Carla Kelly (17 page)

He knew that if he lived into the twentieth century, he would never forget the look on her face as she raised her head. The depth of her misery appalled him. He thought he had seen it all in Spain and Portugal, all the death and destruction, all the homeless, all the ruined. He knew then, as he held out his arms and she collapsed in them, that he had only seen the smallest part of war. The woman sobbing in his arms now had felt its stripes on her back infinitely worse than he had ever experienced.

He held her close, his ears full of the sounds of the most terrible lamentation he could imagine, and he knew he had a vivid imagination. As he drew her into the tightest embrace he could manage without hurting her ribs, she wept as though she cried for everyone who had ever lived in the world. He crooned her name over and over, and in his mind damned Napoleon to the farthest, deepest rung of hell for the misery he had caused all across the face of Europe. Damn you, Bonaparte, for taking my youth, he thought, but damn you more for snatching this girl’s soul. He knew then without a doubt how much he hated war, and how much he loved Liria Valencia.

When she had graduated to deep, dry sobs that wracked her whole body, he took out his handkerchief and wiped her face. She let him, raising her face to his as obediently as a child. “Liria,” he murmured,
“menina pobrecita.”

Her sobs subsided, and she relaxed in his arms. In a moment she took the handkerchief from him, and in a delicate gesture that made him wonder at the mystery of human strength, she wiped his face of the blood she had drawn. She leaned her forehead against his chest in what he knew was a gesture of contrition.

He picked her up. To his relief she did not struggle against him, but let him carry her closer to the river, where they could sit among the trees. He leaned against an oak tree, exhausted by her anger. She slumped against him. He put his hand on her head. “Tell me what happened, Liria. Tell me everything you can remember.”

He dreaded to hear her story, but he knew that Sergeant Carr expected it of him. He knew that the patient man who had listened to others had been denied the opportunity to listen to the one person who could not talk, until this moment.

She was silent a long time, and he began to despair. When she did start to talk, he had to remind himself to breathe, so deep was his gratitude. She spoke in Spanish, and she was not the self-possessed lady so easy to call
dama,
but a much younger woman hardly more than a child herself.

“Papa was an
afrancesado.
You have heard of them? He wanted Spain to look outward, to join the rest of Europe. He made sure that we were educated in French and English. We went to a convent where there were French nuns.” She shivered.

She was silent a while, as if picking out her sentences and arranging them in her mind. She sat up and leaned against the tree, too. “Where do I begin? When Fernando was forced from the throne of Spain, Papa welcomed Jose Buonaparte. He even went to Madrid for his coronation, and took Rosario and me with him.”

“She was your sister?”

Liria nodded. “She was two years younger than I.” She gave a little gasp, and began to breathe more quickly. Nez reached for her hand. “I have not said her name out loud in so many years!” She looked at him then, a quick glance as if to see if what she said was bothering him. “You need to know something about my family.”

He almost told her what he had learned from the ambassador, but decided not to. “I take it that some of your brothers and sisters disagreed with your father?”

She nodded. “One of my older brothers was loyal to Spain, and so was my . . . oh
Dios
 . . . my older sister Blanca. She was married to Don Alfonso Calderón y Victoria. Perhaps you have heard him called ‘El Garrote.’”

“I have,” Nez replied, remembering the guerrilla leader notorious throughout southern Spain. “I saw some of his handiwork. Made me almost pity the French.”

“My other brother was an
afrancesado
who served on Marmont’s staff. What a family we were!” she said bitterly. “I do not recall any pleasant family gatherings after 1809,” she added with that touch of irony so Spanish. “And you complain about your sister, senor. Shame on you.”

I think I will never complain again, he thought. All the more reason to reconcile with her. “How was it that you were in Badajoz in 1812?” he asked.

Liria drew up her knees and rested her chin on them. “Papa had been exiled from his land by Don Alfonso, his own son-in-law. We were on our way to rendezvous with Soult in Andalusia, who had promised Papa a voyage to France.” She shivered again. “It was Papa and I and Rosario. We were in Badajoz when the siege began.”

“Three weeks this time,” Nez said, “but it was the third siege of that damned town. What was it like in there?”

She shrugged. “What do I remember? Boredom and hunger, and a great longing to go home, even though we had no home. Papa wouldn’t let us leave his cousin’s house during the bombardment.” She rested her cheek on her knees so she could look him in the face. “I embroidered and counted the firing of the siege guns. Rosario read to me.”

Her face changed then, and the tears welled in her eyes. “And then the bombardment was worse, and then finally one night the city fell.” She closed her eyes. “At first I thought that was wonderful, because it would be quiet then.”

He thought about what she said, calling to mind the great silence in Badajoz, followed by the cries of the British wounded and dying, calling for their mothers, or for water. He remembered his own huge anger, double quicking his men past the
glacís,
sharp swords with soldiers impaled there, and then the rush of entering the city itself, full of rubble. Fire crackled here and there, muskets popped, and rubble from the walls shook itself free, but after the bombardment, it seemed quiet. Until we turned our men loose, he thought. “Go on, Liria,” he said, weary to the depth of his heart. He pressed his handkerchief, soaked with her tears, to a deep scratch beside his nose. “Go on,” he repeated more softly, when she rested her forehead against her knees.

Her voice was muffled then. “I opened the window—oh, I don’t know why I bothered, because the panes of glass were gone—and leaned out, and then I heard the most peculiar sound.” She turned her face away. “It sounded like wolves.”

He told her to continue.

She began to speak faster. “Papa told me to take Rosario and run for the British lines. He said that if we spoke English, he knew the soldiers would see us to safety.”

In his mind’s eye he could almost see the two sisters, hand in hand probably, skirting their way in the dark among the masonry from the walls and the bodies of the defenders, two young ladies gently reared in one of Spain’s noblest families.

“I did as he said, I never disobeyed Papa,” she said, and the anger returned to her voice. “‘Of course I will learn English, Papa,’” she said, mimicking herself. “‘Oh, French, too?
Por supuesto.
Napoleon is to be our liberator?
Naturallement.
The English will help us, Papa. They are such gentlemen.’” Her voice dropped to a whisper again. “He told us to put on our best white dresses, and make sure we had our biggest gold hoops in our ears. I wore Mama’s gold crucifix.”

You were living, breathing, moving easy targets for men enraged by too much bloodshed, too little food, and three weeks of taunts from the city walls of that horrible, arrogant town, he thought. “What happened then?” he asked.

She shivered and wrapped her arms around her drawn-up legs. “We were so close to a breach in the walls—I could see it up ahead—but then I got lost in that strange fog. Was it from the guns? I went down an alley, and there was no way out.” She put her hands over her ears then, as though she heard the soldiers running toward them. “I turned around to leave the alley, but the way was blocked by so many men.”

Liria stirred restlessly, and he thought for a moment she was going to leap up and run, like the girl in her memory. Instead, she crouched down, as close as she could get to him without actually touching him. “I stood there and called out to them in English, but they just . . . just roared! I grabbed Rosario and we ran, even though there was no place to run. They sounded like wolves. Did you hear them, too?”

“Yes, I did,” he said, hardly breathing. I heard them getting fainter and fainter, because I had turned my regiment loose and was heading back toward the siege guns, he thought, hating himself. In a few minutes I was going to drop down by the guns and go to sleep. I was so tired, Liria. I had trained my men well, my dear. I knew they would return to the bivouac when they were through with Badajoz.

She was breathing too rapidly then, which made her press her shaking hand to her forehead. He didn’t know whether he should pull her close to him, or not touch her at all. She solved his dilemma by burrowing tight against him like a small animal.

“You don’t want to hear this,” she told him, her voice barely recognizable.

“You must tell me anyway.”

“I am not proud of what happened then,” she said in a small voice. “Senor, someone grabbed me and threw me down. Rosario, too.” She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to crawl inside his armpit. All Nez could do was hold her as tight as he could. “She was screaming and screaming! I could just reach her fingers with mine then someone stepped on our hands and made us let go. I think someone stuffed a rag in her mouth, because then all I could hear was her gagging.”

Nez swallowed the hot acid that rose in his throat and closed his eyes.

“They held us there. Someone tried to pull my dress over my head, but someone else was holding my arms so he could only work it up to my armpits.” She stopped and was silent a long time. “I remember that the stones were sharp on my back, senor, but that was what I tried to think about. Have you ever really concentrated on something before? I mean, really? Really?”

He turned away from her then and retched in the grass by the tree, then pressed his stomach and willed himself to stop. He felt her hand on his shoulder then, and she rubbed his arm, as she would comfort a child. “Oh, I am so sorry, senor,” she whispered, which only made him retch harder. His stomach continued to heave as he sagged back against the tree again.

“And then the worst thing happened,” she said. She seemed almost eager to talk, to spill out the story she had tried to bury deep inside herself. “There we were, held down hand and foot, and one of the soldiers asked the man standing by my head—he was standing on my hair—if he wanted to go first with me.” She shuddered then. “He laughed that awful laugh I heard at your dinner table. Oh, before God and the angels, he said no, that he liked them younger and went to Rosario. Senor, she was only twelve!” Her breath came in gasps. “He made one of the soldiers turn my head so I had to watch while he . . . he violated my little sister. O
Dios,
while he was jamming himself inside her and she was screaming behind that gag, he shouted to me, ‘This is what we do to lovers of the French!’”

She burst into tears again, helpless tears. “It happened over and over, senor, until all the soldiers were through. Then it was my turn. I counted the soldiers at first, and then stopped because I knew I would go mad if I kept counting. All the time someone was pulling my hair and then yanking my earrings until they tore away, and that man was laughing. How dare he?”

It was a question for the ages. He could do nothing but gather her into his arms and hold her under the tree, his mind filled with the terrifying images of that alley in Badajoz. She stopped crying then and lay in his arms as limp as a doll, soaking wet from tears and perspiration even as he was.

She said nothing for a long time, and he heard a fish jump in the river. He breathed deep of the wildflowers in the field beside them, and listened as a bird perched in the next tree warbled its summer call. Somewhere farther off he heard a child laugh, and then people singing. It reminded him that he was in England and that it was high summer. He listened as Liria’s breathing slowed. He told himself that they were both far away from a ruined city in a poor, tired country so remote that it might have existed only in his mind, except that he held in his arms someone who had lived a nightmare he couldn’t even fathom.

“They left finally,” she said. “I suppose everyone had his turn, and we had nothing more to give. Someone tried to take Mama’s crucifix, but it was tangled in my hair.” She heaved an enormous sigh. “I heard someone draw a sword, and I thought he was going to cut off my head for that necklace. What he did was hack off a hunk of my hair and carry off the hair and the crucifix. Then they left.”

“What did you do?” he asked finally when she was silent a long time.

“I didn’t think I could ever move again, but I did, after a while. I still had my dress, so I pulled it down and crawled over to Rosario.” Liria covered her face with her hands. “Senor, she was just staring and staring! I pulled that gag from her mouth, and still her mouth stayed open. I think she must have thought she was screaming, but I didn’t hear a sound.”

“Was she dead, Liria?” He could hardly recognize his own voice.

“I . . . I don’t know. I was afraid to touch her because she looked so . . . so broken. Her legs . . . I couldn’t even cover her because they had ripped her dress to pieces. Jackals! May they rot!” She couldn’t go on. He held her close.

“Did you go for help?”

“I wish you would not ask me,” she replied. “I thought I would get some water for her. I just wanted to wash her legs. Benedict, why was I so concerned about washing her legs? What was the matter with me?”

He absorbed the fact that she had just called him by name for the first time. “I don’t know, Liria. Maybe there’s a part of our mind that wants to help keep us sane by doing something ordinary.” He sat up straighter. “Do you know what I did when it was finally quiet at Waterloo?” He could feel her shake her head. “I took out my housewife kit—I’m sure Sergeant Carr had one—and I sewed a button on a dead man’s shirt. Imagine that! I had glanced at him just before the Imperial Guard started marching toward us, and it really bothered me that he was so untidy.”