This tower was six stories high. The top floor was a roofed platform with a stone balustrade and Sharpe eased his head over the parapet very slowly so that no one watching would see a sudden movement. He peered eastward and saw he had been right and that this was the perfect place to watch Nuñez’s house, which was just fifty paces away and joined to the abandoned building by other houses, all with flat roofs. Most of the city’s houses had flat roofs, places to enjoy the sun that rarely reached into the deep, narrow, balcony-blocked ravines of the streets. The chimneys cast black shadows and it was in one of those shadows that Sharpe saw the sentinel on Nuñez’s house: one man, dark cloaked, sitting with a musket across his knees.
Sharpe watched for the best part of an hour during which the man hardly moved. The French mortars had stopped firing, but far off to the south and east there was the bloom of gunsmoke beyond the marshes where the French besiegers faced the small British army that protected Cádiz’s isthmus. The sound of the guns was muted, a mere grumble of distant thunder, and then that too died away.
Sharpe went back to the street where he closed the gates, put the chain back, and used his new padlock to secure it. He thrust the key into a pocket and walked east and south, away from Nuñez’s house. He kept the ocean on his right, knowing that would bring him to the cathedral where he was to meet Lord Pumphrey. He thought about Jack Bullen as he walked. Poor Jack, a prisoner, and he remembered the burst of smoke from Vandal’s musket. There was a revenge waiting. His head hurt. Sometimes a stab of pain blackened the sight in his right eye, which was odd, because the wound was on the left side of his scalp. He arrived early at the cathedral, so he sat on the seawall and watched the great rollers come from the Atlantic to break on the rocks and suck back white. A small band of men was negotiating the jagged reef that extended west from the city and ended in a lighthouse. He could see they were carrying burdens, presumably fuel for the fire that was lit nightly on the lighthouse platform. They hesitated between rocks, jumping only when the sea drew back and the white foam drained from the stones.
A clock struck five and he walked to the cathedral, which, even unfinished, loomed massively above the smaller houses. Its roof was half covered in tarpaulins so it was hard to tell what it would look like when it was complete, but for now it looked ugly, a brutal mass of gray-brown stone broken by few windows and spidery with scaffolding. The entrance, which fronted onto a narrow street piled with masonry, was approached by a fine flight of stairs where Lord Pumphrey waited, fending off the beggars with an ivory-tipped cane. “Good God, Richard,” His Lordship said as he greeted Sharpe, “where did you get that cloak?”
“Off a beggar.”
Lord Pumphrey was soberly dressed, though a smell of lavenders wafted from his dark coat and long black cloak. “Have you had a useful day?” he asked lightly, as he used the cane to part the beggars and reach the door.
“Maybe. All depends, doesn’t it, whether the letters are in that newspaper place?”
“I trust it doesn’t come to that,” Lord Pumphrey said. “I trust our blackmailers will contact me.”
“They haven’t yet?”
“Not yet,” Pumphrey said. He dipped a forefinger in the stoup of holy water and wafted it across his forehead. “I’m no papist, of course, but it does no harm to pretend, does it? The message hinted that our opponents are willing to sell us the letters, but only for a great deal of money. Isn’t it ghastly?” This last question referred to the cathedral interior, which did not seem ghastly to Sharpe, just splendid and ornate and huge. He was staring down a long nave flanked by clusters of pillars. Off the side aisles were rows of chapels bright with painted statues, gilded altars, and candles lit by the faithful. “They’ve been building it for ninety-something years,” Lord Pumphrey said, “and work has now more or less stopped because of the war. I suppose they’ll finish it all one day. Hat off.”
Sharpe snatched off his hat. “Did you write to Sir Thomas?”
“I did.” Lord Pumphrey had promised to write a note requesting that Sharpe’s riflemen be kept on the Isla de León rather than be put on a ship heading north to Lisbon. The wind had gone southerly during the day and some ships had already headed north.
“I’ll fetch my men tonight,” Sharpe said.
“They’ll have to be quartered in the stables,” Pumphrey said, “and pretend to be embassy servants. We are going to the crossing.”
“The crossing?”
“The place where the transept crosses the nave. There’s a crypt beneath it.”
“Where Plummer died?”
“Where Plummer died. Isn’t that what you wanted to see?”
The farther end of the cathedral was still unbuilt. A plain brick wall rose where, one day, the sanctuary and high altar would stand. The crossing, just in front of the plain wall, was an airy high space with soaring pillars at each corner. Above Sharpe now was the unfinished dome where a few men worked on scaffolding that climbed each cluster of pillars and then spread about the base of the dome. A makeshift crane was fixed high in the dome’s scaffolding and two men were hauling up a wooden platform loaded with masonry. “I thought you said they’d stopped building,” Sharpe said.
“I suppose they must do repairs,” Lord Pumphrey said airily. He led Sharpe past a pulpit behind which an archway had been built into one of the massive pillars. A flight of steps disappeared downward. “Captain Plummer met his end down there.” Lord Pumphrey gestured at the steps. “I try to feel sorrow at his passing, but I must say he was a most obnoxious man. You wish to descend?”
“Of course.”
“I very much doubt they will choose this place again,” His Lordship said.
“Depends what they want,” Sharpe said.
“Meaning?”
“If they want us dead then they’ll choose this place. It worked for them once, so why not use it again?” He led the way down the stairs and so emerged into an extraordinary chamber. It was circular with a low-domed ceiling. An altar lay at one end of the chamber. Three women knelt in front of the crucifix, beads busy in their fingers, staring up at the crucified Christ as Pumphrey tiptoed to the crypt’s center. Once there he put a finger to his lips and Sharpe assumed His Lordship was being reverent, but instead Pumphrey rapped his cane sharply on the floor and the sound echoed and reechoed. “Isn’t it amazing?” Lord Pumphrey asked. “Amazing,” the echo said, and then again, and again, and again. One of the women turned and scowled, but His Lordship just smiled at her and offered an elegant bow. “You can sing in harmony with yourself here,” Pumphrey said. “Would you like to try?”
Sharpe was more interested in the archways leading from the big chamber. There were five. The center one led to another chapel, which had an altar lit by candles, while the remaining four were dark caverns. He explored the nearest one and discovered a passage leading from it. The passage circled the big chamber, going from cavern to cavern. “Clever bastards, aren’t they?” he said to Lord Pumphrey who had followed him.
“Clever?”
“Plummer must have died in the middle of the big chamber, yes?”
“That’s where the blood was, certainly. You can still see it if you look carefully.”
“And the bastards must have been in these side chambers. And you can never tell which one they’re in because they can go around the passage. There’s only one reason for meeting in a place like this. It’s a killing ground. You’re negotiating with the bastards? You tell them to meet us in a public place, in daylight.”