Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages. Sophia James

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      ‘And back,’ he continued and smiled.

      Unexpectedly she did, too, green eyes dancing with humour and the dimples in both cheeks deep.

      He imagined her in a ballroom in London, hair dressed and well-clothed. Red, he thought. The colour of her gown would need to be bold. She would be unmatched.

      ‘If you walk that far, Ingles, I will bring you a bottle of the best aguardiente de orujo.’

      ‘Firewater?’ he returned. ‘I have heard of this but have not tried it.’

      ‘Drink too much and the next day you will be in bed till the sundown, especially if you are not used to the strength of it. But drink just enough and the power fills you.’

      ‘Would you join me in the celebration?’

      She tipped her head up and looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Perhaps.’

      * * *

      Lucien spent the evening on the floor of his room exercising and trying to get some strength into his upper body. He could feel the muscles remembering what they had once been like, but he was a couple of stone lighter with his sickness and the shaking that overtook him after heavy exertion was more than frustrating.

      So he lay there on the polished tiled floor and watched the ceiling whilst his heart rate slowed and the anger cooled. Just two months ago he could have so easily managed all that he now could not.

      He cleared his mind and imagined the walk from the trees to the outhouse and back. He’d walk past the first olive tree and then on to the sheltered path with lavender on each edge. The hedges were clipped there and could not be used for balance and after that there were three steps that came up to the covered porch. Two hundred yards there and another two hundred back and flat save for the stairs.

      Of course he could manage such a distance. He only had to believe it.

      The marks drawn into the plaster beneath the windows caught his attention again. Closer up he could see they formed a pattern different from the one he had first thought.

      There were many more indents than he had originally imagined, smaller scrawlings caught in between the larger strokes. Twenty-nine. Thirty-one. Fifteen. Days of the months, perhaps? His mind quickly ran across the year. February and March was a sequence that worked and 1808 had been a leap year. But why would anybody keep such a track of time?

      A noise through the inside wall then also caught his attention, quiet and muffled. Plainly it was the sound of someone crying and he knew without a doubt that it was Alejandra. Her room was next to his, the thickness of a stone block away.

      Rising, he stood and tipped his head to the stone. One moment turned into two and then there was silence. It was as if on the other side of the wall she knew he was there, too, listening and knowing. He barely allowed himself breath.

      * * *

      She could feel him there, a foot away through the plaster and stone, knew that he stood where she had stood for all of the months at the end of Juan’s life; he a prisoner of her father’s, a man who had betrayed the cause.

      She could not save Captain Lucien Howard should Papa decide that he was expendable, so she needed to take him out of here to the west. The evening light drew in on itself, watchful, the last bird calls and then the quiet. Juan had lost his speech and his left arm, but he had lingered for two of the months of winter and into the first weeks of spring. She had prayed each day that it would be the end and marked the wall when it was not.

      Her marks were still there, the indents of time drawn into the plaster, one next to the other near the base of the wall, and left there when he passed away as a message and a warning.

      Betray El Vengador and no one is safe, not even the one married to his only daughter. Juan had died with a rosary in his hands. Her father had, at least, allowed him that.

      A year ago now, before the worst of the war. She wondered how many more men would be gone by the same time next year and, crossing her room, took out the maps of the northern mountains that Lucien Howard had upon him when he was captured. Precise and detailed. With such drawings the passage through the Cantabrians for a marauding army would be an easy thing to follow. She wondered why the French had not thought to search his saddlebags and take the treasure after leaving him for dead on the field.

      Probably the rush of war had allowed the mistake. Not torture, but battle. Certainly the swords drawn against the Englishman had not been carefully administered, but made in the hurried flurry of panic.

      She ought to deliver these maps into the hands of her father, but something stopped her. Papa did not need information to make his killings easier, no matter what she thought of the French. These were English maps, any military advantage gained belonged to them. On the road west she would give them back to the captain to take home and say nothing of them to her father. Perhaps they might be some recompense for Lucien Howard coming into Spain with an army that had been far too small and an apology, too, for his substantial injuries.

      She felt tired out from her worrying, shattered by her father’s reactions to the Englishman. She had hardly slept in weeks for the dread of finding him with his throat cut or simply not there when she hovered outside his chamber just to see that he still breathed.

      She did not want to be this person, this worrier. But no matter how the day started and how many hours she could stretch it out between making sure he was neither dead nor gone, she also couldn’t truly relax until the continued health and welfare of Captain Lucien Howard had been established.

      A knock on the door had her standing very still and she glanced at herself in the mirror opposite. She looked as if she had been crying, her eyes red and swollen. The knock came again.

      ‘Who is it?’ Her tone was strong.

      ‘Your father, Alejandra. Can I come in?’

      Concealing the maps in a drawer, she wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket and rubbed her cheeks. If the skin there was a little redder, her eyes would not show up quite so much. Then she flicked the lock.

      Enrique Fernandez y Castro strode in and shut the door behind him. Slowly. She knew the exact second he recognised she had been upset.

      ‘If your mother were here...’ he began, but she shook that train of thought away and he remained silent.

      Rosalie Santo Domingo y Giminez stood between them in memory and sometimes this was the only thing they still had in common, their love for a woman who had been good and brave and was gone. Both of them had dealt with her death in different ways, her father with his anger and his wars and her with a sense of distance that sometimes threatened to overcome her completely. But they seldom spoke of Rosalie now. To lessen the anguish, she surmised, and to try to survive life with the centre of their world missing.

      ‘The English earl is gaining his strength back.’ This was not phrased as a question. ‘I have heard he is a man of intellect and intuition. What do you make of him?’

      ‘A good man, I think, Papa. A man who might do your bidding in London well if you let him.’

      ‘He could be dangerous. To you on the way west. Others could take him.’

      Alejandra knew enough of her father СКАЧАТЬ