“What’s that?”
“Vinegar, sir, for your head, sir. Take off your hat.” Hagman insisted on soaking the bandage with vinegar. “It’ll help, sir.”
“I stink.”
“We all stink, sir. We’re the king’s soldiers.”
The storm was worsening. The rain had started again and was coming harder, driven by a wind that pounded the city’s ocean walls with heavy waves. Thunder rolled like cannon shots above the watchtowers and lightning ripped across the bay where the waiting fleet jerked at its anchor lines.
Sharpe guessed it was past two in the morning when he reached the abandoned building close to Nuñez’s house. The rain was malevolent. Sharpe fumbled in his pocket for the key, opened the padlock, and pushed the door open. He had only got lost twice on the way here, and had eventually found the place by taking the route along the harbor wall. There had been Spanish soldiers there, sheltering by the cannons overlooking the bay’s entrance, and Sharpe had feared being asked his business, so he had marched his five men as a squad. He reckoned the Spanish sentinels would assume the five men were a detail from the garrison, forced to endure the weather, and leave them alone. It had worked, and now they were inside the abandoned building. He closed the gates and locked them with the inside bolts. “You’ve got the lantern?” he asked Perkins.
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t light it till you’re inside the building,” Sharpe said. Then he gave Harper careful orders before taking Hagman to the watchtower. They groped their way through the dark and up the steps. Once at the top, it was hard to see anything because the night was so dark. Sharpe was watching for a sentry on the roof of the Nuñez house, but could see nothing. He had brought Hagman because the old poacher had the best eyesight of any of his riflemen.
“If he’s there, sir,” Hagman said, “he’s staying out of the wind and rain.”
“Probably.”
A shard of lightning lit the interior of the watchtower. Then thunder echoed across the city. The rain was pelting down, hissing on the roofs below. “Do people live above the printers, sir?” Hagman asked.
“I think so,” Sharpe said. Most of the houses in the city seemed to have shops or workplaces on the ground floor and living quarters above.
“Suppose there are women and children there?”
“That’s why I’ve got the smoke balls.”
Hagman thought about that. “You mean you’ll smoke them out?”
“That’s the idea, Dan.”
“Only I wouldn’t like to kill little ones, sir.”
“You won’t have to,” Sharpe said, hoping he was right.
There was another flash of lightning. “There’s no one there, sir,” Hagman said, nodding toward the roof of Nuñez’s house. “On the roof, sir,” he added, realizing that Sharpe could not have seen the nod.
“They all went to the cathedral, didn’t they?”
“They did, sir?”
“I’m talking to myself, Dan,” Sharpe said, staring into the rain and wind. He had seen a sentry on the roof in daylight and he had assumed there would be a man there at night, but suppose that man was still in the cathedral? Or was he just keeping dry and warm inside the house? Sharpe had planned to drop the smoke balls down the chimneys. The smoke would drive whoever was inside the building out to the street. Then Sharpe would drop the shells down to wreak what damage they could. The idea of using the chimneys had come to him when he saw the firewood being carried through the city’s streets, but suppose he could get inside Nuñez’s house?
“When this is done, sir,” Hagman asked, “do we go back to battalion?”
“I hope so,” Sharpe said.
“I wonder who’s commanding the company now, sir. Poor Mister Bullen isn’t.”
“Lieutenant Knowles, I should think.”
“He’ll be glad to see us back, sir.”
“I shall be glad to see him. And it won’t be long, Dan. There!” Sharpe had seen a glimmer of light immediately beneath the tower. It showed for a second, then vanished, but told Sharpe that Harper had found a way onto the roof. “Down we go.”
“How’s your head, sir?”
“I’ll live, Dan.”
Sharpe reckoned the flat roofs were a thief’s dream. A man could walk all around Cádiz four stories above the streets, and few of those streets were too wide to be jumped. The storm was just as big a help. The rain and wind would drown any noise, though he still told his men to take off their boots. “Carry them,” he said. Even with the storm the boots would make too much noise on the roofs of the houses between the watchtower and the newspaper.
There were low walls between the roofs, but it took less than a minute to cross them and so discover that there was no sentry on Nuñez’s house. There was a trapdoor, but it was firmly bolted on the inside. Sharpe had seen the ladder climbing from the balcony on his first reconnaissance. He gave Perkins his boots, slung his rifle, and climbed down. The ladder went to the side of the balcony so the big wooden shutters covering the door had room to open. The shutters were closed and latched now. Sharpe groped for the place they joined, then put his knife between them. The blade slid easily because the wood had rotted. He found the latch, pushed it up, and one of the shutters caught the wind and swung violently, banging against the wall. The shutters had protected a half-glazed door that began to rattle in the wind. Sharpe put his knife into the gap between the doors, but this wood was solid. The shutter banged again. Break the glass, he thought. Easy. But suppose there were bolts at the foot of the door?
He was about to crouch and push against the foot of the door when he saw a glimmer of light from inside the room. For a heartbeat he thought he had imagined it, then wondered whether it was the reflection of distant lightning on the glass, but the glimmer showed again. It was a spark. He stepped to one side. The light vanished a second time, reappeared, and he reckoned someone inside had been sleeping. They had been woken by the banging of the shutter and now they used a tinderbox to light a candle. The flame burned bright suddenly, then steadied as the candle was lit.
Sharpe waited, knife in hand. The rain was loud on his hat, the same hat he had bought from the beggar. He heard the bolts being drawn. Three bolts. Then the door opened and a man appeared in a nightshirt. He was an older man, in his forties or fifties, and had tousled hair and a bad-tempered face. He reached for the swinging shutter as the candle flickered in the wind behind him. Then he saw Sharpe and opened his mouth to shout. The blade touched his throat. “Silencio,” Sharpe hissed. He pushed the man inside. There was a rumpled bed, clothes heaped on a chair, a chamber pot, and nothing else. “Pat! Bring ’em down!”
The riflemen filled the room. They were dark figures, soaking wet, who now pulled on their boots. Sharpe closed the shutters and latched them. Harris, who spoke the best Spanish, was talking to the prisoner who gesticulated wildly as he spoke. “He’s called Nuñez, sir,” Harris said, “and he says there’s two men on the ground floor.”
“Where are the others?” Sharpe knew that there had to be more than two guards.
There was a flurry of Spanish. “He says they went out, sir,” Harris said.
So Montseny had stripped the place of sentries in hope of making an ungodly profit. “Ask him where the letters are.”
“The letters, sir?”
“Just ask him. He’ll know.”
A sly look flickered on Nuñez’s face, then an expression of pure alarm as Sharpe turned on him with the knife. He stared into Sharpe’s face and his courage fled. He spoke fast. “He says they’re downstairs, sir,” Harris translated, “with the writer. Does that make sense?”
“It makes sense. Tell him to be quiet now. Perkins, you’re going to stay here and watch him.”
“Tie him up, sir?” Harris suggested.
“And stop his mouth up too.”
Sharpe lit a second candle and carried it into the next room where he saw a flight of stairs going up to the bolted trapdoor. Another flight went down to the second floor where there was a small kitchen and a parlor. A door opened onto the next stairway, which led to one huge storeroom, piled with paper. Light showed from the ground floor. Sharpe, leaving the candle on the stairs, went to the top of the open staircase and saw the press vast and black beneath him, and next to it a table on which playing cards had been discarded. A man was sleeping on the floor, while another, with a musket over his knees, was slouched in a chair. A huge pile of newly printed newspapers was stacked against the wall.