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
