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‘I got him to run his blade through my thigh. That trapped it and I killed him.’
D’Alembord stared at the Major, whose fame had reached Britain, and saw that he had been told the truth. He shuddered. ‘You are mad.’
‘It helps when you’re fighting. Shall we go down?’
D’Alembord was searching the cemetery and roadway for a sign of Lieutenant Price bringing Colonel Leroy to the duel, but he could see no horsemen. He shrugged inwardly. ‘To our fate, sir, to our fate.’
‘You don’t have to come, d’Alembord.’
‘True, sir. I shall say I was a mere innocent misled by you.’ He spurred his horse down the pastureland of the hillside.
Sharpe followed. It was a beautiful evening, a promise of summer in the blossoms beneath his horse’s hooves and in the warm fragrant air. There was a scattering of high mackerel clouds in the west, each tiny cloud touched with pink as though they were puffs of cannon smoke drifting over a burning field.
The men sitting on the cemetery wall saw the two horsemen coming, recognised the green jacket, and a yell went up as though Sharpe was a prizefighter coming to hammer out a hundred bloody rounds with his naked fists. To his right, coming from the town, he saw a dark coach, windows curtained, and on its doorway, too far away to distinguish the details, was a coat of arms.
He knew that escutcheon. It had been quartered and requartered over the years as the family of Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba had married more wealth and privilege until now, as the nineteenth century began, the crest was a patchwork of the history of the Spanish nobility. And into that family, marrying the childless widower who had been close to the Spanish throne, had come the golden-haired woman who was a traitor. La Marquesa. She would be pleased, Sharpe thought, to know that two men would face each other with drawn swords on her account.
The cheers were echoed by jeers from the Spaniards as he ducked under the arched gateway of the cemetery. The shadows of the carved graves were long. Flowers wilted in earthenware pots. An old lady, swathed and scarved in black, ignored the unseemly noise that sullied her family’s resting place.
D’Alembord led Sharpe to the south side of the burial ground where they dismounted. The British troops, mixed with some of the tough soldiers of the King’s German Legion, shouted at Sharpe to kill the dago, to teach the bastard a lesson, and then Sharpe heard the far side of the cemetery erupt into celebration and he turned to see his opponent walk into the burial ground. The Marqués had his long sword tucked in Spanish fashion beneath his arm. The priest was beside him, while Major Mendora walked behind. The old woman knelt to the priest who made the sign of the cross over her then touched her scarved head.
D’Alembord smiled at Sharpe. ‘I shall go and make polite conversation. Try and persuade them to back down.’
‘They won’t.’
‘Of course not. Fools never do.’ D’Alembord shrugged and walked towards the party of Spaniards. Major Mendora, the Marqués’s second, came to meet him.
Sharpe tried to ignore the cheering, the insults, and the shouts. There was no turning back now. In less time than it took the sun to go down, he had changed his life. He had accepted the challenge and nothing would be the same again. Only by walking away now, by refusing to fight, could he save his career. Yet to do that was to lose his pride, and deny fate.
He drew the great sword, and the action provoked another huge cheer from his supporters. Some of the South Essex, he saw, had managed to get to the place and were pushing for room on the wall’s broad top. They cheered as he raised the sword and as the sunlight ran up the steel. With this blade, he thought, he had killed La Marquesa’s brother. Was he now to kill her husband?
He looked up. The Marqués had taken off his gold-encrusted jacket. He flexed his sword, the steel moving like a whip. He was a big man, heavily muscled, strong enough to carry his huge weight lightly. Sharpe had still not seen the man’s face. He had often wondered who it was that Helene had married. He remembered that she had often spoken of her husband’s piety. That, Sharpe thought, explained the tall priest who leaned in urgent conversation towards the Marqués.
D’Alembord turned and paced the weed-grown path towards Sharpe. ‘You’ll face north. The fight ends with death or if, in the opinion of the seconds, one man is too badly hurt to continue. Satisfied?’
Sharpe nodded. The evening was warm. He could feel the sweat prickling beneath his shirt. He handed d’Alembord his sword, undid his belt, then peeled off his jacket. He thought suddenly that the fine linen shirt he wore had been a gift from the Marquesa. He took his sword back and held it up to the sun as though some ancient god would bless it and bring him success. ‘Now?’
‘It seems as good a time as any.’
He walked forward, his tall French boots crunching on the stones of the path. They would fight where the paths crossed at the graveyard’s centre, where the Marqués would try to turn Sharpe into the dazzling sun and run him through with the slim, shining blade.
He stopped opposite his enemy. He stared into the blank, expressionless eyes and he tried to imagine Helene marrying this man. There was a weakness in the fleshy, proud face. Sharpe tried to pin it down, tried to analyse this man whose skill he had to beat. Perhaps, he thought, the Marqués was a man born to greatness who had never felt himself worthy. That perhaps was why he prayed so hard and had so much pride.
The Marqués stared at Sharpe, seeing the man whom he believed had insulted his wife and tried to assault her. The Marqués did not just fight for Helene, nor just for his pride, but for the pride of all Spain that had been humbled by needing to make an Englishman its Generalisimo.
The Marqués remembered what the Inquisitor, Father Hacha, had said about this man. Fast, but unskilled. Sharpe, the Marqués knew, would try to kill him as if he was an ox. He twitched the fine sword in his hand. It was odd, he thought, that an Inquisitor should carry Helene’s letter. He pushed the thought away.
‘You are ready, my Lord?’ Mendora called.
The Marqués’s face gave the smallest twitch. He was ready.
‘Major Sharpe?’
‘Yes.’
Major Mendora flexed his sword once so that the steel hissed in the air. The Inquisitor stood with a doctor beside the Marqués’s coach. D’Alembord looked hopefully towards the cemetery entrance, but it was empty. He felt the hopelessness of this idiocy, and then Mendora called them forward. ‘Your swords, gentlemen?’
Sharpe’s boots grated on the gravel. If he got into real trouble, he thought, then he could pretend to fall down, scoop up a handful of the stones, and hurl them to blind the big man who came cautiously forward. What had d’Alembord said? He would feint to the right and go left? Or was it the other way round?
He raised his big, straight sword and it looked dull beside the slim, polished blade that came beside it. The swords touched. Sharpe wondered if he detected a quiver in the other man’s grip, but no, the blades rested quietly as Mendora drew his own sword, held it beneath the raised blades, then swept his weapon up to part the two swords and the duel had begun.
Neither man moved.
They watched each other, waiting. Sharpe’s urge was to shout, as he shouted on a battlefield to frighten his opponents, but he felt cowed by the formality of this setting. He was fighting a duel against an aristocrat and he felt that he must behave as they expected him to behave. This was not like battle. This was so cold-blooded, so ritualistic, and it seemed hard to believe that in this warm evening air a man must fall to bleed his life onto the gravel.
The Marqués’s sword came slowly down, reached out, touched Sharpe’s blade, then flickered in bright, quick motion, and Sharpe took two steps back.
The Marqués still watched him. He had done no more than test Sharpe’s speed. He would test his skill next.
Sharpe tried to shake the odd lethargy away. It seemed impossible that this was real, that death waited here. He saw the Marqués come forward again, his heavy tread no clue to the speed that Sharpe had already seen, and Sharpe went forward too, his sword reaching, and the Marqués stepped back.
The troops jeered. They wanted blood, they wanted a furious mill with their champion standing over the ripped corpse of the other man.
The Marqués tried to oblige. He came forward with surprising speed, his blade flickering past Sharpe’s guard, looping beneath the heavy cavalry sword and lunging to Sharpe’s right.
Sharpe countered desperately, knowing that the speed had beaten him, but with a luck he did not deserve he felt the Marqués’s blade-tip lodge in the tassel hole of his sword’s hilt. It seemed to stick there and Sharpe wrenched his weapon, forcing it towards the Marqués, hoping to break the man’s slim blade, but the Marqués turned, drew his sword away, and the cheers of the spectators were louder. They had mistaken Sharpe’s desperate counters as a violent attack.
The sun was in Sharpe’s eyes. Fluently, easily, the Marqués had turned him.
The Marqués smiled. He had the speed and the skill of this Englishman, and all that mattered now was to choose the manner of Sharpe’s death.
Sharpe seemed to know it, for he attacked suddenly, lunging at the big man, using all his own speed, but his blade never struck home. It rang against the slimmer blade, scraped, flashed sunlight into the spectators’ eyes, and though the Marqués went back on quick feet, he was having no trouble in avoiding the attacks. Only once, when Sharpe pressed close and tried to ram his sword into the Marqués’s eyes, did the Spaniard twist desperately aside and lose his composure. He regained it at once, elegantly parrying the next thrust, turning Sharpe’s blade and counter-attacking from his back foot.
The counter-attack was quick as a hawk, a slashing stab of steel as the Marqués went under his guard, the point rose, and Sharpe swept his enemy’s blade aside, his hand providentially moving in the right direction, but he was regretting he ever chose swords because the Marqués was a fencer of distinction, and Sharpe lunged again, hit nothing, and he saw the smile on the Marqués’s face as the aristocrat coolly parried the attack.
The smile was a mistake.
God damn the aristocracy, and God damn good manners, this was a fight to the death, and Sharpe growled at the man, cursed, and he felt the anger come on him, an anger that always in battle seemed to manifest itself as cold deliberation. It was as if time slowed, as if he could see twice as clearly, and suddenly he knew that if he was to win this fight then he must attack as he had always attacked. He had learned to fight in the gutter and that was where he must take this big, smiling aristocrat who thought he had Sharpe beaten.
The Marqués came forward, his blade seeking to take Sharpe’s sword one way so that he could slide the steel beneath the Englishman’s guard and finish him.
‘She calls you a pig, Spaniard.’ Sharpe saw the flicker of surprise in the Marqués’s face, heard the hiss of disapproval from Mendora. ‘A fat pig, out of breath, son of a sow, pork-brain.’ Sharpe laughed. His sword was down. He was inviting the attack, goading the man.
Captain d’Alembord frowned. It was hardly decent manners, but he sensed something more. Sharpe was now the master here. The Marqués thought he had the Rifleman beaten, but all he had done was to make the Rifleman fight. This no longer looked like a duel to d’Alembord; it looked like a brawl leading to slaughter.
The Marqués wanted to kill. He did not understand why the Englishman’s guard was down. He tried to ignore the insults, but they raked at his pride.
‘Come on, pig! Come on!’ Sharpe stepped to one side, away from the sun, and the Marqués saw the Englishman lose his balance as his boot struck a large stone in the path. He saw the alarm on Sharpe’s face as he flailed his sword arm to stay upright and the Marqués stamped his right foot forward, shouted in triumph, and the sword was piercing at Sharpe.
Who had known that the pretence of losing his balance would invite the straight lunge and who beat the sword aside with a shout that sounded in every part of the cemetery. He brought up his left knee, shouted again as the Marqués squealed, and punched the heavy guard forward so that the steel thumped into the Spaniard’s breastbone, threw him backwards, and the next scything blow of the sword ripped the Marqués’s blade clean from his hand and Sharpe, the battle anger seething in him, brought the huge, heavy sword back for the killing blow. The shot sounded.
The Marqués knew that death was in the bright, sun-blazing steel. He had never faced a force like this, a sheer animal force that snarled at him and he shook his head and wondered why the great blade did not come. For a second, as he felt his legs shaking, there was the wild hope that the Englishman was going to let him pick up his sword that had been forced out of his hand when the cavalry blade had struck the slimmer sword’s ornate guard.
Then he saw the Englishman lower his sword. Saw him step back and suddenly heard the rush of hooves. The cheers about the cemetery wall had faded. The echo of the pistol shot died into silence.
Four horsemen had ducked under the gate. Now they rode towards the place where the paths crossed in the cemetery’s centre. In the lead was Colonel Thomas Leroy, the inevitable cigar clenched in his mouth. In his hand was a smoking pistol. Behind him rode two Provosts, the army’s policemen, and a Spanish officer.
‘Major Sharpe!’ Leroy’s voice was harsh.
‘Sir?’
‘You choose an odd place to practise your sword arm.’ Leroy swung from his horse and tossed the reins to d’Alembord. His ravaged, burned face made the Marqués frown with distaste. Leroy jerked his head. ‘Come with me, Sharpe.’
Sharpe hesitated, but Leroy ordered it again, his voice more savage still, and Sharpe, his sword in his hand, followed his Colonel up the northern path between the intricate gravestones. ‘You are a goddamned bloody fool, Sharpe.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Christ in his benighted bloody heaven!’ The American seemed lost for words. He took the cigar from his lips, spat a speck of leaf onto the gravel, and stared at his Major. ‘I’ve seen an eight-year-old with more damned sense! What in hell’s name are you doing here?’
‘A matter of honour, sir.’
‘Honour!’ The scarred face twisted in rage. ‘Don’t talk of honour, Sharpe. You’re here because you’re a fool!’ He looked left. ‘Captain d’Alembord?’
‘Sir?’
‘You’ll oblige me by bringing your horses.’
Sharpe frowned. ‘Sir!’
Leroy swung back on him, the cigar jabbed at Sharpe’s face. ‘Quiet! You’re under orders!’ Leroy saw that the Rifleman was about to protest and he jerked his head at the Provosts behind him. ‘And if you disobey orders, Sharpe, I’ll have you arrested. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fetch your jacket. You’re going.’ Leroy shook his head in frustrated bitterness. ‘I can’t leave the goddamned Battalion for one day!’
‘Señor!’ It was Major Mendora, a sneer on his face, coming on catlike feet towards Leroy and Sharpe. ‘There is a delay?’
Leroy turned to the white-uniformed man, and Sharpe saw the Spaniard recoil from the bubbled, stretched scar tissue. Leroy was trying to govern his anger. ‘Major?’
‘Major Sharpe cannot fight? He is afraid, perhaps?’
Leroy pushed Sharpe aside. He stared with his ravaged face at Mendora. ‘Listen, you son of a whore, you prinked-up bastard. There was no duel, there is no duel, there never was a duel! This was a friendly piece of sword practice! Do you understand me?’
Mendora understood. In the face of the American’s rage he simply nodded. He said nothing as Leroy tartly ordered Sharpe to follow him.
The Spanish soldiers jeered as Sharpe left. They accused him of cowardice, of lacking manhood, of being afraid to fight. It was gall to Sharpe, a shame he had to endure until Leroy had led him out of earshot. Leroy scowled at him. ‘Never again, Sharpe, understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Remember you owe me a career now.’ Leroy was grim. ‘One more goddamn mistake and I’ll have you shipped back to goddamn England. You understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘This is my Battalion now, Sharpe. It is going to be good. You’re going to help me make it good.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And thank God Colonel Alvarez was at Brigade. He’ll talk sense into that stupid fool. Nothing happened, you understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The American seemed unimpressed by Sharpe’s contriteness. ‘Christ! If the Peer learned about this he’d tear you into pieces. You goddamn deserve it. You’re a fool.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Now go and get drunk. Sergeant Harper says his woman’s cooked you a meal. I don’t want to see your ugly face till tomorrow.’
‘No, sir.’
Chastened, embarrassed, humiliated by the jeers of his enemies, but his career safe, Sharpe watched Leroy ride away. The Provosts, not needed, followed the Colonel.
D’Alembord stayed with Sharpe. ‘It seems our Colonel has a knack of turning up at the right time.’
Sharpe, humiliated by the tongue-lashing, nodded.
D’Alembord smiled. ‘You were right.’
‘Right?’
‘You were about to hack the bugger into bits.’
Sharpe smiled bitterly. ‘The next time I will.’
D’Alembord sighed. ‘With the greatest respect, sir, don’t be a goddamned idiot. You’ve survived a duel with your career intact. Be content.’
‘I’m dishonoured.’
D’Alembord mocked him with laughter. ‘Honour!’ He led Sharpe off the road, up towards the ash trees on the hill. ‘Honour, my dear Sharpe, is just a word behind which we hide our sins. It disappears, I find, whenever a lady’s bedroom door opens.’ He smiled at his Major, remembering the awesome moment when he had seen Sharpe stop trying to fence and begin to fight. He had understood then, even better than at the bridge where they had waited without ammunition, why this man was a soldier’s soldier. ‘Do you think if I bring some wine I might share your dinner?’
‘I’m sure Harps will be pleased.’
‘He’d better be, it’s good wine. We can drink to your restored career in it.’
Sharpe followed him. The anger had gone, he felt foolish. Leroy was right; his job was to make the South Essex into the best it could be, and never had the time been more propitious. The Battalion had a good Colonel, and the new officers, like d’Alembord, promised well. He felt suddenly as though a hanging judge had reprieved him. He had escaped his own foolishness and he rode towards a campaign, a summer, and a future. The madness was gone, the doom lifted, and he was alive.
CHAPTER FIVE
That night, behind thick curtains, in a dark-panelled room lit by heavy candles that threw their flickering light on a crucifix of gold, the Marqués de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba prayed.
