The Lieutenant's voice was low, worried. 'Do you know the gold is there, sir?'

'You know I don't.'

There was a pause; Knowles shifted from foot to foot. 'It's a risk, sir.'

'How?' Sharpe knew that his Lieutenant was not lacking in courage.

'I thought Major Kearsey ordered you back to the army, sir. If he comes back and finds us poking round Casatejada he won't exactly be happy. And El Catolico won't welcome us with open arms. And…' His voice trailed away.

'And what?'

'Well, sir.' Knowles crouched down so he was closer to Sharpe, his voice even lower. 'Everyone knows you were in trouble with the General after those provosts, sir. If Kearsey complains about you, sir, well…' He ran out of words again.

'I could be in even more trouble, yes?'

'Yes, sir. And it's not just that.' His words suddenly tumbled out as if he had been storing the speech for days, or even weeks. 'We all know the gazette hasn't come through, sir, and it's so unfair! Just because you were once a Private they seem to be doing nothing, and the Eagle counts for nothing.'

'No, no, no.' Sharpe stopped the flow. He was embarrassed, touched, even surprised. 'The army isn't unfair, just slow.'

He did not believe that himself, but if he let himself express his real thoughts, then the bitterness would show. He remembered the elation of the moment, a year before, when the General had gazetted him a Captain, but since then there had been only silence from the Horse Guards. He wondered whether the gazette had already been refused and no one dared tell him; that had happened before and battalion commanders had made up the pay themselves. Damn the army, damn the promotion system. He looked at Knowles.

'How long have you been a Lieutenant?'

'Two years and nine months, sir.' Sharpe was hardly surprised that the answer was given so fully and so quickly. Most Lieutenants counted the days till they had three years' seniority. 'So you'll be a Captain by Christmas?'

Knowles sounded embarrassed. 'My father's paying, sir. He promised me the money after Talavera.'

'You deserve it.' Sharpe felt the pang of jealousy. He could never afford fifteen hundred pounds for a Captaincy, and Knowles was lucky in his father. Sharpe laughed, disguising his mood. 'If my gazette fails, Robert, then by Christmas we'll have changed places!' He stood up, looked across the dark valley. 'Time to go. God knows how we find the way. But good luck.'

A thousand miles away, north and east, a small man with an untidy hank of hair and an insatiable appetite for work looked at the pile of papers he had dealt with and grunted approvingly as he re-read the last paragraphs of the latest despatch from Marshal Andre Massena. He wondered if the Marshal, whom he himself had made into the Prince of Essling, was losing his touch. The British army was so small – the newspapers from London said a mere twenty-three thousand with twenty-two thousand Portuguese allies – while the French armies were so big, and Massena seemed to be taking the devil of a long time. But the despatch said that he was going forward, into Portugal, and soon the British would have their backs to the sea and would face nothing but terror, shame, and defeat. The small man yawned. He knew everything that happened in his huge Empire, even that the Prince of Essling had taken a young woman to the war to keep his bed warm at night, but he would be forgiven. A man needed that, especially as the years went on, and victory forgave all. He laughed out loud, startling a servant and flickering the candles, as he remembered a secret agent's report that said Massena's mistress was disguised in Hussar uniform. But what did that matter? The Empire was safe and the small man went to his bed, to his Princess, in utter ignorance of the Company that marched through his territory in the hope of giving him many sleepless nights in the months to come.

CHAPTER 12

It was a nightmare journey and only Hagman's instincts, honed by years of poaching dark countryside, took the Riflemen safely back over the paths where they had been escorted earlier in the day. Sharpe wondered how Knowles, with the larger number of men, was surviving, but there were poachers not unlike Hagman in the Redcoats and there was no point in worrying. The Riflemen made good time, cursing through the rocks, stumbling on the streambeds, going faster than the less well-trained men of the South Essex could travel. The Rifles were the elite of the army, the best trained, the best equipped, the finest infantry of an army which boasted the best foot soldiers in the world, but none of their training, their vaunted self-reliance, had prepared them for the job of sneaking into Casatejada under the noses of suspicious Partisans.

Perversely the moon made an appearance as the green-jacketed men reached the final crest before the village. It sailed clear of the ragged cloud-edge and showed the village, innocent and silent, in the centre of the valley. The men dropped to the ground, pushed their rifles forward, but nothing moved in the moonlight except the barley rippling in the breeze and the maize clattering on its long stalks. Sharpe stared at the village, reliving the hopelessness of trying to get near it unseen, and tonight there would be no hope of persuading its defenders to light fires, dazzle themselves, and thus give the attackers an advantage. He stood up. 'Come on.'

They made a wide circuit, round the southern end of the valley, moving fast in the moonlight and hoping that if their shadowed bodies were dimly seen against the dark background of the hills the sentries in the village would think that it was one of the wolf-packs that ran in the uplands. Twice on the journey the Riflemen had heard the wolves near them, once seen a ragged profile on a crest, but they had not been troubled. The cemetery was on the eastern side of the street and the Riflemen had to circle the village so they could approach from the darkness. Sharpe kept looking towards the east, fearing the first sliver of dawn, fearing the approach to the village. 'Down!'

They dropped again, panting, in a field of half-cut barley that the French had trampled with their horses, criss-crossing the field so that, in the darkness, it was made of fantastic patterns and strangely shadowed curves. 'Come on.' They wriggled forward, the hermitage a quarter-mile away with its bell-tower staring at them, picking paths through the stalks where the crop had been flattened and where standing clumps gave them cover. No one spoke; each man knew his job, and each knew, too, that the Spaniards, who talked to one another with white stones on hilltops, could have watched them for the last five miles. Yet why should they be suspicious? Sharpe was haunted by the question, by the possible answers, by the knife-edge on which he had balanced the Company.

Two hundred yards to go and he stopped, raised a hand, and turned to Hagman. 'All right?'

The man nodded, grinned his toothless grin. 'Perfect, sir.'

Sharpe looked at Harper. 'Come on.'

Now it was just the two of them, creeping forward into the growing stench of the manure, listening for the tiny sounds that could betray an alert sentry. The barley, crushed and tortuous, grew almost to the wall of the graveyard, but as they twisted their way closer to the high white wall Sharpe knew they could not hope to climb it unseen. He let Harper wriggle alongside and put his mouth close to the Sergeant's ear.

'You see the bell-tower?"

Harper nodded.

'There has to be someone up there. We can't cross here. We'll be seen.'

The Sergeant put out a hand and curved it to the left. Sharpe nodded. 'Come on.'

The bell-tower, with its arches facing the four points of the compass, was the most obvious sentry post in the village. Sharpe could see nothing in the shadowed space at the top of the tower, but he knew a man was there, and as they crawled, the stalks of the barley deafening, he felt like a small animal creeping towards a trap. They reached the corner of the cemetery, stood against the wall with a false sense of relief, and then, hidden from the tower, edged slowly down its left-hand side towards the gate, the bushes, and the rank heap of manure.