The high valley was called the Gateway of God. By the castle, on the grass that was littered with rabbit droppings like miniature musketballs, was a long, low mound. It was a grave, and in the grave were the bodies of the men who had died defending this pass in the winter. They had been few, and their enemies many, yet they had held the pass until relief came. They had been led by a soldier, by a Rifleman, by Richard Sharpe.
The French who had died, and there had been many, had been buried more hurriedly in a mass grave by the village. In the winter the scavenging beasts had scraped the earth from the grave and eaten what flesh they could find. Now, as the spring days turned to summer and the small stream in the Gateway of God shrank, the bones of the dead Frenchmen were littered about the village. Skulls lay like a monstrous crop of mushrooms.
In the south there was a war, armies marching to this year’s campaign, but in the Gateway of God, where Sharpe had fought his war against an army, there was nothing but death and the wind moving the thorns and the skulls grinning from the cropped grass. It was a place of no use to either army, a place of ghosts and death and loneliness, a place forgotten.
The city of Burgos was where the Great Road split. The road came from the French frontier to San Sebastian, then plunged south through the mountains where the Partisans made every journey hell for the French. There was relief from ambush at Vitoria, then the road went into the hills again, going ever south, until it came to the wide plains where Burgos lay.
It was the road down which the French had invaded Spain. It was the road back up which they would retreat. At Burgos the road divided. One branch went south to Madrid, the other south and west towards Portugal and the Atlantic. Burgos was the crossroads of invasion, the guardian of retreat, the fortress on the plains.
It was not a large fortress, yet in the last days of the summer of 1812 it had withstood a British siege. The castle was still scarred by the marks of cannon-balls and shells. In 1812 the castle had kept the British from chasing the French over the Pyrenees, and this summer, men feared, it might be called on to do the same work again against a reinforced British army.
Pierre Ducos did not care. If the soldiers lost Spain, then his secret Treaty would save France. The Inquisitor, back in Burgos, had promised that he would deliver, within the month, the letters that were even now being collected by the threatened Spanish Inquisition. The letters would convince Ferdinand VII of Spain’s support of a French treaty.
The two men met, not in the castle, but in one of the town’s tall, gloomy houses. Ducos winced as his spectacles rubbed his sore skin. On the advice of an army surgeon he had put axle grease behind his ears to protect against the chafing wire, but still the earpieces irritated him. At least he had the consolation of knowing that the man who had broken his other, comfortable spectacles was dead.
‘Hanged,’ the Inquisitor said. ‘Hanged quickly.’ He sounded resentful, as though he truly believed Sharpe to have been responsible for the Marqués’s death.
Ducos had only one regret about Richard Sharpe’s death. He wished that the Englishman had known that it was he, Ducos, who had reached out across a nation and engineered revenge. Ducos liked his victims to understand who had beaten them, and why they had been beaten. Ducos paraded his cleverness as other men displayed their medals. He took some papers from his pocket. ‘La Marquesa’s wagons are in the castle.’
‘They will be delivered to us?’
‘If you give me an address.’ Ducos smiled. ‘The cathedral perhaps?’
The Inquisitor did not blink at the taunt. ‘My house, Major.’
‘In Vitoria?’
‘In Vitoria.’
‘And you will give the wealth to the Church?’
‘What I do with the wealth is between me and God.’
‘Of course.’ Ducos pushed at his spectacles again. ‘They will go north with the next convoy. Of course, father, the wealth is not yours. It belongs to the widow.’
‘Not if she leaves Spain.’
‘Which we have agreed would be unwise.’ Ducos smiled. He did not want Helene bleating to the Emperor how he had cheated her of his wealth. ‘So you will take care of that business?’
‘When it is convenient.’
‘Tonight is convenient.’ Ducos pushed the papers across the table. ‘Those are our dispositions. Casapalacio’s men guard the western road.’
The Inquisitor took the paper and Ducos stared out of the window towards the west. Martins cut the warm air on curved wings. Beyond them, beyond the last houses of the town, the plain looked dry. He could see the village far off where the single tower of a small castle threw its long shadow. That tower was another French garrison, a place where cavalry were based to keep the Great Road clear of Partisans. Tonight, when the martins were back in their nests, and the plain was dark, La Marquesa was travelling to that tower, going to meet her lover, General Verigny.
Such a journey was safe. The land about Burgos was free of Partisans; the country was too flat and too well patrolled by the French garrisons of the plain. Yet this night there would be no safety for the Marquesa. The troops who guarded the road this night were troops who served France, but were not French. They were Spanish. They were the remnants of the army that had been recruited five years before, an army of Spaniards who believed in French ideas, in liberty, equality and fraternity; but defeat, hopelessness, and desertion had thinned their ranks. Yet there were still two Battalions of Spanish troops, and Ducos had ordered that they be given this duty this night.
The Inquisitor looked at him. ‘She goes tonight?’
‘As last night, and the night before. They have prodigious appetites.’
‘Good.’
‘And your brother?’
‘He waits in the north.’
‘Splendid.’ Ducos stood. ‘I wish you joy of it all, father.’
The Inquisitor stared up at the subtle, clever man. ‘You will have your letters soon.’
‘I never doubted it.’ Ducos smiled. ‘Give Helene my regards. Tell her I trust her marriage will be long and very happy.’ He laughed, turned, and went from the room.
This night the Inquisitor arranged a marriage. Soon La Marquesa would wear, on her left hand, a wedding ring. She would not marry some Grandee of Spain, but a man who had been born in humble circumstances and lived a life of poverty and struggle. She would become a bride of Christ.
She was rich beyond avarice, yet the Marqués’s will had contained one small and not uncommon stipulation which had not escaped the Inquisition’s notice. If his widow took her vows as a nun, then the Marqués’s wealth reverted to the church.
To which purpose she would be taken to a convent in the north country, a far, hidden, remote convent, and there she would be buried alive in the silent loneliness of the sisters while the Inquisitor, on behalf of God, took her inheritance.
It would be legal, there would be no scandal, for who could argue with a woman’s decision to take the veil? Father Hacha felt the beauty of the scheme. It could not fail now. The Marqués was dead, his only legatee would become a nun, and the Inquisition
