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.
He liked listening to her voice and he liked watching her, the exploits of the eccentric and hapless Knight of La Mancha bringing deep dimples to both of her cheeks. She used her free hand a lot, too, he saw, in exclamation and in emphasis, and when the edge of her jacket dipped he saw a number of white scars drawn across the dark blue of her blood line at her wrist.
As she finished the book she snapped the covers together and leant back against the wide leather chair, watching him. ‘The pen is the language of the soul, would you not agree, Capitán?’
He could not help but nod. ‘Cervantes, as a soldier, was seized for five years. All good fodder for his captive’s tale, I suppose.’
‘I did not know that.’
‘Perhaps that is where he first conjured up the madness of his hero. The uncertainty of captivity forces questions and makes one re-evaluate priorities.’
‘Is it thus with you?’
‘Indeed. A prisoner always wonders whether today is the day he holds no further use alive to those who keep him bound.’
‘You are not a prisoner. You are here because you are sick. Too sick to move.’
‘My door is locked, Alejandra. From the outside.’
That disconcerted her, a frown appearing on her brow as she glanced away. ‘Things are not always as they seem,’ she returned and stood. ‘My father isn’t a man who would kill you for no reason at all.’
‘Is expedience enough of a reason? Or plain simple frustration? He wants me gone. I am a nuisance he wishes he did not have.’ Lifting his hand, he watched it shake. Violently.
‘Then get better, damn you.’ Her words were threaded with the force of anger. ‘If you can walk to the door, you can get to the porch. And if you can manage that, then you can go further and further again. Then you can leave.’
In answer he reached for the Bible by his bed and handed it to her. ‘Like this man did?’
Puzzled, she opened the book to the page indicated by the plaited golden thread of a bookmark.
Help me. I forgive you.
Written shakily in charcoal, the dust of it blurred in time and use and mirrored on the opposite page. When her eyes went to the lines etched in the whitewash beneath the window on the opposite wall Lucien knew exactly what the marks represented.
‘He was a prisoner in this room, too?’
She crossed herself, her face frozen in pain and shock and deathly white.
‘You know nothing, Capitán. Nothing at all. And if you ever mention this to my father even once, he will kill you and I won’t be able to stop him.’
‘You would try?’
The air about them stilled into silence, the dust motes from the old fabric on the Bible twirling in the light, a moment caught for ever. And he fell into the green of her unease without resistance, like a moth might to flame in the darkest of nights.
She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but it was not that which drew him. It was her strength of emotion, the anger in her the same as that in him. She balanced books and a blade with an equal dexterity, the secrets in her eyes wound into both sadness and knowledge.
They were knights tilting at windmills in the greater pageant of a Continental war, the small hope of believing they might make a difference lost under the larger one of nationalistic madness.
Spain. France. England.
For the first time in his life Lucien questioned the wisdom of soldiering and the consequences of battle, for them all, and came up wanting.
Alejandra had known the man who had written this message, he was sure of it, and it had shocked her. The pulse in her throat was still heightened as she licked her lips against the dryness of fear.
He watched as she ripped the page from the Bible before giving the tome back to him, tearing the age-thin paper into small pieces and pocketing them.
The weight of the book in his fist was heavy as she turned and left the room.
God.
