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‘They are about a quarter of a mile away, but heading north. Nine or ten of them, I think, with horses.’
She pulled the brown coat she wore across her head and dug into the cavity of dirt on the edge of their track.
Further ahead there was no sign at all of the others. He guessed they, too, had blended in with the undergrowth, staying put as the foreign party passed.
His eyes went to the leaves above them. Downwind. If there were dogs, they would stay safe.
Alejandra held her pistol out and her knife lay in her lap. He removed his own blade and fitted it into his fist, wishing he had been given a gun as well and rueing the loss of the fine weapons he had marched up to A Coruña with.
The rain had lightened now, beads of it across Alejandra’s cheeks and in the long dark strands of hair that had escaped from the fastening beneath her hat.
He wondered if she had killed before. The faces of the many men he had consigned to the afterlife rose up in memory, numerous ghostly spectres wrapped about the heart of battle. He had long since ceased to mourn them.
The enforced rest had allowed his heartbeat to slow and the breath in him to return. Even the tiredness was held temporarily at bay by this new alertness. They were not French, he was sure of that; too few and too knowledgeable of the pathway through the foothills. A band of men of the same ilk as El Vengador, then? Guerrillas roaming the countryside. He could hear a few words of Spanish in the wind.
‘It’s the Belasio family,’ Alejandra explained as he looked up. ‘On their way back to their lands.’
‘You saw them?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘I smelt them.’ When her nose sniffed the air he smiled, for the rain and wind had left only wetness across the scent of winter and earth and she was teasing. Still, the small humour in the middle of danger was comforting.
‘They are armed partisans, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then surely we would hardly be enemies?’
‘There are no hard and fast rules to this kind of warfare. We have guns they want and your presence here would have been noted.’
‘Me?’
‘There is money in the exchange of prisoners. Good money, too, and it is difficult to hide the blue of your eyes. You do not look Spanish even though you speak the language well.’
He swore. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Corcubion. It is a small harbour two days away.’
‘I thought I had heard Muros?’
She shook her head and stood. ‘My father and Adan are insistent on the closer port given your condition. Come, the Belasios are gone now and the trees are not far.’
* * *
Thirty minutes later they stopped beneath the pines. It was full dark and the rain had gone, though the intermittent drips from drenched boughs above were heavy.
‘We will leave again at first light.’ Adan, the older of the two men, stated this as he bedded down in the lee of a medium-sized bush and the other man joined him. A good twenty yards away Alejandra stayed at Lucien’s side.
He knew there was bread in his bag and he pulled out the crust of it and began to eat. Any sustenance would see him through the next day and he needed all the energy he could muster. He wished he still had his silver flask filled with good English brandy, but it had gone with the rest of his things. The French, probably, when they had first caught him.
He did have a skin of Spanish red wine and he drank this thankfully. Alejandra simply sat there, neither eating nor drinking. She looked tired through the gloom and he handed her the skin.
Surprisingly she took it, wiping the mouth of the vessel with her sleeve when she had finished before giving it back.
‘Do you want bread, too?’
She shook her head and arranged her bag as a pillow, fastening the cloak she wore about her and curling into sleep.
Overhead a bird called once. He had heard very few on the march up with the British in the lower valleys of the Cantabrians. But outside Lugo he had shot a substantial owl and sucked the warm blood from its body, because there was neither wood nor safety to cook it and he had not eaten for three days. Then he had plucked the breast and stuffed the feathers in his ruined boots to try to ward off frostbite.
He breathed out. Hard. It was relatively warm here under the trees and he had food, drink and a soft bed. The pine needles formed a sort of mattress as he lay down on his back and looked up. His knife he placed within easy reach, just outside the folds of his jacket.
‘You are a careful man.’ Alejandra’s words were whispered.
‘I have learnt that it pays to expect trouble.’
‘It is my opinion that we will be safe tonight. The noise of the eagle owl, the birds you heard cry out before, is why we stop here. They roost in the trees above and are like sentries. If anything moves within a thousand yards of us, they will all be silent.’
‘A comforting warning,’ he returned softly, and her white teeth flashed in the darkness.
* * *
‘Spain is like a lover, Señor Howard, known and giving to those who are born here. The bird sounds, the berries, the many streams and the pine needles beneath us. It is the strangers that come who change the balance of the place, the ones with greed in their eyes and the want of power.’
She saw the way he stretched out, his knife close and a sense of alertness that even sickness and a long walk had not dimmed.
She knew it had been hard for him, this climb. She had seen it in the gritted lines of his face and in the heavy beat of his pulse. His silence had told her of it, as well. It was as if every single bit of his will was used in putting one foot in front of the other and trudging on. The wine might dim the pain a little. She hoped it would.
He had removed his hat just before the light had fallen and the newly dyed darkness of his hair changed the colour of his eyes to a brighter blue. If anyone at all looked at him closely, they would know him as a stranger, a foreigner, a man to be watched.
‘It is mostly downhill tomorrow.’ The words came even as she meant not to say them, but there was some poignancy in one who had been so very sick and whose strength was held only by the threads of pure and utter will. He would not complain and she was thankful for it.
On her part all she wanted to do was sleep. His presence at the hacienda had left her fretting for his safety, mindful of her father’s propensity to do away with problems and so for many nights she had barely slumbered.
Here at least Manolo and Adan were a good way off and Lucien Howard’s knife was sharp. There was some ease in being next to him as well and she had made sure to place her blanket roll between the captain and the others. It was as much as she could do.
The birds above called and insects buzzed about them, zinging in the night. The music of a quiet forest unthreatened by advancing armies or groups of the enemy.
She felt the warmth of Lucien Howard’s shoulder as she turned away and slept.
* * *
Lucien woke as the first chorus of general birdsong sounded. Alejandra was still asleep, her arm across his as if the warmth had brought it there in a mind all of its own. One finger was badly scarred and another had lost a nail altogether. The hand of a girl who had seen hardship and pain. The lines he had noticed before on her right wrist showed up as multiple white slashes in the dullness.
He remembered all the other hands of the women of the ton with their painted nails and smoothness and he wanted to reach out and take her fingers in his own with a desperateness that surprised him. In sleep she looked younger, the tip tilt of her nose strangely innocent and freckles on the velvet of her cheeks.
A wood nymph and a warrior. When a spider crawled up the run of her arm he carefully brushed it away. Still, she came awake on the tiniest of touches, from slumber to complete wakefulness in less than a blink.
‘Good morning.’
She did not answer him as she sat, her hair falling in a long tousled curtain to her waist, the darkness in it threaded with deeper reds and black.
He saw her glance at the sky. Determining time, he supposed, and marking the hour of dawn. The steel in her knife’s hilt had left deepened ridges on the skin of her forearm, so close had she held it as she slept. When her glance took in the empty clearing she looked around.
‘Where are the others?’
‘They went to the stream we can hear running, about ten minutes ago. I should imagine they will be back soon.’
Standing she packed her things away and kicked at the pine needles with her feet.
‘It is better no one knows we were here. A good tracker could tell, of course, but someone merely passing by...’ She left the rest unsaid, but the green in her eyes was wary as she turned to him. ‘Spain is not a soft country, Capitán Howard. It is a land with its heart ripped out.’
‘Yet you stay here. You do not leave.’
‘It’s home,’ she said simply and handed him a hard cooked biscuit, the top of which was brushed in a sugar syrup. ‘For walking,’ she explained when he looked at it without much appetite. ‘If you do not eat, you will be slower.’
He felt better now that it was morning, the old sense of energy and purpose returning; perhaps it was the change of scenery or the hope of getting back to England soon that did it. His companion’s smile was also a part of the equation. Without the scowl or the anger Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo was beautiful. Breathtakingly so, he supposed, if she were to be seen in a gown that fitted and a face that was not always filthy.
Where the hell was this train of thought going? He pulled his mind back to their more immediate problems.
‘Do you have any idea on the movements of the French?’
‘Marshal Soult has taken Oporto and Marshal Victor and Joseph Bonaparte hold the centre and Madrid. They seldom travel in small groups in this part of the country anyway.’
‘Because they are afraid of being picked off by the guerrillas?’
‘Would you not be, too, Capitán?’
Their travelling companions were back now and Alejandra gestured to them to give her a moment as she disappeared into the bushes in the direction of the stream. Left alone with the two men, Lucien was suddenly tense. Something was wrong; he felt it in his bones and he was too much of a soldier not to take notice. He had his knife out instantly as he turned to find the threat.
‘Someone’s close,’ he said, ‘to the east.’ Manolo and Adan also drew their weapons and moved up beside him.
They came out of nowhere, a group of men dressed in a similar fashion as they were, the first discharging gun slamming straight into the gut of Adan. He fell like a stone, dead as he hit the ground, eyes wide to the heavens above in surprise. Lucien had his knife at the assailant’s throat before the man could powder up again, slicing the artery in a quick and simple task of death. Then he did the same to the next one. Alejandra was in the clearing now, her knife out and her breathing loud. He stepped in front of her, keeping her out of the line of fire. Two more men, he counted. Manolo disposed of one and then fell against flashing steel. As Lucien advanced the last man simply turned tail and ran. Stooping to pick up a stone, he threw it as hard as he could and was pleased to hear a yelp further away. He’d have liked to have sent his blade, too, but he did not want to lose it.
The quiet returned as quickly as it had left, the shock in Alejandra’s voice vibrating as she kneeled first beside Adan and then Manolo.
‘Dios mio. Dios mio. Dios mio.’
Manolo clutched her hand and tried to say something, but the words were shallow and indistinct. In return she simply held his fingers stained in blood and dirt and waited until the final breath was wrenched from him. Folding his arms across his stomach and closing his eyes, she swore roundly and stood to see to Adan. With him she arranged the cloth of his jacket across the oozing wound at his stomach before covering his eyes with her handkerchief. The small piece of fabric was embroidered with purple and blue flowers, Lucien saw, a delicate example of fine stitchery from her past.
‘It was the Betancourts. I recognised them from before, but we will revenge them. It is what my father is good at.’
With a deft movement she collected the discarded weapons and water bottles and covered the bodies of her fellow partisans with pine needles, reciting some sort of prayer over them with her rosary. Then she indicated a direction. He could see tears on her cheeks, though she brushed them away with the coarse fabric of her jacket as she noticed his observation.
‘We have no time to bury them properly. Those who did this will be back as soon as the others are informed and they will be baying for revenge. Adan and Manolo would not wish to die for nothing, so now we will have to use the mountain tracks to go west and see you safe.’
She struck out inland, away from the sea, the breeze behind them. As they traversed along a river, making sure to place their feet only in the rocky centre of it for a good quarter of a mile, they saw the first scree slopes of the mountains.
She listened, too, every three or four minutes stopping and turning her head into the wind so that sounds might pass down to her, in warning.
Lucien knew inside that no one followed them. Always when he had tracked for Moore across the front of a moving army he had held the knowledge of others. Here, the desolate cold and open quiet contained only safety.
The Betancourts might try to follow them, but he and Alejandra had been careful to leave no trace of themselves as they had walked and the rains had begun again, the water washing away footfalls.
* * *
‘You have done this before?’ he finally asked when Alejandra indicated a stop.
‘As many times as you have, Capitán. Who taught you to fight with a knife like that?’
‘A rum maker in Kingston Town. I was a young green officer with all the arrogance associated with it. A man by the name of Sheldon Williams took the shine off such cockiness by challenging me to a fight.’
When he saw she was interested he continued.
‘It was hot, too, mid-July and no breeze, the greasy smell of the sea in the air and a good number of ships in. He could have killed me twenty times or more, but he didn’t. Instead he showed me how to live.’
‘You fight like my father.’
‘Is that a compliment?’
She shook away his question with a frown.
* * *
She couldn’t take him home now, not with Manolo and Adan dead and a father who would place the blame on the Englishman’s presence for it and kill him. The horror of their deaths hit her anew as a great wave of grief broke inside.
No. She would have to take him on over the Galician Mountains and down into Pontevedra in the hope that Adan’s family might help them. A longer walk and one she had done only a few times before and always under guidance. Her whole body ached with the grief of more death, so senseless and quick.
She was on edge, too. The way Lucien Howard had slit the throats of those who had attacked them was so gracefully brutal and deceptively practised that she was wary. A man like this would make a dangerous enemy and alone with him she would need to be careful.
Still, she could not just leave him. Another thought occurred. He wore the sickness of exhaustion on his face and she noticed blood seeping again through the fabric of his jacket. From the wound on his neck, she supposed, the one that had not yet healed.
An Englishman alone in Spain would have no chance of escaping through any of the harbours on the east side of A Coruña. People here would be naturally suspicious, the scourge of the French having left a residual hatred for anyone new and different.
He spoke the language well, she would give him that, but his eyes were the light blue of a foreigner and the dye in his hair was already weakening. When she noticed the pale gold in the roots of his parting that small false truth of him firmed up resolve.
Rifling in her bag, she drew out the maps she had found concealed under the last blanket of his dead horse.
‘These are yours.’
He wiped his hands against his jacket before he reached out and took the offered documents, spreading the pages wide to ascertain they were all there.
‘I thought them lost.’ Puzzlement lay on his brow.
‘They were trapped beneath your horse and I saw them as we lifted it off you. Did you draw them?’
‘Partly. I had a group of guides and the information was collated over several months of travel. Maps like this have enormous value.’
‘To those who would pillage Spain? The secrets of the mountains exposed to those who would want to rape it more quickly.’
