A Stranger at Castonbury(34)

‘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.