The Guardian of Secrets and Her Deathly Pact Read online

  María and Carlos lay side by side in the small bed in a hotel behind the cathedral.

  Carlos had always been patient with her. He had wanted her on many occasions in the groves at La Glorieta but had never urged her to give herself to him completely. He wanted to wait until she was absolutely ready. She was naked now, and he drank in her curves and innocence. “Are you sure?” he asked her.

  “I’ve never been so sure of anything, darling. I want to be yours in every way. I’ve waited so long for this. Love me, love me, please.”

  She was his now, and he had never thought it possible to love another human being so completely.

  Later, they tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. As they held each other throughout the night, María realised that everything had changed forever.

  They talked about Marta. María cried and laughed at her memories of the sister who had been the most important person in her young life. She then realised that life was filled with memories and future plans, and they often became more important than the actions of the present, the here and now. The future would unfold; the past would remain. She and Carlos had to seize every second of every minute of life’s pleasures right now, before they disappeared forever. She touched him, caressed every part of him, and their passion reignited once again.

  “Orders and a letter,” Lucia said, thrusting a piece of paper and an envelope into María’s hand as soon as she walked into the room. “And where were you last night? No, don’t answer that. I can guess. María, we’re leaving. We have orders to follow the army to the Jarama valley. It will be field rations from now on; that’s all I know,” she added with a twisted pout that always made María laugh. “Open the letter quick! It’s from London!”

  The two girls held no secrets from each other and had formed the habit of reading aloud letters from home, which often bolstered the other, even when the letter was not for them. Maria laughed again at Lucia’s childish excitement and began to read.

  London, 15 January, 1937

  Our darling María,

  We were so happy to receive your last letter and hope that this one reaches you just as quickly and as safely as yours did us. Father is resting and, as I mentioned last month, is still itching to find out everything that’s happening in your area and being very irritable if he thinks there’s something we’re not telling him. Thank God for Aunt Marie! She is the only person with enough information to quell his hunger for news, and she keeps him in line as well (you know what she’s like.)

  We’ve heard from Pedro at last. I think he might be close by, with the International Brigades. Father says I mustn’t say too much, but I just felt I had to tell you the wonderful news that Pedro is well and finally in touch. I wrote straight back and told him that you were in roughly the same place, so don’t be surprised to see him any day now.

  There’s still no word from Miguel, and I’m worrying about him so much that lately he hasn’t been out of my dreams. Your father is distraught, but I keep telling him that it means Miguel is probably safe and well. As they say, no news is good news. Don’t they?

  I am taking the family back to Merrill Farm because I think the country air will be a great deal healthier for your father. He tries to play down his illness, but he doesn’t realise that I hear him coughing all night and that I’ve seen spots of blood on his handkerchiefs. I worry about him so much, but the good news is that the doctor still maintains that he has a good chance of recovery, so I must make myself believe that too.

  Aunt Marie has decided to stay in London until the spring, and then she’s promised to join us in Goudhurst. Tom Butcher’s grandson Peter has gone to Spain to aid the republic. I promised his mother and father that I’d ask you to keep an eye out for him, although I know Spain’s a big country and he could be anywhere (but I didn’t tell them that).

  We miss you, darling, and I miss talking to you about Marta. Your father doesn’t even like to hear the mention of her name, not even from me. He is keeping his grief well and truly hidden, and he becomes angry when I try to talk about her. I believe he feels guilty at allowing her to stay in that damned convent in the first place, which is utter nonsense of course, as we all know she had her heart set on it.

  María, if anything should happen to you, I would die, so remember to keep safe as much as you possibly can and not take any unnecessary risks. I will write to you every moment I can and will try to send you news of your brothers if or when I receive their letters. Take great care, darling, and don’t forget that we all love you and miss you every single day. And if you ever feel that you want to come to London, let’s just say that it would make us very, very happy.

  All our love always,

  Mother and Father

  PS: I wish you could see Auntie Rosa. She is knitting two jumpers a week for the ‘defenders of the Church’, as she is now calling the nationalists. She hasn’t left her room in a fortnight. I think she’s gone quite mad!

  “My God, María, Pedro might be close by. That’s what your mother said. She did say that, right?” Lucia said, dancing around their small room

  “Yes, she did say that.” María smiled back.

  “Do you know what this means? It means that now I have a good chance of finding someone who might know someone who knows Pedro.”

  María sat at the edge of the bed and gave Lucia another affectionate smile. She was a sweet and innocent girl, and she loved her brother very much, but sometimes her incessant chatter drove her to distraction.

  “Lucia, calm down for a moment and listen to me. Doesn’t it strike you as strange, I mean, Pedro being in Madrid? Maybe he just told my mother that to keep her calm. If you knew my mother, you’d understand why, so please don’t get your hopes up about seeing him. After all, if Pedro is in Madrid, why has he not come to see us yet? And we are leaving soon, remember?”

  Lucia sat down beside María on the bed. “You’re right, of course, but hope is all I have at the moment, and you of all people should know that it is the hope of seeing our men that brought us here in the first place. Maybe Pedro doesn’t know where to find us. Maybe he is too far away from the hospital and can’t get to us.”

  “Maybe you should start packing,” María told her.

  Chapter 69

  It soon seemed that the whole of Madrid had upped sticks and moved camp to the Jarama valley. Fifty battalions had been mustered, converging on the Jarama area in hundreds of trucks, tanks, artillery units, and ambulances. They drove slowly and carefully through the muddied dirt tracks and the cornfields destroyed by the heavy traffic. Everyone in the convoy had been told repeatedly that the stakes were high and that should they fail, they would leave the back door open, allowing the nationalists to enter Madrid.

  For the first few weeks, María could think of nothing but the job she’d been sent to do. There were enormous losses, estimated at between twenty and twenty-five thousand, on the republican side, and the International Brigades also lost thousands in the first few days of fighting.

  Day after day, María watched the orderlies leave the tents, carrying out amputated limbs and corpses, mopping up blood from the floors that filled buckets to the brim, and dumping mountains of bodies for a later burial. When the fighting eased off for a short while, her life became a monotonous existence of muddy fields of olive groves, rain-drenched trenches, and food that consisted of watery soup or congealed stew. María acknowledged that the doctors and medical staff tried their best to save the dying men, crying for their mothers and asking with hope in their eyes if they were going to live, but the reality was that they just couldn’t cope with the seriousness of injuries inflicted on the battlefield.

  The normal passage of time didn’t exist anymore. The wounded came in day and night – they were everywhere – and the shortage of doctors and nurses was becoming increasingly apparent. María was only a trainee nurse at best, but she found herself giving injections and administering anaesthetics for doctors who no longer cared who did it. Soldiers with stomach wounds w
ere the worst, for she had been warned not to give water to those patients. She did disobey that command on occasion, though only when she thought that a drink of water was the only comfort she could give to a man who was going to die anyway.

  After a while, the medical station found itself right at the front, stuck there without the possibility of moving back again because of the risks to the stretcher-bearers. To make things worse, the dressing stations were carried into sheltered ditches and trenches that made them increasingly vulnerable to enemy fire, not to mention a dirty and muddy place to work.

  María handed the wounded who had a chance of survival over to the ambulance men, who probably had the most dangerous job of all. She shook the hands of these men and tried to ignore the fear she saw in their eyes before they set off on their perilous journey to the hospital in the dead of night without lights to guide them. She knew that she might never see the face of a driver again, for there was always the danger of the ambulance being blown up with the wounded inside before reaching the destination. She walked around the camp practically dead on her feet but always with one eye looking out for Pedro’s familiar face. She asked the International Brigade Units if they knew of him. She gave notes to some who said they might and a description of him to those who asked for it. She tried not to think about Miguel, Pedro, or Carlos lying injured or dead close by, but she was convinced that one day soon, her worst fear would become a reality and she would just have to deal with it.

  She especially tried not to think about Carlos. She was becoming increasingly worried about him, but she also felt strangely detached from him. He had given her moments of such happiness only to take them away again, but she was not stupid. They were at war, and war was unreliable. It played with people’s lives and tore them apart. He had told her that he loved her and would do anything for her. He would run to the ends of the earth to be near her, but if he really did love her, she thought, why had he not come to her?

  There were few rest periods; but when they did manage to sleep, it was in a trench near the medical tents. There were never enough private moments, time to think, reflect, and dream. The nurses’ tent was worse than a busy metro station, with people coming and going all through the day and night, passing through whilst waiting for the next shift to begin and washing away the blood that stained clothes and skin.

  She found that she could sleep better in the trenches, where she could think, dream, and be undisturbed for the most part. It was quiet there, peaceful almost, and María was intensely moved at these times. The dark sky at night, with beautiful softly twinkling stars, seemed so close yet at the same time so far away from the reality of the scorched and bloodied earth. Sometimes she would be lucky enough to see the sunrise. In those precious moments, she was home in her world and the war was so far away that she could even forget it for a moment or two. At other times, she sat in the hole and studied the calm bravery of the men around her. Some were far from their own countries, families, and everything they knew. They had chosen to come to the madness and, if necessary, to die. She had spoken to many men, lying in pain, knowing that they would die, yet out in the fields, others still rushed forwards, truly believing in the righteousness of the republican cause and seemingly undeterred by thoughts of their own deaths.

  Chapter 70

  Pedro’s battalion incurred heavy losses in February, seeing their number almost halved. He and Hans were relatively unscathed so far, apart from a slight deafness in their ears and a touch of diarrhoea that reared its ugly head at the most inconvenient of times. When the fighting eased off, they lay in muddied trenches full of flies feeding off the filth and, when there was any, ate congealed stew and drank coffee that Pedro’s new ‘friend’, Harry Miller, always managed to get his hands on. Orders had filtered down the line, and they were fit and ready for the next day’s advance to Guadalajara. They were on the move at last, and for Pedro and Hans, the orders had come not a minute too soon. They lay in a corner of the trench, Pedro sleeping and Hans tossing and turning and flicking away the mosquitoes that were eating him alive:

  “I think they’ve got coffee over there … I smell coffee,” Hans whispered to a sleepy Pedro, who was not amused at being woken up.

  “You get some. I don’t want any,” Pedro told him. “And whatever you do, don’t bring that Harry Miller back with you. I’m sick of the bloody sight of him. He’s a pain in the arse; he’s stuck himself to me like bird shit.”

  “And here’s me thinking he’s your new best friend,” Hans laughed. “I think he is jealous of me; I do not like the way he looks at me. You must want coffee,” Hans insisted. “Don’t tell me you don’t, Englishman.”

  “Hans, just get the bloody coffee, will you? And try not to wake me when you slurp it down like you always do.”

  Pedro closed his eyes and smiled. Hans had become a great friend, and friends were what kept him going, gave him strength, and made him smile in all the madness. But if he woke him up again, he’d have them sleeping in separate trenches from now on!

  Joseph Dobbs hid in his usual shadowy place, which was always no more than a few feet away from Pedro. He watched Hans leave the trench and followed him into the thick grass, his face full of hatred. For weeks, he’d waited for an opportunity like this to come along, to get rid of the German bastard, to get him away from Pedro.

  Both Hans and Joseph hunched down as low as possible to avoid sniper fire. They were only yards apart, but Joseph was a good stalker, with plenty of practice under his belt since meeting Pedro. Hans stopped suddenly, kept his head low, and looked around the area. He moved again, this time on his belly, slowly and meticulously.

  Joseph circled around him. His heart felt as if it were jumping out of his chest, and he almost turned back with fear, but he had a job to do, and in order to get it done, he had to be ahead of the German. Joseph stopped by a clump of trees and checked his pistol. He had four bullets in the chamber and figured that was more than enough. He had never fired the pistol before; this would be its first outing. He cocked it as quietly as possible and waited.

  Hans’s head came into view, and Joseph aimed the pistol, practicing for the real thing. It’s just like shooting a bird, he told himself. He had shot birds many times in Kent, and he didn’t need to kill Hans. He just needed to wound him, get him out of the way for a while. The bastard wouldn’t leave Pedro’s side for a minute, which meant he couldn’t get near his son without falling over the German in the process. He was ruining the plan. Joseph found his target in a perfect position. Hans was now far enough away from the supply trucks, far enough away from Pedro but close enough to the enemy lines. He steadied his hand, gently covered the trigger with his finger, and fired three shots in succession. He heard Hans moan and slump to the ground. Joseph smiled. He had hit his mark!

  The shots were fired from the treeline, three shots. Pedro lifted his head cautiously, looked to the left of his position, and saw a body in the distance being dragged through the grass by two stretcher-bearers. Hans, he thought. It had to be him.

  “That bloody stupid German,” he spat, hitting his fist on the ground.

  He crawled over to the medical trench through the tall grass, taking the same route as Hans, listening for shots that always seemed to come out of nowhere to pick them off like rabbits.

  “Please, God, no. Please don’t let it be him,” he whispered.

  In the medical station, Hans’s bloodied body lay on a makeshift stretcher. A nurse said:

  “This station’s too small. There’s not enough room here to treat him. Anyway, he needs a doctor. He will have to go to the field hospital by ambulance.

  Pedro then heard the nurse tell the stretcher-bearers, “It’s only five minutes away, but it’s too dangerous on foot at this time of night. You’ll never make it with all the sniper fire that’s going on. It’s too close tonight.”

  “Is he going to live?” Pedro asked the nurse.

  “I doubt it. He’s got one in the stomach and one in the side of the neck
, although I don’t think the bullet hit the artery,” she told him matter-of-factly.

  Pedro looked at Hans’s unconscious body and decided in an instant that he would have to go with him. He would need him when he woke up. “I’ll go too and cover the stretcher-bearers,” he said. “You can’t let this man die, do you hear me?”

  The nurse gave him a sympathetic smile. “We’ll do everything we can to save him, but I’m afraid he will die if we don’t get him to an operating theatre soon.”

  Pedro didn’t take his eyes off Hans, who recovered consciousness just as the stretcher-bearers lifted him out of the trench. His ashen face and bright eyes stared up at them, begging to be saved. He whispered in German, plainly unaware of Pedro holding his hand, and Pedro could only guess that he was praying. The three men ran, bodies cowed and heads lowered, away from the treeline and towards a waiting ambulance at the back of the line.

  “What have you got for me?” the ambulance driver asked, jumping down from his seat.

  “Some stupid brigadier who thought he’d take a walk in the middle of the night,” one of the stretcher-bearers said.

  “Right, get him in. It’s the east station, right?”

  The stretcher-bearer nodded. “Take him with you,” he said, pointing to Pedro.

  It was dark and difficult to see the road ahead. They took the long road round, but it was the safest route. The ambulance didn’t have lights for fear of an ambush attack on the narrow road; but the ambulance driver had done this journey a hundred times, always knowing that it could be his last.