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‘Are we nearly there?’ she asked, and was answered by Alex’s gesture to further down the slope where thin columns of smoke could just be seen. The track suddenly met a wider cart track at right angles and Alex turned on to it, then stopped. Around the bend, approaching them, came the sound of voices and the rumble of wheels.
‘Leave the talking to me,’ he said urgently as a group of people accompanying two laden carts came into view.
Hebe held her breath. They were all civilians, four men and two younger women, and by the look of them they were returning to their village after a day gathering wood or looking after animals on the pastures. Alex stood quietly by the side of the road, one hand on hers as it rested on the mule’s neck, his eyes on the approaching group, who were regarding the pair of them with undisguised curiosity as they came.
Then the
re was a cry of ‘Major Alex!’ and they were in the centre of a laughing group, slapping Alex on the back, grinning at her, firing rapid Spanish at him despite his efforts to slow them down. Hebe sat, weak with relief, and studied them, liking what she saw. They were all dark, the men rather stocky and dressed very much alike in knee breeches over rough woollen hose with heavy buckled shoes. Their shirts were generously cut and on top some wore leather waistcoats, others jackets. One woman was about Hebe’s age, shy and long haired in a plain gown kirtled up to show her sturdy shoes and dusty petticoats; the other was a little older, with a thin, expressive face. She sat up on the box of the first wagon, the oxen’s reins held loosely in her hand, her eyes vivid as she smiled at Alex.
The excited group suddenly fell silent and turned as one to look down the cart track towards the village. They had heard what it took Hebe a moment longer to recognise, the beat of many hooves on the hard-packed surface.
‘Los francès!’ one of the men said and before she knew what was happening Hebe was sitting in the back of one of the wagons, a sack thrown over her trousers and the musket tucked down beside her. One of the men had clapped his hat on Alex’s head, the mule was hitched on behind and suddenly the little group had acquired two more weary workers returning home for the evening.
They stood aside, sullen, but showing no obvious hostility, as the small troop of cavalry swept past them, the officer giving them a sharp, dismissive glance as he passed. Then they were walking again, keeping to the pace of the oxen. Hebe let her head fall back against the side of the cart and fell into a doze of sheer weariness.
She was woken by Alex shaking her gently by the shoulder to find they had stopped in the tiny square of the village. Whitewashed houses interspersed with others built from the local granite formed three sides, with the church on the fourth. Lanes ran off from it, busy with small children playing and chasing chickens and dogs; old women sitting outside their front doors preparing vegetables and their menfolk wearily making their way home.
‘We are safe here,’ he said, smiling at her as she knuckled her tired eyes. ‘You go with Anna, she will look after you.’
‘But, Alex!’ Hebe started to scramble down, conscious that several old ladies were regarding her attire with surprise. One crossed herself. ‘Alex, I do not speak any Spanish!’
‘But I speak English,’ said the woman who had been driving the oxen. She jumped down from the cart in a swirl of skirts and Hebe saw she was perhaps thirty years old, and tall. ‘I am Anna Wilkins. Mrs Anna Wilkins. And you are welcome to my brother’s house as is any friend of Major Alex.’
Her accent was heavily Spanish, but Hebe could make out an underlying edge of cockney. She was urging Hebe towards the front door of one of the larger houses, talking as she went. ‘Do not worry about the Major, he is talking to the headman of the village. ’Ere we are.’ The tranquil shade hit Hebe like a breath of cool air. The shutters were closed and the evening light sent bars across the terra-cotta-tiled floor, falling here and there on the few pieces of massive oak furniture that flanked the wide fireplace.
‘Is this your house?’ Hebe asked. ‘It is beautiful.’
‘My brother Ernesto owns it. I keep house for him, now I am a widow.’ She steered Hebe towards a door that opened to reveal stairs. ‘You like a bath?’
‘Oh, yes, please. I am sorry, was your husband an Englishman?’ It seemed quite unreal to be making polite conversation with this woman in a remote mountain village.
‘Yes, ’arry Wilkins, one of the Major’s sergeants. I follow him all over, until he died of the fever.’ She glanced at Hebe. ‘The Major had it too, it comes back I think, sometimes. He does not look well now.’
‘Yes, he was very ill for two days: we were washed overboard from a frigate on the way to Gibraltar. Al—the Major saved me.’
Anna nodded sharply as though she would expect nothing else, and shouted down the stairs, ‘Donna! Venga aqui!’
A woman appeared, was deluged with a rapid fire of instructions and retreated again, muttering. Anna rolled her eyes and showed Hebe through to a bedroom with a wide bed with a headboard of chestnut planks and a billowing mattress covered in white sheets.
‘Now, you have a bath…’ Anna tugged a hipbath out from behind a screen ‘…and then you go to bed and I fetch you some food and some drink and you sleep or eat as you want. Sì?’
The maid must have had hot water on the fire awaiting her mistress’s return, for it seemed only a few minutes before she was puffing up the stairs, followed by a youth, both of them carrying buckets that steamed gently. When the bath was full Anna shooed them out of the room and lifted towels, fine but worn, and a long white nightgown out of the chest at the foot of the bed. ‘I help you undress?’
She took Hebe’s tired fumblings with buttons and ties as assent and began to help her out of her clothes. Hebe was too weary to either feel any embarrassment, or wonder what state her adventures had left her in. It was not until the older woman gasped and took Hebe by the shoulders, turning her so she could look at her properly, that she realised that perhaps she was rather bruised and battered.
‘I must have got very knocked about in the sea,’ she said, looking down at her shins and the state of her forearms.
‘This was all not the sea,’ Anna said harshly, twisting her round until she faced a long mirror. Even in the gloom Hebe could see the finger marks on her upper arms and shoulders, the bruises on the white skin of her thighs. ‘The man that raped you, the Major has killed him, no?’
‘No!’
‘I find that hard to believe,’ Anna said sternly. ‘And what is he about, not telling me so that I can look after you properly. I shall have words with him!’
‘No!’ Hebe said again with such an edge of desperation that Anna stopped fulminating on the idiocy of men and looked at her closely.
‘He does not know?’ Hebe shook her head. ‘But how is this? These are not old bruises, they are newer than the ones on your…’ She lost the English word and gestured at Hebe’s calves.
Hebe gave a little sob and found herself wrapped in a warm embrace. ‘Come along, tell Anna. Who was it, ducky?’
