Sharpe's Sword Part 16

"Richard! Are you going?"

Spears whirled offthe dance floor, climbed the two steps to where Sharpe was standing, and brought with him a small, dark-haired girl with brightly rouged cheeks. "Say h.e.l.lo to Maria."

Sharpe half bowed to her. "Senorita."

"We are formal." Spears grinned at him. "You're not going, are you?"

"I was."

"You can't, my dear fellow! Positively can't. You'll have to see La Marquesa, at least. Press her exquisite fingers to your lips, murmur "charmed", and compliment heron her frock."

"Tell her from me she looked wonderful." He had not seen her, though he had looked, in either room.

Spears slumped back in mock resignation. "Are you a dull dog, Richard? Don't tell me that the hero of Talavera, the Conqueror of Badajoz, is creeping back to his lonely cot to say a few prayers for lame dogs and orphans! Enjoy yourself!" He gestured at the girl. "Do you want her? She's probably as clean as they come. Really! You can have her! There are plenty more down there." Maria, who obviously spoke not a word of English, looked devotedly up into Spears' handsome face.

Sharpe wondered why Spears was so friendly. Perhaps his Lords.h.i.+p needed a strong arm to protect him from his gambling creditors or maybe, as he had accused La Marquesa, Spears liked the company of his social inferiors. Whatever, it did not matter. "I'm going. It's been a long day."

Spears shrugged. "If you must, Richard. If you must. I did try."

"Thank you, my lord."

Sharpe took one last look at the ballroom, at the circling, brilliant people beneath the great chandeliers, and he knew he had been foolish in coming to this place. La Marquesa was not to be his reward. He had been presumptuous in even coming. He nodded to Spears, turned, and walked onto the upper landing. He stopped behind the shako-hatted statue and stared up at the great, painted ceiling, and he could not imagine owning one hundredth of one hundredth part of all this wealth. He would go back and tell Harper of it.

"Senor?" A servant had appeared beside him. The man was aloof, liveried, and with a supercilious look in his eye.

"Yes?"

"This way, senor." The man plucked Sharpe's sleeve towards a tapestry against the wall.

Sharpe shook the hand off, growled, and he saw alarm come into the servant's eyes.

"Senor! Por favor! This way!"

It suddenly occurred to Sharpe that the man only had these two words of English, words he had been coached in, and only one person gave orders in this house. La Marquesa. He followed the man towards the hanging tapestry. The servant glanced around the landing, making sure that no-one was watching, and then he swiftly drew back one heavy corner of the great cloth. Behind it was a low, open doorway. "Senor?"

There was urgency in the man's voice. Sharpe ducked under the lintel and the footman, staying on the landing, let the tapestry fall back into place. Sharpe was alone, quite alone, in a musty and total darkness.

CHAPTER 9.

He stood quite still, the air cooler on one side of his face, the sound of revelry m.u.f.fled by the thick tapestry. He put out his left hand slowly, found the open door, and swung it shut. The hinges were well greased. It moved soundlessly until the latch clicked into place and then Sharpe leaned against it and let his eyes adjust slowly to the darkness.

He was on a small, square landing between two staircases. To his right the steps went downwards into utter darkness, to his left they climbed and at their head he could see a pale square that might have been the night sky except that it was curiously mottled and had no stars. He went to his left, climbing slowly, and his boots grated on the stone steps until he came out onto a wide balcony.

He saw now why there were no stars visible. The open side and roof of the balcony were enclosed by a small-latticed screen, dense with climbing plants, and the effect was to make the balcony comfortably cool. The plant stems had been trained so there were wide gaps between them and he crossed to the nearest gap and rested his shako peak on the lattice so he could see out. The lattice moved. He started back, then realised that the screen was a series of hinged doors, any of which could be opened so that the sun could flood onto the flagstones. The city was spread beneath him, grey moonlight on tiles and stone, the glow of fires reddening some of the buildings.

The balcony was deserted. Rush mats lay at its centre, making a path between troughs planted with small shrubs and stone benches supported by carved, crouching lions. He walked slowly along the balcony's length and his eye caught strange, intermittent flashes of light from his right. They seemed to come from the balcony floor where it met the wall of the Palacio and he stopped, crouched, and saw that the lights came from a series of tiny windows that looked into the ballroom below. They were like spyholes. Beyond the palm-sized panes of gla.s.s were tunnels that must go through stone and plaster and each revealed a small patch of the great ballroom. Sharpe saw Lord Spears circle through his spyhole, his pelisse round Maria's shoulders and his one good arm somewhere beneath the pelisse. Sharpe stood up and walked on.

The balcony turned to the right and Sharpe stopped at the corner. The rush mats on the new stretch were overlaid with rugs and there were doors, shut and shuttered, that led into the Palacio's interior. At the far end, hard against a blank wall, Sharpe could see a table that was set with food and wine. The crystal and china winked with the reflected light of a single candle, s.h.i.+elded by gla.s.s, that stood in a niche of the wall. Only two chairs stood by the table, both empty, and Sharpe felt the stirring of his instinct, of danger, and he wondered why he had been invited to what looked like a very small party indeed. It made no sense, despite Spears' explanation, for La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba to invite Captain Sharpe to this private, expensive, and luxurious balcony.

Halfway down the balcony a huge bra.s.s telescope was mounted on a heavy iron tripod. Sharpe walked to it and pushed open a lattice door next to the instrument and saw, as he had guessed, that it pointed toward the night's battlefield. The wasteland was pale in the moonlight, the fortresses dark, and Sharpe could see the ravine clearly that ran between the San Vincente and the smaller forts. There was the glow of fire tingeing the roofline of the San Vincente's courtyard and he knew the French were celebrating their victory around the flames, but fearing, too, the next a.s.sault. There were other fires, small torches that were hand-held in the wasteland where men searched for the wounded and dead. The French ignored them. Sharpe suddenly s.h.i.+vered. For no reason he remembered the burning of the dead after the a.s.sault on Badajoz just a few weeks before. There had been too many bodies to bury so they had been stacked in layers, timber between the stripped corpses, and the fires had burned darkly and he remembered how the corpses on the top layer had sat up in the heat, almost as if they were alive and begging for rescue, and then the corpses below had also begun to bend in the great fire and, as if to blot out the vision, he pulled shut the lattice door with a loud click.

"What are you thinking?" Her voice was husky. He turned and La Marquesa was standing by the table, by a door that had opened silently, and a woman servant was in the doorway offering a shawl. La Marquesa shook her head and the servant disappeared, shutting the door as noiselessly as it had opened. La Marquesa was light in the darkness. Her golden hair seemed glowing to Sharpe, spun with gossamer fine radiance, and her dress was a brilliant white. It left her shoulders and arms bare and he could see the shadows of her collarbones and he wanted to put his hands on that fine, pale skin because she was, in a Palacio of priceless and beautiful objects, the most perfect of them all. He felt clumsy.

"I was told to compliment you on your frock."

"My dress? I suppose that was Jack Spears?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"He never saw me." She leaned over the table and Sharpe saw her light a small cigar from the candle. He was amazed. He was used to the women of the army smoking their short clay pipes, but he had never seen a woman with a cigar before. She blew a plume of smoke that drifted up to the lattice. "I saw you, though, both of you. You were glowering at the ballroom, hating it all, and he was wondering where he could find an empty bedroom to take that silly girl. Do you smoke?"

"Sometimes. Not now, thank you." Sharpe gestured at the spyholes. "Did you see through those?"

She shook her head. "The palace is full of spyholes, Captain. Riddled with secret pa.s.sages." She walked towards him, her feet quite silent on the rugs. Her voice seemed different to Sharpe, this was not the same woman who had been excited and enthusiastic at San Christobal. Tonight she spoke crisply, with a confident authority, and all traces of wide-eyed naivete had gone. She sat on a cus.h.i.+oned bench. "My husband's great-great-grandfather built the Palacio and he was a suspicious man. He married a younger wife, like me, and he feared she would be unfaithful so he built the pa.s.sages and the peepholes. He would follow her round the building, she in light and he in darkness, and everything she did, he watched." She told the story as if it was a much-told tale, of interest to the listener, but holding boredom for herself. She shrugged, blew smoke upwards, and looked at him. "That's the story."

"Did he see anything he shouldn't have?"

She smiled. "It's said she discovered about the pa.s.sages and that she hired two masons. One day she waited until her husband was in a long tunnel that bends round the library. It has only one entrance." Her eyes were huge in the dimness. Sharpe watched her, entranced by the line of her throat, the shadows on her skin above the low white dress, by the wide mouth. She chopped down with the cigar. "She gave a signal and the masons nailed the entrance shut and then they laid stones over it. After that she made the servants pleasure her, one by one, two by two, and all the time they could hear the husband screaming and scrabbling beyond the wall. She told them it was rats and told them to keep going." She shrugged. "It's just a nonsense, of course, not true. The pride of this house would not allow it, but the people of Salamanca tell the story and certainly the pa.s.sages exist."

"It's a harsh story."

"Yes. It goes on that she died, strangled by the ghost of her husband, and that will be the fate of any mistress of this house who is unfaithful to her husband." She glanced up at Sharpe as she said the last words and there was a curious hostility in her expression, a challenge perhaps.

"You say the story isn't true?"

She gave a crooked, secret smile. "How very indelicate of you, Captain Sharpe." She drew on the cigar, hardening the red point of the tobacco. "What did Lord Spears tell you about me?"

He was startled by the directness of her question, by the inference that she was commanding him to answer. He shook his head. "Nothing."

"How very unlike Jack." She drew on the cigar again. "Did he tell you that I asked him to make you come here?"

"No."

"I did. Aren't you curious why?"

Heleaned against the frameof the lattice. "I'm curious, yes."

"Thank G.o.d for that! I was beginning to think there wasn't a human feeling in your body." Her voice was harsh. Sharpe wondered what game she was playing. He watched as she tossed the cigar onto the flagstones of the balcony and, as it landed, it showered sparks like a musket pan fired at night. "Why do you think, Captain?"

"I don't know why I'm here, Ma'am."

"Oh!" Her voice was mocking now. "You find me on my own, ignoring all my guests, not to mention the proprieties, and there's a table set with wine, and you think nothing?"

Sharpe did not like being toyed with. "I'm only a humble soldier, Ma'am, unused to the ways of my betters."

She laughed, and her face suddenly softened. "You said that with such delicious arrogance. Do I make you uncomfortable?"

"If it pleases you to, yes."