El Matarife pulled his trigger.
Captain Saumier jerked backwards, hands flying up and pistol falling.
He splashed into the ditch, his boots slowly sucking up from the bubbling mud.
He floated.
His blood drifted in the dirty water, spreading as he died, choking on ditch-water and blood.
El Matarife smiled at La Marquesa, at the woman whose golden hair had been like a beacon in the havoc. ‘My Lady,’ he said. He began to laugh, the laugh getting louder and louder until it blotted out the screams of the chaos. ‘My Lady, my dear lady.’ He reached, for her, dragged her belly-downwards over his saddle. She screamed, and he slapped her rump to keep her quiet, then headed back towards the wagons. As he had followed her carriage here he had seen the gold and silver scattered like leaves upon the ground. There would be time, he knew, to take some for himself before he delivered the golden whore to her new prison. He went into the chaos with his prisoner.
CHAPTER 26
‘God save Ireland!’ Patrick Harper’s favourite oath, saved only for the things that truly astonished him, was hardly sufficient to describe what he saw as he crossed the shallow crest where the grass was still scorched from the French guns that had made the slaughter on the bridge. He tried another. ‘God save England, too.’
Sharpe laughed. The sight, for a few seconds, had taken his mind from La Marquesa.
Angel stared open-mouthed. An army was running a race. Thousands and thousands of Frenchmen, all order gone, ran between the river and the city, streaming eastwards, abandoning muskets, packs, anything that would slow them.
From Sharpe’s right, cavalry approached, British cavalry who stared and laughed at the tide of panicked men. Their Major came towards Sharpe and grinned. ‘It’s cruel to charge them!’
Sharpe smiled. ‘Do you have a glass, Major?’
The cavalryman offered Sharpe a small spyglass. The Rifleman opened it, trained it, and saw what he thought he had seen with his naked eye. The road was blocked. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of wagons that were stuck in the fields east of Vitoria. He could see carriages there, their windows red from the setting sun. There was a woman there, and a treasure there. He closed the glass and gave it back to the cavalryman. ‘You see those wagons, Major?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s a god-damned fortune there. The gold of a bloody empire.’
The cavalryman stared at Sharpe as if he was mad, then slowly smiled. ‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure. It’s a king’s ransom.’
The cavalryman looked at Angel, ragged on his stolen horse, then at Harper, huge on his. ‘You think you can keep up with us?’
‘Think you can keep up with us?’ Sharpe smiled. In truth he needed these Hussars to help cut through the panicked mass of fugitives who still streamed between them and the city.
The Major grinned, brushed at his moustaches and turned to look at his men. ‘Troop!’
The trumpeter challenged the sky, the troopers drew their sabres and walked the horses forward. The men were in ranks of ten, knee to knee. The Major drew his sabre and looked at Sharpe. ‘This is going to be better than a strong scent on a fine day!’ He looked at his trumpeter and nodded.
The trumpet sounded the gallop. There was no other way to go through the flood of fugitives and the Hussars shouted, raised their sabres, and plunged into the fleeing army.
If Sharpe had not been so concerned for the fate of La Marquesa he would have remembered that ride for ever. The Hussars cut into the French retreat like men going into a dark river, and, just as in a river, the current took them downstream. The French, seeing their enemy coming, parted before the horses and only those who could not move fast enough were cut down by the curved blades.
They went like steeplechasers. They crossed a small stream, hooves shattering water silver in the air, scrambled up a field bank, jumped a stone wall, and the men whooped like maniacs and the French split before them. The hooves hurled mud higher than the guidon that was held aloft by the standard bearer.
There were guns everywhere, abandoned field guns with blackened muzzles, their wheels mired in the soft earth. The cavalry rode in the middle of their enemies and not a hand was lifted against them.
There were carts overturned, mules running free, wounded men crawling eastwards, and everywhere there were women. They called for their men, for their husbands or lovers, and their voices were forlorn and hopeless.
The Major, breaking free of the French rout, cut his men towards the wagons. Sharpe shouted at Harper and Angel, pulled left, and reined Carbine in. He had stopped by a dark blue carriage, its wheels sunk into soft turf, its varnished panels spattered with mud. He stared at the coat of arms that was painted on the carriage door. He knew it. He had seen it first on another carriage in Salamanca’s splendid square.
It was La Marquesa’s carriage, and it was empty.
The upholstery had been split open and the horses led away. One window was broken. He peered inside and saw no blood on the torn cushions of the seats. One silver trace chain was left in the mud.
He stared into the havoc of wagons and carriages. She could be anywhere in that chaos of shouting and theft, of musket shots and screams, or she could be gone.
Harper looked at the carriage and frowned, ‘Sir?’
‘Patrick?’
‘Would that be her Ladyship’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why we’re here?’
‘Yes. I want to find her. God knows how.’
The Irishman stared at the baggage park. ‘You say there’s treasure here?’
‘A god-damned fortune.’
‘Seems a good place to start looking, sir.’
Sharpe urged his horse towards the wagons. He was looking for the great mane of golden hair amidst the chaos that had once been King Joseph’s baggage train. ‘Helene!’
A box of fine porcelain was spilt ahead of him, the plates smashed into a thousand gilded shards. A woman, blood streaming from her scalp, hurled a second dinner service out of its packing cases, looking for gold.
A French soldier lay dying, his throat half cut by a Spaniard who ripped with his knife at the man’s pockets.
He found a watch, a stolen masterpiece made by Breguet in Paris. He put it to his ear, heard no tick, and furiously smashed the crystal with the hilt of his knife.
‘Helene!’
Sharpe’s horse trampled on leather-bound books, books that had been made before the printing press had been invented, books made by patient men over months of work, with exquisitely painted capitals that were now ground into the mire.
A tapestry that had been made in Flanders when Queen Elizabeth was a child was torn by two women to make blankets. Another woman, wine bottle in hand, danced between the wagons with the gilded coat of a Royal Chamberlain on her shoulders. She wore nothing else. A French soldier, drunk on brandy, plucked the coat from her and tore at the gilt braid. The naked woman hit him with her bottle and snatched the coat back.
‘Helene!’
Silver Spanish dollars, each worth five English shillings, were strewn like pebbles between the wagons. No one wanted silver when there was so much gold.
‘Helene!’
Two men bent, twisted, and hacked apart a golden candelabra, one of a set of four that had been given to King Phillip II by Queen Mary of England when she had married the Spanish King.
‘Helene!’
Two Frenchwomen, abandoning their army and their children for the sake of a box of jewels, prised the stones from a reliquary that contained the shin-bone of John the Baptist. The jewels were glass, replacements for the real stones that had been stolen three centuries before. They dropped the shin-bone into the mud where it was snapped up by a dog.