‘Where will I be sent...on from?’ His gaze narrowed.
It was seldom she told anyone of plans that did not include the next hour, for it gave the asker too much room to wriggle free of any constraints. With him she was honest.
‘Not from here. It is too dangerous in A Coruña now. You will leave from the west.’
‘From one of the small ports in the Rias Altas, then?’
So Captain Lucien Howard knew his geography, but not his local politics.
‘No, that area harbours too many enemies of my father. It shall not be there.’ She turned and looked up at the sky, frowning. ‘There is a storm coming in with the wind from the ocean.’
The clouds had amassed and darkened across the horizon, a thick band of leaden grey just above the waterline.
My father needs to find out who you are first before he lets you go. He needs to understand your people and your character and the danger you might pose to us should you not be the man you say you are. And if you are not...
These thoughts she kept to herself.
‘I am not your enemy, Alejandra.’ He seldom called her by her given name, but she liked it. Soft. Almost whispered. Her heart beat a little faster, surprising her, annoying her, and she looked away, making much of watching those who had come in from Betanzos. Tomeu was amongst them, shading his face and peering at them, the bandage on his wrist white in the light even at this distance.
‘But neither are you my friend, Ingles, for all your sacrifice and devotion to the cause of Spain.’
He laughed, the edges of his eyes creasing, and she took in breath. What was it about him that made her more normal indifference shatter? She even imagined she might have blushed.
‘I am here, señorita, because of a mistake.’
Now, this was new. A piece of personal information that he offered without asking.
‘A mistake?’
‘I spent too long in the Hercules Tower looking for the British transports. They had not arrived and the French were circling.’
‘So they found you there?’
‘Hardly.’ This time there was nothing but cold ice in his glance. ‘They had taken one of my men and I thought to save him.’
‘And did you?’
‘No.’
The wind could be heard above their silence. Strengthening and changing direction. Soon the sun would be gone and it would rain. The beating pulse in a vein of his throat below his left ear was the only sign of great emotion and greater fury. So very easy to miss.
‘He was a spy, like you?’
He nodded. ‘There are weaknesses that are found out only under great duress. Jealousy. Greed. Fear. For Guy the weakness was cowardice, but he ran in the wrong direction.’
‘So you left him there? As a punishment?’
‘No. I tried to bring him safely through the lines of the French. I failed.’
For some men, Alejandra thought, the rigours of war brought forward cowardice. For others it highlighted a sheer and bloody-minded bravery. She imagined what it must have cost Captain Lucien Howard in pain to try to rescue his friend. She doubted anyone or anything could push him into doing that he did not wish to, but still, most men held a limit of what was sacred and worth dying for and a well-aimed hurt usually brought results.
Her father was the master of it.
But this Englishman’s strength, even in the lines of his wasted and marked body, was obvious. Unbreakable and stalwart. She imagined, given the choice, that he would choose death over dishonour and pain across betrayal.
She wondered if she could manage the same.
The blood from his torn hands stained his white shirt and the sweat from his exertions had darkened the linen.
But he was beautiful with his pale eyes and his gold hair, longer now after weeks of sickness and fallen from the leather tie he more normally sported. She wanted to run her fingers through the length of it just to see it against the dark of her own skin.
Contrasts.
Inside and out.
Lucien. The name suited him with its silky vowels. Almost the name of one of the three archangels in the Bible, the covering angel, the fallen one. Alejandra shook her head and cleared her thoughts.
‘I will send Constanza to you again tonight with her herbs. She has a great prowess in the healing arts.’
When he brushed back his hair the sun flinted in the colour. ‘If she leaves the ointment in my room, I can tend to it myself.’
‘As you wish, then.’
Kicking at the mud beneath her feet, once and then another time, she left him to the coming rain and the wind and the rising tides of fortune, and when she reached the hacienda’s stables she turned once to see the shadow of him watching her.
Lucien woke in the night to a small and quiet noise. He had been trained well to know the difference in sounds and knew that the louder ones were those less likely to kill you.
This one was soft and muffled. He tensed into readiness.
The door opened and a candle flared as Alejandra’s father came to sit on the small stool near the bed, stretching his long legs out before him and grimacing as though in pain.
‘You sleep lightly, Capitán.’
‘Years of practice, señor,’ Lucien returned.
‘Put the knife away. I am only here to talk.’
Lucien slipped the blade beneath his pillow, angling it so that it might be taken up quickly again if needed. He did not think the man opposite missed the inherent threat.
Alejandra had brought him the weapon on his second evening here, a quiet offering in the heat of his fever.
‘For protection,’ she had said in warning. ‘I am presuming you know how to use it. If not, it is probably better...’ He’d simply reached out and taken it from her, the insult smarting given the wounds on his back.
Tonight her father looked weary and he took his time in forming the message before he spoke.
‘It has come to my notice that you are a peer of the English aristocracy, Capitán Howard.’ The ring Lucien had been wearing lay in the older man’s hand when he opened his fingers, the Ross family coat of arms shining in the candlelight. He thought it had been lost for ever. ‘Lord Lucien Howard, the sixth Earl of Ross. The title sits on your shoulders as the head of your household and you wield a good deal of power in English society.’
Lucien remained silent for he was certain that there would be more to come.
‘But your family seat is bankrupt by all accounts. Poor investments by your father and his father, it is said, and now there is very little in the Howard coffers. Soon there will be nothing.’
Well, that was not a secret, Lucien thought bitterly. The penury of the earldom of Ross was well known. Anyone could have told him of it.
But his attention was taken by a sheaf of papers the other man lifted into view. He saw his own face on the front cover of The Times, a black-and-white copy of a likeness his mother had once commissioned of him, smiling as if he meant it. My God, it seemed an age since he had done so with any sincerity.
‘You have a good number of brothers and sisters and a mother who is heartbroken because you are presumed dead.’
Lucien imagined