boy laughed. ‘I saw a man who knows me. He tells the Partisans what troops are marching towards the hills. I trust him.’ The words should have sounded odd coming from a sixteen-year-old, but they did not seem strange coming from this boy who had risked his life since he was thirteen. Angel took some loose tobacco from a pocket, a scrap of paper, and, in Spanish fashion, rolled a makeshift cigar. He leaned forward and the tip of the cigar flared as he sucked on a flame of the fire. ‘This man says that he has heard that the woman was taken to Santa Monica, to the convent. He heard from the Partisans.’ Angel blew smoke into the air. ‘The Partisans are guarding the convent.’
‘The Partisans?’
‘Si. You have heard of El Matarife?’
Sharpe shook his head. The hills of Spain were filled with Partisan leaders who took fanciful nicknames. He tried to think what the word meant. ‘A man who kills animals?’
‘Yes. A slaughterman. You should have heard of him. He is famous.’
‘And he guards the convent?’
Angel sucked on the disintegrating tube of tobacco. ‘So it is said. He will guard the mesa, not the convent.’
‘The table?’
‘The convent is on a mountain, yes? Very high with a flat top, a mesa. There are few paths up, señor, so it is easy to guard.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Two days’ ride? There.’ He pointed to the north-east.
‘Have you been there?’
‘No.’ Angel disgustedly threw the remains of his cigar into the fire. He had somehow not mastered the knack of twisting the paper and tobacco exactly right. ‘I have heard of it though.’
Sharpe was trying to make sense, any kind of sense, from Angel’s news. The Inquisition? That coincidence made the boy’s tale seem true, but why should the Inquisition want to kidnap Helene? Or why, for that matter, would the Slaughterman be guarding the convent where she was held?
He asked the boy, and Angel shrugged. ‘Who knows? He is not a man you can ask.’
‘What kind of man is he?’
The boy frowned. ‘He kills Frenchmen.’ He paid the compliment dubiously. ‘But he kills his own people, too, yes? He once shot twelve men of a village because the villagers had refused his men food. He rode in at the siesta time and shot them. Even Mina cannot control him.’ Angel spoke of the man who had been made general of all the Partisans. Mina had been known to execute men such as El Matarife who persecuted their own countrymen. Angel was making himself another cigar. ‘The French are scared of him. It’s said that he once put the heads of fifty Frenchmen on the Great Road, one every mile through the mountains so the French would find them. That was near Vitoria where he comes from.’ The boy laughed. ‘He kills slowly. They say he has a leather coat made from French skins. Some say he is mad.’
‘Can we find him?’
‘Si.’ Angel said it as though the question was unnecessary. ‘So we ride to the mountains?’
‘We ride to the mountains.’
They rode north-east to where the mountains became dizzying crags, the hunting grounds of eagles, a land of awesome valleys and of waterfalls that seethed from the low clouds of morning to fall scores of feet into cold, upland streams.
They rode north-east into a land where the inhabitants were few, and those inhabitants so poor and frightened that they fled when they saw two strange horsemen coming. Some of the people here, Angel said, would not even know there was a war on. ‘They’re not even Spanish!’ He said it scathingly.
‘Not Spanish?’
‘They’re Basques. They have their own language.’
‘So who are they?’
Angel shrugged dismissively. ‘They live here.’ He obviously had nothing more to say about them.
Angel, it seemed to Sharpe, was fretting. They had come into these northern mountains and were far from the French. They were far from the war and, from what Angel had heard in Burgos, far from the excitement.
The rumours in Burgos said that the British had at last marched, and were attacking in the north. The French northern army was retreating and Sharpe had seen the vanguard of that army as it approached Burgos. Angel feared the campaign would be over before he could kill again. Sharpe laughed. ‘It won’t be over.’ ‘You promise?’
‘I promise. How do we find El Matarife?’ ‘He finds us, señor. Do you think he doesn’t know there’s an Englishman in the hills?’
‘Just remember not to call me Sharpe.’ ‘Si, señor.’ Angel grinned. ‘What are you called now?’ Sharpe smiled. He remembered the suave, regretful officer who had conducted his prosecution. ‘Vaughn. Major Vaughn.’
He rode between high rocks, beneath the eagles, and he searched for the Marquesa and for the Slaughterman.
El Matarife, like Angel, fretted at being so far from the richer pickings that were to be had to the south. These high, deep valleys were poor, there were few French to be ambushed, and little to be stolen from the meagre villages. He had two French prisoners with him, playthings for his entertainment.
The news of the Englishman was brought to him by three of his men. El Matarife occupied an inn, or what passed in this miserable place for an inn, and he scowled at the three men as though they were responsible for the Englishman’s coming. ‘He said he wanted to speak with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘He did not say why?’
‘Only that his General had sent him.’
El Matarife grunted. ‘Not before time, eh?’ His lieutenants nodded. Wellington had sent messengers to other Partisan leaders, requesting their co-operation, and the Slaughterman presumed that his turn had come.
But he could not be sure of it. In the convent, thousands of feet above the valley, was La Puta Dorada. She had been brought by his brother who had warned El Matarife that the French might search for her, but the Inquisitor had said nothing about any Englishman. El Matarife could understand a man searching for the woman. He had seen her in the carriage and, even dishevelled and tearful, she had been beautiful. ‘Why give her to the nuns?’ he had asked.
His brother had snapped at him. ‘She has to take the vows, don’t you understand? It must be legal! She must become a nun! She must take her vows, nothing else matters!’
The Inquisitor had left his brother with instructions that no one was to be allowed close to the convent, and that, if anyone asked about the Marquesa, her presence was to be denied. She was to be buried and forgotten and left to Christ.
Now El Matarife wondered whether the Englishman had come looking for the whore of gold. ‘What is he called?’
‘Vaughn. Major Vaughn.’
‘He’s alone?’
‘He has
