A Stranger at Castonbury (9 page)

‘Madre de Dios,’
she whispered. Jamie? Here, alive. No, it could not be. She was asleep and dreaming. The journey had tired her and she was imagining things again, just like with that man in the garden.

But then he took her cold, limp hand in his and looked at her with those bright grey eyes. She felt his skin against hers, so warm, so real. So alive. Not a dream, not a vision that would dissolve when she awoke.

‘Catalina,’ he whispered so only she could hear. His voice, too, was real, just as she remembered it.

The whole crowded room spun around her, and there was such a roaring in her ears, like a dozen rushing rivers. Just like the river that had supposedly swallowed him up. She stumbled back against the nearest table, her legs too weak to hold her up.

‘You’re not going to swoon, are you, Catalina? Not now,’ Jamie said. His voice was exactly the same, just as she heard it so often in her haunted dreams. Rough and warm all at the same time.

‘No,’ she managed to say, just before darkness closed in around her and she felt herself falling and falling.

Until strong arms closed around her.

She came to when she heard Lydia sobbing and crying, ‘Mrs Moreno! Oh, Mrs Moreno, please wake up.’

‘Give the lady some air, for heaven’s sake,’ Lady Phaedra said impatiently.

‘I have my vinaigrette,’ Aunt Wilhemina said. ‘No one should ever go anywhere without their vinaigrette. Here, James, give her this.’

Catalina tried to open her eyes, to tell them all she was quite all right, but she felt so very cold. She couldn’t quit shivering. And she felt so silly. She never fainted, not even during her nursing duties in Spain when there had been blood and limbs everywhere.

‘I think she is in shock,’ Jamie said. He sounded so calm, just as he had whenever a crisis threatened in the military camps, but there was tremor running just beneath the words. ‘Everyone move aside, please. Phaedra is right, she does need some air. It is much too warm in here.’

Jamie scooped her up in his arms and Catalina felt him carry her across the drawing room and nudge open a door with his shoulder. The noise of everyone arguing over the best way to treat a faint faded behind them.

He lowered her carefully until she felt satin cushions at her back and she finally opened her eyes. He had carried her into a small sitting room crowded with furniture, and the only light was the silvery glow of the moon from beyond the window. He leaned over her, watching her in silence, and she stared up at him in the moonlight. He was a stranger, yet once he had been her husband.

He was certainly as handsome as ever, tall and elegantly lean, dark and bright all at the same time. Yet there was something there that had not been in the man she married. Deep lines bracketed his sensual mouth. His grey eyes were so wary, as flat and still as a millpond, hiding his emotions. It was almost as if another soul had come to inhabit the body of the man she loved.

Was her Jamie still behind those dead eyes? What had happened to him? Had he finished his work in Spain? Above all—how was he here, alive, when he had been gone for so long?

‘I—I thought you dead,’ she managed to say. ‘They told me you were drowned that day.’

‘Catalina. What an impasse,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought
you
were dead.’

She stared up at him, aghast at his words. ‘You thought I was dead? Why?’

‘After the river, and many days in a makeshift field hospital nearby, I managed to make my way back to the camp, but it had been destroyed. I found a farmer who told me the French had attacked the contingent who had been left behind after we departed, that almost everyone had been killed—including the surgeon you worked with and the chaplain who married us. He showed me the place where they buried everyone. He showed be
your
grave. And he gave me...this.’

Jamie untied his cravat and reached inside his shirt to draw out a thin gold chain. The moonlight caught on the object that dangled from it, a sapphire ring. ‘He was an honest man indeed to give it up,’ he said quietly. ‘I knew you would not have parted from it willingly.’

Catalina rubbed at her bare finger and closed her eyes as the terror of that long-ago day washed over her again. She remembered so well running, fleeing blindly to she knew not where until she found that hidey-hole in the woods. By then it was too late to go back and search for her precious ring. All that she had left of Jamie.

But Jamie was
here.
And he wore her ring. Surely that meant something. Anything.

She opened her eyes again, only to find that he still looked down at her with that steady stillness, that lack of expression that made him resemble one of the marble statues that dotted Castonbury’s lush gardens. Jamie was so different here, like an entirely separate person from the man she had married. What had happened to him? Where was he?

What was he capable of, this man she had once thought she knew so well and then turned out not to know at all?

Perhaps the ring was not a memento of her, then. Perhaps it was merely to remind him not to make the mistake of marrying in haste again.

Slowly, cautiously, she reached up and brushed the scar on his face with her fingertips. It felt rough under her touch, but his skin was so warm. So real. He tensed, that muscle in his jaw flexing, but he didn’t pull away.

‘Where did you go after that?’ she whispered. ‘What have you been doing?’ Had he done his task of restoring the king to the Spanish throne? What lengths had he gone to in order to do that?

‘That is not important,’ he answered, his voice low and rough. ‘I can hardly think of anything tonight. It has all been turned upside down.’

Catalina nodded. She knew how that felt—it seemed like a hundred years since she had walked downstairs with Lydia. The moment before and the moment after she saw him again marked a vast chasm of time. Right now she felt as if she floated free in the night sky, untethered to any kind of reality at all.

Jamie took her hand in his with a terrible gentleness and held her fingers on his palm as he studied them. ‘Why did you come to England? Did you journey here alone, or on some mission?’

Catalina stared at him. Just like him, she couldn’t remember why she had come to England, or anything else. Just him, just this moment. ‘I came to England because I couldn’t bear Spain any longer. With the Bourbons returned—it was not my home, you know. I wanted to make a new start here.’

‘Ah, yes. I remember how you hated the king.’ Jamie carefully laid her hand back at her side. ‘You were so passionate about it.’

And she suddenly recalled how
he
had been meant to help restore the monarchy, to send Spain back to the terrible torpor it had known before Napoleon, with no chance for a new start. Until he died.

‘Jamie, what did you...’ she began, only to break off when a soft knock sounded at the door. It was as if the cold knife of reality sliced into the moment with Jamie and shattered it.

‘Jamie?’ Lily called. ‘Is Mrs Moreno quite all right?’

‘Come in,’ Jamie answered. He rose from the settee and moved over to the empty fireplace. He turned his back to Catalina and braced his forearm on the mantel.

Catalina pushed herself up until she could swing her feet down to the floor just as Lily slipped into the room. She held a goblet in her hand.

‘Goodness, but it is dark in here,’ she said, but she seemed calm and not shocked at all that a man and a woman would be in a dim room together. ‘Are you feeling better, Mrs Moreno? Everyone is quite worried, especially Miss Westman.’

Lydia.
How could she have forgot? Catalina quickly stood up, only to sway dizzily as her head swam. ‘I must go to her.’

‘Not until you feel better,’ Lily said. ‘She is very well looked after by Phaedra and Elena. Here, drink some of this.’

‘I feel so foolish,’ Catalina murmured as she sipped at the cool water. It helped steady her, but she was still all too aware of Jamie standing there by the fireplace. So near yet so very far away.

‘Nonsense. It’s always far too stuffy in the drawing room, and you have had a long day.’ Lily slanted a glance at Jamie. ‘You moved very quickly to catch her, Jamie.’

He gave them a wry smile over his shoulder. ‘I am not so useless, then. I can still rescue damsels in distress.’

‘You will surely be kept busy around here, then,’ Lily said.

Catalina set her empty glass down on the nearest table. ‘I feel quite well now. I should rejoin Miss Westman.’

‘I will walk with you,’ Lily said. ‘Jamie, will you join us?’

‘In a moment,’ he said, his back turned again.

Catalina gave a lingering glance at his silent figure. There were still so very many things to say, things that could fill days and days. She still longed to wrap her arms around him and hold him close, and know that he was real and not just another dream. That he was real, both the good and the bad.

But this was not the moment. They couldn’t be alone, not without everyone in the house knowing it, and she didn’t want gossip or speculation. She followed Lily from the small sitting room and back down the corridor to where Lydia and the others waited.

Yet her head still spun with only one confusing, fantastical, glorious thought.
Jamie was alive.

* * *

Catalina was alive.

Jamie braced his fists on the fireplace mantel and fought against the surge of fierce emotion that swept through him. He wasn’t even sure what he felt, it was all so tangled up. Joy, shock, appalled fascination. But in the end it just came down to those three powerful words.

Catalina was alive. His wife was alive.

Jamie stared down blindly into the empty grate. He saw her again as she was when he first glimpsed her across that crowded army camp, laughing in the brilliant Spanish sunshine. The most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He remembered how he had wanted that laughter, craved it as he never had anything else. Those days with her had been magic, the most perfect he had ever known.

In the end it was all destroyed, vanished in the face of the reality of what they were living through in the midst of war and upheaval. Then she was dead, gone. And he had gone on to do things she would have hated him for.

He thought again of the pain in her dark eyes when he had told her of his work to bring the Bourbons back to Spain. Then the vision melted into Catalina as he had seen her tonight.

For an instant he had almost thought she was a ghost, come to Castonbury to haunt him as he struggled to make a new life here with the family he no longer belonged to. She was so quiet, hovering at the edges of the crowd in her grey gown, that he imagined he was the only one who could see her. But she had smiled at the young lady who stood beside her, and he had seen a flash of his Catalina again. She was real, she was there, miraculously deposited into his own home.

He almost shouted out her name as a wondrous exultation flashed in his heart. It was as if his life, so cold and pale for so long, turned back to vivid colour and he felt the heat of it on his skin, in his blood. In his very soul. The only place he had ever belonged was
there.
He wanted to run to her, hold her in his arms and feel her body warm and real against his.

Until she looked at him—and turned as white as if she was a real ghost. He saw only shock in her eyes, and then she had fainted at his feet.

When everyone cried out and gathered around her, all his family, he remembered where they were. In the drawing room at Castonbury. No one knew about her, about Catalina and their impetuous marriage. And the family had only just been rid of one of his supposed wives. And imposter, for sure. But now it was Giles and Lily’s moment, a moment they had waited for for a long time. Because of him, his absence, his supposed death, his supposed wife, the near-collapse of the family fortune... He was responsible for delaying their happiness. And his father was still fragile, despite all his bluster. Jamie couldn’t just shout out, ‘There is my wife!’

No matter how much he wanted to.

But even more than his family, what held him back was Catalina herself. The frightened look in her eyes, the way she had trembled when he touched her. No matter how vivid his memories were, they had been apart for a long time. So much had happened since he last saw her. He had done so much he was not proud of. What had
she
been doing all this time? And how had she escaped the camp when so many had not? When she had known things others had not, because he had confided in her.

Jamie pounded his fist on the mantel. There was so very much they needed to talk about. Years’ worth. She was his wife, whether she wanted to be or not.

What was he going to do about that? What did she want from him now?

There was a brisk knock at the door, and he turned around just as Phaedra poked her head inside.

‘We’re all going in to dinner now, except for Mrs Moreno,’ she said. ‘Lily insisted she go straight to bed with some ridiculous posset Lily’s old Gypsy grandmother, Mrs Lovell, used to make.’

‘Mrs Moreno has retired?’ he said. He thought he sounded calm and indifferent but perhaps not, as Phaedra frowned as she looked at him. His sister often seemed as if she was completely distracted by her horses, but Jamie knew she was always most aware of everything around her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Does that make you more or less inclined to come to dinner?’

‘Of course I am coming to dinner,’ Jamie said irritably. Dinner with his family and a gaggle of guests, all gaping at him like he was a creature in a menagerie, sounded unbearable.

And so did knowing Catalina was somewhere in the house and he could not be with her.

‘Then you may want to retie your cravat,’ Phaedra said matter-of-factly.

Jamie glanced down to see that his cravat was indeed still untied and the ring hung against his shirt. He laughed ruefully and got himself put together again. Once he looked somewhat respectable, he offered Phaedra his arm and they started towards the dining room.

‘It feels almost as if Castonbury has become a small Spain of sorts,’ she said. ‘What with you and Harry just now home from there, and Elena, and now Miss Westman’s mysterious companion. Most interesting.’