by Wilma Counts
Having watered the horses, then loosely hobbled them in grass, Whitten joined them. “How’s she doing?”
“Still out,” Gordon said. “She needs rest and, judging by those clouds building in the west, she’s going to need shelter. We all will.”
Zachary glanced at the sky and said, “It’s some distance away yet. And we have to meet the others first. Maybe we can find a shepherd’s hut. God knows we’ve seen enough of them when we were not looking for one.”
They spread their bedrolls, ate some more bread and cheese and proceeded to rest themselves as well as their horses for a couple of hours. Zachary lay with his head near the girl’s in case she should wake in a panic. With the typical soldier’s ability to rest when opportunity presented itself, he slept. When he awoke, he found her staring at him, very alert to her surroundings.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“You fainted.”
“I never faint.”
“You fainted.” He got to his feet and called to the others, “All right, lads. Up and about.”
The other two groaned, but followed suit. Whitten and Zachary saw to the animals while Gordon fashioned a sling for their patient’s arm. She was obviously still woozy; when she tried to stand, she quickly sat back down.
“Give me a moment,” she said.
“Never mind,” Zachary told her, leading his horse near. “You’ll ride with me. Whitten will lead your pony.”
She looked as though she wanted to protest, but ignoring that possibility, he lifted her onto his saddle and climbed on behind her. His saddlebags and bedroll were added to hers on the pony.
“Ready?” he asked in English, and, trying not to jar her injury, awkwardly took up the reins in front of her with one hand. At first she tried to hold herself stiffly away from him, but gradually he sensed that she was dozing off. Her body slumped against his and he wrapped one arm about her waist to keep her in the saddle. He found himself feeling inordinately protective.
Three hours later, they reached the rest of the Rangers at the rendezvous point.
“You’re late,” Adam Richardson called, then his eyes widened at seeing the fourth member of the arriving party. “Well, I’ll be—Trust our fearless leader to find a damsel in distress.”
Zachary glared at him. “That storm is coming on fast. I don’t suppose you stalwart fellows who’ve been scouting this area for three days might have stumbled upon some place we might wait it out?”
His friends looked thoughtful, then Charlie O’Brien said, “Yeh. There’s one o’ them stone huts ’bout half an hour that way.” He pointed north.
“Mount up and lead on,” Zachary ordered. “We’ll do a proper introduction when we get there.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” they chorused in slightly mocking tones.
It was late in the afternoon, the wind was blowing hard, and the first drops of rain were falling by the time they found the hut. Over her protests, Zachary settled Miss Ramirez on a blanket on the dirt floor, then went out to help with the animals. Soon, eight slightly damp people—along with saddles, saddlebags, packs, and bedrolls—were crowded into a living space meant to accommodate two.
“At least it’s out of the rain,” someone said as the storm unleashed its fury.
“And the wind,” another offered.
The hut sported no usable furniture; a chair with a leg missing and a few pieces of wood lay about. It smelled of mold and rodents. The door hung at a peculiar angle on its one remaining leather hinge; there were no windows and Zachary thought the fireplace might produce more smoke than warmth. The men sat on the bare floor or on their saddles, staring in the dim light at the female in their midst. Zachary thought she looked as though she were terrified, but bravely fighting not to show her fear. He wondered if she had heard about the way the British army had gone berserk with looting and raping when they finally took Badajoz. He moved to sit next to her.
“Relax. You are safe,” he told her in Spanish, then addressed the men. “Gentlemen, may I present Señorita Elena Ramirez?”
“Who?” Richardson asked in a wondering voice.
Owen Penryn whistled. “La Belle Diable. The beautiful devil. That’s what the frogs call her.”
Zachary looked at her to see her blushing.
“Well, she is a beauty,” Richardson said appreciatively.
Penryn went on. “She and her brother and their gang have been playing bloody hell with French couriers and supply lines for months. Uh, sorry, miss.”
Her blush had deepened and Zachary was sure she understood the gist of this conversation in English, if not every word.
“The bounty on their heads is as great as the one on ours,” Richardson observed. This idea sobered them all for a moment.
Zachary turned to her and said in Spanish, “I’m sure you won’t remember all these names, but allow me to present these boorish fellows to you anyway.” He proceeded to point out and name each of them. She smiled and repeated the names as they were given to her, stumbling over the unfamiliar English syllables. She seemed pleased when McIntyre addressed her in her own language.
Zachary was glad to see her relax as the conversation veered away from her, but he also noted that she kept the saddlebag containing her pistol near her, even using it as a pillow when she slept.
The storm raged on, offering claps of thunder and hailstones the size of large peas at one point, then settling into a steady rain. As they ate sparingly of their remaining food, Zachary thought they’d have to find a goat or a couple of rabbits tomorrow.
Richardson sat near the doorway, sketching; Penryn and Harrelson played piquet with a well-worn deck of cards. When the sun set in some uncloudy part of the world, and it became very dark in the hut, two of them rummaged in their bags and produced stubs of two candles. McIntyre had moved near the girl and engaged her in seemingly idle conversation. Zachary listened, occasionally offering a question or comment. He was always amazed at the information McIntyre was able to extract when he interviewed anyone. Her father was a colonel in the Spanish army serving the government in exile in Cadiz; she and her brother—both of whom had been away at school—joined the partisans after the French kidnapped, tortured, and murdered their mother and two younger siblings; her brother had taken over the group when their leader was killed.
Still it rained.
Zachary assigned guards to serve two-hour shifts and the rest of them slept, lined up in the tight space like logs tied in a raft. He had Gordon check Elena’s bandages, then he insisted the girl lie between him and McIntyre, partly to preserve body warmth and partly because he did not fully trust her. Stories abounded of explorers betrayed by supposedly friendly partisans.
It was well after midnight when the rain let up. Zachary woke and lay still, thinking it was too quiet. The guard was not near the door. Probably out checking on the horses. He heard an owl hoot and felt the girl stiffen next to him. She remained tense. He feigned sleep.
Suddenly, a human figure loomed in the gray rectangle of the doorway.
“Elena!” the man yelled.
Even in the faint predawn light, Zachary saw that the newcomer held a pistol and there were two other figures behind him, probably equally armed.
CHAPTER 11
Acting instinctively, Zachary jerked her saddlebag from beneath her head and drew his own always loaded weapon as he scrambled to his feet. He grabbed her good arm and pulled her close as he positioned the gun under her chin and drew back the hammer.
“Miguel!” the girl cried. “No dispares! No dispares!” Don’t shoot.
The others were all awake now, probably surreptitiously reaching for weapons. Zachary knew his men would not be taken without a fight.
The hut faced east and the sun was rising rapidly. Zachary watched Miguel’s face carefully as the man took in the situation.
“We seem to have a stand-off here,” Zachary said in Spanish, his tone deliberately conversational.
The man nodded, but did not lower his w
eapon. “Elena?” His voice was controlled, but Zachary was sure his fear for his sister was very real.
“Inglés, Miguel. They are English. Put away the weapons.”
She spoke in rapid Spanish, but she seemed calm. Zachary could not help but admire her cool handling of the situation. He watched the information register with the man in the doorway.
“Inglés?” he asked.
“Yes. English,” she said.
“But you are hurt. Who did this to you?”
“The French,” she said hastily. “They killed Fernando, but we got the courier and the message he carried. Two of them escaped. Jorge took me to Father Lorenzo. These English helped me. Now put the gun away.”
Finally, the man in the doorway lowered his weapon and, lowering his as well, Zachary said to his own people, “It’s all right, fellows. No shoot-out today.”
There was a collective sigh of relief.
In the immediate aftermath, Ramirez apologized to O’Brien, the morning’s guard who had been knocked unconscious when he’d gone to check on the horses. Miguel sat with his arm around his sister.
“We thought you were French,” he explained.
“Why?” Zachary asked.
“We went to Segueros. We knew Elena would get that dispatch to Father Lorenzo. But when we got there, Father Lorenzo was dead and she was gone.”
Zachary heard Elena’s sharp intake of breath and saw her quickly make the sign of the cross.
Miguel went on. “The neighbors knew nothing of Father Lorenzo’s guest—only that French soldiers had broken into his cottage. I knew the prints of Elena’s pony. Once we picked up those prints, it was not too difficult for us to follow you—until the storm wiped out all signs of traffic.” He grinned, a flash of white teeth against several days’ growth of a very black beard. “We thought you’d look for shelter. We’ve been to every hut in a radius of fifteen kilometers or more. No easy task with the storm and darkness.”
Zachary nodded sympathetically, then looked up at a sharp gasp from McIntyre, who had again this morning taken up his task of decoding the message Zachary had received from the priest.
“I’ve got it!” McIntyre said. “The peer needs to see this right away. Soult is on the move.”
The peer of course was Wellington, who had been accorded that nickname when Parliament had first elevated the general to that status. Zachary thought it better than “ole nosey,” which referred not only to the most prominent feature of the general’s face, but also to his uncanny tendency to be anywhere and everywhere on a battlefield. Soult was the French commander at the moment. McIntyre handed his worksheet to Zachary, who read it and lifted a brow in surprise.
“Recode it and we’ll send it off with Whitten. Harrelson and Penryn can go with him in case he runs into trouble. The rest of us will carry on—keep tabs on the frogs and find a passable route through these infernal mountains.”
The Ramirez brother and sister had been conferring and now invited the rest of Zachary’s team to their headquarters in a village even smaller and more remote than Segueros. On arrival, Zachary estimated this village’s population at about fifty or sixty, half of them adult men with maybe fifteen women. The rest were children of varying ages.
The Ramirez village had started out in the middle of the last century as a rich aristocrat’s hunting lodge with the necessary plethora of servants to cater to his and his guests’ needs. These had been housed in smaller cottages, clustered around the lodge like chicks around a mother hen.
“Our great-grandfather was a favorite of the king,” Miguel explained. He waved a hand in a sweeping gesture. “My family once controlled thousands of hectares of land here.”
“What happened?” Zachary asked as he, Miguel, and Elena rode ahead of the others.
Miguel laughed. “Our grandfather was not such a favorite of the next king.”
Elena explained. “They were both in love with the same woman.”
“And?”
Miguel emitted another hoot of laughter. “Grandfather always said she was worth every grain of sand he had lost.”
Zachary grinned, and glanced at Elena, who merely smiled and shrugged.
Zachary and the remaining Rangers spent several weeks with the Ramirez partisans. They were housed in the lodge itself with the Ramirez family—Elena; Miguel; Miguel’s wife, Pilar; and their two young children—along with the unmarried men of the Ramirez gang. The married men occupied the surrounding cottages. During these weeks, the Rangers would ride out for two or three days at a time, sometimes on their own, sometimes with two or more of the Ramirez people.
Often when they rode out together, Zachary would end up riding next to Elena. They shared stories of their childhoods and discussed a myriad of topics. If it occurred to him that she was as easy to talk with as Sydney had been, he quickly quashed that thought. Sydney had talked much about equality between men and women; Elena simply assumed it was so—or ignored that it was not so—and acted accordingly. He tried to dismiss Sydney as a fantasy, part of an interlude in life to be enjoyed only while it lasted, a pleasant memory from which one had to move on. His growing attraction to Elena was certainly helping him achieve this end.
The Rangers shared game and other foodstuffs they happened upon, so they were readily accepted into the partisans’ extended family. No matter how sparse the fare on the table, Miguel, his wife, and his sister dressed for dinner, Ramirez in a semblance of formal evening wear, Pilar in a soft green gown, Elena in a fiery red one—both in a style popular four or five years before. Zachary conjectured that this practice was to remind them of what they came from and what they were fighting for: A way of life.
The other men, including the Rangers, made do with whatever clothing they had. Zachary and his men murmured admiringly on first seeing Pilar and Elena so elegantly gowned.
“Women are meant to be properly appreciated,” Miguel said.
“Amen to that,” Richardson said.
Zachary’s usual place at the table was next to Elena. Often their hands, arms, or legs would happen to touch. And just as often, he wondered whether she might welcome more.
The third time the Rangers and members of the Ramirez band rode out together, Zachary was forced to face just how different their goals were. The mission of Zany Zack’s Rangers was strictly reconnaissance: to identify and keep track of numbers and positions of elements of the French army, to intercept messages between those elements where possible, and to find and map alternate routes through the mountains. The Ramirez people were bent on engagement—and they were driven by revenge. Every adult member of their group had lost property, family members, or both to the marauding French.
By this time, Elena’s wound had healed. Zachary admired her determination to regain full use of her arm. Even sitting quietly, she would alternately tense and relax that shoulder. Only during the first week did she forego riding out with the others. She was the only woman who did participate in this manner. The Ramirez men took great pride in her, even as they were intensely protective of her, and he suspected more than one of them to be half or wholly in love with her. As for that, the same might be said of his own men—and of himself.
Thoughts of Sydney still crept up on him when he least expected them, but Elena had managed to lessen their impact—at least during his waking hours.
Elena was beautiful, intelligent, playful, and generous with her brother and his family. On several occasions he saw her drop something she was doing to lend a hand in the kitchen or with the children, who adored her—as did their mother. She was gentle and sympathetic over a scraped knee or a loose tooth.
One afternoon he had been idly watching her from the veranda that encircled the entire ground floor of the three-story lodge. Elena was playing with the children on a swing in the yard. He had not noticed Pilar at his elbow until she spoke.
“You just see you don’t break her heart,” Pilar said just as though she were continuing a conversation.
Zachary started. �
�I have no idea what you mean.”
“Oh, I think you do. I’ve seen the way you look at each other. Elena is not as tough as she wants people to think.”
“I doubt any of us is,” he replied, not wanting to encourage this discussion.
Pilar was not to be deterred. “Three years ago—she was only eighteen—she was hurt very badly. It must not happen again.”
Zachary was appalled. “Someone abused her? Physically?”
“Her heart.” Pilar touched her own chest. “They were to be married. He joined with Bonaparte and betrayed the Ramirez family.”
Two days later, he saw an entirely different side of the fascinating Elena.
The four remaining Rangers had ridden out with about a dozen of the Ramirez people. They had been following what might have been a company of French soldiers. The Rangers were particularly keen on finding out precisely how individual French soldiers were now armed—new innovations in weapons, amounts of ammunition they carried, conditions of clothing and rations.
“Our orders are very clear,” Zachary explained to all the others. “We are to avoid direct confrontation with the enemy. In no case may we betray the presence of British military in this area. Doing so would ruin the surprise Wellington is planning.”
Miguel exchanged a speaking look with his sister, then said, “Luckily, we are not bound by such scruples.”
“What do you mean to do?” Zachary asked.
“There’s a ravine up ahead. Arroyo Robles. They are headed right for it. We shall arrange our people up above and pick them off as they pass through.”
“Like ducks in a pond,” exulted José, a young partisan standing next to Elena.
She wore a closed expression and nodded grimly.
“You can join us or not,” Miguel said, “but do not try to interfere.” His threat was clear.
Bound by their orders, the four Rangers hung back and watched, thinking the Ramirez people, opposing trained soldiers, might be in for more opposition than they counted on. Only then could the Rangers justify getting directly involved. It did not happen that way.