by Tracy Grant
"I do what I can."
"Yet you are not a soldier."
"No, I'm an aide to Sir Charles Stuart, the British Ambasador in Lisbon. But he finds it useful to send me to work with the general."
Victor's face broke into a smile. "The great Wellington. I have heard of some of the things you do, Adam Durward. You are a man of uncommon courage."
Uncomfortable at the turn of the conversation, Adam said, "You've been in the north."
"Yes. Above La Lora. In the Cantabrian mountains." Victor was silent a moment. "Our war goes well, Señor Durward, but not well enough. How soon will the English march?"
"Another six weeks, I would guess." Adam studied the other man. He was younger than he had expected, though his face bore the lines and fatigue that seemed common to all the guerrilleros. Cold and hunger and danger quickly took their toll. "How long since you have seen your wife and children?" Adam asked.
"Over a month." Victor's face softened. "It is too long, but what must be must be." He lifted his shoulders in a gesture that acknowledged the futility of defying fate, "I would have gone now to Acquera, but there is no time. I carry a message for the English general." He smiled. "A French dispatch which happened to fall into our hands. Tell me, Señor, you travel to Freneda?"
So this was the reason for their conversation. "You wish to come with us?" Adam said. "We would be grateful for your company."
"No, Señor, I wish you to carry the message for me. Then I can return to my comrades who need every man they can get." He grinned. "And I can make a short detour and pleasure my wife."
Adam laughed. "Your wife deserves much pleasure. She is a fine woman. She has been a great friend to Señora Rawley."
"Ah, that one. She has been a good friend to Adela. Take good care of her, Señor. And of the little one. I would die rather than see them come to harm."
"As would I." Adam held the other man's eyes. Carrying the message might pose some danger, but it was a small price to pay for Adela's kindness. "I will carry your message, Señor Soro, and you may go to your wife. Give her my blessing."
An hour later they left the camp. Their encounter with the guerrilleros had left Caroline badly shaken. She had been frightened when Gazin had entered her cottage, but the guerilleros had shown her just how vulnerable she was. She had thought of the Spaniards as friends, but she knew now that Spaniards could kill as easily as the French. She had been mad to bring Emily into Spain. It was a hasty, reckless act, like so many of the acts that had shaped her life, but for this one Emily was likely to pay the price.
Emily was riding now with Adam, while Hawkins rode in the rear, leading the mule. Emily looked happy and secure, confident in the new day and whatever it might bring. The terrors of the past night might never have been. Caroline smiled. It was a strange irony. Now, as she was recognizing her folly in never thinking beyond the immediate moment, she was learning to live, like her daughter, only in the present, one day, one hour, one moment at a time.
Feeling like a boat that had lost its moorings, Caroline pulled back so she could ride beside Hawkins. The events of the past four days had bound them together, and she took some comfort from his presence. "What would have happened," she asked him, "if Victor had not come? Would they have killed Adam?"
"I doubt it." Hawkins gave her a smile that seemed intended for reassurance.
Caroline did not want to be reassured. "Would they have turned us over to the French?"
"I suspect they would have left you and Emily in the nearest village."
"And Adam?"
"Oh, the French, I think. French or English, he would have fetched a price." The mule stopped and Hawkins yanked on its lead. "But I would have found you and seen you safe to Lisbon."
"And leave Adam prisoner?" Caroline was outraged at the suggestion. Whatever Adam had done, she could not bear to see him harmed.
"Lady," Hawkins said, suddenly serious. "Adam Durward is my friend. My best friend. My only friend. In the hands of the French, he would not be in mortal danger, and I would not leave him if he were. But neither would I leave you and Emily unprotected."
Chastened, Caroline was quiet.
"You and Adam go back a long time, don't you?" Hawkins said.
Caroline looked at the man riding beside her. Why, he was as curious about the time she had spent with Adam as she was about the time Adam and Hawkins had shared. She smiled, more than ready to share confidences. "I was seven," she began, "when he came to Finley-Abbott."
"To live with his Aunt Margaret."
"Yes." Caroline was silent for a while, remembering the past. "I'll never forget the day Adam arrived in Finley-Abbott," she went on, "thin and brown and arrogant. And terrified. He was the most exotic child I'd ever seen and I wanted him desperately for a friend."
"I daresay he was exotic. He'd just come from India and he'd never been in England."
Caroline laughed. "India. Palaces and maharajahs and brave British soldiers. I had no idea where on the globe it was."
"But you became friends."
"We were inseparable. There was scarcely a day we didn't meet."
"What happened?"
The question was blunt to the point of rudeness. Caroline did not know how to answer and took refuge in brushing a fly from her horse's neck.
"Not that it's my business, mind," Hawkins said in an earnest voice, "but I have eyes. It's clear things aren't right between you, not for two people who were such very good friends."
"What happened," Caroline said after a moment, "is that I agreed to marry Jared Rawley." She glanced at Hawkins and saw nothing but sympathy in his blue eyes. Suddenly she wanted to explain herself, to make clear how things had been. "Finley-Abbott is a small town, really little more than a village. My family owns some land nearby, but we aren't the most important family in the neighborhood. It was the Rawleys who were the grandest of all. Jared's father was a general. They made him a baron, Baron Anandale, for services rendered during the war with America. Then he was forced to retire because of his wife's health. But he was also younger brother to an earl. And there was money in the family, far more than my own family ever hoped to see."
"Lord of the manor?"
Caroline smiled. "Something like that. As children we all played together. As we grew older, we became aware of the things that separated us. The Rawleys were far above the Bennets—"
Hawkins raised his brows. "Just as the Bennets were far above Adam Durward and his aunt?"
Caroline was taken aback. But Hawkins was right, that was exactly how it had been. And that had been the root of all the trouble.
They rode in silence for a while. Caroline was aware of Emily's voice coming back to them in fragments of sound. The child talked incessantly, to herself as often as to other people.
Hawkins's face broke into a broad smile. "A bonny lassie."
"Are you a Scot?" Caroline asked.
"No, London born and London bred. My father was a shopkeeper and I was one of a dozen brats. 'Twas a fellow in my regiment who talked that way."
Without thinking, Caroline glanced at his left leg, the one on which he could not put his weight properly. She looked away quickly, afraid that Hawkins might be sensitive on that score.
Hawkins was not. "That's right. It was blown up a bit in India and it didn't set right. I was invalided out. Not that I minded. I'd become Sergeant Plumb and there wasn't any place higher for me to go. And I was tired of India and the things we had to do there."
Adam had been in India. He'd gone back just before she married Jared, gone, some said, to seek his fortune in that fabled land. Caroline suspected he had gone to find some remnant of himself, left behind when his parents' deaths sent him to the foreignness of England. "Is that where you met Adam?" she asked.
Hawkins drew his horse aside to avoid a stunted gorse bush. "No. We met on the ship coming home. He'd had his fill of India, as had I. Six months before us on the sea, with little to do but talk to each other. Adam hadn't much use for the othe
r passengers, and they didn't want anything to do with a rough soldier like me."
"He was fortunate to find you, Hawkins Plumb." Six months. Six months of talk. Caroline wondered what Adam had told Hawkins about her, about them, but she couldn't bring herself to ask.
Hawkins must have read her mind, for he said, "He didn't speak about you at all, or even much about Finley-Abbott. Only about his aunt and the school and things like that. I didn't know your name till a month ago when he told me we must go to Spain to find Lieutenant Rawley who'd been left behind at Burgos and his wife who'd been fool enough to follow him there." Hawkins glanced at her. "Begging your pardon. They weren't my words."
"I know. They were Adam's, and he was right." Hawkins had said nothing about their meeting in Adam's lodgings five years ago nor about the fraud, though he must know of it. Caroline was grateful to him. "I've put you both to a great deal of trouble," she said.
Hawkins gave her a smile of such sweetness that she knew why Adam had sought him as a friend. "Ah, well then, but I wouldn't have met Emily."
Adam, who'd been riding a few yards ahead, came to a halt. "There's a village over there." He pointed to a straggly line of poplars. "They might be willing to sell us some bread."
"I'll go ahead," Hawkins said, "just in case."
He handed the reins of the mule to Adam and rode off toward the poplars. "Why can't we go, too?" Emily asked.
"There might be soldiers," Adam said.
After her experience in Acquera, Emily did not need to be told about soldiers. She settled back against Adam, her face solemn, her eyes watching for Hawkins's return.
To her surprise, Caroline found that she took some comfort from Adam's presence. He was a link to her childhood when her life had been predictable and secure, just as Victor, who had also brought her comfort this day, was a link to her more recent past. She watched Adam holding her daughter—his daughter—and felt a twinge of guilt. Since they had begun their journey, Caroline had avoided Adam when she could, and Adam, aware of her dislike of his company, had drawn into himself like a hedgehog, just as he had done when he was a boy. Now, when she wanted to reach out, she scarcely knew how to begin. She looked at the face she knew so well, the dark eyes narrowed against the light, the black hair falling in a familiar pattern over his forehead. His face was seamed with lines that had not been there five years before. Caroline wondered what harsh experiences they recorded.
There was so much anger still between them, and yet, riding across an empty plain with their pitifully small party, the immensity of the universe about them, coming out of danger to meet unknown danger ahead, dependent on one another for their very survival, it was hard to hold the anger in her heart. But Caroline knew it wasn't safe to get too close to Adam. She could be ensnared by memories of their early closeness. She could be seduced by his touch. And then she would forget how he had betrayed her and what he had done to deserve her enmity.
"Look!" Emily said, pointing ahead with sudden excitement. Hawkins was emerging from the poplars and he soon reached them with the welcome intelligence that there was not a French soldier in sight. "They haven't seen a soldier at all," he added, "since last winter when a handful of English came through. They like the English, they paid for what they took. I told them we'd pay too."
It was a dismal little village, not unlike Acquera, but it was a respite from the bleak country through which they had been riding where the only sign of life was an occasional eagle soaring overhead. Caroline felt immediately at home. She dismounted and went to the well to refill their canteens. The women clustered there looked at her askance, but Caroline's mastery of their tongue plus the presence of Emily, who was already making friends with the barefooted children playing nearby, earned her a grudging acceptance. They made space for her at the well and helped her fill the canteens. Caroline felt refreshed by the interlude, and by the time they remounted she had determined to try to mend things between Adam and herself. Hawkins, in a cheerful mood, swung Emily up before him. "It's my turn with the little lady," he said, Caroline suspected it was to spare Adam whose wound must still be painful, though he had insisted that morning that it was not.
"Did you buy bread?" Emily asked.
"And a bit of cheese. And wine. We didn't want to take any from Victor and his friends."
"The bad men didn't pay for it." Emily had seen Luis and his men loading the wine barrel and she had remembered their discussion over dinner.
"Ay, there's that. We're honest folk. Or we try to be."
Emily giggled and settled back happily against Hawkins. Caroline spurred her horse to catch up with Adam, who was riding ahead. "Hawkins told me you met when you both left India."
Adam looked at her in surprise, but he seemed willing to talk. "Yes, on the ship coming home from Bombay. Hawkins had to leave the army, and I—I knew it was time to move on."
Hearing the pain in his voice, Caroline wondered what he had found in India to hurt him so. She knew that India was the land of his birth, and she knew, because she had listened to the whispers when no one had thought a child of seven would understand, that his mother had been a Hindu. Caroline hadn't been sure what a Hindu was, save that it was something at once exotic and shameful. When she and Adam had become friends and he trusted her, he had told her of his childhood in Bombay and of his father who had been a soldier with the British army. But in all the years of their friendship he had never spoken of his mother nor of how she and his father had met their deaths, and Caroline had respected his reticence.
The children in Finley-Abbott had not always been kind to Adam. He was different, and difference was not well tolerated in their little corner of Staffordshire. Adam had been better accepted at university, Caroline knew, but once he decided to return to the land of his birth he faced the question of his difference again. With a father who had given honorable service in India, Adam should have had no trouble getting a position with the East India Company and rising with it as far as he was able. He could have made his fortune there. Caroline had not understood why he chose instead to go to India as private secretary to a private citizen of scholarly bent who could offer him no hope of riches or advancement. "The Company don't employ men of mixed blood," her father had told her, and those few harsh words had shattered her view of a world that was rational and kind.
But she could not talk of this to Adam, who still carried the hurts of childhood rejection. Instead she asked, "Was India as you remembered?"
A wry smile crossed Adam's face. "In some ways. But I'd grown used to England and it was a shock to return. Everything is more vivid there. The sun is hotter, the colors are brighter, the crowds denser, and the noise indescribable. Yes, I suppose it was the same. India has its own sound and its own smell. I knew it the minute I stepped off the boat." He paused. "I thought I was coming home."
Caroline looked at him in surprise. Home was his aunt's small house in Finley-Abbott and the loving care she had given Adam since he had been sent to her at the age of ten, his parents left buried in another world. But Caroline knew why he had left his English home. She had poisoned it for him with her cruelty, and in his anger he had run off to find another home. "Your home is in Finley-Abbott," she said, trying to shake off her guilt.
"My home is nowhere." Adam had not meant speak so sharply, but it was hard to talk of India. He had thought to find that glorious land a refuge and it had proved a torment. "My mother didn't like to speak of her family," he said, feeling a sudden need to make Caroline understand, "and when she did she spoke only of her youth. She never returned to her village. She came from a large family, but as far as I know she never sent a message to any of them. And never received one either. When I'd ask her why, she put me off. I thought perhaps she was afraid of offending my father."
"Was it hard for her, being married to an Englishman?"
Adam knew what she was asking. "The English accepted her readily enough. In those days there were many families like ours. It was only later, when more English women
came to India, that it became a stigma to have mixed blood. But my mother's family—" Adam could feel the bitter taste in his mouth. "I found her village, Caro. I found her family, every one of them. She was dead to them the moment she married the English soldier, and twenty-three years later they refused to acknowledge her son. I discovered that hate can last a long time. I no more belonged in Bengal than I belonged in England."
Caroline made a small sound of distress.
"Don't pity me, Caro," Adam said, more harshly than he intended. "We are as we are. We must accept what fate chooses to give us."
"It's not fair!" she said with sudden passion.
Adam shrugged. "Look round you, Caro. Life has nothing to do with fairness."
She was silent, for he had left her nothing more to say. Adam wrenched his mind back to the present. They were making good time. Even the mule was proving cooperative. The hills were behind them and they were crossing a dry rough plain broken by outcroppings of sharp-pointed rocks. Adam pulled out his compass to check his bearings. "We'll cross the Carrión above Palencia," he told Caroline, wishing to make amends for his ill-humor. "Our way should be easier, but I want to avoid the main roads. There'll be French patrols about."
And he had more than one reason to avoid them. Wrapped in thin oilskin, the dispatch Victor had given him to put into Wellington's hands rested secure beneath the lining of Adam's boot. But perhaps not secure enough to survive a search. For their own safety, he had told neither Caroline nor Hawkins about it. Caroline drew her cloak more tightly about her. "The guide I hired to take us to Acquera kept to the main roads, but he cared more for speed than safety. It was colder then—in some places there was snow—and the French army seemed to have gone to earth. I scarcely knew there was danger."
Adam asked the question that had tormented him since he had first learned of Caroline's flight. "Why did you go? Did you hope to bring Jared back?"
