his boots unnaturally loud in the cavernous hallway. ‘You may force me to bring my men and search the whole convent.’ That struck him as the right thing to say. The woman was frightened, and rightly, by the incursion of one man into this building where no man but a priest was ever supposed to tread. She would surely fear a whole company of soldiers.
She looked at him, frowning. ‘Who are you?’
The truth would not do. When the tale got about that an Englishman had broken into a convent there would be hell to pay. Sharpe smiled. ‘Major Vaughn.’
‘English?’
He thought how often Wellington had insisted in his orders that the Roman church in Spain must be respected by the British. Nothing, the General believed, was more damaging to the alliance than insults to Spain’s religion. Sharpe smiled. ‘No, ma’am. American.’ He hoped Colonel Leroy would forgive the lie, and he was glad that he did not wear a red coat that was always thought to be the only uniform of Britain.
She frowned. ‘American?’
‘I have come a long way to see La Marquesa.’
‘Why do you wish to see that woman?’
‘Matters of policy.’ He hoped his Spanish was correct.
She tossed her head. ‘She will see no one.’
‘She will see me.’
‘She is a sinner.’
‘So are we all.’ Sharpe wondered why on earth he was swapping theological small talk with a Mother Superior. He supposed she was the Mother Superior.
‘She is doing penance.’
‘I wish only to talk with her.’
‘The Church has ordered that no one should see her.’
‘I have come from North America to see her.’ He liked the lie. Even in this remote convent the news must have arrived that the Americans had joined the war that burned about the world. ‘My President demands that I see her. He will send many coins to Rome if I can see her.’ Why the hell not, he thought? The Americans had declared war on Britain, so why should the Pope not declare war on America? He embroidered the lie. ‘Many, many gold coins.’
‘It is against God’s law to see her.’
‘God will forgive me.’
‘You are a sinner.’
Sharpe frowned. ‘I am an American!’
The Mother Superior turned away, her voice superb. ‘You cannot see her. Go away.’
She had reached a door and Sharpe feared breaking through another barrier in this place, for he needed all the time he could scrape together for his battle against El Matarife.
He ran forward, his boots loud on the chequered tiles, and the noise made the woman turn. For the first time she showed fear. It seemed for a moment that she would try to stop him as she lifted her thin hands from beneath the strip of white cloth that hung from her neck, but as he came close she twisted aside and snatched up a brass bell that stood on a dark oak table. Sharpe thought she was going to hit him with the bell, but instead she began to ring it. She fled from him, through the door, the bell clanging as a warning for the nuns to hide.
He followed. It was as if a wildcat had come into a hen run. He was on the top floor of a double cloister and the sound of the bell was driving white-robed women in desperate flight towards stairs and doors. Despite their panicked, fluttering scattering, they were all silent, only the clanging bell telling Sharpe that he had not been struck deaf as a punishment for his terrible sin. His was the only voice in the place. ‘Helene!’
There were a dozen doors to choose from. Somewhere in the recesses of the building the bell still clanged. He decided to follow it. ‘Helene! Helene!’
He found himself in a long corridor hung with huge, gloomy pictures that showed martyrs undergoing the kind of fate that the bell now warned the nuns against. The corridor smelt foully of soap.
He pushed open doors. In the chapel there was a huddle of nuns, their backs to him, their robes quivering as their hands counted beads. The candles flickered. ‘Helene?’
There was no answer. The bell still tolled. He ran down a flight of stairs and heard the soft sound of slippered feet fleeing on flagstones. He wondered who repaired the old buildings. Did the nuns plaster the walls and put up new beams? Perhaps men were allowed in to do the heavy work, just as a priest undoubtedly visited to give the sacraments. ‘Helene!’
He pushed open doors of empty cells, losing himself in the maze of small passages and musty rooms. He pushed open one door to find himself, aghast, in a bathroom. A woman, dressed in a white linen shift, sat in a tub of water. She stared at him, her mouth dropped, and he shut the door quickly before her scream deafened him.
He went through another door and found himself in a walled kitchen garden. The clouds were grey overhead. It had begun to rain, soaking some scrawny chickens who miserably flocked at one end of the walled garden. ‘Helene!’
Back in the convent he found the refectory, the long tables set with dull metal plates. The Virgin Mary, in a vast picture, raised her eyes to the beamed ceiling. ‘Helene! Helene!’
And this time there was a scream in reply, the first human voice Sharpe had heard since the Mother Superior had lifted the brass bell, and Sharpe crossed the great room to push open a door beside the empty, cold fireplace.
A chicken carcass missed his head by inches. It was only half-plucked and the feathers settled on the shoulder of his Rifleman’s jacket.
He was in a huge kitchen, the vaulted stone ceiling blackened by the centuries of smoke, and facing him were a dozen nuns who had none of the demure fear that filled the rest of the convent. The half-plucked chicken had been hurled by a great, ham-faced woman with forearms like pontoon cables, who now seized a second chicken and drew back her arm.
Sharpe ducked. The body thumped on the wall behind him. ‘Helene!’
He saw her, and even here, imprisoned and drab, her beauty checked him. She made the breath stop in his throat and his heart race with the surge of desire.
The widowed Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba stared at him. She was dressed in a shapeless grey shift, her hair caught up and tied by a hank of grey rag, her face devoid of any cosmetic. The nun who held her had a hand over La Marquesa’s mouth, but Helene must have sunk her teeth into the woman’s palm for the hand jerked away and she struggled against the other hand. ‘Richard!’ Her eyes were huge, as though he was a ghost.
A great flabby ball of dough was hurled at him, he ducked again and went forward, and the nun who had started the artillery bombardment picked up a rolling pin that was as big as a cannon’s axle. Sharpe ignored her. He looked at the nun holding La Marquesa. ‘Let her go.’
The rolling pin was tapped once into a huge hand. The woman, Sharpe thought, looked big enough to be Patrick Harper’s twin. It was a good job she had chosen the Church, he reflected, for otherwise she would have made some poor man’s life a flaming hell. She stepped towards him, no fear on her face, the rolling pin ready to strike.
Yet
