‘Who are you?’ The green in her eyes under moonlight matched the dark of the trees. In the daylight they were bluer, changeable.
‘Nathanael Colbert. A friend.’ Barked out, none of the empathy he knew she wanted held within the word. She remained silent, a small broken shape in the gloom, tucked up against bracken, the holes in the leather soles of her shoes easily seen from this angle. ‘Why the hell were you there in the first place?’
He did not think she would answer as the wind came through into the hollow, its keening sound as plaintive as her voice.
‘They caught us a long time ago.’ He saw her counting on her fingertips as she said it, the frown upon her brow deepening. Months? Years?
‘Us?’
He had seen no other sign of captives.
‘Celeste and I.’
Hell. Another girl. ‘Where is she?’
‘Dead.’ The flat anger in her voice was cold.
‘Recently?’
She nodded, her expression gleamed in sadness. She had old bruises across her cheek and new ones on her hand. In the parting of her hair when her cap had been dislodged he had seen the opaque scar of a wound that could have so easily killed her.
As damaged as he was.
Tonight he did not have the energy to know more of her story and the thin wanness was dispiriting. If they could have a drink things would be better, but the flask he had brought with him was long since empty.
‘Can you hear that stream?’
She nodded.
‘We need water...?’
He left the words as a question. No amount of want in the world could get him standing. He had lost too much blood and he knew it.
‘Do you have the flask?’
‘Here.’
When she took it and left he closed his eyes and tried to find some balance in the silence. He wanted to tend to himself, but he would need water to do that. And fire. He wondered if the young French captive would be able to follow his instructions when she returned.
He also wondered just exactly how those at Nay had gained their information on the identity and movements of a British agent who had long been a part of the fabric of French country life.
* * *
It was quiet in the trees and all the grief of losing Celeste flooded back. Her cousin’s body rounded with child. Her eyes lifeless. The pain of it surged into Cassie’s throat, blocking breath, and she stopped to lean against a tree. The anguish of life and death. What was it the man who sat in the clearing wrapped in bandages had said?
Killing is easy. It’s the living that is difficult.
Perhaps, after all, he was right. Perhaps Celeste had known that, too, and put an end to all that she had loathed, taking the child to a place that was better but leaving her here alone.
Alone in a world where everything looked bleak. Bleaker than bleak even under the light of a small moon, the trickle of water at her feet running into the tattered remains of her boots and wetting her toes. The cold revived a little of her fight, reminded her how in the whole of those eight terrible months she had not given up, had not surrendered. She wished the stream might have been deeper so that she could have simply stripped off and washed away sin. A baptism. A renewal. A place to begin yet again and survive.
The flask in hand reminded her of purpose and she knelt to the water.
Her companion looked sick, the crusted blood beneath his nails reflected in the red upon his clothes, sodden through the layers of bandage. Without proper medicine how could he live? Water would clean the wound, but what could be done for any badness that might follow? The shape of leaves in the moonlight on the other side of the river suddenly caught her attention. Maudeline. Her mother had used this very plant in her concoctions. An astringent, she had said. A cleanser. A natural gift from the hands of a God who placed his medicines where they were most needed.
The small bank was easy to climb and, taking a handful of the plant, she stripped away the woody stems, the minty scent adding certainty to her discovery. She remembered this fresh sweet smell from Alysa’s rooms and was heartened by the fact. The work of finding enough leaves and tucking them into her pocket took all her concentration, purpose giving energy. A small absolution. A task she had done many hundreds of times under the guidance of her mother.
An anchor to the familiar amidst all that was foreign. She needed this stranger in a land she held no measure of and he needed her. An equal support. It had been so long since she had felt any such worthiness.
He was asleep when she returned, though the quiet fall of her feet woke him.
‘I have maudeline for your injury.’ Bringing out the leaves, she began to crush them between her fingers, mixing them to a paste with the water on a smooth rock she had wiped down before using. She saw how he watched her, his grey eyes never leaving the movement of her hands.
‘Are you a witch, then?’
She laughed, the sound hoarse and rough after so many months of disuse. ‘No, but Mama was often thought to be.’
Again she saw the dimple in his right cheek, the deep pucker of mirth making her smile.
‘Maudeline? I have not heard of it.’
‘Another name for it is camphor.’
He nodded and came up on to his knees, holding his head in his hands as though a headache had suddenly blossomed.
‘It hurts you?’
‘No.’ Squeezed out through pain.
When he stood she thought he looked unsteady, but she simply watched as he gathered sticks and set to making a fire. The tinder easily caught, the snake of smoke and then flame. Using the bigger pieces of branch he built it up until even from a distance she could feel the radiating warmth.
‘The tree canopy will dissipate the smoke,’ he said after a few moments. ‘The low cloud will take care of the rest.’
* * *
Half an hour later flame shadow caught at his torso as he removed his shirt, the bandages following. His wound showed shattered skin, the tell-tale red lines of inflammation already radiating.
‘Don’t touch.’ Her directive came as she saw he was about to sear the edges of skin together with a glowing stick. ‘It is my belief that dirt kills a man with more certainty than a bullet and I can tell it is infected.’
Crossing to him, she wiped her hands with the spare leaves and poured water across the sap. When she touched him she knew he had the fever. Another complication. A further problem.
‘I have been ill like this before and lived.’ He had seen her frown.
Lots of ‘befores’, she mused, lines of crossed white opaque scars all over his body. The thought made her careful.
‘You are a soldier?’
He only laughed.
Or a criminal, she thought, for what manner of man looked as he did? When he handed over the flask of water, she did not take a drink.
‘I will heat it to clean the wound. It might hurt for it has been left a while. If you had some leather to bite down upon...?’’
He broke into her offered advice. ‘I will cope.’
* * *
Stephen Hawkhurst’s voice made Nathaniel start, the echo around the marbled lobby disconcerting as all the years past rolled back into the present.
‘You look as though you have the problems of the world upon your shoulders, Nat. Still thinking of the