Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages. Sophia James
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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 others will not be so lenient of your conjectures were you to utter them carelessly and everybody here would protect me with their life.’
He nodded and looked away from the uneasy depths of green.
‘I take it, then, that you are the daughter of this house.’ He had changed his accent now into a courtly High Castilian and saw her stiffen, but she did not answer and was gone before he could say another word.
* * *
Who the hell was he, this stranger with the pale blue eyes that saw everything, his hair like spun gold silk and a body marked by war?
No simple soldier, that much was certain. The Light Dragoons had fought with Paget out of San Cristobel and yet he had been found east of Piedralonga, a good two miles away under Hope’s jurisdiction. She frowned in uncertainty.
Captain Howard had spoken in the León dialect and then in the Castilian, easily switching. A changeling who could be dangerous to them all and it was she who had brought him here. She should say something of the worrying contradictions to her father and the others. She should order him removed and left far from the hacienda to fend for himself. But instead...
Instead she walked to the windows of her room and looked out across the darkness to the sea beyond. There was something about this capitán that she recognised in herself. An interloper isolated from others and surrounded by danger. He did not show fear, either, for when she had taken the air from his windpipe with her hands he had not fought her. But waited. As if he had known she would let go.
Cursing, she pulled the shutters in closed against the night.
* * *
Lucien lay awake and listened. To the gentle swish of a servant’s skirt and then the harder steps of someone dousing the lights outside. A corridor by the sounds of it and open to the sea. When his rescuer passed without he had smelt the salt and heard the waves crashing against the shore. Three miles she had said to A Coruña and yet here the sea was closer, a mile at the most and less if the wind drew from the north as it had done three days ago. Now the breeze was lighter for there was no sound at all against the wood of the shutters. Heavy locks pulled the coverings together in three places and with a patina of age Lucien knew these to be old bindings. To one side of the thick lintels of double-sashed windows he saw scratches in the limewash over stone, lines carefully kept in groups. Days of the week? Hours of a day? Months of a year? He could not quite make them out from this distance.
Why had these been left there? A servant could have been ordered to cover them in the matter of a few moments; a quick swish of thick plaster and they would have been gone.
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