In answer he reached for the Bible by his bed and handed it to her. ‘Like this man did?’
Puzzled, she opened the book to the page indicated by the plaited golden thread of a bookmark.
Help me. I forgive you.
Written shakily in charcoal, the dust of it blurred in time and use and mirrored on the opposite page. When her eyes went to the lines etched in the whitewash beneath the window on the opposite wall Lucien knew exactly what the marks represented.
‘He was a prisoner in this room, too?’
She crossed herself, her face frozen in pain and shock and deathly white.
‘You know nothing, Capitán. Nothing at all. And if you ever mention this to my father even once, he will kill you and I won’t be able to stop him.’
‘You would try?’
The air about them stilled into silence, the dust motes from the old fabric on the Bible twirling in the light, a moment caught for ever. And he fell into the green of her unease without resistance, like a moth might to flame in the darkest of nights.
She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but it was not that which drew him. It was her strength of emotion, the anger in her the same as that in him. She balanced books and a blade with an equal dexterity, the secrets in her eyes wound into both sadness and knowledge.
They were knights tilting at windmills in the greater pageant of a Continental war, the small hope of believing they might make a difference lost under the larger one of nationalistic madness.
Spain. France. England.
For the first time in his life Lucien questioned the wisdom of soldiering and the consequences of battle, for them all, and came up wanting.
Alejandra had known the man who had written this message, he was sure of it, and it had shocked her. The pulse in her throat was still heightened as she licked her lips against the dryness of fear.
He watched as she ripped the page from the Bible before giving the tome back to him, tearing the age-thin paper into small pieces and pocketing them.
The weight of the book in his fist was heavy as she turned and left the room.
God. In the ensuing silence he flicked through the pages and his eyes again found a further passage marked in charcoal amongst the teachings of the Old Testament. Matthew 6:14. ‘For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you.’
Clearly Alejandra, daughter of El Vengador, sought neither forgiveness nor absolution. Lucien wondered why.
* * *
He woke much later, startled into consciousness by great pain, and she was there again, sitting on the chair near the bed and watching him. The Bible had been removed altogether now, he noted as he chanced a glance at the table by the bed.
‘The doctor said you had to drink.’
He tried to smile. ‘Brandy?’
Her lips pursed as she raised a glass of orange-and-mint syrup. ‘This is sweetened and the honey will help you to heal.’
‘Thank you.’ Sipping at the liquid, he enjoyed the coolness as it slid down his throat.
‘Don’t take too much,’ she admonished. ‘You will not be used to much yet.’
He frowned as he lay back, the dizziness disconcerting. If he did lose the contents of his stomach, he was almost certain it would not be Alejandra who would be offering to clean it up. He swallowed heavily and counted to fifty.
After a few moments she spoke again. ‘Are you a religious man, Capitán Howard?’
A different question from what he had expected. ‘I was brought up in the Anglican faith, but it’s been a while since I was in any church.’
‘When faith is stretched the body suffers.’ She gave him this as though she had read it somewhere, a sage piece of advice that she had never forgotten.
‘I think it is the French who have more to do with my suffering, señorita.’
‘Ignoring the power of God’s healing in your position could be dangerous. A priest could give you absolution should you wish it.’ There was anger in her words.
‘No.’ He had not meant it to sound so final. ‘If I die, I die. If I don’t, I don’t.’
‘Fate, you mean? You believe in such?’
‘I do believe in a fate that falls on men unless they act. The prophet Buddha said something like that a very long time ago.’
She smiled. ‘Your religion is eclectic, then? You take bits from this deity and then from that one? To suit your situation?’
He looked away from her because he could tell she thought his answer important and he didn’t have the strength to explain that it had been a while since he had believed in anything at all.
The shutters hadn’t been closed tonight at his request and the first light of a coming dawn was low on the horizon. He was gladdened to see the beginning of another day. ‘Do you not sleep well? To be here at this time?’
‘Once, I did. Once, it was hard to wake me from a night’s slumber, but since...’ She stopped. ‘No. I do not sleep well any more.’
‘Is there family in other places, safer places than here?’
‘For my father to send me to, you mean?’ She stood and blew out the candle near his bed. ‘I need no looking after, señor. I am quite able to see to myself.’
Shadowed against the dying night she looked smaller than usual, as if in the finding of the words in the Bible earlier some part of her had been lost.
‘Fate can also be a kind thing, señor. There is a certain grace in believing that nothing one does will in the end make any difference to what finally happens.’
‘Responsibility, you mean?’
‘Do not discount it completely, Capitán. Guilt can eat a soul up with barely a whisper.’
‘So you are saying fate is like a pardon because all free will is gone?’
Even in the dim light he could see her frown.
‘I am saying that every truth has shades of lies within and one would be indeed foolish to think it different.’
‘Like the words you tore from the Bible? The ones written in charcoal?’
‘Especially those ones,’ she replied, a strength in the answer that had not been there a moment ago. ‘Those words were a message he knew I would find.’
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