Marriage Made in Rebellion Page 6

  ‘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.

  T
he 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

  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.

  ‘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 stre
ngth 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.