A Stranger at Castonbury

chapterr Four

It looked like the landscape of another world entirely, not a place where he had once lived and worked, fought and loved. It was a place he had never seen before except in nightmares.

Jamie felt strangely numb, remote from his surroundings as he climbed stiffly down from his horse and studied the scorched patch of earth where the camp once stood. The hot sun beat down from a clear, mercilessly blue sky onto the baked, cracked dust, but Jamie didn’t even feel it. He was vaguely aware of Xavier Sanchez, sitting on his own horse several feet away and watching the scene warily, but Jamie felt like the only living being left for miles around.

Maybe the only living being left on the planet.

There were no sounds, no birds singing or wind sweeping through the trees. Once this place had been filled with voices, laughter, the cries of the injured, the barked orders of a military operation. The ghosts of such sounds in his mind made the silence even heavier.

Jamie tilted back his head to stare up into the sky. He could smell the dusty scent of the air, the faint, acrid remains of fire. The echoes of the violence that had happened here.

And Catalina had been caught in it. His numbness was shattered by a spasm of pure, raw pain at the thought of what must have happened here. The fear and panic, the sense of being trapped amid fire and ruin with nowhere to run. No one to help her, because he had gone.

‘Catalina,’ he whispered, his heart shattered at the thought of her being afraid. Had she thought of him in that moment, just as he had pictured only her face when he was sure he was drowning? Had she called out his name?

Jamie walked slowly across the blasted, blackened patch of earth, not seeing it how it was now, abandoned and ruined, but how it was that day he first saw Catalina. Her smile, her face like a beautiful, exotic flower, a haven of peace and loveliness in a mad world. She had given him something he had never known before—stillness, a place to belong. She had made him think of things he had never dared to before, like a future, a home. With her, he had imagined even the grand halls of Castonbury could be that home, if she was there.

And then in only a moment that was all gone.

He remembered her hurt, pale face when she found out about the nature of his secret work. The doubts that lingered in her eyes when they parted. He had foolishly imagined he would have time to make all that right later, to make everything up to her.

Jamie reached up and pressed his hand over the ring he wore on a chain around his neck under his shirt, against his heart. Cawley had said this ring, Catalina’s ring, had been found here among the dead. Yet some stubborn hope had clung to Jamie—what if she had somehow miraculously got away?

Cawley had said a farmer found the ring, and that was what had brought Jamie here. He had discovered the name of the farmer and come back to the camp in the wild, far-fetched notion that he could find this man and make him tell more details of the day when the camp was destroyed. If he knew more, maybe he could find Catalina’s body and put her properly to rest.

Or he might find her. At night, in his fever dreams when he was ill, he saw just such a thing. Catalina, alive again, smiling at him, holding out her arms to him. Telling him it had all been a terrible mistake.

But as he looked at the darkened earth, he saw just how wild a hope that was. Surely no one had survived such an onslaught.

He climbed to the top of a steep slope into which the backside of the camp had been built. It led down to the river on the other side, and to fields beyond. They, too, were deserted, everyone having fled before the advancing armies. But Jamie glimpsed one tiny spot of life, an old woman walking by the river, swathed in shawls even in the hot day. She was checking fishing nets laid out in the river.

Jamie made his way slowly down the other side of the hill, careful to make sure the woman saw him approach so he would not frighten her. She didn’t run away, but went very still, her eyes dark and wary in her sunken, wrinkled face.

‘Señora, I only came to ask a few questions here,’ Jamie said in Spanish.

The woman slowly nodded, and he asked her about the destruction of the camp. She didn’t know much; she had been staying with her daughter in another village, and had only returned to her home here with her son after the armies had gone.

‘What do you seek here, young man?’ she asked. ‘There is nothing left, not for anyone.’

‘I want to find out what happened to my wife,’ Jamie answered honestly. ‘She was a nurse at the English camp here. I was told a farmer saw what happened, and found her wedding ring.’

The woman nodded, her face softening at his stark words. ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘Perhaps my son can help. He was here that day, I am sure he’s the one you’re looking for.’

She led him over a low, crumbling stone wall and through a blasted field. A man was working there, bent and careworn as he tried to eke out some kind of meal from the ruined ground. Even though the woman said he was her son, he looked as old as she did. But his eyes also turned kind when the woman explained why Jamie was there.

‘I did see the camp after the French left,’ he said, leaning on his rake with a haunted look in his eyes. ‘I wanted to see if I could help, but there was nothing left to do but bury the dead.’

Jamie took out Catalina’s ring and showed it to him. ‘Were you the one who found this?’

The man nodded, tears in his eyes. ‘I found it in the dust, near a woman’s body. It had been trampled down, half buried.’

Jamie swallowed hard at the stark words. Catalina’s ring trampled, destroyed. ‘This woman—did she have dark hair? Not very tall?’

‘Sí, she looked Spanish, but her skin was pale with freckles on the nose. And she wore a nurse’s apron.’

Jamie closed his fist around the ring. ‘And you gave this back to the English? That was very generous of you, considering you could have sold it.’

The man shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t want to bring curses onto my family. What if the woman’s spirit attached to the ring?’

Jamie stared down at the sapphire, almost wishing that he, too, could believe in curses. That Catalina could stay with him through her ring. ‘What happened to the woman’s body?’

The man turned away silently, and led Jamie over the field to an empty meadow that lay just beyond. There the dirt was piled in a long, heaped-up mound, with a line of roughly hewn crosses.

‘They were all buried here,’ the man said. ‘She is down there at that end. I laid her there myself.’

Jamie moved slowly towards the grave. The world slowed to a blur around him, and he felt so numb again, old, remote from everything. All he could see was that patch of earth.

He knelt down and for a moment grief pressed in all around him and he was utterly alone. Catalina was buried here; he could feel it. His family was far away, and in this, the most profound moment of his life, he was alone.

‘I am so sorry, Catalina,’ he said. Sorry he had not been there for her; sorry he could not have been what she needed him to be. Sorry he had ever hurt her at all.

He tilted back his head and stared up into the sky, feeling so very empty. He had to finish his task here in Spain, no matter how distasteful it was. He had to do it for his family.

But he feared he himself would never feel anything again.

* * *

Catalina leaned against the railing of the ship and peered through the thick, wet grey mist at the slowly approaching shoreline.

England. She was in England at last. And she didn’t notice the sharp, cold wind that tore at her hat or the noise and activity on the deck behind her. She could only think about how close her destination was, after weeks of weary travel—and of how different this arrival was from how she had once so briefly pictured it. How she had once dreamed it might be, with Jamie by her side, taking her home with him.

She curled her gloved hand into a tight fist. The brief, dizzying days of her romance and marriage seemed so far away now, a vision clouded by months of trying to survive as she travelled across war-torn Spain. Yet still she could see Jamie’s face so clearly in her mind, could hear his voice calling her name and feel his hand on hers.

At night she lay awake, unable to sleep as she remembered him. She was plagued by so many thoughts, so many questions she was sure could never be answered now that he was gone. What had really happened to him? Who had gone on to do his mission of restoring the Spanish king?

Had he thought of her there at the end? Had he loved her? Had their time together brought him any peace at all?

She did hope so. And she hoped that one day her heart would not feel so shattered and lonely whenever she thought of him.

The shore was looming closer with every moment, dark and shadowed in the rain but unmistakably green, just as she had pictured England when Jamie told her about his homeland. Somewhere out there was his home, Castonbury, and his family, mourning him as she was.

‘Mrs Moreno! There you are,’ she heard her employer, Mrs Burnes, say. Catalina turned to see the lady emerging from below decks, bundled in shawls and scarves, her face pale under her fashionable bonnet.

Catalina smiled and hurried to her side. She liked Mrs Burnes, and considered herself fortunate to have the job of her companion on the voyage home to England. Her husband, General Burnes, had sent her away from Spain for the sake of her health and safety. Mrs Burnes was rather sickly and sometimes quite demanding, but she was not mean as Mrs Chambers had often been to poor Alicia Walters. She enjoyed hearing Catalina read to her to distract her from the rough seas, and the days passed well enough on the voyage.

It was the nights, when she was alone with no duties to perform, that filled Catalina with thoughts of Jamie.

She helped Mrs Burnes onto a deckchair and tucked the shawls closer around her. ‘We are almost there now, Mrs Burnes. Land at last.’

‘Thank heavens for that! I could never bear another sea voyage,’ Mrs Burnes said. ‘Once my dear general is home, I shall insist we never leave again.’

Catalina laughed. ‘I can definitely agree to that, Mrs Burnes. The sea is not so agreeable as land.’

‘Oh, but surely you will want to return to Spain one day, Mrs Moreno. When things are settled there.’

Catalina shook her head. ‘This will be my home now.’ She couldn’t go back to Spain, not with the king returning. Not with all the memories lurking there.

‘Well, I hope you will like England, then. It’s very different from Spain, but there are interesting sights and people to be found here as well, if one only looks.’ Mrs Burnes chattered on as the ship lumbered towards shore, telling Catalina about all her friends in London she hoped to see again and the country house she wanted to buy as soon as her husband returned so they could retire there together.

‘...it is very near Castonbury Park, the seat of the Duke of Rothermere,’ Mrs Burnes said.

The words caught Catalina’s attention. ‘Castonbury?’ she said, and all the tales Jamie had told her of his home came flooding back to her.

‘Oh, yes. Have you heard of the house? It is one of the loveliest in all England, and surely one of the grandest. I toured it once as a girl, and I still remember the great marble columns and the lovely frescoes on the ceilings! Just what a Roman emperor’s palace must have been like, I imagine. I even caught a glimpse of the duchess, who was just going out for a ride. She was so very beautiful and elegant, just what an English duchess ought to be.’ Mrs Burnes sighed. ‘That is the sort of thing I will be happy to return to, something so English.’

Catalina almost laughed. Once, she might have been mistress of that place, a new duchess. Yet all she had wanted was Jamie, Jamie who turned out to be a dream creation of her own romantic heart.

But she still almost wished she could see the house just once. See it, and imagine Jamie was somehow still with her there...