Marriage Made in Rebellion Read online

  ‘Love me, Alejandra,’ he said and drove in further.

  ‘I do,’ she replied, and it was only much later when he was gone from her that she understood exactly what such a truth meant.

  He was not gentle or tentative or hesitant. He was pure raw man with the red roar of sex in his blood and a given compliance to take her. She had never felt more of a woman, more beautiful, more cherished, more connected, more completely full.

  The way he made love was unlike anything. He used his hands and his mouth and his body wholeheartedly and joyously, as if in the very act he sacrificed his reserve in real life, nothing held back, nothing hidden.

  And this time he came with her to the golden place far above, the place where their hearts were melded into one, cleaved by breath and flesh, joined in the sole pursuit of rapture and escape and fantasy. Delivered into euphoria. Like a dream.

  The shaking started as quietly as it had done before, at first in the very pit of her stomach and then radiating out, clenching and tight, her breath simply stopping as it spread so that her back arched and she took what he offered with the spirit that it was given, with honesty and pleasure and something else that was more unnameable.

  And then the tautness dissolved into lethargy and the tears came running down her cheeks in the comprehension of all that had just occurred and never might again.

  She could not ask him to stay, there was no place safe here for him, and she knew she would not fit into the polite and structured world of an English earl.

  This small now was all the time they would have together, close and real, yet transitory. She found his hand. She liked the way he linked their fingers.

  ‘I will come back for you. Wait for me.’ His words whispered into the light, the promise within both gratifying and impossible.

  ‘I will.’

  She did not think that either of them truly believed it.

  Chapter Eight

  She was there and not there in the ether of pain and sickness, close beside him in memory and in loss.

  ‘Alejandra?’ Her name. Strangely sounded. There was something wrong with his voice and he was burning up.

  ‘It is me, Luce. It’s Daniel.’ The feel of a cloth pressed so cold it made him shake, first across his brow and then under his arms when they were lifted. Gentle. Patient. Kind. ‘You are back in England now. You are safe. The doctor says that if you rest...’ The words stopped and Lucien opened his eyes to see the familiar pale green orbs of his oldest friend, Daniel Wylde, slashed in worry.

  ‘I...am...dying?’ His question held no emotion within it. He did not care any more. It was too painful and he was too weak, the wounds on his neck making breath come shallow.

  ‘No. Have some of this. It will help.’

  A bitter drink was placed between his lips and his head raised. One sip and then two. Lucien could not remember how he knew this taste, but he did, from somewhere else, some dangerous place, some other time.

  ‘You need to fight, Lucien. If you give up...’ The rest was left unsaid but already the dark was coming, threading inside the day, like crows in a swarm before the sun. Wretched and unexpected.

  ‘You have been in England for six weeks. I brought you up to Montcliffe three days ago. For the air and the springtime. The doctor said that it might help. He stopped the laudanum five days ago.’

  ‘My mother...?’

  ‘Is in Bath visiting her sister. Christine made her take a break from nursing you.’

  Lucien began to remember bits and pieces of things now, his family gathered around and looking down on him as though the next breath he took would be his last one. He remembered a doctor, too, the Howard family physician, a good man and well regarded. He’d been bled more than once. A bandage still lay on his left wrist. He wished he might remove it because it was tight and sore and because for a moment he would like to look at himself as he had been, unbound and well.

  Alejandra.

  The name came through the fog with a stinging dreadful clarity.

  The hacienda and the Spanish countryside tumbled back as did the journey across the Galician Mountains. He shut his eyes against more because he did not wish to relive all that came next.

  ‘I thought you’d been killed, Luce, when you did not arrive on the battlements by the sea to get on to the transports home. Someone said they had seen you fall on the high fields, before Hope’s regiment. I could not get back to look for you because of my leg—’

  Daniel broke off and swallowed before continuing.

  ‘We’d always sworn we’d die together. When you didn’t come I thought...’

  Lucien could only nod because it was too hard to lift his arm and take Daniel’s hand to reassure him and because the truth of battle was nothing as they had expected it to be. So very quick the final end, so brutal and incapacitating. No room in it for premade plans and strategy.

  * * *

  He came awake again later, three candles on the bedside table and a myriad of other bottles beside them.

  Daniel was still there, his collar loosened and eyes tired.

  ‘The doctor has been by again. He will come back in the morning to change your bandages as he has taken a room in the village with his brother. He said that I was to keep you awake and talking for as long as I could tonight and he wants you up more. Better for the drainage, he said. I have the same instructions.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I took a bullet through the thigh as we left A Coruña. It seems it is too close to the artery to be safely excised, so I have to strengthen the muscle there instead if I am to have any chance of ever walking again without a limp.’

  ‘Hell.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly. But we are both at least half alive and that is better than many of the others left in the frozen wastes of the Cantabrians.’

  ‘Moore is there, too. A cannonball in Penasqueda. He died well.’

  ‘You heard of that. I wondered. Who saved you, Luce? Who dressed your wounds?’

  ‘The partisans under El Vengador.’ His resolve slipped on the words.

  ‘Then who is Alejandra? You have called for her many times.’

  The slice of pain hit him full on, her name said aloud here in the English night, unexpected.

  ‘She is mine.’

  * * *

  They had come down in the morning across the white swathe of a winter sun, warmer than it had been and clearer. Alejandra walked in front, a lilt in her step.

  ‘You thought what...?’ she said, turning to him, the smile in her eyes lightened by humour. Girlish. Coquettish even.

  ‘I thought you would be regretful in the morning.’

  ‘Of making love?’

  ‘With a stranger. With me. So soon...’

  The more he said the worse it sounded. He was a man who had always been careful with his words and yet here they fell from his mouth unpractised and gauche. Alejandra made him incautious. It was a great surprise that.

  She waited until he had reached her and simply placed her arms about his neck.

  ‘Kiss me again and tell me we are strangers, Capitán.’

  And he did, his lips on hers even before he had time to question the wisdom of such a capitulation here in the middle of the morning. She tasted like hope and home. And of something else entirely.

  Tristesse.

  The French word for sadness came from nowhere, bathed in its own truth, but it was too soon to pay good mind to it and too late to want it different.

  ‘Only now, Lucien,’ she whispered. ‘I know it is all that each of us can promise, but it is enough.’

  He looked around, his meaning plain, and she took his hand and led him off the track and into a dense planting of aloes.

  ‘It will have to be quick. I am not sure how safe...’

  He didn’t let her finish, his fingers at her belt and the trousers down. His own fall was loosened in the next seconds and he lifted her on to his erection, easily, filling her warmth and plunging deeper into the living soul of
delight.

  Nothing compared to this. Nothing had prepared him for it, either, the response of her flesh around him, keeping him within her, quivering and clenching.

  He had always held a healthy appetite for the women he had coupled with, not too numerous, but not a puny number, either. Always before he stayed in charge and detached, as though at any moment he had the capacity to pull away and leave. Only momentary. Only casual. He never lingered to hear the inevitable tears or pleadings, preferring instead to depart on his terms, before closeness settled.

  Until here and now in the shifting allegiances of war when it was both impossible to stay and dangerous to leave.

  His hand cupped Alejandra’s chin and he slanted his mouth across the fine lines of her. He wanted to mark her as his, in a primal demarcation of possession. Just as he wished to plant his seed in a place where the quickness might take and grow and be.

  The very thought made him come, hot into her, the pulse of desire, the sating of want. He pumped the heart of himself into her womb and held her still so that there might be a chance that part of him would live in her and she might remember. Him.

  Dangerous. Stupid. Impossible.

  But the rational side of him was gone and in its place stood such a shaking want he could follow no other master.

  She had closed her eyes now, as her own orgasm strengthened, panting and tensing as it took her, the flat planes of her stomach as jerky as her breath. He liked listening to her edge of surprise, the red whorls on her throat only emphasising all she had allowed him as the waves of release billowed.

  She tried to say something afterwards, but he stopped her because he knew what the words might be and he was not ready to hear them, feel them, know them. Not here in the centre of chaos and pain and delight.

  She needed to be away safe and his presence could only harm her if they were found together. Already those on the waterfront might have talked; a stranger with the daughter of El Vengador coming down from the high hills and unaccompanied. Small ports like this did not allow the shelter of anonymity or the chance to disappear unnoticed into a crowd and stay hidden.

  As though she could sense him thinking she pulled away, quick fingers retying her buttoned fall. She did not look at him, either, a faint redness tingeing both her cheeks. He could smell the scent of loving between them, pungent and raw.

  ‘We should go, Capitán. The tide will not wait...’

  ‘And you? How will you get home from here?’ He could not help but ask, though he held no mandate to shape her future.

  ‘The way I always do. Easily.’

  He wanted to believe that. He did. He wanted to think that after he had boarded the boat to England she would simply walk down the path towards home, unmolested, unchallenged.

  And if not...

  He shook that thought away and took her arm. ‘If you are ever in trouble, send a letter and this to the Howard town house in Grosvenor Square. Do you understand? Address it to the Earl of Ross and mark it as important.’ His warm signet ring sat in the centre of her hand, pulled from his finger as the only possession he could bestow on her that was truly recognisable.

  She nodded, her eyes had faded into a flat dull green, though her fist curled around the crest engraved in gold.

  * * *

  Alejandra knew as a certainty that an important English earl would have no place beside the daughter of one of the most infamous guerrilla leaders in the northern parts of Spain. A woman who had been married once badly and who had killed and fought and maimed. For freedom, she told herself, but each time took more of her soul and now there was so little left of it Alejandra was afraid. He had not asked about the marks on her wrist, either, the scars of hopelessness and betrayal. The way out.

  She would not contact him, she knew that as certainly as she did her own name, but she would keep the ring. These were the last moments that they would be together and she was glad for the wet of him there inside her body, to hold on to and to remember.

  The blood was seeping through his clothes again, a dark stain against the navy of his borrowed jacket. She knew how much it would be hurting him.

  ‘Only now,’ she whispered at his back. Only this time, she chanted inside herself as the path wound its way down towards the port and to the bright emerald of the sea. He needed medical help and he needed it fast for the heat in him last night had not been all from ardour. A few days to the coast of England in fair weather. ‘God, please let it be enough. Please deliver him from his troubles.’

  Luis Alvarez was ready to leave, his cargo secured and his sails unfurled. Another man she had not met reefed the ropes at the back of the boat and moved a pile of canvas.

  ‘Is there luggage?’

  ‘No.’ Lucien Howard had finally found his voice again. ‘My sister married an Englishman and is sick. I need to be there quickly.’ She was glad he spoke the Spanish with such precision, for Alvarez seemed to accept his story without pause.

  ‘Come aboard, then.’

  She turned towards him and folded her hands across her chest. She was glad this was such a public space, glad that he would not touch her, glad that it was only a matter of minutes before he was gone. Because she could not have borne a dragged-out goodbye. Not after the night and morning that had just been.

  ‘Safe journey, then, Lucien.’

  ‘And to you, too, Alejandra.’

  She stepped back and so did he, one foot and then another until the gap between them was such that even had she wanted to she could not reach out and touch him.

  Then he was on the boat, gold and black hair blowing in the breeze as he removed his hat.

  The noise of ropes stretching and shouts, the slap of water when the vessel turned into the current, shadows and light as the sails slid into shape, filling with wind and then movement.

  One yard and then ten.

  She did not raise her arms or shout goodbye, but stood there, silent, caught between hope and despair.

  ‘Only now,’ she whispered to herself as the shape of him grew blurred by distance and was gone.

  * * *

  His sister, Christine, was there the next time he awoke, her hand across his on the spotless counterpane of his sickbed. She had been crying, he could see it in the swollen redness around her eyes.

  ‘I might live, yet.’ It was all he could think of to reassure her and she looked up, a frown across her brow.

  ‘You think that is why I sit here and weep, because you are bound for heaven any moment?’ There was sadness in her voice. ‘You will recover, Lucien, though the doctor said it might take a while.’

  ‘Then why are you crying?’

  ‘Joseph died before his regiment reached Betanzos. The cold, I think, and a lack of clothing. I got the letter the day after you arrived home and I have heard the stories.’ She lifted her hand and showed him a heavy diamond in white gold. ‘He had asked me to marry him when he returned and I was waiting...’

  ‘God, Joe Burnley is dead? I am sorry for it.’

  His sister detested profanities and she pursed her lips in that particular way she had done so all of her life when one of her brothers annoyed her.

  ‘What? You never swear in your bed at night when no one is listening, Christine? Never rant against the unfairness of it all?’

  As she shook her head he laughed and was surprised at how hoarse such humour sounded. ‘Then I think you should start. That truth at least is universal.’

  ‘You are so much more cynical than you were, Luce.’

  ‘A failed military campaign does that to one, I should imagine. All the mistakes and the damned waste of it...’ He drew in breath. Once he started on the debris of war he might never stop and his sister should not need to learn that her betrothed had died because of an error. Let her imagine bravery and courage and valour instead. Let her think the British expeditionary force under Moore had had a firm plan and a fine higher purpose.

  Closing his eyes, he was glad when he heard her stand and leave the room.
Grief was a lonely companion after all, hers and his, unexplainable and constant. He imagined Alejandra here looking down upon him, willing him better, challenging him to fight. But his strength had left him ever since he had stepped on to that boat in the harbour of Pontevedra and all he could feel now was an ache of aloneness.

  Dislocated and adrift.

  The skin on his wrist where the doctor had bled him pulled against the stitching of a blanket and began to bleed again through the bandage as he raised it. One drip and then two against the snowy white of the sheets. He was suddenly reminded of the scars on Alejandra’s right wrist, precise white lines that looked deliberate and lethal.

  Where was she now? Was she safe? Was she home with her father or out on the hills above A Coruña again scouting? He’d get someone from the intelligence sector to find out the situation there. He’d ask Daniel to organise it come the morning. Then he would return and look for her. That thought allowed him to close his eyes and sleep.

  * * *

  Four weeks later Lucien was back in London and up walking short distances. Oh, granted, he did not have his full energy back or the same sense of well-being he was more used to but he was out of bed and dressed and for that he was grateful.

  When Daniel turned up at the Howard town house early after breakfast, though, Lucien knew something was not right. Excusing himself from the table, he bade his friend follow him to the library, away from the ears of others in his family because already he had a fair knowledge of what this visit might be about. ‘You have had word from Spain?’

  Daniel handed him a sealed missive, but his face looked drawn.

  ‘Is it bad news?’ The flat question was asked in the face of disbelief.

  As his friend failed to answer Lucien ripped apart the missive, unfurling the page so that the tall spidery writing could be better viewed.

  I am sorry to inform you that the Hacienda of Señor Enrique Fernandez y Castro was razed to the ground on the second week of March 1809 and all the occupants within it appear to have died.

  These occupants are listed as:...

  Both the names of Alejandra and her father were amongst those missing.