The condemned man was standing precariously on the ladder, the rope about his neck looping downwards. The Provost Sergeant looked at his officer.
The Lieutenant of the Provosts disliked this task, but orders were orders. Major Sharpe was to be hanged in full view of the Spanish troops. He looked up at the man standing on the ladder, his body leaning on the wall, and he caught the dark eyes in a final glance, wondered at a man who could grin at him at this moment, then the Lieutenant gave the order.
‘Carry on, Sergeant.’ The words came out as a croak.
The crowd gasped, then cheered.
The Provosts pulled the ladder from beneath the doomed man.
For a second the booted feet stayed on the falling rung, then they slipped off, he dropped, and the rope jerked tight. He bounced, dropped again, and then was swaying and turning from the high hook. His body seemed to arch as he dangled. His feet flailed the air, kicked the wall, and he twisted so that his unhooded face stared at the packed plaza.
The eyes bulged, the tongue pushed at the lips, the neck was grotesquely stretched to the tilted head. The Spanish watched in fascination. He jerked again, fighting upwards as if for air, and then the English Sergeant jumped up, caught one of the man’s ankles, and jerked his weight down.
The extra weight snapped his neck. The Sergeant let go of the man’s ankles and slowly, as the body swung, the legs drew themselves up a few inches. He was dead.
A coffin waited on the wagon bed; pine boards, rough planed, nailed together. The body was cut down. The hair had been smeared white by the limewash as the body thrashed in death.
They took the boots from the corpse, but nothing else was worth saving. They lifted him into the coffin, but he was too tall for the box and so the Sergeant took a musket from one of his men and smashed the butt down, sweating and grunting, smashed again, and the broken shinbones let the legs be forced inside. The lid was nailed shut.
Wellington stared at the whole thing with distaste. When it was done, when the Spanish Battalions were being marched from the plaza and the pine box was being carried away, he turned his cold eyes on the assembled officers. ‘That’s over, gentlemen. Perhaps we can now get on with this war?’
They filed silently from the room. The murder of the Marqués had failed to split the British and Spanish. The Generalisimo had made his blood sacrifice to keep the alliance alive and now there was a war to fight.
By a roadside, beneath the high mountains where the wolves roamed between grey rocks, they buried the broken-legged corpse. The Provosts heaped rocks over the shallow grave to stop predators digging up the body, and then they left it without any marker. That night a peasant put a nailed cross on the spot, not out of reverence, but to frighten the protestant spirit and keep it underground. The Inquisitor and El Matarife, riding north and east, passed the grave. The Slaughterman reined in. ‘I should have watched him die.’
‘It was better that no one saw you, Juan.’
The Slaughterman shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen a man hanged.’
The Inquisitor looked incredulous. ‘Never?’
‘Never.’ El Matarife sounded ashamed.
‘Then find one and hang him.’
‘I will.’
‘But first look after our next business.’ The priest put spurs to his horse. ‘And hurry!’
They carried papers that would pass them through the British and French lines, and they carried news that would end this war and restore Spain to its old glory. The Inquisitor gave thanks to God and hurried on.
The valley was a pass through the mountains. It was high. From its western rim, where it spilt down to a river far, far beneath, a man could see into Portugal. The hills of the Tras os Montes, the ‘land beyond the mountains’, looked like purple-blue ridges that became dimmer and more indistinct until the horizon was a mere blur like a smear of dark watercolour on a painter’s canvas.
The sides of the valley were thick with thorn. The blossoms were white in the sunlight. The road, that climbed the steep pass and went through the high valley, was edged with yellow ragwort that the Spanish called St James’s grass. The pasture at the valley bottom was close cropped by sheep and rabbits. Ravens nested on stone ledges, foxes hunted the thorn’s margins, while wolves roamed the rock-strewn hills that barred the sky in a jagged barrier.
There was a village in the high valley, but it was deserted. The doors of the cottages had been torn from their hinges and burned by one of the armies that fought in Spain.
At the western end of the valley, where the crest showed the magnificent view of the land beyond the mountains, were two great buildings. Both were ruins.
On the north side, low and squat, was an old convent. Its two cloisters still stood, though the upper cloister had been grievously torn by a great explosion that had destroyed the old chapel. The convent had long been deserted. Weeds grew on its patterned tiles, leaves choked the channels that had once carried water in its lower garden.
To the south, barring the pass, was a castle. A man could still climb to the top of the keep, or stand on the gatehouse, but it had been centuries since a lord lived in the castle. Now it was a home for the ravens, and bats hung in its high dark rooms.
Further east, and higher still, dominating the land for miles around, was an old watchtower. That, too, could be climbed, though the winding stair led only to a broken battlement.
The high valley was called the Gateway of God. By the castle, on the grass that was littered with rabbit droppings like miniature musketballs, was a long, low mound. It was a grave, and in the grave were the bodies of the men who had died defending this pass in the winter. They had been few, and their enemies many, yet they had held the pass until relief came. They had been led by a soldier, by a Rifleman, by Richard Sharpe.
The French who had died, and there had been many, had been buried more hurriedly in a mass grave by the village. In the winter the scavenging beasts had scraped the earth from the grave and eaten what flesh they could find. Now, as the spring days turned to summer and the small stream in the Gateway of God shrank, the bones of the dead Frenchmen were littered about the village. Skulls lay like a monstrous crop of mushrooms.
In the south there was a war, armies marching to this year’s campaign, but in the Gateway of God, where Sharpe had fought his war against an army, there was nothing but death and the wind moving the thorns and the skulls grinning from the cropped grass. It was a place of no use to either army, a place of ghosts and death and loneliness, a place forgotten.
The city of Burgos was where the Great Road split. The road came from the French frontier to San Sebastian, then plunged south through the mountains where the Partisans made every journey hell for the French. There was relief from ambush at Vitoria, then the road went into the hills again, going ever south, until it came to the wide plains where Burgos lay.
It was the road down which the French had invaded Spain. It was the road back up which they would retreat. At Burgos the road divided. One branch went south to Madrid, the other south and west towards Portugal and the Atlantic. Burgos was the crossroads of invasion, the guardian of retreat, the fortress on the plains.
It was not a large fortress, yet in the last days of the summer of 1812 it had withstood a British siege. The castle was still scarred by the marks of cannon-balls and shells. In 1812 the castle had kept the British from chasing the French over the Pyrenees, and this summer, men feared, it might be called on to do the same work again against a reinforced British army.
Pierre Ducos did not care. If the soldiers lost Spain, then his secret Treaty would save France. The Inquisitor, back in Burgos,