She met him on the landing. He grabbed her by the shoulders.
‘We’re fine,’ she assured him, frightened now.
‘Where is Signorina Callona?’ he demanded, his eyes boring into hers, captain’s eyes, and not the eager husband she wanted to see.
‘Good news, my love,’ she said, relieved. He must not know; he would be pleased. ‘Imagine this: her uncle arrived a few days ago and…’
He pulled her close. ‘Anna, thatisher uncle, but the uncle who loves Napoleon, damn him. Her other uncle, her real rescuer, is dead aboard a yacht we found drifting north of these islands. Anna, she is in enemy hands.’
Her dear brother, lying in his Gibraltar grave, had once called her the stalwart member of the family. ‘Nothing seems to faze you, sis,’ he’d teased once. ‘A million ladies would collapse in a heap before you would even blink.’
A million ladies must have collapsed. Anna stared at her husband, watching him turn into three men before her eyes. The room whirled them all around and she fainted.
Chapter Thirty-Three
She woke, lying on her bed, to the horrible odour of burned feathers waved under her nose by Madame Durand.
‘That will do,madame,’ John said. ‘Leave us.’ The door closed behind her.
She tried to sit up, but the room still revolved. John held her close as she sobbed. ‘There is the letter,’ she managed to say, ‘over there.’ He ignored the letter, then lay down beside her. She clung to his hand. ‘I never would have let her go, but he was her uncle and…and… You see that official letter. What have Idone?’
He held her close as she tried to burrow inside him, anything to be swallowed up and disappear. ‘You did what anyone would have done. My God,Iwould have done the same thing, had I been here with you. Shh, shh, no tears.’
That was easy to say, she thought as she wept. She heard John’s low voice: ‘Pru, Allan, I’ll speak to you soon. Give us a moment.’ The door closed.
‘They’re back from the parish school. They need me,’ she said, rubbing her eyes because they hurt from so many tears.
‘They can wait. Hear me out.’
She lay in his arms, desperate to find out what he knew. She hoped it would make her feel better, but knew it wouldn’t because Sofia was gone.
‘Captain Tyler and theHartfordwere sailing in tandem with us. We’re doing that more and more. We came across a yacht drifting, and boarded her.’ He paused and she saw the pain in his eyes. ‘The crew was dead, and so was an old gentleman.’
‘Sofia’s uncle,’ she whispered, anticipating his answer.
‘We only knew that because the yacht’s captain, a man named Luigi, lay there beside him, barely alive.’
She shuddered, and he held her tighter.
‘What he managed to say before he died was that they had been boarded by a French ship—probablyLa Guerre—carrying Sofia Callona’s uncle, the one you met.’
‘She…she knew him. She was so pleased to see him. She thought… Oh, John, he was to take her to England!’
‘Wrong brother, and how would she have known? She was distanced from the whole business because she was in that convent school in Rome.’
‘Such a nice man,’ Anna said softly. ‘So courtly, so dignified.’
‘So traitorous. Mr Marsing and I pieced the story together from what Luigi managed to tell us. There were two uncles, one loyal to Napoleon, anafrancesado, as the Spanish would say—oh, don’t get me started on the Spanish, who can’t decide whose side they are on!’
‘John,’ she said quietly, as calm reason began to peep out from wherever it had fled in terror.
‘Aye. The other uncle was opposed to our despot from Corsica, that damned Bonaparte.’
‘What else?’
‘That’s all we know. Luigi died.’ He held up the letter. ‘The countyousaw obviously confiscated this from the yacht. Hekilled his own brother.’ He shook his head. ‘The things people do for a little power…’
They lay there in silence. She wondered if he slept now, imagining that once this long war ended he would probably sleep for a week, perhaps hibernate for a winter.
