Sharpe tried to laugh it off. “She tells Marmont? Just like that?”

“No one in Spain stops a messenger who carries the seal of the house of Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba.”

Sharpe shook his head. “No.” He wanted to see her, to hold her, to listen to her voice, laugh with her.

Curtis sat again, near Sharpe, and he talked as the rain pelted on the river, as the storm moved southwards, and he talked of the letters that came to him, hidden letters, coded letters. He talked of the men who sent them and the ruses they employed to get the messages through. Now, it seemed to Sharpe, Curtis was a magician. He conjured the picture of his correspondents who feared for their lives, who worked only for liberty, who had stretched a web across Napoleon’s empire that led to this elderly priest. “I don’t remember exactly when it started, perhaps four years ago, but I found the letters coming, and I wrote back, and then I began to hide the letters, to put them inside the bindings of books. Then, when the English army came, it seemed sensible to pass the material onwards, so I did, and now I find that I am the most important spy you have.” Curtis shrugged. “I did not mean to be. I’ve trained priests, Sharpe, for years. Many of them write to me, often in Latin, sometimes in Greek, and I have lost only one man. I fear Leroux.” Sharpe remembered La Marquesa telling him how she feared Leroux. She was his sister.

Sharpe looked at Curtis. “You think Leroux is in the city?”

“I think so. I don’t know, but it seems logical that he would hide there until the French came back. Or stay there so he could go on looking for me.” Curtis laughed to himself. “They arrested me once. They took all my books, all my papers, but they found nothing. I persuaded them that as an Irish priest I had little love for the English. I don’t have much. But I do love this country, Sharpe, and I fear France.”

The rain had almost stopped. The thunder was sounding to the south. Sharpe felt utterly alone.

Curtis looked at the Rifleman. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Because I think you’re fond of her?” Sharpe nodded, and Curtis sighed. “Michael Hogan said you would be. He didn’t know if you were her lover, so I probed you to see how you reacted. Lord Spears said you were, but that young man spreads scandal. I think perhaps I envy you.”

“Why?” Sharpe was low; feeling that his life had been dissected. He had been used.

“I’m a professional gelding, Sharpe, but that doesn’t mean I never notice the mares.”

“She’s very noticeable.”

Curtis smiled in the darkness. “Jellification.”

Sharpe put the rifle onto the bench beside him. “What happens if there is a battle tomorrow?”

“We’ll look for Leroux in the evening. I suppose we’ll have to search the Palacio Casares.”

“And her?”

Curtis smiled at him. “Nothing. She’s a member of the Spanish aristocracy, beyond reproach, beyond punishment.” The wind was chilled by the passing rain. Curtis looked into the night. “I must go. If she found me here, then I had the excuse of the rifle, but it’s better that she doesn’t find me.” He stood up. “Convince her tonight, Sharpe, and I absolve you. for this night, for this deed.”

Sharpe did not want absolution, he wanted Helena, or Helene if that was her name, and yet he feared to see her in case she noticed a difference in him. She had used him, and perhaps he should never have believed that an aristocrat could have a genuine purpose in friendship with a man such as he, yet he could not believe that it had all been a pretence. She had needed him at first because he was the man hunting her brother and he had told her everything, so she had told Leroux, but she had come back for him, had rescued him from the hospital, and tonight he wanted her, whatever the darkness might hatch.

Curtis went through the door into a garden that was heavy with rain. The trees dripped after the storm. “Good luck, Sharpe.”

“And you, sir.”

Curtis went. Sharpe felt foolish and alone. He wanted her, to lie to her and with her, and he was alone. He waited. To the south, over the village of Arapiles, the thunder bellowed.

CHAPTER 19

The ridge ran north and south. It had been close cropped by sheep, goats, and by the rabbits whose droppings lay like miniature spent musket balls in the thin, springy grass. The ridge smelt of wild thyme.

The day had dawned with a pale, rinsed sky. The only remnants of the great thunder storm were a few high, ragged clouds and a burden of water on the soil that promised to be burned away by noon. The ridge top was already drying when Sharpe arrived.

She had begged him to stay. She had begged him to protect her against Leroux, and he had joined in the lie by begging her to retreat with the army, to go to Ciudad Rodrigo, but she would not.

She had gone back to the city in the early morning, when it was still dark, and she had promised to send Sharpe a horse, a gift, and he had protested, but the horse came. A servant gave it to him and watched, silent, as the Rifleman rode towards the fords east of the city. She had given him a horse, a saddle, a bridle, and he could not guess how much the gift was worth. Soon she would discover that he had betrayed her, as she had him, and he would return the gift. Now he rode the horse down the great ridge towards the place where the hills ended and the plain began; the turning place. This was the bend where the armies went west and the ridge was like the marker on the inside of the curve. He had explained it all to her, in the darkness, and he had said that the French could march faster than the British and so Wellington planned to steal a march. He would leave a Division at Arapiles and send the rest of the army on a fast march, fifteen miles westward and, by staying with the rearguard himself, Wellington would persuade Marmont that the whole army was still in front of Salamanca. She had listened to him, asked questions, and Sharpe had warmed to the lie.

They had lain together in the shelter and when the time came for them to part she had touched the scar on his face. “I don’t want to go.”

“Then stay.”

“I must go.” She smiled sadly. “I wonder if I’ll ever see you again.”

“You’ll be surrounded by cavalry officers and I’ll be jealous.”

She kissed his cheek. “You’ll bristle with dignity, like the first time you came to the mirador.”

He kissed her back. “We’ll meet again.” The words echoed in his head as his horse, her horse, trotted on the ridge’s spine.

To the east of the ridge was a wide sweeping valley where the ripening wheat had been flattened by the rain and where a few dark trees showed the course of a stream. At the far side of the valley was an escarpment, its steep side facing Sharpe, and he knew that beyond the sheer red-rock bluffs at its crest the French army would be marching. The ridge and the escarpment ended in a great rolling plain and it was on that plain that Marmont would swing westward into the home straight; the race to block the Portuguese road.

At the southern end of the ridge the ground fell steeply away and, a short walk from the ridge’s end to the west, was a village. It was like a thousand other Spanish villages. The cottages were low, made of rough-dressed stone, and a man could not stand upright in most of the small houses. The houses grew into each other and formed a maze of tiny alleyways that surrounded the simple church, no bigger than a storehouse. The church had a small stone arch built on one end of its roof that acted as the belfry for the one counter-weighted bell. A stork’s nest clung to the top of the arch.

The richer peasants, and there were few of them, had painted their cottages white. Roses grew against the walls. Farmyards lay next to some cottages, empty now for the villagers feared the army that the night had brought behind the ridge. The villagers had driven their cattle away, to another village, and the hovels and alleyways had been left to God and the soldiers. The village, which had never been famous, was called Arapiles.