Chapter Eight

      She was there and not there in the ether of pain and sickness, close beside him in memory and in loss.

      ‘Alejandra?’ Her name. Strangely sounded. There was something wrong with his voice and he was burning up.

      ‘It is me, Luce. It’s Daniel.’ The feel of a cloth pressed so cold it made him shake, first across his brow and then under his arms when they were lifted. Gentle. Patient. Kind. ‘You are back in England now. You are safe. The doctor says that if you rest...’ The words stopped and Lucien opened his eyes to see the familiar pale green orbs of his oldest friend, Daniel Wylde, slashed in worry.

      ‘I...am...dying?’ His question held no emotion within it. He did not care any more. It was too painful and he was too weak, the wounds on his neck making breath come shallow.

      ‘No. Have some of this. It will help.’

      A bitter drink was placed between his lips and his head raised. One sip and then two. Lucien could not remember how he knew this taste, but he did, from somewhere else, some dangerous place, some other time.

      ‘You need to fight, Lucien. If you give up...’ The rest was left unsaid but already the dark was coming, threading inside the day, like crows in a swarm before the sun. Wretched and unexpected.

      ‘You have been in England for six weeks. I brought you up to Montcliffe three days ago. For the air and the springtime. The doctor said that it might help. He stopped the laudanum five days ago.’

      ‘My mother...?’

      ‘Is in Bath visiting her sister. Christine made her take a break from nursing you.’

      Lucien began to remember bits and pieces of things now, his family gathered around and looking down on him as though the next breath he took would be his last one. He remembered a doctor, too, the Howard family physician, a good man and well regarded. He’d been bled more than once. A bandage still lay on his left wrist. He wished he might remove it because it was tight and sore and because for a moment he would like to look at himself as he had been, unbound and well.

      Alejandra.

      The name came through the fog with a stinging dreadful clarity.

      The hacienda and the Spanish countryside tumbled back as did the journey across the Galician Mountains. He shut his eyes against more because he did not wish to relive all that came next.

      ‘I thought you’d been killed, Luce, when you did not arrive on the battlements by the sea to get on to the transports home. Someone said they had seen you fall on the high fields, before Hope’s regiment. I could not get back to look for you because of my leg—’

      Daniel broke off and swallowed before continuing.

      ‘We’d always sworn we’d die together. When you didn’t come I thought...’

      Lucien could only nod because it was too hard to lift his arm and take Daniel’s hand to reassure him and because the truth of battle was nothing as they had expected it to be. So very quick the final end, so brutal and incapacitating. No room in it for premade plans and strategy.

      * * *

      He came awake again later, three candles on the bedside table and a myriad of other bottles beside them.

      Daniel was still there, his collar loosened and eyes tired.

      ‘The doctor has been by again. He will come back in the morning to change your bandages as he has taken a room in the village with his brother. He said that I was to keep you awake and talking for as long as I could tonight and he wants you up more. Better for the drainage, he said. I have the same instructions.’

      ‘You do?’

      ‘I took a bullet through the thigh as we left A Coruña. It seems it is too close to the artery to be safely excised, so I have to strengthen the muscle there instead if I am to have any chance of ever walking again without a limp.’

      ‘Hell.’

      ‘My thoughts exactly. But we are both at least half alive and that is better than many of the others left in the frozen wastes of the Cantabrians.’

      ‘Moore is there, too. A cannonball in Penasqueda. He died well.’

      ‘You heard of that. I wondered. Who saved you, Luce? Who dressed your wounds?’

      ‘The partisans under El Vengador.’ His resolve slipped on the words.

      ‘Then who is Alejandra? You have called for her many times.’

      The slice of pain hit him full on, her name said aloud here in the English night, unexpected.

      ‘She is mine.’

      * * *

      They had come down in the morning across the white swathe of a winter sun, warmer than it had been and clearer. Alejandra walked in front, a lilt in her step.

      ‘You thought what...?’ she said, turning to him, the smile in her eyes lightened by humour. Girlish. Coquettish even.

      ‘I thought you would be regretful in the morning.’

      ‘Of making love?’

      ‘With a stranger. With me. So soon...’

      The more he said the worse it sounded. He was a man who had always been careful with his words and yet here they fell from his mouth unpractised and gauche. Alejandra made him incautious. It was a great surprise that.

      She waited until he had reached her and simply placed her arms about his neck.

      ‘Kiss me again and tell me we are strangers, Capitán.’

      And he did, his lips on hers even before he had time to question the wisdom of such a capitulation here in the middle of the morning. She tasted like hope and home. And of something else entirely.

      Tristesse.

      The French word for sadness came from nowhere, bathed in its own truth, but it was too soon to pay good mind to it and too late to want it different.

      ‘Only now, Lucien,’ she whispered. ‘I know it is all that each of us can promise, but it is enough.’

      He looked around, his meaning plain, and she took his hand and led him off the track and into a dense planting of aloes.

      ‘It will have to be quick. I am not sure how safe...’

      He didn’t let her finish, his fingers at her belt and the trousers down. His own fall was loosened in the next seconds and he lifted her on to his erection, easily, filling her warmth and