Sophia James - Regency Surrender - Passionate Marriages

When he saw she was interested he continued.

‘It was hot, too, mid-July and no breeze, the greasy smell of the sea in the air and a good number of ships in. He could have killed me twenty times or more, but he didn’t. Instead he showed me how to live.’

‘You fight like my father.’

‘Is that a compliment?’

She shook away his question with a frown.

* * *

She couldn’t take him home now, not with Manolo and Adan dead and a father who would place the blame on the Englishman’s presence for it and kill him. The horror of their deaths hit her anew as a great wave of grief broke inside.

No. She would have to take him on over the Galician Mountains and down into Pontevedra in the hope that Adan’s family might help them. A longer walk and one she had done only a few times before and always under guidance. Her whole body ached with the grief of more death, so senseless and quick.

She was on edge, too. The way Lucien Howard had slit the throats of those who had attacked them was so gracefully brutal and deceptively practised that she was wary. A man like this would make a dangerous enemy and alone with him she would need to be careful.

Still, she could not just leave him. Another thought occurred. He wore the sickness of exhaustion on his face and she noticed blood seeping again through the fabric of his jacket. From the wound on his neck, she supposed, the one that had not yet healed.

An Englishman alone in Spain would have no chance of escaping through any of the harbours on the east side of A Coruña. People here would be naturally suspicious, the scourge of the French having left a residual hatred for anyone new and different.

He spoke the language well, she would give him that, but his eyes were the light blue of a foreigner and the dye in his hair was already weakening. When she noticed the pale gold in the roots of his parting that small false truth of him firmed up resolve.

Rifling in her bag, she drew out the maps she had found concealed under the last blanket of his dead horse.

‘These are yours.’

He wiped his hands against his jacket before he reached out and took the offered documents, spreading the pages wide to ascertain they were all there.

‘I thought them lost.’ Puzzlement lay on his brow.

‘They were trapped beneath your horse and I saw them as we lifted it off you. Did you draw them?’

‘Partly. I had a group of guides and the information was collated over several months of travel. Maps like this have enormous value.’

‘To those who would pillage Spain? The secrets of the mountains exposed to those who would want to rape it more quickly.’

‘Or protect it.’

She laughed then because she could not help it. Once, she might have believed in the noble pursuits of soldiers. ‘Good or bad? There is a fine line between each, Capitán. People die here because of armies. Innocent people, and a land in winter has a limit on the succour it can manage to harvest before starvation settles in. In the north we have reached that limit. Another season of battle and there will be nothing left in Galicia save for the freedom to starve.’

She had not meant to say as much, to give a man as clever as the one before her the true slant of her opinion. But she had ceased many months ago to believe in the easy spoils of war or the glory in it.

‘Liberty and safety always come at a price, I’ll give you that.’ His eyes were threaded with weariness.

‘And today Adan and Manolo paid for it dearly. The French will come and then they will go because there is no way they can stay here and live and people like the Betancourts will be swallowed up by bitterness and hate until there is nothing left of them, either. That, Capitán, is the true cost of valour. No one ever wins. Not for ever. Not even for a little while.’

‘But is not simply accepting subjugation the true meaning of surrender?’ The planes on his cheeks held the light and his eyelashes were the darkest of blacks against the pale of his skin.

Once, she had thought the same, Alejandra conceded. Once, before her mother and her husband and friends had all been consigned to the afterlife she might have imagined resistance to be worth it, to be honourable, even, and right. But no more. Her heart had been lost to the other side of caring months and months ago, before Juan even, before he had betrayed her and her father for the heady lure of gold and power.

A mishmash of promises had left her grappling for even one honest hope for Spain. All she wished for was peace and a rest from the war and blood that surrounded them. The face of Adan surprised by his death came to mind and she turned it away, unable to bear the image. It could have so easily been her. Or Lucien Howard. It could have been them tonight lying stiff on the cold earth with the pine needles across their faces.

‘England is a soft country, Capitán, and far from battle. If I were a woman of Britain, I should never leave it.’

‘Come with me, then, when I go. You could be safe there.’

She was intrigued by his words. ‘A large promise, señor. Too large to believe in, I am afraid, and if it is a choice between battle here or homesickness there, then I think I should always choose the former.’

Unexpectedly he reached out and took her hand and she wished that her nails had been cleaner or her skin softer. Stupid foolish wishes here out in the mountains with the scent of Adan’s and Manolo’s blood between them and a hundred hard miles to go.

‘I appreciate that you are helping me to get home.’ His words were quiet and for the first time she could hear a hint of foreignness within them.

It had been so long since someone had touched her with gratitude and kindness that she was overcome with a kind of dizzying unbalance. For a second she wanted to wind her fingers into his strength and follow him to England. The absurdity of that thought made her pull away and place a good distance between them.

‘I would have done it for anyone.’ But she knew it was not true, that small dishonesty. Right from the first second of seeing Lucien Howard on the battlefield above A Coruña, his long pale hair pinked in blood, she had felt a...sameness, a connection. Unexplainable. Unsettling.

The edges of his lips turned up into humour as he pushed a length of hair away from his eyes.

He held his maps in the other hand with a careful deliberateness and scanned the trees behind. A noise had caught his attention, perhaps, or a bird frightened from its perch. They were too high up for any true danger and the nights without cover were cold. Already the snowdrifts could be seen and if it rained again the ice would form. His breath clouded with the condensation and she felt a momentary panic about exposure. If it darkened and they could not find shelter...

‘We have at least five hours before the night settles.’ She wondered how he did that, reading her mind without warning and taking the words she was about to say.

A guide, he had said, for General Moore. Penning maps and alone before the main body of the English army as it ran before the worst storm in decades across the Cantabrian Mountains. Even looking at him she could see he fitted into this landscape with an astounding ease and mastery; a chameleon, hurt and exhausted, but as dangerous as they came.

He had bent to lift a dried acorn now, peeling off the husks to let them blow in the breeze. ‘’Tis nor-nor-west. Another day and there will be heavier rain in it. Sleet, too, if the temperatures keep dropping. Do you know the way?’

Alejandra did not answer. If she got her bearings wrong, then they were both dead. There was very little civilisation between here and Pontevedra and already she was shaking.

Not all from cold, either, she thought to herself. Anger was a part of it, too, that she should allow her worry for this man to override sense.