Jennings sighed.
‘Yes. As you will. Do what you want with them. I’ve had enough of her.’
He turned and walked back towards the main street, calling for his Sergeant. Rank had undisclosed advantages, thought Jennings. It was vital to his purpose that they should spend the night here. Jennings knew Steel to be right, that the army was at the most a half day’s march from them. He knew that this would be his last opportunity to acquire the papers. Here, he thought, it could be easily contrived. Steel might be clever, but he was no match for Jennings and his Sergeant. Stringer was a natural assassin, as silent as a cat and as swift and sure as a butcher with a knife in the dark. He turned and looked back at Steel, who was opening the door of the carriage and wondered whether the Lieutenant had any inkling that tonight would be his last on earth.
Steel peered into the carriage. Inside, he could make out Kretzmer’s lumpen, sleeping form, still bound and gagged. Opposite him, horribly close to her assailant, sat Louisa. She too was asleep, as was her father. Closing the door gently, Steel thought it best to leave them. He stationed a Grenadier at the carriage and walked across the square to a small terrace from which he was able to observe the bridge and the road into the town. The wagons were slowly moving in for the night although perhaps a score of them still lay on the other side of the river.
Down in the reedy shallows he could see a half-dozen of his men. They had thrown off their clothes on to the grassy bank and were jumping about like children, stark naked, laughing and splashing each other in the simple unaccustomed joy of cold, fresh water. Watching them like that, stripped of their uniform, robbed of any vestige of military life, Steel felt more than ever like their adoptive father. They were his family. He knew their ways, their foibles, the reasons why they had joined and how they had come to be here with him. In his care. He felt a responsibility for them and prayed that they would, all of them, the good and the bad, get through whatever trials the coming days would hold.
He was watching one man, John Simmons, a towering Glasgow navvy, as he attempted to duck a fellow Grenadier under the water for a third time, when something caught his eye upstream. A glint of sunlight on an unexpectedly bright object.
It happened in an instant, just thirty yards from where his men were playing. At a point where the river rounded a sharp bend overhung with trees, they came into view. Fifty, no sixty cavalrymen, spurring their horses directly along the river bed, straight towards the bathers. One of the picquets fired at them but missed. The noise gave the alarm but too late.
The water erupted in white spray under the hooves as they beat out against the sand and stones beneath and Steel felt sick to his stomach as he realized that the glint he had seen had been sunlight glancing off the polished steel blade of a drawn cavalry sabre. And then, with a great shout, they were upon the naked Grenadiers and the nightmare unfolded before him. His men never stood a chance.
He had a passing impression of colours. Of pale blue coats, glittering with silver buttons and braid, red hats resplendent with fur and feathers and elaborate, fur-trimmed cloaks slung from one shoulder. Hussars. These were the new cavalry employed by the French. The cavalry they had modelled on the Hungarian light. Fast, skilled and deadly. He had never encountered hussars before but they were all he had expected, and more. The great curved sabres rose and fell and he saw the pale white bodies of his men go down in a sea of blood. Saw Simmons, his face half-severed by a single stroke standing incredulous, grasping at the place where his eye had been, until a second sweeping cut from a grinning hussar took him down. Another man, McCartney, stood clutching at his bare chest which had been laid open by a razor-sharp edge of steel. A third man bubbled and gasped as he collapsed in the pink froth. The horsemen rode round and round the naked soldiers, hacking at their bare flesh in a scene of nightmarish biblical horror, drawn straight from a painting by one of the Italian masters. Steel watched as the naked men clawed and grabbed at the legs of the merciless riders. Watched as one by one they went down into the shallow water, not to rise. Steel snapped away from the vision and yelled down towards the bridge.
‘Cavalry. Ware cavalry. Grenadiers. Form on me.’
Followed by the guards from the carriage and a handful of other men who poured from the deserted houses and alleys they had been searching around the square, Steel ran headlong down the main street, towards the bridge.
Emerging on the upper stretch of the riverbank, behind the low, lichen-clad wall which ran along the waterfront, he looked about to assess their strength. He saw Carter, Macpherson, Mackay, six others. He glimpsed Williams running towards them.
‘Mister Williams. Sarn’t Slaughter. Form along the entrance to the street. Three ranks deep.’
‘But the wagons, Sir. Look.’
Williams was pointing down the road towards the remaining flour wagons which had not yet crossed the bridge. Steel could see there were still at least a dozen, perhaps fifteen of them. Half of the hussars, having finished off the Grenadiers in the river, had charged directly towards the transport and were now attacking the drivers and whatever of the escort they could find who had not already fled across the bridge and into the town.
Steel watched as the unarmed civilians threw themselves from their seats. Some, begging for mercy, were butchered in cold blood. Others attempted to run into the trees at the roadside or waded into the river, only to be ridden down by the blue-coated cavalry and spitted on the riders’ outstretched sabres, like vermin. Some of the hussars were armed with short axes and Steel watched as they hacked mercilessly into the running civilians. Many of the horsemen, he noticed, were grinning. He turned away.
‘It’s too late for them.’
Then he realized that a half platoon of Jennings’ men, the rearguard, were down there with the train. He looked and saw that they had been caught in a semi-circle of hussars, behind the last wagon. Form square damn you. He willed them to do it. It was their only chance. And then he noticed that none of them had fixed their bayonets.
‘Dear Christ.’
He saw one man, presumably a sergeant, attempt to take control, trying to form them into ranks before being cut down with an axe, his head severed from his neck at an angle. Steel knew their fate. The hapless redcoats managed to get off three random shots before the cavalry rode in and simply cut them to pieces. To his horror Steel realized too that the wagon directly behind the dying group of redcoats was that bearing the wounded. The poor devils would be killed where they lay. Sure enough, one man leapt from his horse and began to walk among the wounded. Between the wooden poles of the wagon, Steel saw his axe rise and fall with relentless repetition. He looked more closely at the cavalry and saw long pigtails and swarthy, moustachioed faces. What the hell were French cavalry doing here, so close to the allied lines and so far away from their own army? And then he noticed something else. There, among the slashing fury of the blue-coated hussars, was another uniform quite out of place. A man dressed all in white. An infantry officer, his head crowned with a fur cap. An officer of French Grenadiers. It occurred to Steel that perhaps there might be a connection between the man’s presence here and their encounter with the French Grenadiers at Sattelberg. Perhaps it was the Grenadier who had brought the horsemen here. Could the French have discovered the existence of Marlborough’s letter? It was possible. Word was that the allied camp was as rife with spies and informers as the French.
Putting his hand to his chest, Steel felt the reassuring presence of the package and turned back to Williams.
‘Form up the men here, Tom. Three ranks if you can manage it. You can be sure that they’ll come for us next. And I dare say there’ll be infantry not far behind. Have you seen who’s with them?’
He pointed out the white-coated rider.
‘Sarn’t Slaughter. Three ranks. Alternating fire. However you care to do it. Just keep those bloody