The French Colonel turned his charm onto Sharpe. 'Major?' He gestured towards the centre of the cloister, bent down and dragged his saddlebags until they rested beside the one Sharpe had brought. Dubreton nodded at it. 'Yours?’
’Yes, sir.’
’Gold?’
’Five hundred guineas.'
Dubreton raised his eyebrows. 'I presume you have hostages here, yes?'
'Just one, sir.'
'An expensive one. We have three.' His eyes were looking at the roofline, searching down into the shadows, while his hands brought out a ragged cheroot that he lit from his tinder box. It took a few seconds for the charred linen to catch fire. He offered a cheroot to Sharpe. 'Major?'
'No thank you, sir.'
'Three hostages. Including my wife.'
'I'm sorry, sir.'
'So'm I.' The voice was mild, light even, but the face was hard as flint. 'Deron will pay.'
'Deron?'
'Sergeant Deron, who now styles himself Marshal Pot-au-Feu. He was a cook, Major, and rather a good one. He's quite untrustworthy.' The eyes came down from the roofline to look at Sharpe. 'Do you expect him to keep his word?'
'No, sir.'
'Nor I, but it seemed worth the risk.'
Neither spoke for a moment. There was still silence beyond the Convent, and silence within the walls. Sharpe pulled the watch out of his pocket. Twenty-five minutes to twelve. 'Were you ordered here at a specific time, sir?'
'Indeed, Major.' Dubreton blew a stream of smoke into the air. 'Twenty-five minutes past eleven.' He smiled. 'Perhaps our Sergeant Deron has a sense of humour. I suspect he thought we might fight each other. We very nearly did.'
Harper and Bigeard, either sicle of the cloister, watched the roofs and doors. They made a frightening pair and encouraged Sharpe to believe that they all might leave alive. Two such men as the Sergeants would take a deal of killing. He looked again at the French Colonel. 'Can I ask how your wife was captured, sir?'
'Ambushed, Major, in a convoy going from Leon to Salamanca. They stopped it by using French uniforms, no one suspected anything, and the bastards went off with a month's supplies. And three officers' wives who were coming to join us for Christmas.' He walked over to the door in the western wall that Sharpe had already tried to open, tugged at it, then came back to Sharpe. He smiled. 'Would you be Sharpe of Talavera? Of Badajoz?'
'Probably, sir.'
Dubreton looked at the Rifle, at the huge Cavalry sword that Sharpe chose to carry high in its slings, and then at the scarred face. 'I think I could do the Empire a great service by killing you, Major Sharpe.' He said the words without offence.
'I'm sure I could do Britain an equal service by killing you, sir.'
Dubreton laughed. 'Yes, you could.' He laughed again, pleased at his immodesty, but despite the laughter he was still tense, still watchful, the eyes rarely leaving the doors and roof.
'Sir!' Harper growled from behind them, pointing his gun at the chapel door. Bigeard had swung round to face it. There was a small noise from inside, a grating noise, and Dubreton threw his cheroot away. 'Sergeant! To our right!'
Harper moved fast as Dubreton waved Bigeard to stand behind the officers and to their left. The Colonel looked at Sharpe. 'You were in there. What's there?'
'A chapel. There's a bloody great grille behind the door. I think it's being unlocked.'
The chapel doors were pulled open and facing them, curtseying, were two girls. They giggled, turned, and fetched a table from behind them which they carried out the door, beneath the cloister, and placed in the sunlight. One looked at Bigeard, then at Harper, and made a face of mock surprise at their height. They giggled again.
A third girl appeared with a chair which she placed beside the table. She too curtseyed towards the officers then blew them a kiss.
Dubreton sighed. 'I fear we must endure whatever they have planned for us.'
'Yes, sir.'
Boots clattered in the chapel and soldiers filed out, left and right, into the cloisters. They wore uniforms of Britain, France, Portugal and Spain, and their muskets were tipped with bayonets. Their faces were mocking as they filed to line three of the four walls. Only the wall behind Dubreton and Sharpe was unguarded. The three girls stood by the table. They wore low cut blouses, very low, and Sharpe guessed they must be cold.
'Mes amis! Mes amis!’ The voice boomed from within the chapel. It was a deep voice, gravelly, a great bass voice. 'Mes amis.’
A ludicrous figure came out of the shadow, through the cloister's arch, to stand by the table. He was short and immensely fat. He spread his arms, smiled. 'Mes amis!'
His legs were cased in tall black leather boots, cut away behind the knees, and then in white breeches that were dangerously tight about his huge fat thighs. His belly wobbled as he laughed silently, ripples of fat running up his body beneath the flowered waistcoat he wore beneath a blue uniform jacket that was lavishly adorned with gold leaves and looping strands. The jacket could not button over his immense front, instead it was held in place by a golden waist sash, while a red sash was draped across his right shoulder. At his neck, below the multitude of chins, an enamelled gold cross hung. The tassels of his gold epaulettes rested on his fat arms.
Sergeant Deron, now calling himself Marshal Pot-au-Feu, took off his hat, wondrously plumed in white, and revealed a face that was almost cherubic. An aging cherub with a halo of white curls, a face that beamed with goodwill and delight. 'Mes amis!' He looked at Sharpe. 'Parlez-vous Francais?'
'No.'
He wagged a finger at Sharpe. 'You should learn the French. A beautiful language! Eh, Colonel?' He smiled at Dubreton who said nothing. Pot-au-Feu shrugged, laughed, and looked again to Sharpe. 'My English is very bad. You the Colonel meet, yes?' He twisted his head as far as the rolls of fat on his neck would allow. 'Mon Colonel! Mon brave!’
'Coming, sir, coming! Coming! And here I am!' The man with the yellow face, the toothless grin, the blue, child-like eyes, and the horrid ungovernable spasms, leaped grotesquely through the door. He was dressed in the uniform of a British Colonel, but the finery did nothing to hide the lumpen gross body or the brute strength that was in his arms and legs.
The capering figure stopped, half crouching, and stared at Sharpe. The face twitched, the voice cackled, and then the mouth twisted into a smile. 'Sharpy! Hello Sharpy!' A string of spittle danced from his lips as the face jerked.
Sharpe turned calmly towards Harper. 'Don't shoot, Sergeant.'
'No, sir.' Harper's voice was full of loathing. 'Not yet, sir.'
'Sir! Sir! Sir!' The yellow face laughed at them as the man who called himself Colonel straightened up. 'No ‘sirs’ here, no. No bloody airs and bloody graces here.' The cackle again, obscene and piercing.
Sharpe had half expected this, and he suspected that Harper had expected it too, yet neither had voiced the fear. Sharpe had hoped that this man was dead, yet this man boasted he could not be killed. Here, in the sunlight of the cloister, spittle dangling from his mouth, stood ex-Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill. Hakeswill.
Chapter 5
Obadiah Hakeswill, the Sergeant who had recruited Sharpe into the army, the man who had caused Sharpe to be flogged in a dusty Indian square. Hakeswill.
The man who had Harper flogged earlier this same year, who had tried to rape Teresa, Sharpe's wife, who had held a saw-backed bayonet at the throat of Sharpe's baby daughter, Antonia. Obadiah Hakeswill.
The head twitched on its long neck. The spittle dropped in a glittering cartwheel from his mouth. He hawked, spat, and shuffled sideways. This was the man who could not be killed.
He had been hanged when he was twelve. It was a trumped-up charge of stealing sheep, trumped-up because the vicar whose daughter young Hakeswill had tried to molest did not want to drag his child's reputation in the mud. The magistrates had been happy to oblige.
He was the youngest of all the prisoners being hanged that day. The executioner, wanting to please the massed spectators,
had not given any of his victims a neck-breaking drop. He had suspended them slowly, letting them hang and throttle themselves to death, letting the crowd enjoy each choking sound, each futile kick, and the executioner had tantalized the crowd by offering to tug on the ankles and responding to their shouts of yes or no. No one cared about the small boy at the end of the gibbet. Hakeswill had hung, feigning death, cunning even as he slipped into nightmare-ridden darkness, and then, before the end, the heavens had opened.
The street outside the gaol was hammered and sluiced by the cloudburst, lightning slammed and bent the weathercock on the high church steeple, and the wide market street cleared as men, women and children ran for shelter. No one cared as Hakeswill's uncle cut the small body down. They thought the boy was dead, that the body was being sold to a doctor eager for a fresh corpse to explore, but the uncle took Obadiah into an alleyway, slapped him into consciousness, and told the child to go away, never to return. Hakeswill had obeyed.
He had started twitching that day and the twitching had not stopped in thirty years. He had found the army, a refuge for men like himself, and in its ranks he had discovered a simple code for survival. To those who were superior, the officers, Hakeswill was the perfect soldier. He was punctilious in his duty, in his respect, and he was made into a Sergeant. No officer with Hakeswill as his Sergeant needed worry about discipline. Sergeant Hakeswill terrorized his Companies into obedience and the price of freedom from that tyranny was paid to the ugly Sergeant in money, liquor or women. It never ceased to amaze Hakeswill what a married woman would do to keep her soldier husband from a flogging. His life was dedicated to revenge upon a fate that had made him ugly, unloved, a creature loathed by its fellows, useful only to its superiors.
Yet fate could give blessings too. It had cheated death for Obadiah Hakeswill. He was not the only man or woman to escape a hanging. So many survived that some hospitals charged the cost of caring for the living-hanged on the ghouls who fought to snatch fresh corpses from the gallows to sell to doctors, yet Hakeswill saw himself as unique. He was the man who had survived death, and now no man could kill him. He feared no man. He could be hurt, but he could not be killed, and he had proven that on battlefields and in back alleys. He was the favoured child of death.
And he was here, in the Gateway of God, Pot-au-Feu's Lieutenant. He had deserted from Sharpe's Company in April, his careful rules for survival in the army shattered by his lust for Teresa, his court-martial and execution guaranteed by his murder of Sharpe's friend, Captain Robert Knowles, and so he had slipped into the black-red darkness of the horror that was Badajoz at the siege's end. Now he was in Adrados where he had found other desperate men who would play to his evil, pander to his madness, follow him into the murk of his lusts.
'A pleasure, yes?' Hakeswill laughed at Sharpe. 'Got to call me ‘sir’ now! I'm a Colonel!' Pot-au-Feu watched Hakeswill fondly, smiling at the performance. The face jerked. 'Going to salute me, are you? Eh?' He took off the bicorne hat so that his hair, grey now, hung lank over the yellow skin. The eyes were china-blue in the ravaged face. He looked past Sharpe. 'Got the bloody Irishman with you. Born in a pig-sty. Bloody Irish muck!'
Harper should have kept quiet, but there was a pride in the Irishman and in his voice was a sneer. 'How's your poxed mother, Hakeswill?'
Hakeswill's mother was the only person in the world he loved. Not that he knew her, not that he had seen her since he was twelve, but he loved her. He had forgotten the beatings, his whimpering as a small child beneath her anger, he remembered only that she had sent her brother to take him from the scaffold, and in his world that was the one act of love. Mothers were sacred. Harper laughed and Hakeswill bellowed in uncontrollable rage, lurched into a run, and his hand fumbled for the unfamiliar sword at his side.
The cloister was stunned by the size of this hatred, the force of it, the noise that echoed through the arches as the huge man charged at Harper.
The Sergeant stood calm. He let the flint down onto the steel of his gun, reversed it, and then thrust the heavy brass-bound butt into Hakeswill's belly, stepped to one side and kicked him in the side.
The muskets of Pot-au-Feu's men twitched into their shoulders, flints back, and Sharpe dropped to one knee, rifle steady, and the barrel was aimed straight between Pot-au-Feu's eyes.
'Non! Non!’ Pot-au-Feu screamed at his men, flapping a hand towards Sharpe. 'Non!’
Hakeswill was on his feet again, eyes streaming in pain and anger, and the sword was in his hand and he whipped it at Harper's face, the steel hissing and blurring in the sunlight, and Harper parried it with the butt of his gun, grinned, and no one moved to help Hakeswill for they feared the huge Rifleman. Dubreton looked at Bigeard, nodded.
It had to be ended. If Hakeswill died then Sharpe knew they were all doomed. If Harper died then Pot-au-Feu would die and his men would avenge him. Bigeard strode calmly behind the officers and Hakeswill screamed at him, shouted for help, but still no one moved. He lunged with the sword at Harper, missed, and swung helplessly towards the vast French Sergeant who seemed to laugh, moved with sudden speed, and Hakeswill was pinioned by the great arms. The Englishman fought with all his strength, wrenched at the hands which held him, but he was like a kitten in the Frenchman's grip. Harper stepped forward, took the sword from Hakeswill's hand, stepped back with it.
'Sergeant!' Dubreton's tone was a warning. Sharpe still had his eyes on Pot-au-Feu.
Harper shook his head. He had no intention of killing this man yet. He held the sword handle in his right hand, the blade in his left, grinned at Hakeswill and then slammed the sword onto his knee. It broke in two and Harper threw the fragments onto the tiles. Bigeard grinned.
A scream cut through the Convent, an awful scream, agony slicing the air.
No one moved. The scream had come from within the Convent. A woman's scream.
Pot-au-Feu looked at Sharpe's rifle, then at Dubreton. He spoke in a reasonable tone, his deep voice placatory, and Dubreton looked at Sharpe. 'He suggests we forget this small contretemps. If you lower your gun, he will call his man back.'
'Tell him to call the man first.' It was as if the scream had never happened.
'Obadiah! Obadiah!' Pot-au-Feu's voice was wheedling. 'Come 'ere, Obadiah! Come!'
Dubreton spoke to Bigeard and the French Sergeant slowly released his grip. For a second Sharpe thought Hakeswill would throw himself at Harper again, but Pot-au-Feu's voice drew the shambling, yellow faced figure back towards him. Hakeswill stooped, picked up the fragment of sword with its handle, and thrust it pathetically into his scabbard so that at least it looked correct. Pot-au-Feu spoke softly to him, patted his arm, and beckoned to one of the three girls. She huddled next to Obadiah, stroking him, and Sharpe lowered his rifle as he stood up.
Pot-au-Feu spoke to Dubreton. The Colonel translated for Sharpe. 'He says Obadiah is his loyal servant. Obadiah kills for him. He rewards Obadiah with drink, power and women.'
Pot-au-Feu laughed when Dubreton had finished. Sharpe could see the strain on the Colonel's face and he knew the Frenchman was remembering the scream. His wife was held here. Yet neither officer had asked about the scream, for both knew that to do so was to play into Pot-au-Feu's hands. He wanted them to ask.
It came again, wavering to a shrill intensity, sobbing in gasps to silence. Pot-au-Feu acted as if it had never sounded. His deep voice was talking to Dubreton again.
'He says he will count the money, then the women will be brought.'
Sharpe had presumed that the table was for counting the money, but three men dragged the coins to a clear patch of tiles and began the laborious task of piling them and counting. The table had another purpose. Pot-au-Feu clapped his podgy hands and a fourth girl appeared who carried a tray. She put it on the table and the fat Frenchman fondled her, took the lid from the earthenware pot on the tray, and then spoke lengthily to Dubreton. The rumbling voice seemed full of pleasure; it lingered lasciviously on certain words as Pot-au-Feu spooned food into a
bowl.
Dubreton sighed, turned to Sharpe, but his eyes looked into the sky. Smoke was rising where there had been none twenty minutes before. 'Do you want to know what he said?'
'Should I, sir?'
'It's a recipe for hare stew, Major.' Dubreton gave a thin smile. 'I suspect rather a good one.'
Pot-au-Feu was eating greedily, the thick sauce dripping onto his fat, white-breeched thighs.
Sharpe smiled. 'I just cut them up, boil them in water and salt.'
'I can truly believe that, Major. I had to teach my own wife to cook.'
Sharpe raised an eyebrow. There was an inflection in Dubreton's words that was intriguing.
The Frenchman smiled. 'My wife is English. We met and married during the Peace of Amiens, the last time I was in London. She has lived the ten years since in France and is now even a creditable cook. Not as good as the servants, of course, but it takes a lifetime to learn how simple cooking is.'
'Simple?'
'Of course.' The Colonel glanced at Pot-au-Feu who was delicately picking up a lump of meat that had fallen onto his lap. 'He takes his hares, cuts the flesh off the bones, and then soaks them for a full day in olive oil, vinegar and wine. You add garlic, Major, a little salt, some pepper, and a handful of juniper berries if you have them. You save the blood and you mix it with the livers which you have ground into a paste.' There was an enthusiasm in Dubreton's voice. 'Now. After a day you take the flesh and you cook it in butter and bacon fat. Just brown it. Put some flour in the pan then put it all back into the sauce. Add more wine. Add the blood and the liver, and heat it up. Boil it. You will find it superb, especially if you add a spoonful of olive oil as you serve it.'
Pot-au-Feu chuckled. He had understood a good deal of what Dubreton had said, and as Sharpe looked the fat Frenchman smiled and lifted a small jug. 'Oil!' He patted his huge belly and broke wind.
The scream came once more, the third time, and there was a helplessness in the agony. A woman was being hurt, horribly hurt, and Pot-au-Feu's men looked at the four strangers and grinned. These men knew what was happening and wanted to see the effect on the visitors. Dubreton's voice was low. 'Our time will come, Major.'