The church was crowded with dark-shawled women waiting to make their confessions. Phalanxes of candles glimmered in front of statues, altars and paintings. The small lights glittered off the gilded pillars and from the massive silver cross on the high altar that still had its white Easter frontal.
Kiely went to the altar steps. His sword clattered on the marble as he knelt and stared at the rood. He was being crucified too, he told himself, and by smaller men who did not understand his noble aims. He took a flask from his pocket and tipped it to his lips, sucking at the fierce Spanish brandy as though it would save his life.
"Are you well, my son?" A priest had come soft-footed to Kiely's side.
"Go away," Kiely said.
"The hat, my son," the priest said nervously. "This is God's house."
Kiely snatched the plumed hat from his head. "Go away," he said again.
"God preserve you," the priest said and walked back into the shadows. The women waiting to make their confessions glanced nervously at the finely uniformed officer and wondered if he was praying for victory over the approaching French. Everyone knew the blue-coated enemy was coming again and householders were burying their valuables in their gardens in case Massйna's dreaded veterans beat the British aside and came back to sack the town.
Kiely finished the flask. His head spun with liquor, shame and anger. Behind the silver rood in a niche above the high altar was a statue of Our Lady. She wore a diadem of stars, a blue robe, and carried lilies in her hands. It had been a long time since Kiely had stared at such an image. His mother had loved such things. She had forced him to confession and to the sacrament, and had chided him for failing her. She had used to pray to the Virgin, claiming a special kinship with Our Lady as another disappointed woman who had known a mother's sadness. "Bitch," Kiely said aloud, staring at the blue-robed statue, "bitch!" He had hated his mother, just as he hated the church. Juanita had shared Kiely's contempt for the church, but Juanita was another man's lover. Maybe she had always been another man's lover. She had lain with Loup and God knows how many other men and all the while Kiely had been planning to make her a countess and to show off her beauty in all the great capitals of Europe. Tears trickled down his cheeks as he thought of her betrayal and as he remembered his humiliation at the hands of Captain Sharpe. That last memory filled him with a sudden fury. "Bitch!" he shouted at the Virgin Mary. He stood up and hurled the empty flask at her statue behind the altar. "Whore bitch!" he cried as the flask bounced harmlessly off the Virgin's blue robe.
The women screamed. The priest ran towards his Lordship, then stopped in terror because Kiely had drawn the pistol from his holster. The click of the gun's lock echoed loud in the cavernous church as Kiely thumbed back the heavy hammer.
"Bitch!" Kiely spat the word at the statue. "Lying, whoring, thieving, two-faced, leprous bitch!" Tears poured down his cheeks as he aimed the pistol.
"No!" the priest implored as the women's shrieks filled the church. "Please! No! Think of the blessed Virgin, please!"
Kiely turned on the man. "Call her a virgin, do you? You think she'd be a virgin after the Legions had hammered through Galilee?" He laughed wildly, then turned back to the statue. "You whore bitch!" he shouted as he trained the pistol again. "You filthy whore bitch!"
"No!" the priest cried despairingly.
Kiely pulled the trigger.
The heavy bullet smashed through his palate and punched out a palm-sized patch of his skull as it exited. Blood and brain splashed as high as the Virgin's diadem of stars, but none landed on Our Lady. Instead the gore spattered across the sanctuary steps, doused a handful of candles, then trickled down to the nave. Kiely's dead body fell back, his head a mangled horror of blood, brain and bone.
The screams in the church slowly died to be replaced by the rumble of wheels in the street as more guns were dragged towards the east.
And towards the French. Who were coming to reclaim Portugal and break the insolent British at a narrow bridge across the Coa.
PART TWO
CHAPTER VII
The Real Companпa Irlandesa bivouacked on the plateau north and west of Fuentes de Onoro. The village lay astride the southernmost road leading from Ciudad Rodrigo to Almeida and in the night Wellington's army had closed about the village that now threatened to become a battlefield. The dawn mist hid the eastern countryside where the French army readied itself, while up on the plateau Wellington's forces were a smoke-obscured chaos of troops, horses and wagons. Guns were parked on the plateau's eastern crest, their barrels pointing across the Dos Casas stream that marked the army's forward line.
Donaju discovered Sharpe squinting sideways into a scrap of mirror in an attempt to cut his own hair. The sides and the front were easy enough to trim, the difficulty always lay in the rear. "Just like soldiering," Sharpe said.
"You've heard about Kiely?" Donaju, suddenly in command of the Real Companпa Irlandesa, ignored Sharpe's gnomic comment.
Sharpe snipped, frowned, then tried to repair the damage by snipping again, but it only made things worse. "Blew his head off, I heard."
Donaju flinched at Sharpe's callousness, but made no protest. "I can't believe he would do such a thing," he said instead.
"Too much pride, not enough sense. Sounds like most bloody aristocrats to me. These damn scissors are blunt."
Donaju frowned. "Why don't you have a servant?"
"Can't afford one. Besides, I've always looked after myself."
"And cut your own hair?"
"There's a pretty girl among the battalion wives who usually cuts it," Sharpe said. But Sally Clayton, like the rest of the South Essex, was far away. The South Essex was too shrunken by war to serve in the battle line and now was doing guard duty on the army's Portuguese depots and thus would be spared Marshal Massйna's battle to relieve Almeida and cut the British retreat across the Goa.
"Father Sarsfield is burying Kiely tomorrow," Donaju said.
"Father Sarsfield might be burying a lot of us tomorrow," Sharpe said. "If they bury us at all. Have you ever seen a battlefield a year after the fighting? It's like a boneyard. Skulls lying about like boulders, and fox-chewed bones everywhere. Bugger this," he said savagely as he gave his hair a last forlorn chop.
"Kiely can't even be buried in a churchyard" — Donaju did not want to think about battlefields on this ominous morning—"because it was suicide."
"There aren't many soldiers who get a proper grave," Sharpe said, "so I wouldn't grieve for Kiely. We'll be lucky if any of us get a proper hole, let alone a stone on top. Dan!" he shouted to Hagman.
"Sir?"
"Your bloody scissors are blunt."
"Sharpened them last night, sir," Hagman said stoically. "It's like my father always said, sir, only a bad workman blames his tools, sir."
Sharpe tossed the scissors across to Hagman, then brushed the cut strands of hair from his shirt. "You're better off without Kiely," he told Donaju.
"To guard the ammunition park?" Donaju said bitterly. "We would have done better to stay in Madrid."
"To be thought of as traitors?" Sharpe asked as he pulled on his jacket. "Listen, Donaju, you're alive and Kiely isn't. You've got yourself a good company to command. So what if you're guarding the ammunition? You think that isn't important? What happens if the Crapauds break through?"
Donaju did not seem cheered by Sharpe's opinions. "We're orphans," he said self-pityingly. "No one cares what happens to us."