The Penniless Lords

In want of a wealthy wife

Meet Daniel, Gabriel, Lucien and Francis Four lords, each down on his fortune and each in need of a wife of means.

From such beginnings, can these marriages of convenience turn into something more treasured than money?

Don’t miss this enthralling new quartet by Sophia James

Read Daniel, Gabriel, Lucien and Francis’s stories in

Marriage Made in Money Already available

Marriage Made in Shame Already available

Marriage Made in Rebellion Out now

Marriage Made in Hope Coming soon

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.’

Marriage Made in Rebellion

Sophia James

www.millsandboon.co.uk

SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay, on Auckland, New Zealand’s North Shore, with her husband, who is an artist. She has a degree in English and History from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed by reading Georgette Heyer in the holidays at her grandmother’s house. Sophia enjoys getting feedback at sophiajames.co.

Author Note

Marriage Made in Rebellion is the third story in my The Penniless Lords series.

Lucien Howard, the Earl of Ross, is a soldier, a fighter, a spy and a gifted linguist.

Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo is the only daughter of a powerful Spanish guerrilla leader whose family has been decimated by the conflict.

They come together on the battlefields after Corunna in this dark and dangerous story of high-stakes warfare in a country that has been split apart by politics. It is also about a great love that conquers all.

Francis St Cartmail is next. When Lady Sephora Connaught falls from a bridge into the deep and fast-running Thames everything in her world changes.

The stranger who dives in to rescue her, the Earl of Douglas, is known as the black sheep of the ton and is a man of questionable reputation. Yet only with him does she finally feel safe.

I love feedback, and you can find me at sophiajames.co.

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Contents

Cover

Introduction

Excerpt

Title Page

About the Author

Author Note

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

The English declare they will no longer respect neutrals on the sea; I will no longer recognise them on land.

Napoleon Bonaparte

A Coruña, Spain—January 16th, 1809

Captain Lucien Howard, the Earl of Ross, thought his nose was broken. His neck, too, probably, because he couldn’t move it at all. His horse lay upon him, her head bent sideways and liquid-brown eyes empty of life. A good mare she was, one that had brought him up the hard road from Lisboa through the snows of the Cantabrian Mountains and the slippery passways of mud and sleet. He swore silently and looked away.

It hurt to breathe, a worrying thought that, given the distance from any medical help. Another day and Napoleon and his generals would be all over the harbour. It was finished and the British had lost, the harsh winter eating into what was left of resistance and a mix-up with the ocean transports in from the southern port of Vigo.

God, if he wasn’t so badly hurt, he might have laughed, but the movement would have most likely killed him. It was so damn cold, his breath fogging as he fought for what little air he could drag in, but a mist had come up from the sea to mingle with the smoke of battle hanging thick across the valley.

Lucien was not afraid of death. It was the dying that worried him, the length and the breadth of it and the helplessness.

Lying back, he looked up into the heavens, hoping that it would be quick. He couldn’t pray; that sort of hope was long since past and had been for a while now. He could not even find the words to ask for forgiveness or penance. He had killed men, good and bad, in the name of king and country, but once one saw the whites of an enemy’s eyes, the old troths and promises held less sway than they once had.

A man was a man whatever language he spoke and more often than not a family would be waiting at home for their return. As his was. That thought sent a shaft of pain through the greater ache, but, resolving not to die with tears in his eyes, Lucien willed it away.

It was late, that much he did know, the sun deep on the horizon and only a little left of the day. He could see the lights of resin torches further away along the lines of the olive trees and the aloe hedges, searching for those who still lived. He could not summon the strength to call out as he lay there, a rough stone wall to one side and an old garden of sorts on the other.

Lucien imagined he could smell orange blossoms and wild flowers, but that was surely wrong. He wondered about the warmth that he felt as the peace of a contrition he long since should have made came unexpectedly.

‘Forgive me, Jesus, for I have sinned.’ Not so hard now in the final moments of his life. He smiled. No, not so hard at all.

* * *

The English soldier was covered in the blood of his horse, the residual warmth left in the large animal’s pelt saving him, allowing him life in the frigid cold dark dawn of a Galician January winter.

But not for long; his blond hair was pinked in a puddle of blood beneath his head and a wound at his neck wept more. The daybreak was sending its first light across the sky and as far as the eye could see there were bodies. English and French, she thought, entwined in death like friends. Only the generals could have imagined that such a sacrifice was worth it, the prime of each country gone before they had ever had the chance to live. She cursed out loud against the futility of war and removed the gold signet ring from the soldier’s finger to give to her father.

When his eyes flicked open the pale in them was startling in the early-morning light, almost see-through.

‘Not...dead...yet?’ There was disappointment and resignation in the broken question phrased in Spanish.

‘What hurts?’

He smiled. ‘What...does...not?’

The wide planes of his cheeks were bruised and his lip was badly cut, but even with the marks of war drawn from one end of him to the other he was beautiful; too beautiful to just die here unheralded and forgotten. Anger fortified resolve and she slashed at the gorse to one side of him, using the cleared ground to stand upon.

With space she pried a broken stake from a fence under his mount’s neck and managed to lift it up enough, twisting the carcass so that it fell away from him, swirls of mud staining the air.

He groaned, the noise one makes involuntarily when great pain breaks through a consciousness that cannot quite contain it.

‘Scream away, Ingles, if you will,’ she told him. ‘I most certainly would. Your friends have been evacuated by way of the sea and the French are in charge of the township itself, so nobody at all should hear you.’

My God, how tired she was of iron wills and masculine stoicism. Death was a for ever thing and if men taking their last breaths in a land far from their own could not weep for the sacrifice, then who else should?

Not her. Not her father. Not the officers safe with their horses on the transports home across a wild and stormy Biscay Bay. Other steeds roamed the streets of A Coruña, looking for succour, their more numerous and unluckier counterparts dead beneath the cliffs overhanging the beach, throats cut in clumsy acts of kindness.

Better dead than at the mercy of the enemy. Once she might have even believed that truism. Now she failed to trust in anything or anyone. The fury within alarmed her at times, but mostly she did not think on it. Adan and Bartolomeu had joined her now, their canvas stretcher pulled in.

‘You want us to take him back?’

She nodded. ‘Careful how you lift him.’

As Tomeu crouched down he scratched at a muddied epaulette. ‘He’s a capitán.’ The tinged gold was undeniable and her heart sank. Her father had begun to be uncertain of a Spanish triumph and was distancing himself from the politics of the region. An officer would be less welcome than a simple soldier to Enrique. More complex. Harder to explain.

‘Then we need to make sure he recovers to fight again for our cause.’

For some reason the man before her was beginning to mean something. A portent to victory or a prophecy of failure? She could not tell. All she did know was that the damaged fingers of his left hand had curled into her own, seeking comfort, and that despite all intentions to do otherwise she held them close, trying to bring warmth to his freezing skin.

He groaned again when they rolled him on to the canvas and she got the first glimpse of the wounds on his upper back, the fabric of his shirt shredded into slivers and the flesh hanging off him between it.

More than one sword had been used, she thought, and there had been a good deal of hatred in the action. The blood loss was making him shake, so she shrugged off her woollen poncho and laid it across him, tucking it in beneath his chin.

Tomeu looked up with a frown. ‘Why bother? He will die anyway.’ The hard words of truth that she did not want, though there was anger in his tone, too. ‘They come and they go. In the end it’s all the same. Death eats them up.’

‘Padre Nuestro que estás en los cielos...’ She recited the Lord’s Prayer beneath her breath and draped the ornate rosary across him in protection as they started for home.

* * *

The same lad on the fields was beside him again, sitting asleep on a chair, a hat pulled down over his face. Lucien shook his head against the chills that were consuming him and wondered where the hell he was. Not on the battlefields, not on the transports home, either, and this certainly was not hell given the crisp cotton sheets and warm woollen blanket.

Tipping his head, he tried to listen to the cadence of someone speaking far away outside. Spanish. He was certain of it. The heavy beams and whitewashed walls told him this house was also somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula and that whoever owned it was more than wealthy.

His eyes flicked back to the lad. Young. Thin. A working boy. Lucien could not quite understand what he would be doing here. Why was he not labouring somewhere or helping with one of the many things that would need attention on a large and busy hacienda? What master would allow him simply to sit in a sickroom whiling away the hours?

His glance caught the skin of an ankle above a weathered and scuffed boot, though at that very moment deep green eyes opened, a look of interest within them.

‘You are awake?’

A dialect of León, but with an inflection that he didn’t recognise.

‘Where am I?’ He answered in the same way and saw surprise on the lad’s brow.

‘Safe.’ Uttered after a few seconds of thought.

‘How long...here?’

‘Three days. You were found on the battlefield above A Coruña the morning after the English had departed by way of the sea.’

‘And the French?’

‘Most assuredly are enjoying the spoils of war. Soult has come into the town with his army under Napoleon’s orders, I suppose. There are many of them.’

‘God.’

At that the lad crossed himself, the small movement caught by the candlelight a direct result of his profanity.

‘Who are you?’ This question was almost whispered.

‘Captain Howard of the Eighteenth Light Dragoons. Do you have any news of the English general Sir John Moore?’

‘They buried him at night on the high ground close to the ramparts of the Citadel. It is told he died well with his officers around him. A cannon shot to the chest.’

Pain laced through Lucien. ‘How do you know this?’

‘This is our land, Capitán. The town is situated less than three miles from where we are and there is little that happens in the region that we are not aware of.’

‘We.’

The silence was telling.

‘You are part of the guerrilla movement? One of El Vengador’s minions? This is his area of jurisdiction, is it not?’

The boy ignored that and gave a question of his own. ‘Where did you learn your Spanish?’

‘Five months in Spain brings its rewards.’

‘But not such fluency.’ The inflection of disbelief was audible.

‘I listen well.’

In the shadows of a slender throat Lucien saw the pulse quicken and a hand curl to a fist. A broken nail and the remains of a wound across the thumb. Old injuries. Fragile fingers. Delicate. Tentative. Left-handed. There was always so much to learn from the small movements.

She was scared of him.

The pronoun leapt into a life of its own. It was the ankles, he was to think later, and the utter thinness of her arms.

‘Who are you, señorita?’

She stood at that, widening one palm across the skin on his neck and pressing down. ‘If you say one word of these thoughts to anyone else, you will be dead, desconocido, before you have the chance to finish your sentence. Do you understand?’

He looked around. The door was closed and the walls were thick. ‘You did not...save my life...to kill me...now.’

He hoped he was right, because there was no more breath left. When she let him go he hated the relief he felt as air filled his lungs. To care so much about living made him vulnerable.

‘The others will not be so lenient of your conjectures were you to utter them carelessly and everybody here would protect me with their life.’

He nodded and looked away from the uneasy depths of green.

‘I take it, then, that you are the daughter of this house.’ He had changed his accent now into a courtly High Castilian and saw her stiffen, but she did not answer and was gone before he could say another word.

* * *

Who the hell was he, this stranger with the pale blue eyes that saw everything, his hair like spun gold silk and a body marked by war?

No simple soldier, that much was certain. The Light Dragoons had fought with Paget out of San Cristobel and yet he had been found east of Piedralonga, a good two miles away under Hope’s jurisdiction. She frowned in uncertainty.

Captain Howard had spoken in the León dialect and then in the Castilian, easily switching. A changeling who could be dangerous to them all and it was she who had brought him here. She should say something of the worrying contradictions to her father and the others. She should order him removed and left far from the hacienda to fend for himself. But instead...

Instead she walked to the windows of her room and looked out across the darkness to the sea beyond. There was something about this capitán that she recognised in herself. An interloper isolated from others and surrounded by danger. He did not show fear, either, for when she had taken the air from his windpipe with her hands he had not fought her. But waited. As if he had known she would let go.

Cursing, she pulled the shutters in closed against the night.

* * *

Lucien lay awake and listened. To the gentle swish of a servant’s skirt and then the harder steps of someone dousing the lights outside. A corridor by the sounds of it and open to the sea. When his rescuer passed without he had smelt the salt and heard the waves crashing against the shore. Three miles she had said to A Coruña and yet here the sea was closer, a mile at the most and less if the wind drew from the north as it had done three days ago. Now the breeze was lighter for there was no sound at all against the wood of the shutters. Heavy locks pulled the coverings together in three places and with a patina of age Lucien knew these to be old bindings. To one side of the thick lintels of double-sashed windows he saw scratches in the limewash over stone, lines carefully kept in groups. Days of the week? Hours of a day? Months of a year? He could not quite make them out from this distance.

Why had these been left there? A servant could have been ordered to cover them in the matter of a few moments; a quick swish of thick plaster and they would have been gone.

A Bible sat on a small wooden table next to his bed under an ornate golden cross and beside a bronze statue of Jesus with his crown of thorns.

Catholic and devout.

Lucien felt akin to the battered Christ, as his neck ached and sharp pains raked up his back. The sword wounds from the French as he had tried to ride in behind the ranks of General Hope. He was hot now, the pins and needles of fever in his hands, and his front tooth ached badly, but he was too tired to bring his arm up enough to touch the damage. He wished the thin girl would come back to give him some more water and sit near him, but only the silence held court.

* * *

She returned in the morning, before the silver dawn had changed to day, and this time she brought others.

The man beside her was nearing fifty, Lucien imagined, a big man wearing the flaring scarlet-and-light-blue jacket of an Estramaduran hussar. Two younger men accompanied him.

‘I am Señor Enrique Fernandez y Castro, otherwise known as El Vengador, Capitán. It seems you have heard of me?’

Lucien sized up the hard dark eyes and the generous moustache of the guerrilla leader. A man of consequence in these parts and feared because of it. He looked nothing at all like his daughter.

‘If the English soldiers do not return, there will be little hope for the Spanish cause, Capitán.’ High Castilian. There was no undercurrent of any lesser dialect in his speech but the pure and arrogant notes of aristocracy.

Lucien was honest in his own appraisal of the situation. ‘Well, the Spanish generals have done themselves no favour, señor, and it’s lucky the French are in such disorder. If Napoleon himself had taken the trouble to be in the Iberian Peninsula, instead of leaving it to his brother, I doubt anything would be left.’

The older man swore. ‘Spain has no use for men who usurp a crown and the royal Bourbons are powerless to fight back. It is only the likes of the partisans that will throw the French from España, for the army, too, is useless in its fractured purpose.’

Privately Lucien agreed, but he did not say so. The juntas were splintered and largely ineffective. John Moore and the British expeditionary force had found that out the hard way, the promise of a Spanish force of men never eventuating, but sliding away into quarrel.

The girl was listening intently, her eyes wary beneath the rim of the same cap she had worn each time he had seen her. Today the jacket was different, though. Something stolen from an English foot soldier, he guessed, the scarlet suiting her tone of skin. He flipped his glance from her as quickly as it settled. She had given him her warnings already and he owed her that much.

The older man moved back, the glint of metal in his leather belt. ‘Soult and Ney are trampling over the north as we speak, but the south is still free.’

‘Because the British expeditionary forces dragged any opposition up here with them as they came.’

‘Perhaps,’ the other man agreed, dark eyes thoughtful. ‘How is it you know our language so well?’

‘I was in Dominica for a number of years before coming to Madeira.’

‘The dialects would be different.’ The room was still, waiting, a sense of menace and distrust covering politeness.

For the first time in days Lucien smiled. ‘Every tutor I had said I was gifted in hearing the cadence of words and I have been in Spain for a while.’

‘Why were you found behind the English lines? The Eighteenth Dragoons were miles away. Why were you not there with them?’

‘I was scouting the ocean for the British transports under the direction of General Moore. They were late coming into the harbour and he was worried.’

‘A spy, then.’

‘I myself prefer the title of intelligence officer.’

‘Semantics.’ The older man laughed, though, and the tension lessened.

When Lucien chanced a look at the girl he saw she watched him with a frown across her brow. Today there was a bruise on her left cheek that was darkening into purple. It had not been there yesterday.

Undercurrents.

The older man was not pleased by Lucien’s presence in the house and the Catalan escopeta in his cartouche belt was close. One wrong word could decide Lucien’s fate. He stayed silent whilst he tried to weigh up his options and he listened as the other man spoke.

‘Every man and woman in Spain is armed with a flask of poison, a garrotting cord or a knife. Napoleon is not the liberator here and his troops will not triumph. The Treaty of Tilsit was his star as its zenith, but now the power and the glory have begun to fade. C’est le commencement de la fin, Capitán, and the French know it.’

‘Something Talleyrand said, I think? Hopefully prophetic.’ Lucien had heard rumours that the crafty French bishop was seeking to negotiate a secure peace behind his emperor’s back so as to perpetuate and solidify the gains made during the French revolution.

El Vengador stepped forward. ‘You are well informed. But our channels of intelligence are healthy, too, and one must watch what one utters to a stranger, would you not agree, Capitán? Best to hold your secrets close.’

And your enemies closer? A warning masked beneath the cloth of politics? Simple. Intimidating. Lucien resisted any urge to once again glance at his rescuer in the corner.

He nodded without candour and was relieved as the other man moved back.

‘You will be sent by boat to England. Tomeu will take you. But I would ask something of you before you leave us. Your rank will allow you access to the higher echelons of the English military and we need to know the intentions of the British parliament’s actions against the French here in Spain. Someone will contact you wearing this.’ He brought a ruby brooch out of his pocket to show him, the gem substantial and the gold catching the light. ‘Any information you can gather would be helpful. Sometimes it is the very smallest of facts that can make a difference.’

And with that he was gone, leaving his daughter behind as the others departed with him.

‘He trusts you.’ Her words came quietly. ‘He would not have let this meeting run on for as long as it has if he did not.’

‘He knows I know about...?’ One hand gestured towards her.

‘That I am a girl? Indeed. Did you not hear his warning?’

‘Then why did he leave you here? Now?’

At that she laughed. ‘You cannot guess, Capitán?’ Her green eyes glittered with the look of one who knew her worth. To the cause. To her father. To the machinations of a guerrilla movement whose very lifeblood depended on good information and loyal carriers.

‘Hell. It is you he will send?’

‘A woman can move in many circles that a man cannot.’ There was challenge in her words as she lifted her chin and the swollen mark on her cheek was easier to see.

‘Who hit you?’

‘In a place of war, emotions can run high.’

For the first time in his company she blushed and he caught her left hand. The softness of her skin wound around his warmth.

‘How old are you?’

‘Nearly twenty-three.’

‘Old enough to know the dangers of subterfuge, then? Old enough to realise that men might not all be...kind?’

‘You warn me of the masculine appetite?’

‘That is one way of putting it, I suppose.’

‘This is Spain, Capitán, and I am hardly a green girl.’

‘You are married?’

She did not answer.

‘You were married, but he is dead.’

Horror marked her face. ‘How could you possibly know that?’

With care he extended her palm and pointed to her third finger. ‘The skin is paler where you once wore a ring. Just here.’

* * *

She felt the lump at the back of her throat hitch up into fear. She felt other things, too, things she had no mandate to as she wrenched away from his touch and went to stand by the window, the blood that throbbed at her temples making her feel slightly sick.

‘How are you called? By your friends?’

‘Lucien.’

‘My mother named me Anna-Maria, but my father never took to it. He changed it when I was five and I became Alejandra, the defender of mankind. He did not have another child, you see.’

‘So the boy he had always wanted was lost to him and you would have to do?’

She was shocked by his insight. ‘You can see such a truth in my father’s face just by looking at him?’

The pale eyes narrowed as he shook his head. ‘He allows you to dress as a boy and roam the dangerous killing fields of armies. He will have trained you, no doubt, in marksmanship and in the using of a knife, but you are small and thin and this is a perilous time and place for any woman.’

‘What if I told you that such patronage works to my advantage, Capitán? What if I said you think like all the others and dismiss the mouse against the lion?’

His glance went to her cheek.

‘I broke his wrist.’ When he smiled the wound on his lip stretched and blood blossomed.

‘Why did he hurt you?’

‘He felt the English should be left to rot in the arms of the enemy because of the way they betrayed us by departing in such an unseemly haste.’

‘A harsh sentiment.’

‘My father believes it, too, but then every war comes with a cost that you of all people should know of. The doctor said your back will be marked for good.’

‘Are you suggesting that I will survive?’

‘You thought you wouldn’t?’

‘Without you I am certain of it.’

‘There is still time to die, Capitán. The sea trip won’t be comfortable and inflammation and fever are always possibilities with such deep lacerations.’

‘Your bedside manner is lacking, señorita. One usually offers more hope when tending a helpless patient.’

‘You do not seem vulnerable in any way to me, Capitán Howard.’

‘With my back cut to ribbons...?’

‘Even with that. And you have been hurt before. Madeira or Dominica were dangerous places, then?’

‘Hardly. Our regiment was left to flounder and rot in the Indies because no politician ever thought to abandon the rich islands.’

‘For who in power should be brave enough to risk money for justice?’

He laughed. ‘Who indeed?’

Alejandra turned away from his smile. He surely must know how beautiful he was, even with his ruined lip and swollen eye. He should have been weeping with the pain from the wounds at his neck and back and yet here he lay, scanning the room and its every occupant for clues and for the answers to questions she could see in his pale blue eyes. What would a man like this be like when he was well?

As unbeatable and dangerous as her father.

The answer almost had her turning away, but she made herself stand still.

‘My father believes that the war here in the Peninsula will drag on for enough years to kill many more good men. He says it is Spain that will determine the outcome of the emperor’s greed and this is the reason he has fashioned himself into the man he has become. El Vengador. The Avenger. He no longer believes in the precise and polite assignations of armies. He is certain that triumph lies in darker things; things like the collation of gathered information and night-time raids.’

‘And you believe this, too? It is why you would come to England wearing your ruby brooch?’

‘Once upon a time I was another person, Capitán. Then the French murdered my mother and I joined my father’s cause. Revenge is what shapes us all here now and you would be wise to keep that in mind.’

‘When did she die?’

‘Nearly two years ago, but it seems like a lifetime. My father adored her to the exclusion of all else.’

‘Even you?’

Again that flash of anger, buried quickly.

He turned away, the ache of his own loss in his thoughts. Were his group of army guides safe or had they been left behind in the scramble for transports?

He had climbed the lighthouse called the Tower of Hercules a dozen times or more to watch for the squadron to appear across the grey and cold Atlantic Ocean. But the transports and their escorts had not come until the eleventh hour, all his intelligence suggesting that French general Soult was advancing and that the main body of their army was not far behind.

He thought of John and Philippe and Hans and Giuseppe and all the others in his ragtag bag of deserters and ne’er-do-wells; a group chosen for their skill in languages and for their intuition. He had trained them and honed them well, every small shred of intelligence placed into the fabric of a whole, to be deciphered and collated and acted upon.

Communication was the lifeblood of an army and it had been his job to see that each message was delivered and every order and report was followed up. Sometimes there was more. An intercepted cache from the French, a dispatch that had fallen into hands it should not have or a personal letter of inestimable value.

His band of guides was an exotic mix of nationalities only vaguely associated with the English army and he was afraid of what might happen to them if they had been left behind.

‘Were there many dead on the field where you found me?’

‘There were. French and English alike. But there would have been more if the boats had not come into the harbour. The inhabitants of A Coruña sheltered the British well as they scampered in ragged bands to the safety of the sea.’

Then that was that. Every man would have to take their chance at life or death because he could do nothing for any of them and his own future, as it was, was hanging in the balance.

He could feel the heat in him and the tightness, the sensation of nothingness across his shoulders and back worrying. His left hand was cursed again with a ferocious case of pins and needles and his stomach felt...hollow.

He smiled and the girl opposite frowned, seeing through him perhaps, understanding the pretence of it.

He hadn’t been hungry, any slight thought of food making him want to throw up. He had been drinking, though, small sips of water that wet his mouth and burnt the sores he could feel stretched over his lips.

A sorry sight, probably. He only wished he could be sick and then, at least, the gall of loss might be dislodged. Or not.

‘You have family?’

A different question, almost feminine.

‘My mother and four siblings. There were eight of us before my father and youngest brother were drowned.’

‘A big number, then. Sometimes I wish...’ She stopped at that and Lucien could see a muscle under her jaw grinding from the echo of words.

Nothing personal. Nothing particular. It was how this aftermath of war and captivity worked, for anything could be used against anyone in the easy pickings of torture. His own voluntary admissions of family worked in another way, a shared communion, a bond of humanness. Encourage dialogue with a captor and foster friendship. The enemy was much less likely to kill you then.

Fortunes turned on an instant and any thinking man or woman in this corner of a volatile Spain would know that. Battles were won and then lost and won again. It was only time that counted and with three hundred thousand fighting men of France poised at your borders and under the control of Napoleon Bonaparte himself there was no doubt of the outcome.

Unless England and its forces returned and soon, Spain would go the way of nearly every other free land in Europe.

His head ached at the thought.

* * *

The girl came back to read to him the next afternoon and the one after that, her voice rising and falling over the words of the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’s tale Don Quixote.

Lucien had perused this work a number of times and he thought she had, too, for there were moments when she looked up and read from memory.

He liked listening to her voice and he liked watching her, the exploits of the eccentric and hapless Knight of La Mancha bringing deep dimples to both of her cheeks. She used her free hand a lot, too, he saw, in exclamation and in emphasis, and when the edge of her jacket dipped he saw a number of white scars drawn across the dark blue of her blood line at her wrist.

As she finished the book she snapped the covers together and leant back against the wide leather chair, watching him. ‘The pen is the language of the soul, would you not agree, Capitán?’

He could not help but nod. ‘Cervantes, as a soldier, was seized for five years. All good fodder for his captive’s tale, I suppose.’

‘I did not know that.’

‘Perhaps that is where he first conjured up the madness of his hero. The uncertainty of captivity forces questions and makes one re-evaluate priorities.’

‘Is it thus with you?’

‘Indeed. A prisoner always wonders whether today is the day he holds no further use alive to those who keep him bound.’

‘You are not a prisoner. You are here because you are sick. Too sick to move.’

‘My door is locked, Alejandra. From the outside.’

That disconcerted her, a frown appearing on her brow as she glanced away. ‘Things are not always as they seem,’ she returned and stood. ‘My father isn’t a man who would kill you for no reason at all.’

‘Is expedience enough of a reason? Or plain simple frustration? He wants me gone. I am a nuisance he wishes he did not have.’ Lifting his hand, he watched it shake. Violently.

‘Then get better, damn you.’ Her words were threaded with the force of anger. ‘If you can walk to the door, you can get to the porch. And if you can manage that, then you can go further and further again. Then you can leave.’

In answer he reached for the Bible by his bed and handed it to her. ‘Like this man did?’

Puzzled, she opened the book to the page indicated by the plaited golden thread of a bookmark.

Help me. I forgive you.

Written shakily in charcoal, the dust of it blurred in time and use and mirrored on the opposite page. When her eyes went to the lines etched in the whitewash beneath the window on the opposite wall Lucien knew exactly what the marks represented.

‘He was a prisoner in this room, too?’

She crossed herself, her face frozen in pain and shock and deathly white.

‘You know nothing, Capitán. Nothing at all. And if you ever mention this to my father even once, he will kill you and I won’t be able to stop him.’

‘You would try?’

The air about them stilled into silence, the dust motes from the old fabric on the Bible twirling in the light, a moment caught for ever. And he fell into the green of her unease without resistance, like a moth might to flame in the darkest of nights.

She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but it was not that which drew him. It was her strength of emotion, the anger in her the same as that in him. She balanced books and a blade with an equal dexterity, the secrets in her eyes wound into both sadness and knowledge.

They were knights tilting at windmills in the greater pageant of a Continental war, the small hope of believing they might make a difference lost under the larger one of nationalistic madness.

Spain. France. England.

For the first time in his life Lucien questioned the wisdom of soldiering and the consequences of battle, for them all, and came up wanting.

Alejandra had known the man who had written this message, he was sure of it, and it had shocked her. The pulse in her throat was still heightened as she licked her lips against the dryness of fear.

He watched as she ripped the page from the Bible before giving the tome back to him, tearing the age-thin paper into small pieces and pocketing them.

The weight of the book in his fist was heavy as she turned and left the room.

God. In the ensuing silence he flicked through the pages and his eyes again found a further passage marked in charcoal amongst the teachings of the Old Testament. Matthew 6:14. ‘For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you.’

Clearly Alejandra, daughter of El Vengador, sought neither forgiveness nor absolution. Lucien wondered why.

* * *

He woke much later, startled into consciousness by great pain, and she was there again, sitting on the chair near the bed and watching him. The Bible had been removed altogether now, he noted as he chanced a glance at the table by the bed.

‘The doctor said you had to drink.’

He tried to smile. ‘Brandy?’

Her lips pursed as she raised a glass of orange-and-mint syrup. ‘This is sweetened and the honey will help you to heal.’

‘Thank you.’ Sipping at the liquid, he enjoyed the coolness as it slid down his throat.

‘Don’t take too much,’ she admonished. ‘You will not be used to much yet.’

He frowned as he lay back, the dizziness disconcerting. If he did lose the contents of his stomach, he was almost certain it would not be Alejandra who would be offering to clean it up. He swallowed heavily and counted to fifty.

After a few moments she spoke again. ‘Are you a religious man, Capitán Howard?’

A different question from what he had expected. ‘I was brought up in the Anglican faith, but it’s been a while since I was in any church.’

‘When faith is stretched the body suffers.’ She gave him this as though she had read it somewhere, a sage piece of advice that she had never forgotten.

‘I think it is the French who have more to do with my suffering, señorita.’

‘Ignoring the power of God’s healing in your position could be dangerous. A priest could give you absolution should you wish it.’ There was anger in her words.

‘No.’ He had not meant it to sound so final. ‘If I die, I die. If I don’t, I don’t.’

‘Fate, you mean? You believe in such?’

‘I do believe in a fate that falls on men unless they act. The prophet Buddha said something like that a very long time ago.’

She smiled. ‘Your religion is eclectic, then? You take bits from this deity and then from that one? To suit your situation?’

He looked away from her because he could tell she thought his answer important and he didn’t have the strength to explain that it had been a while since he had believed in anything at all.

The shutters hadn’t been closed tonight at his request and the first light of a coming dawn was low on the horizon. He was gladdened to see the beginning of another day. ‘Do you not sleep well? To be here at this time?’

‘Once, I did. Once, it was hard to wake me from a night’s slumber, but since...’ She stopped. ‘No. I do not sleep well any more.’

‘Is there family in other places, safer places than here?’

‘For my father to send me to, you mean?’ She stood and blew out the candle near his bed. ‘I need no looking after, señor. I am quite able to see to myself.’

Shadowed against the dying night she looked smaller than usual, as if in the finding of the words in the Bible earlier some part of her had been lost.

‘Fate can also be a kind thing, señor. There is a certain grace in believing that nothing one does will in the end make any difference to what finally happens.’

‘Responsibility, you mean?’

‘Do not discount it completely, Capitán. Guilt can eat a soul up with barely a whisper.’

‘So you are saying fate is like a pardon because all free will is gone?’

Even in the dim light he could see her frown.

‘I am saying that every truth has shades of lies within and one would be indeed foolish to think it different.’

‘Like the words you tore from the Bible? The ones written in charcoal?’

‘Especially those ones,’ she replied, a strength in the answer that had not been there a moment ago. ‘Those words were a message he knew I would find.’

With that she was gone, out into the early coming dawn, the shawl at her shoulders tucked close around her chin.

Chapter Two

Alejandra watched Captain Lucien Howard out amongst the shadow of trees on the pathway behind the hacienda: one step and then falling, another and falling again. He had insisted on being brought outside each day, one of the servants carrying him to the grove so that he could practise walking.

She could see frustration, rage and pain in every line of his body from this distance and the will to try to stand unaided, even as the dust had barely settled from the previous unsuccessful attempt. His hands would be bleeding, she knew that without even looking, for the bark of the olive was rough and he had needed traction to pull his whole weight up in order to stand each time. Sickness and fever had left him wasted and thin. The man they had brought up from the battlefields of A Coruña had been twice the one he was now.

Another Englishman who had shed his blood on the fleshless bones of this land, a land made bare by war and hate and greed. She turned her rosary in her palm, reciting the names of those who had died already. Rosalie. Pedro. Even Juan with his cryptic and unwanted whine of forgiveness written in a Bible he knew she would find.

Each bead was smooth beneath her fingers, a hundred years of incantations ingrained in the shining jet. Making the sign of the cross, she kept her voice quiet as she prayed. ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth and...’

Salvation came in many forms and this was one of them, the memory of those gone kept for ever present within the timeless words. After the Apostles’ Creed she started on the Our Father, following it with three Hail Marys, a Glory Be and the Fatima Prayer.

She always used the Sorrowful Mysteries now as a way to end her penance, the Joyful and the Glorious ones sticking in her throat; the Agony in the Garden and the Crowning of the Thorns were more relevant to her life these days. Even the Scourging of the Pillars appealed.

When she had finished she placed the beads in her left pocket, easily reached, and drew out a knife from the leather pouch at her ankle, the edge of it honed so that it gleamed almost blue.

A small branch of an aloe hedge lay beside her and she lifted the wood against the blade, sliding the knife so that shavings fell in a pile around her boots.

Her life was like this point of sharp, balanced on a small edge of living. Turning the stick, she drew it down against her forearm, where the skin held it at bay for a moment in a fleeting concave show of resistance.

With only the smallest of pressure she allowed the wood to break through, taking the sudden pain inside her, not allowing even a piece of it to show.

Help me. I forgive you. A betrayal written in charcoal.

Blood welled and ran in a single small stream across her hands and on to her fingertips, where it fell marking the soil.

Sometimes pain was all she had left to feel with, numbness taking everything else. If she were honest, she welcomed the ache of life and the flow of blood because in such quickness she knew she was still here. Still living. Just.

Lucien Howard had almost fallen again and she removed the point from her arm, staunching the wound with pressure, setting blood.

He was like her in his stubbornness, this captain. Never quite giving up. Resheathing the blade, she simply leant back and shut her eyes, feeling the thin morning sun against her lids and the cold wind off the Atlantic across her hair.

Her land. For ever.

She would never leave it. The souls of those long departed walked beside her here. Already mud was reclaiming her blood. She liked to think it was her mother, Rosalie, there in the whorls of wind, drinking her in, caressing the little that was left, understanding her need for aloneness and hurt.

Her eyes caught a faster movement. Now the Englishman had gone down awkwardly and this time he stayed there. She counted the seconds under her breath. One. Two. Three. Four.

Then a quickening. A hand against the tree. The pull of muscle and the strain of flesh. Her fingers lifted to find the rosary, but she stopped them. Not again. She would not help.

He was as alone as she was in this part of a war. His back still oozed and the wounds on his neck had become reinfected. She would get Constanza to look at the damage again and then he would be gone. It was all she could do for him.

* * *

The daughter of El Vengador sat and observed him from a distance, propped against a warm ochre wall out of the breeze. Still. Silent. Barely moving.

He almost hated her for her easy insolence and her unnamed fury. She would not help him. He knew that. She would only watch him fall again and again until he could no longer pull himself up. Then she would go and another would come to lift him back to the kapok bed in the room with its gauzy curtains, half-light and sickness.

Almost six weeks since A Coruña. Almost forty-two days since he had last eaten well. His bones looked stark and drawn against thin skin and big feet. He’d seen himself in the mirror a few days before as the man designated to tend to his needs had lifted him, eyes too large in his face, cheeks sunken.

She had stopped visiting him in his room three weeks ago, when the priest had been called to give him the last rites. He remembered the man through a fog of fever, the holy water comforting even if the sentiment lay jumbled in his mind.

‘Through this holy anointing may the Lord...’

Death came on soft words and cool water. It was a part of the life of a soldier, ever present and close.

But he had not died. He had pulled himself through the heat and come out into the chill. And when he had insisted on being brought to the pathway of trees, she had come, too. Watching. Always from a distance. She would leave soon, he knew. He had fallen too many times for her to stay. His hands bled and his knee, too, caught against a root, tearing. There was no resistance left in him any more and no strength.

He hoped Daniel Wylde had got home safely. He hoped the storms he had heard about had not flung the boat his friend travelled in to the murky bottom of the Bay of Biscay. ‘Jesus, help him,’ he murmured. ‘And let me be remembered.’

A foolish prayer. A vain prayer. His family would miss him. His mother particularly and then life would move on. New babies. Other events until he would be like the memories he carried of his father and his youngest brother, gone before their time into the shifting mists of after.

‘Hell,’ he swore with the first beginnings of anger. A new feeling, this. All-encompassing. Strengthening. Only wrath in it. He reached out for the fortitude and with one last push grabbed the rough bark of the scrawny olive and pulled with all his fury, up this time into a standing position, up again into the world of the living.

He did not let go, did not allow his legs to buckle, did not think of falling or failing or yielding. Nay, he held on through sharp pain and a heartbeat that raked through his ears as a drum thumping in all the parts of his body, his breath hoarse and shaking.

And then she was there with her wide green knowing eyes and her hair stuffed under the hat.

‘I knew that you could do it.’

He could not help but smile.

‘Tomorrow you will take more steps and the next day more again and the day after that you will walk from this path to that one. And then you will go home.’

Her face was fierce and sharp. There was blood on her sleeve and on her fingers. New blood. Fresh blood. He wondered why. She saw where he looked and lifted her chin.

‘The French have taken A Coruña and Ferrol. A resounding defeat with Soult now walking the streets of the towns unfettered. Soon the whole of the north will be theirs.’

‘War...has its...losers.’

‘And its cowards,’ she tossed back. ‘Better to have not come here at all if after the smallest of fights you turn tail and leave.’

He felt the anger and pushed it down. His back ached and his vision blurred and the cold that had hounded the British force through the passes of a Cantabrian winter still hovered close.

Cowards. The word seared into vehemence. So many soldiers lost in the retreat. So much bravery discovered as they had turned their backs against the sea and fought off the might of France. All he could remember was death, blood and courage.

‘You need to sit down.’ These new words were softer, more generous, and in one of the few times since she had found him on the fields above A Coruña, she touched him. A hand cupped beneath his elbow and another across his back. A chain lay around her neck, dipping into the collar of her unbuttoned shirt. He wondered what lay on the end of it; the thought swept away as she angled the garden chair beneath him and helped him to sit.

His breath shook as much as his hands did when he lifted them up across his knees.

‘Thank...you.’ And he meant it. If she had not been behind him seeing to his balance, he knew he would have fallen and the wooden seat felt good and steady and safe. Shutting his eyes against the glare of the morning, he allowed his mind to run across his body, accepting the injury, embracing the pain. The witch doctors in Jamaica had shown him this trick once when he had taken a sickness there. He had used such mesmerising faithfully ever since.

* * *

The Englishman had gone from here somehow, his body still and his heartbeat slowing to a fraction of what it had been only a moment before. Even his skin cooled.

Uneasiness crept in. She could not understand who he was, what he was. A soldier. A fighter. A spy. A man who spoke both the high and low dialects of Spain as well as any native and one who knew at every turn and at every moment exactly what was happening about him. Alejandra could see this in his stance as well as in his eyes now opened, the blue today paler than it had ever looked; alert and all-knowing.

She had never seen another like him. Even worn down to exhaustion she caught the quick glance he chanced behind to where a line of her father’s men were coming in from the south. Gauging danger, measuring response.

‘Where will I be sent...on from?’ His gaze narrowed.

It was seldom she told anyone of plans that did not include the next hour, for it gave the asker too much room to wriggle free of any constraints. With him she was honest.

‘Not from here. It is too dangerous in A Coruña now. You will leave from the west.’

‘From one of the small ports in the Rias Altas, then?’

So Captain Lucien Howard knew his geography, but not his local politics.

‘No, that area harbours too many enemies of my father. It shall not be there.’ She turned and looked up at the sky, frowning. ‘There is a storm coming in with the wind from the ocean.’

The clouds had amassed and darkened across the horizon, a thick band of leaden grey just above the waterline.

My father needs to find out who you are first before he lets you go. He needs to understand your people and your character and the danger you might pose to us should you not be the man you say you are. And if you are not...

These thoughts she kept to herself.

‘I am not your enemy, Alejandra.’ He seldom called her by her given name, but she liked it. Soft. Almost whispered. Her heart beat a little faster, surprising her, annoying her, and she looked away, making much of watching those who had come in from Betanzos. Tomeu was amongst them, shading his face and peering at them, the bandage on his wrist white in the light even at this distance.

‘But neither are you my friend, Ingles, for all your sacrifice and devotion to the cause of Spain.’

He laughed, the edges of his eyes creasing, and she took in breath. What was it about him that made her more normal indifference shatter? She even imagined she might have blushed.

‘I am here, señorita, because of a mistake.’

Now, this was new. A piece of personal information that he offered without asking.

‘A mistake?’

‘I spent too long in the Hercules Tower looking for the British transports. They had not arrived and the French were circling.’

‘So they found you there?’

‘Hardly.’ This time there was nothing but cold ice in his glance. ‘They had taken one of my men and I thought to save him.’

‘And did you?’

‘No.’

The wind could be heard above their silence. Strengthening and changing direction. Soon the sun would be gone and it would rain. The beating pulse in a vein of his throat below his left ear was the only sign of great emotion and greater fury. So very easy to miss.

‘He was a spy, like you?’

He nodded. ‘There are weaknesses that are found out only under great duress. Jealousy. Greed. Fear. For Guy the weakness was cowardice, but he ran in the wrong direction.’

‘So you left him there? As a punishment?’

‘No. I tried to bring him safely through the lines of the French. I failed.’

For some men, Alejandra thought, the rigours of war brought forward cowardice. For others it highlighted a sheer and bloody-minded bravery. She imagined what it must have cost Captain Lucien Howard in pain to try to rescue his friend. She doubted anyone or anything could push him into doing that he did not wish to, but still, most men held a limit of what was sacred and worth dying for and a well-aimed hurt usually brought results.

Her father was the master of it.

But this Englishman’s strength, even in the lines of his wasted and marked body, was obvious. Unbreakable and stalwart. She imagined, given the choice, that he would choose death over dishonour and pain across betrayal.

She wondered if she could manage the same.

The blood from his torn hands stained his white shirt and the sweat from his exertions had darkened the linen.

But he was beautiful with his pale eyes and his gold hair, longer now after weeks of sickness and fallen from the leather tie he more normally sported. She wanted to run her fingers through the length of it just to see it against the dark of her own skin.

Contrasts.

Inside and out.

Lucien. The name suited him with its silky vowels. Almost the name of one of the three archangels in the Bible, the covering angel, the fallen one. Alejandra shook her head and cleared her thoughts.

‘I will send Constanza to you again tonight with her herbs. She has a great prowess in the healing arts.’

When he brushed back his hair the sun flinted in the colour. ‘If she leaves the ointment in my room, I can tend to it myself.’

‘As you wish, then.’

Kicking at the mud beneath her feet, once and then another time, she left him to the coming rain and the wind and the rising tides of fortune, and when she reached the hacienda’s stables she turned once to see the shadow of him watching her.

Chapter Three

Lucien woke in the night to a small and quiet noise. He had been trained well to know the difference in sounds and knew that the louder ones were those less likely to kill you.

This one was soft and muffled. He tensed into readiness.

The door opened and a candle flared as Alejandra’s father came to sit on the small stool near the bed, stretching his long legs out before him and grimacing as though in pain.

‘You sleep lightly, Capitán.’

‘Years of practice, señor,’ Lucien returned.

‘Put the knife away. I am only here to talk.’

Lucien slipped the blade beneath his pillow, angling it so that it might be taken up quickly again if needed. He did not think the man opposite missed the inherent threat.

Alejandra had brought him the weapon on his second evening here, a quiet offering in the heat of his fever.

‘For protection,’ she had said in warning. ‘I am presuming you know how to use it. If not, it is probably better...’ He’d simply reached out and taken it from her, the insult smarting given the wounds on his back.

Tonight her father looked weary and he took his time in forming the message before he spoke.

‘It has come to my notice that you are a peer of the English aristocracy, Capitán Howard.’ The ring Lucien had been wearing lay in the older man’s hand when he opened his fingers, the Ross family coat of arms shining in the candlelight. He thought it had been lost for ever. ‘Lord Lucien Howard, the sixth Earl of Ross. The title sits on your shoulders as the head of your household and you wield a good deal of power in English society.’

Lucien remained silent for he was certain that there would be more to come.

‘But your family seat is bankrupt by all accounts. Poor investments by your father and his father, it is said, and now there is very little in the Howard coffers. Soon there will be nothing.’

Well, that was not a secret, Lucien thought bitterly. The penury of the earldom of Ross was well known. Anyone could have told him of it.

But his attention was taken by a sheaf of papers the other man lifted into view. He saw his own face on the front cover of The Times, a black-and-white copy of a likeness his mother had once commissioned of him, smiling as if he meant it. My God, it seemed an age since he had done so with any sincerity.

‘You have a good number of brothers and sisters and a mother who is heartbroken because you are presumed dead.’

Lucien imagined her grief. The Countess was neither a big woman nor a particularly robust one. If this killed her before he managed to get back...

‘So I have a further proposition for you, my lord.’ The last two words were coated with a violent dislike. ‘I could slice your throat open here and now and no one would ever know what had happened to you, or...’ He stopped.

El Vengador was a man who used theatrics to the full extent, Lucien thought and humoured him. ‘Or...’

‘Or as an earl you are well placed to offer us even more.’

Lucien closed his eyes momentarily. This guerrilla leader was a dangerous adversary and a man who would not make an easy ally. He was also holding all the cards as far as Lucien’s life was concerned. Oh, granted, he knew that he might take a good handful of men with him if he were to fight his way out of here, but he was weak and he was also, to some extent, in debt to the man for his life.

But there were things that were not being said. Lucien was sure of it. He looked the other man straight on.

‘Why me? Why not someone integrated into the fabric of English society, someone from here? It seems you have agents there already. Why not use them?’ Lucien’s eyes turned to the papers and the ring.

‘But we could not access the places you do, my lord. We could never hope to be within earshot of a king.’

‘Society and the monarch do not write the law. England has a democracy and a parliament to do that.’

‘And one of the Houses of Parliament consists of peers of the realm. Your name is included in that representation, is it not, Lord Ross?’

Finally he was gathering the sense of this assignment. If he had not been titled, he would probably have been disposed of by now and this conversation was a warning of it.

El Vengador held men in London, dangerous men, men with dreams of a Spanish free land in their hearts and the means to ensure it had the best chance of fruition.

England and Spain might be on the same side of the fight against Napoleon, but each had their own reasons for victory and the milksop version of democracy held by the Spanish army and the splintered juntas was a very different one from that offered by the guerrilla leaders. ‘The little war’ was the translation, but Lucien had heard tales of the French being killed in their hundreds by the partisan bands roaming the rough and isolated passes of the northern countryside, and many of those deaths had not been a pretty sight.

‘The guerrilla movement might strike terror into the hearts of the French troops, but you also frighten much of the Spanish population with your forced conscription and looting.’ He refrained from adding savagery and barbarousness to the list. ‘What makes you think I would want to help you? I do not wish to be the person who facilitates the death of my countrymen should a battle be badly lost and you have all the personal details of each commanding officer.’

A movement of the door had both of them turning. Alejandra came in. She had been asleep. He could see the remains of slumber in the flush on her cheeks and in the tangle of her hair.

God. She slept fully clothed and with a knife as close as his. The silver of her dagger glimmered in the candlelight. He was surprised she had not sheathed it when she saw her father in the room.

‘I am not here to kill him, hija.’

An explanation of intention that underlined her presence. Lucien frowned. Did she sleep near? To protect him? Her eyes did not meet his own as they took in the papers and his ring sitting on the table to one side of the bed, giving him the notion that she had known of her father’s quest. And of the danger.

‘You will take him to the boat in a week, Alejandra. No later.’

‘Very well.’ Her answer held the same edge of hardness as her father’s.

‘Find another to travel with you. Tomeu, perhaps?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I shall take Adan. He has people to the west and good contacts.’

‘Then it is decided.’ El Vengador’s fingers drummed against his thigh as he stood. ‘I do not expect you to do this work for Spain without reward, Lord Ross. A sum of money shall be deposited into a bank of your choice as soon as any business between us is conducted and I am satisfied with the intelligence.’

A fait accompli. Perhaps El Vengador was not used to having men turn down his offers of assistance. Still, he was in the lair of the tiger, so to speak, and it would be unwise to annoy him.

‘I will think carefully on what you have proposed.’

A hand came forward, grasping his own in a surprisingly firm and warm way.

‘For freedom,’ the older man said as Lucien watched him. ‘And victory.’

Then he was gone. Alejandra stood against the wall to the left of the window, one foot bent so that it rested against the peeling ochre. Ready to flee.

‘You knew about this?’ He gestured to the paper and the ring. ‘You knew what your father might ask?’

‘Or of what he might not,’ she returned and crossed the room to stand beside him, lifting The Times in her hands.

‘You look younger when you smile.’

‘It’s an old likeness.’

This time she laughed and the sound filled the room like warm honey, low and smooth.

‘I think, Lord Lucien Howard, sixth Earl of Ross, that even my father could not kill you if he wanted to.’

‘I hope, Alejandra, only daughter of El Vengador, that you are right.’

She placed the paper down with as much care as she had used to pick it up. No extra movements. No uncertain qualms. Death could have been in the room when she entered as easily as life and yet there was not one expression on her face that told him of either relief or disappointment.

But she had come and her knife was sheathed now, back in the soft leather at her left ankle. Would she have fought her father for him? The thought knocked the breath from his lungs.

‘Thank you.’ He offered the words, no sentiment in them but truth, and by the look on her face he knew she understood exactly what such gratitude was for.

She was gone as quietly as her father had left, one moment there and the next just the breeze of her going. He heard the door close with a scrape of the latch.

* * *

He dreamt of Linden Park, the Howard seat at Tunbridge Wells, with the sun on its windows and the banks of the River Teise lined with weeping willows, soft green in the coat of early spring. His father was there and his brother. The bridge had not collapsed yet and he had not had to try to save them as they turned over and over in the cold current, dragged down by heavy clothing, late rains and panic.

His mind found other happier moments—his sister, Christine, and he as they had ridden across the surrounding valleys, as fast as the wind, the sound of starlings and wrens and the first gambolling lambs in the fields.

He thought of Daniel Wylde, too, and of Francis St Cartmail, and them all as young boys constructing huts in the woods and hunting rabbits with his father’s guns. Gabriel Hughes had come sometime later, on horseback, less talkative than the others, but interesting. Gabe had taught Lucien the trick of holding one’s own counsel and understanding the hidden meaning of words that were not quite being said.

And then Alejandra was there in his thoughts, her long hair down her back and her skin lustrous in candlelight, full lips red and eyes dark. In his dream she wore a thin and flowing nightgown, the shape of her lithe body seen easily through it. He felt himself harden as the breath in him tightened. She came against him like molten fire, acquiescent and searching, her mouth across his own as her head tipped up, taking all that he offered; sweet heat and an unhidden desire before she plunged a knife deep through the naked and exposed gap in his ribs.

‘Hell.’ He came awake in a second, panting, shocked, his member rock solid and ready, the stupidity in him reeling. For the first time in all the weeks of pain and terror and exhaustion he felt like crying; for him and for her and for a war that held death as nothing more than a debt of sacrifice on its laboured way to victory.

Alejandra was her father’s daughter. She had told him that again and again in every way that counted. In her distance and her disdain. In her sharpened blade held at the ready and the rosary she often played with, bead by bead of entreaty and Catholic confession.

Yet still the taste of her lingered in his mouth, and the feel of her flesh on his skin had him pushing back the sheets, a heat all-encompassing even in the cold of winter.

What would happen on the road west, he wondered, the thought of long nights in her company when the moon was high and shadow clothed the landscape? How many days was the journey? How many miles? If he was not to be taken out of Spain by way of the Rias Altas, was it the more southern Rias Baixas they meant to use? Or even the busy seaport of Vigo?

The dream had changed him somehow, made him both less certain and more foolish, the unreality of it sharpened by a hope he hated.

He wished there was brandy left at his bedside or some Spanish equivalent of a strong and alcoholic brew, but there was only the water infused with oranges, honey and mint. He took up the carafe and drank deeply, the quickened beat of his heart finally slowing.

Reaching over to the table, he slipped the signet ring on his finger where it had been for all of the years of his adult life and was glad to have it back. Then he lifted up the paper to see the date.

February the first. His mother’s birthday. He could only guess how she had celebrated such a milestone with this news crammed on to the front page of the broadsheet.

He had always known it might come to this, lost behind the enemy lines and struggling to survive, but he had not imagined a thin and distant girl offering him protection even as she swore she did not. Taking his blade from beneath his pillow, he tucked it into the leather he had found in one of the drawers in this room before placing it back on the bedside table and glancing at the pendulum clock on the far wall.

Almost four, the heavy tick and tock of it filling silence. He would not sleep again.

He tried recalling the maps of Spain he had held in his saddlebag on the long road north to the sea. He and his group of guides had drawn many images, measuring the distances and topography, the ravines and the crossable passes, the rivers and the bridges and the levels of water. Much of what they transcribed he had determined himself as they had traversed across into the mountains, the margins of each impression filled with comments and personal observations.

When he had encountered the French soldiers the folder had been lost, for he had not seen it since lying wounded on the field above the town. He could probably redraw much of it from memory, but the loss of such intelligence was immense. Without knowledge of the local landscape the British army was caught in the out-of-date information that allowed only poor and dangerous passage.

A noise brought him around to the door once again and this time it was the one named Tomeu who stood watching him.

‘May I speak with you, Ingles?’

Up close the man who had helped him from the battleground was younger than he remembered him to be. His right wrist was encased in a dirty bandage.

He closed the door carefully behind himself and stood there for a moment as if listening. ‘I am sorry to come so late, Capitán, but I leave in an hour for the south and I wanted to catch you before I went. I saw your candle still burnt in the gap beneath the door and took the chance to see if you were awake.’

Lucien nodded and the small upwards pull of the newcomer’s lips changed a sullen lad into a more handsome one.

‘My name is Bartolomeu Diego y Betancourt, señor, and I am a friend of Alejandra’s.’ He waited after delivering this piece of news, eyes alert.

‘I recognise you. You are the one who got me on the canvas stretcher behind the horse the morning after I was hurt.’

‘I did not wish to. I thought you would have been better off dead. It was Alejandra who insisted we bring you here. If it had been left to me, I would have plunged my blade straight through your heart and finished it.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you, señor? Do you really understand how unsafe it is for Alejandra at the hacienda now that you are here and what your rescue might have cost her? El Vengador has his own demons and he is ruthless if anyone at all gets in his way.’

‘Even his daughter?’

That brought forth a torrent of swearing in Spanish, a bawdy long-winded curse. ‘Enrique Fernandez will end his life here in bitterness and hate. And if Alejandra stays with him, so will she, for her stubbornness is as strong as his own. Fernandez has enemies who will pounce when he is least expecting it and a host of others who are jealous of his power.’

‘Like you?’

The young man turned away.

‘She said you were clever and that you could see into thoughts that should remain private. She said you were more dangerous than even her father and that if you stay here much longer, El Vengador would know it to be such and have you murdered.’

‘Alejandra said this?’

‘Yes. She wants you gone.’

‘I know.’

‘But she wants you safe, too.’

He stayed quiet as Tomeu went on.

‘She is like a sister to me. If you ever hurt her...’

‘I will not.’

‘I believe you, Capitán, and that is one of the reasons I am here. You, too, are powerful in your own right, powerful enough to protect her, perhaps?’

‘You think Alejandra would accept my protection?’ He might have laughed out loud if the other man had not looked both so very serious and so very young.

‘Her husband was killed less than one year ago, a matter of months after their marriage.’

‘I see.’ And Lucien did. It was the personal losses that made a man or a woman fervent and Alejandra was certainly that.

‘Are there other relatives?’

‘An uncle down south somewhere, but they are not close.’

‘Friends, then, apart from you?’

‘This is a fighting unit, ranging across this northern part of Spain with the express purpose of causing chaos and mayhem. Most of the women are gone either to safety or to God. It is a dangerous place to inhabit.’

‘Here today and gone tomorrow?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Was it Alejandra who hurt your wrist?’

‘It was. I asked her to be my wife and she refused.’

Lucien smiled. ‘A comprehensive no, then.’

‘The bruise on her face was an accident. I dragged her down the stairs with me after losing my footing. She said she would never marry anyone again and even the asking of it was an insult. To her. She never listens, you see, never takes the time to understand her own and ever-present danger.’

‘She loved her husband, then?’

The other man laughed. ‘You will need to ask her that, señor.’

‘I will. So you think her father would harm her?’

‘El Vengador? Not intentionally. But your presence here is difficult for them both. Alejandra wants you well enough to travel, but Enrique only wants you gone. The title you hold has swung opinion in your favour a little, but with the slightest of pushes it could go the other way and split us all asunder. Better not to care too much about the health and welfare of others in this compound, I think. Better, too, to have you bundled up and heading for home.’

A safer topic, this one. But every word that Tomeu had spoken told Lucien something of his authority. A man like El Vengador would not be generous in his fact sharing, yet this young man had a good knowledge of the conversation he had just had with Alejandra’s father. Lucien had seen him glance at the signet ring back on his finger and in the slight flare of his eyes he had understood just what Tomeu did not say.

He was a lieutenant perhaps, or at least one who participated in the decision-making for the group. The young face full of smiles and politeness almost certainly masking danger, for the lifeblood of the guerrilla movement was brutality and menace.

Had Alejandra’s father sent Tomeu to sound him out? Had Alejandra herself? Or was this simply a visit born from expediency and warning?

Thirty-two years of living had made Lucien question everything and in doing so he was still alive.

‘What of her groom’s family? Could she go there to safety?’

‘My cousin, señor, and they want the blood of the Fernandez family more than anyone else in Spain. More than the French, even, and that is saying something.’

This was what war did.

It tore apart the fabric and bindings of society and replaced them with nothing. He thought of his own immediate family in England and then of his large extended one of aunts, uncles and cousins. Napoleon and the French had a lot to answer for the wreckage that was the new Europe. He suddenly wished he was home.

‘I am sorry...’ Lucien left the words dangling. Sorry for them all. It was no answer, he knew, but he could promise nothing else. As if the young man understood, he, too, turned for the door.

‘Do not trust anyone on your trip to the west.’

‘I won’t.’

‘And watch over Alejandra.’

With that he was gone, out into the fading night of a new-coming dawn, for already Lucien could hear the first chorus of birdsong in the misty air.

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