one all the next morning as they walked west.
Lucien would have taken her hand if he thought she’d have allowed it, but he did not make the suggestion and she did not ask for any help. Rather they picked their way down, a slow and tedious process, the rain around midday making it worse.
If he had been alone, he would have stopped, simply dug into the hillside and waited for better conditions.
But Alejandra kept on going, a gnarled stick in her hand to aid in balance and a grim look across her face. She stood still often now, to listen and watch, the frown between her eyes deep.
‘Are you expecting someone?’ He asked the question finally because it was so obvious that she was. Tipping his head out of the northerly wind, he tried to gain the full quotient of sound.
‘I hope not. But we are close here to the lands of the Betancourts.’
‘And the fracas yesterday will have set them after us yet again?’
‘That, too.’ This time she smiled and all Lucien could think of was how fragile she looked against the backdrop of craggy mountains and steep pathways. Gone was the girl from the hacienda who had dared and defied him, the gleam of challenge egging him on and dismissing any weaker misgivings he might have felt with his neck and back on fire and a fever raging. This woman could have held each and every dainty beauty in the English court to ransom, with her dimples and her high cheekbones and the velvet green of her eyes. Beautiful she might be, but there was so much more than just that.
Men have loved me, she had said. Many men, she had qualified, and he could well believe in such a truth. Angry at his ruminations, he spoke more harshly than he meant to.
‘Surely they know it was your father who shot your husband?’
‘Well, Capitán, it was not quite that simple,’ she replied and turned away, the flush of skin at her nape telling.
‘It was you?’
‘Yes.’ One word barked against silence, echoing back in a series of sounds. ‘But when he came back from the brink of death it was Papa who made certain he should not survive it.’
‘Repayment for his acts of brutality as a husband?’
‘You understand too much, Capitán. No wonder Moore named you as his spy.’
He ignored that and delved into the other unsaid. ‘But someone else knew that it was you who had fired the first shot?’
‘In a land at war there are ears and eyes everywhere. On that day it was a cousin of Juan’s, a priest, who gave word of my violence. No one was inclined to disbelieve a man of God, you understand, even if what he said was questionable. I was younger and small against the hulk of my husband and he was well lauded for his prowess with both gun and knife.’
‘A lucky shot, then?’
She turned at that to look at him straight and her glance was not soft at all. ‘He was practised, but I am better. The shot went exactly where I had intended it.’
‘Good for you.’
A second’s puzzlement was replaced by an emotion that he could only describe as relief. The rosary was out, too, he saw it in her hands, the beads slipping through her fingers in a counted liturgy.
‘You have killed people before, too, Capitán?’
‘Many times.’
‘Did it ever become easier?’
‘No.’ Such a truth came with surprising honesty and one he had not thought of much before.
‘“And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death.” Leviticus, Chapter Twenty-Four, Verse Seventeen.’ Her voice shook.
‘You know the Bible by heart?’
‘Just the parts in it that pertain to me.’
‘You truly think that God in his wisdom would punish you for fighting back?’
‘He was my husband. We were married in the Lord’s house.’
‘He was a brute and any God worth his salt would not say otherwise.’
She crossed herself at the blasphemy as he went on.
‘Looking too far back can be as dangerous as looking too far forward in life. In my experience it is best to understand this moment, this hour, this day and live it.’
‘It’s what got you through, then? Such a belief?’
‘I’m a soldier. If I made it my mantra not to kill the enemy, I would have been dead long before we left the safety of Mondego Bay, near Lisboa. No, what gets me through is knowing who I am and what I stand for.’
‘England?’
He laughed. ‘Much more than that, I hope.’
He looked across at the land spread out before him, its valleys and its peaks, its beauty and its danger. ‘Democracy and the chance of freedom might be a closer guess. Spain is in your blood as England is in mine, yet who can say what draws us to fight to the death for them? Is it the soil or the air or the colours of home?’ Picking up a clump of leaves, he let them run through his fingers, where they caught the rising wind and spun unstopped across the edge of the pathway into nothingness.
‘We are like these pine needles, small in the scheme of things, but together...’ His hand now lay against the trunk of the giant tree on the side of the track, its roots binding what little was left of the soil into a steady platform.
* * *
‘Together there is strength?’ Alejandra understood him exactly. This war was not about Juan or her father or her. It was about democracy and choice and other things worth the blood that spilled into death to defend such freedoms. And was not personal liberty the base stone of it all? Papa had never taken the time to understand this, the residual guilt of her mother’s murder overriding everything and allowing only the bitterness to survive.
The waste of it made her stumble, but a strong hand reached out.
‘Careful. We are high up and the edge is close.’
She wound her fingers through his and kept them there, wishing she might move every part of her body against his to feel the honour within him. Could life be like this, she thought, could one person be simply lost in the goodness of the other for ever, not knowing where one began and the other ended?
This was a kind of music and the sort that took your breath and held it there around your heart with an ache of heaviness and disbelief. Hope lay in the knowledge of a man who had not given up his integrity despite every hardship.
Such foolish longings made her frown. Her clothes were dirty and the knife that she carried in the sleeve of her jacket was sharp. This was who she was. A woman honed by war and loss and lessened by marriage and regret; a woman whose truths had long since been shaved away by the difficulty of living from one day to the next.
He could only be disappointed in her, should he understand the parts that made her whole. Carefully
