Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages. Sophia James

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СКАЧАТЬ away, Ingles, if you will,’ she told him. ‘I most certainly would. Your friends have been evacuated by way of the sea and the French are in charge of the township itself, so nobody at all should hear you.’

      My God, how tired she was of iron wills and masculine stoicism. Death was a for ever thing and if men taking their last breaths in a land far from their own could not weep for the sacrifice, then who else should?

      Not her. Not her father. Not the officers safe with their horses on the transports home across a wild and stormy Biscay Bay. Other steeds roamed the streets of A Coruña, looking for succour, their more numerous and unluckier counterparts dead beneath the cliffs overhanging the beach, throats cut in clumsy acts of kindness.

      Better dead than at the mercy of the enemy. Once she might have even believed that truism. Now she failed to trust in anything or anyone. The fury within alarmed her at times, but mostly she did not think on it. Adan and Bartolomeu had joined her now, their canvas stretcher pulled in.

      ‘You want us to take him back?’

      She nodded. ‘Careful how you lift him.’

      As Tomeu crouched down he scratched at a muddied epaulette. ‘He’s a capitán.’ The tinged gold was undeniable and her heart sank. Her father had begun to be uncertain of a Spanish triumph and was distancing himself from the politics of the region. An officer would be less welcome than a simple soldier to Enrique. More complex. Harder to explain.

      ‘Then we need to make sure he recovers to fight again for our cause.’

      For some reason the man before her was beginning to mean something. A portent to victory or a prophecy of failure? She could not tell. All she did know was that the damaged fingers of his left hand had curled into her own, seeking comfort, and that despite all intentions to do otherwise she held them close, trying to bring warmth to his freezing skin.

      He groaned again when they rolled him on to the canvas and she got the first glimpse of the wounds on his upper back, the fabric of his shirt shredded into slivers and the flesh hanging off him between it.

      More than one sword had been used, she thought, and there had been a good deal of hatred in the action. The blood loss was making him shake, so she shrugged off her woollen poncho and laid it across him, tucking it in beneath his chin.

      Tomeu looked up with a frown. ‘Why bother? He will die anyway.’ The hard words of truth that she did not want, though there was anger in his tone, too. ‘They come and they go. In the end it’s all the same. Death eats them up.’

      ‘Padre Nuestro que estás en los cielos...’ She recited the Lord’s Prayer beneath her breath and draped the ornate rosary across him in protection as they started for home.

      * * *

      The same lad on the fields was beside him again, sitting asleep on a chair, a hat pulled down over his face. Lucien shook his head against the chills that were consuming him and wondered where the hell he was. Not on the battlefields, not on the transports home, either, and this certainly was not hell given the crisp cotton sheets and warm woollen blanket.

      Tipping his head, he tried to listen to the cadence of someone speaking far away outside. Spanish. He was certain of it. The heavy beams and whitewashed walls told him this house was also somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula and that whoever owned it was more than wealthy.

      His eyes flicked back to the lad. Young. Thin. A working boy. Lucien could not quite understand what he would be doing here. Why was he not labouring somewhere or helping with one of the many things that would need attention on a large and busy hacienda? What master would allow him simply to sit in a sickroom whiling away the hours?

      His glance caught the skin of an ankle above a weathered and scuffed boot, though at that very moment deep green eyes opened, a look of interest within them.

      ‘You are awake?’

      A dialect of León, but with an inflection that he didn’t recognise.

      ‘Where am I?’ He answered in the same way and saw surprise on the lad’s brow.

      ‘Safe.’ Uttered after a few seconds of thought.

      ‘How long...here?’

      ‘Three days. You were found on the battlefield above A Coruña the morning after the English had departed by way of the sea.’

      ‘And the French?’

      ‘Most assuredly are enjoying the spoils of war. Soult has come into the town with his army under Napoleon’s orders, I suppose. There are many of them.’

      ‘God.’

      At that the lad crossed himself, the small movement caught by the candlelight a direct result of his profanity.

      ‘Who are you?’ This question was almost whispered.

      ‘Captain Howard of the Eighteenth Light Dragoons. Do you have any news of the English general Sir John Moore?’

      ‘They buried him at night on the high ground close to the ramparts of the Citadel. It is told he died well with his officers around him. A cannon shot to the chest.’

      Pain laced through Lucien. ‘How do you know this?’

      ‘This is our land, Capitán. The town is situated less than three miles from where we are and there is little that happens in the region that we are not aware of.’

      ‘We.’

      The silence was telling.

      ‘You are part of the guerrilla movement? One of El Vengador’s minions? This is his area of jurisdiction, is it not?’

      The boy ignored that and gave a question of his own. ‘Where did you learn your Spanish?’

      ‘Five months in Spain brings its rewards.’

      ‘But not such fluency.’ The inflection of disbelief was audible.

      ‘I listen well.’

      In the shadows of a slender throat Lucien saw the pulse quicken and a hand curl to a fist. A broken nail and the remains of a wound across the thumb. Old injuries. Fragile fingers. Delicate. Tentative. Left-handed. There was always so much to learn from the small movements.

      She was scared of him.

      The pronoun leapt into a life of its own. It was the ankles, he was to think later, and the utter thinness of her arms.

      ‘Who are you, señorita?’

      She stood at that, widening one palm across the skin on his neck and pressing down. ‘If you say one word of these thoughts to anyone else, you will be dead, desconocido, before you have the chance to finish your sentence. Do you understand?’

      He looked around. The door was closed and the walls were thick. ‘You did not...save my life...to kill me...now.’

      He hoped he was right, because there was no more breath left. When she let him go he hated the relief he felt as air filled his lungs. To care so much about living made him vulnerable.

      ‘The СКАЧАТЬ