Marriage Made in Rebellion

by Sophia James

  There was only a small paper in his pocket as she went through the jacket and it was in code. She had seen these before, the jumbled nonsense of war secrets written so that no one else, save the proper receiver, could understand them.

  Sitting at her armoire, she meticulously copied the scrawl, making certain that every letter was exactly the same and that each line reflected precisely what was written there. The English would pay well for this and the soldier for all his youth had a jacket with many decorations upon it.

  Tucking the letter in her diary and placing it in the secret drawer at the back of her desk, she returned the original document to the particular pocket it had come from and signalled to Eloise that her search was finished. He would wake soon and then...

  The door was torn open and it hung drunkenly on its hinges. There was the sound of crying and screaming from further within the house and a group of French soldiers here in her room.

  ‘Come here.’ The first man gave the order and Eloise scrambled to her feet to hide behind Alejandra as two others came forward. In her nightgown the young girl was at a distinct disadvantage, the thin lacy fabric of the thing stretched across her breasts so that everything was exposed.

  ‘It is me you need to speak with, monsieur. The girl here is young and an innocent—’

  The older officer slapped her across the face, hard, and Alejandra tasted blood and fear at the very same time, though she was pleased when Eloise was allowed to run from the room.

  ‘It is you I particularly wish to speak with, Señora Antonia Herrera y Salazar.’

  His glance took in the young soldier naked upon the bed and the clothes he had been in folded neatly across a nearby chair. He found the document within a moment and held it up to her.

  ‘We have word that you are a spy for the English and that you are using this place as a means to steal intelligence from any military man who has the misfortune to use your establishment. You drug them? Is that how it is done?’

  ‘No.’ She sought for feminine wiles and abject terror. ‘I am only a working woman and he is asleep.’

  ‘Wake him up.’ A barked order to a fourth man, who promptly shook the boy on the bed violently. He remained in slumber.

  The first man hit her again. She felt the smack of his hand across the bridge of her nose and wondered if perhaps it was broken. At least he had not smashed in her teeth.

  Maria was suddenly there, the old woman fighting her way through the crowd with her stick raised.

  ‘Leave her alone. She has done none of the things you say she has. She is a good girl and—’ Someone pushed her away and she fell, slowly, one moment there with her anger and her concern and the next falling, her head striking against the sharp brick corner of the fireplace as she went down and then silence.

  It was as if Alejandra was in a play, not quite real, the fantasy of horror and blood and glassy eyes. Death held a look that she had seen many times over and here it was again in her room, beside the thick burgundy velvet of the curtains and on the waxed boards of the floor, the polished stick turning in its own macabre circle before it slowed and stopped.

  She tried to get to her, to pull away and cradle the woman who had taken her in, pregnant and terrified all those years before, to give her a home and a place of safety. But the older man simply walked forward and without saying a word removed his pistol from his pocket and slammed it down across the back of her head.

  * * *

  She woke in a cell and she was naked. It was dark and she was shivering violently, from fright rather than cold, she thought, though small tufts of straw were the only barrier between her and a rough dirt floor.

  Maria was dead. It was finished, this part of her life, and she had heard what happened to women prisoners taken by the French. Many did not return and if they did they were seldom the same. War held a violence that would never have been acceptable in peacetime and a spy couldn’t expect a pleasant time of it. They would have found the copied note by now and the laudanum held enough evidence for them to be certain of her guilt.

  She had not been raped yet. Her head was sore and there were scratches on her breasts. Her nose ached and her cheek stung, but apart from that... She ran her fingers across herself just to check and found nothing more than a badly split bottom lip.

  It was either very late or very early, the darkness complete and thick. The cell held no window and the walls were all of stone. She wondered if she could start digging, but the ground was as hard as any rock and she knew that she would need to conserve her energy for what would come next.

  She was not afraid of dying.

  That thought came with a surprising certainty. There was nothing left here for her now that Maria was gone and Ross was there on the other side waiting.

  She wished she might pray, might find the words that used to mean so much to her, the guidance and the truth, but even as she started to recite the Apostles’ Creed she stopped. God would know she did not mean them, could not mean them, because her heart had been shut off to that succour for years, the falsity of it so very obvious.

  A noise held her still, a small quiet sound that came from the left down a dark corridor. And then Lucien Howard was there on the other side of the heavy iron gate, dressed in black like a shadow, a slouchy hat pulled down low across his hair.

  ‘Shh.’ He did not say a word as he lifted the lock and fitted it to a thick wire he held in his hands. Two seconds and the catch released. Opening the door, he drew her out, whipping a blanket around her shoulders and head so that she was like a wraith in the night. He wore gloves, thin leather ones that felt warm against the skin of her arms where he held her.

  She could barely see where they were going it was so black, but he moved like one who could find the way and soon a new corridor appeared.

  ‘This way.’ His first real words. She stood on something and it cut her foot. She felt the slice of it and the pain, but did not say a thing.

  Then he was lifting her through a window and out into the cool of night, where she fell a good few feet on to the softness of long grass and earth and rolled to the bottom of an incline.

  They ran as fast as they could go across the wide openness of the ground around the building, away from the high stone walls and silence, up into the hills and early-morning light, stopping only as the cover of the bushes became thicker.

  ‘Hell.’ He was looking at her foot and the trail of blood she had left behind her. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘In one...of the...corridors.’ She was so breathless she could hardly give him answer. He simply pulled her up then and wrapped his cloak about her foot and carried her on into the morning until they reached a stream.

  ‘Stay in the middle of the water and don’t touch any of the branches.’ He did not wish for broken twigs or torn leaves, but she understood that well and was careful in her progress.

  * * *

  One hour and then two and then two more, the sun full up into the sky now and her throat burning with thirst. They had left the river a few hours ago and were now well out into the countryside. The water had stopped the bleeding and all that was there now was a dimpled white jagged line of skin, sealed off by the cold.

  He handed her a flask he’d filled from the stream and she drank until he took it off her and drank himself. Then he turned to her, the look in his eyes angry and distant. She tucked the blanket over her shins to cover any piece of skin that was showing.

  ‘Right. Now, Señorita Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo, you are going to tell me exactly what the hell just happened and why you were in a Spanish brothel pretending to be a whore.’

  ‘Pretending?’

  ‘Enough.’ This time she heard more than only indifference. This time the man she had known in the north of Spain was back, too, careful, still and clever. ‘I came to save you from the French because you did the same for me, once, but it seems you have been selling secrets to the British army for the past three years.’

  He brought a paper
from his pocket and she saw it was the same coded document she had copied out...yesterday? Or was it the day before?

  ‘It is a wonder the French didn’t find this. A secret drawer in a desk is hardly difficult to locate. A woman at the brothel told me you were the owner and that you did not service patrons.’

  ‘Did she also tell you Maria is dead, the old woman who I work with? The French soldier killed her so easily when...’ She stopped because she could not go on. ‘What now? What happens to me now?’

  ‘I am no longer with the military for I resigned my commission after A Coruña, but I will take you to the British in the north. You will be safe there.’

  He promised her nothing more. He had saved her because she had done the same for him and now...now they were people travelling in directions that the other could not follow. Still, she could not quite give up.

  ‘I wrote to you. In England. But you know that.’

  His head tipped and he stilled. ‘No letter ever found me. When was this?’

  ‘After you left Pontevedra. And then again when I first arrived in Madrid. I wrote to tell you...’ She just could not go on. Not like this, not in fright on the run and a scowl on his face. Not when he was looking at her as if she were a stranger, a foreigner, a woman whom he no longer recognised.

  Ross deserved more than that, more than a quick mention and an instant dismissal. Someone had written back to her, though, and if it was not him...? His family, perhaps, horrified that a girl of no title who wrote in broken English might claim the Earl of Ross as the father of her illegitimate child.

  ‘I was sick for a long time when I arrived back in England. Perhaps the missive was lost.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she murmured back and took in breath. She’d burnt the letter she had received from London with the seal of an important earldom upon it and the words that had broken her heart.

  Suddenly it all seemed like a long time ago and she was so tired she felt as if she would just fall down to sleep for a hundred years, like that princess in a folk tale her mother had told her once.

  But she was not a princess. She was a runaway and a traitor. She was also broke, naked and hurt.

  ‘You need to sleep.’ He had been able to do this before, to read her mind and find the solution to the problems of it. ‘I will find you some clothes at the next town we come to.’

  ‘Thank you, Lucien. For everything.’

  Even if it was not love that had brought him to the French prison she could not imagine what might have happened in the morning if he had not come. The hugeness of such a risk made her stomach feel sick. If they had captured him, too...

  She wished he might touch her as he used to, just once, but he did not. The scowl on his face was distinct.

  * * *

  They had moved nor-nor-west at night when dusk fell and the moon rose. He had found her clothes and boots in a small village in the afternoon of the first day and she was dressed as a lad because it was less conspicuous and much safer. The next morning they boarded a public coach going north on the Burgos Road.

  He seldom really looked at her, his whole being focused on the journey and their safety. The intimacy that they’d had was gone and in its place sat a shared wariness.

  She did not mention the letter and the reply and he did not ask her anything of her time in Madrid. A strained truce of acceptance ensued, the fragile new shoots of trust too young and small to be battered again by revelation and survive.

  They skirted around other more impersonal issues, though mostly there was silence.

  * * *

  The fire at the hacienda came up on the fourth day of travelling as they moved north from Burgos and towards the coast.

  ‘I thought you were dead. The documents of the fire I saw in London mentioned your name beneath your father’s. There were no survivors. No one was left.’

  ‘It was the Betancourts,’ she said, lifting her glance to his. They were sitting beneath the overhanging boughs of a large oak just outside San Sebastian and it was almost dusk. ‘The family hated us after Juan’s death and I think they saw their chance and took it. The fight that killed Manolo and Adan was a part of their revenge, I suppose, as well. Did your report mention what happened after the fire?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not everyone perished in the house. When they came out from the hacienda they were shot and their bodies tossed back into the flames.’

  ‘Where were you when this was happening?’

  ‘Returning on the high pass from Pontevedra. It had been raining heavily and I had to wait until the weather cleared to get through.’

  ‘Then who told you of it? Of the aftermath, I mean. Of the fighting?’

  ‘Tomeu escaped and he came to find me. He was burnt badly, trying to save my father, and died four days later for I had very little to tend him with and dared not risk going down into the village again. I spent a night watching the house from the hill behind after he had passed and saw that the land was empty, of men and livestock. Then I left.’

  ‘You went alone?’

  ‘I did. I travelled south to Madrid and cut my hair and bleached it. I found new clothes, a new voice and a new name.’

  She did not mention the fact that she had returned to Pontevedra and waited many more weeks for him in the hills above, praying to God all the while that he might come back and save her.

  * * *

  In the last light of the day Lucien saw other truths that she was not saying, darker honesties that left the green of her eyes locked in hurt.

  The colour of her hair was a bright and artificial red. He wished she had left it just as it was, long and dark and shining. He wished, too, that she might look at him properly, the furtive short glances beginning to annoy him. Only a few times had she lifted her chin and met his eyes directly, but the challenge and the strength he had always associated with Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo was gone, an indifferent resignation at her lot in its place. A watered-down version of the girl he had once known, wary, plaintive and sad.

  Her hands, too, were so much more still. Her rosary was missing and when she spoke her fingers hung now by her side, lifeless and quiet. Each nail was coloured in a redness to match her hair, though the paint was chipped badly with the exertion and hardships of the past days. He wondered how one removed such lacquer so that the vestige of anything left was gone. She had worn gloves in the carriage up to Burgos and a large cloth hat that had hidden most of her face and hair. She walked like a lad and acted as one, too. A chameleon, changed beyond belief.

  Her right wrist was still crossed with the scars he had seen there before and although she saw him looking she did not try to hide them as she had always done in the hacienda above A Coruña or in the mountains of Galicia.

  This is me, she seemed to wordlessly say. Battered and ruined. Take it or leave it. I do not care. The buttons on her shirt were done up to her throat in a tight marching line despite the heat and the collar of the jacket she wore at night was raised around her neck. Concealment. She wore it like another set of clothes.

  ‘Did you bury your father?’

  ‘No. I left him where he was, for all the bodies were charred beyond recognition and I could not risk being seen there. When I travelled the acrid smell of burning followed me for miles.’

  He thought she might cross herself or recite some appropriate and known verse of the Bible, but that was another difference. In the five days of her company he had not seen her once murmur a Hail Mary or hold her hands up in silent prayer.

  It was as if the changes in her appearance outside were mirrored in the inside traits. She had never asked him even one personal question about his own recent past.

  ‘Do you still carry a knife?’ His own query was out before he could stop it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never?’

  For the first time in his company since leaving Madrid she smiled, a nervous and measured humour, but undeniably there. He was heartened by it and pressed on.

 
‘You have lost the skill of wielding a blade?’

  ‘More the inclination, I think, Capitán.’ A quick surge of anger accompanied her reply. He covered the silence quickly.

  ‘I do not know whether to be relieved or concerned by that.’

  ‘At least you have no worry of a dagger through your ribs in the dead of night.’

  Only in my dreams, he thought and stood, the conversation getting too close to the bone.

  He had wanted her before and he still wanted her in the way a man needs a woman. He shouldn’t and he hated that he did, but there was no help for it.

  ‘It is time to go.’

  Scuffing at the ground in which they had lain, he picked up his bag. The bruises on her face were fading and the black beneath her left eye was changed to a lighter tone. Her bottom lip still looked puffed and split, but he’d had the same at A Coruña after the battle and he remembered that had taken a long while to heal.

  All in all she had been lucky. At least they had not used their knives on her and everything would mend. The sunset tonight was a vibrant yellow, the branches of the trees outlined in the stillness so that every leaf could be seen against the glow. A moment in time and yet out of it, he thought, a moment remembered for its quiet peace and beauty amongst all the danger, chaos and change.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lucien Howard had always had that knack of full certainty, she thought as she watched him check his compass and look up at the sky. He had been the same in A Coruña, and on the road across the Galician Mountains, and here he did not falter or hesitate as he pushed forward through the scrub-filled hills in the moonlight.

  She had no idea as to where they were headed, but he had said he would take her to the British camp and she knew the army under Wellington to be somewhere in the vicinity of the northern coast towards the east.

  The smell of smoke was barely noticeable at first, a slight wisp of burning on the air. She knew he had smelt it, too, for he stopped, his face lifting into the wind.