LITMIR.BIZ

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in his head was the recurring fear that she would know nothing, that she would find the death of her husband as great a mystery as Sharpe, yet if he had any hopes of regaining his rank and his career, he had to ask her his questions. ‘You are bringing her to this room?’

      ‘I will give you a room to talk with her, Englishman.’

      ‘I am grateful to you, Matarife.’

      ‘A private room, Major!’ El Matarife laughed and made an obscene gesture. ‘Perhaps when you see her you will want to do more than talk, yes?’

      El Matarife’s gust of laughter was interrupted by a shout from outside the inn and the sound of feet running. The back door was thrown open and a voice shouted that El Matarife should come and come quickly.

      The Slaughterman pushed towards the door, Sharpe beside him, and the room was full of men shouting for lanterns, and then Sharpe ducked under the lintel and saw a light coming from a broken-down shed that was being used as a stable. Men ran towards the shed, lanterns bright, and Sharpe went with them. He pushed through them and stopped at the doorway. He wanted to vomit, so sudden was the shock, and his next urge was to draw the big sword and scythe these beasts who pressed in the small yard around him.

      A girl hung in the shed. She was naked. Her body was a tracery of gleaming rivulets of blood, blood new enough to shine, yet not so new that it still flowed.

      She turned on the rope that was about her neck.

      El Matarife swore. He cuffed at a man who claimed that the girl had committed suicide.

      The body turned, slim and white. The thighs and stomach showed dark bruises beneath the blood that had reached her ankles. Her hands were slim and pale, the nails broken, but still with flecks of red where they had once been painted. There was straw in her hair.

      A dozen men shouted. They had locked the girl in here and she must have found the rope. El Matarife’s voice drowned them all, cursing them for this stupidity, their carelessness. He looked up at the tall Englishman. ‘They are fools, señor. I will punish them.’

      Sharpe noticed how, for the first time, the Slaughterman called him señor. He stared up at the face that had once been lovely. ‘Punish them well.’

      ‘I will! I will!’

      Sharpe turned away. ‘And give her Christian burial!’

      ‘Yes, señor.’ The Slaughterman watched the Englishman closely. ‘She was beautiful, yes?’

      ‘She was beautiful.’

      ‘The Golden Whore.’ El Matarife said the words slowly, as though he pronounced an epitaph. ‘You can’t talk to her now, señor.’

      Sharpe looked at the hanging body. There were scratches on the breasts. He nodded and forced calmness into his voice. ‘I shall ride south this night.’ He turned away. He knew El Matarife’s men watched him, but he would show nothing. He shouted for Angel to bring the horses.

      He stopped a mile from the small village. The memory of the hanging, turning body was foul in him. He thought of his wife dead, of the blood on her throat. He thought of the torture that the dead woman in the stable had endured, of the horrid last moments of a life. He closed his eyes and shuddered.

      ‘We go back now, señor?’ Sharpe heard the sadness in Angel’s voice that their mission had been wasted.

      ‘No.’

      ‘No?’

      ‘We go to the convent.’ They had seen it before the dusk, a building clinging impossibly to a plateau’s edge. ‘We climb there tonight.’ He opened his eyes, twisted in the saddle, and stared behind him. No one had followed them from the inn.

      ‘We go to the convent? But she’s dead!’

      ‘She’s called the whore of gold.’ Sharpe’s voice was savage. ‘Gold because of her hair, Angel, not her money. Whoever that girl was, she wasn’t La Marquesa.’

      But whoever the black-haired girl was whose body hung bloody and slim in the stable, she was dead, and newly dead at that, and Sharpe knew the girl had died because he had asked about La Marquesa. She had died so that Sharpe would leave this valley quietly, convinced that La Marquesa was dead. He pushed back with his heels, turning Carbine, and rode towards the dark mountain. He felt a thickness in his throat because the unknown girl was dead, and he promised her spirit, wherever it was, that he would avenge her. He rode with anger, he climbed to the Convent of the Heavens, and he planned a rescue and a battle.

CHAPTER 11

      It could have been winter, so cold and misty was the plateau. At this height the mist was low cloud that threatened rain. Only the dripping leaves of the few stunted birches witnessed that summer had come to this high, strange, chilling place.

      Sharpe had not slept. He had planned the fight he knew he would face once El Matarife discovered that he had not passed his sentinels at the two bridges. In the dawn he had scouted the plateau’s edge, peering through the mist down the tumbled, precipitous slopes of the great hill.

      Sharpe had not brought Angel all the way to the flat summit of the great hill. He had left the boy on the track with both rifles and careful, painstaking instructions.

      Angel had been worried. ‘It’s a holy place, señor.’

      ‘Trust me, Angel, just trust me.’

      Sharpe had climbed to the plateau with the two horses, and with the fear that this dreadful, desperate deed that he planned could all be for nothing. He would fight Partisans, he would offend the Church, and all for a woman who might not have the answers to save his career and solve Hogan’s mystery.

      Angel had wished him luck, but the boy had been distressed. ‘We have to fight them, señor?’ He spoke of the Partisans.

      ‘To defeat France, yes.’ It was a lie, or at the very least Sharpe did not know if it was a truth. Yet Angel, who trusted the English, had believed him.

      Now, as the dawn showed the grass wet on the plateau, and as the grey clouds sifted through the small trees, Sharpe galloped towards the convent. He was alone in the high place.

      The Convent of the Heavens deserved its name. It was built at the highest point of this steep range of hills, a building that clung alarmingly to the edge of a precipice. It had been built in the days when the Muslims hunted the Christians north, when the prayers of Christians had to be offered in high places that could be defended by Christian swords. The walls of the convent showed no windows. They were grey like the rocks, stained by the rain, a fortress of women. There was only one door in its prison-like walls.

      Sharpe knocked and waited. He knocked again, then hammered the door with a stone, making sparks fly from the square-headed iron nails that studded the great planks of wood. He could hear the sound reverberating within the building, but no answer came.

      He waited. The mist drifted over the plateau. The two horses, tethered to a great stone, watched him. Their saddles were beaded with moisture.

      He kicked the door, cursing, then found a larger stone that he smashed onto the timber, smashed again, until the hollow echoes were like the sound of a battery of field artillery in full fight.

      There was a click.

      In one of the door’s two leaves was a small shutter, protected by a rusted iron grille, and the shutter had slid back. He could see an eye staring at him. He smiled and spoke in his most polite voice. ‘I have come to see La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba.’

      The eye blinked, the shutter slid shut, then nothing.

      He waited.

      There was silence from the great building. No bolts were shot back on the door, no footsteps or voices sounded from the far side. For a moment he wondered if the eye beyond the shutter

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