Sharpe’s Fury: The Battle of Barrosa, March 1811

‘Caterina Veronica Blazquez,’ Montseny said, ‘and God brought her to me. There were seven other priests hearing confession in the cathedral that day, but she was guided to me.’

‘So you killed her pimp, then you killed the Englishman and his servants. I trust God will forgive you for that, Father.’

Montseny had no doubts about God’s opinions. ‘What God wants, my lord, is a holy and a powerful Spain. He wants our flag spread across South America, he wants a Catholic king in Madrid and he wants his glory to be reflected in our people. I do God’s work.’

‘Do you enjoy it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ the admiral said, then paused beside a cannon that faced the bay. ‘I need more money,’ he said.

‘You will have it, my lord.’

‘Money,’ the admiral said in a tone of disgust. He was the Marquis de Cardenas and he had been born to money, and he had made more money, but there was never enough money. He tapped the cannon with the tip of his cane. ‘I need money for bribes,’ he said sourly, ‘because there is no courage in these men. They are lawyers, Father. Lawyers and politicians. They are scum.’ The scum of whom the admiral spoke were the deputies to the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, which now met in Cadiz where its chief business was to construct a new constitution for Spain. Some men, the liberales, wanted a Spain governed by the Cortes, a Spain in which citizens would have a say in their own destiny, and such men spoke of liberty and democracy and the admiral hated them. He wanted a Spain like the old Spain, a Spain led by king and church, a Spain devoted to God and to glory. He wanted a Spain free of foreigners, a Spain without Frenchmen and without Britons, and to get it he would have to bribe members of the Cortes and he would have to make an offer to the French Emperor. Leave Spain, the offer would say, and we shall help you conquer the British in Portugal. It was an offer, the admiral knew, that the French would accept because Napoleon was desperate. He wanted an end to the war in Spain. To the world’s eyes it looked as if the French had won. They had occupied Madrid and taken Seville so that now the Spanish government, such as it was, clung to the land’s edge at Cadiz. Yet to hold Spain meant keeping hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen in fortresses, and whenever those men left their walls they were harried by partisans. If Bonaparte could make peace with an amenable Spanish government then those garrisons would be freed to fight elsewhere.

‘How much money do you need?’ Montseny asked.

‘With ten thousand dollars,’ the admiral said, ‘I can buy the Cortes.’ He watched a British frigate sail past the end of the long mole which protected Cadiz’s harbour from the open Atlantic. He saw the great ensign ripple at the frigate’s stern and felt a pulse of pure loathing. He had watched Nelson’s ships sail towards him off Cape Trafalgar, he had breathed the powder smoke and listened to the screams of men dying aboard his ship. He had been felled by a piece of grapeshot that had shattered his left leg, but the admiral had stayed on the quarterdeck, shouting at his men to fight, to kill, to resist, then he had watched as a crowd of yelling British sailors, ugly as apes, swarmed across his deck, and he had wept when Spain’s ensign was lowered and the British flag hoisted. He had surrendered his sword, and then been a prisoner in England and now he was the limping admiral of a broken country that had no battle fleet. He hated the British. ‘But the English,’ he said, still watching the frigate, ‘will never pay ten thousand dollars for the letters.’

‘I think they will pay a great deal,’ Father Montseny said, ‘if we frighten them.’

‘How?’

‘I shall publish one letter. I shall change it, of course. And the implicit threat will be that we shall publish them all.’ Father Montseny paused, giving the admiral time to object to his proposal, but the admiral stayed silent. ‘I need a writer to make the changes,’ Montseny went on.

‘A writer?’ the admiral asked in a sour tone. ‘Why can’t you make the changes yourself?’

‘I can,’ Montseny said, ‘but once the letters are changed, the English will proclaim them forgeries. We cannot present the originals to anyone, because the originals will prove the English correct. So we must make new copies, in English, in an English hand, which we shall claim as the originals. I need a man who can write perfect English. My English is good, but not good enough.’ He fingered his crucifix, thinking. ‘The new letters need only persuade the Cortes, and most deputies will want to believe them, but the changes must still be convincing. The grammar, the spelling, must all be accurate. So I need a writer who can achieve that.’

The admiral made a dismissive gesture. ‘I know a man. A horrid creature. He writes well, though, and has a passion for English books. He’ll do, but how do you publish the letters?’

‘El Correo de Cádiz,’ Father Montseny said, naming the one newspaper that opposed the liberales. ‘I shall print one letter and I shall say in it that the English plan to take Cadiz and make it a second Gibraltar. The English will deny it, of course, but we will have a new letter with a forged signature.’

‘They’ll do more than make denials,’ the admiral said vigorously, ‘they’ll persuade the Regency to close the paper down!’ The Regency was the council which ruled what was left of Spain, and ruled it with the help of British gold which was why they were eager to keep the British friendly. A new constitution, though, could mean a new Regency, one which the admiral could lead.

‘The Regency will be powerless if the letter is unsigned,’ Montseny pointed out drily. ‘The English will not dare own to its authorship, will they? And rumour can do its work for us. Within a day all Cadiz will know that their ambassador wrote the letter.’

The letters had been written by the British ambassador to Spain and they were pathetic outpourings of love. There was even a proposal of marriage in one letter, a proposal made to a girl who was a whore called Caterina Veronica Blazquez. She was an expensive whore, to be sure, but still a whore.

‘The owner of the Correo is a man named Nunez, yes?’ the admiral asked.

‘He is.’

‘And he will publish the letter?’

‘There is an advantage to being a priest,’ Montseny said. ‘The secrets of the confessional, of course, are sacred, but gossip persists. We priests talk, my lord, and I know things about Nunez that he does not want the world to know. He will publish.’

‘Suppose the English try to destroy the press?’ the admiral enquired.

‘They probably will,’ Montseny said dismissively, ‘but for a small sum I can turn the building into a fortress, and your men can help protect it. Then the British will be forced to buy the remaining letters. I’m sure, once we have published one, they will pay very generously.’

‘What utter fools men make themselves over women,’ the admiral said. He took a long, black cigar from a pocket and bit the end off. Then he just stood, waiting until a couple of small boys saw the cigar and came running. Each lad held a length of thick hemp rope that smouldered at one end. The admiral indicated one of the boys who slapped his rope twice on the ground to revive its fire then held it up so the admiral could light the cigar. He waved the boy towards the men who followed him and one of them tossed a coin. ‘It would be best,’ the admiral said, ‘if we possessed both the letters and the gold.’ He watched the British frigate that was now near the rocks that lay off the bastion of San Felipe and he prayed she would run aground. He wanted to see her masts lurch forward as the hull struck the rocks, he wanted to see her canted and sinking, and he wanted to see her sailors floundering in the heaving seas, but of course she sailed serenely past the danger.

‘It would be best,’ Father Montseny said, ‘if we had the English gold and published the letters.’

‘It would be treacherous, of course,’ the admiral observed mildly.

‘God wants Spain great again, my lord,’ Montseny said fervently. ‘It is never treachery to do God’s work.’

The sudden boom of a gun sounded flat across the bay and both men turned to see a far white cloud of smoke. It had come from one of the giant mortars the French had placed in their forts on the Trocadero Peninsula and the admiral hoped the shell had been aimed at the British frigate. Instead the missile fell on the city’s waterfront a half mile to the east. The admiral waited for the shell to explode, then drew on his cigar. ‘If we publish the letters,’ he said, ‘then the Cortes will turn against the British. The bribes will make that certain, and then we can approach the French. You would be willing to go to them?’

‘Very willing, my lord.’

‘I shall give you a letter of introduction, of course.’ The admiral had already made his proposals to Paris. That had been easy. He was known to hate the British and a French agent in Cadiz had spoken to him, but the reply from the Emperor was simple. Deliver the votes in the Cortes and the Spanish king, now a prisoner in France, would be returned. France would make peace and Spain would be free. All the French demanded in return was the right to send troops across Spanish roads to complete the conquest of Portugal and so drive Lord Wellington’s British army into the sea. As an earnest of their goodwill the French had given orders that the admiral’s estates on the Guadiana should not be plundered and now, in return, the admiral must deliver the votes and so sever the alliance with Britain. ‘By summer, Father,’ he said.

‘Summer?’

‘It will be done. We shall have our king. We shall be free.’

‘Under God.’

‘Under God,’ the admiral agreed. ‘Find the money, Father, and make the English look like fools.’

‘It is God’s will,’ Montseny said, ‘so it will happen.’

And the British would go to hell.

Everything was easy after the shot felled Sharpe.

The boat drifted down the ever-widening Guadiana into the night. A hazed moon silvered the hills and lit the long water that shuddered under the small wind. Sharpe lay in the boat’s bilges, senseless, his head broken and bloodied and bandaged, and the brigadier sat in the stern, his leg splinted and his hands on the tiller ropes, and he wondered what he should do. The dawn found them between low hills without a house in sight. Egrets and herons stalked the river’s edge. ‘He needs a doctor, sir,’ Harper said, and the brigadier heard the anguish in the Irishman’s voice. ‘He’s dying, sir.’

‘He’s breathing, isn’t he?’ the brigadier asked.

‘He is, sir,’ Harper said, ‘but he needs a doctor, sir.’

‘Good God incarnate, man, I’m not a conjuror! I can’t find a doctor in a wilderness, can I?’ The brigadier was in pain and spoke more sharply than he intended and he saw the flare of hostility on Harper’s face and felt a stab of fear. Sir Barnaby Moon reckoned himself a good officer, but he was not comfortable dealing with the ranks. ‘If we come to a town,’ he said, trying to mollify the big sergeant, ‘we’ll look for a physician.’

‘Yes, sir, thank you, sir.’

The brigadier hoped they would find a town. They needed food and he wanted to find a doctor who could look at his broken leg which throbbed like the devil. ‘Row!’ he snarled at the men, but they made a poor job of it. The painted blades clashed with every stroke, and the more they rowed, the less headway they seemed to make and the brigadier realized that they were fighting an incoming tide. They must have been miles from the sea, yet the tide was flooding against them and there was still no town or village anywhere in sight.

‘Your honour!’ Sergeant Noolan shouted from the bows, and the brigadier saw another boat had appeared about a bend in the wide river. She was a rowing boat, about the size of his own commandeered launch, and she was crammed with men who knew how to use their oars, and she had other men with muskets, and the brigadier hauled on the tiller to point the boat towards the Portuguese bank. ‘Row!’ he shouted, then cursed as the oars tangled again. ‘Dear God,’ he said, because the strange boat was coming fast. She was expertly manned and being carried on the flooding tide, and Brigadier Moon cursed a second time just before the man commanding the approaching boat stood and hailed him.

The shout was in English. The officer commanding the boat wore naval blue and had come from a British sloop that patrolled the Guadiana’s long tidal reach, and the sloop rescued them, lifted Sharpe from the bottom boards, fed them and then carried them out to sea where they were rowed to HMS Thornside, a thirty-six-gun frigate, and Sharpe knew none of it. There was just pain.

Pain and darkness, and a creaking sound so that Sharpe half dreamed he was back on HMS Pucelle, sailing endlessly across the Indian Ocean, and Lady Grace was with him, and in his delirium he was happy again, but then he would half wake and know she was dead and he wanted to weep for that. The creaking went on and the world swayed and there was pain and darkness and a sudden flash of agonizing brilliance, then darkness again.

‘I think he blinked,’ a voice said.