Marriage Made in Rebellion Page 11

  Lucien looked up. ‘You knew?’

  ‘They told me to make sure you were sitting when I gave you this.’

  ‘Gone.’ He read the names again and then again, as if on another try the words might have changed, releasing Alejandra from the spectre of fire.

  Crossing the room, Daniel extracted two glasses from the mahogany cabinet, pouring a generous brandy in each. Handing one over, he sat on the leather chair opposite.

  ‘Tell me about her, Luce. Sometimes talking helps.’

  Could anything truly help? Lucien wondered as the grief of his loss broke through. ‘She was brave and beautiful and fought for my health harder than even I did at the time. She found me the morning after the retreat, under the dead carcass of my horse, and brought me home.’

  ‘Courageous indeed, then.’ Lucien liked the way Daniel said that, his tone full of thought and truth.

  ‘She brought me down to the port of Pontevedra and got me on a boat. Then she returned to the hacienda.’ He took a long sip of the brandy. ‘To die in a fire. I should have insisted that she came with me, to England, where she might have been safe, but she had made it clear Spain was her home and I was...’ He stopped.

  What? he wondered. What exactly had he been to Alejandra?

  ‘Did you love her?’ Brandy words. Careless and exposed and demanding answer.

  ‘No.’ Lucien felt his insides curl into grief because he could not say it, could not let the truth become his reality. His fist brought the paper into a tight ball and he was shaking. Fiercely. He wondered for a moment whether this was what it felt like to die of shock. He’d seen others take the same path and it had always been quick.

  But then Daniel was there, taking the glass from his hand and lifting him in arms warm and solid on to the sofa to one end of the library, a blanket shoved across the cold.

  ‘Should I get a doctor, Luce?’

  ‘Don’t.’ He had found his voice again and his wits. Uncurling his fist, he let the paper drop on to the floor, where it sat quiet and tiny, the penmanship unseen. ‘Can you burn it?’ He didn’t want to read it again and find her name there on the third row down.

  Her middle name had been Florencia. He had not known that. There were a thousand things he had not known of her and now never would.

  When Daniel did as he asked Lucien watched as the paper caught alight in the grate, a small flare of yellow and orange and then gone.

  ‘Was it Alejandra who had your hair dyed black?’

  ‘Yes. She thought it was safer that way. Less obvious. Another protection.’

  ‘I should have liked to have met her. Your woman.’

  ‘Mine.’ Now he could not stop the tears that fell unheeded down his cheeks and into loneliness so deep and painful he thought he might never survive it.

  Chapter Nine

  London—1813

  The widow Margarita van Hessenberg was beautiful, clever and wealthy and she was a good friend of Daniel’s wife, Amethyst, a woman Lucien both liked and admired.

  Lucien had seen her from a distance many times, but of late she had sought him out, to ask an opinion of a book or a play or a painting. A cultured woman with an enquiring mind and a curious nature.

  Today in his arms in the Harveys’ ballroom Margarita was speaking of the Turner painting that had surfaced at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition at Somerset House last year.

  ‘It was widely praised as magnificent and sublime by any critics who mattered. But for myself the axis of perspective seemed to break with the traditional rules of composition and I could not quite enjoy it.’

  Lucien knew that Margarita was an artist and was said to be most practised, but still the painting of the ancient Punic Wars had released something unexpected in him when he had gone to see it.

  The image of Hannibal and his army crossing the Maritime Alps with the Salassian tribesmen thwarting them had had a familiar sense to it. The forces of nature he determined, and the smallness of man, caught in war and snowstorms. For a moment he had been transported to his own hell, marching the icy passes between Villafranca and Lugo, the road one long line of bloody footmarks and corpses.

  Turner had rendered exactly the despair of soldiers and the loss of compassion. He had placed in the strokes of a brush the exhaustion there, too, and the pain of struggle.

  ‘You are most quiet, Lucien. Do you hold a differing opinion?’

  ‘I liked its power. I liked its terrible truth.’

  Her hands tightened across his back as she moved closer. ‘Will you come home with me tonight and stay?’

  This was whispered in his ear in a sultry tone and the hairs on his arms stood up at the invitation. It had been so long since he had last bedded a woman.

  He should say yes; already he could see Daniel and Amethyst beside him, the hope in their eyes shining like beacons. Gabriel Hughes was there, too, to one side of the room with Adelaide, his new and most interesting wife, and they, too, looked pleased for him.

  They all wanted him to be as happy as they were and as content with life and love and hearth. For a good two years now, after the Higham-Browne fiasco, they had paraded one sterling woman after another in front of him, at dinner parties and balls and also at more private soirées especially manoeuvred to make everything conducive to a successful affair of the heart.

  And for all that time he had pleaded excuses and found escapes, unwilling to remember all that he only wanted to forget.

  Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo.

  Even here she haunted him, amongst the laughter and the dancing, sadness the only honest emotion in his breast. Four years of loneliness. Four years of self-inflicted isolation. Four years of a grief that he could not shake.

  And suddenly it was enough.

  ‘Yes, I would like that.’ He swallowed and felt the dry fear of the answer in his mouth curling into panic.

  ‘Thank you.’ Margarita was clever in her reply. If she had said anything else, he might have bolted, but the sweet gratitude in her words touched him.

  ‘I am not a woman prone to asking men to my bed, you understand.’ He smiled as her breath warmed the skin on his neck. ‘Once, I was married to a man I loved with all my heart and when he died I could not understand who I was any more. But with you...’ The words slid into a silence as he nodded and the music soared in the air above them, promise and hope within its melody.

  * * *

  The substantial van Hessenberg town house was darkened with only a few candles still alight as she led him through the reception area and up the stairs to a room that was painted as a garden, murals on each wall by the windows.

  ‘This is my folly, Lucien,’ she said softly. ‘I missed my flower beds in Essex and sought to bring them here.’

  ‘Inanimate and permanent? No watering needed.’

  She laughed at that and moved closer. ‘That is what I love most about you, Lucien. You are a man of few words, but all are well chosen.’

  Her fingers went to the tie of his cravat, unwinding it slowly and discarding the length of it on the floor. He watched the white cloth fall and thought of the scars she would soon see, across his neck and back, thick and ugly and red.

  ‘Perhaps we could have a drink first?’ The quiver in his voice worried him.

  ‘Of course.’ She had heard it, too, he thought as she broke away to find glasses and a bottle of champagne.

  An 1811 Veuve Clicquot and the very best of that vintage. He finished almost half the glass before he took a breath and Margarita filled it again.

  ‘I went there once, you know, to France, to sample the wine in the cave itself. It was magnificent.’

  Only the best, he thought. Gowns. Rooms. Wine. Travel. His mind wandered to the dishevelled clothes of Alejandra, torn and dirty as they had marched through the mountains. He remembered the home-brewed orujo, too, and small dugout spaces between tree roots, where they had fashioned beds in pine needles under the endless Spanish sky.

  He felt less here in a room of
so much more. He felt less certain and less strong and less sure. He took in breath and turned to the window, watching the lights of London town and Margarita’s reflection in the glass as she walked up behind him.

  And he knew without doubt that this was wrong, that he was wrong, that the closeness he had known with Alejandra would not be repeated here.

  ‘I need to go. I am sorry.’

  She took his words with calmness and dignity. ‘Then I hope you will be back...some other time. You would always be welcome.’

  He nodded because the pretence of it was expected and because anything to allow him the chance to depart with some dignity was to be snatched at. He picked his neckcloth up from the thick burgundy rug as he strode to the door.

  Once outside the house his desperate haste seemed to slow. He was free. Of the cloying room. Of sex. Of expectation. The night air calmed him, the first hint of winter on the breath of breeze. He should have stayed in Pontevedra or he should have insisted Alejandra go with him to England. He should have done anything other than what he had done, simply getting on that boat home and leaving her to die less than a few days later in the fiery inferno of her home. He missed her. He missed everything about Alejandra Florencia Fernandez y Santo Domingo.

  ‘Jesus, help me,’ he whispered as he walked. ‘Please, please help me.’

  * * *

  White’s was still open. He thankfully found a seat in a secluded alcove and, ordering a drink, leant back against the soft leather.

  ‘Lord Ross?’

  A man Lucien did not recognise stood there.

  ‘I am Captain Trevellyan Harcourt, the son of Major Richard Harcourt. I think you might know him?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Lucien clipped the word, hoping the young fellow might simply leave it at that. He did not feel like chatting after such a personal and intimate failure.

  ‘The thing is, sir, I have only just recently returned from the Iberian Peninsula. I have a commission in the Seventh Light Division under Wellington, you see, and was sent home because I was injured. Not badly, but enough,’ he carried on and smiled.

  Lucien could not see where any of this was leading, but he listened because there was something in the young man that others might have seen in him. Dislocation, he supposed, and struggle. Gesturing for Harcourt to sit in the chair opposite, he ordered another brandy.

  ‘I was there myself under Moore, five years ago, in the first campaign.’

  ‘A difficult time, sir, and although the push into Spain was ultimately a retreat it was also important. General Moore paved the way for us.’

  ‘A forward-thinking opinion, Captain Harcourt. There were many who would not be so generous.’

  ‘I take it you made the long march north, then, up to the coast, my lord, and the Bay of Biscay.’

  There was a tone in Harcourt’s voice that had Lucien sitting up straighter. He knew the sound of a man fishing for information, sifting for details. My God, it had been his job for all the years of his commission with the British army and a prickling awareness of something being important began to rise.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  Harcourt sat forward, one hand delving into his jacket. ‘I found this on a finger of a homeless drunk I had a contretemps with and I recognised the insignia. The Ross crest. Your coat of arms, sir?’

  Time simply stopped for Lucien. Dead still. Like a crack in the fabric of his world, one moment this and the next one that.

  It was his ring, the one he had given Alejandra all those years ago with the strict instructions to contact him if she ever needed help.

  She hadn’t done that.

  Yet here it was again, a little less shiny and a deep scratch across the bottom of the crest. To determine whether it was gold or not, he presumed, to see if the worth of it held value. How the hell had it escaped the fire?

  ‘It is mine.’ Lucien felt his heart race. ‘You found it on a drunk, you say?’

  ‘I did. He was a man of dubious means and had a propensity for thievery. I am guessing that the ring was stolen, too, by the looks of him. From you?’

  ‘Where exactly did you come across it?’

  ‘In Madrid, sir, in one of the older barrios there. I cannot remember which. I would not have thought you to come through the city under General Moore.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ He did not want to say more. ‘I will pay you for the return of the ring, of course...’

  ‘I am a commissioned officer, sir, and you were one before me. I should not accept any recompense for returning property that was so patently yours in the first place and one that cost me nothing more than a slight shove to acquire.’

  ‘Then I thank you.’ Already Harcourt was rising as his name was called from further down the room; friends, Lucien supposed, waiting for him and wondering why he tarried. Lucien stood as well and shook his hand.

  ‘I am indebted to you. If you ever have the need of a favour...’ The other man bowed slightly and moved off.

  Left alone, he reached down and took the ring in his fingers, clasping it gently and well. How had such a valuable piece been lost from Alejandra’s possession before ending up in the biggest city of Spain? Turning the gold into the light above, he saw a mark on the inside band, an inscription that had not been there when he had given it to her.

  Only now.

  ‘God.’ A wave of heat washed across him and he sat down.

  Had Alejandra survived the fire? She would have had neither the time nor the place to have an inscription engraved on the road back from Pontevedra. Had she somehow turned in another direction and gone south?

  His fingers closed down over the ring and he hated the way they shook.

  ‘Please, please let her be alive.’

  * * *

  Luis Alvarez looked more than a decade older when Lucien finally found him, outside a tavern on the very edge of the port road of Pontevedra.

  He’d come by boat from Portsmouth the day before into Vigo and taken a horse on the paths north, careful of strangers and mindful of jeopardy. The war between France and Spain still raged in the north, but the direction of the battles has been pulled east towards the Pyrenees.

  The old man’s face crinkled further as he recognised him. ‘I took you over to England once,’ he said. ‘The friend of El Vengador’s daughter?’

  Lucien nodded, ordering a round of drinks and paying.

  ‘I heard that Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo had died in a fire at the hacienda.’ He tempered the question in his voice and watched the man directly.

  ‘Aye, a tragedy that. Enrique Fernandez y Castro for all his violence was a good man once. Rumour says it was an act of revenge by his daughter’s dead husband’s family. An eye for an eye...’ His voice fell as he looked around. ‘But she was not long gone from here when the atrocity happened and I wondered...’ He stopped.

  ‘You wondered what?’

  ‘I wondered if she had escaped it and disappeared altogether for the charred bodies of those left were burnt beyond all recognition and form. It was said someone saw El Vengador’s daughter in Madrid a good six months after the fire and another swore she resided in Almeida, but by that time the heart had gone from the hatred of the Betancourts and they just let it go.’

  Lucien turned the ring on his finger as the man carried on.

  ‘People say things and see things that are not real. Like the dye in your hair. It was black once, if I recall. Now it is the colour of the sun.’

  Placing his glass down, Lucien spoke slowly, feeling his old self coming back, the man that he had been here once. The soldier. The spy. The careful gatherer of information, no scrap of it too small or unimportant.

  ‘Do you remember the exact date of the fire, señor?’ It had never been noted on any of the reports.

  ‘The tenth of March,’ the older man replied. ‘My birthday. We were out celebrating when we got the news.’

  Lucien quickly calculated time and distance. He had left Spain on the fifth of March. That left five days
from Pontevedra to A Coruña. It could be done if she had used the coastal road, but it had rained hard that night out in the Bay of Biscay. Had it done the same here, slowing everything?

  ‘Do you remember what the weather was like that evening?’ He held his breath as the old man thought.

  ‘It was pouring earlier on, but it had cleared by midnight. We walked home from the tavern without getting wet, but the mud underfoot was deep.’

  The rain meant Alejandra would have had to be more careful. It meant that she might have sheltered, too, in one of the overhangs of a cliff or beneath the gnarled roots of trees until it passed. Unless she had simply pushed on undeterred and met her maker in the hot flush of flame.

  He wondered how long she had stood on the wharf watching him go. Others might have seen her there and could remember. He phrased his next query carefully.

  ‘Your son helped you on the docks, didn’t he? He was there the day we left, tidying the last of the cargo that you had delivered. A large youth with a beard?’

  ‘Indeed. He is there.’ He pointed towards the bar and the same barrel-chested young man materialised from within the forms of others.

  ‘Might I talk with him for just a moment?’

  ‘Keep your voice down, then, if it’s questions you are asking. Bringing up the past can sometimes cause problems around here. Xavier. A word, if you please.’

  The lad came quickly, a full tankard in hand, and sat by his father. Side by side there was more of a resemblance than Lucien had previously thought.

  ‘Do you remember the daughter of El Vengador, the beautiful young woman who came to the wharf that day with this man?’

  Dark eyes flicked across him. ‘Yes.’

  Lucien took over.

  ‘Did she stay here long in the village after I left with your father?’

  ‘Sí. She sat against the mooring post and watched the ocean for all of the next few hours, and she was sad. Not crying, but I could tell she was near to it.’

  Lucien’s heart lurched and fell to the very pit of his stomach. ‘And then?’

  ‘She left just after dusk. She went up the high path and into the hills. I thought she would take the low road, but she didn’t. It was raining and there was the promise of more.’