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?’
‘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,
