“I suspect we have reason to indulge them, rather than the other way around.”
“Whatever that means,” Sharpe said. “How much money are we talking about?”
“At least a thousand guineas. At least. Probably much more.”
“Bloody hell!” Sharpe said, then gave a humorless laugh. “That’ll teach the ambassador to choose his women more carefully.”
“Henry paid the three hundred guineas that Plummer lost,” Pumphrey said, “but he can well afford it. The man who stole his wife had to pay him a fortune. But from now it will be the government’s money.”
“Why?”
“Because once our enemies published a letter it became a matter of public policy. This business is no longer about Henry’s unfortunate choice of bedmate, but about British policy toward Spain. Perhaps that’s why they printed the one letter. It put up the price and opened His Majesty’s purse strings. If that was their motive, then I must say it was rather clever of them.”
Sharpe walked back to the central chamber. He imagined enemies hidden all around, enemies who were moving through the hidden passage, enemies threatening from a new archway every few seconds. Plummer and his companions would have been like rats in a pit, never knowing which hole the terriers would come from. “Suppose they do sell you the letters,” he said. “What’s to stop them keeping copies and publishing them anyway?”
“They will undertake not to. That is one of our immutable conditions.”
“Immutable rubbish,” Sharpe said scornfully. “You’re not dealing with other diplomats, but with bloody blackmailers!”
“I know, Richard,” Pumphrey said. “I do know. It is unsatisfactory, but we must do our best and trust that the transaction is attended by honor.”
“You mean you’re just hoping for the best?”
“Is that bad?”
“In battle, my lord, always expect the worst. Then you might be ready for it. Where’s the woman?”
“Woman?”
“Caterina Blazquez, is that her name? Where is she?”
“I have no idea,” Pumphrey said distantly.
“Is she part of it?” Sharpe asked forcefully. “Does she want guineas?”
“The letters were stolen from her!”
“So she says.”
“You have a very suspicious mind, Richard.”
Sharpe said nothing. He disliked the way Pumphrey used his Christian name. It denoted more than familiarity. It suggested Sharpe was a valued inferior, a pet. It was patronizing and it was false. Pumphrey liked to give the impression of frailty, lightness, and frivolity, but Sharpe knew there was a razor mind at work in that well-groomed head. Lord Pumphrey was a man at home in darkness, and a man who knew well enough that ulterior motives were the driving force of the world. “Pumps,” he said, and was rewarded by a slight flicker of an eyebrow, “you know bloody well that they’re going to cheat us.”
“Which is why I asked for you, Captain Sharpe.”
That was better. “We don’t know the letters are at the newspaper house, do we?”
“No.”
“But if they cheat us, which they will, then I’m going to have to deal with them. What’s the object, my lord? To steal them, or to stop them from being published?”
“His Majesty’s government would like both.”
“And His Majesty’s government pays me, don’t they? Ten shillings and sixpence a day, with four shillings and sixpence deducted for mess costs.”
“The ambassador, I’m sure, will reward you,” Lord Pumphrey said stiffly.
Sharpe said nothing. He went to the center of the chamber where he could see the dried blood black between the flagstones. He slapped his toe on the floor and listened to the echo. Noise, he thought, noise and bullets. Scare the bastards to death. But perhaps Pumphrey was right. Perhaps they did intend to sell the letters. But if they chose this crypt for the exchange then Sharpe reckoned they wanted both letters and gold. He climbed the steps back to the cathedral’s crossing and Lord Pumphrey followed. There was a door in the temporary brick wall and Sharpe tried it. It opened easily and beyond was the open air and great stacks of abandoned masonry waiting for work to resume on the cathedral. “Seen enough?” Lord Pumphrey asked.
“Just pray they don’t want to meet us in the crypt,” Sharpe said.
“Suppose they do?”
“Just pray they don’t,” Sharpe said, for he had never seen a place so ideally suited for ambush and murder.
They walked silently through the small streets. A mortar shell exploded dully at the other end of the city and a moment later every church bell in the city sounded at once. Sharpe wondered if the clangor was a summons for men to extinguish a fire set by the shell. Then he saw that everyone on the street had stopped. Men took off their hats and bowed their heads. “The oraciones,” Lord Pumphrey said, taking off his own hat.
“The what?”
“Evening prayer time.” The folk made the sign of the cross when the bells ended. Sharpe and Pumphrey walked on, but had to step into a shopfront to make way for three men carrying gigantic loads of firewood on their backs. “It’s all imported,” Lord Pumphrey said.
“The wood?”
“Can’t get it from the mainland, can we? So it’s fetched in from the Balearics or from the Azores. It costs a great deal of money to cook or stay warm in a Cádiz winter. Luckily the embassy gets coal from Britain.”
Firewood and coal. Sharpe watched the men disappear. They gave him an idea. A way to save the ambassador if the bastards did not sell the letters. A way to win.
FATHER SALVADOR Montseny ignored the two men operating the printing press while they were only too aware of him. There was something very threatening in the priest’s calmness. Their employer, Eduardo Nuñez, who had brought Montseny to the pressroom, sat on a high chair in the room’s corner and smoked a cigar as Montseny explored the room. “The work has been well done,” Montseny said.
“Except now we can’t see.” Nuñez waved at the brick rectangles where the two windows had been. “Light was bad anyway. Now we work in the dark.”
“You have lanterns,” Father Montseny observed.
“But the work is delicate,” Nuñez said, pointing at his two men. One was inking the press’s form with a sheepskin ball while the other was trimming a sheet of paper.
“Then do the work carefully,” Montseny said sourly. He was satisfied. The cellar, where the two printing apprentices lived, had no entrance other than a trapdoor that let into the pressroom’s floor, while the pressroom itself, which took up almost all the ground floor, was now only accessible by the door that led from the courtyard. The first story was a storeroom, crammed with paper and ink, that could only be reached by an open stair beside the trapdoor. The second and third stories were Nuñez’s living quarters, and Montseny had blocked the stairway leading to the flat roof. A guard was up on that roof at all hours, climbing to his post by a ladder from the balcony of Nuñez’s bedroom. Nuñez did not like the arrangements, but Nuñez was being well paid in English gold.
“Do you really believe we shall be attacked?” Nuñez asked.
“I hope you’re attacked,” Montseny said.
Nuñez made the sign of the cross. “Why, Father?”
“Because then the admiral’s men will kill our enemies,” Montseny said.
“We are not soldiers,” Nuñez said nervously.
“We are all soldiers,” Montseny said, “fighting for a better Spain.”
He had nine guards to keep the press safe. They lived in the storeroom upstairs and cooked their meals in the courtyard beside the latrine. They were solid oxlike men with big hands stained by years spent in the tarred rigging of warships, and they were all familiar with weapons and all ready to kill for their king, their country, and their admiral.
There was one small room off the pressroom. It was Nuñez’s office, a charnel house of old bills, papers, and books, but Montseny had turfed Nuñez out, replacing him with a creature supplied by the admiral; a miserable creature, a whining, smoke-ridden, alcohol sodden, sweat-stinking excuse for a man, a writer. Benito Chavez was fat, nervous, peevish, and pompous. He had made his living writing opinions for the newspapers, but as the land ruled by the Spanish shrank, so the newspapers that would accept his opinions vanished until he was left only with El Correo de Cádiz, but that, at least, now promised to pay him well. He glanced around as Montseny opened the door. “Magnificent,” he said, “quite magnificent.”