Despite his success this morning he could not even imagine climbing into the foothills of the Cantabrians or the Galicians and pretending energy and health for hours and hours on end.
‘If you lag behind, you will be shot. My father’s orders.’
Finishing his drink, he held out his glass for more. ‘Then I hope the firewater is all that you say it is.’
‘Papa has enemies here and the French have not withdrawn. But we know this place like the back of our hands, the secret trails, the hidden paths, and we will be armed.’
‘We?’
‘Adan, Manolo and I.’ She looked around as if to check no one else was close. ‘You have your knife, Capitán. Make certain it is within easy reach and keep it hidden. If anyone threatens you, use it.’
‘Anyone?’ His eyes scanned her dark ones.
‘Anyone at all,’ she returned and finished the last of her orujo.
‘Clothes will be brought to your room for the journey. And hair dye. The pale of your hair would give you away completely. Constanza will come and do it.’
‘A disguise, then?’
He saw how she hesitated, the stories of men captured without their uniform and hanged perfunctorily so much a part of folklore. With a cloak over blue and white he might be safer, but those travelling with him would not.
‘You speak Spanish like a native of this part. It will have to be enough.’
‘Do you expect trouble?’
She only laughed.
The pleasure of completing the walk had receded a little, but Lucien did not want her to see it. Even the orujo was warring against his stomach, a strong dram that scoured his digestive system after six weeks of bland gruel.
‘Can I ask you a question, Alejandra?’ She nodded. ‘What happened to your husband?’
The deep green of her eyes sharpened, bruising in memory. ‘He betrayed us, so he died.’
The shock of her answer left him reeling. ‘How?’
‘The betrayal or the death?’
‘Both.’
‘It was almost a year ago now and it was winter and cold. There was a fight and my husband lost. He died slowly, though.’
‘Three months’ worth of slowly? It is his room I am in.’
‘How could you possibly know that?’ She had stepped back now and her voice shook.
‘The marks on my wall. February had twenty-nine days in the last year only and March has thirty-one. I am presuming he died on April the fifteenth. I think you placed the marks there. To remember.’
‘I did.’ This time she held nothing back in the quiet fury. ‘I drew them into the plaster every night I stood in his room and wished him dead. It was for money he betrayed us. Did you figure that out, too? For the princely sum of pesos and guns, enough to start his own army and replace my father. And me.’
‘He confessed?’
‘No. A shot through the head was not conducive to any sort of explanation. Papa only let him live so that he might understand his reasoning and to see who else was implicated in the plot.’
‘Did El Vengador find others?’
‘He died without speaking again.’ Her answer came back with fierceness and Lucien could see in her eyes the truth of hurt. ‘Though it seems he could still write. I had not known that.’
A minute later she was gone.
The words in the Bible had been her late husband’s handiwork, then? Lucien wondered what he had done to Alejandra to make her hate him so very much.
Sometimes the weather in Spain, even in winter, could be windless and dry.
But on this night, early in the first week of March, the gales howled from the north in a single blowing force, enough pressure in it to make Lucien lean forward to find balance. The rains came behind, drenching, icy and cold.
His clothes at least were keeping the wet out and the warmth in. He was surprised how comfortable his new boots were and pleased the hat he had been given had a wide and angled brim. He had long since lost the feeling in his bare fingers, though.
They had been walking for a good two hours and he’d managed to keep up. Just. Alejandra hovered behind him, Adan and the other man, Manolo, cutting through the bushes ahead.
‘We will stop soon.’ Her words were muffled by the rain.
‘And make camp?’
‘More like sleep,’ she returned. ‘It is too dangerous to risk a fire, but the trees there will allow us at least shelter.’
He looked up. A moon was caught behind the heavy cloud, but he could see the dark shape of a line of pines about a quarter of a mile away.
He was glad for it, for although he carried very little in the bag on his back, his body ached with the prolonged exercise after such a sickness. He had not eaten much, either, his stomach still recovering from the effects of the orujo.
He knew Alejandra had slowed to match his pace and was thankful for it, the blunt warning she had given him still present.
Adan suddenly tipped his head. Alarmed, Lucien did the same and the sound of far-off voices came on the wind. A group of men, he determined, and ones who thought they were alone in these passes. A hand gesture had him dropping down and Alejandra crawled up beside him.
‘They are about a quarter of a mile away, but heading north. Nine or ten of them, I think, with horses.’
She pulled the brown coat she wore across her head and dug into the cavity of dirt on the edge of their track.
Further ahead there was no sign at all of the others. He guessed they, too, had blended in with the undergrowth, staying put as the foreign party passed.
His eyes went to the leaves above them. Downwind. If there were dogs, they would stay safe.
Alejandra held her pistol out and her knife lay in her lap. He removed his own blade and fitted it into his fist, wishing he had been given a gun as well and rueing the loss of the fine weapons he had marched up to A Coruña with.
The rain had lightened now, beads of it across Alejandra’s cheeks and in the long dark strands of hair that had escaped from the fastening beneath her hat.
He wondered if she had killed before. The faces of the many men he had consigned to the afterlife rose up in memory, numerous ghostly spectres wrapped about the heart of battle. He had long since ceased to mourn them.
The enforced rest had allowed his heartbeat to slow and the breath in him to return. Even the tiredness was held temporarily at bay by this new alertness. They were not French, he was sure of that; too few and too knowledgeable of the pathway through the foothills. A band of men of the same ilk as El Vengador, then? Guerrillas roaming the countryside. He could hear a few words of Spanish in the wind.
‘It’s the Belasio family,’ Alejandra explained as he looked up. ‘On their way back to their lands.’
‘You saw them?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘I smelt them.’ When her nose sniffed the air he smiled, for the rain and wind had left only wetness across the scent of winter and earth and she was teasing. Still, the small humour in the middle of danger was comforting.
‘They