"In a bad way, is he?" Sharpe asked.
"Heartbroken," Hogan said callously. "Keeps claiming that nothing was his fault. He doesn't seem to grasp that isn't the point."
"It isn't, is it? The point is that you'd prefer to keep bloody Valverde happy."
Hogan shook his head. "I'd prefer to bury Valverde, and preferably alive, but what I really want is for Wellington to be Generalisimo."
"And you'll sacrifice me for that?"
"Of course! Every soldier knows you must lose some valuable men if you want to win a great prize. Besides, what does it matter if you do lose your commission? You'll just go off and join Teresa and become a famous partisan: El Fusilero!" Hogan smiled cheerfully, then turned to Harper. "Sergeant? Would you do me a great service and give me a moment's privacy with Captain Sharpe?"
Harper obligingly walked on ahead where he tried to overhear the conversation between the two officers, but Hogan kept his voice low and Sharpe's exclamations of surprise offered Harper no clue. Nor did he have any chance to question Sharpe before the three British officers turned a corner to see Lord Kiely's servants and Captain Donaju's twenty men standing awkwardly beside a grave that had been recently dug in an orchard next to a graveyard. Father Sarsfield had paid the village gravediggers to dig the hole just feet away from consecrated ground for, though the laws of the church insisted that Lord Kiely's sins must keep him from burial in holy ground, Sarsfield would nevertheless place the body as near as he could to consecrated soil so that on Judgment Day the exiled Irishman's soul would not be utterly bereft of Christian company. The body had been stitched into a dirty white canvas shroud. Four men of the Real Companпa Irlandesa lowered the corpse into the deep grave, then Hogan, Sharpe and Harper took off their hats as Father Sarsfield said the prayers in Latin and afterwards spoke in English to the twenty guardsmen. Lord Kiely, the priest said, had suffered from the sin of pride and that pride had not let him endure disappointment. Yet all Irishmen, Sarsfield said, must learn to live with disappointment for it was given to their heritage as surely as the sparks flew upwards. Yet, he went on, the proper response to disappointment was not to abandon hope and reject God's gift of life, but to keep the hope glowing bright. "We have no homes, you and I," he said to the sombre guardsmen, "but one day we shall all inherit our earthly home, and if it is not given to us then it will come to our children or to our children's children." The priest fell silent and stared down into the grave. "Nor must you worry that his Lordship committed suicide," he finally continued. "Suicide is a sin, but sometimes life is so unbearable that we must risk the sin rather than face the horror. Wolfe Tone made that choice thirteen years ago." The mention of the Irish patriot rebel made one or two of the guardsmen glance at Sharpe, then they looked back to the priest who went on in his gentle, persuasive voice to tell how Wolfe Tone had been held captive in a British dungeon and how, rather than face the enemy's gallows, he had slit his own throat with a penknife. "Lord Kiely's motives might not have been so pure as Tone's," Sarsfield said, "but we don't know what sadness drove him to his sin and in our ignorance we must therefore pray for his soul and forgive him." There were tears in the priest's eyes as he took a small phial of holy water from the haversack at his side and sprinkled its drops on the lonely grave. He offered the benediction in Latin, then stepped back as the guardsmen raised their muskets to fire a ragged volley over the open grave. Birds panicked up from the orchard's trees, then circled and flew back as the smoke dissipated among the branches.
Hogan took charge as soon as the volley had been fired. He insisted that there was still some danger of a French attack at dusk and that the soldiers should all return to the ridge. "I'll follow soon," he told Sharpe, then he ordered Kiely's servants back to his Lordship's quarters.
The soldiers and servants left, the sound of their boots fading in the late afternoon air. It was sultry in the orchard where the two gravediggers waited patiently for the signal to fill up the grave beside which Hogan now stood, hat in hand, staring down at the shrouded corpse. "For a long time," he said to Father Sarsfield, "I've carried a pillbox with some Irish earth inside so that if I should die I would rest with a little bit of Ireland all through eternity. I seem to have mislaid it, Father, which is a pity for I'd have liked to sprinkle a wee bit of Ireland's soil onto Lord Kiely's grave."
"A generous thought, Major," Sarsfield said.
Hogan stared down at Kiely's shroud. "The poor man. I hear he was hoping to marry the Lady Juanita?"
"They spoke of it," Sarsfield said drily, his tone implying his disapproval of the match.
"The lady's doubtless in mourning," Hogan said, then put his hat back on. "Or maybe she's not mourning at all? You've heard that she's gone back to the French? Captain Sharpe let her go. He's a fool for women, that man, but the Lady Juanita can easily make a fool of men. She did of poor Kiely here, did she not?" Hogan paused as a sneeze gathered and exploded. "Bless me," he said, wiping his nose and eyes with a vast red handkerchief. "And what a terrible woman she was," he went on. "Saying she was going to marry Kiely, and all the while she was committing adultery and fornication with Brigadier Guy Loup. Is fornication a mere venial sin these days?"
"Fornication, Major, is a mortal sin." Sarsfield smiled. "As I suspect you know only too well."
"Crying out to heaven for revenge, is it?" Hogan returned the smile, then looked back to the grave. Bees hummed in the orchard blossoms above Hogan's head. "But what about fornicating with the enemy, Father?" he asked. "Isn't that a worse sin?"
Sarsfield took the scapular from around his neck, kissed it, then carefully folded the strip of cloth. "Why are you so worried for the Dona Juanita's soul, Major?" he asked.
Hogan still looked down at the dead man's coarse shroud. "I'd rather worry about his poor soul. Do you think it was discovering that his lady was humping a Frog that killed him?"
Sarsfield flinched at Hogan's crudity. "If he did discover that, Major, then it could hardly have added to his happiness. But he was not a man who knew much happiness, and he rejected the hand of the church."
"And what could the church have done? Changed the whore's nature?" Hogan asked. "And don't tell me that Dona Juanita de Elia is not a spy, Father, for I know she is and you know the selfsame thing."
"I do?" Sarsfield frowned in puzzlement.
"You do, Father, you do, and God forgive you for it. Juanita is a whore and a spy, and a better whore, I think, than she is a spy. But she was the only person available for you, isn't that so? Doubtless you'd have preferred someone less flamboyant, but what choice did you have? Or was it Major Ducos who made the choice? But it was a bad choice, a very bad choice. Juanita failed you, Father. We found her when she was trying to bring you a whole lot of these." Hogan reached into his tail pocket and produced one of the counterfeit newspapers that Sharpe had discovered in San Cristobal. "They were wrapped in sheets of sacred music, Father, and I thought to myself, why would they do that? Why church music? Why not other newspapers? But, of course, if she was stopped and given a cursory search then who would think it odd that she was carrying a pile of psalms to a man of God?"
Sarsfield glanced at the newspaper, but did not take it. "I think, maybe," he said carefully, "that grief has deranged your mind."
Hogan laughed. "Grief for Kiely? Hardly, Father. What might have deranged me is all the work I've been having to do in these last few days. I've been reading my correspondence, Father, and it comes from all sorts of strange places. Some from Madrid, some from Paris, some even from London. Would you like to hear what I've learned?"