invader, but to restore their King to his throne. Now Napoleon proposed to give them back their King.
El Matarife paused. He was slicing the goat’s cheese with the knife that had tormented and killed the prisoner. ‘Give him back?’ He sounded incredulous.
‘He will be restored to the throne,’ Ducos said.
Ferdinand VII, the Frenchman explained, would be sent back to Spain. He would be sent in majesty, but only if he signed the Treaty of Valençay. That was the secret; the Treaty, a treaty which, to Ducos’s clever mind, was an idea of genius. It declared that the state of war that had unfortunately arisen between Spain and France was now over. There would be peace. The French armies would withdraw from Spain and a promise would be made that hostilities would not be resumed. Spain would be a free, sovereign country with its own beloved King. Spanish prisoners in French camps would be sent home, Spanish trophies restored to their regiments, Spanish pride burnished by French flattery.
And in return Ferdinand had only to promise one thing; that he would end the alliance with Britain. The British army would be ordered to leave Spain, and if it hesitated then there would be no forage for its horses, food for its men, or ports for its supply ships. A starved army was no army. Without a shot being fired, Wellington would be forced from Spain and Napoleon could take every one of France’s quarter million soldiers in Spain and march them against the northern foes. It was a stroke of genius.
And, of necessity, a secret. If the British government even dreamed that such a treaty was being prepared then British gold would flow, bribes be offered, and the populace of Spain roused against the very thought of peace with France.
The Treaty, Ducos allowed, would not be popular in Spain. The common people, the peasants whose lands and women had been ravaged by the French, would not welcome a peace with their bitterest enemy. Only their beloved, absent King could persuade them to accept it, and their King hesitated.
Ferdinand VII wanted reassurance. Would the nobility of Spain support him? Would the Spanish Generals? What, most important of all, would the Church say? It was Ducos’s job to provide those answers for the King, and the man who would give Ducos those answers was the Inquisitor.
Father Hacha was clever. He had risen in the Inquisition by his cleverness, and he knew how to use the secret files that the Inquisition kept on all Spain’s eminent men. He could use his fellow Inquisitors in every part of Spain to collect letters from such men, letters that would be passed to the imprisoned Spanish King and assure him that a peace with France would be acceptable to enough nobles, churchmen, officers, and merchants to make the Treaty possible.
To all this El Matarife listened. He shrugged when the story finished, as if to suggest that such politics were not his business. ‘I am a soldier.’
Pierre Ducos sipped wine. A gust of wind lifted one of the damp blankets at a window and fluttered the tallow candle that lit their meal. He smiled. ‘Your family was rich once.’
El Matarife stabbed his cheese-flecked knife at the Frenchman. ‘Your troops destroyed our wealth.’
‘Your brother,’ and Ducos’s voice held a hint of mockery, ‘has put a price upon the assistance he will give me.’
‘A price?’ The bearded face smiled at the thought of money.
Ducos smiled back. ‘The price is the restoration of your family’s fortune, and more.’
‘More?’ El Matarife looked at his brother.
The priest nodded. ‘Three hundred thousand dollars, Juan.’
El Matarife laughed. He looked from his brother to the Frenchman and he saw that neither smiled, that the sum was true, and his laughter died. He stared belligerently at Ducos. ‘You’re cheating us, Frenchman. Your country will never pay that much. Never!’
‘The money will not come from France,’ Ducos said.
‘Where then?’
‘From a woman.’ Ducos spoke softly. ‘But first there has to be a death, then an imprisonment, and that, El Matarife, is your part of this.’
The Partisan leader looked at his brother for confirmation, received it, and looked back at the small Frenchman. ‘A death?’
‘One death. The woman’s husband.’
‘The imprisonment?’
‘The woman.’
‘When?’
Pierre Ducos saw the Partisan’s smile and felt the surge of hope. The secret would be safe and France saved. He would buy, with three hundred thousand Spanish dollars that were not his to spend, the future of Napoleon’s empire.
‘When?’ the Partisan asked again.
‘Spring,’ Ducos said. ‘This spring. You will be ready?’
‘So long as your troops leave me alone.’ El Matarife laughed.
‘That I promise.’
‘Then I will be ready.’
The bond was sealed by a handshake. The secret would be safe, the Treaty that would defeat Britain made, and, in the course of it, Pierre Ducos would accomplish his revenge on the Englishman who had broken his spectacles. When the spring came, and when the armies prepared to fight a war that would, within a year, be made redundant by the secret treaty, a man called Richard Sharpe, a soldier, would die.
CHAPTER ONE
Major Richard Sharpe, on a damp spring day when a cold wind whipped down a rocky valley, stood on an ancient stone bridge and stared at the road which led southwards to a low pass in the rocky crest. The hills were dark with rain.
Behind him, standing at ease, with their musket locks wrapped with rags and the muzzles plugged with corks to stop the rain soaking into the barrels, stood five companies of infantry.
The crest, Sharpe knew, was five hundred yards away. In a few moments there would be enemy on that crest and his job was to stop them crossing the bridge. A simple job, a soldier’s job. It was made easier because the spring of 1813 was late, the weather had brought these border hills nothing but rain, and the stream beneath the bridge was deep, fast, and impassable. The enemy would have to come to the bridge where Sharpe waited or not cross the watercourse at all.
‘Sir?’ D’Alembord, Captain of the Light Company, sounded apprehensive, as if he did not want to provoke Major Sharpe’s ill temper.
‘Captain?’
‘Staff officer coming, sir.’
Sharpe grunted, but said nothing. He heard the hooves slow behind him, then the horse was in front of him and an excited cavalry Lieutenant was looking down on him. ‘Major Sharpe?’
A pair of dark eyes, hard and angry, looked from the Lieutenant’s gilt spurs, up his boots, up the rich, mud-spattered, blue woollen cloak till they met the excited staff officer’s eyes. ‘You’re in my way, Lieutenant.’
