, the gales howled from the north in a single blowing force, enough pressure in it to make Lucien lean forward to find balance. The rains came behind, drenching, icy and cold.
His clothes at least were keeping the wet out and the warmth in. He was surprised how comfortable his new boots were and pleased the hat he had been given had a wide and angled brim. He had long since lost the feeling in his bare fingers, though.
They had been walking for a good two hours and he’d managed to keep up. Just. Alejandra hovered behind him, Adan and the other man, Manolo, cutting through the bushes ahead.
‘We will stop soon.’ Her words were muffled by the rain.
‘And make camp?’
‘More like sleep,’ she returned. ‘It is too dangerous to risk a fire, but the trees there will allow us at least shelter.’
He looked up. A moon was caught behind the heavy cloud, but he could see the dark shape of a line of pines about a quarter of a mile away.
He was glad for it, for although he carried very little in the bag on his back, his body ached with the prolonged exercise after such a sickness. He had not eaten much, either, his stomach still recovering from the effects of the orujo.
He knew Alejandra had slowed to match his pace and was thankful for it, the blunt warning she had given him still present.
Adan suddenly tipped his head. Alarmed, Lucien did the same and the sound of far-off voices came on the wind. A group of men, he determined, and ones who thought they were alone in these passes. A hand gesture had him dropping down and Alejandra crawled up beside him.
