Sharpe laid a hand on Pumphrey’s shoulder, making His Lordship shiver. Sharpe bent down to whisper hoarsely in His Lordship’s ear. “If you don’t pay her, then I’ll do to you what you ordered done to Astrid.”
“Sharpe!”
“Throat cut,” Sharpe said. “It’s harder than gelding hogs, but just about as messy.” He drew a few inches of his sword, letting the blade scrape against the scabbard’s throat. He felt a quiver in Lord Pumphrey’s shoulder. “I ought to do it to you, my lord, for Astrid’s sake, but Caterina doesn’t want me to. So, are you paying her the money?”
Pumphrey stayed very still. “You won’t cut my throat,” he said with surprising calm.
“I won’t?”
“People know I’m here, Sharpe. I had to ask two provosts where you were billeted. You think they’ll forget me?”
“I take risks, my lord.”
“Which is why you are valuable, Sharpe, but you are not a fool. Kill one of His Majesty’s diplomats and you will die yourself. Besides, as you say, Caterina won’t let you kill me.”
Caterina said nothing. Instead she just shook her head slightly, though whether that was a denial of Lord Pumphrey’s confident assertion or a sign that she did not want him killed, Sharpe could not tell.
“Caterina wants money,” Sharpe said.
“A motive I entirely comprehend,” Pumphrey said, and pushed his bag into the center of the table. “You have the letters?”
Caterina gave the six letters to Sharpe, who showed them to His Lordship, then carried them to the fire.
“No!” Pumphrey said.
“Yes,” Sharpe said, and threw them on the burning driftwood. The letters flared up, sudden and bright, filling the room with a flickering glow that lit Lord Pumphrey’s pale face. “Why did you kill Astrid?” Sharpe asked.
“To preserve Britain’s secrets,” Pumphrey said harshly, “which is my job.” He stood abruptly, and there was a sudden air of authority in his frail figure. “You and I are alike, Captain Sharpe, we know that in war, as in life, there is only one rule. To win. I am sorry about Astrid.”
“No, you’re not,” Sharpe said.
Pumphrey paused. “You’re right. I’m not.” He smiled suddenly. “You play the game very well, Captain Sharpe, I congratulate you.” He blew a kiss to Caterina, then left without another word.
“I do like Pumps,” Caterina said when his lordship had gone, “so I’m glad you didn’t kill him.”
“I should have done.”
“No,” she said firmly. “He’s like you, a rogue, and rogues should be loyal to each other.” She was putting guineas into piles, playing with the coins, and the light from the lamp hanging from the beam reflected from the gold to shine yellow on her skin.
“You’ll go back to Cádiz now?” Sharpe asked.
She nodded. “Probably,” she said, and spun a coin.
“Find a man?”
“A rich man,” she said, watching the spinning coin. “What else can I do? But before I find him I would like to see a battle.”
“No!” Sharpe said. “It’s no place for a woman.”
“Maybe,” she shrugged, then smiled. “So how much do you want, Richard?”
“Whatever you want to give me.”
She pushed a generous pile across the table. “You are a fool, Captain Sharpe.”
“Probably. Yes.”
And somewhere to the south two armies were marching. And Sharpe reckoned there was a chance he might be able to join them, and gold would be no good to him there, but the memory of a woman was always a comfort. “Let’s take the money upstairs,” he suggested.
So they did.
ONE OF General Lapeña’s aides had seen the dragoons. He was watching them file out of the far olive grove toward the troops waiting at the causeway’s far end. General Lapeña borrowed a telescope and made an aide stand his horse beside him so he could rest the barrel on the aide’s shoulder. “Dragons,” he said balefully.
“Not many of them,” Sir Thomas said brusquely, “and a damned long way off. Good God, can’t they shift that gun?”
They could not. The cannon, a nine-pounder with a six-foot-long barrel, was stuck fast. Most of the gun was underwater so that only the tip of its left wheel and the top of the breech were visible. One horse was flailing as a gunner tried to keep its head above water. The riflemen posted to guard the causeway’s edges were holding the other horses, but the beasts were getting increasingly fearful and the panicking horse threatened to jar both gun and limber farther down the flooded embankment. “Detach the limber, man!” Sir Thomas roared and, when his injunction failed to have an immediate effect, he spurred his horse onto the causeway. “I want a dozen more fellows!” he shouted at the nearest infantry.
A squad of Portuguese infantrymen followed Sir Thomas who curbed his horse beside the stricken cannon. “What’s the problem?” he asked brusquely.
“There seems to be a culvert down here, sir,” a lieutenant said. He was clinging to the drowned wheel and plainly feared the whole heavy weapon would tip onto him. “The wheel’s caught in the culvert, sir,” the lieutenant added. A sergeant and three gunners were heaving at the gun, attempting to lift the trail-plate eye that attached the cannon to its limber, and every heave jarred the cannon slightly deeper, but at last they succeeded in raising the eye free of the pin so that the limber shot out onto the road in a flurry of splashing hooves. The gun stayed behind but lurched dangerously, and the lieutenant’s eyes widened in fear before the weapon settled, though now the breech was entirely submerged.
Sir Thomas unbuckled his sword belt and threw it with his scabbard and pouches to Lord William who had dutifully followed his master onto the causeway. Sir Thomas gave the aide his cocked hat too, so that the small wind stirred his white hair. Then he slid from the saddle, plunging up to his chest into the gray water. “Not nearly as cold as the River Tay,” he said. “Come on, boys.”
The water was now up to Sir Thomas’s armpits. He put his shoulder to the wheel while grinning riflemen and Portuguese privates joined him. Lord William wondered why Sir Thomas had allowed the gun to be released from its horse team, then understood that the general did not want the freed gun to leap ahead and crush a man under its wheel. Slow and steady would do this job.
“Put your backs into it!” the general shouted to the men around him. “Heave on it! Come on now!”
The gun moved. The breech reappeared, then the top of its right wheel showed above water. A rifleman lost his footing, slipped under, flailed his way back, and hauled on a wheel spoke. The gunners on the road had attached a strap to the trail and were pulling like men in a tug-of-war.
“Here she comes!” Sir Thomas shouted triumphantly, and the cannon lurched up the verge and rolled onto the causeway. “Hook her up!” Sir Thomas said. “And let’s get moving!” He wiped his hands on his drenched jacket as the trail-plate eye was reconnected. There was the crack of a whip and the gun was on its way again. A Portuguese sergeant, seeing that the general was having trouble mounting his horse because of the weight of his wet clothes, hurried to help and heaved Sir Thomas upward. “Obliged to you, obliged,” Sir Thomas said, giving the man a coin before settling himself in the saddle. “That’s the way to do it, Willie.”
“You’ll catch your death, sir,” Lord William said with genuine concern.
“Aye, well, if I do, Major Hope knows what to do with my corpse,” Sir Thomas said. He was wet through, but grinning broadly. “That water was cold, Willie! Damned cold! Make sure those infantrymen get a change of clothes.” He laughed suddenly. “When I was a lad, Willie, we chased a fox into the Tay. I was just a boy and the hounds were doing nothing except bark at the thing, so I drove my horse into the river and caught the beast with my bare hands. I thought I was a hero! My uncle gave me a whipping for that. Never do the hounds’ work, he told me, but sometimes you have to, sometimes you just have to.”
The dragoons had swerved northward, never coming within a mile of the troops crossing the causeway, and when the light cavalry of the King’s German Legion trotted toward them the dragoons galloped fast away. The rest of the Spanish infantry crossed, still going with painful slowness, so that it was dusk before Sir Thomas’s two brigades came across the causeway, and full dark before the army marched again. The road climbed steadily and undramatically toward the lights of Vejer that flickered and twinkled on the hilltop beneath the stars. The army marched north of the town, following a road that led to a midnight bivouac in a spread of olive groves where Sir Thomas at last rid himself of his damp clothes and crouched over a fire to get warm.