Marriage Made in Rebellion Page 7

‘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?’
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  ‘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.’

  ‘Or protect it.’

  She laughed then because she could not help it. Once, she might have believed in the noble pursuits of soldiers. ‘Good or bad? There is a fine line between each, Capitán. People die here because of armies. Innocent people, and a land in winter has a limit on the succour it can manage to harvest before starvation settles in. In the north we have reached that limit. Another season of battle and there will be nothing left in Galicia save for the freedom to starve.’

  She had not meant to say as much, to give a man as clever as the one before her the true slant of her opinion. But she had ceased many months ago to believe in the easy spoils of war or the glory in it.

  ‘Liberty and safety always come at a price, I’ll give you that.’ His eyes were threaded with weariness.

  ‘And today Adan and Manolo paid for it dearly. The French will come and then they will go because there is no way they can stay here and live and people like the Betancourts will be swallowed up by bitterness and hate until there is nothing left of them, either. That, Capitán, is the true cost of valour. No one ever wins. Not for ever. Not even for a little while.’

  ‘But is not simply accepting subjugation the true meaning of surrender?’ The planes on his cheeks held the light and his eyelashes were the darkest of blacks against the pale of his skin.

  Once, she had thought the same, Alejandra conceded. Once, before her mother and her husband and friends had all been consigned to the afterlife she might have imagined resistance to be worth it, to be honourable, even, and right. But no more. Her heart had been lost to the other side of caring months and months ago, before Juan even, before he had betrayed her and her father for the heady lure of gold and power.

  A mishmash of promises had left her grappling for even one honest hope for Spain. All she wished for was peace and a rest from the war and blood that surrounded them. The face of Adan surprised by his death came to mind and she turned it away, unable to bear the image. It could have so easily been her. Or Lucien Howard. It could have been them tonight lying stiff on the cold earth with the pine needles across their faces.

  ‘England is a soft country, Capitán, and far from battle. If I were a woman of Britain, I should never leave it.’

  ‘Come with me, then, when I go. You could be safe there.’

  She was intrigued by his words. ‘A large promise, señor. Too large to believe in, I am afraid, and if it is a choice between battle here or homesickness there, then I think I should always choose the former.’

  Unexpectedly he reached out and took her hand and she wished that her nails had been cleaner or her skin softer. Stupid foolish wishes here out in the mountains with the scent of Adan’s and Manolo’s blood between them and a hundred hard miles to go.

  ‘I appreciate that you are helping me to get home.’ His words were quiet and for the first time she could hear a hint of foreignness within them.

  It had been so long since someone had touched her with gratitude and kindness that she was overcome with a kind of dizzying unbalance. For a second she wanted to wind her fingers into his strength and follow him to England. The absurdity of that thought made her pull away and place a good distance between them.

  ‘I would have done it for anyone.’ But she knew it was not true, that small dishonesty. Right from the first second of seeing Lucien Howard on the battlefield above A Coruña, his long pale hair pinked in blood, she had felt a...sameness, a connection. Unexplainable. Unsettling.

  The edges of his lips turned up into humour as he pushed a length of hair away from his eyes.

  He held his maps in the other hand with a careful deliberateness and scanned the trees behind. A noise had caught his attention, perhaps, or a bird frightened from its perch. They were too high up for any true danger and the nights without cover were cold. Already the snowdrifts could be seen and if it rained again the ice would form. His breath clouded with the condensation and she felt a momentary panic about exposure. If it darkened and they could not find shelter...

  ‘We have at least five hours before the night settles.’ She wondered how he did that, reading her mind without warning and taking the words she was about to say.

  A guide, he had said, for General Moore. Penning maps and alone before the main body of the English army as it ran before the worst storm in decades across the Cantabrian Mountains. Even looking at him she could see he fitted into this landscape with an astounding ease and mastery; a chameleon, hurt and exhausted, but as dangerous as they came.

  He had bent to lift a dried acorn now, peeling off the husks to let them blow in the breeze. ‘’Tis nor-nor-west. Another day and there will be heavier rain in it. Sleet, too, if the temperatures keep dropping. Do you know the way?’

  Alejandra did not answer. If she got her bearings wrong, then they were both dead. There was very little civilisation between here and Pontevedra and already she was shaking.

  Not all from cold, either, she thought to herself. Anger was a part of it, too, that she should allow her worry for this man to override sense.

  She could easily slip into the forest around them and disappear, leaving him with his wits to follow and the pine needles and oak leaves to bed down in. But she saw the fever in his eyes even as he held her glance, daring her not to comment, and turned to stride out before her. The bloodstain across his shoulders had widened and every so often a drip of crimson lay on the earth and bracken as he walked.

  Chapter Six

  An hour later Lucien knew he needed to stop, needed to lie down and reassemble his balance and his energy. His neck ached and the wound had reopened; the warmth of blood had held the cold at bay for a time until it could do so for no longer. Now he felt the shivers even across the soles of his feet.

  ‘We can camp here.’ Alejandra’s voice cut through his thoughts and he looked around. The clearing was undisturbed by civilisation, with a view wide down across the way they had just come. But most surprising of all was the tall tree tucked just before the overhang, the roots of it providing a shelter of sorts.

  ‘Like a house—’ she smiled ‘—with walls and a ceiling. I have used them before.’

  ‘An oak?’ The leaves and structure of the tree were not quite familiar.

  She nodded. ‘Spanish sessile oak. Different from English oak, I think.’

  Lucien put down his rucksack and sat against it. If he had been alone, he would have closed his eyes and tried to regroup, but he could see from the expression on her face that she was already worried by the tenuous nature of his health and he did not wish to add to her concerns. The hardness of the bark hurt and he leant forward a little. He needed to get his jacket off and some water on to the heat of the wound, but in the descending dusk and cold there would be little chance of such doctoring.

  ‘You are shivering.’

  He simply looked up at her, unable to hide the reaction of his body further. It was finished, this pretence. He couldn’t have moved had his life depended on it, not even if a bunch of marauding partisans were to have charged at that moment through the trees.

  ‘Leave me and go home. You’d have a better chance of surviving if—’ She did not let him finish.

  ‘I didn’t take you for a quitter, Capitán.’

  He smiled because that was what he might have said to her had the tables been turned.

  ‘Besides, you have been hurt before just as badly. I saw the scars on your body when we brought you from the battlefields of A Coruña and if you can survive once, you can do so twice, or a thousand times.’

  Her words rattled him. Had it been her who had stripped off his ruined uniform after the battle? He’d been nude beneath the covers when he had awoken in the quiet room that first time, a bandage the only thing covering him.r />
  ‘Who undressed me?’

  ‘Oh, I forget that you English have such a large dollop of prudishness. War has changed things like that here.’ She was rummaging through her bag, so Lucien was unable to determine her expression, though he could hear the humour in her voice. ‘Take off both your shirt and jacket so I can see to you.’

  He made no move whatsoever to do as she asked.

  ‘Salve,’ she explained as she found what she’d been searching for. ‘Constanza gave this to me before we left. She said if the wound bled again and you had a fever, I was to make certain to use it.’

  For just one moment Lucien thought to simply ignore her and lie down, but the throb in his neck was making his temples ache badly and he knew slumber would be hard to come by in such a state.

  Hating the way his fingers fumbled, he unbuttoned the heavy jacket and then the shirt, the fabric of the latter sticking to his skin. When he tugged harder the coppery smell of fresh blood filled the air around them and he thought for an instant he might be sick.

  The cold was helping, though, the breath of the mountains soothing and smooth. When Alejandra walked behind and laid her fingers against his shoulder to draw the last piece of fabric away, he started.

  ‘It is off,’ she said after a moment, ‘and the bleeding has slowed.’ Drawing a picture with her forefinger on his skin, she gave him words, as well. ‘The cuts are deeper in the middle here than at each side and it is only those ones above your spine that have festered and still bleed.’

  He’d been taken from the back. Lucien remembered the first pain as Guy had fallen.

  Turning on his horse to fight, he’d drawn his sword quickly, but there had been too many and at too close a range. He had no true recollection of what had happened next save for a vague recall of place. The first true memory was on the field above A Coruña, waking to find Alejandra kneeling beside him and his steed’s heavy head across his abdomen.

  She washed the injury with cool water and blotted the blood with something soft. The salve held the smell of garlic, lavender and camphor and was cooling. Then she gave him a cup with herbs infused in water taken from a glass container within her rucksack. Its lid was of red wax.