“Sir?” Sharpe asked. He knew he should call the ambassador “Your Excellency,” but he kept forgetting and Wellesley did not seem to mind.
“We live, breathe, and have our very being in this city by permission of the Spanish. That is as it should be. So whatever you do, Sharpe, do it carefully. And please don’t mention this to anyone but Lord Pumphrey. He alone is privy to the negotiations.” That was not true. There was another man who might help, who would help, though Henry Wellesley doubted that he would succeed. Which left him dependent on this scarred and bandaged rogue.
“I won’t mention it, sir,” Sharpe said.
“Then good night, Sharpe.”
“Good night, sir.”
Lord Pumphrey, smelling faintly of violets, was waiting in the hall. “Well, Richard?”
“It seems I’ve got a job here.”
“I’m so pleased. Shall we talk?” Lord Pumphrey led Sharpe down the candlelit corridor. “Was it really five men, Richard? Be truthful. Five?”
“Seven,” Sharpe said, though he could not remember. Nor did it matter. He was a thief, he was a murderer, he was a soldier, and now he had a blackmailer to settle.
PART TWO
THE CITY
CHAPTER 4
SHARPE WAS GIVEN A room in the embassy’s attic. The roof was flat and it had leaked badly at some time for a great patch of plaster was missing and the rest was dangerously cracked. A jug of water stood on a small table and a chamber pot lay beneath the bed. Lord Pumphrey had apologized for the accommodation. “The consul here in Cádiz rented the premises for us. Six houses in all. I have one of them, but I think you’d be happier staying in the embassy itself.”
“I would,” Sharpe had said hurriedly.
“I thought as much. Then I shall meet you at five tomorrow evening.”
“And I need some civilian clothes,” Sharpe had told His Lordship, and when he went to bed he found a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a coat laid out for him. He suspected the clothes had belonged to the unfortunate Plummer. They were black, too big, stiff, and slightly damp, as if they had never dried properly after being washed.
He left the embassy at six in the morning. He knew that because a score of church bells rang the hour, their sound cacophonous in the rising wind. He carried neither sword nor rifle, for both weapons were conspicuous, though he had borrowed a pistol from the embassy. “You won’t need it,” Lord Pumphrey had said the previous night.
“Don’t like being unarmed,” Sharpe had retorted.
“You know best, I’m sure,” Pumphrey had said, “but for God’s sake don’t startle the natives. They mistrust us enough as it is.”
“I’m just exploring,” Sharpe had said. There was nothing else for him to do. Lord Pumphrey was waiting for a message from the blackmailers. Who those blackmailers were, no one knew, but the appearance of the letter in the newspaper pointed to the political faction most desperate to break the British alliance. “If your negotiations fail,” Sharpe had said, “then that newspaper is where we start.”
“My negotiations never fail,” Lord Pumphrey averred grandly.
“I’ll still have a look at the newspaper,” Sharpe insisted, and so he had left in the early morning and, though he had been given careful directions, was soon lost. Cádiz was a maze of narrow dark alleys and high buildings. No one could use a carriage here for few streets were wide enough so the wealthy either rode, were carried in sedan chairs, or walked.
The sun had not yet risen and the city was asleep. The few folk awake had probably not yet gone to bed or else were servants sweeping courtyards or carrying firewood. A cat writhed about Sharpe’s ankles and he stooped to pet it, then headed down another cobbled alleyway at the end of which he found what he wanted outside a church. A beggar slept on the steps, and he woke the man and gave him a whole guinea along with Plummer’s cloak and hat. In return he got the beggar’s cloak and wide-brimmed hat. Both were greasy and matted with filth.
He walked toward his few glimpses of the dawn and found himself on the city rampart. Its outer face fell steeply to the harbor wharves, but the firestep was almost on the same level as the city’s streets. He walked along the wide top where dark cannons hunched behind embrasures. A spark of light showed across the water on the Trocadero Peninsula where the French had their giant mortars. A company of Spanish soldiers was posted on the wall, but at least half were snoring. Dogs foraged along the rampart’s edge.
The whole world, like the city, seemed asleep, but then an explosion of light ripped the eastern horizon in two. The light spread flat, like a disk, sudden and white to silhouette the few ships anchored near the wharves, and then the light faded, the last of it writhing in a great blossom of smoke that billowed above one of the French forts, and then the noise came. A thunder rolled over the bay, startling sleeping sentries awake as the shell landed just across the ramparts, a quarter mile ahead of Sharpe. There was a brief silence before the missile exploded. A wavering trace of smoke, left by the burning fuse, hung in the first daylight. The shell had blown itself apart inside a small grove of orange trees and Sharpe, when he reached the spot, could smell the powder smoke. He kicked a shard of broken casing that skittered down the rampart. Then he jumped down to the scorched grass and crossed the grove into a dark street. The house walls were a dirty white now as dawn glowed in the east.
He was lost, but he was at the city’s northern edge where he wanted to be. By exploring the narrow streets he at last found the church with the red-painted crucifix on its outer wall. Lord Pumphrey had told him the crucifix had been brought from Venezuela and it was believed that on the Feast of Saint Vincent the red paint turned to blood. Sharpe wondered when the saint’s feast day was. He would like to see paint turn to blood.
He squatted on the bottom step of the church entrance. The filthy cloak swathed him and the wide hat hid his face. The street here was just five paces wide, and almost opposite him was a four-storied house marked by a stone scallop shell cemented into the white facade. An alley ran down the side of the house that had an ornate front door flanked by two windows. The windows were shuttered on the inside while outside the glass were thick black-painted grilles. The upper floors had three windows apiece facing onto narrow balconies. This, Pumphrey had assured him, was where El Correo de Cádiz was printed. “The house belongs to a man called Nuñez, who owns the newspaper. He lives above the printing premises.”
No one stirred in the Nuñez house. Sharpe squatted, unmoving, with a wooden bowl taken from the embassy kitchen beside him on the step. He had put a handful of coins in the bowl, remembering that that was the way to encourage generosity, though as the street stayed empty there was no generosity to encourage. He thought about the beggars of his childhood. Blind Michael, who could see like a hawk, and Ragged Kate, who hired babies for tuppence an hour and plucked at the shawls of well-dressed women in the Strand. She had carried a hat pin to make the babies cry and on a good day she had sometimes made two or three pounds that she would drink away in an evening. There had been Stinking Moses who claimed to have been a parson before he fell into debt. He would tell folks’ fortunes for a shilling. “Always tell them they’ll be lucky in love, boy,” he had advised Sharpe, “’cuz they’d rather be lucky in bed than get to heaven.”
It was oddly restful. Sharpe squatted and, when the first pedestrians appeared, he mumbled the words Pumphrey had suggested. “Por favor, Madre de Dios.” He said the words over and over, occasionally muttering thanks when a copper coin rattled into the bowl. And all the time he watched the house with the scallop shell, and he noted that the big front door was never used and that the shutters behind the heavy window grilles were never opened even though the other houses in the street opened their shutters to take advantage of what small light found its way between the high buildings. Six men came to the house and all used a side door down the alley. Late in the morning Sharpe moved there, muttering his incantation as he went, and he squatted again, this time just inside the alley’s mouth, and watched a man go to the side door and knock. A hatch slid open, a question was asked, it was evidently answered satisfactorily, and the door opened. In the next hour three porters delivered crates and a woman brought a bundle of laundry. The same hatch was slid open each time before the visitors were allowed inside. The laundress dropped a coin in Sharpe’s bowl. “Gracias,” he said.