A Stranger at Castonbury(16)

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.’