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.’
‘And its cowards,’ she tossed back. ‘Better to have not come here at all if after the smallest of fights you turn tail and leave.’
He felt the anger and pushed it down. His back ached and his vision blurred and the cold that had hounded the British force through the passes of a Cantabrian winter still hovered close.
Cowards. The word seared into vehemence. So many soldiers lost in the retreat. So much bravery discovered as they had turned their backs against the sea and fought off the might of France. All he could remember was death, blood and courage.
‘You need to sit down.’ These new words were softer, more generous, and in one of the few times since she had found him on the fields above A Coruña, she touched him. A hand cupped beneath his elbow and another across his back. A chain lay around her neck, dipping into the collar of her unbuttoned shirt. He wondered what lay on the end of it; the thought swept away as she angled the garden chair beneath him and helped him to sit.
His breath shook as much as his hands did when he lifted them up across his knees.
‘Thank...you.’ And he meant it. If she had not been behind him seeing to his balance, he knew he would have fallen and the wooden seat felt good and steady and safe. Shutting his eyes against the glare of the morning, he allowed his mind to run across his body, accepting the injury, embracing the pain. The witch doctors in Jamaica had shown him this trick once when he had taken a sickness there. He had used such mesmerising faithfully ever since.
* * *
The Englishman had gone from here somehow, his body still and his heartbeat slowing to a fraction of what it had been only a moment before. Even his skin cooled.
Uneasiness crept in. She could not understand who he was, what he was. A soldier. A fighter. A spy. A man who spoke both the high and low dialects of Spain as well as any native and one who knew at every turn and at every moment exactly what was happening about him. Alejandra could see this in his stance as well as in his eyes now opened, the blue today paler than it had ever looked; alert and all-knowing.
She had never seen another like him. Even worn down to exhaustion