was thick this year in the Cordillera Cantabrica. It is a wonder anyone survived such a journey.’
‘Many didn’t. They lay there on the side of the steep passes and never moved again. Those behind stripped them of shoes and coats.’
She had heard the stories of the English dead. The tales of the march had long been fodder for conversations about the fires at the hacienda. ‘Papa said a gypsy had told him once that the French will triumph three times before they are repelled. This is the first, perhaps?’
He only laughed.
‘You do not believe in such prophesy, Capitán?’
‘Generals decide the movements of armies, Alejandra, not sages or soothsayers.’
‘Do you think they will return? The British, I mean. Will they come back to help again, in your opinion?’
‘Yes.’
She smiled. ‘You are always so very certain. It must be comforting that, to believe in yourself so forcibly, to trust in all you say.’
‘You don’t?’
She swallowed. Once she had, before all this had happened, before a war had cut down her family and left her in the heart of chaos.
Now she was not sure of exactly who or what she was. The fabric in her trousers was dirty and ripped and the jacket she wore had come off the dead body of a headless Hussar in the field above A Coruña. It still held the dark stains of blood within the hemline for she had neither the time nor the inclination to wash it. A life lost, nameless and vanished. It was as if she functioned in a place without past or future.
Shimmying across to sit beside him, she took his hand, opening the palm so that she might see the lines in the flame. If he was wary, he did not show it, not in one singular tiny way.
‘There are some here who might read your life by mapping out the junctures and the missing gaps. Juan, my husband, was told he would meet his Maker in remorse and before his time.’ She smiled. ‘At least that came true.
‘Pepe, the gypsy, said that I would travel and become a hidden woman.’ She frowned. ‘He said that I should be the purveyor of all secrets and help those who were oppressed. Juan was not well pleased by this reading. His life ending and mine opening out into another form. I do remember how much I wanted it to be true, though. A separation, the hope of something else, something better.’
His fingers were warm and hard calloused. She wished they might curl around her own and signal more, but they did not.
She couldn’t ever remember talking to another as she had to him, the hours of evening passing in confidences long held close. But it was getting colder and they needed to sleep. It would be tough in the morning with the rain on the mountains and still a thousand feet to climb.
As if sensing her tiredness he let go of her hand and stood.
‘The dugout might be the best place for slumber. At least it is out of the wind.’
But small, she thought, and cosy. There would be no room between them in the close confines of the tree roots. He had already taken his coat off and laid it down on the dirt after shifting clumps of pine needles in. His bag acted as a pillow and a length of wool she recognised from the hacienda completed the bed.
‘I...am not...sure.’
‘We can freeze alone tonight or survive together.’ His breath clouded white in the last light of the burning embers. ‘Tomorrow we will hew out a pathway to the west and take our chances in finding a direction to the coast. It is too dangerous to keep climbing.’
He was right. Already the chills of cold made her stiffen and if the earlier rain returned...
Finding her own blanket, she placed it on top of his. Then, removing her boots, she got in, bundling the other two pieces of clothing from her bag on top of the blankets.
Lucien Howard scooped up more oak leaves and these added another buffer to the layers already in place. Alejandra was surprised by how warm she felt when he burrowed in beside her and spooned around her back.
When she breathed in she could smell him, too, a masculine pungent scent interwoven with the herbs she had used on his back.
Juan had smelt of tobacco and bad wine, but she shook away that memory and concentrated on making this new one. He wasn’t asleep, but he was very still. Listening probably to the far-off sounds and the nearer ones. Always careful. She chanced a question.
‘Are you ever surprised by anyone or anything, Capitán?’
‘I try not to be.’ There was humour in his answer.
‘You sleep lightly, then?’
‘Very.’
Her own lips curled into a smile.
* * *
She finally slept. Lucien was tired of lying so still and even the cold did not dissuade him from rising from the warmth of this makeshift bed and stretching his body out in the darkness.
His neck hurt like hell and he crossed to her sack. The salve was in here somewhere, he knew it was. Perhaps if he slathered himself with the cooling camphor he might gain a little rest.
The rosary caught him by surprise as did the small stone statue of the resurrected Jesus. She carried these with her at all times? He’d often seen her fingering something in her pocket as they walked, her lips moving in a soundless entreaty.
A prayer or a confession. Her husband would be in there somewhere, he imagined, as would her father. Spain, too, would hold a place in her Hail Marys. He looked across at her lying in the bed of pine needles and old blankets. She slept curled around herself, her fist snuggled beneath her neck, smaller again in sleep and much less fierce.
Alejandra, daughter of El Vengador. Brave and different, damaged and surviving. One foot poked out from under the coverings, the darned stockings she had worn to bed sagging around a shapely ankle.
She was thin. Too thin. What would happen to her when he left? She’d have to make her own way home through the coastal route as she had said, but even that was dangerous alone. What was it she had said of the Betancourts? They hated her family more even than they hated the French. He should insist she go back from here and press on by himself, but he knew he would not ask it.
He liked her with him, her voice, her smell, her truths. He’d have been dead on the high hills above A Coruña if any one of the others had found him, an Englishman who was nothing but a nuisance given the departed British forces. But she’d bundled him up and brought him home, the same rosary in her bag cradled against his chest and her fingers warm within his own.
She’d stood as a sentry, too, at the hacienda when danger had threatened, his sickness relegating him to a world of weakness.
Jesus, help me, he prayed into the cold and dark March night, and help her, too, he added as the moon came through the banks of clouds and landed upon them, ungainly moths breaking shadows through the light.
