And across the plain, beyond the long stretch of marshes, a glint of sun reflected from metal.
Dragoons.
IT WAS over that night, all except for the fighting that would determine whether Cádiz would survive or fall. But the treacherous part ended when Lord Pumphrey came to the house Sharpe had rented in San Fernando. He came after dark, carrying the same bag he had taken to the cathedral crypt, and it seemed to Sharpe that His Lordship was even more nervous than when he had gone down the steps to where Father Montseny had waited in the dark. Pumphrey edged into the room and his eyes widened slightly when he saw Sharpe sitting by the hearth. “I thought you might be here,” he said. He forced a smile for Caterina, then looked around the room. It was small, sparsely furnished with a dark table and high-backed chairs. The walls were lime washed and hung with portraits of bishops and with an old crucifix. The light came from a small fire and from a flickering lantern hanging under one of the black beams that crossed the ceiling. “This isn’t the comfort you like, Caterina,” Pumphrey said lightly.
“It’s heaven compared to the home where I grew up.”
“There is that, of course,” Lord Pumphrey said. “I forget you grew up in a garrison town.” He gave a worried glance at Sharpe. “She tells me she can geld hogs, Sharpe.”
“You should see what she can do to men,” Sharpe said.
“But you’d be much more comfortable back in the city,” Pumphrey said to Caterina, ignoring Sharpe’s sour words. “You have nothing to fear now from Father Montseny.”
“I don’t?”
“He was injured when the scaffolding fell in the cathedral. I hear he won’t ever walk again, not ever.” Pumphrey looked again at Sharpe, waiting for a reaction. He got none so he smiled at Caterina, put the bag on the table, drew a handkerchief from his sleeve, dusted a chair, and sat. “So your reason for leaving the city, my dear, no longer applies. Cádiz is safe.”
“What about my reasons for staying here?” Caterina asked.
Pumphrey’s eyes rested briefly on Sharpe. “Those reasons are your affair, my dear. But do come back to Cádiz.”
“Are you Henry’s procurer?” Sharpe asked scornfully.
“His Excellency,” Pumphrey said with assumed dignity, “is in some ways relieved that Señorita Blazquez is gone. He feels, I think, that an unfortunate chapter in his life is now over. It can be forgotten. No, I merely wish Caterina to return so I can enjoy her company. We are friends, are we not?” He appealed to Caterina.
“We’re friends, Pumps,” she said warmly.
“Then as a friend I have to tell you that the letters no longer have value.” He smiled at her. “They ceased to have value the moment Montseny was crippled. I only learned of that unfortunate outcome this morning. No one else, I assure you, will try to publish them.”
“So why did you bring the money, my lord?” Sharpe asked.
“Because I had withdrawn it before I heard the sad news about Father Montseny, and because it is safer with me than left in my house, and because His Excellency is willing to pay a smaller sum for the return of the letters.”
“A smaller sum,” Sharpe repeated tonelessly.
“Out of the kindness of his heart,” Lord Pumphrey said.
“How small?” Sharpe asked.
“One hundred guineas,” Pumphrey proposed. “It is really very generous of His Excellency.”
Sharpe stood and Lord Pumphrey’s hand twitched toward the pocket of his coat. Sharpe laughed. “You’ve brought a pistol! You really think you can fight me?” Lord Pumphrey’s hand went very still and Sharpe walked behind him. “His Excellency doesn’t know a damn bloody thing about these letters, my lord. You didn’t tell him. You want them for yourself.”
“Don’t be absurd, Sharpe.”
“Because they’d be valuable, wouldn’t they? A small lever to hold over the Wellesley family forever? What does Henry’s oldest brother do?”
“The Earl of Mornington,” Pumphrey said very stiffly, “is foreign secretary.”
“Of course he is,” Sharpe said, “and a useful man to have indebted to you. Is that why you want the letters, my lord? Or do you plan to sell them to His Excellency?”
“You have a fertile imagination, Captain Sharpe.”
“No. I’ve got Caterina, and Caterina has the letters, and you’ve got money. Money’s easy for you, my lord. What did you call it? Subventions to the guerrilleros and bribes for the deputies? But the gold is for Caterina now, which is a hell of a better cause than filling the purses of a pack of bloody lawyers. And there’s one other thing, my lord.”
“Yes?” Lord Pumphrey asked.
Sharpe laid a hand on Pumphrey’s shoulder, making His Lordship shiver. Sharpe bent down to whisper hoarsely in His Lordship’s ear. “If you don’t pay her, then I’ll do to you what you ordered done to Astrid.”
“Sharpe!”
“Throat cut,” Sharpe said. “It’s harder than gelding hogs, but just about as messy.” He drew a few inches of his sword, letting the blade scrape against the scabbard’s throat. He felt a quiver in Lord Pumphrey’s shoulder. “I ought to do it to you, my lord, for Astrid’s sake, but Caterina doesn’t want me to. So, are you paying her the money?”
Pumphrey stayed very still. “You won’t cut my throat,” he said with surprising calm.
“I won’t?”
“People know I’m here, Sharpe. I had to ask two provosts where you were billeted. You think they’ll forget me?”
“I take risks, my lord.”
“Which is why you are valuable, Sharpe, but you are not a fool. Kill one of His Majesty’s diplomats and you will die yourself. Besides, as you say, Caterina won’t let you kill me.”
Caterina said nothing. Instead she just shook her head slightly, though whether that was a denial of Lord Pumphrey’s confident assertion or a sign that she did not want him killed, Sharpe could not tell.
“Caterina wants money,” Sharpe said.
“A motive I entirely comprehend,” Pumphrey said, and pushed his bag into the center of the table. “You have the letters?”
Caterina gave the six letters to Sharpe, who showed them to His Lordship, then carried them to the fire.
“No!” Pumphrey said.
“Yes,” Sharpe said, and threw them on the burning driftwood. The letters flared up, sudden and bright, filling the room with a flickering glow that lit Lord Pumphrey’s pale face. “Why did you kill Astrid?” Sharpe asked.
“To preserve Britain’s secrets,” Pumphrey said harshly, “which is my job.” He stood abruptly, and there was a sudden air of authority in his frail figure. “You and I are alike, Captain Sharpe, we know that in war, as in life, there is only one rule. To win. I am sorry about Astrid.”
“No, you’re not,” Sharpe said.
Pumphrey paused. “You’re right. I’m not.” He smiled suddenly. “You play the game very well, Captain Sharpe, I congratulate you.” He blew a kiss to Caterina, then left without another word.
“I do like Pumps,” Caterina said when his lordship had gone, “so I’m glad you didn’t kill him.”
“I should have done.”
“No,” she said firmly. “He’s like you, a rogue, and rogues should be loyal to each other.” She was putting guineas into piles, playing with the coins, and the light from the lamp hanging from the beam reflected from the gold to shine yellow on her skin.
“You’ll go back to Cádiz now?” Sharpe asked.
She nodded. “Probably,” she said, and spun a coin.
“Find a man?”
“A rich man,” she said, watching the spinning coin. “What else can I do? But before I find him I would like to see a battle.”
“No!” Sharpe said. “It’s no place for a woman.”
“Maybe,” she shrugged, then smiled. “So how much do you want, Richard?”
“Whatever you want to give me.”
She pushed a generous pile across the table. “You are a fool, Captain Sharpe.”
&
nbsp; “Probably. Yes.”
And somewhere to the south two armies were marching. And Sharpe reckoned there was a chance he might be able to join them, and gold would be no good to him there, but the memory of a woman was always a comfort. “Let’s take the money upstairs,” he suggested.
So they did.
ONE OF General Lapeña’s aides had seen the dragoons. He was watching them file out of the far olive grove toward the troops waiting at the causeway’s far end. General Lapeña borrowed a telescope and made an aide stand his horse beside him so he could rest the barrel on the aide’s shoulder. “Dragons,” he said balefully.
“Not many of them,” Sir Thomas said brusquely, “and a damned long way off. Good God, can’t they shift that gun?”
They could not. The cannon, a nine-pounder with a six-foot-long barrel, was stuck fast. Most of the gun was underwater so that only the tip of its left wheel and the top of the breech were visible. One horse was flailing as a gunner tried to keep its head above water. The riflemen posted to guard the causeway’s edges were holding the other horses, but the beasts were getting increasingly fearful and the panicking horse threatened to jar both gun and limber farther down the flooded embankment. “Detach the limber, man!” Sir Thomas roared and, when his injunction failed to have an immediate effect, he spurred his horse onto the causeway. “I want a dozen more fellows!” he shouted at the nearest infantry.
A squad of Portuguese infantrymen followed Sir Thomas who curbed his horse beside the stricken cannon. “What’s the problem?” he asked brusquely.
“There seems to be a culvert down here, sir,” a lieutenant said. He was clinging to the drowned wheel and plainly feared the whole heavy weapon would tip onto him. “The wheel’s caught in the culvert, sir,” the lieutenant added. A sergeant and three gunners were heaving at the gun, attempting to lift the trail-plate eye that attached the cannon to its limber, and every heave jarred the cannon slightly deeper, but at last they succeeded in raising the eye free of the pin so that the limber shot out onto the road in a flurry of splashing hooves. The gun stayed behind but lurched dangerously, and the lieutenant’s eyes widened in fear before the weapon settled, though now the breech was entirely submerged.
Sir Thomas unbuckled his sword belt and threw it with his scabbard and pouches to Lord William who had dutifully followed his master onto the causeway. Sir Thomas gave the aide his cocked hat too, so that the small wind stirred his white hair. Then he slid from the saddle, plunging up to his chest into the gray water. “Not nearly as cold as the River Tay,” he said. “Come on, boys.”
The water was now up to Sir Thomas’s armpits. He put his shoulder to the wheel while grinning riflemen and Portuguese privates joined him. Lord William wondered why Sir Thomas had allowed the gun to be released from its horse team, then understood that the general did not want the freed gun to leap ahead and crush a man under its wheel. Slow and steady would do this job.
“Put your backs into it!” the general shouted to the men around him. “Heave on it! Come on now!”
The gun moved. The breech reappeared, then the top of its right wheel showed above water. A rifleman lost his footing, slipped under, flailed his way back, and hauled on a wheel spoke. The gunners on the road had attached a strap to the trail and were pulling like men in a tug-of-war.
“Here she comes!” Sir Thomas shouted triumphantly, and the cannon lurched up the verge and rolled onto the causeway. “Hook her up!” Sir Thomas said. “And let’s get moving!” He wiped his hands on his drenched jacket as the trail-plate eye was reconnected. There was the crack of a whip and the gun was on its way again. A Portuguese sergeant, seeing that the general was having trouble mounting his horse because of the weight of his wet clothes, hurried to help and heaved Sir Thomas upward. “Obliged to you, obliged,” Sir Thomas said, giving the man a coin before settling himself in the saddle. “That’s the way to do it, Willie.”
“You’ll catch your death, sir,” Lord William said with genuine concern.
“Aye, well, if I do, Major Hope knows what to do with my corpse,” Sir Thomas said. He was wet through, but grinning broadly. “That water was cold, Willie! Damned cold! Make sure those infantrymen get a change of clothes.” He laughed suddenly. “When I was a lad, Willie, we chased a fox into the Tay. I was just a boy and the hounds were doing nothing except bark at the thing, so I drove my horse into the river and caught the beast with my bare hands. I thought I was a hero! My uncle gave me a whipping for that. Never do the hounds’ work, he told me, but sometimes you have to, sometimes you just have to.”
The dragoons had swerved northward, never coming within a mile of the troops crossing the causeway, and when the light cavalry of the King’s German Legion trotted toward them the dragoons galloped fast away. The rest of the Spanish infantry crossed, still going with painful slowness, so that it was dusk before Sir Thomas’s two brigades came across the causeway, and full dark before the army marched again. The road climbed steadily and undramatically toward the lights of Vejer that flickered and twinkled on the hilltop beneath the stars. The army marched north of the town, following a road that led to a midnight bivouac in a spread of olive groves where Sir Thomas at last rid himself of his damp clothes and crouched over a fire to get warm.
Foraging parties went out the next day, returning with a herd of skinny bullocks and a flock of pregnant ewes and fractious goats. Sir Thomas fretted, eager to be moving, and, for want of other activity, he rode with a squadron of German cavalry to find that the hills north and east were lively with enemy horsemen. A troop of Spanish cavalry cantered down a stream bank to join Sir Thomas’s men. Their commander was a captain who wore yellow breeches, a yellow waistcoat, and a blue jacket with red facings. He touched his hat to Sir Thomas. “They’re watching us,” he spoke in French, assuming that Sir Thomas could not speak Spanish.
“That’s their job,” Sir Thomas answered in Spanish. He had taken care to learn the language when he was first posted to Cádiz.
“Captain Sarasa.” The Spaniard named himself, then took a cigar from his saddlebag. One of his men struck a light with a tinderbox and Sarasa bent over the flame until the cigar was drawing properly. “I have orders,” he said, “not to engage the enemy.”
Sir Thomas heard the sullen tone and understood that Sarasa was frustrated. He wanted to take his men up to the crests of the low hills and match them against the French vedettes. “You have orders?” Sir Thomas inquired tonelessly.
“General Lapeña’s orders. We are to protect the forage parties, no more.”
“You would rather fight?”
“Is that not why we are here?” Sarasa asked truculently.
Sir Thomas liked Sarasa. He was a young man, probably not yet thirty, and he had a belligerence that encouraged Sir Thomas, who believed that the Spaniards would fight like devils if they were given a chance and, perhaps, some leadership. At Bailén, three years before, a Spanish force had outfought a whole French corps and forced a surrender. They had even taken an eagle so they could fight well enough and, if Captain Sarasa was an example, they wanted to fight, but for once Sir Thomas found himself agreeing with Lapeña. “What’s across the hill, Captain?” he asked.
Sarasa stared at the nearest crest where two vedettes were visible. A vedette was a sentry post of cavalrymen who were posted to watch an enemy. There were twelve men in the two vedettes while Sir Thomas, reinforced now by Sarasa’s swordsmen, had more than sixty. “We don’t know, Sir Thomas,” he admitted.
“There’s probably nothing across the hill,” Sir Thomas said, “and we could chase those fellows off, and if we did we’d see them on a farther hill and we’d think there’s no harm in chasing them off that, and so it would go on until we’re five miles north of here and the forage parties are dead.”
Sarasa drew on his cigar. “They offend me,” he said vehemently.
“They disgust me,” Sir Thomas said, “but we fight them where we choose or where we must, not always when we want.”
Sarasa gave a quick smile as if to say he had learned his lesson. He tapped ash from his cigar. “The rest of my regiment, Sir Thomas,” he said, “is ordered to reconnoiter the road to Conil.” He spoke very flatly.
“Conil?” Sir Thomas asked and Sarasa nodded. The Spaniard was still watching the distant dragoons, but he was very aware as Sir Thomas took a folded map from his saddlebag. It was a bad map, but it did show Gibraltar and Cádiz, and between them it marked Medina Sidonia and Vejer, the town which lay just to the south. Sir Thomas drew a finger westward from Vejer until he reached the Atlantic coast.
“Conil?” he asked again, tapping the map.
“Conil de la Frontera.” Sarasa confirmed the location by giving the town its full name. “Conil beside the sea,” he added in an angrier voice.
Beside the sea. Sir Thomas stared at the map. Conil was indeed on the shore. Ten miles north of it was a village called Barrosa, and from there a road led east to Chiclana, which was the base of the French siege lines, but Sir Thomas already knew that General Lapeña had no intention of using that road, because, just a couple of miles north of Barrosa was the Rio Sancti Petri where, supposedly, the Spanish garrison was making a pontoon bridge. Cross that bridge and the army would be back on the Isla de León, and another two hours’ marching would have Lapeña’s men back in Cádiz and safe from the French. “No,” Sir Thomas said angrily and his horse stirred nervously.
The road north from Vejer was the one to take. Break through the French cordon of vedettes and march hard. Victor would be defending Chiclana, of course, but by skirting east of the city the allied army could maneuver the French marshal out of his prepared position and force him to fight on ground of their own choosing. But instead the Spanish general was thinking of a stroll by the sea? He was thinking of retreating to Cádiz? Sir Thomas could hardly believe it, but he knew that an attack on Chiclana from Barrosa was untenable. It would be an advance over poor country tracks against an army in prepared positions and Lapeña would never contemplate such a risk. Doña Manolito just wanted to go home, but to get home he would march his army along a coastal road and all the French needed to do was advance on that road to trap the allies against the sea. “No!” Sir Thomas said again, then turned his horse toward the distant encampment. He spurred away, then abruptly curbed the stallion and turned back to Sarasa. “You’re not to engage, those are your orders?”