LITMIR.BIZ

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They came slowly, cautiously. One of them, the tallest, had a bag. That man peered into the big round chamber and saw no one. ‘Hello!’ he shouted.

      Father Montseny tossed a packet into the chamber. It was a thick packet, tied with string. ‘What you will do,’ he said in the English he had learned as a prisoner, ‘is bring the money, put it beside the letters, take the letters and go.’

      The man looked at the black archways leading from the big candlelit chamber. He was trying to decide where Montseny’s voice had come from. ‘You think I’m a fool?’ he asked. ‘I must see the letters first.’ He was a big man, red-faced, with a bulbous nose and thick black eyebrows.

      ‘You may examine them, Captain,’ Montseny said. He knew the man was called Plummer and that he had been a captain in the British army, and now he was a functionary in the British embassy. Plummer’s job was to make certain the embassy’s servants did not steal, that the gratings on the windows were secure and that the shutters were locked at night. Plummer was, in Montseny’s opinion, a nonentity, a failed soldier, a man who now came anxiously into the ring of candles and squatted by the package. The string was tough and knotted tight and Plummer could not undo it. He felt in his pocket, presumably looking for a knife.

      ‘Show me the gold,’ Montseny ordered.

      Plummer scowled at the peremptory tone, but obliged by opening the bag he had placed beside the package. It was a cloth bag which he unlaced, then brought out a handful of golden guineas. ‘Three hundred,’ he said, ‘as we agreed.’ His voice echoed back and forth, confusing him.

      ‘Now,’ Montseny said, and his men appeared from the dark with levelled muskets. The two men Plummer had left on the steps staggered forward as Montseny’s last two men came down the stairs behind them.

      ‘What the hell are you …’ Plummer began, then saw the priest was carrying a pistol. ‘You’re a priest?’

      ‘I thought we should all examine the merchandise,’ Montseny said, ignoring the question. He had the three men surrounded now. ‘You will lie flat while I count the coins.’

      ‘The devil I will,’ Plummer said.

      ‘On the floor,’ Montseny spoke in Spanish, and his men, all of whom had served in the Spanish navy and had muscles hardened by years of gruelling work, easily subdued the three and put them face down on the crypt floor. Montseny picked up the string-bound package and put it in his pocket, then pushed the gold aside with his foot. ‘Kill them,’ he said.

      The two men accompanying Plummer were Spaniards themselves, embassy servants, and they protested when they heard Montseny’s order. Plummer resisted, heaving up from the floor, but Montseny killed him easily, sliding a knife up into his ribs and letting Plummer heave against the blade as it sought his heart. The other two died just as quickly. It was done with remarkably little noise.

      Montseny gave his men five golden guineas apiece, a generous reward. ‘The English,’ he explained to them, ‘secretly plan to keep Cadiz for themselves. They call themselves our allies, but they will betray Spain. Tonight you have fought for your king, for your country and for the holy church. The admiral will be pleased with you, and God will reward you.’ He searched the bodies, found a few coins and a bone-handled knife. Plummer had a pistol under his cloak, but it was a crude, heavy weapon and Montseny let one of the sailors keep it.

      The three corpses were dragged up the steps, down the nave and then carried to the nearby sea wall. There Father Montseny said a prayer for their souls and his men heaved the dead over the stony edge. The bodies smacked down into the rocks where the Atlantic sucked and broke white. Father Montseny locked the cathedral and went home.

      Next day the blood was found in the crypt and on the stairs and in the nave, and at first no one could explain it until some of the women who prayed in the cathedral every day declared that it must be the blood of Saint Servando, one of Cadiz’s patron saints whose body had once lain in the city, but had been taken to Seville, which was now occupied by the French. The blood, the women insisted, was proof that the saint had miraculously spurned the French-held city and returned home, and the discovery of three bodies being buffeted by the waves on the rocks below the sea wall would not dissuade them. It was a miracle, they said, and the rumour of the miracle spread.

      Captain Plummer was recognized and his body was carried to the embassy. There was a makeshift chapel inside and a hurried funeral service was read and the captain was then buried in the sands of the isthmus that connected Cadiz to the Isla de León. Next day Montseny wrote to the British ambassador, claiming that Plummer had tried to keep the gold and take the letters, and his regrettable death had thus been inevitable, but that the British could still have the letters back, only now they would cost a great deal more. He did not sign the letter, but enclosed one bloodstained guinea. It was an investment, he thought, that would bring back a fortune, and the fortune would pay for Father Montseny’s dreams. A dream of Spain, glorious again and free of foreigners. The English would pay for their own defeat.

      CHAPTER TWO

      ‘Now what?’ Brigadier Moon demanded.

      ‘We’re stuck, sir.’

      ‘Good God incarnate, man, can’t you do anything right?’

      Sharpe said nothing. Instead he and Harper stripped off their cartridge boxes and jumped overboard to find themselves in four feet of water. They heaved on the pontoon, but it was like trying to push the Rock of Gibraltar. It was immovable and they were stranded fifty or sixty feet from the eastern bank on which the French pursued them, and over a hundred and fifty yards from the British-held bank. Sharpe ordered the other soldiers to get in the river and push, but it did no good. The big pontoons had grounded hard on a shingle bank and evidently intended to stay there.

      ‘If we can cut one of the buggers free, sir,’ Harper suggested. It was a good suggestion. If one of the pontoons could be loosed from the others then they would have a boat light enough to be forced off the shingle, but the big barges were connected by ropes and by stout timber beams that had carried the plank roadway.

      ‘It’ll take us half a day to do it,’ Sharpe said, ‘and I don’t think the Crapauds will be happy.’

      ‘What the devil are you doing, Sharpe?’ Moon demanded from the raft.

      ‘Going ashore, sir,’ Sharpe decided, ‘all of us.’

      ‘For God’s sake, why?’

      ‘Because, sir,’ Sharpe said, forcing himself to stay patient, ‘the French will be here in half an hour and if we’re in the river, sir, they’ll either shoot us down like dogs or else take us prisoner.’

      ‘So your intentions?’

      ‘Go up that hill, sir, hide there, and wait for the enemy to leave. And when they’ve gone, sir, we’ll cut one of the pontoons free.’ Though how he would do that with no tools he was not sure, but he would have to try.

      Moon plainly wanted to suggest another course of action, but none came to his mind so he submitted to being carried ashore by Sergeant Harper. The rest of the men followed, carrying their weapons and cartridge boxes over their heads. Once ashore they made a makeshift stretcher from a pair of muskets threaded through the sleeves of two red coats, then Harris and Slattery carried the brigadier up the steep hill. Sharpe, before leaving the river bank, collected a few short sticks and a scrappy piece of fishing net, all of which had been washed onto the rocks, then he followed the others up to the first crest and saw, looking to his left, that the French had climbed to the top of the bluff. They were nearly half a mile away, which did not stop one of them letting off his musket. The ball must have fallen into the intervening valley and the report, when it came, was muffled.

      ‘This is far enough,’ Moon announced. The jolting of the crude stretcher was giving him agony and he looked pale.

      ‘To the top,’ Sharpe

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