The letters had been written by the British ambassador to Spain and they were pathetic outpourings of love. There was even a proposal of marriage in one letter, a proposal made to a girl who was a whore called Caterina Veronica Blazquez. She was an expensive whore, to be sure, but still a whore.
"The owner of the Correo is a man named Nuñez, yes?" the admiral asked.
"He is."
"And he will publish the letter?"
"There is an advantage to being a priest," Montseny said. "The secrets of the confessional, or course, are sacred, but gossip persists. We priests talk, my lord, and I know things about Nuñez that he does not want the world to know. He will publish."
"Suppose the English try to destroy the press?" the admiral suggested.
"They probably will," Montseny said dismissively, "but for a small sum I can turn the building into a fortress, and your men can help protect it. Then the British will be forced to buy the remaining letters. I'm sure, once we have published one, they will pay very generously."
"What utter fools men make themselves over women," the admiral said. He took a long black cigar from a pocket and bit the end off. Then he just stood, waiting until a couple of small boys saw the cigar and came running. Each lad held a length of thick hemp rope that smoldered at one end. The admiral indicated one of the boys who slapped his rope twice on the ground to revive its fire, then held it up so the admiral could light the cigar. He waved the boy toward the men who followed him and one of them tossed a coin. "It would be best," the admiral said, "if we possessed both the letters and the gold." He watched the British frigate that was now near the rocks that lay off the bastion of San Felipe and he prayed she would run aground. He wanted to see her masts lurch forward as the hull struck the rocks, he wanted to see her canted and sinking, and he wanted to see her sailors floundering in the heaving seas, but of course she sailed serenely past the danger.
"It would be best," Father Montseny said, "if we had the English gold and published the letters."
"It would be treacherous, of course," the admiral observed mildly.
"God wants Spain great again, my lord," Montseny said fervently. "It is never treachery to do God's work."
A sudden boom of a gun sounded flat across the bay and both men turned to see a far white cloud of smoke. It had come from one of the giant mortars the French had placed in their forts on the Trocadero Peninsula and the admiral hoped the shell had been aimed at the British frigate. Instead the missile fell on the city's waterfront a half mile to the east. The admiral waited for the shell to explode, then drew on his cigar. "If we publish the letters," he said, "then the Cortes will turn against the British. The bribes will make that certain, and then we can approach the French. You would be willing to go to them?"
"Very willing, my lord."
"I shall give you a letter of introduction, of course." The admiral had already made his proposals to Paris. That had been easy. He was known to hate the British and a French agent in Cádiz had spoken to him, but the reply from the emperor was simple. Deliver the votes in the Cortes and the Spanish king, now a prisoner in France, would be returned. France would make peace and Spain would be free. All the French demanded in return was the right to send troops across Spanish roads to complete the conquest of Portugal and so drive Lord Wellington's British army into the sea. As an earnest of their goodwill the French had given orders that the admiral's estates on the Guadiana should not be plundered and now, in return, the admiral must deliver the votes and so sever the alliance with Britain. "By summer, Father," he said.
"Summer?"
"It will be done. We shall have our king. We shall be free."
"Under God."
"Under God," the admiral agreed. "Find the money, Father, and make the English look like fools."
"It is God's will," Montseny said, "so it will happen."
And the British would go to hell.
* * *
EVERYTHING WAS easy after the shot felled Sharpe.
The boat drifted down the ever widening Guadiana into the night. A hazed moon silvered the hills and lit the long water that shuddered under the small wind. Sharpe lay in the boat's bilges, senseless, his head broken and bloodied and bandaged, and the brigadier sat in the stern, his leg splinted and his hands on the tiller ropes, and he wondered what he should do. The dawn found them between low hills without a house in sight. Egrets and herons stalked the river's edge. "He needs a doctor, sir," Harper said, and the brigadier heard the anguish in the Irishman's voice. "He's dying, sir."
"He's breathing, isn't he?" the brigadier asked.
"He is, sir," Harper said, "but he needs a doctor, sir."
"Good God incarnate, man, I'm not a conjuror! I can't find a doctor in a wilderness, can I?" The brigadier was in pain and spoke more sharply than he intended and he saw the flare of hostility on Harper's face and felt a stab of fear. Sir Barnaby Moon reckoned himself a good officer, but he was not comfortable dealing with the ranks. "If we come to a town," he said, trying to mollify the big sergeant, "we'll look for a physician."
"Yes, sir, thank you, sir."
The brigadier hoped they would find a town. They needed food and he wanted to find a doctor who could look at his broken leg that throbbed like the devil. "Row!" he snarled at the men, but they made a poor job of it. The painted blades clashed with every stroke, and the more they rowed, the less headway they seemed to make, and the brigadier realized that they were fighting an incoming tide. They must be miles from the sea, yet the tide was flooding against them and there was still no town or village anywhere in sight.
"Your honor!" Sergeant Noolan shouted from the bows, and the brigadier saw another boat had appeared about a bend in the wide river. She was a rowing boat, about the size of his own commandeered launch, and she was crammed with men who knew how to use their oars, and she had other men with muskets, and the brigadier hauled on the tiller to point the boat toward the Portuguese bank. "Row!" he shouted, then cursed as the oars tangled again. "Dear God," he said, because the strange boat was coming fast. She was expertly manned and being carried on the flooding tide, and Brigadier Moon cursed a second time just before the man commanding the approaching boat stood and hailed him.
The shout was in English. The officer commanding the boat wore naval blue and had come from a British sloop that patrolled the Guadiana's long tidal reach. The sloop rescued them, lifted Sharpe from the bottom boards, fed them, and then carried them out to sea where they were rowed to HMS Thornside, a thirty-six-gun frigate, and Sharpe knew none of it. There was just pain.
Pain and darkness, and a creaking sound so that Sharpe dreamed he was back on HMS Pucelle, sailing endlessly across the Indian Ocean, and Lady Grace was with him, and in his delirium he was happy again, but then he would half wake and know she was dead and he wanted to weep for that. The creaking went on and the world swayed and there was pain and darkness and a sudden flash of agonizing brilliance, then darkness again.
"I think he blinked," a voice said.
Sharpe opened his eyes and the pain in his skull was like white-hot embers. "Sweet Jesus," he hissed.
"No, it's just me, sir, Patrick Harper, sir." The sergeant loomed over him. There was a wooden ceiling partially lit by narrow shafts of sunlight that stabbed through a small grating. Sharpe closed his eyes. "Are you still there, sir?" Harper asked.
"Where am I?"
"HMS Thornside, sir. A frigate, sir."
"Jesus Christ," Sharpe groaned.
"He's had a few prayers this last day and a half, so he has."
"Here," another voice said and a hand went beneath Sharpe's shoulders to lift him so that the pain stabbed into his skull and he gasped. "Drink this," the voice said.
The liquid was bitter and Sharpe half choked on it, but whatever it was made him sleep and he dreamed again, and woke again, and this time it was night and a lantern in the passageway outside his diminutive cabin swung with the ship's motion so that the shadows careered all over the canvas walls and
dizzied him.
He slept again, half aware of the sounds of a ship, of the bare feet on the planking overhead, the creak of a thousand timbers, the rush of water, and the intermittent clangor of the bell. Soon after dawn he woke and discovered his head was swathed in thick bandages. The pain was still gouging his skull, but it was no longer intense and so he swung his feet out of the cot and was immediately dizzy. He sat on the cot's swaying edge with his head in his hands. He wanted to vomit except there was nothing but bile in his stomach. His boots were on the floor, while his uniform, rifle, and sword were swaying from a wooden peg on the door. He closed his eyes. He remembered Colonel Vandal firing the musket. He thought of Jack Bullen, poor Jack Bullen.
The door opened. "What the hell are you doing?" Harper asked cheerfully.
"I want to go on deck."
"The surgeon says you must rest."
Sharpe told Harper what the surgeon could do. "Help me dress," he said. He did not bother with boots or sword, just pulled on his French cavalry overalls and his ragged green coat, then held on to Harper's strong arm as they walked out of the cabin. The sergeant then hauled Sharpe up a steep companionway to the frigate's deck where he clung to the hammock netting.
A brisk wind was blowing and it felt good. Sharpe saw that the frigate was sliding past a low dull coast dotted with watchtowers. "I'll get you a chair, sir," Harper said.
"Don't need a chair," Sharpe said. "Where are the men?"
"We're all snug up front, sir."
"You're improperly dressed, Sharpe." A voice interrupted and Sharpe turned his head to see Brigadier Moon enthroned near the frigate's wheel. He was sitting in a chair with his splinted leg propped on a cannon. "You haven't got boots on," the brigadier observed.
"Much better to go barefoot on deck," a cheerful voice said, "and what are you doing on your bare feet anyway? I gave orders that you were to stay below." A plump, cheerful man in civilian clothes smiled at Sharpe. "I'm Jethro McCann, surgeon to this scow." He introduced himself and held up a closed fist. "How many fingers am I showing you?"
"None."
"Now?"
"Two."
"The Sweeps can count," McCann said. "I'm impressed." The Sweeps were the Riflemen, so called because their dark green uniforms often looked black as a chimney sweep's rags. "Can you walk?" McCann asked and Sharpe managed a few paces before a gust of wind lurched the frigate and drove him back to the hammock netting. "You're walking well enough," McCann said. "Are you in pain?"
"It's getting better," Sharpe lied.
"You're a lucky bastard, Mister Sharpe, if you'll forgive me. Lucky as hell. You were hit by a musket ball. Glancing shot, which is why you're still here, but it depressed a piece of your skull. I fished it back into place." McCann grinned proudly.
"Fished it back into place?" Sharpe asked.
"Oh, it's not difficult," the surgeon said airily, "no more difficult than scarfing a sliver of wood." In truth it had been appallingly difficult. It had taken the doctor an hour and a half's work under inadequate lantern light as he teased at the wedge of bone with probe and forceps. His fingers had kept slipping in blood and slime, and he had thought he would never manage to free the bone without tearing the brain tissue, but at last he had succeeded in gripping the splintered edge and pulling the sliver back into place. "And here you are," McCann went on, "sprightly as a two-year-old. And the good news is that you've got a brain." He saw Sharpe's puzzlement and nodded vigorously. "You do! Honest! I saw it with my own eyes, thus disproving the navy's stubborn contention that soldiers have nothing whatsoever inside their skulls. I shall write a paper for the Review. I'll be famous! Brain discovered in a soldier."
Sharpe tried to smile in the pretense that he was amused, but only succeeded in a grimace. He touched the bandage. "Will the pain go?"
"We know almost nothing about head wounds," McCann said,
"except that they bleed a lot, but in my professional opinion, Mister Sharpe, you'll either drop down dead or be right as rain."
"That is a comfort," Sharpe said. He perched on a cannon and stared at the distant land beneath the far clouds. "How long till we reach Lisbon?"
"Lisbon? We're sailing to Cádiz!"
"Cádiz?"
"That's our station," McCann said, "but you'll find a boat going to Lisbon quick enough. Ah! Captain Pullifer's on deck. Straighten up."
The captain was a thin, narrow-faced, and grim-looking man, a scarecrow figure who, Sharpe noticed, was barefooted. Indeed, if it had not been for his coat with its salt-encrusted gilt, Sharpe might have mistaken Pullifer for an ordinary seaman. The captain spoke briefly with the brigadier, then strode down the deck and introduced himself to Sharpe. "Glad you're on your feet," he said morosely. He had a broad Devon accent.
"So am I, sir."
"We'll have you in Cádiz soon enough and a proper doctor can look at your skull. McCann, if you want to steal my coffee you'll find it on the cabin table."
"Aye aye, sir," the doctor said. McCann was evidently amused by his captain's insult, which suggested to Sharpe that Pullifer was not the grim beast he appeared to be. "Can you walk, Sharpe?" Captain Pullifer asked gruffly.
"I seem to be all right, sir," Sharpe said, and Pullifer jerked his head, indicating that the rifleman should go with him to the stern rail. Moon watched Sharpe pass by.
"Had supper with your brigadier last night," Pullifer said when he was alone with Sharpe beneath the great mizzen sail. He paused, but Sharpe said nothing. "And I spoke with your sergeant this morning," Pullifer went on. "It's strange, isn't it, how stories differ?"
"Differ, sir?"
Pullifer, who had been staring at the Thornside's wake, turned to look at Sharpe. "Moon says it was all your fault."
"He says what?" Sharpe was not certain he had heard right. His head was filled with a pulsing pain. He tried closing his eyes, but it did not help so he opened them again.
"He says you were ordered to blow a bridge, but you hid the powder under women's luggage, which is against the rules of war, and then you dillydallied and the frogs took advantage, and he finishes up with a dead horse, a broken leg, and no saber. And the saber was Bennett's best, he tells me."
Sharpe said nothing, just stared at a white bird skimming the broken sea.
"You broke the rules of war," Pullifer said sourly, "but as far as I know the only rule in bloody war is to win. You broke the bridge, didn't you?"
"Yes, sir."
"But you lost one of Bennett's best sabers"—Pullifer sounded amused—"so your brigadier borrowed pen and paper off me this morning to write a report for Lord Wellington. It's going to be poisonous about you. Do you wonder why I'm telling you?"
"I'm glad you're telling me," Sharpe said.
"Because you're like me, Sharpe. You came up the hawse hole. I started as a pressed man. I was fifteen and had spent eight years catching mackerel off Dawlish. That was thirty years ago. I couldn't read, couldn't write, and didn't know a sextant from an arsehole, but now I'm a captain."
"Up the hawse hole," Sharpe said, relishing the navy's slang for a man promoted from the ranks into the officer's mess. "But they never let you forget, do they?"
"It's not so bad in the navy," Pullifer said grudgingly. "They value seamanship more than gentle birth. But thirty years at sea teaches you a thing or two about men, and I have a notion that your sergeant was telling the truth."
"He bloody was," Sharpe said hotly.
"So I'm warning you, that's all. If I were you I'd write my own report and muddy the water a little." Pullifer glanced up at the sails, found nothing to criticize, and shrugged. "We'll catch a few mortar rounds going into Cádiz, but they haven't hit us yet."
In the afternoon the west wind turned soft so that the Thornside slowed and wallowed in the long Atlantic swells. Cádiz came slowly into sight, a city of gleaming white towers that seemed to float on the ocean. By dusk the wind had died to a whisper that did nothing except fret the frigate's sails and Pullifer was content to
wait till morning to make his approach. A big merchantman was much closer to land and she was ghosting into harbor on the last dying breaths of wind. Pullifer gazed at her through a big telescope. "She's the Santa Catalina," he announced. "We saw her in the Azores a year ago." He collapsed the glass. "I hope she's getting more wind than we are. Otherwise she'll never make the southern part of the harbor."
"Does it matter?" Sharpe asked.
"The bloody frogs will use her for target practice."
It seemed the captain was right for just after dark Sharpe heard the muffled sound of heavy guns like thunder far away. They were the French mortars firing from the mainland and Sharpe watched their monstrous flashes from the Thornside's forecastle. Each flash was like sheet lightning, silhouetting a mile of shoreline, gone in a heartbeat, the sudden brilliance confused by the lingering smoke beneath the stars. A sailor was playing a sad tune on a fiddle and a small wash of lantern light showed from the aft cabin's companionway where the brigadier was dining again with Captain Pullifer. "Were you not invited, sir?" Harper asked. Sharpe's riflemen and the Connaught Rangers were lounging around a long-barreled nine-pounder on the forecastle.
"I was invited," Sharpe said, "but the captain reckoned I might be happier eating with the wardroom."
"They made a plum duff up here," Harper said.
"It was good," Harris added, "really good."
"We had the same."
"I sometimes think I should have joined the navy," Harper said.
"You do?" Sharpe was surprised.
"Plum duff and rum."
"Not many women."
"That's true.
"How's your head, sir?" Daniel Hagman asked.
"Still there, Dan."
"Is it hurting?"
"It hurts," Sharpe admitted.
"Vinegar and brown paper, sir," Hagman said earnestly. "It always works."
"I had an uncle that was knocked on the head," Harper said. The Ulsterman had an endless supply of relatives who had suffered various misfortunes. "He was butted by a nanny goat, so he was, and you could have filled Lough Crockatrillen with his blood! Jesus, it was everywhere. My auntie thought he was dead!"