Sharpe's Fury

CHAPTER 4

SHARPE WAS GIVEN A room in the embassy’s attic. The roof was flat and it had leaked badly at some time for a great patch of plaster was missing and the rest was dangerously cracked. A jug of water stood on a small table and a chamber pot lay beneath the bed. Lord Pumphrey had apologized for the accommodation. “The consul here in Cádiz rented the premises for us. Six houses in all. I have one of them, but I think you’d be happier staying in the embassy itself.”

“I would,” Sharpe had said hurriedly.

“I thought as much. Then I shall meet you at five tomorrow evening.”

“And I need some civilian clothes,” Sharpe had told His Lordship, and when he went to bed he found a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a coat laid out for him. He suspected the clothes had belonged to the unfortunate Plummer. They were black, too big, stiff, and slightly damp, as if they had never dried properly after being washed.

He left the embassy at six in the morning. He knew that because a score of church bells rang the hour, their sound cacophonous in the rising wind. He carried neither sword nor rifle, for both weapons were conspicuous, though he had borrowed a pistol from the embassy. “You won’t need it,” Lord Pumphrey had said the previous night.

“Don’t like being unarmed,” Sharpe had retorted.

“You know best, I’m sure,” Pumphrey had said, “but for God’s sake don’t startle the natives. They mistrust us enough as it is.”

“I’m just exploring,” Sharpe had said. There was nothing else for him to do. Lord Pumphrey was waiting for a message from the blackmailers. Who those blackmailers were, no one knew, but the appearance of the letter in the newspaper pointed to the political faction most desperate to break the British alliance. “If your negotiations fail,” Sharpe had said, “then that newspaper is where we start.”

“My negotiations never fail,” Lord Pumphrey averred grandly.

“I’ll still have a look at the newspaper,” Sharpe insisted, and so he had left in the early morning and, though he had been given careful directions, was soon lost. Cádiz was a maze of narrow dark alleys and high buildings. No one could use a carriage here for few streets were wide enough so the wealthy either rode, were carried in sedan chairs, or walked.

The sun had not yet risen and the city was asleep. The few folk awake had probably not yet gone to bed or else were servants sweeping courtyards or carrying firewood. A cat writhed about Sharpe’s ankles and he stooped to pet it, then headed down another cobbled alleyway at the end of which he found what he wanted outside a church. A beggar slept on the steps, and he woke the man and gave him a whole guinea along with Plummer’s cloak and hat. In return he got the beggar’s cloak and wide-brimmed hat. Both were greasy and matted with filth.

He walked toward his few glimpses of the dawn and found himself on the city rampart. Its outer face fell steeply to the harbor wharves, but the firestep was almost on the same level as the city’s streets. He walked along the wide top where dark cannons hunched behind embrasures. A spark of light showed across the water on the Trocadero Peninsula where the French had their giant mortars. A company of Spanish soldiers was posted on the wall, but at least half were snoring. Dogs foraged along the rampart’s edge.

The whole world, like the city, seemed asleep, but then an explosion of light ripped the eastern horizon in two. The light spread flat, like a disk, sudden and white to silhouette the few ships anchored near the wharves, and then the light faded, the last of it writhing in a great blossom of smoke that billowed above one of the French forts, and then the noise came. A thunder rolled over the bay, startling sleeping sentries awake as the shell landed just across the ramparts, a quarter mile ahead of Sharpe. There was a brief silence before the missile exploded. A wavering trace of smoke, left by the burning fuse, hung in the first daylight. The shell had blown itself apart inside a small grove of orange trees and Sharpe, when he reached the spot, could smell the powder smoke. He kicked a shard of broken casing that skittered down the rampart. Then he jumped down to the scorched grass and crossed the grove into a dark street. The house walls were a dirty white now as dawn glowed in the east.

He was lost, but he was at the city’s northern edge where he wanted to be. By exploring the narrow streets he at last found the church with the red-painted crucifix on its outer wall. Lord Pumphrey had told him the crucifix had been brought from Venezuela and it was believed that on the Feast of Saint Vincent the red paint turned to blood. Sharpe wondered when the saint’s feast day was. He would like to see paint turn to blood.

He squatted on the bottom step of the church entrance. The filthy cloak swathed him and the wide hat hid his face. The street here was just five paces wide, and almost opposite him was a four-storied house marked by a stone scallop shell cemented into the white facade. An alley ran down the side of the house that had an ornate front door flanked by two windows. The windows were shuttered on the inside while outside the glass were thick black-painted grilles. The upper floors had three windows apiece facing onto narrow balconies. This, Pumphrey had assured him, was where El Correo de Cádiz was printed. “The house belongs to a man called Nuñez, who owns the newspaper. He lives above the printing premises.”

No one stirred in the Nuñez house. Sharpe squatted, unmoving, with a wooden bowl taken from the embassy kitchen beside him on the step. He had put a handful of coins in the bowl, remembering that that was the way to encourage generosity, though as the street stayed empty there was no generosity to encourage. He thought about the beggars of his childhood. Blind Michael, who could see like a hawk, and Ragged Kate, who hired babies for tuppence an hour and plucked at the shawls of well-dressed women in the Strand. She had carried a hat pin to make the babies cry and on a good day she had sometimes made two or three pounds that she would drink away in an evening. There had been Stinking Moses who claimed to have been a parson before he fell into debt. He would tell folks’ fortunes for a shilling. “Always tell them they’ll be lucky in love, boy,” he had advised Sharpe, “’cuz they’d rather be lucky in bed than get to heaven.”

It was oddly restful. Sharpe squatted and, when the first pedestrians appeared, he mumbled the words Pumphrey had suggested. “Por favor, Madre de Dios.” He said the words over and over, occasionally muttering thanks when a copper coin rattled into the bowl. And all the time he watched the house with the scallop shell, and he noted that the big front door was never used and that the shutters behind the heavy window grilles were never opened even though the other houses in the street opened their shutters to take advantage of what small light found its way between the high buildings. Six men came to the house and all used a side door down the alley. Late in the morning Sharpe moved there, muttering his incantation as he went, and he squatted again, this time just inside the alley’s mouth, and watched a man go to the side door and knock. A hatch slid open, a question was asked, it was evidently answered satisfactorily, and the door opened. In the next hour three porters delivered crates and a woman brought a bundle of laundry. The same hatch was slid open each time before the visitors were allowed inside. The laundress dropped a coin in Sharpe’s bowl. “Gracias,” he said.

Around midmorning a priest came out of the alley door. He was tall and lantern-jawed. He dropped a coin in Sharpe’s bowl and at the same time gave a command that Sharpe did not understand, but the priest pointed to the church and Sharpe assumed he had been ordered to move out of the alleyway. He picked up his bowl and shuffled toward the church, and there saw trouble waiting.

Three beggars had taken his place on the steps. All were men. At least half the male beggars in Cádiz were cripples, survivors of battles against the British or the French. They were limbless, scarred, and ulcerous. Some wore placards with the names of the battles where they had been wounded, while others proudly wore the remnants of their uniforms, but none of the three waiting men was crippled or wore uniforms, and all three were watching Sharpe.

He had trespassed. The beggars in London were as organized as any battalion. If a man took post where other beggars had their usual pitches, then the man would be warned, and if he did not heed the warning, the beggar-lords would be summoned from their lairs. Stinking Moses had always worked the church of St. Martins in the Fields, and he had once been robbed by two sailors who had kicked him across the street to the door of the workhouse, where they had taken his coins, then taken his place on the church steps. Next morning Stinking Moses was back at the church and two corpses were found in Moons Yard.

These three men were on a similar mission. They said nothing as Sharpe emerged from the alley, but just surrounded him. One took his bowl and the remaining two held his elbows and hurried him westward until they reached a shadowed archway. “Madre de Dios,” Sharpe mumbled. He was still crouching as though he had a wounded spine.

The man holding the bowl demanded to know who Sharpe was. Sharpe did not understand the man’s fast and colloquial Spanish, but guessed that was what the man wanted to know, just as he guessed what was coming next. It was a knife that came from under the man’s ragged cloak and flashed up toward Sharpe’s throat. At that moment the apparently crippled beggar turned into a soldier. Sharpe seized the man’s wrist and kept the knife moving upward, but now toward its owner, and Sharpe was smiling as the blade slid easily into the soft flesh under the man’s chin. He gave the wrist one last jerk so that the knife went through the man’s tongue into his palate. The man made a mewling noise as blood spilled from his lips. Sharpe, who had easily freed his right arm, now pulled his left free as the man on that side launched a massive kick and Sharpe seized the boot and pushed it upward so that the man flew back, to fall hard on the cobbles, his skull making a sound like a musket butt dropped on stone. Sharpe elbowed the third man between the eyes. It had taken seconds. The first man was staring with wide eyes at Sharpe, who now drew his pistol. The man who had fallen was now on his knees, groggy. The second man had blood pouring from his nose and the pistol was pointing at the leader’s groin. Sharpe cocked the gun and, in the archway, the sound was ominous.

The man, with his own knife still pinning his mouth shut, put down the bowl. He held his hands out as if to ward off trouble. “Bugger off,” Sharpe said in English and, though they did not understand, they obeyed. They backed away slowly until Sharpe leveled the pistol, and then they ran.

“Bugger,” Sharpe said. His head was throbbing. He touched the bandage and flinched from the pain. He crouched and scooped up the coins. When he stood, there was a heartbeat and he felt faint, so he leaned at the archway’s side and looked up, because that seemed to alleviate the pain. There was a cross incised into the keystone of the arch. He stared at it until the pain receded. He put away the pistol, which, carelessly, he was still holding, though the arch was deep enough to hide him from the few pedestrians who passed. He noticed weeds growing at the foot of the gates, which were secured by a big old-fashioned ball padlock, like the one that had guarded the Marquesa’s boathouse. This padlock was rusted. He went out into the street and saw that the building’s windows were shuttered and barred. A watchtower rose above the building, and more weeds grew between the tower’s stones. The building was abandoned and no more than forty paces from Nuñez’s house. “Perfect,” he said aloud, and a woman leading a goat on a length of rope made the sign of the cross because she thought he was mad.

It was close to midday. He spent a long time searching the streets for the merchant he wanted, and had to bundle the filthy cloak and hat under his arm before going into the shop, where he bought a new padlock. The lock had been made in Britain and had wards inside the steel case to protect the levers from picks. The shopkeeper charged him too much, probably because his customer was English, but Sharpe did not argue. The money was not his, but had been given him by Lord Pumphrey from the embassy’s cash box.

He went back to the miraculous crucifix and settled on the steps under its stone canopy. He knew the three men would be back, or two of them would be back, but not until they had rousted up reinforcements, and he reckoned that gave him an hour or two. A dog investigated the interesting smells of his borrowed cloak, then pissed against the wall. Women came and went to the church and most dropped small coins into his bowl. Another beggar, a woman, whined at the far side of the steps. She tried to engage Sharpe in conversation, but all he would say was “Mother of God,” and she abandoned her attempts. He just watched the house and wondered how he could ever hope to steal anything from inside, if indeed, the letters were even there. The place was plainly well guarded, and he suspected that the front door and the ground-floor windows had been blocked. A monk had been calling house to house, probably collecting for charity, and the man had hammered unavailingly on the door until the lantern-jawed priest had appeared from the alleyway. He shouted at the monk to go away. So the front door could not be opened, and that suggested it had been barricaded, as had the two barred windows. The French mortars fired twice more, but neither of the shells came anywhere near the street where Sharpe was waiting. He sat on the steps until the streets emptied as folk went for their siesta, then he shuffled back to the abandoned building where the three men had tried to rob him. He cracked the ball padlock with a loose cobblestone, unthreaded the chain, and went inside.

He found himself in a small cloistered courtyard. One part of the cloisters had collapsed and the stonework of the rest was scorched. There was a small chapel to one side and something had plunged through its roof and burned everything inside. A French mortar shell? Except, as far as Sharpe could see, the big French mortars did not have the range to reach this far into the city and, besides, this damage was old. There was mold growing on the scorch marks and weeds between the flagstones of the chapel floor.

He climbed the watchtower steps. The city’s skyline was punctuated by the towers, close to two hundred of them, and Sharpe supposed they had been built so merchants could watch for their ships beating in from the Atlantic. Or perhaps the first of them had been built when Cádiz was young, when the Romans had garrisoned the peninsula and watched for Carthaginian pirates. Then the Moors had taken Cádiz and they had watched for Christian raiders, and when the Spaniards at last took the city for themselves they had watched for English buccaneers. They had called Sir Francis Drake el Draco, and the dragon had come to Cádiz and burned most of the old city, and so the towers had been rebuilt, tower after tower, because Cádiz was never short of enemies.

This tower was six stories high. The top floor was a roofed platform with a stone balustrade and Sharpe eased his head over the parapet very slowly so that no one watching would see a sudden movement. He peered eastward and saw he had been right and that this was the perfect place to watch Nuñez’s house, which was just fifty paces away and joined to the abandoned building by other houses, all with flat roofs. Most of the city’s houses had flat roofs, places to enjoy the sun that rarely reached into the deep, narrow, balcony-blocked ravines of the streets. The chimneys cast black shadows and it was in one of those shadows that Sharpe saw the sentinel on Nuñez’s house: one man, dark cloaked, sitting with a musket across his knees.

Sharpe watched for the best part of an hour during which the man hardly moved. The French mortars had stopped firing, but far off to the south and east there was the bloom of gunsmoke beyond the marshes where the French besiegers faced the small British army that protected Cádiz’s isthmus. The sound of the guns was muted, a mere grumble of distant thunder, and then that too died away.

Sharpe went back to the street where he closed the gates, put the chain back, and used his new padlock to secure it. He thrust the key into a pocket and walked east and south, away from Nuñez’s house. He kept the ocean on his right, knowing that would bring him to the cathedral where he was to meet Lord Pumphrey. He thought about Jack Bullen as he walked. Poor Jack, a prisoner, and he remembered the burst of smoke from Vandal’s musket. There was a revenge waiting. His head hurt. Sometimes a stab of pain blackened the sight in his right eye, which was odd, because the wound was on the left side of his scalp. He arrived early at the cathedral, so he sat on the seawall and watched the great rollers come from the Atlantic to break on the rocks and suck back white. A small band of men was negotiating the jagged reef that extended west from the city and ended in a lighthouse. He could see they were carrying burdens, presumably fuel for the fire that was lit nightly on the lighthouse platform. They hesitated between rocks, jumping only when the sea drew back and the white foam drained from the stones.

A clock struck five and he walked to the cathedral, which, even unfinished, loomed massively above the smaller houses. Its roof was half covered in tarpaulins so it was hard to tell what it would look like when it was complete, but for now it looked ugly, a brutal mass of gray-brown stone broken by few windows and spidery with scaffolding. The entrance, which fronted onto a narrow street piled with masonry, was approached by a fine flight of stairs where Lord Pumphrey waited, fending off the beggars with an ivory-tipped cane. “Good God, Richard,” His Lordship said as he greeted Sharpe, “where did you get that cloak?”

“Off a beggar.”

Lord Pumphrey was soberly dressed, though a smell of lavenders wafted from his dark coat and long black cloak. “Have you had a useful day?” he asked lightly, as he used the cane to part the beggars and reach the door.

“Maybe. All depends, doesn’t it, whether the letters are in that newspaper place?”

“I trust it doesn’t come to that,” Lord Pumphrey said. “I trust our blackmailers will contact me.”

“They haven’t yet?”

“Not yet,” Pumphrey said. He dipped a forefinger in the stoup of holy water and wafted it across his forehead. “I’m no papist, of course, but it does no harm to pretend, does it? The message hinted that our opponents are willing to sell us the letters, but only for a great deal of money. Isn’t it ghastly?” This last question referred to the cathedral interior, which did not seem ghastly to Sharpe, just splendid and ornate and huge. He was staring down a long nave flanked by clusters of pillars. Off the side aisles were rows of chapels bright with painted statues, gilded altars, and candles lit by the faithful. “They’ve been building it for ninety-something years,” Lord Pumphrey said, “and work has now more or less stopped because of the war. I suppose they’ll finish it all one day. Hat off.”

Sharpe snatched off his hat. “Did you write to Sir Thomas?”

“I did.” Lord Pumphrey had promised to write a note requesting that Sharpe’s riflemen be kept on the Isla de León rather than be put on a ship heading north to Lisbon. The wind had gone southerly during the day and some ships had already headed north.

“I’ll fetch my men tonight,” Sharpe said.

“They’ll have to be quartered in the stables,” Pumphrey said, “and pretend to be embassy servants. We are going to the crossing.”

“The crossing?”

“The place where the transept crosses the nave. There’s a crypt beneath it.”

“Where Plummer died?”

“Where Plummer died. Isn’t that what you wanted to see?”

The farther end of the cathedral was still unbuilt. A plain brick wall rose where, one day, the sanctuary and high altar would stand. The crossing, just in front of the plain wall, was an airy high space with soaring pillars at each corner. Above Sharpe now was the unfinished dome where a few men worked on scaffolding that climbed each cluster of pillars and then spread about the base of the dome. A makeshift crane was fixed high in the dome’s scaffolding and two men were hauling up a wooden platform loaded with masonry. “I thought you said they’d stopped building,” Sharpe said.

“I suppose they must do repairs,” Lord Pumphrey said airily. He led Sharpe past a pulpit behind which an archway had been built into one of the massive pillars. A flight of steps disappeared downward. “Captain Plummer met his end down there.” Lord Pumphrey gestured at the steps. “I try to feel sorrow at his passing, but I must say he was a most obnoxious man. You wish to descend?”

“Of course.”

“I very much doubt they will choose this place again,” His Lordship said.

“Depends what they want,” Sharpe said.

“Meaning?”

“If they want us dead then they’ll choose this place. It worked for them once, so why not use it again?” He led the way down the stairs and so emerged into an extraordinary chamber. It was circular with a low-domed ceiling. An altar lay at one end of the chamber. Three women knelt in front of the crucifix, beads busy in their fingers, staring up at the crucified Christ as Pumphrey tiptoed to the crypt’s center. Once there he put a finger to his lips and Sharpe assumed His Lordship was being reverent, but instead Pumphrey rapped his cane sharply on the floor and the sound echoed and reechoed. “Isn’t it amazing?” Lord Pumphrey asked. “Amazing,” the echo said, and then again, and again, and again. One of the women turned and scowled, but His Lordship just smiled at her and offered an elegant bow. “You can sing in harmony with yourself here,” Pumphrey said. “Would you like to try?”

Sharpe was more interested in the archways leading from the big chamber. There were five. The center one led to another chapel, which had an altar lit by candles, while the remaining four were dark caverns. He explored the nearest one and discovered a passage leading from it. The passage circled the big chamber, going from cavern to cavern. “Clever bastards, aren’t they?” he said to Lord Pumphrey who had followed him.

“Clever?”

“Plummer must have died in the middle of the big chamber, yes?”

“That’s where the blood was, certainly. You can still see it if you look carefully.”

“And the bastards must have been in these side chambers. And you can never tell which one they’re in because they can go around the passage. There’s only one reason for meeting in a place like this. It’s a killing ground. You’re negotiating with the bastards? You tell them to meet us in a public place, in daylight.”

“I suspect we have reason to indulge them, rather than the other way around.”

“Whatever that means,” Sharpe said. “How much money are we talking about?”

“At least a thousand guineas. At least. Probably much more.”

“Bloody hell!” Sharpe said, then gave a humorless laugh. “That’ll teach the ambassador to choose his women more carefully.”

“Henry paid the three hundred guineas that Plummer lost,” Pumphrey said, “but he can well afford it. The man who stole his wife had to pay him a fortune. But from now it will be the government’s money.”

“Why?”

“Because once our enemies published a letter it became a matter of public policy. This business is no longer about Henry’s unfortunate choice of bedmate, but about British policy toward Spain. Perhaps that’s why they printed the one letter. It put up the price and opened His Majesty’s purse strings. If that was their motive, then I must say it was rather clever of them.”

Sharpe walked back to the central chamber. He imagined enemies hidden all around, enemies who were moving through the hidden passage, enemies threatening from a new archway every few seconds. Plummer and his companions would have been like rats in a pit, never knowing which hole the terriers would come from. “Suppose they do sell you the letters,” he said. “What’s to stop them keeping copies and publishing them anyway?”

“They will undertake not to. That is one of our immutable conditions.”

“Immutable rubbish,” Sharpe said scornfully. “You’re not dealing with other diplomats, but with bloody blackmailers!”

“I know, Richard,” Pumphrey said. “I do know. It is unsatisfactory, but we must do our best and trust that the transaction is attended by honor.”

“You mean you’re just hoping for the best?”

“Is that bad?”

“In battle, my lord, always expect the worst. Then you might be ready for it. Where’s the woman?”

“Woman?”

“Caterina Blazquez, is that her name? Where is she?”

“I have no idea,” Pumphrey said distantly.

“Is she part of it?” Sharpe asked forcefully. “Does she want guineas?”

“The letters were stolen from her!”

“So she says.”

“You have a very suspicious mind, Richard.”

Sharpe said nothing. He disliked the way Pumphrey used his Christian name. It denoted more than familiarity. It suggested Sharpe was a valued inferior, a pet. It was patronizing and it was false. Pumphrey liked to give the impression of frailty, lightness, and frivolity, but Sharpe knew there was a razor mind at work in that well-groomed head. Lord Pumphrey was a man at home in darkness, and a man who knew well enough that ulterior motives were the driving force of the world. “Pumps,” he said, and was rewarded by a slight flicker of an eyebrow, “you know bloody well that they’re going to cheat us.”

“Which is why I asked for you, Captain Sharpe.”

That was better. “We don’t know the letters are at the newspaper house, do we?”

“No.”

“But if they cheat us, which they will, then I’m going to have to deal with them. What’s the object, my lord? To steal them, or to stop them from being published?”

“His Majesty’s government would like both.”

“And His Majesty’s government pays me, don’t they? Ten shillings and sixpence a day, with four shillings and sixpence deducted for mess costs.”

“The ambassador, I’m sure, will reward you,” Lord Pumphrey said stiffly.

Sharpe said nothing. He went to the center of the chamber where he could see the dried blood black between the flagstones. He slapped his toe on the floor and listened to the echo. Noise, he thought, noise and bullets. Scare the bastards to death. But perhaps Pumphrey was right. Perhaps they did intend to sell the letters. But if they chose this crypt for the exchange then Sharpe reckoned they wanted both letters and gold. He climbed the steps back to the cathedral’s crossing and Lord Pumphrey followed. There was a door in the temporary brick wall and Sharpe tried it. It opened easily and beyond was the open air and great stacks of abandoned masonry waiting for work to resume on the cathedral. “Seen enough?” Lord Pumphrey asked.

“Just pray they don’t want to meet us in the crypt,” Sharpe said.

“Suppose they do?”

“Just pray they don’t,” Sharpe said, for he had never seen a place so ideally suited for ambush and murder.

They walked silently through the small streets. A mortar shell exploded dully at the other end of the city and a moment later every church bell in the city sounded at once. Sharpe wondered if the clangor was a summons for men to extinguish a fire set by the shell. Then he saw that everyone on the street had stopped. Men took off their hats and bowed their heads. “The oraciones,” Lord Pumphrey said, taking off his own hat.

“The what?”

“Evening prayer time.” The folk made the sign of the cross when the bells ended. Sharpe and Pumphrey walked on, but had to step into a shopfront to make way for three men carrying gigantic loads of firewood on their backs. “It’s all imported,” Lord Pumphrey said.

“The wood?”

“Can’t get it from the mainland, can we? So it’s fetched in from the Balearics or from the Azores. It costs a great deal of money to cook or stay warm in a Cádiz winter. Luckily the embassy gets coal from Britain.”

Firewood and coal. Sharpe watched the men disappear. They gave him an idea. A way to save the ambassador if the bastards did not sell the letters. A way to win.

FATHER SALVADOR Montseny ignored the two men operating the printing press while they were only too aware of him. There was something very threatening in the priest’s calmness. Their employer, Eduardo Nuñez, who had brought Montseny to the pressroom, sat on a high chair in the room’s corner and smoked a cigar as Montseny explored the room. “The work has been well done,” Montseny said.

“Except now we can’t see.” Nuñez waved at the brick rectangles where the two windows had been. “Light was bad anyway. Now we work in the dark.”

“You have lanterns,” Father Montseny observed.

“But the work is delicate,” Nuñez said, pointing at his two men. One was inking the press’s form with a sheepskin ball while the other was trimming a sheet of paper.

“Then do the work carefully,” Montseny said sourly. He was satisfied. The cellar, where the two printing apprentices lived, had no entrance other than a trapdoor that let into the pressroom’s floor, while the pressroom itself, which took up almost all the ground floor, was now only accessible by the door that led from the courtyard. The first story was a storeroom, crammed with paper and ink, that could only be reached by an open stair beside the trapdoor. The second and third stories were Nuñez’s living quarters, and Montseny had blocked the stairway leading to the flat roof. A guard was up on that roof at all hours, climbing to his post by a ladder from the balcony of Nuñez’s bedroom. Nuñez did not like the arrangements, but Nuñez was being well paid in English gold.

“Do you really believe we shall be attacked?” Nuñez asked.

“I hope you’re attacked,” Montseny said.

Nuñez made the sign of the cross. “Why, Father?”

“Because then the admiral’s men will kill our enemies,” Montseny said.

“We are not soldiers,” Nuñez said nervously.

“We are all soldiers,” Montseny said, “fighting for a better Spain.”

He had nine guards to keep the press safe. They lived in the storeroom upstairs and cooked their meals in the courtyard beside the latrine. They were solid oxlike men with big hands stained by years spent in the tarred rigging of warships, and they were all familiar with weapons and all ready to kill for their king, their country, and their admiral.

There was one small room off the pressroom. It was Nuñez’s office, a charnel house of old bills, papers, and books, but Montseny had turfed Nuñez out, replacing him with a creature supplied by the admiral; a miserable creature, a whining, smoke-ridden, alcohol sodden, sweat-stinking excuse for a man, a writer. Benito Chavez was fat, nervous, peevish, and pompous. He had made his living writing opinions for the newspapers, but as the land ruled by the Spanish shrank, so the newspapers that would accept his opinions vanished until he was left only with El Correo de Cádiz, but that, at least, now promised to pay him well. He glanced around as Montseny opened the door. “Magnificent,” he said, “quite magnificent.”

“Are you drunk?”

“How can I be drunk? There’s no liquor here! No, the letters!” Chavez chuckled. “They are magnificent. Listen! ‘I cannot wait to caress your…’”

“I have read the letters,” Montseny interrupted coldly.

“Passion! Tenderness! Lust! He writes well.”

“You write better.”

“Of course I do, of course. But I would like to meet this girl”—Chavez turned a letter over—“this Caterina.”

“You think she would want to meet you?” Montseny asked. Benito Chavez was corpulent, his clothes were unkempt, and his graying beard speckled with scraps of tobacco. There was a bucket beside him and it was almost filled with cigar stubs and ash. Two half-smoked cigars were in a saucer on the table. “Caterina Blazquez,” Montseny said, “serves only the best clients.”

“She certainly knows how to wear out a mattress,” Chavez said, ignoring Montseny’s scorn.

“So make your copies,” Montseny said, “and do your work.”

“No need for copies,” Chavez said. “I shall just rewrite everything and we can print it all at once.”

“All at once?”

Chavez picked up one of the cigars, relit it from a candle, then scratched at an itch on his belly. “The English,” he said, “provide the funds that keep the Regency going. The English supply the muskets for our army. The English give us the powder for the cannon on the city walls. The English have an army on the Isla de León that protects Cádiz. Without England, Father, there is no Cádiz. If we annoy the English sufficiently, then they will persuade the Regency to shut the newspaper, and what use are the letters then? So fire all our ammunition at once! Give them a volley that will finish them. All the letters, all the passion, all the sweat on the sheets, all the lies I shall write, all at once! Blast them in one edition. Then it does not matter if they do close the newspaper.”

Montseny stared at the miserable creature. There was some sense there, he allowed. “But if they do not close the newspaper,” he pointed out, “then we shall have no more letters.”

“But there are other letters,” Chavez said enthusiastically. “Here”—he sorted through the sheets of paper—“there’s a reference to His Excellency’s last letter and it isn’t here. I assume this marvelous creature still has some?”

“She does.”

“Then get them,” Chavez said, “or don’t, as you please. It doesn’t matter. I am a journalist, Father, so I make things up.”

“Publish them all at once,” Montseny said thoughtfully.

“I need a week,” Chavez said, “and I shall rewrite, translate, and invent. We shall say the English are sending muskets to the rebels in Venezuela, that they plan to impose the Protestant heresies on Cádiz”—he paused, sucking on the cigar—“and we shall say”—he went on more slowly, thoughtfully—“that they are negotiating a peace with France that will give Portugal its independence at the price of Spain. That should do it! Give me a week!”

“Ten days,” Montseny snorted. “You have five.”

Chavez’s broad face took on a sly look. “I work better with brandy, Father.” He gestured at the empty hearth, “and it is cold in here.”

“After five days, Chavez,” Montseny said, “you shall have gold, you shall have brandy, and you shall have all the fuel you can burn. Until then, work.” He closed the door.

He could taste victory already.

THE NEW south wind had loosed a dozen ships on their voyages to Portugal. Sergeant Noolan and his men had left, ordered aboard a naval sloop that was carrying dispatches to Lisbon, but Lord Pumphrey’s note to Sir Thomas Graham had been sufficient to keep Sharpe’s riflemen on the Isla de León. That evening Sharpe went to look for them in the tent lines. He had changed back into his uniform, then borrowed one of the embassy’s horses. It was dark by the time he reached the encampment where he discovered Harper trying to revive a dying fire. “There’s rum in that bottle, sir,” Harper said, nodding at a stone bottle at the tent door.

“Where are the others?”

“Where I’ll be in ten minutes. In a tavern, sir. How’s your head?”

“It throbs.”

“Are you keeping the bandage wet, like the surgeon said you must?”

“I forgot.”

“Sergeant Noolan and his men are gone,” Harper said. “Took a sloop of war to Lisbon. But we’re staying, is that it?”

“Not for long,” Sharpe said. He slid clumsily out of the saddle and wondered what the hell he was to do with the horse.

“Aye, we got orders from Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Graham himself,” Harper said, relishing the rank and title, “delivered to us by Lord William Russell, no less.” He gave Sharpe a quizzical look.

“We’ve got a job, Pat,” Sharpe said, “some bastards in the city who need thumping.”

“A job, eh?” There was a touch of resentment in Harper’s voice.

“You’re thinking of Joana?”

“I was, sir.”

“Only be a few days, Pat, and there might be some cash in it.” It had occurred to him that Lord Pumphrey was right and that Henry Wellesley could well be generous in his reward if the letters were retrieved. He stooped to the fire and warmed his hands. “We have to get you all some civilian clothes, then move you into Cádiz for a day or two, and after that we can go home. Joana will wait for you.”

“She will, I hope. And what are you doing with that horse, sir? It’s wandering off.”

“Bloody hell.” Sharpe retrieved the mare. “I’m going to take it to Sir Thomas’s quarters. He’ll have stables. And I want to see him anyway. Got a favor to ask him.”

“I’ll come with you, sir,” Harper said. He abandoned the fire and Sharpe realized Harper had been waiting for him. The big Irishman retrieved his rifle, volley gun, and the rest of his equipment from the tent. “If I leave anything here, sir, the bastards will steal it. There’s nothing but bloody thieves in this army.” Harper was happier now, not because Sharpe had returned, but because his officer had remembered to ask about Joana. “So what’s this job, sir?”

“We’ve got to steal something.”

“God save Ireland. They need us? This camp is full of thieves!”

“They want a thief they can trust,” Sharpe said.

“I suppose that’s difficult. Let me lead the horse, sir.”

“I need to talk to Sir Thomas,” Sharpe said, handing over the reins. “Then we’ll join the others. I could do with a drink.”

“I think you’ll find Sir Thomas is busy, sir. They’ve been running around all evening like starlings, they have. Something’s brewing.”

They walked into the small town. The streets of San Fernando were much more spacious than the alleys of Cádiz and the houses were lower. Lamps burned on some corners and light spilled from the taverns where British and Portuguese soldiers drank, watched by the ever-present provosts. San Fernando had become a garrison town, home to the five thousand men sent to guard the isthmus of Cádiz. Sharpe asked one of the provosts where Sir Thomas’s quarters were and was pointed down a lane that led to the quays beside the creek. The creek made the isthmus into an island. Two large torches flamed outside the headquarters, illuminating a group of animated officers. Sir Thomas was one of them. He was standing on the doorstep and it was clear that Harper had been right: something was brewing and the general was busy. He was giving orders, but then he saw Sharpe and broke off. “Sharpe!” he shouted.

“Sir?”

“Good man! You want to come? Good man! Willie, look after him.” Sir Thomas said nothing more, but turned brusquely away and, accompanied by a half dozen officers, strode toward the creek.

Lord William Russell turned to Sharpe. “You’re coming!” Lord William said. “Good!”

“Coming where?” Sharpe asked.

“Frog-hunting, of course.”

“Do I need a horse?”

“Good God, no, not unless it can swim?”

“Can I stable it here?”

“Pearce!” Lord William shouted. “Pearce!”

“I’m here, Your Lordship, I’m here, ever present and correct, sir.” A bowlegged cavalry trooper who appeared old enough to be Lord William’s father appeared from the alley beside the headquarters. “Your Lordship’s forgotten Your Lordship’s saber.”

“Dear God, have I? So I have, thank you, Pearce.” Lord William took the proffered saber and slid it into its scabbard. “Look after Captain Sharpe’s gee-gee, will you, Pearce? There’s a good fellow. Sure you don’t want to come with us?”

“Have to get Your Lordship’s breakfast.”

“So you do, Pearce, so you do. Beefsteak, I hope?”

“Might I wish Your Lordship good hunting?” Pearce said, flicking a speck of dust from one of Lord William’s epaulettes.

“That’s uncommonly kind of you, Pearce, thank you. Come on, Sharpe, we can’t dillydally. We have a tide to catch!” Lord William set off after Sir Thomas at a half run. Sharpe and Harper, still bemused, followed him to a long wharf where, in the small moonlight, Sharpe could see files of redcoats clambering into boats. General Graham was dressed in black boots, black breeches, red coat, and a black cocked hat. He had a claymore at his belt and was talking to a naval officer, but stopped long enough to greet Sharpe again. “Good man! How’s your head?”

“I’ll live, sir.”

“That’s the spirit! And that’s our boat. In you get.”

The boat was a big, flat-bottomed lighter, manned by a score of sailors with long sweeps. It was a short jump down onto the wide aft deck. The boat’s hold was already occupied by grinning redcoats. “What the hell are we doing?” Harper asked.

“Damned if I know,” Sharpe said, “but I need to talk to the general and this looks like as good a chance as I’ll get.”

Four other lighters lay astern and all were slowly filling with redcoats. An engineer officer threw a coil of quick match down onto the rearmost barge. Then a file of his men carried kegs of powder to the hold. Lord William Russell jumped down beside Sharpe, while General Graham, almost alone on the quay now, walked above the lighters. “No smoking, boys!” the general called. “We can’t have the French seeing a light just because you need a pipe. No noise, either. And make damned sure your guns aren’t cocked. And enjoy yourselves, you hear me? Enjoy yourselves.” He repeated the injunctions to the men in each of the barges, then clambered down onto the foremost lighter. The spacious afterdeck had room for a dozen officers to stand or sit and still leave space for the sailor who wielded the long tiller. “Those rogues,” Sir Thomas said to Sharpe, gesturing at the redcoats crouched in the lighter’s hold, “are from the 87th. Is that who you are, boys? Damned Irish rebels?”

“We are, sir!” two or three men called back.

“And you’ll not find better soldiers this side of the gates of hell,” Sir Thomas said, loud enough for the Irishmen to hear. “You’re most welcome, Sharpe.”

“Welcome to what, sir?”

“You don’t know? Then why are you here?”

“Came to ask a favor of you, sir.”

Sir Thomas laughed. “And I thought you wanted to join us! Ah well, the favor must wait, Sharpe, it must wait. We have work to do.”

The lighters had cast off and were now being rowed down a channel through the marshes that edged the Isla de León. Ahead of Sharpe, north and east, the long, low black silhouette of the Trocadero Peninsula just showed in the night. Sparks of light betrayed where the French forts lay. Lord William told him there were three forts. The farthest away was the Matagorda, which lay closest to Cádiz, and it was the giant mortar in the Matagorda Fort that did most damage to the city. Just to its south was the Fort San José and, farther south still and closest to the Isla de León, was the Fort San Luis. “What we’re doing,” Lord William explained, “is rowing past San Luis to the river just beyond. The river mouth is a creek, and once we’re in that creek, Sharpe, we’ll be plumb between the San Luis and the San Jose. Enfiladed, you might say.”

“And what’s in the creek?”

“Five damned great fire rafts.” Sir Thomas Graham had heard Sharpe’s question and now answered it. “The bastards are just waiting for a brisk northerly wind to set them loose on our fleet. Can’t have that.” The fleet, mostly small coasters with a few larger merchantmen, was assembling to take Graham’s men and General Lapeña’s Spanish army south. They would land on the coast, then march north to assault the siege lines from the rear. “We plan to burn the rafts tonight,” Sir Thomas went on. “It’ll be past midnight before we get there. Perhaps you’ll do the 87th the honor of joining them?”

“With pleasure, sir.”

“Major Gough! You’ve met Captain Sharpe?”

A shadowy officer appeared at Sir Thomas’s side. “I have not, sir,” Gough said, “but I remember you from Talavera, Sharpe.”

“Sharpe and his sergeant would beg the privilege of fighting with your boys tonight, Hugh,” Sir Thomas said.

“They’ll be most welcome, sir.” Gough spoke in a soft Irish accent.

“Warn your boys they have two stray riflemen, will you?” Sir Thomas said. “We don’t want your rogues shooting two men who captured a French eagle. So there you are, Sharpe. Major Gough is landing his lads on the south side of the creek. There are some guards there, but they’ll be easy enough to take care of. Then I imagine the French will send a relief party from the San Luis fort so it should all become fairly interesting.”

Sir Thomas’s plan was to land two lighters on the southern bank and two on the northern, and the men would disembark to drive off the French guards, then defend the creek against the expected counterattacks. Meanwhile the fifth lighter, which carried engineers, would row to the fire rafts that were just upstream of the twin French encampments, capture them, and set their explosives. “It should look like Guy Fawkes Night,” Sir Thomas said wolfishly.

Sharpe settled on the deck. Lord William Russell had brought cold sausage and a flask of wine. The sausage was chopped into slices and the flask handed around as the sailors heaved on the great sweeps and the lighter steadily butted its way through the small choppy waves. A Spaniard stood beside the steersman. “Our guide,” Sir Thomas explained. “A fisherman. A good fellow.”

“He doesn’t hate us, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“Hate us?”

“I keep being told how the Spanish hate us, sir.”

“He hates the French, like I do, Sharpe. If there is one constancy in this vale of tears, it is to always hate the damned French, always.” Sir Thomas spoke with a real vehemence. “I trust you hate the French, Sharpe?”

Sharpe paused. Hate? He was not sure he hated them. “I don’t like the bastards, sir,” he said.

“I used to,” Sir Thomas said.

“Used to?” Sharpe asked, puzzled.

“I used to like them,” Sir Thomas said. The general was staring ahead at the small lights showing through the embrasures of the forts. “I liked them, Sharpe. I rejoiced in their revolution. I believed it was a dawn for mankind. Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. I believed in all those things and I believe in them still, but now I hate the French. I’ve hated them, Sharpe, since the day my wife died.”

Sharpe felt almost as uncomfortable as when the ambassador had confessed his foolishness in writing love letters to a whore. “I’m sorry, sir,” he muttered.

“It was nineteen years ago,” Sir Thomas said, apparently oblivious of Sharpe’s inadequate sympathy, “off the southern coast of France. June twenty-sixth, 1792, was the day my dear Mary died. We took her body ashore and we placed it in a casket, and it was my wish that she should be buried in Scotland. So we hired a barge to take us to Bordeaux where we might find a ship to take us home. And just outside Toulouse, Sharpe”—the general’s voice was turning into a growl as he told the tale—“a rascally crowd of half-drunk Frenchmen insisted on searching the barge. I showed them my permits, I pleaded with them, I entreated them to show respect, but they ignored me, Sharpe. They were men wearing the uniform of France, and they tore that coffin open and they molested my dear Mary in her shroud, and from that day, Sharpe, I have hardened my heart against their damned race. I joined the army to get my revenge and I pray to God daily that I live long enough to see every damned Frenchman scoured off the face of this earth.”

“Amen to that,” Lord William Russell said.

“And tonight, for my Mary’s sake,” Sir Thomas said with relish, “I’ll kill a few more.”

“Amen to that,” Sharpe said.

A SMALL wind came from the west. It threw up tiny waves in the Bay of Cádiz across which the five lighters crawled slow, low and dark against the black water. It was chilly, not truly cold, but Sharpe wished he had worn a greatcoat. Five miles to the north and off to his left the lights of Cádiz glimmered against white walls to make a pale streak between the sea and sky, while closer, perhaps a mile to the west, yellow lantern light spilled from the stern windows of the anchored ships. Yet here, in the belly of the bay, there was no light, just the splash of black-painted oar blades. “It would have been quicker”—Sir Thomas broke a long silence—“to have rowed from the city, but if we’d have put lighters against the city wharves then the French would have known we’re coming. That’s why I didn’t tell you about this little jaunt last night. If I’d said a word of what we were planning, then the French would have known it all by breakfast time.”

“You think they have spies in the embassy, sir?”

“They have spies everywhere, Sharpe. Whole city is riddled with them. They get their messages out on the fishing boats. The bastards already know we’re sending an army to attack their siege lines and I suspect Marshal Victor knows more about my plans than I do.”

“The spies are Spanish?”

“I assume so.”

“Why do they serve the French, sir?”

Sir Thomas chuckled at that question. “Well, some of them think as I used to think, Sharpe, that liberty, equality, and fraternity are fine things. And so they are, but God knows not in French hands. And some of them just hate the British.”

“Why?”

“They’ve got plenty of reasons, Sharpe. Good Lord, it was only fourteen years ago we bombarded Cádiz! And six years ago we broke their fleet at Trafalgar! And most merchants here believe we want to destroy their trade with South America and take it for ourselves, and they’re right. We deny it, of course, but we’re still trying to do it. And they believe we’re fomenting rebellion in their South American colonies, and they’re not far wrong. We did encourage rebellion, though now we’re pretending we didn’t. Then there’s Gibraltar. They hate us for being in Gibraltar.”

“I thought they gave it to us, sir.”

“Aye, so they did, by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, but they were raw damn fools to sign that piece of paper and well they know it. So enough of them hate us, and now the French are spreading rumors that we’ll annex Cádiz as well! God knows that isn’t true, but the Spanish are willing to credit it. And there are men in Spain who fervently believe a French alliance would serve their country better than a British friendship, and I’m not sure they’re wrong. But here we are, Sharpe, allies whether we like it or not. And there are plenty of Spaniards who hate the French more than they dislike us, so there’s hope.”

“There’s always hope,” Lord William Russell said cheerfully.

“Aye, Willie, maybe,” Sir Thomas said, “but when Spain is reduced to Cádiz and Lord Wellington only holds the patch of land around Lisbon, it’s hard to see how we’ll drive the damn French back to their pigsties. If Napoleon had a scrap of sense he’d offer the Spanish their king back and make peace. Then we’d be properly cooked.”

“At least the Portuguese are on our side,” Sharpe said.

“True! And fine fellows they are. I’ve got two thousand of them here.”

“If they’ll fight,” Lord William said dubiously.

“They’ll fight,” Sharpe said. “I was at Bussaco. They fought.”

“So what happened?” Sir Thomas asked, and the telling of that story carried the lighter close to the reed-thick shore of the Trocadero Peninsula. The Fort of San Luis was close now. It stood two or three hundred paces inland, where the marshes gave way to ground firm enough to support the massive ramparts. Beyond the fort’s flooded ditch Sharpe could just see a small glow of light above the glacis. That was a mistake by the French. Sharpe suspected that the sentries had braziers burning on the firestep to keep themselves warm, and even the small light of the coals would make it difficult for them to see anything moving in the black shallows. Yet the greater danger was not the fort’s sentries, but guard boats, and Sir Thomas whispered that they were to keep a good lookout. “Listen for their oars,” he suggested.

The French evidently possessed a dozen guard boats. They had been seen in the dusk as they patrolled the Trocadero’s low coast, but there was no sign of them now. Either they were deeper in the bay or, more likely, their crews had been driven back to the creek by the chill wind. Sir Thomas suspected the crews of the boats were soldiers rather than sailors. “Bastards are shirking, aren’t they?” he whispered.

A hand touched Sharpe’s shoulder. “It’s Major Gough,” a voice said from the darkness, “and this is Ensign Keogh. Stay with him, Sharpe, and I’ll warrant we won’t shoot you.”

“We probably won’t.” Ensign Keogh corrected the major.

“He probably won’t shoot you.” Major Gough accepted the correction.

There was light ahead now, just enough for Sharpe to see that Ensign Keogh was absurdly young with a thin and eager face. The light came from campfires that burned perhaps a quarter mile ahead. The five boats were turning into the creek, creeping through the water to avoid the withies that marked the shallow channel, and the campfires burned where the French sentries guarded the fire rafts. The lighters’ black oars scarce touched the water now. The naval officer who led the boats had timed the expedition to arrive just as the tide finished its flood and so the rising water carried the lighters against the river’s small current. By the time the raid was over the tide should have turned and the ebb would hurry the British away. Still no Frenchman saw the boats, though the sentries were certainly on duty, for Sharpe could see a blue uniform with white crossbelts beside one of the fires. “I hate them,” Sir Thomas said softly, “God, how I do hate them.”

Sharpe could see the dim trace of light leaking over the glacis of Fort San Jose. It looked about half a mile away. Long cannon shot, he thought, especially if the French used canister, but the southernmost fort, San Luis, was much closer, close enough to shred the creek with rounds of canister, which were missiles of musket balls encased in tin cylinders that burst apart at the cannon’s muzzle. The balls, hundreds of them, spread like duck shot. Sharpe hated canister. All infantrymen did. “Buggers are asleep,” Lord William murmured.

Sharpe was suddenly struck by guilt. He had arranged to meet Lord Pumphrey at midday to discover whether the blackmailers had sent any message, and though he doubted there would be any word he knew his place was in Cádiz, not here. His duty was to Henry Wellesley, not to General Graham, yet here he was and he could only pray that he was not gutted by canister fired in the night. He touched his sword hilt and wished he could have sharpened the blade before he came. He liked to go into battle with a sharpened blade. Then he touched his rifle. Not many officers carried a longarm, but Sharpe was not like most officers. He was gutter-born, gutter-bred, and a gutter fighter.

Then the lighter’s bows ran softly onto the mud.

“Let’s kill some bastards,” Sir Thomas said vengefully.

And the first troops went ashore.

CHAPTER 5

SHARPE JUMPED FROM THE lighter into water that came over his boot tops. He waded ashore, following Ensign Keogh whose cocked hat looked as though it had belonged to his grandfather. It had exaggeratedly hooked points from which hung skimpy tassels and at its crown was a massive blue plume that matched the facings of the 87th’s red coats. “Follow, follow, follow,” Keogh hissed, not at Sharpe, but at a big sergeant and a score of men who were evidently his responsibility this night. The sergeant had become entangled in a wicker fish trap and was cursing as he tried to kick it free of his boots. “Do you need help, Sergeant Masterson?” Keogh asked.

“Jesus no, sir,” Masterson said, trampling on the trap’s remnants. “Bloody thing, sir.”

“Fix bayonets, boys!” Keogh said. “Do it quietly now!”

It seemed extraordinary to Sharpe that four or five hundred men could disembark so close to the twin encampments on the creek’s banks and not be noticed, but the French were still oblivious of the attackers. Sharpe could see small tents in the firelight, and among the tents were crude shelters made of branches thatched with reeds. A stand of muskets stood outside one sagging tent and Sharpe wondered why in God’s name the French had provided tents. The men were supposed to be guarding the rafts, not sleeping, but at least a few of the sentries were still awake. Two men wandered slowly across the encampment, muskets slung, suspecting nothing as a second lighter disgorged another company of redcoats alongside the men of the 87th. Two more companies were wading ashore on the northern bank.

“For a balla, boys,” Major Gough appeared to say softly and urgently just behind Keogh’s men, “for a balla!”

“For a what?” Sharpe whispered to Harper.

“Faugh a ballagh, sir. Clear the way, it means. Get out of our path because the Irish are coming.” Harper had drawn his sword bayonet. He was evidently reserving the seven bullets in the volley gun for later in the fight. “We bloody well are coming too,” he said, and clicked the sword’s brass hilt over his rifle’s muzzle so that the barrel now held twenty-three inches of murderous steel.

“Forward now!” Major Gough reverted to English, but still spoke quietly. “And slaughter the bastards. But do it softly, boys. Don’t wake the little darlings till you have to.”

The 87th started forward, their bayonets glinting in the small light of the fires. Clicks sounded as men cocked their muskets and Sharpe was certain the French must hear that noise, but the enemy stayed silent. It was a sentry on the northern bank who first realized the danger. Perhaps he saw the dark shape of the lighters in the creek, or else he glimpsed the glimmering blades coming from the west, but whatever alarmed him prompted a strangled cry of astonishment followed by a bang as he fired his musket.

“Faugh a ballagh!” Major Gough yelled. “Faugh a ballagh! Hard at them, boys, hard at them!” Gough, now that surprise was lost, had no intention of keeping his advance slow and disciplined. Sharpe remembered the battalion from Talavera, and he knew them to be a steady unit, but Gough wanted speed and savagery now. “Run, you rogues!” he shouted. “Take them fast! And give tongue! Give tongue!”

The men responded to this hunting command by screaming like banshees. They began running through the marsh, stumbling on tussocks, and jumping small ditches. Ensign Keogh, lithe and young, ran ahead with his slender-bladed infantry officer’s sword held aloft. “Faugh a ballagh!” he shouted. “Faugh a ballagh!” Then he leaped a ditch, all sprawling legs and flapping scabbard, while his left hand clutched at his oversized hat to keep it from falling off. He stumbled, but Sergeant Masterson, who was almost as big as Harper, snatched the frail-looking ensign back to his feet. “Kill them!” Keogh screamed. “Kill them!” Muskets sparked among the campfires, but Sharpe neither heard a ball pass nor saw anyone fall. The French, scattered and dozy, were scrambling out of their tents and shelters. An officer, his sword reflecting the firelight, tried to rally his troops, but the screams of the attacking Irish were enough to drive the newly woken men into the farther darkness. There was a smattering of musket fire from Gough’s Irishmen, but most of the work was done by the mere threat of their seventeen-inch bayonets. A woman, bare-legged, scooped up her bedding and sprinted after her man. Two dogs were running in circles, barking. Sharpe saw a pair of mounted men vanishing into the darkness behind him. He whirled, rifle raised, but the horsemen had galloped past the Irish flank into the dark toward the place where the lighters had grounded. Keogh had vanished ahead, followed by his men, but Sharpe held Harper back. “We’ve got green coats, Pat,” he warned. “Someone will mistake us for Crapauds if we’re not careful.”

He was right. A half dozen men with yellow facings on their red jackets suddenly appeared among the fires and Sharpe saw a musket swing toward him. “Ninety-fifth!” he shouted. “Ninety-fifth! Hold your fire! Who are you?”

“Sixty-seventh!” a voice shouted back. The 67th was a Hampshire regiment and they had advanced more slowly than the Irishmen, but kept closer order. A captain now took them east and south to guard the captured camp’s inland perimeter, while Major Gough was shouting at his Irishmen to move back through the tents and make a similar cordon on the bay side. Sharpe was thrusting his sword into the small tents as he and Harper walked toward Gough, and one such thrust elicited a yelp. Sharpe pulled the canvas flaps aside and saw two Frenchmen cowering inside. “Out!” he snarled. They crawled out and waited at his feet, shaking. “I don’t even know if we’re taking prisoners,” Sharpe said.

“We can’t just kill them, sir,” Harper said.

“I’m not going to kill them,” Sharpe snarled. “Get up!” He prodded the men with his sword, then drove them toward another band of prisoners being escorted by the Hampshire redcoats. One of those Hampshires was stooping by a French boy who did not look more than fourteen or fifteen. He had taken a bullet in his chest and was choking to death, his heels beating a horrid tattoo on the ground. “Be easy, boy,” the Hampshire man said as he stroked the dying boy’s cheek. “Be easy.” The far bank sparked with a sudden flurry of musket shots that died away as quickly as they had risen, and it was evident that the redcoats there had been just as successful as the men on the southern shore.

“Is that you, Sharpe?” It was Major Gough’s voice.

“It is, sir.”

“That was damnably quick,” Gough said, sounding disappointed. “The fellows just ran! Didn’t put up a fight at all. Will you do me the honor of reporting to General Graham that this bank is secure and that there’s no counterattack in sight? You should find the general by the rafts.”

“A pleasure, sir,” Sharpe said. He led Harper back through the captured encampment.

“I thought we’d get some fighting,” Harper said, sounding as disappointed as Gough.

“Buggers were asleep, weren’t they?”

“I come all this way just to watch a bunch of Dubliners wake up some Crapauds?”

“Are Gough’s men from Dublin?”

“That’s where the regiment’s raised, sir.” Harper spotted a discarded French pack, scooped it up, and filleted inside. “Bugger all,” he said and threw it away. “So how long do we stay here?”

“Long as it takes. An hour?”

“That long!”

“Engineers have a lot of work to do, Pat,” Sharpe said, and suddenly thought of poor Sturridge who had trusted that Sharpe would keep him alive on the Guadiana.

They found General Graham on the bank where the fire rafts were moored. The fifth lighter, the one containing the engineers, had tied up on the nearest raft where two Frenchmen lay dead.

Each of the five rafts was a great square platform of timber with a short mast to which a scrap of sail could be attached. The French had been waiting for a dark night, a north wind, and an incoming tide to drive the rafts down onto the fleet waiting to take the army south. Volunteer crews would have manned the ponderous rafts, guiding them to within a quarter mile or so of the anchorage. Then they would have lit the slow matches and taken to their rowing boats to escape the inferno. If the rafts had ever succeeded in getting among the British and Spanish shipping they would have caused panic. Ships would have cut their anchor cables rather than be set afire and the wind would have driven the anchorless ships crashing into one another or onto the marshy shore of the Isla de León, and meanwhile the monster fire rafts would drift on, causing more chaos. Each was crammed with barrels of incendiaries and with baulks of firewood, and they were armed with ancient cannons at their perimeters. The cannons’ touchholes were connected to the incendiary-filled barrels with slow matches. The cannons, some of which looked two hundred years old, were all small, but Sharpe supposed they were loaded with grapeshot, round shot, and anything else the French could cram into their muzzles so that the blazing rafts would spit balls and shells and death as they lumbered into the tightly packed anchorage.

The engineers were setting their charges and running quick fuse to the southern bank where General Graham stood with his aides. Sharpe gave him Gough’s message and Sir Thomas nodded an acknowledgment. “Evil bloody things, aren’t they?” he said, nodding at the nearest raft.

“Balgowan!” a voice hailed from the northern bank. “Balgowan!”

“Perthshire!” Sir Thomas bellowed back.

“All secure on this side, sir!” the voice shouted back.

“Good man!”

“Balgowan, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“Password,” Sir Thomas said. “Should have told you that. Balgowan is where I grew up, Sharpe. Finest place on God’s earth.” He was frowning as he spoke, staring south toward the San Luis fort. “It’s all been too easy,” he said, worried. Sharpe said nothing because Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Graham did not need his comments. “Bad troops.” Sir Thomas spoke of the French who had supposedly been guarding the rafts. “That’s what it is. Battalion level, that’s where the rot starts. I’ll wager your year’s wages against mine, Sharpe, that the senior battalion officers are sleeping in the forts. They’ve got warm beds, fires in the hearth, and dairymaids between the sheets while their men suffer out here.”

“I’ll not take your wager, sir.”

“You’d be a fool if you did,” Sir Thomas said. In the light of the dying French campfires the general could see ranks of redcoats facing the fort. Those men would be silhouetted against the fires and thus be prime targets for the fort’s artillery. “Willie,” he said, “tell Hugh and Johnny to lay their men down.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Lord William said, dropping into naval jargon. He ran southward and Sir Thomas slopped through the mud and clambered on board the nearest raft.

“Come and have a look, Sharpe!” he invited.

Sharpe and Harper followed the general who used his heavy-bladed claymore to prize open the nearest barrel. The top came off to reveal a half dozen pale balls, each about the size of a nine-pounder round shot. “What the devil are those?” Sir Thomas asked. “They look like haggis.”

“Smoke balls, sir,” an engineer lieutenant said after taking a quick look at the balls. He and an engineer sergeant were replacing the slow matches in the cannons with quick match.

Sir Thomas lifted one smoke ball and prodded the mixture beneath it. “What’s in the rest of the barrel?” he asked.

“Mostly saltpeter, sir,” the lieutenant said, “probably mixed with sulfur, antimony, and pitch. It’ll burn like hell.”

Sir Thomas hefted the smoke ball. The case was pierced by a dozen holes and, when Sir Thomas tapped it, sounded hollow. “Papier-mâché?” the general guessed.

“That’s it, sir. Papier-mâché filled with powder, antimony, and coal dust. Don’t see many of those these days. Naval equipment. You’re supposed to light them and hurl them through the enemy gunports, sir, where they choke the gunners. Of course you’ll probably die doing it, but they can be nasty little chaps in confined spaces.”

“So why are they here?” Sir Thomas asked.

“I suppose the frogs hoped they’d churn out a cloud of smoke that would drift ahead of the rafts to hide them, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir.”

“Of course, man.” The general stepped out of the lieutenant’s way. He put the smoke ball back in the barrel and was about to replace the lid when Sharpe reached for the balls.

“Can I have those, sir?”

“You want them?” Sir Thomas asked, surprised.

“With your permission, sir.”

Sir Thomas looked as though he thought Sharpe very strange, then shrugged. “Whatever you want, Sharpe.”

Sharpe sent Harper to find a French haversack. He was thinking of the cathedral’s crypt, and about the caverns and passages around the low chamber, and about men lurking in the dark with muskets and blades. He filled the haversack with the smoke balls and gave it to Harper. “Look after it, Pat. It could save our lives.”

General Graham had jumped onto the next raft where a squad of engineers was putting new fuses to the loaded cannon and planting powder charges in the raft’s center. “More smoke balls here, Sharpe,” he called back.

“I’ve enough, sir, thank you, sir.”

“Why do you need…” the general began asking, then stopped abruptly because a gun had fired from the Fort of San Luis. The garrison had at last woken up to what was happening in the marsh and, as the bellow of the gun faded, Sharpe heard musket balls whistle overhead. That meant the cannon had been loaded with canister or grapeshot. The sound of the cannon had scarcely gone silent when the smoke of its shot was lit by three violent explosions of red light as more guns slashed their shots from the embrasures. A round shot screamed just above the general’s head and a swarm of musket balls seethed across the marsh. “They won’t use shell,” Sharpe told Harper, “because they don’t want to set the rafts alight themselves.”

“That’s not much of a comfort, sir,” Harper said, “considering they’re aiming their guns straight at us.”

“They’re just firing at the camp,” Sharpe said.

“And we happen to be in the camp, sir.”

Then the guns of the San José Fort opened on the northern bank. They were much farther away and the grapeshot sighed in the dark rather than hissed or whistled. A round shot landed in the creek and splashed water over the nearest raft. The guns’ flashes were to the north and south now, lighting the night with sudden lurid flares that glowed on the writhing smoke, then faded, but leaving Sharpe dazzled. He knew he should not have come, nor indeed should Sir Thomas have come. A lieutenant general had no business joining a raiding party that should have been led by a major or, at most, a lieutenant colonel. But Sir Thomas was plainly a man who could not resist danger. The general was gazing south, trying to see in the intermittent light of the cannons’ muzzle flashes whether any French infantry had sallied from San Luis. “Sharpe!” he called.

“Sir?”

“Captain Vetch tells me the engineers are making fine time. Go back to the lighters, will you? You’ll find a marine captain there, name of Collins. Tell him we’ll be sounding the withdrawal in about twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour. Remember the password and countersign?”

“Balgowan and Perthshire, sir.”

“Good man. Off you go. And I haven’t forgotten you need a favor from me! We’ll talk about it over breakfast.”

Sharpe led Harper back along the creek. The marines challenged them with the password and Sharpe called the countersign. Captain Collins proved to be a stout man who looked askance at the score of prisoners who had been put under his charge. “What am I supposed to do with them?” he asked plaintively. “There’s no room in the lighters to take them back.”

“Then we’ll leave them here,” Sharpe said. He delivered the general’s message, then stood beside Collins and watched the cannon flashes. One French round shot struck the remains of a campfire so that embers, sparks, and flames exploded thirty or forty feet into the air. Some burning shards landed on the tents and started small fires that illuminated the cumbersome rafts.

“Don’t like fighting at night,” Collins admitted.

“It’s not easy,” Sharpe said. Every shadow seemed to move and the marshland was full of shadows cast by the fires. He remembered the night before Talavera, and how he had discovered the French coming up the hill. That had been a mad night of confusion, but tonight, at least, the enemy seemed to be supine. The fortress artillery still fired, but the grape and round shot were now going well to Sharpe’s left.

“Two of the buggers came here,” Collins said. “Both on horseback! I know we haven’t got any horses, but I still thought they might have been a pair of our lads who’d captured a couple. They rode up to me, calm as you like, and then galloped off. We never fired a shot. One of them even called good evening as he went, the insolent bastard.”

So the French, Sharpe thought, knew that the lighters were well downstream of the camp, and knew, moreover, that they were lightly guarded by a small picquet of marines. “If you don’t mind me suggesting it,” Sharpe said, “I’d move the lighters upstream.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a big gap between you and the Irish boys.”

“We had to land here,” Collins said. “We couldn’t row right up to the camp, could we?”

“You could get up there now,” Sharpe said, nodding at the sailors who waited on the thwarts.

“My job is to guard the boats,” Collins said heavily. “I don’t command them.”

“So who does?”

A naval lieutenant commanded the lighters, but he had evidently gone upstream on board the fifth boat and was now with the engineers, and Collins, with no direct orders, would not risk moving the two lighters on his own initiative. He seemed insulted that Sharpe had even suggested it. “I shall wait for orders,” he said indignantly.

“In that case we’ll make a picquet for you,” Sharpe said. “We’ll be out there.” He nodded southward. “Warn your lads not to shoot us when we come back.”

Collins did not reply. Sharpe told Harper to drop the haversack of smoke balls in the general’s lighter, then took him southward. “Keep a lookout, Pat.”

“You think the French will come?”

“They can’t just sit there and let us burn the rafts, can they?”

“They’ve been dozy so far, sir.”

They crouched in the reeds. The small wind was coming from the far ocean and it brought the smell of salt from the pans across the bay. Sharpe could see the reflection of the city’s lights winking and shaking on the water. The gunfire from the forts punctured the night, but from this distance it was hard to tell if the shots were doing any damage in the captured camps. It was hard to see anything. The men from Dublin and Hampshire were lying flat and the engineers were busy in the shadows on the rafts. “If I were the Crapauds,” Sharpe said, “I wouldn’t worry about the rafts. I’d come and take these lighters. That would strand us all here, wouldn’t it? They’ll pick up a couple of hundred prisoners including a lieutenant general. Not a bad night’s work for a dozy pack of bastards, eh?”

“You’re not the Crapauds, are you, sir? They’re probably getting drunk. Letting their gunners do the work.”

“They can afford to lose the fire rafts,” Sharpe went on, “if they capture five lighters. They can use the lighters instead of the rafts.”

“We’ll be gone soon, sir,” Harper said consolingly. “No need to worry.”

“Let’s hope so.”

They fell silent. Marsh birds, woken by the firing, cried forlorn in the dark. “So what are we doing in the city?” Harper asked after a while.

“There’s some bastards that have got some letters and we have to buy them back,” Sharpe said. “Or at least we have to make sure no one does anything nasty while they are bought back, and if it all goes wrong, which it will, we’re going to have to steal the bloody things.”

“Letters? Not gold?”

“Not gold, Pat.”

“And it will go wrong?”

“Of course it will. We’re dealing with blackmailers. They never settle for the first payment, do they? They always come back for more, so we’re probably going to have to kill the bastards before it’s all over.”

“Whose letters are they?”

“Some whore wrote them,” Sharpe said vaguely. He supposed that Harper would learn the truth soon enough, but Sharpe liked Henry Wellesley enough not to spread the man’s shame even wider. “It should be easy enough,” he went on, “except that the Spaniards won’t like what we’re doing. If we get caught they’ll arrest us. Either that or shoot us.”

“Arrest us?”

“We’ll just have to be clever, Pat.”

“That’s all right then,” Harper said. “We don’t have a problem, do we?”

Sharpe smiled. The wind stirred the reeds. The tide was still. The guns were firing steadily, their shots thumping in the marsh or churning the creek. “I wish the bloody 8th was here,” Sharpe said softly.

“The Leather-hats?” Harper asked, thinking Sharpe meant a regiment from Cheshire.

“No. The French 8th, Pat. The bastards we met up the river. The ones that took poor Lieutenant Bullen prisoner. They’ve got to be coming back here, don’t they? They can’t reach Badajoz now, not without a bridge. I want to meet them again. That bloody Colonel Vandal. I’m going to shoot him in the skull, the bastard.”

“You’ll find him, sir.”

“Maybe. But not here. We’ll be gone in a week. But one day, Pat, I’ll find that bastard and murder him for what he did to Lieutenant Bullen.”

Harper did not respond. Instead he laid a hand on Sharpe’s sleeve and Sharpe, at the same instant, heard the rustle of reeds. It was not the sound of the small wind stirring the plants, but more regular. Like footsteps. And it was close. “See anything?” he whispered.

“No. Yes.”

Sharpe saw them then. Or he saw shadows running at a crouch. Then there was the glint of reflected light from a piece of metal, perhaps a musket muzzle. The shadows stopped so that they melded into the darkness, but Sharpe saw more men moving beyond. How many? Twenty? No, double that. He leaned close to Harper. “Volley gun,” he breathed into the sergeant’s ear. “Then we go to the right. We run like hell for thirty paces, then drop.”

Harper raised the volley gun slowly, very slowly. Then, with the stock against his right shoulder, he cocked it. The lock’s pawl made a click as it engaged and the sound carried to the Frenchmen and Sharpe saw the pale faces turn toward him and just then Harper pulled the trigger and the gun flooded the marsh with noise and lit it with the burst of muzzle flashes. Smoke hid Sharpe as he took off running. He counted the paces and, at thirty, dropped flat. He could hear a man moaning. Two muskets fired, then a voice shouted a command, and no more guns sounded. Harper dropped beside him. “Rifles next,” Sharpe said. “Then we go to the boats.”

He could hear the Frenchmen hissing to one another. They had been hit hard by the seven bullets and they were doubtless talking about their casualties, but then they fell silent and Sharpe could see them more clearly now for they were suddenly outlined against the muzzle flames of the cannons firing from the fort. He got to one knee and aimed his rifle. “Ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fire.”

The two rifles spat toward the shadows. Sharpe had no idea if either bullet struck. All he knew was that the French were trying to take the lighters, they were perilously close to the creek, and the shots would have raised the alarm. He hoped the marine captain would have had the initiative to order the boats upstream. “Come on,” he said, and they ran clumsily, half-tripping on tussocks, and he sensed that the French had cast caution away and were running to his right. “Move the boats!” Sharpe shouted at the marine picquet. “Move the boats!” His head was all pain, but he had to ignore it. French muskets crashed in the night. A bullet thumped into mud close to Harper’s feet just as the marines fired a ragged volley into the dark.

The sudden outburst of musketry had alerted the sailors and they had cut the lines to the boarding grapnels they were using as anchors and then shoved the lighters away from the bank, but the ponderous boats moved painfully slowly. The one farthest from Sharpe made better progress, but the nearer one seemed to be half-grounded. More French muskets banged, coughing out smoke in which Sharpe saw the glint of bayonets. The outnumbered marines scrambled aboard the nearest lighter as the French reached the bank. A marine fired and a blue-coated Frenchman was hurled back and two others closed on the lighter and rammed their bayonets at sailors who were trying to pole the lighter off the bank with their oars. The attackers grabbed the oars. The French prisoners who had been under the guard were free now and, though unarmed, were also trying to board the lighter. A pistol fired, its report crisper than a musket. Then a dozen heavier crashes sounded and Sharpe guessed the sailors had been issued with the heavy pistols used by boarding parties. They had been issued with cutlasses too, though doubtless none had expected to use them, but now the sailors were hacking at men scrambling over the lighter’s gunwale.

Sharpe was twenty yards away, crouching at the creek’s edge. He told himself that this was not his fight, that his responsibility was back in the city whose lights shimmered across the wide bay. But he had six smoke balls aboard that threatened lighter and he wanted them, and besides, if the French took even one lighter then it would make Sir Thomas’s withdrawal almost impossible. “We’re going to have to drive the buggers away from the boat,” Sharpe said.

“There must be fifty of the bastards, sir. More.”

“Plenty of our lads still fighting,” Sharpe said. “We’ll just scare the buggers. Maybe they’ll run.” He stood, slung the unloaded rifle on his back, and drew his sword.

“God save Ireland,” Harper said.

Army regulations decreed that Sharpe, as a skirmishing officer, should be armed with a cavalry saber, but he had never liked the weapon. The saber’s curve made it good for slashing, but in truth most officers wore the blades as mere decoration. He much preferred the heavy cavalry trooper’s sword that was one of the longest manufactured. The blade was straight, almost a yard of Birmingham steel. The cavalry complained constantly of the weapon. It did not keep an edge, it was too heavy in the blade, and the asymmetrical point made it ineffective. Sharpe had ground down the back blade to make the point symmetrical and he liked the weapon’s weight that made the sword into an effective club. He and Harper splashed into the creek’s shallows and came at the French from their left. The blue-coated men were not expecting an attack and may even have thought the two dark-uniformed men were French, for none turned to oppose them. These men were the French laggards, those unwilling to plunge into the creek and fight against the marines and sailors, and none wanted a fight. Some were reloading their muskets, but most just watched the struggle for the lighter as Sharpe and Harper hit them. Sharpe lunged the sword at a throat and the man fell away, his ramrod clattering in his musket’s barrel. Sharpe struck again. Harper was thrusting the sword bayonet and bellowing in Gaelic. A French bayonet glinted to Sharpe’s right and he swung the sword hard, thumping its blunt edge against a man’s skull, and suddenly there was no immediate enemy in front, just a stretch of water and a knot of Frenchmen trying to board the lighter’s bows that was being defended by marines with cutlasses and bayonets. Sharpe waded into the creek and thrust the sword at a man’s spine, and knew he had taken too big a chance because the men assailing the lighter turned on him ferociously. A bayonet slashed into his jacket and became entangled there. He cut sideways just as Harper arrived beside him.

Harper was screaming incoherently now. He drove his rifle butt into a man’s face, but more Frenchmen were coming and Sharpe dragged Harper back from their blades. Four men were attacking them and these were not the laggards. These were men who wanted to kill and he could see their bared teeth and their long blades. He swept the sword in a massive haymaking blow that deflected two bayonet thrusts, then stepped back again. Harper was beside him, and the Frenchmen pressed hard, thinking they had easy victims. At least, Sharpe thought, the enemy had no loaded muskets. Just then a gun went off and the muzzle flash blinded him and thick smoke engulfed him. But the bullet went God knows where, and Sharpe instinctively twitched from it and fell sideways into the creek. The French must have thought he was dead because they ignored him and lunged at Harper who thrust his sword bayonet hard into a man’s eyes just as the Irish struck.

Major Gough had brought his company back to the creek and the first Sharpe knew of their coming was a volley that drowned the marsh in noise. After that came the screams of the attacking redcoats. They came with bayonets and fury. “Faugh a ballagh!” they shouted, and the French obeyed. The attack on the lighter shredded under the assault of the 87th. A Frenchman stooped to Sharpe, thinking him dead and presumably wanting his sword, and Sharpe punched the man in the face, then came out of the water, sword swinging, and he slashed it across the man’s face. The Frenchman ran. Sharpe could see Ensign Keogh cutting his straight sword at a much bigger enemy who flailed at the thin officer with his musket. Then the big Sergeant Masterson drove his bayonet into the man’s ribs. The Frenchman went down under Masterson’s weight. Keogh sliced his sword at the fallen man and wanted more. He was screaming a high-pitched scream and he saw the two dark figures in the creek’s shallows and turned to attack, shouting at his men to follow.

“Faugh a ballagh!” Harper roared.

“It’s you!” Keogh stopped at the water’s edge. He grinned suddenly. “That was a proper fight.”

“It was bloody desperate,” Harper muttered.

Major Gough was shouting at his men to form line and face south. Sergeants pulled redcoats away from the enemy corpses they were plundering. The surviving marines were clubbing the few remaining Frenchmen off the lighter, but Captain Collins, a cutlass in his hand, was dead. “He should have moved the bloody boats, sir,” a marine sergeant said as he greeted Sharpe. The sergeant spat a dark stream of tobacco juice onto a French corpse. “You’re soaked through, sir,” he added. “Did you fall in?”

“I fell in,” Sharpe said, and the first explosion split the darkness.

The explosion came from one of the five fire rafts. A spire of flame, brilliantly white, shot into the sky, then red light followed, flashing outward in a ring that flattened the marsh grass. The night was flooded with fire. Later it was decided that an errant spark from a fire in one of the captured French camps had somehow ignited a quickfuse. The charges had already been laid and the engineers were stringing the last of the fuses when one saw the bright fizz of a burning quick match. He shouted a warning, then jumped off the raft just as the first powder keg exploded. All across the rafts now the fuses sparked and smoked like wriggling snakes of fire.

The white spire twisted and dimmed. The rumble of the explosion faded across the marshland as a bugle sounded, ordering the British troops back to the lighters. The bugle was still calling when the next charges exploded, one after the other, their fire pounding toward the clouds and their noise punching across the marshes where the reeds and grasses bent again to the warm and unexpected winds. Smoke began to boil from the rafts where the French-laid incendiaries caught the fire and their flames illuminated the French troops who had retreated from the lighters. “Fire!” Major Gough roared, and his company of the 87th loosed a volley, and still the charges exploded and the rafts burned. The cannons at the rafts’ perimeters began to fire, the balls and grapeshot whistling across the creek and marsh.

“Back! Back!” Sir Thomas Graham was roaring. The bugle sounded again. Redcoats were streaming back from the camp, their work done. Some were being helped by comrades. At least the fort’s cannon fire had stopped, presumably because the gunners were watching the fireworks in the creek. Flaming scraps of wood whirled in the air, new pulses of fire pierced the night, and another cannon exploded. Sharpe stumbled on a Frenchman’s body half sunk at the creek’s edge.

“Count them in!” Major Gough shouted. “Count them in!”

“One, two, three!” Ensign Keogh was touching men on the shoulder as they clambered aboard. A sailor retrieved one of the oars snatched by the French. A crackle of musketry sounded from the marsh and a man of the 87th fell face forward in the mud. “Pick him up!” Keogh shouted. “Six, seven, eight, where’s your musket, you rogue?”

The Hampshire men were boarding the other lighter. General Graham, with his two aides and a group of engineers, was waiting to be the last aboard. The rafts were infernos now. They would never leave the creek. The smoke boiled hundreds of feet into the night sky, but there was enough flame feeding that smoke to illuminate the marsh, and the gunners of San Luis could see the redcoats grouped on the creek bank and they must have known the lighters were there, and suddenly the cannons started firing again. Now they used shell as well as round shot. One shell exploded on the far bank while another, the trail of its fuse a crazed streak of spinning red in the flame-shot night, plunged into the creek. A round shot crashed through the Hampshire’s ranks.

“All here!” Keogh shouted.

“Sir Thomas!” Major Gough yelled. An exploding shell threw up mud, reeds, and a French musket. An ancient cannon banged from the closest raft and Sharpe saw the ball skipping along the water. “Sir Thomas!” Major Gough bellowed again, but Sir Thomas was waiting to make sure all the Hampshires had embarked, and only then did he come to the lighter. A shell exploded just paces behind him, but miraculously the scraps of casing whistled harmlessly past him. Sailors thrust the lighter off the bank and the ebbing tide took it out toward the bay. The fire rafts were now a huge incandescent blaze beneath a thundercloud of smoke. The reflections of their flames rippled on the water, then were broken by a round shot that hurled up a great splash to soak men on the two lighters leaving the northern bank. The fifth lighter was in mid-creek, its sailors heaving on their oars to escape the gunfire.

“Row!” a naval officer shouted in Sharpe’s boat. “Row!”

Three guns fired at once from the San Luis and Sharpe heard a shot rumble overhead. Musket fire flickered in the marsh and some redcoats stood up in the belly of the lighter and fired back. “Hold your fire!” Gough shouted.

“Row!” the naval officer called again.

“Not quite the orderly withdrawal I anticipated,” Sir Thomas said. A shell, fuse whipping the dark with its thread of frantic red light, slapped into the creek. “Is that you, Sharpe?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re wet, man.”

“Fell in the water, sir.”

“You’ll catch your death! Strip off. Take my cloak. How’s your head? I forgot you were wounded. I should never have asked you to come.”

Two more guns fired, then two more from the San José Fort to the north, but every pull of the great oars took the lighters away from the flames and into the blackness of the bay. Wounded men moaned in the lighters’ holds. Other men talked excitedly, and Gough allowed it. “What’s your butcher’s bill, Hugh?” Sir Thomas asked the Irishman.

“Three men dead, sir,” Gough said, “and eight wounded.”

“But a good night’s work,” Sir Thomas said, “a very good night’s work.”

Because the fleet was safe and Sir Thomas, when the Spaniards were at last ready, could take his small army south.

SIR THOMAS Graham’s quarters in San Fernando were modest. He had commandeered a boat builder’s workshop that had whitewashed stone walls. He had furnished it with a bed, a table, and four chairs. The workshop had a great hearth in front of which Sharpe’s clothes were put to dry. Sharpe had put his rifle there too, with its lock plate removed so that the heat of the fire could reach the mainspring. He himself was swathed in a shirt and cloak that General Graham insisted on lending him. The general, meanwhile, was dictating his report. “Breakfast soon,” the general said in between sentences.

“I’m starving,” Lord William Russell observed.

“Be a good fellow, Willie, see what’s keeping it,” the general said, then dictated lavish praise of the men he had led to the creek. Dawn was outlining the inland hills, but still the glow of the burning rafts was vivid in the dark marshlands, while the plume of smoke must have been visible in Seville over sixty miles away. “You want me to mention your name, Sharpe,” Sir Thomas asked.

“No, sir,” Sharpe said. “I didn’t do anything, sir.”

Sir Thomas gave Sharpe a shrewd look. “If you say so, Sharpe. So what’s this favor I can do for you?”

“I want you to give me a dozen rounds of shell, sir. Twelve-pounders if you’ve got them, but nine-pounders will do.”

“I’ve got them. Major Duncan does, anyway. What happened to your jacket? Sword cut?”

“Bayonet, sir.”

“I’ll have my man sew it up while we have breakfast. Twelve rounds of shell, eh? What for?”

Sharpe hesitated. “Probably best you don’t know, sir.”

Sir Thomas snorted at that answer. “Write that up, Fowler,” he said to the clerk, dismissing him. He waited for the clerk to leave, then went to the fire and held his hands to its warmth. “Let me guess, Sharpe, let me guess. Here you are, orphaned from your battalion, and suddenly I’m commanded to keep you here rather than send you back where you belong. And meanwhile Henry Wellesley’s love letter is amusing the citizens of Cádiz. Would those two things be connected?”

“They would, sir.”

“There are more letters?” Sir Thomas asked shrewdly.

“There are plenty more, sir.”

“And the ambassador wants you to do what? Find them?”

“He wants to buy them back, sir, and if that doesn’t work he wants them stolen.”

“Stolen!” Sir Thomas gave Sharpe a skeptical look. “Had any experience in that business?”

“A bit, sir,” Sharpe said and, after a pause, realized the general wanted more. “It was in London, sir, when I was a child. I learned the business.”

Sir Thomas laughed. “I was once held up by a footpad in London. I knocked the fellow down. Wasn’t you, was it?”

“No, sir.”

“So Henry wants you to steal the letters and you want a dozen of my shells? Tell me why, Sharpe.”

“Because if the letters can’t be stolen, sir, they might be destroyed.”

“You’re going to explode my shells inside Cádiz?”

“I hope not, sir, but it might come to that.”

“And you’ll expect the Spanish to believe it was a French mortar bomb?”

“I hope the Spanish won’t know what to think, sir.”

“They’re not fools, Sharpe. The dons can be bloody uncooperative, but they’re not fools. If they discover you exploding shells in Cádiz they’ll have you in that pestilential prison of theirs before you can count to three.”

“Which is why it’s best you don’t know, sir.”

“Breakfast is coming,” Lord William Russell burst into the room. “Beefsteak, fried liver, and fresh eggs, sir. Well, almost fresh.”

“I suppose you’ll want the things delivered to the embassy?” Sir Thomas ignored Lord William and spoke to Sharpe.

“If it’s possible, sir, and addressed to Lord Pumphrey.”

Sir Thomas grunted. “Come and sit down, Sharpe. You’re partial to fried liver?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll have the things boxed up and delivered today,” Sir Thomas said, then shot Lord William a reproving look. “No good looking curious, Willie. Mister Sharpe and I are discussing secret matters.”

“I can be the very soul of discretion,” Lord William said.

“You can be,” Sir Thomas agreed, “but you very rarely are.”

Sharpe’s coat was taken away to be mended. Then he sat to a breakfast of beefsteak, liver, kidneys, ham, fried eggs, bread, butter, and strong coffee. Sharpe, though he was only half dressed, enjoyed it. It struck him, halfway through the meal, that one table companion was the son of a duke and the other a wealthy Scottish landowner, yet he felt oddly comfortable. There was no guile in Lord William, while it was plain Sir Thomas simply liked soldiers. “I never thought I’d be a soldier,” he confessed to Sharpe.

“Why not, sir?”

“Because I was happy as I was, Sharpe, happy as I was. I hunted, I traveled, I read, I played cricket, and I had the best wife in the world. Then my Mary died. I brooded for a time and it occurred to me that the French were an evil presence. They preach liberty and equality, but what are they? They are degraded, barbarous, and inhuman, and it was borne upon me that my duty was to fight them. So I put on a uniform, Sharpe. I was forty-six years old when I first donned the red coat, and that was seventeen years ago. And on the whole, I must say, they have been happy years.”

“Sir Thomas,” Lord William remarked as he savaged the bread with a blunt knife, “did not just put on a uniform. He raised the 90th Foot at his own expense.”

“And a damned expense it was too!” Sir Thomas said. “Their hats alone cost me four hundred and thirty-six pounds, sixteen shillings, and fourpence. I always wondered what the fourpence was for. And here I am, Sharpe, still fighting the French. Have you had enough to eat?”

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”

Sir Thomas made a point of walking Sharpe to the stables. Just before they reached the building the general stopped Sharpe. “Play cricket, do you, Sharpe?”

“We used to play at Shorncliffe, sir,” Sharpe said cautiously, referring to the barracks where the riflemen were trained.

“I need cricketers,” the general said, then frowned in thought.

“Henry Wellesley’s a damned fool,” he said, abruptly changing the subject, “but he’s a decent damned fool. Know what I mean?”

“I think so, sir.”

“He’s a very good man. He deals well with the Spanish. They can be infuriating. They promise the world and deliver scraps, but Wellesley has the patience to treat with them, and the sensible Spaniards know they can trust him. He’s a good diplomat and we need him as ambassador.”

“I liked him, sir.”

“But he made a bloody fool of himself over that woman. Does she have the letters?”

“I think she has some, sir.”

“So you’re looking for her?”

“I am, sir.”

“You’re not going to blow her up with my shells, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“I hope not, because she’s a pretty wee thing. I saw her with him once and Henry looked like a tomcat that had found a bowl of cream. She looked happy too. I’m surprised she betrayed him.”

“Lord Pumphrey says it was her pimp, sir.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think she saw gold, sir.”

“Of course the thing about Henry Wellesley,” Sir Thomas said, apparently ignoring Sharpe’s words, “is that he’s a forgiving sort of man. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s still sweet on her. Ah well, I’m probably just blathering. I enjoyed your company last night, Mister Sharpe. If you finish your business quickly enough, then I hope you’ll give us a game or two. I’ve a clerk who’s a ferocious bowler, but the wretched man has sprained his ankle. And I trust you’ll do me the honor of sailing south with us. We can bowl a few quick ones at Marshal Victor, eh?”

“I’d like that, sir,” Sharpe said, though he knew there was no hope of it coming true.

He went to find Harper and the other riflemen. He found a slop shop in San Fernando and, with the embassy’s money, bought his men civilian clothes and then, beneath the smoke of the burning rafts that hung above Cádiz like a great dark cloud, they went to the city.

In the afternoon the cloud was still there, and twelve common shells, boxed up and labeled as cabbages, had arrived at the embassy.

CHAPTER 6

NOTHING HAPPENED IN THE next three days. The wind turned east and brought persistent February rain to extinguish the burning fire rafts, though the smoke from the rafts still smeared the Trocadero marshes and drifted across the bay toward the city where Lord Pumphrey waited for a message from whoever possessed the letters. The ambassador dreaded another issue of El Correo de Cádiz. None appeared. “It publishes rarely these days,” James Duff, the British consul in Cádiz, reported to the ambassador. Duff had lived in Spain for nearly fifty years and had been consul for over thirty. Some folk reckoned Duff was more Spanish than the Spaniards and even when Spain had been at war with Britain he had been spared any insult and allowed to continue his business of buying and exporting wine. Now that the embassy had been driven to seek refuge in Cádiz, there was no need for a consul in the city, but Henry Wellesley valued the older man’s wisdom and advice. “Nuñez, I think, is struggling,” Duff said, speaking of the owner of El Correo de Cádiz. “He has no readership beyond the city itself now, and what can he print? News of the Cortes? But everyone knows what happens there before Nuñez can set it in type. He has nothing left except rumors from Madrid, lies from Paris, and lists of arriving and departing ships.”

“Yet he won’t accept money from us?” Wellesley asked.

“Not a penny,” Duff said. The consul was thin, shrunken, elegant, and shrewd. He visited the ambassador most mornings, invariably complimenting Henry Wellesley on the quality of his sherry, which Duff himself sold to the embassy, though with the French occupying Andalusia the supply was running very short. “I suspect he’s in someone else’s pay,” Duff went on.

“You offered generously?” the ambassador asked.

“As you requested, Your Excellency,” Duff said. He had visited Nuñez on Wellesley’s behalf and had offered the man cash if he agreed to publish no more letters. The offer had been refused, so Duff had made an outright bid for the newspaper itself, a bid that had been startlingly generous. “I offered him ten times what the house, press, and business are worth, but he would not accept. He would have liked to, I’m sure, but he’s a very frightened man. I think he dares not sell for fear of his life.”

“And he proposes publishing more of the letters?”

Duff shrugged, as if to suggest he did not know the answer.

“I am so sorry, Duff, to place you in this predicament. My foolishness, entirely my foolishness.”

Duff shrugged again. He had never married and had no sympathy for the idiocies that women provoked in men.

“So we must hope,” the ambassador went on, “that Lord Pumphrey is successful.”

“His Lordship might well succeed,” Duff said, “but they’ll have copies, and they’ll publish them anyway. You cannot depend on their honor, Your Excellency. The stakes are much too high.”

“Dear God.” Henry Wellesley rubbed his eyes, then swiveled in the chair to stare at the steady rain falling on the embassy’s small garden.

“But at least,” Duff said consolingly, “you will then possess the originals and can prove that the Correo has changed them.”

Henry Wellesley winced. It might be true that he could prove forgery, but he could not escape the shame of what was not forged. “Who are they?” he asked angrily.

“I suspect they are people in the pay of Cardenas,” Duff said calmly. “I can smell the admiral behind this one, and I fear he is implacable. I surmise”—he paused, frowning slightly—“I surmise you have thought of more direct action to deter publication?”

Wellesley was silent for a few seconds, then nodded. “I have, Duff, I have. But I would sanction such action most reluctantly.”

“You are wise to be reluctant. I have noted an increase in Spanish patrols around Nuñez’s premises. I fear Admiral Cardenas has prevailed on the Regency to keep a watchful eye on the newspaper.”

“You could talk to Cardenas,” Wellesley suggested.

“I could,” Duff agreed, “and he will be courteous, he will offer me excellent sherry, and he will then deny any knowledge of the matter.”

Wellesley said nothing. He did not need to. His face betrayed his despair.

“Our only hope,” Duff went on, “is if Sir Thomas Graham succeeds in lifting the siege. A victory of that sort will confound those who oppose a British alliance. The problem, of course, is not Sir Thomas, but Lapeña.”

“Lapeña.” Wellesley repeated the name dully. Lapeña was the Spanish general whose forces would accompany the British southward.

“He will have more men than Sir Thomas,” Duff went on remorselessly, “so he must have command. And if he is not given command, then the Spanish will not commit troops. And Lapeña, Your Excellency, is a timid creature. We must all hope that Sir Thomas can inspire him to valor.” Duff held his glass of sherry to the window light. “This is the ’03?”

“It is.”

“Very fine,” Duff said. He got to his feet and, with the help of a cane, crossed to the table with the inlaid checkered top. He stared for a few seconds at the chess pieces, then advanced a white bishop to take a castle. “I fear that is check, Your Excellency. Doubtless by next week you will confound me.”

The ambassador courteously walked Duff to the sedan chair waiting in the courtyard. “If they publish more,” Wellesley said, holding an umbrella over the consul as they approached the chair, “I shall have to resign.”

“It will not come to that, I’m sure,” Duff said unconvincingly.

“But if it does, Duff, you’ll have to shoulder my burden till a new man arrives.”

“I pray you remain in office, Your Excellency.”

“As do I, Duff, as do I.”

Some kind of answer to the ambassador’s prayers came on the fourth day after the fire rafts had been destroyed. Sharpe was in the stables where he struggled to keep his bored men busy by repairing the stable roof, a job they hated, but a better occupation than being drunk. Lord Pumphrey’s servant found Sharpe handing tiles to Rifleman Slattery. “His Lordship requests your attendance, sir,” the servant said, eyeing Sharpe’s dirty overalls with distaste, “as soon as possible, sir,” the servant added.

Sharpe pulled on Captain Plummer’s old black jacket, donned a cloak, and followed the servant through the city’s maze of alleys. He discovered Lord Pumphrey in the middle balcony of the church of San Felipe Neri. The church was an oval-shaped chamber with a floor tiled in bold black and white, above which three balconies punctuated the domed ceiling from which hung a tremendous chandelier that was unlit, but thick with stalactites of candle wax. The church was now home to the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, and the upper balcony, known as paradise, was where the public could listen to the speeches being given below. The middle balcony was for grandees, churchmen, and diplomats, while the lowest was where the deputies’ families and friends gathered.

The church’s huge altar had been draped in a white cloth, in front of which a portrait of Spain’s king, now a prisoner in France, was displayed where the crucifix normally stood. In front of the concealed altar the president of the Cortes sat at a long table flanked by a pair of rostrums. The deputies were in three rows of chairs facing him. Sharpe slid onto the bench beside Lord Pumphrey who was listening to a speaker haranguing the church in shrill, passionate tones, but was plainly being dull, for deputies were slipping away from their chairs and hurrying out of the church’s main door. “He is explicating,” Lord Pumphrey whispered to Sharpe, “the crucial role played by the Holy Spirit in the governance of Spain.”

A priest turned and scowled at Pumphrey who smiled and waggled his fingers at the offended man. “It is a pity,” His Lordship said, “that they’ve draped the altar. It possesses a quite exquisite painting of the Immaculate Conception. It’s by Murillo and the cherubs are enchanting.”

“Cherubs?”

“Plump little darlings that they are,” Lord Pumphrey said, leaning back. He smelled of rosewater today, though thankfully he had resisted wearing his velvet beauty patch and was soberly dressed in plain black broadcloth. “I do think cherubs improve a church, don’t you?” The priest turned and demanded silence and Lord Pumphrey raised an eyebrow in exasperation, then plucked Sharpe’s elbow and led him around the balcony until they were directly above the altar and so facing the three rows where the remaining deputies sat. “Second row back,” Pumphrey whispered, “right-hand side, four chairs in. Behold the enemy.”

Sharpe saw a tall thin man in a dark blue uniform. He had a stick propped between his knees and he looked bored for his head was tilted back and his eyes were closed. His right hand opened and closed repeatedly over the stick’s head. “Admiral the Marquis de Cardenas,” Lord Pumphrey said.

“The enemy?”

“He has never forgiven us for Trafalgar. We lamed him there and took him prisoner. He was well enough looked after in a very decent house in Hampshire, but he hates us all the same and that, Sharpe, is the man rumored to be paying El Correo de Cádiz. Do you have a spyglass?”

“Mine’s at the embassy,” Sharpe said.

“Fortunately I possess all the essential accoutrements of a spy,” Lord Pumphrey said and gave Sharpe a small telescope with an outer barrel sheathed in mother-of-pearl. “You might care to look at the admiral’s coat?”

Sharpe opened the glass and trained the lens, focusing it on the admiral’s blue jacket. “What am I looking at?”

“The horns,” Lord Pumphrey said, and Sharpe edged the glass right and saw one of the horned brooches pinned to the dark cloth. The mark of el Cornudo, the enemy’s mocking badge. Then he raised the glass and saw that the admiral’s eyes were now open and were staring straight up at him. A hard face, Sharpe thought, hard and knowing and vengeful. “What do we do about the admiral?” he asked Lord Pumphrey.

“Do?” Pumphrey asked. “We do nothing, of course. He’s an honored man, a deputy, a hero of Spain and, publicly at least, a valued ally. In truth he’s a sour creature, animated by hatred, who is probably negotiating with Bonaparte. I suspect that, but I can’t prove it.”

“You want me to murder the bastard?”

“That would certainly improve diplomatic relations between Britain and Spain, wouldn’t it?” Pumphrey asked tartly. “Why didn’t I think of doing that? No, Richard, I do not want you to murder the bastard.”

The admiral had summoned a servant and now whispered to him, pointing up at Sharpe as he did. The servant hurried away and Sharpe collapsed the glass. “What did you say his name was?”

“The Marquis de Cardenas. He owns much land in the Guadiana valley.”

“We met his mother,” Sharpe said, “and she’s a wicked old bitch. Well in bed with the French too.”

“Literally?”

“No. But they haven’t plundered her estate. And she summoned them when we arrived. Tried to have us taken prisoner. Bitch.”

“Like mother like son,” Pumphrey said, “and you’re not to murder him. We must frustrate his knavish tricks, of course, but we must do it without anybody noticing. You look very dirty.”

“We’re mending the stable roof.”

“That is hardly an officer’s occupation.”

“Nor is getting back blackmailer’s letters,” Sharpe said, “but I’m doing it.”

“Ah, the messenger, I suspect,” Lord Pumphrey said. He was looking at a man who had come onto the balcony and was sidling behind the benches toward them. The man wore the same small horned badge as the admiral.

“Messenger?” Sharpe asked.

“I was told to wait here. We are to have a meeting to discuss the purchase of the letters. I was afraid you would not arrive on time.” Pumphrey went silent as the man edged behind him, then leaned down to His Lordship’s ear. He spoke briefly and too quietly for Sharpe to hear, then moved on toward the balcony’s second door.

“There is a coffeehouse opposite the church,” Lord Pumphrey said, “and an envoy will meet us there. Shall we go?”

They followed the messenger down the stairs, emerging on the ground floor into a small antechamber where the admiral now stood. The Marquis de Cardenas was very tall and very thin and had a black wooden leg. He leaned on an ebony stick. Lord Pumphrey gave him a low and exquisite bow, which the admiral returned with a stiff nod before turning on his heel and limping back into the church. “Bugger’s not bothering to hide from us,” Sharpe said.

“He has won, Sharpe,” Lord Pumphrey said. “He has won, and he gloats.”

The wind was gusting in the narrow street, snatching at Lord Pumphrey’s hat as he hurried through the cold drizzle to the coffeehouse. There were a dozen tables inside, most of which were taken by men who all seemed to be talking at once. They shouted at one another, ignored one another, and gesticulated extravagantly. One, to emphasize his argument, tore a newspaper into shreds and scattered the pieces on the table, then leaned back triumphantly. “The deputies of the Cortes,” Lord Pumphrey explained. He looked around him, but saw no one who was obviously waiting and so threaded the noisy crowd to take one of the empty tables at the back of the café.

“Other chair, my lord,” Sharpe said.

“You’re fussy?”

“I want to face the door.”

Lord Pumphrey dutifully moved and Sharpe sat with his back against the wall. A girl took an order for coffee and Pumphrey twisted to look at the customers who argued in the pall of cigar smoke. “Mostly lawyers,” he said.

“Lawyers?”

“A large proportion of the deputies are lawyers,” Pumphrey said, rubbing his thin face with both hands. “Slaves, liberals, and lawyers.”

“Slaves?”

Lord Pumphrey gave an exaggerated shiver and drew his coat tighter about his thin shoulders. “There are, very crudely, two factions in the Cortes. One side are the traditionalists. They’re comprised of the monarchists, the pious, and the old-fashioned. They’re called the serviles. It’s an insulting nickname, like calling a man a Tory. Serviles means the slaves, and they wish to see the king restored and the church triumphant. They are the faction of landlords, privilege, and aristocracy.” He shivered again. “The serviles are opposed by the liberales,” he went on, “who are so called because they are forever talking about liberty. The liberales want to see a Spain in which the people’s wishes are more influential than the decrees of a tyrannical church or the whims of a despotic king. His Brittanic Majesty’s government has no official view in these discussions. We merely wish to see a Spanish government willing to pursue the war against Napoleon.”

Sharpe looked scornful. “You’re on the side of the serviles. Of course you are.”

“Oddly enough, no. If anything we support the liberales, so long, of course, as their wilder ideas are not exported to Britain, God forbid that. But either faction will suffice if they continue to fight Bonaparte.”

“So where’s the confusion?”

“The confusion, Sharpe, is that men on both sides dislike us. There are serviles and liberales who earnestly believe that Spain’s most dangerous enemy is not France, but Britain. The leader of that faction, of course, is Admiral Cardenas. He’s a servile, naturally, but if he can scare enough liberales into believing that we’ll annex Cádiz, then he should get his way. He wants Spain under a Catholic king and with himself as the king’s chief adviser, and to achieve that he has to make peace with France and then where will we all be?” Lord Pumphrey shrugged. “Tell me, why did the redoubtable Sir Thomas Graham send me a gift of artillery shells? Not that I’m ungrateful, of course I’m not, but curious, yes? Good God! What are you doing?”

The question was prompted by the sudden appearance of a pistol, which Sharpe laid on the table. Pumphrey was about to protest, then saw Sharpe was looking past him. He twisted to see a tall black-cloaked man coming toward them. The man had a long face with a lantern jaw that somehow seemed familiar to Sharpe.

The man took a chair from another table, swung it around, and sat between Sharpe and Pumphrey. He glanced at the pistol, shrugged, and waved at the serving girl. “Vino tinto, por favor,” he said brusquely. “I’m not here to fight,” he said, speaking English now, “so you can put the gun away.”

Sharpe turned it so the muzzle pointed directly at the man, who took off his damp cloak, revealing that he was a priest. “My name,” he spoke to Lord Pumphrey now, “is Father Salvador Montseny. Certain persons have asked me to negotiate on their behalf.”

“Certain persons?” Lord Pumphrey asked.

“You cannot expect me to reveal their identity, my lord.” The priest glanced at Sharpe’s pistol and it was then that Sharpe recognized him. This was the priest who had been at Nuñez’s house, the one who had ordered him out of the alleyway. “I have no personal interest in this matter,” Father Montseny went on, “but those who asked me to speak for them believed you would take confidence that they chose a priest.”

“Do hide that gun, Sharpe,” Lord Pumphrey said. “You’re frightening the lawyers. They think you might be one of their clients.” He waited as Sharpe lowered the flint and put the pistol under his cloak. “You speak excellent English, Father.”

“I have a talent for languages,” Montseny said modestly. “I grew up speaking French and Catalan. Then I learned Spanish and English.”

“French and Catalan? You’re from the border?”

“I am Catalonian.” Father Montseny paused as coffee and a flask of red wine were placed on the table. He poured himself wine. “The price, I am instructed to tell you, is three thousand guineas in gold.”

“Are you authorized to negotiate?” Lord Pumphrey asked.

Montseny said nothing. Instead of answering, he took a scrap of sugar from a bowl and dropped it into his wine.

“Three thousand guineas is risible,” Pumphrey said, “quite exorbitant. But to end what is an embarrassment His Majesty’s government is prepared to pay six hundred.”

Father Montseny gave a slight shake of the head as if to suggest the counteroffer was absurd, then took an empty glass from the next table and poured Sharpe a glass of wine. “And who are you?” he asked.

“I look after him,” Sharpe said, jerking his head at Lord Pumphrey and wishing he had not because pain whipped through his skull.

Montseny looked at the bandage on Sharpe’s head. He seemed amused. “They gave you a wounded man?” he asked Lord Pumphrey.

“They gave me the best they had,” Pumphrey said apologetically.

“You hardly need protecting, my lord,” Montseny said.

“You forget,” Lord Pumphrey said, “that the last man to negotiate for the letters was murdered.”

“That is regrettable,” the priest said sternly, “but I am assured it was the fault of the man himself. He attempted to seize the letters by force. I am authorized to accept two thousand guineas.”

“One thousand,” Pumphrey said, “with an undertaking that no more will be published in El Correo.”

Montseny poured himself more wine. “My principals,” he said, “are willing to use their influence on the newspaper, but it will cost you two thousand guineas.”

“Alas,” Pumphrey said, “we only have fifteen hundred left in the embassy’s strongbox.”

“Fifteen hundred,” Father Montseny said, as if he was thinking about it.

“For which sum, Father, your principals must give us all the letters and an undertaking to publish no more.”

“I think that will be acceptable,” Father Montseny said. He gave a small smile, as if satisfied with the outcome of the negotiations, then leaned back. “I could offer you some advice that would save you the money, if you wish?”

“I should be most grateful,” Pumphrey said with exaggerated politeness.

“Any day now your army will sail, yes? You will land your troops somewhere to the south and come north to face Marshal Victor. You think he doesn’t know? What do you think will happen?”

“We’ll win,” Sharpe growled.

The priest ignored him. “Lapeña will have, what? Eight thousand men? Nine? And your General Graham will take three or four thousand? So Lapeña will have command, and he’s an old woman. Marshal Victor will have just as many, probably more, and Lapeña will take fright. He’ll panic, and Marshal Victor will crush him. Then you will have very few soldiers left to protect the city, and the French will storm the walls. It will take many deaths, but by summer Cádiz will be French. The letters won’t matter then, will they?”

“In that case,” Lord Pumphrey said, “why not just give them to us?”

“Fifteen hundred guineas, my lord. I am instructed to tell you that you must bring the money yourself. You may have two companions, no more, and a note will be sent to the embassy telling you where the exchange will be made. You may expect the note after today’s oraciones.” Montseny drained his glass, stood, and dropped a dollar on the table. “There, I have discharged my function,” he said, nodded abruptly, and left.

Sharpe spun the dollar coin on the table. “At least he paid for his wine.”

“We can expect a note after the evening prayers,” Lord Pumphrey said, frowning. “Does that mean he wants the money tonight?”

“Of course. You can trust the bugger on that,” Sharpe said, “but on nothing else.”

“Nothing else?”

“I saw him at the newspaper. He’s up to his bloody eyes in it. He’s not going to give you the letters. He’ll take the money and run.”

Pumphrey stirred his coffee. “I think you’re wrong. The letters are a depreciating asset.”

“Whatever the hell that means.”

“It means, Sharpe, that he’s right. Lapeña will have command of the army. You know what the Spanish call Lapeña? Doña Manolito. The lady Manolito. He’s a nervous old woman and Victor will thrash him.”

“Sir Thomas is good,” Sharpe said loyally.

“Perhaps. But Doña Manolito will command the army, not Sir Thomas, and if Marshal Victor beats Doña Manolito then Cádiz will fall, and when Cádiz falls the politicians in London will fall over one another in their race to the negotiating chamber. The war costs money, Sharpe, and half of Parliament already believe it cannot be won. If Spain falls, what hope is there?”

“Lord Wellington.”

“Who clings to a corner of Portugal while Bonaparte bestrides Europe. If the last scrap of Spain falls, then Britain will make peace. If, no, when Victor defeats Doña Manolito the Spaniards won’t wait for Cádiz to fall. They’ll negotiate. They would rather surrender Cádiz than see the city sacked. And when they surrender, the letters won’t be worth a tin penny. That is what I mean by describing them as a depreciating asset. The admiral, if it is the admiral, would rather have the money now than a few worthless love letters in a month’s time. So, yes, they’re negotiating in good faith.” Lord Pumphrey added a few small coins to the priest’s dollar and stood. “We must get to the embassy, Richard.”

“He’s lying,” Sharpe warned.

Lord Pumphrey sighed. “In diplomacy, Sharpe, we assume that everyone lies all the time. That way we make progress. Our enemies expect Cádiz to be French within a few weeks so they want their money now because after those few weeks there will be no money. They make hay while the sun shines, it is as simple as that.”

It was raining harder now and the wind was gusting strong. The signs over the shops were swinging wildly and a crash of thunder rumbled over the mainland, sounding uncannily like heavy artillery shots traveling overhead. Sharpe let Pumphrey guide him through the maze of narrow alleys to the embassy. They went through the arch that was guarded by a squad of bored Spanish soldiers and hurried across the courtyard, only to be checked by a voice from high above. “Pumps!” the voice called. “Up here!”

Sharpe, like Lord Pumphrey, looked up to see the ambassador leaning out of a window of the embassy’s watchtower, a modest five-story structure at the edge of the stable yard. “Up here,” Henry Wellesley called again, “and you, Mister Sharpe! Come on!” He sounded excited.

Sharpe emerged onto the roofed platform to see that Brigadier Moon was lord of the tower. He had a chair and a footstool, and beside the chair was a telescope, while on a small table was a bottle of rum and beneath it a chamber pot. This tower had been equipped with windows to protect the upper platform from the weather, and it was plain that Moon had adopted the aerie. He had got to his feet now and, resting on his crutches, was looking eastward with the ambassador. “The ships!” Henry Wellesley greeted Sharpe and Lord Pumphrey.

A whole host of small ships was scurrying through white-capped waves into the vast harbor of the Bay of Cádiz. They were odd-looking craft to Sharpe’s eyes. They were single-masted and had one gigantic sail each. The sails were wedge-shaped, sharp at the front and massive at the stern. “Feluccas,” the ambassador said, “not a word to attempt when drunk.”

“Felucky to get here before the storm broke,” the brigadier commented, earning a smile from Henry Wellesley.

The French mortars were trying to sink the feluccas but having no success. The sound of the guns was muted by the rain and wind. Sharpe could see the blossom of smoke from inside Fort Matagorda and Fort San José each time a mortar fired, but he could not see where the shells plummeted for the water was already too turbulent. The feluccas thrashed onward, heading for the southern end of the bay where the rest of the shipping was safely out of mortar range. They were pursued by dark squalls and seething rain as the storm spread southward. A lightning bolt cracked far away on the northern coast. “So the Spaniards kept their word!” Henry Wellesley said exultantly. “Those ships have come here all the way from the Balearics! A couple of days to provision them, then the army can embark.” He was a man who looked as though his troubles were coming to an end. If the combined British and Spanish army could destroy the French siege works and drive Victor’s forces away from Cádiz, then his political enemies would be neutered. The Cortes and the Spanish capital might even move back to a recaptured Seville and there would be the rare taste of victory in the air. “The plan,” Henry Wellesley said to Sharpe, “is for Lapeña and Sir Thomas to rendezvous with troops from Gibraltar, then march north, take Victor in the rear, hammer him, and drive his troops out of Andalusia.”

“It’s supposed to be a secret,” the brigadier grumbled.

“Some secret,” Lord Pumphrey said sourly. “A priest just told me all about it.”

The ambassador looked alarmed. “A priest?”

“Who seemed quite certain that Marshal Victor is entirely apprised of our plans to assault his lines.”

“Of course he’s bloody apprised of them,” the brigadier said. “Victor might have started his career as a trumpeter, but the man can count ships, can’t he? Why else is the fleet gathering?” He turned back to watch the feluccas that were now out of range of the mortars that had fallen silent.

“I think, Your Excellency, that we should confer,” Lord Pumphrey said. “I have a proposal for you.”

The ambassador glanced at the brigadier who was studiously watching the ships. “A useful proposal?”

“Most encouraging, Your Excellency.”

“Of course,” Henry Wellesley said and headed for the stairs.

“Come, Sharpe,” Lord Pumphrey said imperiously, but as Sharpe followed His Lordship the brigadier snapped his fingers.

“Stay here, Sharpe,” Moon ordered.

“I’ll follow you,” Sharpe told Pumphrey. “Sir?” he asked the brigadier when Wellesley and Pumphrey were gone.

“What the devil are you doing here?”

“I’m helping the ambassador, sir.”

“Helping the ambassador, sir,” Moon mimicked Sharpe. “Is that why you stayed? You were supposed to ship back to Lisbon.”

“Weren’t you supposed to as well, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“Broken bones heal better on land,” the brigadier said. “That’s what the doctor told me. Stands to reason when you think about it. All that lurching about on ship? Doesn’t help a bone knit, does it?” He grunted as he lowered himself into his chair. “I like it up here. You see things.” He tapped the telescope.

“Women, sir?” Sharpe asked. He could think of no other reason why a man with a broken leg would struggle to the top of a watchtower, and the tower did give Moon views of dozens of windows.

“Mind your tongue, Sharpe,” Moon said, “and tell me why you’re still here.”

“Because the ambassador asked me to stay, sir, to help him.”

“Did you learn your impudence in the ranks, Sharpe? Or were you born with it?”

“Being a sergeant helped, sir.”

“Being a sergeant?”

“You have to deal with officers, sir. Day in, day out.”

“And you have no high opinion of officers?”

Sharpe did not answer. Instead he gazed at the feluccas that were rounding into the wind and dropping anchors. The bay was a turmoil of whitecaps and small angry waves. “If you’ll excuse me, sir?”

“Is it anything to do with that woman?” Moon demanded.

“What woman, sir?” Sharpe turned back from the stairs.

“I can read a newspaper, Sharpe,” Moon said. “What are you and that bloody little molly cooking up?”

“Molly, sir?”

“Pumphrey, you idiot. Or hadn’t you noticed?” The question was a sneer.

“I’d noticed, sir.”

“Because if you’re too fond of him,” the brigadier said nastily,

“you’ve got a rival.” Moon was delighted by the indignation on Sharpe’s face. “I keep my eyes open, Sharpe. I’m a soldier. Best to keep your eyes open. You know who visits the molly’s house?” he gestured through the window. The embassy was composed of a series of houses, gathered around two courtyards and a garden, and the brigadier pointed to a house in the smaller yard. “The ambassador, Sharpe, that’s who! Sneaks into the molly’s house. What do you think of that, then?”

“I think Lord Pumphrey is an adviser to the ambassador, sir.”

“Advice that must be given at night?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir,” Sharpe said, “and if you’ll excuse me?”

“Excused,” Moon sneered, and Sharpe clattered down the tower stairs, going to the ambassador’s study where he found Henry Wellesley staring into the garden where the rain crashed down. Lord Pumphrey was by the fire, warming his behind. “Captain Sharpe is of the opinion that Father Montseny was lying,” Pumphrey told Wellesley as Sharpe entered.

“Are you, Sharpe?” Wellesley asked without turning.

“Don’t trust him, sir.”

“A man of the cloth?”

“We don’t even know he’s a real priest,” Sharpe said, “and I saw him at the newspaper.”

“Whatever he is,” Lord Pumphrey said tartly, “we have to deal with him.”

“Eighteen hundred guineas,” the ambassador said, sitting at his desk, “good God.” He was so appalled that he did not see the look Sharpe shot at Lord Pumphrey.

Pumphrey, his peculation inadvertently revealed by the ambassador, looked innocent. “I would suggest, Your Excellency, that the Spaniards saw the ships arriving before we did. They conclude that our expedition will sail in the next day or two. That means battle within a fortnight and they are entirely confident of victory. And if the forces defending Cádiz are destroyed, then the letters become irrelevant. They would like to profit from them before that happens and thus the acceptance of my offer.”

“Eighteen hundred guineas, though,” Henry Wellesley said.

“Not your guineas,” Pumphrey said.

“Good God, Pumps, the letters are mine!”

“Our opponents, Your Excellency, by publishing one letter, have made the correspondence into instruments of diplomacy. We are therefore justified in using His Majesty’s funds to render them ineffectual.” Lord Pumphrey made a pretty gesture with his right hand. “I shall lose the money, sir, in the accounts. Not difficult.”

“Not difficult!” Henry Wellesley retorted.

“Subventions to the guerrilleros,” Lord Pumphrey said smoothly, “purchase of information from agents, bribes to the deputies of the Cortes. We expend hundreds, thousands of guineas on such recipients and the Treasury has never glimpsed a receipt yet. It’s not difficult at all, Your Excellency.”

“Montseny will take the money,” Sharpe said stubbornly, “and keep the letters.”

Both men ignored him. “He insists you make the exchange personally?” the ambassador asked Lord Pumphrey.

“I suspect it is his way of assuring me that violence is not contemplated,” Lord Pumphrey said. “No one would dare murder one of His Majesty’s diplomats. It would cause too much of a ruction.”

“They killed Plummer,” Sharpe said.

“Plummer was not a diplomat,” Lord Pumphrey said sharply.

The ambassador looked at Sharpe. “Can you steal the letters, Sharpe?”

“No, sir. I can probably destroy them, sir, but they’re too well guarded to steal.”

“Destroy them,” the ambassador said. “I assume that means violence?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I do not, I cannot, countenance acts that might aggravate our relationship with the Spanish,” Henry Wellesley said. He rubbed his face with both hands. “Will they keep their word, Pumps? No more letters published?”

“I imagine the admiral is content with the damage done by the first, my lord, and is eager for gold. I think he will keep his word.” Pumphrey frowned as Sharpe made a noise of disgust.

“Then so be it,” Henry Wellesley said. “Buy them back, buy them back, and I apologize for causing this trouble.”

“The trouble, Your Excellency,” Lord Pumphrey said, “will soon be done.” He looked down at the ambassador’s chess game. “We have come, I think,” he said, “to the end of the matter. Captain Sharpe? I assume you will accompany me?”

“I’ll be there,” Sharpe said grimly.

“Then let us gather gold,” Lord Pumphrey said lightly, “and be done with it.”

THE NOTE came well after dark. Sharpe was waiting with his men in an empty stall of the embassy stables. His five men were all in cheap civilian clothes and looked subtly different. Hagman, who was thin anyway, looked like a beggar. Perkins resembled an unappealing street rat, one of the London boys who swept horse shit out of the way of pedestrians in hope of a coin. Slattery appeared menacing, a footpad who could turn violent at the slightest show of resistance. Harris looked like a man down on his luck, perhaps a drunken schoolmaster turned onto the streets, while Harper was like a countryman come to town, big and placid and out of place in his shabby broadcloth coat. “Sergeant Harper comes with me,” Sharpe told them, “and the rest of you wait here. Don’t get drunk! I might need you later tonight.” He suspected this night’s adventure would go sour. Lord Pumphrey might be optimistic about the outcome, but Sharpe wanted to be ready for the worst, and the riflemen were his reinforcements.

“If we’re not to get drunk, sir,” Harris asked, “why the brandy?”

Sharpe had brought four bottles of brandy from the ambassador’s own supply and now he uncorked the bottles and poured their contents into a stable bucket. Then he added a jug full of lamp oil. “Mix all that up,” he told Harris, “then put it back in the bottles.”

“You’re setting a fire, sir?”

“I don’t know what the hell we’re doing. Maybe we’re doing nothing. But stay sober, wait, and we’ll see what happens.”

Sharpe had thought about taking all his men, but the priest had been insistent that Pumphrey only bring two companions, and if His Lordship arrived with more, then probably nothing would happen. There was a chance, Sharpe allowed, that Montseny was dealing honestly, and so Sharpe would give the priest that small chance in hope that the letters would be handed over. He doubted it. He cleaned the two sea-service pistols he had taken from the embassy’s small arsenal, oiled their locks, then loaded them.

The clocks in the embassy struck eleven before Lord Pumphrey came to the stables. His Lordship was in a black cloak and carried a leather bag. “It’s the cathedral, Sharpe,” Lord Pumphrey said. “The crypt again. After midnight.”

“Bloody hell,” Sharpe said. He splashed water on his face and buckled his sword belt. “Are you armed?” he asked Pumphrey, and His Lordship opened his cloak to show a pair of dueling pistols stuck in his belt. “Good,” Sharpe said, “because the bastards are planning murder. Is it still raining?”

“No, sir,” Hagman answered. “Windy, though.”

“Pat, volley gun and rifle?”

“And a pistol, sir,” Harper said.

“And these,” Sharpe said. He crossed to the wall where the French haversack hung and took out four of the smoke balls. He was remembering the engineer lieutenant describing how the balls could be nasty in tight places. “Anyone got a tinderbox?”

Harris had one. He gave it to Harper. “Maybe we should all come, sir?” Slattery suggested.

“They’re expecting three of us,” Sharpe said, looking at Pumphrey who nodded in confirmation, “so if they see more than three they’ll probably vanish. They’re going to do that anyway once they’ve got what’s in that bag.” He nodded at the leather valise that Lord Pumphrey carried. “Is that heavy?”

Pumphrey shook his head. “Thirty pounds,” he guessed, hefting the bag.

“Heavy enough. Are we ready?”

The cobbled streets were wet, gleaming in the intermittent light of torches burning in archways or at street corners. The wind gusted cold, plucking at their cloaks. “You know what they’re going to do?” Sharpe said to Pumphrey. “They’ll have us hand over the gold, then they’ll make themselves scarce. Probably fire a couple of shots to keep our heads down. You’ll get no letters.”

“You are extremely cynical,” Pumphrey said. “The letters are of ever-lessening use to them. If they print more, then the Regency will close them down.”

“They will print more,” Sharpe said.

“They would rather have this,” Lord Pumphrey said, raising the bag.

“What they’d rather have,” Sharpe said, “is the letters and the gold. They probably don’t want to kill you, considering that you’re a diplomat, but you’re worth fifteen hundred guineas to them. So they’ll kill if they have to.”

Pumphrey led them west toward the sea. The wind was brisker and the night filled with the booming, slapping sound of the canvas covering the unfinished parts of the cathedral’s roof. Sharpe could see the cathedral now, its vast gray wall flickering with patches of light thrown by torches in the nearby streets. “We’re early,” Lord Pumphrey said, sounding nervous.

“They’ll already be here,” Sharpe said.

“Maybe not.”

“They’ll be here. Waiting for us. And don’t you owe me something?”

“Owe you?” Pumphrey asked.

“A thank you,” Sharpe said. “How much is in the bag, my lord?” he asked when he saw Lord Pumphrey’s puzzlement. “Eighteen hundred or fifteen?”

Lord Pumphrey glanced at Harper, as if to suggest Sharpe should not talk about such matters in front of a sergeant. “Fifteen, of course,” Pumphrey said, his voice low, “and thank you for saying nothing in front of His Excellency.”

“Doesn’t mean I won’t tell him tomorrow,” Sharpe said.

“My work requires expenses, Sharpe, expenses. You probably have expenses too?”

“Don’t count me in, my lord.”

“I merely do,” Lord Pumphrey said with fragile dignity, “what everyone else does.”

“So in your world everyone lies, and everyone’s corrupt?”

“It is called the diplomatic service.”

“Then thank God I’m just a thief and a murderer.”

The wind buffeted them as they left the last small street and climbed the steps to the cathedral’s doors. Pumphrey went to the left-hand one that squealed on its hinges as he pushed it open. Harper, following Sharpe inside, made the sign of the cross and gave a brief genuflection.

Pillars stretched toward the crossing where small lights glimmered. More candles burned in the side chapels, all of the flames flickering in the wind that found its way into the vast space. Sharpe led the way down the nave, rifle in hand. He could see no one. A broom lay discarded against one pillar.

“If trouble starts,” Sharpe said, “lie flat.”

“Not just run away?” Lord Pumphrey asked flippantly.

“They’re behind us already,” Sharpe said. He had heard footsteps and now, glancing back, saw two men in the shadows of the nave’s end. Then he heard the scratch and bang of bolts being shot home. They were locked in now.

“Dear God,” Lord Pumphrey said.

“Pray he’s on our side, my lord. There are two men behind us, Pat, guarding the door.”

“I’ve seen them, sir.”

They reached the crossing where the transept met the nave. More candles burned on the temporary high altar. Scaffolding climbed the four huge pillars, vanishing in the lofty darkness of the unfinished dome. Pumphrey had gone to the crypt steps, but Sharpe checked him. “Wait, my lord,” he said, and he went to the door in the temporary wall built where the sanctuary would one day stand. The door was locked. There were no bolts on the inner side, no padlock and no keyhole, which meant it was secured on the outer side and Sharpe cursed. He had made a mistake. He had assumed the door would be bolted from the inside, but when he had explored the cathedral with Lord Pumphrey he had not checked, which meant his retreat was cut off. “What is it?” Lord Pumphrey asked.

“We need another way out,” Sharpe said. He stared up into the tangled shadows of the scaffolding that surrounded the crossing. He remembered seeing windows up there. “When we come out,” he said, “it’s up the ladders.”

“There won’t be any trouble,” Lord Pumphrey said nervously.

“But if there is,” Sharpe said, “then it’s up the ladders.”

“They will not dare attack a diplomat,” Lord Pumphrey insisted in a hoarse whisper.

“For fifteen hundred beans I’d attack the king himself,” Sharpe said, then led the way down the steps to the crypt. Candlelight glowed in the big round chamber. Sharpe went almost to the foot of the steps and crouched there. He thumbed back the rifle’s flint and the small noise echoed back to him. To his right he could see the second flight of stairs. He could also see three of the cavern archways and he edged down another step until he could see the remaining two passageways to his left. No one was in sight, but a dozen candles burned on the floor. They had been arranged in a wide circle and there was something sinister about them, as if they had been placed for some barbaric ritual. The walls were bare stone and the ceiling a shallow dome of rough masonry. There was no decoration down here. The chamber looked as bare and cold as a cave, which it was, Sharpe realized, for the crypt had been hacked out of the rock on which Cádiz was built. “Watch behind, Pat,” he said softly, and his voice bounced back to him across the wide chamber.

“I’m watching, sir,” Harper said.

Then something white flashed in the corner of Sharpe’s vision and he twisted, rifle coming up, and saw it was a packet thrown from a passage on the far side. It landed on the floor and the sound of it hitting the stones reverberated in multiple echoes that did not fade until the package had slid to a stop almost in the center of the ring of candles. “The letters,” Montseny’s voice sounded from one of the dark passageways, “and good evening, my lord.”

Pumphrey said nothing. Sharpe was watching the dark archways, but it was impossible to tell which cavern Montseny was speaking from. The echo blurred the sound, destroying any hint of its source.

“You will put down the gold, my lord,” Montseny said, “then pick up the letters and our business is concluded.”

Pumphrey twitched as if he was going to obey, but Sharpe checked him with the rifle barrel. “We have to look at the letters,” Sharpe said loudly. He could see the package was tied with string.

“The three of you will examine the letters,” Montseny said, “then leave the gold.”

Sharpe could still not determine where Montseny was. He thought the packet had been thrown from the passageway nearest the other flight of steps, but he sensed Montseny was in a different chamber. Five chambers. A man in each? And Montseny wanted Pumphrey and his companions in the center of the floor where they would be surrounded by guns. Rats in a barrel, Sharpe thought. “You know what to do,” he said softly. He lowered the flint so the rifle was safe. “Pat? Take His Lordship’s arm, and when we go, we go fast.” He trusted Harper to do the right thing, but suspected Lord Pumphrey would be confused. What was important now was to stay away from the packet of letters, because that was in the lit space, the killing place. Sharpe suspected Montseny did not want to kill, but he did want the gold and he would kill if he had to. Fifteen hundred guineas was a fortune. You could build a frigate with that money, you could buy a palace, you could bribe a church full of lawyers. “We go slow at first,” he said very softly, “then fast.”

He stood, walked down the last step, looked as if he was leading his companions to the package in the floor’s center, then swerved left, to the nearest passageway where a burly man stood just inside the masonry arch. The man looked astonished as Sharpe appeared. He was holding a musket, but he was plainly not ready to fire it, and he was still just gaping as Sharpe hit him with the rifle’s brass butt. It was a hard hit, smack on the man’s jaw, and Sharpe seized the musket with his left hand and wrenched it away. The man tried to hit him, but Harper was there now and the butt of the volley gun cracked on the man’s skull and he went down like a slaughtered ox. “Watch him, Pat,” Sharpe said, and he went to the back of the chamber where the passage linked the separate crypts. Some small light filtered back here and a shadow moved. Sharpe hauled back the rifle’s flint and the sound made the shadow move away.

“My lord!” Montseny said sharply from the dark.

“Shut your face, priest!” Sharpe shouted.

“What do I do with this bugger?” Harper asked.

“Kick him out, Pat.”

“Put the gold down!” Montseny called. He did not sound calm now. Things were not going as he had planned.

“I must see the letters!” Lord Pumphrey called, his voice high.

“You may look at the letters. Come out, my lord. All of you! Come out, bring the gold, and inspect the letters.”

Harper pushed the half-stunned man out into the light. He staggered there, then hurried across the chamber into one of the far passageways. Sharpe was crouching beside Pumphrey. “You don’t move, my lord,” Sharpe said. “Pat, smoke balls.”

“What are you doing?” Pumphrey asked in alarm.

“Getting you the letters,” Sharpe said. He slung the rifle and cocked the captured musket instead.

“My lord!” Montseny called.

“I’m here!”

“Hurry, my lord!”

“Tell him to show himself first,” Sharpe whispered.

“Show yourself!” Lord Pumphrey called.

Sharpe had gone back to the dark passage leading around the outer rim of the chambers. Nothing moved there. He heard the click of Harper’s tinderbox, saw the flame spring up, then the sparking of the fuse of the first smoke ball.

“It is you who want the letters, my lord,” Montseny called, “so come for them!”

The second, third, and fourth fuses were lit. The worms of fire vanished into the perforated balls, but then nothing seemed to happen. Harper edged away from them, as if fearing they would explode.

“You wish me to come and fetch the gold?” Montseny shouted, and his voice reverberated around the crypt.

“Why don’t you?” Sharpe shouted. There was no answer.

Smoke began leaking from the four balls. It started thinly, but suddenly one of them gave a fizzing sound and the smoke thickened with surprising speed. Sharpe picked it up, feeling the warmth through the papier-mâché case.

“My lord!” Montseny shouted angrily.

“We’re coming now!” Sharpe called, and he rolled the first ball into the big chamber. The other three balls were spewing foul-smelling smoke now and Harper tossed them after the first, and suddenly the big central crypt was no longer a well-lit place, but a dark cavern filling with a writhing, choking smoke that obliterated the light of the dozen candles. “Pat!” Sharpe said. “Take His Lordship up the stairs. Now!”

Sharpe held his breath, ran to the crypt’s center, and scooped up the package. He turned back to the steps just as a man came through the smoke with musket in hand. Sharpe swept his own musket at him, ramming the muzzle into the man’s eyes. The man fell away as Sharpe ran to the steps. Harper was near the top, holding Pumphrey’s elbow. A musket fired in the crypt and the multiple echo made it sound like a batallion volley. The ball clipped the ceiling over Sharpe’s head, striking off a chip of stone, and then Sharpe was up the steps and Harper was there, waiting for Sharpe, and there were two men with muskets halfway down the nave. Sharpe knew Harper was wondering whether to attack them and so escape out of the cathedral’s main doors.

“Ladder, Pat!” Sharpe said. To go down the nave would be to allow Montseny and his men to fire at them from behind. “Go!” He pushed Pumphrey toward the nearest ladder. “Take him up, Pat! Go! Go!”

A musket fired from the nave. The shot went past Sharpe and buried itself in a pile of purple cloths waiting to decorate the cathedral’s altars during the coming season of Lent. Sharpe ignored the man who had fired, shooting his captured musket down the crypt stairs. Then he took the rifle off his shoulder and fired that as well. He heard men scrambling in the smoke below, heard them coughing. They expected a third shot, but none came because Sharpe had run for the scaffold and was climbing for his life.

CHAPTER 7

SHARPE SCRAMBLED UP THE ladder. A musket fired from the nave, its sound magnified by the cathedral walls. He heard the ball crack on stone and whine off into the transept. Then an enormous crash prompted a shout of alarm from his pursuers. Harper had thrown a block of building stone into the crossing and the limestone shattered there, skittering shards across the floor.

“Another ladder, sir!” Harper called from above and Sharpe saw the second ladder climbing into the upper gloom. Each of the massive pillars at the corners of the crossing supported a tower of scaffolding, but once the four flimsy towers reached the arches spanning the pillars the scaffolding branched and joined to encompass the walls climbing to the base of the dome. Another musket fired and the ball buried itself in a plank, starting dust that half choked Sharpe as he climbed the second ladder that swayed alarmingly. “Here, sir!” Harper reached out a hand. The Irishman and Lord Pumphrey were on the wide stone ledge of the tambour, a decorative shelf running around the middle of the pillar. Sharpe guessed he was forty feet above the cathedral floor now, and the pillar climbed that far again before the scaffolding spread out beneath the dome. There was a window high in the gloom. He could not see it, but he remembered it.

“What have you done?” Lord Pumphrey asked angrily. “We should have negotiated! We didn’t even see the letters!”

“You can see them now,” Sharpe said, and he thrust the packet into Pumphrey’s hands.

“Do you know what offense this will cause the Spaniards?” Lord Pumphrey’s anger was unassuaged by the gift of the packet. “This is a cathedral! They’ll have soldiers here at any moment!”

Sharpe gave his opinion of that statement, then peered over the tambour’s edge as he reloaded the rifle. They were safe enough for the moment because the stone ledge was wide and it protected them from any shots fired from the crossing’s floor, but he guessed their enemies would soon try to climb the scaffold and attack them from the flanks. He could hear men talking below, but he could also hear something odd, something that sounded like battle. It was a booming sound like cannon fire. It crackled, rose, and fell, and Sharpe realized it was the wind tearing at the tarpaulins covering the unfinished roof. A louder grumble overlaid the booming, and that was thunder. Any noise of guns in the cathedral would be drowned by the storm and besides, Montseny had bolted the doors. The priest would send for no soldiers. He wanted the gold.

A volley of musketry cracked and echoed and the balls spattered all around the tambour. Sharpe guessed the shots must have been fired to protect someone climbing a ladder. He looked, saw the shadow on the opposite pillar, aimed the rifle, and pulled the trigger. The man was hurled sideways off the rungs and fell to the floor before crawling into the nave’s choir stalls and so out of sight.

“You have a knife?” Pumphrey asked.

Sharpe gave him his pocketknife. He heard the string being cut, then the rustle of papers. “You want Sergeant Harper to strike a light?” he offered.

“No need,” Pumphrey said sadly. He unfolded a large sheet of paper. Even in the semidarkness above the tambour, Sharpe could see the package had not contained letters, but a newspaper. Presumably El Correo de Cádiz. “You were right, Sharpe,” Pumphrey said.

“Fifteen hundred beans,” Sharpe said, “one thousand five hundred and seventy-five pounds. A man could retire on that. You and me, Pat, we could take the money”—Sharpe paused to bite off the end of a cartridge—“we could sail off to America, open a tavern, live well forever.”

“Wouldn’t need a tavern, sir, not with fifteen hundred guineas.”

“Be nice though, wouldn’t it?” Sharpe said. “A tavern in a town by the sea? We could call it the Lord Pumphrey.” He took a leather patch from his cartridge pouch, wrapped the bullet, and rammed it down the barrel. “But they don’t have lords in America, do they?”

“They don’t,” Lord Pumphrey said.

“So maybe we’ll call it the Ambassador and the Whore instead,” Sharpe said, sliding the ramrod back into place beneath the barrel. He primed and cocked the rifle. No one was moving below, which suggested Montseny was considering his tactics. He and his men had learned to fear the firepower above them, but that would not deter them for long, not when there were fifteen hundred golden English guineas to be won.

“You wouldn’t do that, Sharpe, would you?” Pumphrey asked nervously. “I mean, you’re not planning on taking the money?”

“For some reason, my lord, I’m a loyal bastard. God knows why. But Sergeant Harper is Irish. He’s got plenty of cause to hate us English. One shot from that volley gun and you and I are dead meat. Fifteen hundred guineas, Pat. You could do a lot with that.”

“I could, sir.”

“But what we have to do now,” Sharpe said, “is go to our left. We climb to that window.” He pointed. His eyes had adjusted to the gloom and he could see a slight sheen betraying the window beneath the dome. “We break through. There’s scaffolding on the outer wall. We go down that and we’re off into the city like rats into a hole.”

To get there they would have to climb the scaffold above the tambour, then cross a narrow plank and climb another ladder, which led to a rickety platform just beneath the window. The ladders, like the scaffolding poles, were tied in place with rope. It was not a long journey, no more than thirty feet upward, the same across, and half as much up again, but to make it they must expose themselves to the men below. Sharpe guessed there were eight or nine men there, all with muskets, and even a musket could hit at that distance. Once they left the shelter of the wide stone ledge, then one of them would surely be struck by a bullet. “What we have to do,” he said, “is distract the bastards. Pity we don’t have those other smoke balls.”

“They worked fine, didn’t they?” Harper said happily. Smoke was leaking out of the crypt stairways and spreading on the crossing floor, but there was not enough to obscure the high dome.

Sharpe crouched on the tambour, staring at the scaffolding all about the crossing. Montseny and his men were just out of sight in the nave. They were doubtless waiting for Sharpe to move off the safety of the stone ledge. Then they would fire a volley. So distract them, he thought, confuse them, but how? “You got any more stone, Pat?”

“There’s a dozen blocks here, sir.”

“Throw them down. Just to keep them happy.”

“Can I use the volley gun, sir?”

“Only if you see two or three of them.” The volley gun was a vicious thing, but took so long to reload that it was useless once it was fired.

“What about you, sir?”

“I’ve got an idea,” Sharpe said. It was a desperate idea, but Sharpe had seen the long rope that was tied to the base of the scaffold opposite. It climbed into the gloom, vanishing somewhere in the dome, then reappeared closer to him. There was a great iron hook on its end and that hook was tied to the scaffold to his right and on the next platform down. The rope was used to hoist the masonry blocks to the dome. “Give me back the knife,” he said to Pumphrey. “Now, Pat!” he said, and Harper heaved a block of limestone into the transept. When it crashed onto the floor, Sharpe dropped down the ladder. He did not use the rungs, but went down it like a seaman using a companionway, hands and feet on the outer edge, and he swore as a splinter drove into his right hand. He hit the plank platform hard and felt it shake. A second stone banged onto the cathedral floor, and Montseny must have thought they were hurling the masonry because they had run out of ammunition, for he and three other men stepped out with muskets.

“God bless you,” Harper said, and fired the volley gun. The sound was deafening, a massive explosion that reverberated around the cathedral as the seven bullets flayed the space between the choir stalls. A man cursed below as Sharpe reached the hook. A musket fired at him, but the shot came from the far transept and the ball missed by a yard. He seized the heavy hook and sawed through the rope lashing it in place, then carried the hook and its heavy line back along the plank, up the ladder, and onto the tambour just as another two shots cracked bright in the gloom below. He gave the hook to Harper. “Pull on it,” he said. “Don’t jerk it, just pull as hard as you can.” He did not want the men below to understand what was happening, so the tension on the rope had to be gradual.

A faint squeal from the upper darkness betrayed that the rope went through a sheave up there. Sharpe saw the line tighten and heard Harper grunt. A shadow moved below and Sharpe snatched up his rifle, aimed too quickly, and fired. The shadow vanished. Harper was pulling with all his huge strength as Sharpe took out another cartridge.

“It’s not moving,” Harper said.

Sharpe finished reloading, then gave the rifle and his pistol to Lord Pumphrey. “Keep them amused, my lord,” he said. Then he crouched by Harper and both of them heaved on the rope. It did not budge an inch. The bitter end was tied to a scaffold pole and the pole seemed immovable. The knot had slid up to where a second pole was tied crosswise and it would move no farther. The angle was all wrong, too acute, but if Sharpe could just move that pole he might have his distraction.

Lord Pumphrey fired one of his dueling pistols, then the second one, and Sharpe heard a yelp from the nave. “Well done, my lord,” he said. He decided to abandon caution now. “Jerk it,” Sharpe told Harper, and they gave the rope a series of hard pulls. Sharpe thought the pole moved slightly, just a shudder, and the men below must have realized what they were doing for one of them ran out of the nave with a knife in his hand. Lord Pumphrey fired a sea-service pistol and the ball struck the flagstone floor and whipped away down the nave. The man had reached the scaffold and was climbing to cut the rope. “Pull!” Sharpe said, and he and Harper gave a huge heave. The scaffold pole bent outward. The scaffolding was old. It had been in place for almost twenty years and the lashings were frayed. Masonry blocks were piled on its platforms and some of them shifted. Once they began to move, they would not stop. “Pull!” Sharpe said again, and they tugged on the rope once more. This time the far scaffold pole snapped clean away from the rest of the structure. Stones began to crash through the planking. The man with the knife jumped for his life, and just then the rest of the scaffolding on the crossing’s far side collapsed in a welter of noise and dust.

“Now,” Sharpe said.

The noise was monstrous. The falling poles, planks, and stones crashed and tore, splintered and banged as almost a hundred feet of scaffolding cascaded into the crossing. Blocks of stone ripped through the poles and planks, but what was most useful was the dust. It was thicker than smoke, and amid the tumbling stones and timber it blossomed like a dark gray cloud to dim the small candlelight coming from the cathedral’s chapels. The scaffolding that Sharpe was crossing began to shake as the destruction spread around the crossing. Then he pushed Pumphrey up the ladder. Harper was already at the top, using his volley gun’s butt to smash open the window. “Use your cloak!” Sharpe shouted. He could hear someone screaming below.

Harper laid his cloak over the broken shards of glass in the bottom of the shattered window and then unceremoniously hauled Pumphrey up beside him. “Come on, sir!” He reached for Sharpe’s hand and grabbed it just as the planks slid out from under Sharpe’s feet. The last of the scaffolding tumbled, filling the cathedral with more noise and dust.

They were now balanced precariously on the window’s edge. The crossing behind them was boiling with dust through which the candlelight died, plunging the cathedral into utter darkness. “There’s a drop, sir,” Harper warned. Sharpe jumped, thought the drop would never end, and suddenly sprawled on a flat roof. Pumphrey came next, hissing with pain as he landed, and Harper followed. “God save Ireland, sir,” the sergeant said fervently, “but that was desperate!”

“Have you got the money?”

“Yes,” Pumphrey said.

“I enjoyed that,” Sharpe said. His head hurt like the devil and his hand was bleeding, but there was nothing he could do about either. “I really enjoyed that,” he said. The wind plucked at him. He could hear waves breaking nearby. When he went to the edge of the roof he saw the pale white fret of breakers beyond the seawall. It had begun to rain again, or perhaps it was sea spray driven on the wind. “Scaffolding’s on the other side,” he said.

“I think my ankle’s broken,” Lord Pumphrey said.

“No it’s bloody not,” Sharpe said, who did not know one way or the other, but this was no time for His Lordship to become feeble. “Walk and it’ll get better.”

The monstrous sails beat against the unfinished crown of the dome and above the unbuilt sanctuary. Sharpe blundered into one of the ropes securing them, then felt his way to the roof’s edge. Just enough light came from a lantern in a courtyard below for him to see where the scaffolding was built. He could see other lanterns, bobbing as they were carried through the streets. Someone must have heard the shots in the cathedral despite the noise of the storm, but whoever went to investigate was going to the eastern facade with its three doors. No one was watching the cathedral’s northern flank where Sharpe found the ladders. With Harper now holding the gold, they went down ladder after ladder. Thunder sounded overhead and a flash of lightning lit the intricate pattern of poles and planks down which they climbed. Lord Pumphrey almost kissed the cobblestones when they reached the bottom. “Dear God,” he said. “It’s just sprained, I think.”

“Told you it wasn’t broken,” Sharpe said. He grinned. “It was all a bit hurried at the end, but otherwise it went well.”

“It was a cathedral!” Harper said.

“God will forgive you,” Sharpe said. “He might not forgive those bastards inside, but he’ll forgive you. He loves the Irish, doesn’t he? Isn’t that what you keep telling me?”

It was not far to the embassy. They knocked on the gate and a sleepy doorkeeper pulled it open. “The ambassador’s waiting?” Sharpe asked Pumphrey.

“Of course.”

“Then you can give him His Majesty’s money back,” Sharpe said, “less six guineas.” He opened the valise and found it filled with leather bags. He untied one, counted six guineas, and gave the rest to Pumphrey.

“Six guineas?” Lord Pumphrey asked.

“I might need to bribe someone,” Sharpe said.

“I imagine His Excellency will want to see you in the morning,” Pumphrey said. He sounded dispirited.

“You know where to find me,” Sharpe said. He walked toward the stables, but stopped under the arch and saw that Lord Pumphrey was not going toward the house where the embassy had its offices and Henry Wellesley had his quarters. Instead he went to the courtyard that led to the smaller houses, to his own house. He watched His Lordship disappear, then spat. “They think I’m daft, Pat.”

“They do, sir?”

“They all do. Are you tired?”

“I could sleep for a month, sir, so I could.”

“But not now, Pat. Not now.”

“No, sir?”

“When’s the best time to hit a man?”

“When he’s down?”

“When he’s down,” Sharpe agreed. There was work to do.

SHARPE GAVE each of his riflemen a guinea. They had been fast asleep when he and Harper returned to the stables, but they woke up when Sharpe lit a lantern. “How many of you are drunk?” Sharpe asked.

The faces looked at him resentfully. No one spoke. “I don’t care if you are,” Sharpe said, “I just want to know.”

“I had some,” Slattery said.

“Are you drunk?”

“No, sir.”

“Harris?”

“No, sir. Some red wine, sir, but not much.”

Perkins was frowning at his guinea. He might never have seen one before. “What does m, b, f, et, h, rex, f, d, b, et, l, d, s, r, I, a, t, et, e mean,” he asked. He had read the inscription on the coin and stumbled over the letters, half remembered from some long-ago schooling.

“How the hell would I know?” Sharpe asked.

“King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland,” Harris said. “Defender of the Faith, Duke of Brunswick and Luneburg, Arch-Treasurer and Elector, of course.”

“Bloody hell,” Perkins said, impressed. “So who’s that, then?”

“King George, you idiot,” Harris said.

“Put it away,” Sharpe told Perkins. He was not quite sure why he had given them the guineas, except that on a night when so much money had been treated so lightly he saw no reason why his riflemen should not benefit. “You’re all going to need greatcoats and hats.”

“Jesus,” Harris said, “we’re going out? In this storm?”

“I need the twelve-pounder shells,” Sharpe said, “and the last two smoke balls. Put them in your packs. Did you fill the bottles with lamp oil and brandy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We need those too. And yes, we’re going out.” He did not want to. He wanted to sleep, but the time to strike was when the enemy was off balance. Montseny had taken at least six men, maybe more, to the cathedral, and those men were probably still entangled with the wreckage of the scaffolding and snared in the questions of the troops who had gone to discover the cause of the commotion. Did that mean the newspaper was unguarded? But guarded or not, the storm was a godsend. “We’re going out,” he said again.

“Here, sir.” Hagman brought him a stone bottle.

“What’s that?”

“Vinegar, sir, for your head, sir. Take off your hat.” Hagman insisted on soaking the bandage with vinegar. “It’ll help, sir.”

“I stink.”

“We all stink, sir. We’re the king’s soldiers.”

The storm was worsening. The rain had started again and was coming harder, driven by a wind that pounded the city’s ocean walls with heavy waves. Thunder rolled like cannon shots above the watchtowers and lightning ripped across the bay where the waiting fleet jerked at its anchor lines.

Sharpe guessed it was past two in the morning when he reached the abandoned building close to Nuñez’s house. The rain was malevolent. Sharpe fumbled in his pocket for the key, opened the padlock, and pushed the door open. He had only got lost twice on the way here, and had eventually found the place by taking the route along the harbor wall. There had been Spanish soldiers there, sheltering by the cannons overlooking the bay’s entrance, and Sharpe had feared being asked his business, so he had marched his five men as a squad. He reckoned the Spanish sentinels would assume the five men were a detail from the garrison, forced to endure the weather, and leave them alone. It had worked, and now they were inside the abandoned building. He closed the gates and locked them with the inside bolts. “You’ve got the lantern?” he asked Perkins.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t light it till you’re inside the building,” Sharpe said. Then he gave Harper careful orders before taking Hagman to the watchtower. They groped their way through the dark and up the steps. Once at the top, it was hard to see anything because the night was so dark. Sharpe was watching for a sentry on the roof of the Nuñez house, but could see nothing. He had brought Hagman because the old poacher had the best eyesight of any of his riflemen.

“If he’s there, sir,” Hagman said, “he’s staying out of the wind and rain.”

“Probably.”

A shard of lightning lit the interior of the watchtower. Then thunder echoed across the city. The rain was pelting down, hissing on the roofs below. “Do people live above the printers, sir?” Hagman asked.

“I think so,” Sharpe said. Most of the houses in the city seemed to have shops or workplaces on the ground floor and living quarters above.

“Suppose there are women and children there?”

“That’s why I’ve got the smoke balls.”

Hagman thought about that. “You mean you’ll smoke them out?”

“That’s the idea, Dan.”

“Only I wouldn’t like to kill little ones, sir.”

“You won’t have to,” Sharpe said, hoping he was right.

There was another flash of lightning. “There’s no one there, sir,” Hagman said, nodding toward the roof of Nuñez’s house. “On the roof, sir,” he added, realizing that Sharpe could not have seen the nod.

“They all went to the cathedral, didn’t they?”

“They did, sir?”

“I’m talking to myself, Dan,” Sharpe said, staring into the rain and wind. He had seen a sentry on the roof in daylight and he had assumed there would be a man there at night, but suppose that man was still in the cathedral? Or was he just keeping dry and warm inside the house? Sharpe had planned to drop the smoke balls down the chimneys. The smoke would drive whoever was inside the building out to the street. Then Sharpe would drop the shells down to wreak what damage they could. The idea of using the chimneys had come to him when he saw the firewood being carried through the city’s streets, but suppose he could get inside Nuñez’s house?

“When this is done, sir,” Hagman asked, “do we go back to battalion?”

“I hope so,” Sharpe said.

“I wonder who’s commanding the company now, sir. Poor Mister Bullen isn’t.”

“Lieutenant Knowles, I should think.”

“He’ll be glad to see us back, sir.”

“I shall be glad to see him. And it won’t be long, Dan. There!” Sharpe had seen a glimmer of light immediately beneath the tower. It showed for a second, then vanished, but told Sharpe that Harper had found a way onto the roof. “Down we go.”

“How’s your head, sir?”

“I’ll live, Dan.”

Sharpe reckoned the flat roofs were a thief’s dream. A man could walk all around Cádiz four stories above the streets, and few of those streets were too wide to be jumped. The storm was just as big a help. The rain and wind would drown any noise, though he still told his men to take off their boots. “Carry them,” he said. Even with the storm the boots would make too much noise on the roofs of the houses between the watchtower and the newspaper.

There were low walls between the roofs, but it took less than a minute to cross them and so discover that there was no sentry on Nuñez’s house. There was a trapdoor, but it was firmly bolted on the inside. Sharpe had seen the ladder climbing from the balcony on his first reconnaissance. He gave Perkins his boots, slung his rifle, and climbed down. The ladder went to the side of the balcony so the big wooden shutters covering the door had room to open. The shutters were closed and latched now. Sharpe groped for the place they joined, then put his knife between them. The blade slid easily because the wood had rotted. He found the latch, pushed it up, and one of the shutters caught the wind and swung violently, banging against the wall. The shutters had protected a half-glazed door that began to rattle in the wind. Sharpe put his knife into the gap between the doors, but this wood was solid. The shutter banged again. Break the glass, he thought. Easy. But suppose there were bolts at the foot of the door?

He was about to crouch and push against the foot of the door when he saw a glimmer of light from inside the room. For a heartbeat he thought he had imagined it, then wondered whether it was the reflection of distant lightning on the glass, but the glimmer showed again. It was a spark. He stepped to one side. The light vanished a second time, reappeared, and he reckoned someone inside had been sleeping. They had been woken by the banging of the shutter and now they used a tinderbox to light a candle. The flame burned bright suddenly, then steadied as the candle was lit.

Sharpe waited, knife in hand. The rain was loud on his hat, the same hat he had bought from the beggar. He heard the bolts being drawn. Three bolts. Then the door opened and a man appeared in a nightshirt. He was an older man, in his forties or fifties, and had tousled hair and a bad-tempered face. He reached for the swinging shutter as the candle flickered in the wind behind him. Then he saw Sharpe and opened his mouth to shout. The blade touched his throat. “Silencio,” Sharpe hissed. He pushed the man inside. There was a rumpled bed, clothes heaped on a chair, a chamber pot, and nothing else. “Pat! Bring ’em down!”

The riflemen filled the room. They were dark figures, soaking wet, who now pulled on their boots. Sharpe closed the shutters and latched them. Harris, who spoke the best Spanish, was talking to the prisoner who gesticulated wildly as he spoke. “He’s called Nuñez, sir,” Harris said, “and he says there’s two men on the ground floor.”

“Where are the others?” Sharpe knew that there had to be more than two guards.

There was a flurry of Spanish. “He says they went out, sir,” Harris said.

So Montseny had stripped the place of sentries in hope of making an ungodly profit. “Ask him where the letters are.”

“The letters, sir?”

“Just ask him. He’ll know.”

A sly look flickered on Nuñez’s face, then an expression of pure alarm as Sharpe turned on him with the knife. He stared into Sharpe’s face and his courage fled. He spoke fast. “He says they’re downstairs, sir,” Harris translated, “with the writer. Does that make sense?”

“It makes sense. Tell him to be quiet now. Perkins, you’re going to stay here and watch him.”

“Tie him up, sir?” Harris suggested.

“And stop his mouth up too.”

Sharpe lit a second candle and carried it into the next room where he saw a flight of stairs going up to the bolted trapdoor. Another flight went down to the second floor where there was a small kitchen and a parlor. A door opened onto the next stairway, which led to one huge storeroom, piled with paper. Light showed from the ground floor. Sharpe, leaving the candle on the stairs, went to the top of the open staircase and saw the press vast and black beneath him, and next to it a table on which playing cards had been discarded. A man was sleeping on the floor, while another, with a musket over his knees, was slouched in a chair. A huge pile of newly printed newspapers was stacked against the wall.

Henry Wellesley had been insistent that Sharpe should do nothing to upset the Spanish. They were prickly allies, he had explained, resentful that the defense of Cádiz needed British troops. “They must be handled with a very light rein,” the ambassador had said. There must be no violence, Wellesley had declared. “Bugger that,” Sharpe said aloud, and hauled back the flint of the rifle. The sound of it made the man in the chair start.

The man began to lift his musket, then saw Sharpe’s face. He put it down and his hands trembled.

“You can come down, lads,” Sharpe called back up the stairs. It was all so easy. Too easy? Except fifteen hundred guineas was a powerful incentive to carelessness and Father Montseny was doubtless still trying to explain the wreckage in the cathedral.

The two men were disarmed. Harper discovered two apprentice printers sleeping in the cellar and they were brought up and put into a corner with the guards while the writer, a wreck of a man with an unkempt beard, was dragged out of a smaller room. “Harris,” Sharpe said, “tell that miserable bugger he’s got two minutes to live unless he gives me the letters.”

Benito Chavez yelped as Harris put a sword bayonet to his throat. Harris forced the wretched man against a wall and started questioning him as Sharpe explored the room. The door that led to the street was blocked up with rough masonry while the back door, which presumably led to the courtyard, was locked with big iron bolts. This meant that Sharpe and his men had the place to themselves. “Sergeant? All that paper on the first floor, throw it down here. Slattery? Keep one of those newspapers”—he pointed to the newly printed editions stacked against the blocked front door—“and scatter the rest. And I want the shells.”

Sharpe put the shells on the bed of the press, then screwed down the platen so they were held as though in a vice. Harper and Hagman were chucking the paper onto the floor and Sharpe pushed crumpled sheets into the gaps between the shells so that the burning paper would light their fuses. “Tell Perkins to bring Nuñez down,” Sharpe said.

Nuñez came down the stairs and immediately understood what Sharpe intended. He began pleading. “Tell him to be quiet,” Sharpe told Harris.

“These are the letters, sir.” Harris held out a sheaf of papers that Sharpe thrust into a pocket. “And he says there are more.”

“More? So get them!”

“No, sir, he says the girl must have them still.” Harris jerked a thumb at Chavez who was fumbling as he lit a cigar. “And he says he wants a drink, sir.”

There was a half-empty bottle of brandy on the table with the playing cards. Sharpe gave it to the writer, who sucked on it desperately. Hagman was pouring the mix of brandy and lamp oil onto the paper covering the floor. The two remaining smoke balls were by the back door, ready to fill the house with smoke and impede any attempt to extinguish the blaze. The fire, Sharpe reckoned, would gut the whole house. The lead letters, carefully racked in their tall cases, would melt, the shells would destroy the press, and the fire would climb the stairs. The stone side walls of the house should keep it confined and, once the roof burned through, the furious rain would subdue the flames. Sharpe had planned to just take the letters, but he suspected there might be copies. An intact press could still print the lies, so it was better to burn it all.

“Throw them out,” he told Harper, gesturing at the prisoners.

“Out, sir?”

“All of them. Into the back courtyard. Just kick them out. Then bolt the door again.”

The prisoners were all pushed through the door, the bolts were shot home, and Sharpe sent his men back up the stairs. He went to the foot of the stairs and used a candle to light the nearest papers. For a few seconds the flame burned low. Then it caught some sheets soaked in brandy and lamp oil and the fire spread with surprising speed. Sharpe ran up the steps, pursued by smoke. “Out the trapdoor onto the roof,” he told his men.

He was the last to the trapdoor. Smoke was already filling the bedroom. He knew the smoke balls would be seething in the flames. Then it seemed the whole house shuddered as the first shell exploded. Sharpe clung to the trapdoor’s edge as a succession of deep thumps and blasting smoke punched past him to announce that the rest of the shells had caught the fire. That, he thought, was the end of El Correo de Cádiz, and he slammed the trapdoor shut and followed Hagman across the rooftops to the empty church building. “Well done, lads,” he said when they were back in the chapel. “Now all we have to do is get home,” he told them, “back to the embassy.”

A church bell was ringing, presumably summoning men to extinguish the flames. That meant there would be chaos in the streets and chaos was good because no one would notice Sharpe and his men in the confusion. “Hide your weapons,” he told them, then led them across the courtyard. His head was throbbing and the rain was crashing down, but he felt a huge relief that the job was done. He had the letters, he had destroyed the press, and now, he thought, there was only the girl to deal with, but he saw no problem there.

He shot the heavy bolts and pulled at the gate. He only wanted to open it an inch, just enough to peer outside, but before it had moved even half an inch it was thrust inward with such force that Sharpe staggered back into Harper. Men suddenly crowded the gate. They were soldiers. Folk who lived in the street had lit lamps and opened shutters to see what happened at Nuñez’s house. There was more than enough light for Sharpe to see pale blue uniforms and white crossbelts and half a dozen long bayonets that glinted bright as a seventh soldier appeared with a lantern. Behind him was an officer in a darker blue coat, his waist circled by a yellow sash. The officer snarled an order that Sharpe did not understand, but he understood well enough what the bayonets meant. He backed away. “No weapons,” he told his men.

The Spanish officer growled a question at Sharpe, but again spoke too fast. “Just do whatever they want,” Sharpe said. He was trying to work out the odds and they were not good. His men had guns, but they were concealed beneath cloaks or coats, and these Spanish soldiers looked efficient, wide awake, and vengeful. The officer spoke again. “He wants us in the chapel, sir,” Harris translated. Two of the Spanish soldiers went first to make sure none of Sharpe’s men produced a weapon once they were out of the rain. Sharpe thought of attacking those two men, chopping them down and then defending the chapel’s doorway, but he abandoned the idea instantly. He doubted he could escape from the chapel, men would surely die, and the political fuss would be monstrous. “I’m sorry about this, boys,” he said, not sure what he could do.

He backed toward the empty altar steps. The Spanish soldiers lined opposite, their faces grim and their bayonets held level. The lantern was put on the floor and in its light Sharpe could see that the muskets were cocked. He doubted the guns would fire. There had been too much rain, and even the best musket lock could not prevent heavy rain dampening the powder. “If the bastards pull a trigger,” he said, “you can fight back. But not till then.”

The officer looked to be in his twenties, perhaps ten years younger than Sharpe. He was tall and had a broad, intelligent face and a hard jaw. His uniform, wet as it was, betrayed that he was wealthy for it was beautifully tailored of rich cloth. He rattled a question at Sharpe, who shrugged. “We were sheltering from the rain, señor,” Sharpe said in English.

The officer asked another question in impenetrable Spanish. “Just sheltering from the rain,” Sharpe insisted.

“Their powder will be damp, sir,” Harper said softly.

“I know. But I don’t want any killing.”

The officer had seen their weapons now. He snapped an order. “He says we’re to put the weapons on the floor, sir,” Harris said.

“Do it,” Sharpe said. This was a bloody nuisance, he thought. The likelihood was that they would end up in a Spanish jail, in which case the important thing was to destroy the letters, but this was no place to try that. He laid his sword down. “We were just sheltering from the rain, señor,” he said.

“No you weren’t,” the officer suddenly spoke in good English. “You were setting fire to Señor Nuñez’s house.”

Sharpe was so surprised by the abrupt change of language that he could find nothing to say. He was still half crouched, his hand on his sword.

“You know what this place is?” the Spaniard asked.

“No,” Sharpe said cautiously.

“The Priory of the Divine Shepherdess. It used to be a hospital. My name is Galiana, Captain Galiana. And you are?”

“Sharpe,” Sharpe said.

“And your men call you ‘sir,’ so I assume you have rank?”

“Captain Sharpe.”

“Divina Pastora,” Galiana said, “the Divine Shepherdess. Monks lived here, and the poor could receive medical care. It was a charity, Captain Sharpe, a Christian charity. You know what happened to it? Of course you don’t.” He took a step forward and kicked the sword out of Sharpe’s reach. “Your Admiral Nelson happened. It was in ’97. He bombarded the city and this was the worst damage he did.” Galiana gestured about the scorched chapel. “One bomb, seven dead monks, and a fire. The priory closed because there was no money to make the repairs. My grandfather founded the place and my family would have repaired it, but our fortune comes from South America and your navy ended that income. That, Captain Sharpe, is what happened.”

“We were at war when it happened,” Sharpe said.

“But we are not at war now,” Galiana said. “We are allies. Or had that escaped your attention?”

“We were sheltering from the rain,” Sharpe said.

“It was fortunate, then, that you discovered the priory unlocked?”

“Very fortunate,” Sharpe said.

“But what of the misfortune of Señor Nuñez? He is a widower, Captain Sharpe, struggling to make a living, and now his business is in ruins.” Galiana gestured to the chapel door, beyond which Sharpe could hear the commotion in the street.

“I don’t know anything about Señor Nuñez,” Sharpe said.

“Then I shall educate you,” Galiana said. “He owns, or rather he did own, a newspaper called El Correo de Cádiz. It’s not much of a newspaper. One year ago it was read all across Andalucía, but now? Now it sells a few copies only. He used to publish twice a week, but now he is lucky to find enough news for one issue a fortnight. He lists the ships arriving and departing the harbor and he describes their cargoes. He prints which priests will preach in the city churches. He describes the proceedings of the Cortes. It is thin fare, isn’t that what you say? But in the last issue, Captain Sharpe, there was something much more interesting. A love letter. It was not signed. Señor Nuñez merely said it was a letter translated from the English and that he had found it lying in the street, and that if the true owner would like it then he should come to the newspaper. Is that why you were here, Captain? No! Please don’t say you were sheltering from the rain.”

“I didn’t write any love letters,” Sharpe said.

“We all know who wrote it,” Galiana said scornfully.

“I’m a soldier. I don’t deal with love.”

Galiana smiled. “I doubt that, Captain, I do doubt that.” He turned as a man came through the chapel door. A small crowd was braving the rain to watch the efforts to extinguish the fire and some, seeing the priory gates open, had come into the courtyard. One of them, a bedraggled, soaking-wet creature with a tobacco-stained beard, stepped into the chapel.

“It was him!” the man shouted in Spanish, pointing at Sharpe. It was the writer, Benito Chavez, who had managed to get another bottle of brandy. He was almost drunk, but not so helpless that he could not recognize Sharpe. “It was him!” he said, still pointing. “The one with the bandaged head!”

“Arrest him,” Galiana ordered his men.

The Spanish soldiers stepped forward and Sharpe thought of trying to pick up his sword, but before he could move he saw that Galiana was gesturing at Chavez. The soldiers hesitated, unsure what their officer meant. “Arrest him!” Galiana said, pointing at Chavez. The writer yelped in protest, but two of Galiana’s men thrust him against the wall and held him there. “He is drunk,” Galiana explained to Sharpe, “and making damaging accusations against our allies, so he can spend the rest of the night contemplating his own foolishness in jail.”

“Allies?” Sharpe was as confused as Chavez now.

“Are we not allies?” Galiana asked in mock innocence.

“I thought we were,” Sharpe said, “but sometimes I’m not sure.”

“You are like the Spanish, Captain Sharpe, confused. Cádiz is filled with politicians and lawyers and they encourage confusion. They argue. Should we be a republic? Or perhaps a monarchy? Do we want a Cortes? And if so, should it have one chamber or two? Some want a parliament like Britain’s. Others insist that Spain is best ruled by God and by a king. They squabble about these things like children, but in truth there is only one real argument.”

Sharpe understood now that Galiana had been playing with him. The Spaniard truly was an ally. “The argument,” Sharpe said, “is whether Spain fights France or not?”

“Exactly,” Galiana said.

“And you,” Sharpe said carefully, “believe Spain should fight against France?”

“You know what the French have done to our country?” Galiana asked. “The women raped, the children killed, the churches desecrated? Yes, I believe we should fight. I also believe, Captain Sharpe, that British soldiers are banned from entering Cádiz. They are not even allowed inside the city without their uniforms. I should arrest you all. But I assume you are lost?”

“We’re lost,” Sharpe agreed.

“And you were merely sheltering from the rain?”

“We were.”

“Then I shall escort you to your embassy, Captain Sharpe.”

“Bloody hell,” Sharpe said in relief.

It took a half hour to reach the embassy. The wind had died a little by the time they reached the gate and the rain had lessened. Galiana took Sharpe aside. “I was ordered to watch the newspaper,” he said, “in case someone tried to destroy it. I believe, and I trust I am not deceiving myself, that by failing in that duty I have helped the war against France.”

“You have,” Sharpe said.

“I also believe you owe me a favor, Captain Sharpe.”

“I do,” Sharpe agreed fervently.

“I shall find one. Be sure of that, I shall find one. Good night, Captain.”

“Good night, Captain,” Sharpe said. The courtyard inside the embassy was dark, the windows showing no light. Sharpe touched the letters in his coat pocket, took the newspaper from Slattery, and went to bed.

CHAPTER 8

HENRY WELLESLEY LOOKED TIRED, and that was to be understood. He had been at a reception for the Portuguese ambassador half the night and had then been woken soon after dawn when an indignant delegation arrived at the British embassy. It was a measure of the urgency of their protest that the delegation had arrived so early in the morning, long before most of the city was stirring. The two elderly diplomats, each dressed in black, had been sent by the Regency, the council that ruled what was left of Spain, and the pair now sat very stiffly in the ambassador’s parlor where a newly made fire smoked in the hearth behind them. Lord Pumphrey, hastily dressed and looking pale, sat to one side of Wellesley’s desk while the interpreter stood on the other. “One question, Sharpe,” Wellesley greeted the rifleman brusquely.

“Sir?”

“Where were you last night?”

“In bed, sir, all night, sir,” Sharpe said woodenly. It was the tone of voice he had learned as a sergeant, the voice used to tell lies to officers. “Took an early night, sir, on account of my head.” He touched his bandage. The two Spaniards looked at him with distaste. Sharpe had just been woken by an embassy servant and he had hurriedly pulled on his uniform, but he was unshaven, weary, dirty, and exhausted.

“You were in bed?” Wellesley asked.

“All night, sir,” Sharpe said, staring an inch above the ambassador’s head.

The interpreter repeated the exchange in French, the language of diplomacy. The interpreter was only there to translate Sharpe’s words, because everyone else said what they had to say in French. Wellesley looked at the delegation and raised an eyebrow as if to suggest that that was as much as they could hope to learn from Captain Sharpe. “I ask you these questions, Sharpe,” the ambassador explained, “because there was something of a small tragedy last night. A newspaper was burned to the ground. It was quite destroyed, alas. No one was hurt, fortunately, but it’s a sad thing.”

“Very sad, sir.”

“And the newspaper’s proprietor, a man called”—Wellesley paused to look at some notes he had scribbled down.

“Nuñez, Your Excellency,” Lord Pumphrey offered helpfully.

“Nuñez, that’s it, a man called Nuñez, claims that British men did it, and that the British were led by a gentleman with a bandaged head.”

“A gentleman, sir?” Sharpe asked, suggesting that he could never be mistaken for a gentleman.

“I use the word loosely, Captain Sharpe,” Wellesley said with a surprising asperity.

“I was in bed, sir,” Sharpe insisted. “But there was lightning, wasn’t there? I seem to remember a storm, or perhaps I dreamed that?”

“There was lightning, indeed.”

“A lightning strike caused the fire, sir, most likely.”

The interpreter explained to the delegation that there had been lightning and one of the visiting diplomats pointed out that they had found scraps of shell casing in the embers. The two men stared again at Sharpe as their words were translated.

“Shells?” Sharpe asked in mock innocence. “Then it must have been the French mortars, sir.”

That suggestion prompted a flurry of words, summed up by the ambassador. “The French mortars, Sharpe, don’t have the range to reach that part of the city.”

“They would, sir, if they double-charged them.”

“Double-charged?” Lord Pumphrey inquired delicately.

“Twice as much powder as usual, my lord. It will throw the shell much farther, but at the risk of blowing up the gun. Or perhaps they’ve found some decent powder, sir? They’ve been using rubbish, nothing but dust, but a barrel of cylinder charcoal powder would increase their range. Most likely that, sir.” Sharpe uttered this nonsense in a confident voice. He was, after all, the only soldier in the room and the man most likely to know about gunpowder, and no one disputed his opinion.

“Probably a mortar, then,” Wellesley suggested, and the diplomats politely accepted the fiction that the French guns had destroyed the newspaper. It was plain they disbelieved the story and equally plain that, despite their indignation, they did not much care. They had protested because they had to protest, but they had no future in prolonging an argument with Henry Wellesley who, effectively, was the man who funded the Spanish government. The fiction that the French had contrived to extend their mortars’ range by five hundred yards would suffice to dampen the city’s anger.

The diplomats left with mutual expressions of regret and regard. Once they were gone Henry Wellesley leaned back in his chair. “Lord Pumphrey told me what happened in the cathedral. That was a pity, Sharpe.”

“A pity, sir?”

“There were casualties!” Wellesley said sternly. “We don’t know how many, and I daren’t show too much interest in finding out. At present no one is directly accusing us of causing the damage, but they will, they will.”

“We kept the money, sir,” Sharpe said, “and they were never going to give us the letters. I’m sure Lord Pumphrey told you that.”

“I did,” Pumphrey said.

“And it was a priest who tried to cheat you?” Wellesley sounded shocked.

“Father Salvador Montseny,” Lord Pumphrey said sourly.

Wellesley twisted his chair to look out the window. It was a gray day and a thin mist blurred the small garden. “I could, perhaps, have done something about Father Montseny,” he said, still looking into the mist. “I could have brought pressure to bear, I might have had him posted to some mission in a godforsaken fever swamp in the Americas, but that’s impossible now. Your actions at the newspaper, Sharpe, have made it impossible. Those gentlemen pretended to believe us, but they know damned well you did it.” He turned back, his face showing a sudden anger. “I warned you that we must step carefully here. I told you to observe the proprieties. We cannot offend the Spanish. They know that the newspaper was destroyed in an attempt to stop the letters being published, and they will not be happy with us. They might even go so far as to make another press available for the men who have the letters! Good God, Sharpe! We have a house burned, a business destroyed, a cathedral desecrated, men wounded, and for what? Tell me that! For what?”

“For that, sir?” Sharpe said, and laid the copy of El Correo de Cádiz on the ambassador’s desk. “I believe it’s a new edition, sir.”

“Oh, dear God,” Henry Wellesley said. He was blushing as he turned the pages and saw column after column filled with his letters. “Oh, dear God.”

“That’s the only copy,” Sharpe said. “I burned the rest.”

“You burned”—the ambassador began, then his voice faltered because Sharpe had begun laying the ambassador’s imprudent letters on top of the newspaper, one after the other, as if he were dealing cards.

“These are your letters, sir,” Sharpe said, still in his sergeant’s tone of voice, “and we’ve ruined the press that printed them, sir, and we’ve burned their newspapers, and we’ve taught the bastards not to take us lightly, sir. As Lord Pumphrey told me, sir, we have frustrated their knavish tricks. There, sir.” He laid the last letter down.

“Good God,” Henry Wellesley said, staring at the letters.

“Dear Lord above,” Lord Pumphrey said faintly.

“They might have copies, sir,” Sharpe said, “but without the originals they can’t prove the letters are real, can they? And, anyway, they don’t have a way of printing them now.”

“Good God,” Wellesley said again, this time looking up at Sharpe.

“Thief, murderer, and arsonist,” Sharpe said proudly. The ambassador said nothing, just stared at him. “Have you ever heard of a Spanish officer called Captain Galiana, sir?” Sharpe asked.

Wellesley had looked back to the letters and seemed not to have heard Sharpe. Then he gave a start as if he had just woken. “Fernando Galiana? Yes, he was a liaison officer to Sir Thomas’s predecessor. A splendid young man. Are those all the letters?”

“All they had, sir.”

“Good God,” the ambassador said, then stood abruptly, took hold of the letters and the newspaper, and carried them all to the fire. He threw them on the coals and watched them blaze bright. “How—” he began, then decided there were some questions better not answered.

“Will that be all, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“I must thank you, Sharpe,” Wellesley said, still staring at the burning letters.

“And my men, sir, all five of them. I’ll be taking then back to the Isla de León, sir, and we’ll wait there for a ship.”

“Of course, of course.” The ambassador hurried across to his bureau. “Your five men helped?”

“Very much, sir.”

A drawer was opened and Sharpe heard the sound of coins. He pretended not to be interested. The ambassador, not wanting his generosity or lack of it to be obvious, wrapped the coins in a piece of paper that he brought to Sharpe. “Perhaps you’d convey my thanks to your fellows?”

“Of course, sir, thank you, sir.” Sharpe took the coins.

“But you rather look as if you should go back to bed now,” Wellesley said.

“You too, sir.”

“I’m well awake now. Lord Pumphrey and I will stay up. There’s always work to do!” Wellesley was happy suddenly, suffused with relief and the realization that a nightmare was over. “And of course I shall write to my brother commending you in the very highest terms. Be certain I’ll do that, Sharpe.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Good God! It’s over.” The ambassador stared at the last small flames flickering above the blackened mess of the papers lying on the coals. “It’s over!”

“Except the lady, sir,” Sharpe said, “Caterina. She has some letters, doesn’t she?”

“Oh no,” the ambassador said happily, “oh no. It really is over! Thank you, Sharpe.”

Sharpe let himself out. He went into the courtyard where he sniffed the air. It was a dull morning, exhausted after the night’s rain. The weathervane on the embassy’s watchtower betrayed that the wind was from the west. A cat rubbed itself against his ankles and he leaned down to stroke it, then unwrapped the coins. Fifteen guineas. He guessed he was supposed to give one each to his men and keep the rest. He pushed them into a pocket, not sure whether it was a generous reward or not. Probably not, he decided, but his men would be happy enough. He would give them two guineas apiece and that would buy them a lot of rum. “Go and find a mouse,” he told the cat, “because that’s what I’m doing.”

He walked through the archway to the smaller courtyard where servants were sweeping steps and the embassy cow was being milked. The back door to Lord Pumphrey’s house was open and a woman came down the steps to fetch milk. Sharpe waited till her back was turned, then ran up the steps and through the kitchen where the stove had just been relit. He took the next stairs two at a time and opened the door at the top to find himself in a tiled hallway. He climbed more stairs, these deep carpeted, past pictures of Spanish landscapes of white houses, yellow rocks, and blue skies. A white marble statue of a naked boy stood on the landing. The statue was life-size and had a cocked hat on its head. A door stood open and Sharpe saw a woman dusting a bedroom, which he supposed was His Lordship’s. He crept past and she did not hear him. The next flight of stairs was narrower and led to a landing with three closed doors. The first opened onto another stairway, which presumably climbed to the servants’ quarters. The second was the door to a box room that was heaped with unused furniture, valises, and hat boxes. The last door led into a bedroom.

Sharpe crept inside and closed the door. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, for the shutters on both tall windows were closed, but then he could see an empty tin bath in front of the hearth where the remnants of the night’s fire smoldered. There was a bureau, two sofas, a great wardrobe with mirrored doors, and a four-poster bed that had its embroidered curtains drawn.

He crossed the deep rugs and pulled open the nearest shutters to find himself staring across the roofs to the Bay of Cádiz where errant slants of watery sunlight were finding their way through gaps in the cloud to silver the small waves.

Someone grunted in the bed, then moaned slightly, as if resenting being woken by the new light filtering past the bed’s curtains. Sharpe went to the second window and opened its shutters. Arrayed on the window seat, mounted on mahogany stands, were six golden wigs. A blue dress had been discarded on one of the sofas along with a necklace of sapphires and a pair of sapphire earrings. The moan sounded again and Sharpe went to the bed and yanked back the curtains. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully.

And Caterina Veronica Blazquez opened her mouth to scream.

“MY NAME is Sharpe,” Sharpe said before she could alarm the household.

Caterina closed her mouth.

“Richard Sharpe,” he added.

She nodded. She was clutching the bedclothes to her chin. The bed was wide and it was plain a second person had occupied it through the night, for the pillows still showed the mark of his head. The ambassador’s head, Sharpe was certain. Brigadier Moon had seen him come to the house, and Sharpe could not blame Henry Wellesley for being unable to surrender his whore because Caterina Blazquez was a beauty. She had short golden curls that were pretty even in disarray, wide blue eyes, a small nose, a generous mouth, and a smooth pale skin. In a land of dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned women she glowed like a diamond.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Sharpe said, “and I’m not the only one.”

She gave the smallest shake of her head, which, together with her scared expression, conveyed that she was frightened of whoever looked for her.

“You do understand me, don’t you?” Sharpe asked.

A tiny nod of the head. She pulled the covers higher, covering her mouth. This was a good place to hide her, Sharpe thought. She was in no danger here, certainly in no danger from Lord Pumphrey, and she lived in the comfort that a man would want his mistress to enjoy. She was safe enough, at least until the servants’ gossip betrayed her presence in Pumphrey’s house. Caterina was examining Sharpe, her eyes traveling down his shabby uniform, seeing the sword, rising again to his face, and her eyes, if anything, were now slightly wider.

“I was busy last night,” Sharpe said. “I was fetching some letters. Remember those letters?”

Another tiny nod.

“But I got them back. Gave them to Mister Wellesley, I did. He burned them.”

She lowered the bedclothes an inch and rewarded him with a flicker of a smile. He tried to work out how old she was. Twenty-two? Twenty-three? Young, anyway. Young and flawless as far as he could see.

“But there are more letters, darling, aren’t there?”

There was a slight rising of her eyebrows when he called her darling, then a barely discernible shake of her head.

Sharpe sighed. “I know I’m a British officer, darling, but I’m not daft. You know what daft means?”

A nod.

“So let me tell you a bedtime story. Henry Wellesley wrote you a lot of letters that he shouldn’t have written and you kept them. You kept them all, darling. But your pimp took most of them, didn’t he? And he was going to sell them and share the money with you, but then he got murdered. Do you know who murdered him?”

She shook her head.

“A priest. Father Salvador Montseny.”

The slight rise of eyebrows again.

“And Father Montseny murdered the man sent to buy them back,” Sharpe went on, “and last night he tried to murder me, only I’m a much harder man to kill. So he lost the letters and he lost the newspaper that printed them and he’s now a very angry priest, darling. But he knows one thing. He knows you didn’t destroy all the letters. He knows you kept some. You kept them in case you needed the money. But when your pimp got murdered you became scared, didn’t you? So you ran to Henry and told him a pack of lies. You told him the letters were stolen, and told him there weren’t any more. But there are more, and you’ve got them, darling.”

The tiniest and most unconvincing denial, just enough to shiver her curls.

“And the priest is angry, my love,” Sharpe went on. “He wants those other letters. One way or another he’ll find a printing press, but first he has to get the letters, doesn’t he? So he’s coming after you, Caterina, and he’s a wicked man with a knife. He’ll slit your pretty belly from bottom to top.”

Another shiver of the curls. She pulled the bedclothes higher to hide her nose and mouth.

“You think he can’t find you?” Sharpe asked. “I found you. And I know you’ve got the letters.”

This time there was no reaction, just the wide eyes watching him. There was no fear in those eyes. This was a girl, Sharpe realized, who had learned the enormous power of her looks and she already knew that Sharpe was not going to hurt her.

“So tell me, darling,” Sharpe said, “just where the other letters are, and then we’ll be done.”

Very slowly she drew the sheet and blankets down to uncover her mouth. She stared at Sharpe solemnly, apparently thinking about her answer, then she frowned. “Tell me,” she said, “what did you do to your head?”

“It got in the way of a bullet.”

“That was very silly of you, Captain Sharpe.” The smile flickered and was gone. She had a languorous voice, her vowels American. “Pumps told me about you. He said you’re dangerous.”

“I am, very.”

“No, you’re not.” She smiled at him, then half rolled over to look at the face of an ornate clock that ticked on the mantel. “It’s not even eight o clock!”

“You speak good English.”

She lay back on the pillow. “My mother was American. Daddy was Spanish. They met in Florida. Have you heard of Florida?”

“No.”

“It’s south of the United States. It used to belong to Britain, but you had to give it back to Spain after the war of independence. There’s nothing much there except Indians, slaves, soldiers, and missionaries. Daddy was a captain in the garrison at St. Augustine.” She frowned. “If Henry finds you here he’ll be angry.”

“He’s not coming back this morning,” Sharpe said. “He’s working with Lord Pumphrey.”

“Poor Pumps,” Caterina said. “I like him. He talks to me such a lot. Turn around.”

Sharpe obeyed, then edged sideways so that he could see her in the mirrors of the wardrobe doors.

“And move away from the mirrors,” Caterina said.

Sharpe obeyed again.

“You can turn around now,” she said. She had pulled on a blue silk jacket that she laced to her chin, giving him a smile. “When they bring breakfast and water you’ll have to wait in there.” She pointed to a door beside the wardrobe.

“You drink water for breakfast?” Sharpe asked.

“It’s for the bath,” she said. She pulled on a ribbon that rang a bell deep in the house. “I’ll have them revive the fire as well,” she went on. “You like ham? Bread? If the chickens have laid then there’ll be eggs. I’ll tell them I’m very hungry.” She listened until she heard footsteps on the stairs. “Go and hide,” she ordered Sharpe.

He went into a small room filled with Caterina’s clothes. A table with a mirror was cluttered with salves and cosmetics and beauty patches. Behind the mirror was a window and Sharpe, peering into the clearing air, could see the fleet weighing anchor and sailing north out of the bay. The army was on the move. He stared at the ships and thought his place was there, with men, muskets, cannons, and horses stalled in the holds. Men going to war, and here he was in a whore’s dressing room.

The breakfast came a half hour later, by which time the fire was blazing and the bath filled with steaming water. “The servants hate filling the bath,” Caterina said, sitting up on banked pillows now, “because it’s so much work for them, but I insist on having a bath every day. The water will be too hot now, so it can wait. Have some breakfast.”

Sharpe was ravenous. He sat on the bed and ate, and in between mouthfuls he asked questions. “When did you leave, what did you call it, Florida?”

“When I was sixteen, my mother died. Daddy had run away long before that. I didn’t want to stay there.”

“Why not?”

“Stay in Florida?” She shuddered at the thought. “It’s just a hot swamp filled with snakes, alligators, and Indians.”

“So how did you come here?”

“By ship,” she said, her big eyes serious. “It was much too far to swim.”

“By yourself?”

“Gonzalo brought me.”

“Gonzalo?”

“The man who died.”

“The man who was going to sell the letters?”

She nodded.

“And you’ve been working with Gonzalo ever since?”

She nodded again. “In Madrid, Seville, and now here.”

“The same game?”

“Game?”

“Pretend to be well-born, get letters, sell them back?”

She smiled. “We made a lot of money, Captain Sharpe. More than you could ever dream of.”

“I don’t need to dream, darling. I once stole the jewels of an Indian king.”

“So you’re rich?” she asked, eyes brightening.

“Lost it all.”

“Careless, Captain Sharpe.”

“So what will you do without Gonzalo?”

She frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Stay with Henry? Be his mistress?”

“He’s very kind to me,” Caterina said, “but I don’t think he’d take me back to London. And he will go back eventually, won’t he?”

“He’ll go back,” Sharpe confirmed.

“So I’ll have to find someone else,” she said, “but not you.”

“Not me?”

“Someone rich,” she said with a smile.

“And you have to stay away from Father Salvador Montseny,” Sharpe said.

She gave another shudder. “He is really a killer? A priest?”

“He’s as nasty as they come, darling. And he wants your letters. He’ll kill you to get them.”

“But you want my letters too.”

“I do.”

“And Pumps says you’re a killer.”

“I am.”

She seemed to consider her dilemma for a moment, then nodded at the bath. “It’s time to get clean,” she said.

“You want me back in that room?” Sharpe asked.

“Of course not. That bath’s for you. You stink. Get undressed, Captain Sharpe, and I’ll wash your back.”

Sharpe was a good soldier. He obeyed.

“I LIKE Henry Wellesley,” Sharpe said.

“So do I,” Caterina said, “but he is”—she paused, thinking—“earnest.”

“Earnest?”

“Sad. His wife hurt him. Pumps says she was not beautiful.”

“You can’t trust everything Pumps says.”

“But I think he is right. Some women are not beautiful yet they drive men mad. She has driven Henry sad. Are you going to sleep?”

“No,” Sharpe said. The bed was the most comfortable he had experienced. A feather mattress, silk sheets, big pillows, and Caterina. “I have to go.”

“Your uniform isn’t dry.” She had insisted on washing his uniform in the used bath water and it was now propped on two chairs before the fire.

“We have to go,” Sharpe corrected himself.

“We?”

“Montseny wants to find you. And to get the letters he’ll hurt you.”

She thought about that. “When Gonzalo died,” she said, “I came here because I was frightened. And because this is safe.”

“You think Pumps will protect you?”

“No one would dare come in here. It’s the embassy!”

“Montseny will dare,” Sharpe said. “There’s no guard on Lord Pumphrey’s front door, is there? And if the servants see a priest they’ll trust him. Montseny can get in here easily. I did.”

“But if I go with you,” she said, “how do I live?”

“Same as everyone else.”

“I am not everyone else,” she said indignantly, “and didn’t you tell me you were sailing back to Lisbon?”

“I am, but you’ll be safer in the Isla de León. Lots of British soldiers to defend you. Or you can come back to Lisbon with me.” She rewarded that suggestion with a smile and silence. “I know,” Sharpe went on, “I’m not rich enough. So why did you lie to Henry?”

“Lie to him?” She opened her eyes wide and innocent.

“When you came here, darling, you told him you had no letters. You told him you’d lost the ones Gonzalo didn’t have. You lied.”

“I thought perhaps if things went wrong,” she began, then shrugged.

“You’d still have something to sell?”

“Is that bad?”

“Of course it’s bad,” Sharpe said sternly, “but it’s bloody sensible. So how much do you want for them?”

“Your uniform is scorching,” she said. She climbed out of bed and went to turn the jacket and overalls around. Sharpe watched her. A beauty. She would drive men mad, he thought. She came back to the bed and slid in beside him again.

“So how much?” he asked her.

“Gonzalo said he would make me four hundred dollars.”

“He was cheating you,” Sharpe said.

“I don’t think so. Pumps said he couldn’t get more than seven hundred.”

It took Sharpe a moment to understand what she was saying. “Lord Pumphrey said that?”

She nodded very seriously. “He said he could hide the money in the accounts. He would say it was for bribes, but he could only hide seven hundred.”

“And he’d give you that for the letters?”

She nodded again. “He said he would get seven hundred dollars, keep two, and give me five. But he had to wait till the other letters were found. Mine, he said, weren’t valuable till they were the only letters left.”

“Bloody hell,” Sharpe said.

“You’re shocked.” Caterina was amused.

“I thought he was honest.”

“Pumps! Honest?” She laughed. “He tells me his secrets. He shouldn’t, but he wants to know my secrets. He wants to know what Henry says about him so I make him tell me things first. Not that Henry tells me any secrets! So I tell Pumps what he wants to hear. He told me a secret about you.”

“I’ve got no secrets with Lord Pumphrey,” Sharpe said indignantly.

“He has one about you,” she said. “A girl in Copenhagen? Called Ingrid?”

“Astrid.”

“Astrid, that’s the name. Pumps had her killed,” Caterina said.

Sharpe stared at her. “He what?” he asked after a while.

“Astrid and her father. Pumps had their throats cut. He’s very proud of it. He made me promise not to tell anyone.”

“He killed Astrid?”

“He said she and her father knew too many secrets that the French would want to know, and he couldn’t trust them to keep quiet, so he told them to go to England and they wouldn’t so he had them killed.”

It had been four years since Sharpe had been in Copenhagen with the invading British army. He had wanted to stay in Denmark, leave the army, and settle with Astrid, but her father had forbidden the marriage and she was an obedient girl. So Sharpe had abandoned the dream and sailed back to England. “Her father used to send information to Britain,” Sharpe said, “but he got upset with us when we captured Copenhagen.”

“Pumps says he knew a lot of secrets.”

“He did.”

“He doesn’t know any now,” Caterina said callously, “nor does Astrid.”

“The bastard,” Sharpe said, thinking of Lord Pumphrey, “the bloody bastard.”

“You mustn’t hurt him!” Caterina said earnestly. “I like Pumps.”

“You tell Pumps the price for the letters is a thousand guineas.”

“A thousand guineas!”

“In gold,” Sharpe said. “You tell him that, and tell him he can deliver the money to you in the Isla de León.”

“Why there?”

“Because I’ll be there,” Sharpe said, “and so will you. And as long as I’m there you’ll be safe from that murderous priest.”

“You want me to leave here?” she asked.

“You’ve got the letters,” Sharpe said, “so it’s time you made money on them. And if you stay here someone else will make the money. And like as not they’ll kill you to get the letters. So you tell Pumps you want a thousand guineas, and that if you don’t get it you’ll tell me about Astrid.”

“You were in love with her?”

“Yes,” Sharpe said.

“That’s nice.”

“Tell Lord Pumphrey that if he wants to live he should pay you a thousand guineas. Ask for two thousand and maybe you’ll get it.”

“What if he doesn’t pay?”

“Then I’ll slit his throat.”

“You’re a very nasty man,” she said, putting her left thigh across his legs.

“I know.”

She thought for a few seconds, then made a rueful face. “Henry likes having me here. He’ll be unhappy if I go to the Isla de León.”

“Do you mind that?”

“No.” She looked searchingly into Sharpe’s face. “Will Pumps really pay a thousand guineas?”

“He’ll probably pay more,” he said, then kissed her nose.

“So what do you want?” she asked.

“Whatever you want to give me.”

“Oh, that,” she said.

THE FLEET left, all except the Spanish feluccas that could not beat against the monstrous waves that were the remnant of the storm, so they returned to the bay, pursued by the futile splashes of the French mortar shells. The larger British ships drove through the heavy seas and then went south, a host of sail skirting Cádiz to disappear beyond Cape Trafalgar. The wind stayed in the west and the next day the Spaniards found kinder seas and followed.

San Fernando was empty with most of the army gone. There were still battalions on the Isla de León, but they were manning the long defense works on the marshy creek that protected the island and the city from Marshal Victor’s army, though that army left their siege lines two days after the Spanish feluccas sailed. Marshal Victor knew full well what the allies planned. General Lapeña and General Graham would sail their troops south and then, after landing close to Gibraltar, would march north to attack the French siege works. Victor had no intention of allowing his lines to be assailed from the rear. He took most of his army south, looking for a place where he could intercept the British and Spanish forces. He left some men to guard the French lines, just as the British had left some to protect their own batteries. Cádiz waited.

The wind turned north and cold. The Bay of Cádiz was mostly deserted of shipping, except for the small fishing craft and the mastless prison hulks. The French forts on the Trocadero fired desultory mortar shells, but with Marshal Victor gone the garrisons seemed bereft of enthusiasm. The wind stayed obstinately north so that no ships could sail for Lisbon. Sharpe, back on the Isla de León, waited.

A week after the last of the allied ships had sailed, and a day after Marshal Victor had marched away from the siege works, Sharpe borrowed two horses from Sir Thomas Graham’s stable and rode south along the island’s coast where the sea broke white on endless sand. He had been invited to ride to the beach’s end and he was accompanied by Caterina. “Put your heels down,” she told him. “Put your heels down and hold your back straight. You ride like a peasant.”

“I am a peasant. I hate horses.”

“I love them,” she said. She rode like a man, straddling the horse, the way she had been taught in Spanish America. “I hate riding sidesaddle,” she told him. She wore breeches, a jacket, and a wide-brimmed hat that was held in place by a scarf. “I cannot abide the sun,” she said. “It makes your skin like leather. You should see the women in Florida! They look like alligators. If I didn’t wear a hat I’d have a face like yours.”

“Are you saying I’m ugly?”

She laughed at that, then touched her spurs to the mare’s flanks and turned into the sea’s fretted edge. The hooves splashed white where the waves seethed up the beach. She circled back to Sharpe, her eyes bright. She had arrived in San Fernando the day before. She had come in a coach hired from the stables just outside the city, close to the Royal Observatory, and behind the coach three ostlers led packhorses piled with her clothes, cosmetics, and wigs. Caterina had greeted Sharpe with a demure kiss, then gestured at the coachmen and ostlers. “They need paying,” she said airily before stepping into the house Sharpe had rented. There were plenty of empty houses now that the army was gone. Sharpe had paid the men, then looked ruefully at the few coins he had left.

“Is the ambassador unhappy with you?” Sharpe had asked Caterina when he joined her in the house.

“Henry is quiet. He always goes quiet when he’s unhappy. But I told him I was frightened to stay in Cádiz. This is a sweet house!”

“Henry wanted you to stay?”

“Of course he wanted me to stay. But I insisted.”

“And Lord Pumphrey?”

“He said he would bring the money.” She had given him a dazzling smile. “Twelve hundred guineas!”

Sergeant Harper had watched Caterina’s arrival with an expressionless face. “On the strength is she now, sir?”

“She’ll stay with us awhile,” Sharpe said.

“Isn’t that a surprise.”

“And if that bloody priest shows his face, kill him.”

Sharpe doubted Montseny would come near the Isla de León. The priest had been beaten and if the man had any sense he would give up the fight. The best hope for his faction now was that Marshal Victor would beat the allied army, for then Cádiz must inevitably fall and the politicians in its walls would want to make peace with France before that disaster occurred.

That was other men’s business. Sharpe was riding on a long sea-beaten beach. To his east were sand dunes and, beyond them, the marshes. To his west was the Atlantic and to the south, where the beach ended at a river’s mouth, were Spanish soldiers in their sky blue uniforms. From far off across the marshes came the grumble of gunfire, the sound of French cannons bombarding the British batteries guarding the Isla de León. The sound was fitful and faint as distant thunder.

“You look happy,” Caterina said.

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s clean here,” Sharpe said. “I didn’t like Cádiz. Too many alleys, too much darkness, too much treachery.”

“Poor Captain Sharpe.” She mocked him with a brilliant smile. “You don’t like cities?”

“I don’t like politicians. All those bloody lawyers taking bribes and making pompous speeches. What’s going to win the war is that.” He nodded ahead to where the blue-coated soldiers labored in the shallow water. Two feluccas were anchored in the river’s mouth and longboats were ferrying soldiers to the beach beyond. The feluccas were loaded to the gunwales with baulks of timber, anchors and chains, and piles of planks, the materials needed to make a bridge of boats. There were no proper pontoons, but the longboats would serve, and the resultant bridge would be narrow, though if it was properly anchored it would be safe enough.

Captain Galiana was among the officers. It was Galiana who had invited Sharpe to the beach’s end and he now rode out to greet the rifleman. “How is your head, Captain?”

“It’s getting better. It doesn’t hurt so much as it did. It’s vinegar that cures it. May I present the Señorita Caterina Blazquez? Captain Fernando Galiana.”

If Galiana was surprised that a young woman would have no chaperone he hid it, bowing instead and giving Caterina a welcoming smile. “What we’re doing,” he said in answer to her first question, “is making a bridge and protecting it by building a fort on the other bank.”

“Why?” Caterina asked.

“Because if General Lapeña and Sir Thomas fail to reach the French siege works, señorita, they will need a bridge back to the city. I trust the bridge will not be needed, but General Lapeña thought it prudent to make it.” Galiana gave Sharpe a rueful look as though he deplored such defeatism.

Caterina thought about Galiana’s answer. “But if you can build a bridge, Captain,” she asked, “why take the army south on boats? Why not cross here and attack the French?”

“Because, señorita, this is no place to fight. Cross the bridge here and there is nothing but beach in front of you and a creek to your left. Cross here and the French would trap us on the beach. It would be a slaughter.”

“They sailed south,” Sharpe told her, “so they can march inland and take the French from the rear.”

“And you wish you were with them?” Caterina asked Sharpe. She had heard envy in his voice.

“I wish I was,” Sharpe said.

“Me too,” Galiana put in.

“There’s a regiment in the French army,” Sharpe said, “that I’ve got a quarrel with. The 8th of the line. I want to meet them again.”

“Perhaps you will,” Galiana said.

“No, I’m in the wrong place,” Sharpe said sourly.

“But the army will advance from over there”—Galiana pointed inland—“and the French will march to meet them. I think a determined man could ride around the French army and join our forces. A determined man, say, who knows the country.”

“Which is you,” Sharpe said, “not me.”

“I do know the country,” Galiana said, “but whoever commands the fort here will have orders to stop unauthorized Spanish troops from crossing the bridge.” He paused, looking at Sharpe. “But they will have no orders to stop Englishmen.”

“How many days before they get here?” Sharpe asked.

“Three? Four?”

“I’m under orders to take a ship to Lisbon.”

“No ships will be sailing for Lisbon now,” Galiana said confidently.

“The wind might turn,” Sharpe said.

“It’s nothing to do with the wind,” Galiana said, “but with the possibility that General Lapeña is defeated.”

From what Sharpe had heard, everyone expected Lapeña, Doña Manolito, to be thrashed by Victor. “And if he is defeated?” he asked tonelessly.

“Then they will want every available ship ready to evacuate the city,” Galiana said, “which is why no ship will be permitted to leave until the thing is decided.”

“And you expect defeat?” Sharpe asked brutally.

“What I expect,” Galiana said, “is that you will repay the favor you owe me.”

“Get you across the bridge?”

Galiana smiled. “That is the favor, Captain Sharpe. Get me across the bridge.”

And Sharpe thought he might yet meet Colonel Vandal again.