With that she was gone, out into the early coming dawn, the shawl at her shoulders tucked close around her chin.
Alejandra watched Captain Lucien Howard out amongst the shadow of trees on the pathway behind the hacienda: one step and then falling, another and falling again. He had insisted on being brought outside each day, one of the servants carrying him to the grove so that he could practise walking.
She could see frustration, rage and pain in every line of his body from this distance and the will to try to stand unaided, even as the dust had barely settled from the previous unsuccessful attempt. His hands would be bleeding, she knew that without even looking, for the bark of the olive was rough and he had needed traction to pull his whole weight up in order to stand each time. Sickness and fever had left him wasted and thin. The man they had brought up from the battlefields of A Coruña had been twice the one he was now.
Another Englishman who had shed his blood on the fleshless bones of this land, a land made bare by war and hate and greed. She turned her rosary in her palm, reciting the names of those who had died already. Rosalie. Pedro. Even Juan with his cryptic and unwanted whine of forgiveness written in a Bible he knew she would find.
Each bead was smooth beneath her fingers, a hundred years of incantations ingrained in the shining jet. Making the sign of the cross, she kept her voice quiet as she prayed. ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth and...’
Salvation came in many forms and this was one of them, the memory of those gone kept for ever present within the timeless words. After the Apostles’ Creed she started on the Our Father, following it with three Hail Marys, a Glory Be and the Fatima Prayer.
She always used the Sorrowful Mysteries now as a way to end her penance, the Joyful and the Glorious ones sticking in her throat; the Agony in the Garden and the Crowning of the Thorns were more relevant to her life these days. Even the Scourging of the Pillars appealed.
When she had finished she placed the beads in her left pocket, easily reached, and drew out a knife from the leather pouch at her ankle, the edge of it honed so that it gleamed almost blue.
A small branch of an aloe hedge lay beside her and she lifted the wood against the blade, sliding the knife so that shavings fell in a pile around her boots.
Her life was like this point of sharp, balanced on a small edge of living. Turning the stick, she drew it down against her forearm, where the skin held it at bay for a moment in a fleeting concave show of resistance.
With only the smallest of pressure she allowed the wood to break through, taking the sudden pain inside her, not allowing even a piece of it to show.
Help me. I forgive you. A betrayal written in charcoal.
Blood welled and ran in a single small stream across her hands and on to her fingertips, where it fell marking the soil.
Sometimes pain was all she had left to feel with, numbness taking everything else. If she were honest, she welcomed the ache of life and the flow of blood because in such quickness she knew she was still here. Still living. Just.
Lucien Howard had almost fallen again and she removed the point from her arm, staunching the wound with pressure, setting blood.
He was like her in his stubbornness, this captain. Never quite giving up. Resheathing the blade, she simply leant back and shut her eyes, feeling the thin morning sun against her lids and the cold wind off the Atlantic across her hair.
Her land. For ever.
She would never leave it. The souls of those long departed walked beside her here. Already mud was reclaiming her blood. She liked to think it was her mother, Rosalie, there in the whorls of wind, drinking her in, caressing the little that was left, understanding her need for aloneness and hurt.
Her eyes caught a faster movement. Now the Englishman had gone down awkwardly and this time he stayed there. She counted the seconds under her breath. One. Two. Three. Four.
Then a quickening. A hand against the tree. The pull of muscle and the strain of flesh. Her fingers lifted to find the rosary, but she stopped them. Not again. She would not help.
He was as alone as she was in this part of a war. His back still oozed and the wounds on his neck had become reinfected. She would get Constanza to look at the damage again and then he would be gone. It was all she could do for him.
* * *
The daughter of El Vengador sat and observed him from a distance, propped against a warm ochre wall out of the breeze. Still. Silent. Barely moving.
He almost hated her for her easy insolence and her unnamed fury. She would not help him. He knew that. She would only watch him fall again and again until he could no longer pull himself up. Then she would go and another would come to lift him back to the kapok bed in the room with its gauzy curtains, half-light and sickness.
Almost six weeks since A Coruña. Almost forty-two days since he had last eaten well. His bones looked stark and drawn against thin skin and big feet. He’d seen himself in the mirror a few days before as the man designated to tend to his needs had lifted him, eyes too large in his face, cheeks sunken.
She had stopped visiting him in his room three weeks ago, when the priest had been called to give him the last rites. He remembered the man through a fog of fever, the holy water comforting even if the sentiment lay jumbled in his mind.
‘Through this holy anointing may the Lord...’
Death came on soft words and cool water. It was a part of the life of a soldier, ever present and close.
But he had not died. He had pulled himself through the heat and come out into the chill. And when he had insisted on being brought to the pathway of trees, she had come, too. Watching. Always from a distance. She would leave soon, he knew. He had fallen too many times for her to stay. His hands bled and his knee, too, caught against a root, tearing. There was no resistance left in him any more and no strength.
He hoped Daniel Wylde had got home safely. He hoped the storms he had heard about had not flung the boat his friend travelled in to the murky bottom of the Bay of Biscay. ‘Jesus, help him,’ he murmured. ‘And let me be remembered.’
A foolish prayer. A vain prayer. His family would miss him. His mother particularly and then life would move on. New babies. Other events until he would be like the memories he carried of his father and his youngest brother, gone before their time into the shifting mists of after.
‘Hell,’ he swore with the first beginnings of anger. A new feeling, this. All-encompassing. Strengthening. Only wrath in it. He reached out for the fortitude and with one last push grabbed the rough bark of the scrawny olive and pulled with all his fury, up this time into a standing position, up again into the world of the living.
He did not let go, did not allow his legs to buckle, did not think of falling or failing or yielding. Nay, he held on through sharp pain and a heartbeat that raked through his ears as a drum thumping in all the parts of his body, his breath hoarse and shaking.
And then she was there with her wide green knowing eyes and her hair stuffed under the hat.
‘I knew that you could do it.’
He could not help but smile.
‘Tomorrow you will take more steps and the next day more again and the day after that you will walk from this path to that one. And then you will go home.’
Her face was fierce and sharp. There was blood on her sleeve and on her fingers. New blood. Fresh blood. He wondered why. She saw where he looked and lifted her chin.
‘The French have taken A Coruña and Ferrol. A resounding defeat with Soult now walking the streets of the towns unfettered. Soon the whole of the north will be theirs.’
‘War...has its...losers.’