Marriage Made In Rebellion

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.