A drawer was opened and Sharpe heard the sound of coins. He pretended not to be interested. The ambassador, not wanting his generosity or lack of it to be obvious, wrapped the coins in a piece of paper that he brought to Sharpe. “Perhaps you’d convey my thanks to your fellows?”
“Of course, sir, thank you, sir.” Sharpe took the coins.
“But you rather look as if you should go back to bed now,” Wellesley said.
“You too, sir.”
“I’m well awake now. Lord Pumphrey and I will stay up. There’s always work to do!” Wellesley was happy suddenly, suffused with relief and the realization that a nightmare was over. “And of course I shall write to my brother commending you in the very highest terms. Be certain I’ll do that, Sharpe.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Good God! It’s over.” The ambassador stared at the last small flames flickering above the blackened mess of the papers lying on the coals. “It’s over!”
“Except the lady, sir,” Sharpe said, “Caterina. She has some letters, doesn’t she?”
“Oh no,” the ambassador said happily, “oh no. It really is over! Thank you, Sharpe.”
Sharpe let himself out. He went into the courtyard where he sniffed the air. It was a dull morning, exhausted after the night’s rain. The weathervane on the embassy’s watchtower betrayed that the wind was from the west. A cat rubbed itself against his ankles and he leaned down to stroke it, then unwrapped the coins. Fifteen guineas. He guessed he was supposed to give one each to his men and keep the rest. He pushed them into a pocket, not sure whether it was a generous reward or not. Probably not, he decided, but his men would be happy enough. He would give them two guineas apiece and that would buy them a lot of rum. “Go and find a mouse,” he told the cat, “because that’s what I’m doing.”
He walked through the archway to the smaller courtyard where servants were sweeping steps and the embassy cow was being milked. The back door to Lord Pumphrey’s house was open and a woman came down the steps to fetch milk. Sharpe waited till her back was turned, then ran up the steps and through the kitchen where the stove had just been relit. He took the next stairs two at a time and opened the door at the top to find himself in a tiled hallway. He climbed more stairs, these deep carpeted, past pictures of Spanish landscapes of white houses, yellow rocks, and blue skies. A white marble statue of a naked boy stood on the landing. The statue was life-size and had a cocked hat on its head. A door stood open and Sharpe saw a woman dusting a bedroom, which he supposed was His Lordship’s. He crept past and she did not hear him. The next flight of stairs was narrower and led to a landing with three closed doors. The first opened onto another stairway, which presumably climbed to the servants’ quarters. The second was the door to a box room that was heaped with unused furniture, valises, and hat boxes. The last door led into a bedroom.
Sharpe crept inside and closed the door. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, for the shutters on both tall windows were closed, but then he could see an empty tin bath in front of the hearth where the remnants of the night’s fire smoldered. There was a bureau, two sofas, a great wardrobe with mirrored doors, and a four-poster bed that had its embroidered curtains drawn.
He crossed the deep rugs and pulled open the nearest shutters to find himself staring across the roofs to the Bay of Cádiz where errant slants of watery sunlight were finding their way through gaps in the cloud to silver the small waves.
Someone grunted in the bed, then moaned slightly, as if resenting being woken by the new light filtering past the bed’s curtains. Sharpe went to the second window and opened its shutters. Arrayed on the window seat, mounted on mahogany stands, were six golden wigs. A blue dress had been discarded on one of the sofas along with a necklace of sapphires and a pair of sapphire earrings. The moan sounded again and Sharpe went to the bed and yanked back the curtains. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully.
And Caterina Veronica Blazquez opened her mouth to scream.
“MY NAME is Sharpe,” Sharpe said before she could alarm the household.
Caterina closed her mouth.
“Richard Sharpe,” he added.
She nodded. She was clutching the bedclothes to her chin. The bed was wide and it was plain a second person had occupied it through the night, for the pillows still showed the mark of his head. The ambassador’s head, Sharpe was certain. Brigadier Moon had seen him come to the house, and Sharpe could not blame Henry Wellesley for being unable to surrender his whore because Caterina Blazquez was a beauty. She had short golden curls that were pretty even in disarray, wide blue eyes, a small nose, a generous mouth, and a smooth pale skin. In a land of dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned women she glowed like a diamond.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Sharpe said, “and I’m not the only one.”
She gave the smallest shake of her head, which, together with her scared expression, conveyed that she was frightened of whoever looked for her.
“You do understand me, don’t you?” Sharpe asked.
A tiny nod of the head. She pulled the covers higher, covering her mouth. This was a good place to hide her, Sharpe thought. She was in no danger here, certainly in no danger from Lord Pumphrey, and she lived in the comfort that a man would want his mistress to enjoy. She was safe enough, at least until the servants’ gossip betrayed her presence in Pumphrey’s house. Caterina was examining Sharpe, her eyes traveling down his shabby uniform, seeing the sword, rising again to his face, and her eyes, if anything, were now slightly wider.
“I was busy last night,” Sharpe said. “I was fetching some letters. Remember those letters?”
Another tiny nod.
“But I got them back. Gave them to Mister Wellesley, I did. He burned them.”
She lowered the bedclothes an inch and rewarded him with a flicker of a smile. He tried to work out how old she was. Twenty-two? Twenty-three? Young, anyway. Young and flawless as far as he could see.
“But there are more letters, darling, aren’t there?”
There was a slight rising of her eyebrows when he called her darling, then a barely discernible shake of her head.
Sharpe sighed. “I know I’m a British officer, darling, but I’m not daft. You know what daft means?”
A nod.
“So let me tell you a bedtime story. Henry Wellesley wrote you a lot of letters that he shouldn’t have written and you kept them. You kept them all, darling. But your pimp took most of them, didn’t he? And he was going to sell them and share the money with you, but then he got murdered. Do you know who murdered him?”
She shook her head.
“A priest. Father Salvador Montseny.”
The slight rise of eyebrows again.
“And Father Montseny murdered the man sent to buy them back,” Sharpe went on, “and last night he tried to murder me, only I’m a much harder man to kill. So he lost the letters and he lost the newspaper that printed them and he’s now a very angry priest, darling. But he knows one thing. He knows you didn’t destroy all the letters. He knows you kept some. You kept them in case you needed the money. But when your pimp got murdered you became scared, didn’t you? So you ran to Henry and told him a pack of lies. You told him the letters were stolen, and told him there weren’t any more. But there are more, and you’ve got them, darling.”
The tiniest and most unconvincing denial, just enough to shiver her curls.
“And the priest is angry, my love,” Sharpe went on. “He wants those other letters. One way or another he’ll find a printing press, but first he has to get the letters, doesn’t he? So he’s coming after you, Caterina, and he’s a wicked man with a knife. He’ll slit your pretty belly from bottom to top.”
Another shiver of the curls. She pulled the bedclothes higher to hide her nose and mouth.
“You think he can’t find you?” Sharpe asked. “I found you. And I know you’ve got the letters.”
This time there was no reaction, just the wide eyes watching him. There was no fear in those eyes. This was a girl, Sharpe realized, who had learned the enormous power of her looks and she already knew that Sharpe was not going to hurt her.