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
