Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages: Marriage Made in Rebellion / Marriage Made in Hope. Sophia James

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.

      A Bible sat on a small wooden table next to his bed under an ornate golden cross and beside a bronze statue of Jesus with his crown of thorns.

      Catholic and devout.

      Lucien felt akin to the battered Christ, as his neck ached and sharp pains raked up his back. The sword wounds from the French as he had tried to ride in behind the ranks of General Hope. He was hot now, the pins and needles of fever in his hands, and his front tooth ached badly, but he was too tired to bring his arm up enough to touch the damage. He wished the thin girl would come back to give him some more water and sit near him, but only the silence held court.

      * * *

      She returned in the morning, before the silver dawn had changed to day, and this time she brought others.

      The man beside her was nearing fifty, Lucien imagined, a big man wearing the flaring scarlet-and-light-blue jacket of an Estramaduran hussar. Two younger men accompanied him.

      ‘I am Señor Enrique Fernandez y Castro, otherwise known as El Vengador, Capitán. It seems you have heard of me?’

      Lucien sized up the hard dark eyes and the generous moustache of the guerrilla leader. A man of consequence in these parts and feared because of it.