Читать книгу Sharpe’s Fury: The Battle of Barrosa, March 1811 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 9

You were never far from the sea in Cadiz. The smell of it was always there, almost as powerful as the stink of sewage. On the city’s southern side, when the wind was high and from the south, the waves would shatter on the sea wall and spray would rattle on shuttered windows. After the battle of Trafalgar storms had battered the city for a week and the winds had carried the sea spray to the cathedral and torn down scaffolding about its unfinished dome. Waves had besieged Cadiz and pieces of broken ship had clattered on the stones, and then the corpses had come. But that had been almost six years ago and now Spain fought on the same side as Britain, though Cadiz was all that was left of Spain. The rest of the country was either ruled by France or had no government at all. Guerrilleros haunted the hills, poverty ruled the streets and Spain was sullen.

February, 1811. Night time. Another storm beat at the city and monstrous waves shattered white against the sea wall. In the dark the watching man could see the explosions of foam and they reminded him of the powder smoke blasted from cannons. There was the same uncertainty about the violence. Just when he thought the waves had done their worst another two or three would explode in sudden bursts and the white water would bloom above the wall like smoke, and the spray would be driven by the wind to spatter against the city’s white walls like grapeshot.

The man was a priest. Father Salvador Montseny was dressed in a cassock, a cloak and a wide black hat that he needed to hold against the wind’s buffeting. He was a tall man, in his thirties, a fierce preacher of saturnine good looks, who now waited in the small shelter of an archway. He was a long way from home. Home was in the north where he had grown up as the unloved son of a widower lawyer who had sent Salvador to a church school. He had become a priest because he did not know what else he should be, but now he wished he had been a soldier. He thought he would have been a good soldier, but fate had made him a sailor instead. He had been a chaplain on board a Spanish ship captured at Trafalgar and in the darkness above him the sound of battle crashed again. The sound was the boom and snap of the great canvas sheets that protected the cathedral’s half-built dome, but the wind made the huge tarpaulins sound like cannons. The canvas, he knew, had once been the sails of Spain’s battle fleet, but after Trafalgar the sails had been stripped from the few ships that had limped home. Father Salvador Montseny had been in England then. Most Spanish prisoners had been put ashore swiftly, but Montseny was chaplain to an admiral and he had accompanied his master to the damp country house in Hampshire where he had watched the rain fall and the snow cover the pastures and where he had learned to hate.

And he had also learned patience. He was being patient now. His hat and cloak were soaked through and he was cold, but he did not stir. He just waited. He had a pistol in his belt, but he reckoned the priming powder would be sodden. It did not matter. He had a knife. He touched the hilt, leaned on the wall, saw another wave break at the street’s end, saw the spray dash past the dim light from an unshuttered window and then heard the footsteps.

A man came running from the Calle Compañía. Father Montseny waited, just a dark shadow in dark shadows, and saw the man go to the door opposite. It was unlocked. The man went through and the priest followed fast, pushing the door open as the man tried to close it. ‘Gracias,’ Father Montseny said.

They were in an arched tunnel that led to a courtyard. A lantern flickered from an alcove and the man, seeing that Montseny was a priest, looked relieved. ‘You live here, Father?’ he asked.

‘Last rites,’ Father Montseny said, shaking water off his cassock.

‘Ah, that poor woman upstairs.’ The man made the sign of the cross. ‘It’s a dirty night,’ he said.

‘We’ve had worse, my son, and this will pass.’

‘True,’ the man said. He went into the courtyard and climbed the stairs to the first-floor balcony. ‘You’re Catalonian, Father?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Your accent, Father.’ The man took out his key and unlocked his front door and the priest appeared to edge past him towards the steps climbing to the second floor.

The man opened his door, then pitched forward as Father Montseny suddenly turned and gave him a push. The man sprawled on the floor. He had a knife and tried to draw it, but the priest kicked him hard under the chin. Then the front door swung shut and they were in the dark. Father Montseny knelt on the fallen man’s chest and put his own knife at his victim’s throat. ‘Say nothing, my son,’ he ordered. He felt under the trapped man’s wet cloak and found the knife, which he drew and tossed up the passageway. ‘You will speak,’ he said, ‘only when I ask you questions. Your name is Gonzalo Jurado?’

‘Yes.’ Jurado’s voice was scarce above a breath.

‘Do you have the whore’s letters?’

‘No,’ Jurado said, then squealed because Father Montseny’s knife had cut through his skin to touch his jawbone.

‘You will be hurt if you lie,’ the priest said. ‘Do you have the letters?’

‘I have them, yes!’

‘Then show them to me.’

Father Montseny let Jurado rise. He stayed close as Jurado went into a room that overlooked the street where the priest had waited. Steel struck flint and a candle was lit. Jurado could see his assailant more clearly now and thought Montseny must be a soldier in disguise because his face did not have the look of a priest. It was a dark, lantern-jawed face without pity. ‘The letters are for sale,’ Jurado said, then gasped because Father Montseny had hit him in the belly.

‘I said you will speak only when I question you,’ the priest said. ‘Show me the letters.’

The room was small, but very comfortable. It was evident that Gonzalo Jurado liked his luxuries. Two couches faced an empty fireplace above which a gilt-framed mirror hung. There were rugs on the floor. Three paintings hung on the wall opposite the window, all showing naked women. A bureau stood under the window that looked onto the street and the frightened man unlocked one of its drawers and took out a bundle of letters tied with black string. He put them on the bureau and stepped back.

Father Montseny cut the string and spread the letters on the bureau’s leather top. ‘Is this all of them?’

‘All fifteen,’ Jurado said.

‘And the whore?’ Father Montseny asked. ‘She has some still?’

Jurado hesitated, then saw the knife blade reflect candlelight. ‘She has six.’

‘She kept them?’

‘Yes, señor.’

‘Why?’

Jurado shrugged. ‘Fifteen are enough? Maybe she can sell the others later? Perhaps she is still fond of the man? Who knows? Who understands women? But …’ He had been about to ask a question, then feared being hit for speaking out of turn.

‘Go on,’ Father Montseny said, picking out a letter at random.

‘How do you know about the letters? I told no one except the English.’

‘Your whore made confession,’ Father Montseny said.

‘Caterina! She went to confession?’

‘Once a year, she told me,’ Father Montseny said, scanning the letter, ‘always on her patron saint’s name day. She came to the cathedral, told God about her many sins, and I granted her absolution on his behalf. How much do you want for the letters?’

‘English guineas,’ Jurado said, ‘fifteen letters, twenty guineas each.’ He was feeling more confident now. He kept a loaded pistol in the bureau’s bottom drawer. He tested the mainspring every day and changed the powder at least once a month. And his fear had subsided now that he understood Montseny really was a priest. A frightening priest, to be sure, but still a man of God. ‘If you prefer to pay Spanish money, Father,’ he went on, ‘then the letters are yours for thirteen hundred dollars.’

‘Thirteen hundred dollars?’ Father Montseny responded absently. He was reading one of the letters. It was written in English, but that was no problem for he had learned the language in Hampshire. The letter’s writer had been deeply in love and the fool had committed that love to paper. The fool had made promises, and the girl to whom he had made the promises had turned out to be a whore, and Jurado was her pimp, and now the pimp wanted to blackmail the letter writer.

‘I have a reply,’ the pimp dared to speak without invitation.

‘From the English?’

‘Yes, Father. It’s in here.’ Jurado gestured at the bureau’s bottom drawer. Father Montseny nodded his permission and Jurado opened the drawer, then yelped because a fist had struck him so hard that he reeled backwards. He hit the door behind him which gave way so that he fell on his back in the bedroom. Father Montseny took the pistol from the bureau drawer, opened the frizzen, blew out the powder and tossed the now useless weapon onto one of the silk-covered couches. ‘You said you had received a reply?’ he asked as though there had been no violence.

Jurado was shaking now. ‘They said they would pay.’

‘You have arranged the exchange?’

‘Not yet.’ Jurado hesitated. ‘Are you with the English?’

‘No, thank God. I am with the most holy Roman church. So how do you communicate with the English?’

‘I am to leave a message at the Cinco Torres.’

‘Addressed to whom?’

‘To a Señor Plummer.’

The Cinco Torres was a coffee house on the Calle Ancha. ‘So in your next message,’ Father Montseny said, ‘you will tell this Plummer where to meet you? Where the exchange will take place?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘You have been very helpful, my son,’ Father Montseny said, then held out a hand as if to pull Jurado to his feet. Jurado, grateful for the help, allowed himself to be pulled up, and only at the last second saw that he was being hauled onto the priest’s knife which slashed into his throat. Father Montseny grimaced as he wrenched the blade sideways. It was harder than he had thought, but he gave a grunt as he slashed the sharpened steel through gullet and artery and muscle. The pimp collapsed, making a noise like water draining. Montseny held Jurado down as he died. It was messy, but the blood would not show on his black cloak. Some blood drained through the floorboards where it would drip into the saddler’s shop that occupied most of the building’s ground floor. It took over a minute for the pimp to die, and all the while the blood dripped through the boards, but at last Jurado was dead and Father Montseny made the sign of the cross over the pimp’s face and said a brief prayer for the departed soul. He sheathed his knife, wiped his hands on the dead man’s cloak, and went back to the bureau. He found a great stack of money in one of the drawers and he pushed the folded notes into the top of his left boot and then he bundled up the letters. He wrapped them in a cover he took from a cushion and then, to ensure they stayed dry, he put them next to his skin beneath his shirt. He poured a glass of sherry from a decanter and, as he sipped it, he thought about the girl to whom the letters had been written. She lived, he knew, just two streets away and she still had six letters, but he possessed fifteen. More than enough, he decided. Besides, the girl was almost certainly not at home, but servicing a client in one of Cadiz’s more palatial bedrooms.

He blew out the candle and went back into the night where the waves broke white at the city’s edge and the great sails boomed like guns in the wet dark. Father Salvador Montseny, killer, priest and patriot, had just ensured the salvation of Spain.

It had all begun so well.

In the moonlit darkness the River Guadiana lay beneath the South Essex’s light company like a misted streak of molten silver pouring slow and massive between black hills. Fort Joseph, named for Napoleon’s brother who was the French puppet on the throne of Spain, was on the hill closest to the company while Fort Josephine, named after the Emperor’s discarded wife, lay at the top of a long slope on the far bank. Fort Joseph was in Portugal, Josephine was in Spain, and between the two forts was a bridge.

Six light companies had been sent from Lisbon under the command of Brigadier General Sir Barnaby Moon. A coming man, Brigadier Moon, a young thruster, an officer destined for higher things, and this was his first independent command. If he got this right, if the bridge was broken, then Sir Barnaby could look to a future as shining as the river that slid between the darkened hills.

And it had all begun so well. The six companies had been ferried across the Tagus in a misted dawn, then had marched across southern Portugal which was supposedly French-held territory, but the partisans had assured the British that the French had withdrawn their few garrisons and so it proved. Now, just four days after leaving Lisbon, they had reached the river and the bridge. Dawn was close. The British troops were on the Guadiana’s western bank where Fort Joseph had been built on a hill beside the river, and in the last of the night’s darkness the ramparts of the fort were outlined by the glow of fires behind the firestep. The encroaching dawn was dimming that glow, but every now and then the silhouette of a man showed in one of the fort’s embrasures.

The French were awake. The six British light companies knew that because they had heard the bugles calling the reveilles, first in distant Fort Josephine, then in Joseph, but just because the French were awake did not mean they were alert. If you wake men every day in the chill darkness before dawn they soon learn to carry their dreams to the ramparts. They might look as though they are staring alertly into the dark, ready for a dawn attack, but in truth they are thinking of the women left in France, of the women still sleeping in the fort’s barrack rooms, of the women they wished were sleeping in the fort, of the women they could only dream about, of women. They were dozy.

And the forts had been undisturbed all winter. It was true there were guerrilleros in these hills, but they rarely came close to the forts which had cannon in their embrasures, and peasants armed with muskets quickly learn they are no match for emplaced artillery. The Spanish and Portuguese partisans either ambushed the forage parties of the French troops besieging Badajoz thirty miles to the north or else harried the forces of Marshal Victor who besieged Cadiz a hundred and fifty miles to the south.

There had once been five good stone bridges crossing the Guadiana between Badajoz and the sea, but they had all been blown up by the contending armies, and now there was only this one French pontoon bridge to provide a link between the Emperor’s siege forces. It was not used much. Travel in Portugal or Spain was dangerous for the French because the guerrilleros were merciless, but once every two or three weeks the pontoon bridge would creak under the weight of a battery of artillery, and every few days a despatch rider would cross the river escorted by a regiment of dragoons. Not many local folk used the bridge, for very few could afford the toll and fewer still wanted to risk the animosity of the twin garrisons which were, as a result, mostly left in peace. The war seemed far away, which was why the defenders manning the ramparts in the early morning were dreaming of women rather than looking for the enemy troops who had followed a goat track from the darkened heights into the blackness of the valley to the west of Fort Joseph.

Captain Richard Sharpe, commander of the South Essex light company, was not in the valley. He was with his company on a hill to the north of the fort. He had the easiest job of the morning, which was to create a diversion, and that meant none of his men should die and none should even be wounded. Sharpe was glad of that, but he was also aware that he had not been given the easy job as a reward, but because Moon disliked him. The brigadier had made that plain when the six light companies had reported to him in Lisbon. ‘My name’s Moon,’ the brigadier had said, ‘and you’ve got a reputation.’

Sharpe, taken aback by the offhand greeting, had looked surprised. ‘I do, sir?’

‘Don’t be modest with me, man,’ Moon had said, stabbing a finger at the South Essex badge which showed a chained eagle. Sharpe and his sergeant, Patrick Harper, had captured that eagle from the French at Talavera and such a feat, as Moon had said, gave a man a reputation. ‘I don’t want any damn heroics, Sharpe,’ the brigadier went on.

‘No, sir.’

‘Good plain soldiering wins wars,’ Moon had said. ‘Doing mundane things well is what counts.’ That was undoubtedly true, but it was odd coming from Sir Barnaby Moon whose reputation was anything but mundane. He was young, only just a year over thirty, and he had been in Portugal for little more than a year, yet he had already made a name for himself. He had led his battalion at Bussaco where, on the ridge where the French had climbed and died, he had rescued two of his skirmishers by galloping through his men’s ranks and killing the skirmishers’ captors with his sword. ‘No damned Frog will take my fusiliers!’ he had announced, leading the two men back, and his soldiers had cheered him and he had taken off his cocked hat and bowed to them from the saddle. He was also said to be a gambler and a ruthless hunter of women and, because he was as wealthy as he was handsome, he was reckoned a most successful hunter. London, it was said, was a safer city now that Sir Barnaby was in Portugal, though doubtless there were a score or more of Lisbon ladies who might give birth to babies who would grow up to have Sir Barnaby’s lean face, fair hair and startling blue eyes. He was, in brief, anything but a plain soldier, yet that was what he required of Sharpe and Sharpe was happy to oblige. ‘You need make no reputation with me, Sharpe,’ Sir Barnaby had said.

‘I’ll try hard not to, sir,’ Sharpe had said, for which he had received a foul look, and ever since Moon had virtually ignored Sharpe. Jack Bullen, who was Sharpe’s lieutenant, reckoned that the brigadier was jealous.

‘Don’t be daft, Jack,’ Sharpe had said when this was proposed.

‘In any drama, sir,’ Bullen had persevered, ‘there is only room for one hero. The stage is too small for two.’

‘You’re an expert on drama, Jack?’

‘I am an expert on everything except for the things you know about,’ Bullen had said, making Sharpe laugh. The truth, Sharpe reckoned, was that Moon simply shared most officers’ mistrust of men who had been promoted from the ranks. Sharpe had joined the army as a private, he had served as a sergeant and now he was a captain, and that irritated some men who saw Sharpe’s rise as an affront to the established order. Which, Sharpe decided, was fine by him. He would create the diversion, let the other five companies do the fighting, then go back to Lisbon and so back to the battalion. In a month or two, as spring arrived in Portugal, they would march north from the Lines of Torres Vedras and pursue Marshal Masséna’s forces into Spain. There would be plenty enough fighting in the spring, even enough for upstarts.

‘There’s the light, sir,’ Sergeant Patrick Harper said. He was lying flat beside Sharpe and staring into the valley.

‘You’re sure?’

‘There it is again, sir. See it?’

The brigadier had a shielded lantern and, by raising one of its screens, could flash a dim light that would be hidden from the French. It glowed again, made faint by the dawn, and Sharpe called to his men. ‘Now, lads.’

All they had to do was show themselves. Not in ranks and files, but scattered across the hilltop so that they looked like partisans. The object was to make the French peer northwards and so ignore the attack creeping from the west.

‘That’s all we do?’ Harper asked. ‘We just piss around up here?’

‘More or less,’ Sharpe said. ‘Stand up, lads! Let the Crapauds see you!’ The light company was on the skyline, plainly visible, and there was just enough light to see that the French in Fort Joseph had registered their presence. Undoubtedly the garrison’s officers would be training their telescopes on the hill, but Sharpe’s men were in greatcoats so their uniforms, with their distinctive crossbelts, were not visible, and he had told them to take off their shakos so they did not look like soldiers.

‘Can we give them a shot or two?’ Harper asked.

‘Don’t want to get them excited,’ Sharpe said. ‘We just want them to watch us.’

‘But we can shoot when they wake up?’

‘When they see the others, yes. We’ll give them a greenjacket breakfast, eh?’

Sharpe’s company was unique in that while most of its men wore the red coats of the British infantry others were uniformed in the green jackets of the rifle battalions. It was all because of a mistake. Sharpe and his riflemen had been cut off from the retreat to Corunna, had made their way south to the forces in Lisbon and there been temporarily attached to the red-coated South Essex and somehow they had never left. The greenjackets carried rifles. To most people a rifle looked like a short musket, but the difference was hidden inside the barrel. The Baker rifle had seven grooves twisting the length of its barrel and those grooves gave the bullet a spin which made it lethally accurate. A musket was quick to load and fast to fire, but beyond sixty paces a man might as well shut his eyes rather than take aim. The rifle could kill at three times that range. The French had no rifles, which meant Sharpe’s greenjackets could lie on the hill, shoot at the defenders and know that none of the infantry inside Fort Joseph could answer their fire.

‘There they go,’ Harper said.

The five light companies were advancing up the hill. Their red uniforms looked black in the half-light. Some carried short ladders. They had a nasty job, Sharpe thought. The fort had a dry ditch and from the bottom of the ditch to the top of the parapet was at least ten feet and the top of the parapet was protected by sharpened stakes. The redcoats had to cross the ditch, place the ladders between the stakes and climb into the musket fire of the defenders. And, worse, face cannon fire as well. The French cannons were undoubtedly loaded, but with what? Round shot or canister? If it was canister then Moon’s troops could be hit hard by the first volley, while round shot would do much less damage. Not Sharpe’s problem. He walked along the hilltop, making sure he was silhouetted against the lightening sky, and miraculously the French were still oblivious of the four hundred men approaching from the west. ‘Go on, boys,’ Harper muttered, not speaking to all of the attacking troops, but to the light company of the 88th, the Connaught Rangers, an Irish regiment.

Sharpe was not watching. He had suddenly been seized by the superstition that if he watched the attack then it would fail. Instead he stared down at the river, counting the bridge’s pontoons, which were dark shadows in the mist that writhed just above the water. He decided he would count them and not look at Fort Joseph until the first shot was fired. Thirty-one, he reckoned, which meant there was one pontoon every ten feet for the river was just over a hundred yards wide. The pontoons were big, clumsy, square-ended barges across which a timber roadway had been laid. The winter had been wet all across southern Spain and Portugal and the Guadiana was running high and he could see the water seething where it broke on the pontoons’ bluff bows. Each boat had anchor chains running into the river and spring lines tensioned between the neighbouring barges across which the heavy baulks ran to support the chesses, the planks that made the roadway. It probably weighed over a hundred tons, Sharpe reckoned, and this job would not be over until that long bridge was destroyed.

‘They’re dozy bastards,’ Harper said in wonderment, presumably speaking of Fort Joseph’s defenders, but still Sharpe would not look. He was staring at Fort Josephine across the river where he could see men clustered about a cannon. They stepped away and the gun fired, belching a dirty smoke above the river’s thinning mist. It had fired a round of canister. The tin can, crammed with bullets, tore itself apart as it left the cannon’s muzzle and the half-inch balls whipped the air about Sharpe’s hilltop. The boom of the cannon rolled and echoed up the river valley. ‘Anyone hit?’ Sharpe called. No one answered.

The cannon’s fire only made the defenders of the nearer fort stare at the hill more intently. They were aiming one of their own cannon now, trying to elevate it so that the canister would scrape the skyline. ‘Keep your heads down,’ Sharpe said, then there was a dull rattle of musketry and he dared to look back at the attack.

It was almost over. There were redcoats in the ditch, more on ladders, and even as Sharpe watched he saw the redcoats surge over the parapet and carry bayonets at the blue-uniformed Frenchmen. There was no need of his rifles. ‘Get out of sight of that damned gun,’ he shouted, and his men hurried off the crest. A second cannon fired from the fort across the river and a musket ball plucked at the hem of Sharpe’s greatcoat and another drove up a flurry of dew from the grass by his side, but then he was off the hilltop and hidden from the distant gunners.

No gun fired from Fort Joseph. The garrison had been taken utterly by surprise and there were redcoats in the centre of the fort now, and a panicked stream of Frenchmen was running from the eastern gate to cross the bridge to the safety of Fort Josephine on the river’s Spanish bank. The musket fire was slowing. Maybe a dozen Frenchmen had been captured, the rest were fleeing, and there seemed to be scores of them running towards the bridge. The redcoats, screaming their war cries in the dawn, carried bayonets that encouraged the panicked flight. The French tricolour was hauled down before the last of the attacking troops had even crossed the ditch and wall. It had all been that quick.

‘Our job’s done,’ Sharpe said. ‘Down to the fort.’

‘That was easy,’ Lieutenant Jack Bullen said happily.

‘Not over yet, Jack.’

‘The bridge, you mean?’

‘Got to be destroyed.’

‘The hard bit’s done, anyway.’

‘That’s true,’ Sharpe said. He liked young Jack Bullen, a bluff Essex boy who was uncomplaining and hard-working. The men liked Bullen too. He treated them fairly, with the confidence that came from privilege, but it was a privilege that was always tempered by cheerfulness. A good officer, Sharpe reckoned.

They filed down the hill, across the rocky valley, over a small stream that fell cold from the hills and so up the next hill to the fort where the ladders were still propped against the parapet. Every now and then a petulant gun fired from Fort Josephine, but the balls were wasted against the earth-filled wicker baskets that topped the parapet. ‘Ah, you’re here, Sharpe,’ Brigadier Moon greeted him. He was suddenly affable, his dislike of Sharpe washed away by the elation of victory.

‘Congratulations, sir.’

‘What? Oh, thank you. That’s generous of you.’ Moon did seem touched by Sharpe’s praise. ‘It went better than I dared hope. There’s tea on the boil over there. Let your lads have some.’

The French prisoners were sitting in the fort’s centre. A dozen horses had been found in the stables and they were now being saddled, presumably because Moon, who had marched from the Tagus, reckoned he had earned the privilege of riding back. A captured officer was standing beside the well, disconsolately watching the victorious British troops who were gleefully searching the French packs captured in the barracks. ‘Fresh bread!’ Major Gillespie, one of Moon’s aides, tossed Sharpe a loaf. ‘Still warm. The bastards live well, don’t they?’

‘I thought they were supposed to be starving?’

‘Not here they’re not. Land of milk and honey, this place.’

Moon climbed to the eastern firestep which faced the bridge and began looking into the ready magazines beside the guns. The artillerymen in Fort Josephine saw his red coat and opened fire. They were using canister and their shots rattled on the parapet and whistled overhead. Moon ignored the balls. ‘Sharpe!’ he called, then waited as the rifleman climbed to the rampart. ‘Time you earned your wages, Sharpe,’ he said. Sharpe said nothing, just watched as the brigadier peered into a magazine. ‘Round shot,’ Moon announced, ‘common shell and grapeshot.’

‘Not canister, sir?’

‘Grapeshot, definitely grapeshot. Naval stores, I suspect. Bastards haven’t got any ships left so they’ve sent their grapeshot here.’ He let the magazine lid drop and stared down at the bridge. ‘Common shell won’t break that brute, will it? There are a score of women down below. In the barracks. Have some of your fellows escort them over the bridge, will you? Deliver them to the French with my compliments. The rest of your men can help Sturridge. He’ll have to blow the far end.’

Lieutenant Sturridge was a Royal Engineer whose job was to destroy the bridge. He was a nervous young man who seemed terrified of Moon. ‘The far end?’ Sharpe asked, wanting to be sure he had heard correctly.

Moon looked exasperated. ‘If we break the bridge at this end, Sharpe,’ he explained with exaggerated patience as though he were speaking to a young and not very bright child, ‘the damn thing will float downstream, but will still be attached to the far bank. The French can then salvage the pontoons. Not much point in coming all this way and leaving the French with a serviceable pontoon bridge that they can rebuild, is there? But if we break it at the Spanish end the pontoons should end up on this bank and we can burn them.’ A barrel-load of canister or grapeshot hissed overhead and the brigadier threw Fort Josephine an irritated glance. ‘Get on with it,’ he said to Sharpe, ‘I want to be away by tomorrow’s dawn.’

A picquet from the 74th’s light company guarded the eighteen women. Six were officers’ wives and they stood apart from the rest, trying to look brave. ‘You’ll take them over,’ Sharpe told Jack Bullen.

‘I will, sir?’

‘You like women, don’t you?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘And you speak some of their horrible language, don’t you?’

‘Incredibly well, sir.’

‘So take the ladies over the bridge and up to that other fort.’

While Lieutenant Bullen persuaded the women that no harm would come to them and that they must gather their luggage and be ready to cross the river, Sharpe looked for Sturridge and found the engineer in the fort’s main magazine. ‘Powder,’ Sturridge greeted Sharpe. He had prised the lid from a barrel and now tasted the gunpowder. ‘Bloody awful powder.’ He spat it out with a grimace. ‘Bloody French powder. Nothing but bloody dust. Damp, too.’

‘Will it work?’

‘It should go bang,’ Sturridge said gloomily.

‘I’m taking you over the bridge,’ Sharpe told him.

‘There’s a handcart outside,’ Sturridge said, ‘and we’ll need it. Five barrels should be enough, even of this rubbish.’

‘You’ve got fuse?’

Sturridge unbuttoned his blue jacket and showed that he had several yards of slow match coiled around his waist. ‘You just thought I was portly, didn’t you? Why doesn’t he just blow the bridge at this end? Or in the middle?’

‘So the French can’t rebuild it.’

‘They couldn’t anyway. Takes a lot of skill to make one of those bridges. Doesn’t take much to undo one, but making a pontoon bridge isn’t a job for amateurs.’ Sturridge hammered the lid back onto the opened powder barrel. ‘The French aren’t going to like us being over there, are they?’

‘I wouldn’t think so.’

‘So is this where I die for England?’

‘That’s why I’m there. To make sure you don’t.’

‘That is a consolation,’ Sturridge said. He glanced across at Sharpe who was leaning, arms folded, against the wall. Sharpe’s face was shadowed by his shako’s peak, but his eyes were bright in the shadow. The face was scarred, hard, watchful and thin. ‘Actually it is a consolation,’ Sturridge said, then flinched because the brigadier was bellowing in the courtyard, demanding to know where Sturridge was and why the damned bridge was still intact. ‘Bloody man,’ Sturridge said.

Sharpe went back to the sunlight where Moon was exercising a captured horse, showing off to the French wives who had gathered by the eastern gate where Jack Bullen had commandeered the handcart for their luggage. Sharpe ordered the bags off and the cart to the main magazine where Harper and a half-dozen men loaded it with gunpowder. Then the women’s luggage was placed on top. ‘It’ll disguise the powder barrels,’ Sharpe explained to Harper.

‘Disguise it, sir?’

‘If the Crapauds see us crossing the bridge with powder, what do you think they’ll do?’

‘They won’t be happy, sir.’

‘No, Pat, they won’t. They’ll use us for target practice.’

It was mid-morning before everything was ready. The French in Fort Josephine had abandoned their desultory cannon fire. Sharpe had half expected the enemy to send an envoy across the river to enquire about the women, but none had come. ‘Three of the officers’ wives are from the 8th, sir,’ Jack Bullen told Sharpe.

‘They’re what?’ Sharpe asked.

‘French regiment, sir. The 8th. They’ve been at Cadiz, but they were sent to reinforce the troops besieging Badajoz. They’re across the river, sir, but some of the officers and their wives slept here last night. Better quarters, see?’ Bullen paused, evidently expecting some reaction from Sharpe. ‘Don’t you see, sir? There’s a whole French battalion over there. The 8th. Not just the garrison, but a fighting battalion. Oh, dear God.’ This last was because two women had detached themselves from the rest and were haranguing him in Spanish. Bullen calmed them with a smile. ‘They say they’re Spanish, sir,’ he explained to Sharpe, ‘and say they don’t want to go to the other fort.’

‘What are they doing here in the first place?’

The women talked to Sharpe, both at the same time, both urgently, and he thought he understood that they were claiming to have been captured by the French and forced to live with a pair of soldiers. That might be true, he thought. ‘So where do you want to go?’ he asked them in bad Spanish.

They both spoke again, pointing across the river and southwards, claiming that was where they had come from. Sharpe hushed them. ‘They can go wherever they bloody like, Jack.’

The fort’s gate was thrown open and Bullen led the way through, holding his arms wide to show the French across the river that he meant no harm. The women followed. The track down to the river was rough and stony and the women went slowly until they reached the wooden roadway laid across the pontoons. Sharpe and his men brought up the rear. Harper, his seven-barrelled gun slung next to his rifle, nodded across the river. ‘There’s a reception party, sir,’ he said, referring to three mounted French officers who had just appeared outside Fort Josephine. They were waiting there, watching the approaching women and soldiers.

A dozen of Sharpe’s men were manhandling the cart. Lieutenant Sturridge, the engineer, was with them and he kept flinching because the cart had a skewed axle and constantly lurched to the left. It went more smoothly once they were on the bridge, though the women were nervous of crossing because the whole roadway of planked chesses was vibrating from the pressure of the winter-swollen river as it forced its way between the barge-like pontoons. Dead branches and flotsam were jammed on the upstream side, increasing the pressure and making the water break white about the bluff bows. Each of the big pontoons was held against the current by a pair of thick anchor chains and Sharpe hoped that five barrels of damp powder would prove sufficient to shatter the massive construction. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Harper asked.

‘Porto?’

‘All those poor bastards,’ Harper said, remembering the awful moment when the pontoon bridge across the Douro had snapped. The roadway had been crowded with folk fleeing the invading French, and hundreds of them had drowned. Sharpe still saw the children in his dreams.

The three French officers were riding down to the bridge’s far end now. They waited there and Sharpe hurried past the women. ‘Jack?’ he called to Bullen. ‘I need you to translate.’

Sharpe and Bullen led the way to the Spanish bank. The women followed hesitantly. The three French officers waited and, as Sharpe drew near, one of them took off his cocked hat in salute. ‘My name is Lecroix,’ he introduced himself. He spoke in English. Lecroix was a young man, exquisitely uniformed, with a lean handsome face and very white teeth. ‘Captain Lecroix of the 8th,’ he added.

‘Captain Sharpe.’

Lecroix’s eyes widened slightly, perhaps because Sharpe did not look like a captain. His uniform was torn and dirty and, though he wore a sword, as officers did, the blade was a heavy cavalry trooper’s weapon, which was a huge and unwieldy blade better suited for butchering. He carried a rifle too, and officers did not usually carry longarms. Then there was his face, tanned and scarred, a face you might meet in some foetid alley, not in a salon. It was a frightening face and Lecroix, who was no coward, almost recoiled from the hostility in Sharpe’s eyes. ‘Colonel Vandal,’ he said, putting the stress on the name’s second syllable, ‘sends his compliments, monsieur, and requests that you permit us to recover our wounded,’ he paused, glancing at the handcart that had been stripped of the women’s luggage, thus revealing the powder kegs, ‘before you attempt to destroy the bridge.’

‘Attempt?’ Sharpe asked.

Lecroix ignored the scorn. ‘Or do you intend to leave our wounded for the amusements of the Portuguese?’

Sharpe was tempted to say that any French wounded deserved whatever they got from the Portuguese, but he resisted the urge. The request, he reckoned, was fair enough and so he drew Jack Bullen away far enough so that the French officers could not overhear him. ‘Go and see the brigadier,’ he told the lieutenant, ‘and tell him these buggers want to fetch their wounded over the river before we destroy the bridge.’

Bullen set off back across the bridge while two of the French officers started back towards Fort Josephine, followed by all the women except the two Spaniards who, barefoot and ragged, hurried south down the river’s bank. Lecroix watched them go. ‘Those two didn’t want to stay with us?’ He sounded surprised.

‘They said you captured them.’

‘We probably did.’ He took out a leather case of long thin cigars and offered one to Sharpe. Sharpe shook his head, then waited as Lecroix laboriously struck a light with his tinderbox. ‘You did well this morning,’ the Frenchman said once the cigar was alight.

‘Your garrison was asleep,’ Sharpe said.

Lecroix shrugged. ‘Garrison troops. No good. Old and sick and tired men.’ He spat out a shred of tobacco. ‘But I think you have done all the damage you will do today. You will not break the bridge.’

‘We won’t?’

‘Cannon,’ Lecroix said laconically, gesturing at Fort Josephine, ‘and my colonel is determined to preserve the bridge, and what my colonel wants, he gets.’

‘Colonel Vandal?’

‘Vandal,’ Lecroix corrected Sharpe’s pronunciation. ‘Colonel Vandal of the eighth of the line. You have heard of him?’

‘Never.’

‘You should educate yourself, Captain,’ Lecroix said with a smile, ‘read the accounts of Austerlitz and be astonished by Colonel Vandal’s bravery.’

‘Austerlitz?’ Sharpe asked. ‘What was that?’

Lecroix just shrugged. The women’s luggage was dropped at the bridge’s end and Sharpe sent the men back, then followed them until he reached Lieutenant Sturridge who was kicking at the planks on the foredeck of the fourth pontoon from the bank. The timber was rotten and he had managed to make a hole there. The stench of stagnant water came from the hole. ‘If we widen it,’ Sturridge said, ‘then we should be able to blow this one to hell and beyond.’

‘Sir!’ Harper called and Sharpe turned eastwards and saw French infantry coming from Fort Josephine. They were fixing bayonets and forming ranks just outside the fort, but he had no doubt they were coming to the bridge. It was a big company, at least a hundred men. French battalions were divided into six companies, unlike the British who had ten, and this company looked formidable with fixed bayonets. Bloody hell, Sharpe thought, but if the Frogs wanted to make a fight of it then they had better hurry because Sturridge, helped by half a dozen of Sharpe’s men, was prising off the pontoon’s foredeck and Harper was carrying the first powder barrel towards the widening hole.

There was a thunderous sound from the Portuguese side of the bridge and Sharpe saw the brigadier, accompanied by two officers, galloping onto the roadway. More redcoats were coming from the fort, doubling down the stony track, evidently to reinforce Sharpe’s men. The brigadier’s commandeered stallion was nervous of the vibrating roadway, but Moon was a superb horseman and kept the beast under control. He curbed the horse close to Sharpe. ‘What the devil’s going on?’

‘They said they wanted to fetch their wounded, sir.’

‘So what are those bloody men doing?’ Moon looked at the French infantry.

‘I reckon they want to stop us blowing the bridge, sir.’

‘Damn them to hell,’ Moon said, throwing Sharpe an angry look as if it was Sharpe’s fault. ‘Either they’re talking to us or they’re fighting us, they can’t do both at the same time! There are some bloody rules in war!’ He spurred on. Major Gillespie, the brigadier’s aide, followed him after giving Sharpe a sympathetic glance. The third horseman was Jack Bullen. ‘Come on, Bullen!’ Moon shouted. ‘You can interpret for me. My Frog ain’t up to scratch.’

Harper was filling the bows of the fourth pontoon with the barrels and Sturridge had taken off his jacket and was unwinding the slow match coiled about his waist. There was nothing there for Sharpe to do, so he went to where the brigadier was snarling at Lecroix. The immediate cause of the brigadier’s anger was that the French infantry company had advanced halfway down the hill and were now arrayed in line facing the bridge. They were no more than a hundred paces away, and were accompanied by three mounted officers. ‘You can’t talk to us about recovering your wounded and make threatening movements at the same time!’ Moon snapped.

‘I believe, monsieur, those men merely come to collect the wounded,’ Lecroix said soothingly.

‘Not carrying weapons, they don’t,’ Moon said, ‘and not without my permission! And why the hell have they got fixed bayonets?’

‘A misunderstanding, I’m sure,’ Lecroix said emolliently. ‘Perhaps you would do us the honour of discussing the matter with my colonel?’ He gestured towards the horsemen waiting behind the French infantry.

But Moon was not going to be summoned by some French colonel. ‘Tell him to come here,’ he insisted.

‘Or you will send an emissary, perhaps?’ Lecroix suggested smoothly, ignoring the brigadier’s direct order.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Moon growled. ‘Major Gillespie? Go and talk sense to the damned man. Tell him he can send one officer and twenty soldiers to recover their wounded. They’re not to bring any weapons, but the officer may carry sidearms. Lieutenant?’ The brigadier looked at Bullen. ‘Go and translate.’

Gillespie and Bullen rode uphill with Lecroix. Meanwhile the light company of the 88th had arrived on the French side of the bridge that was now crowded with soldiers. Sharpe was worried. His own company was on the roadway, guarding Sturridge, and now the 88th’s light company had joined them, and they all made a prime target for the French company which was in a line of three ranks. Then there were the French gunners watching from the ramparts of Fort Josephine who doubtless had their barrels loaded with grapeshot. Moon had ordered the 88th down to the bridge, but now seemed to realize that they were an embarrassment rather than a reinforcement. ‘Take your men back to the other side,’ he called to their captain, then turned around because a single Frenchman was now riding towards the bridge. Gillespie and Bullen, meanwhile, were with the other French officers behind the enemy company.

The French officer curbed his horse twenty paces away and Sharpe assumed this was the renowned Colonel Vandal, the 8th’s commanding officer, for he had two heavy gold epaulettes on his blue coat and his cocked hat was crowned with a white pom-pom which seemed a frivolous decoration for a man who looked so baleful. He had a savagely unfriendly face with a narrow black moustache. He appeared to be about Sharpe’s age, in his middle thirties, and had a force that came from an arrogant confidence. He spoke good English in a clipped harsh voice. ‘You will withdraw to the far bank,’ he said without any preamble.

‘And who the devil are you?’ Moon demanded.

‘Colonel Henri Vandal,’ the Frenchman said, ‘and you will withdraw to the far bank and leave the bridge undamaged.’ He took a watch from his coat pocket, clicked open the lid and showed the face to the brigadier. ‘I shall give you one minute before I open fire.’

‘This is no way to behave,’ Moon said loftily. ‘If you wish to fight, Colonel, then you will have the courtesy to return my envoys first.’

‘Your envoys?’ Vandal seemed amused by the word. ‘I saw no flag of truce.’

‘Your fellow didn’t carry one either!’ Moon protested.

‘And Captain Lecroix reports that you brought your gunpowder with our women. I could not stop you, of course, without killing women. You risked the women’s lives, I did not, so I assume you have abandoned the rules of civilized warfare. I shall, however, return your officers when you withdraw from the undamaged bridge. You have one minute, monsieur.’ And with those words Vandal turned his horse and spurred it back up the track.

‘Are you holding my men prisoner?’ Moon shouted.

‘I am!’ Vandal called back carelessly.

‘There are rules of warfare!’ Moon shouted at the retreating colonel.

‘Rules?’ Vandal turned his horse and his handsome, arrogant face showed disdain. ‘You think there are rules in war? You think it is like your English game of cricket?’

‘Your fellow asked us to send an emissary,’ Moon said hotly. ‘We did. There are rules governing such matters. Even you French should know that.’

‘We French,’ Vandal said, amused. ‘I shall tell you the rules, monsieur. I have orders to cross the bridge with a battery of artillery. If there is no bridge, I cannot cross the river. So my rule is that I shall preserve the bridge. In short, monsieur, there is only one rule in warfare, and that is to win. Other than that, monsieur, we French have no rules.’ He turned his horse and spurred uphill. ‘You have one minute,’ he called back carelessly.

‘Good God incarnate,’ Moon said, staring after the Frenchman. The brigadier was plainly puzzled, even astonished by Vandal’s ruthlessness. ‘There are rules!’ he protested into thin air.

‘Blow the bridge, sir?’ Sharpe asked stolidly.

Moon was still gazing after Vandal. ‘They invited us to talk! The bloody man invited us to talk! They can’t do this. There are rules!’

‘You want us to blow the bridge, sir?’ Sharpe asked again.

Moon appeared not to hear. ‘He has to return Gillespie and your lieutenant,’ he said. ‘God damn it, there are rules!’

‘He’s not going to return them, sir,’ Sharpe said.

Moon frowned from the saddle. He appeared puzzled, as if he did not know how he was to deal with Vandal’s treachery. ‘He can’t keep them prisoner!’ he protested.

‘He’s going to keep them, sir, unless you tell me to leave the bridge intact.’

Moon hesitated, but then recalled that his future career, with all its dazzling rewards, depended on the bridge’s destruction. ‘Blow the bridge,’ he said harshly.

‘Back!’ Sharpe turned and shouted at his men. ‘Get back! Mister Sturridge! Light the fuse!’

‘Bloody hell!’ The brigadier suddenly realized he was on the wrong side of a bridge that was crowded with men, and that in about half a minute the French planned to open fire and so he turned his horse and spurred it back along the roadway. The riflemen and redcoats were running and Sharpe followed them, walking backwards, keeping his eye on the French, the rifle in his hands. He reckoned he was safe enough. The French company was a long musket shot away and so far they had made no attempt to close the range, but then Sharpe saw Vandal turn and wave to the fort.

‘Bloody hell,’ Sharpe echoed the brigadier, and then the world shook to the sound of six guns emptying their barrels of grapeshot. Dark smoke whipped the sky, the balls screamed around Sharpe, slapping onto the bridge and slashing into men and churning the river into foam. Sharpe heard a scream behind him, then saw the French company running towards the bridge. There was an odd silence after the guns fired. No muskets had been used yet. The river settled from the strike of the grapeshot and Sharpe heard another scream and snatched a look behind to see Moon’s stallion rearing, blood seething from its neck, and then the brigadier fell into a knot of men.

Sturridge was dead. Sharpe found him some twenty paces beyond the powder barrels. The engineer, struck in the head by a piece of grapeshot, was lying beside the slow match that had not been lit and now the French were almost at the bridge and Sharpe snatched up Sturridge’s tinderbox and ran towards the powder barrels. He shortened the slow match by tearing it apart just a couple of paces from the charge, then struck the flint on the steel. The spark flew and died. He struck again, and this time a scrap of dried linen caught the spark and he blew on it gently and the tinder flared up and he put the flame to the fuse and saw the powder begin to spark and fizz. The first Frenchmen were obstructed by the women’s abandoned luggage, but they kicked it aside and ran onto the bridge where they knelt and aimed their muskets. Sharpe watched the fuse. It was burning so damn slowly! He heard rifles fire, their sound crisper than muskets, and a Frenchman slowly toppled with a look of indignation on his face and a bright stab of blood on his white crossbelt, then the French pulled their triggers and the balls flew close around him. The damned fuse was slower than slow! The French were just yards away, then Sharpe heard more rifles firing, heard a French officer screaming at his men, and Sharpe tore the fuse again, much closer to the powder barrels, and he used the burning end to light the new stub. That new stub was just inches from the barrel and he blew on it to make sure it burned fiercely, then turned and ran towards the western bank.

Moon was wounded, but a pair of men from the 88th had picked the brigadier off the roadway and were carrying him. ‘Come on, sir!’ Harper shouted. Sharpe could hear the Frenchmen’s boots on the roadway, then Harper levelled the seven-barrel gun. It was a naval weapon, one that had never really worked well. It was supposed to be carried in the fighting tops where its seven bunched barrels could launch a small volley of half-inch balls at marksmen in the enemy rigging, but the recoil of the volley gun was so violent that few men were strong enough to wield it. Patrick Harper was strong enough. ‘Down, sir!’ he shouted, and Sharpe dropped flat as the sergeant pulled the trigger. The noise deafened Sharpe, and the leading rank of Frenchmen was blown apart by the seven balls, but one sergeant survived and he ran to where the fizzing fuse sparked and smoked at the barrel’s top. Sharpe was still sprawled on the roadway, but he wrenched the rifle clear of his body. He had no time to aim, just point the muzzle and pull the trigger and he saw, through the sudden powder smoke, the French sergeant’s face turn to a blossom of blood and red mist, and the sergeant was hurled backwards, the fuse still smoked, then the world exploded.

The worm of fire had eaten into Sturridge’s charge and the powder blew. The sky filled with noise, turned dark. Flame, smoke and timbers erupted into the air, though the chief effect of the exploding powder was to drive the pontoon down into the river. The roadway buckled under the strain, planks snapping free. The French were thrown back, some dead, some burned, some stunned, and then the shattered pontoon reared violently up from the water and its anchor chains snapped from the recoil. The bridge jerked downstream, throwing Harper off his feet. He and Sharpe clung to the planks. The bridge was juddering now, the river foaming and pushing at the broken gap as scraps of burning timber flamed on the roadway. Sharpe had been half dazed by the explosion and now found it hard to stand, but he staggered towards the British held shore and then the pontoon anchor chains began to snap, one after the other, and the more that parted, the more pressure was put on the remaining chains. The French cannon fired again and the air was filled with screaming grapeshot and one of the men carrying Brigadier Moon jerked forward with blood staining the back of his red coat. The man vomited blood and the brigadier bellowed in agony as he was dropped. The bridge began to shake like a bough in the wind and Sharpe had to fall to his knees and hold onto a plank to stop being thrown into the water. Musket balls were coming from the French company, but the range was too long for accuracy. The brigadier’s wounded horse was in the river, blood swirling as it struggled against the inevitable drowning.

A shell struck the bridge’s far end. Sharpe decided the French gunners were trying to hold the British fugitives on the breaking bridge where they could be flayed by grapeshot. The French infantry had retreated to the eastern bank from where they fired musket volleys. Smoke was filling the valley. Water splashed across the pontoon where Sharpe and Harper clung, then it shook again and the roadway splintered and Sharpe feared the remnants of the bridge would overturn. A bullet slammed into a plank by his side. Another shell exploded at the bridge’s far end, leaving a puff of dirty smoke that drifted upstream where white birds flew in panic.

Then suddenly the bridge quivered and went still. The central portion of six pontoons had broken free and was drifting down the river. There was a tug as a last anchor chain snapped, then the six pontoons were circling and floating as a barrel-load of grapeshot churned the water just behind them. Sharpe could kneel now. He loaded the rifle, aimed at the French infantry, and fired. Harper slung his empty volley gun and shot with his rifle instead. Rifleman Slattery and Rifleman Harris came to join them and sent two more bullets, both aimed at the French officers on horseback, but when the rifle smoke cleared the officers were still mounted. The pontoons were travelling fast in the current, accompanied by broken and charred timbers. Brigadier Moon was lying on his back, trying to prop himself up on his elbows. ‘What happened?’

‘We’re floating free, sir,’ Sharpe said. There were six men of the 88th on the makeshift raft and five of Sharpe’s riflemen from the South Essex. The rest of his company had either escaped the bridge before it broke or else were in the river. So now, with Sharpe and the brigadier, there were thirteen men floating downstream and over a hundred Frenchmen running down the bank, keeping level with them. Sharpe hoped that thirteen was not unlucky.

‘See if you can paddle to the western bank,’ Moon ordered. Some British officers, using captured horses, were on that bank and were trying to catch up with the raft.

Sharpe had the men use their rifle and musket butts as paddles, but the pontoons were monstrously heavy and their efforts were futile. The raft drifted on southwards. A last shell plunged harmlessly into the river, its fuse extinguished instantly by the water. ‘Paddle, for God’s sake!’ Moon snapped.

‘They’re doing their best, sir,’ Sharpe said. ‘Broken leg, sir?’

‘Calf bone,’ Moon said, wincing, ‘heard it snap when the horse fell.’

‘We’ll straighten it up in a minute, sir,’ Sharpe said soothingly.

‘You’ll do no such bloody thing, man! You’ll get me to a doctor.’

Sharpe was not certain how he was going to get Moon anywhere except straight down the river which was curving now about a great rock bluff on the Spanish bank. That bluff, at least, would check the French pursuit. He used his rifle as a paddle, but the raft defiantly took its own path. Once past the bluff the river widened, swung back to the west and the current slowed a little.

The French pursuers were left behind and the British were finding the going hard on the Portuguese bank. The French cannon were still firing, but they could no longer see the raft so they had to be shooting at the British forces on that western bank. Sharpe tried to steer with a length of scorched, broken plank, not because he thought it would do any good, but to prevent Moon complaining. The makeshift rudder had no effect. The raft stubbornly stayed close to the Spanish bank. Sharpe thought about Bullen and felt a pulse of pure anger at the way in which the lieutenant had been taken prisoner. ‘I’m going to kill that bastard,’ he said aloud.

‘You’re going to do what?’ Moon demanded.

‘I’m going to kill that bastard Frenchman, sir. Colonel Vandal.’

‘You’re going to get me to the other bank, Sharpe, that’s what you’re going to do, and you’re going to do it quickly.’

At which point, with a shudder and a lurch, the pontoons ran aground.

The crypt lay beneath the cathedral. It was a labyrinth hacked from the rock on which Cadiz defied the sea, and in deeper holes beneath the crypt’s flagged floor the dead bishops of Cadiz waited for the resurrection.

Two flights of stone steps descended to the crypt, emerging into a large chapel that was a round chamber twice the height of a man and thirty paces wide. If a man stood in the chamber’s centre and clapped his hands once the noise would sound fifteen times. It was a crypt of echoes.

Five caverns opened from the chapel. One led to a smaller round chapel at the furthest end of the labyrinth, while the other four flanked the big chamber. The four were deep and dark, and they were connected to each other by a hidden passageway that circled the whole crypt. None of the caverns was decorated. The cathedral above might glitter with candlelight and shine with marble and have painted saints and monstrances of silver and candlesticks of gold, but the crypt was plain stone. Only the altars had colour. In the smaller chapel a Virgin gazed sadly down the long passage to where, across the wider chamber, her son hung on a silver cross in never-ending pain.

It was deep night. The cathedral was empty. The last priest had folded his scapular and gone home. The women who haunted the altars had been ushered out, the floor had been swept and the doors locked. Candles still burned, and the red light of the eternal presence glowed under the scaffolding which ringed the crossing where the transept met the nave. The cathedral was unfinished. The sanctuary with its high altar had yet to be built, the dome was half made and the bell towers not even started.

Father Montseny had a key to one of the eastern doors. The key scraped in the lock and the hinges squealed when he pushed the door open. He came with six men. Two of them stayed close to the unlocked cathedral door. They stood in shadow, hidden, both with loaded muskets and orders to use them only if things became desperate. ‘This is a night for knives,’ Montseny told the men.

‘In the cathedral?’ one of the men asked nervously.

‘I will give you absolution for any sins,’ Montseny said, ‘and the men who must die here are heretics. They are Protestants, English. God will be gladdened by their deaths.’

He took the remaining four men to the crypt and, once in the main chamber, he placed candles on the floor and lit them. The light flickered on the shallow-domed ceiling. He put two men in one of the chambers to the east while he, with the remaining pair, waited in the darkness of the chamber opposite. ‘No noise, now!’ he warned them. ‘We wait.’

The English came early as Father Montseny had supposed they would. He heard the distant squeal of the hinges as they pushed open the unlocked door. He heard their footsteps coming down the cathedral’s long nave and he knew that the two men he had left by the door would have bolted it now and would be following the English towards the crypt.

Three men appeared on the western steps. They came slowly, cautiously. One of them, the tallest, had a bag. That man peered into the big round chamber and saw no one. ‘Hello!’ he shouted.

Father Montseny tossed a packet into the chamber. It was a thick packet, tied with string. ‘What you will do,’ he said in the English he had learned as a prisoner, ‘is bring the money, put it beside the letters, take the letters and go.’

The man looked at the black archways leading from the big candlelit chamber. He was trying to decide where Montseny’s voice had come from. ‘You think I’m a fool?’ he asked. ‘I must see the letters first.’ He was a big man, red-faced, with a bulbous nose and thick black eyebrows.

‘You may examine them, Captain,’ Montseny said. He knew the man was called Plummer and that he had been a captain in the British army, and now he was a functionary in the British embassy. Plummer’s job was to make certain the embassy’s servants did not steal, that the gratings on the windows were secure and that the shutters were locked at night. Plummer was, in Montseny’s opinion, a nonentity, a failed soldier, a man who now came anxiously into the ring of candles and squatted by the package. The string was tough and knotted tight and Plummer could not undo it. He felt in his pocket, presumably looking for a knife.

‘Show me the gold,’ Montseny ordered.

Plummer scowled at the peremptory tone, but obliged by opening the bag he had placed beside the package. It was a cloth bag which he unlaced, then brought out a handful of golden guineas. ‘Three hundred,’ he said, ‘as we agreed.’ His voice echoed back and forth, confusing him.

‘Now,’ Montseny said, and his men appeared from the dark with levelled muskets. The two men Plummer had left on the steps staggered forward as Montseny’s last two men came down the stairs behind them.

‘What the hell are you …’ Plummer began, then saw the priest was carrying a pistol. ‘You’re a priest?’

‘I thought we should all examine the merchandise,’ Montseny said, ignoring the question. He had the three men surrounded now. ‘You will lie flat while I count the coins.’

‘The devil I will,’ Plummer said.

‘On the floor,’ Montseny spoke in Spanish, and his men, all of whom had served in the Spanish navy and had muscles hardened by years of gruelling work, easily subdued the three and put them face down on the crypt floor. Montseny picked up the string-bound package and put it in his pocket, then pushed the gold aside with his foot. ‘Kill them,’ he said.

The two men accompanying Plummer were Spaniards themselves, embassy servants, and they protested when they heard Montseny’s order. Plummer resisted, heaving up from the floor, but Montseny killed him easily, sliding a knife up into his ribs and letting Plummer heave against the blade as it sought his heart. The other two died just as quickly. It was done with remarkably little noise.

Montseny gave his men five golden guineas apiece, a generous reward. ‘The English,’ he explained to them, ‘secretly plan to keep Cadiz for themselves. They call themselves our allies, but they will betray Spain. Tonight you have fought for your king, for your country and for the holy church. The admiral will be pleased with you, and God will reward you.’ He searched the bodies, found a few coins and a bone-handled knife. Plummer had a pistol under his cloak, but it was a crude, heavy weapon and Montseny let one of the sailors keep it.

The three corpses were dragged up the steps, down the nave and then carried to the nearby sea wall. There Father Montseny said a prayer for their souls and his men heaved the dead over the stony edge. The bodies smacked down into the rocks where the Atlantic sucked and broke white. Father Montseny locked the cathedral and went home.

Next day the blood was found in the crypt and on the stairs and in the nave, and at first no one could explain it until some of the women who prayed in the cathedral every day declared that it must be the blood of Saint Servando, one of Cadiz’s patron saints whose body had once lain in the city, but had been taken to Seville, which was now occupied by the French. The blood, the women insisted, was proof that the saint had miraculously spurned the French-held city and returned home, and the discovery of three bodies being buffeted by the waves on the rocks below the sea wall would not dissuade them. It was a miracle, they said, and the rumour of the miracle spread.

Captain Plummer was recognized and his body was carried to the embassy. There was a makeshift chapel inside and a hurried funeral service was read and the captain was then buried in the sands of the isthmus that connected Cadiz to the Isla de León. Next day Montseny wrote to the British ambassador, claiming that Plummer had tried to keep the gold and take the letters, and his regrettable death had thus been inevitable, but that the British could still have the letters back, only now they would cost a great deal more. He did not sign the letter, but enclosed one bloodstained guinea. It was an investment, he thought, that would bring back a fortune, and the fortune would pay for Father Montseny’s dreams. A dream of Spain, glorious again and free of foreigners. The English would pay for their own defeat.