‘Ah, my Englishman, it is a joy to see you again.’ The hussar general took Hanley by the hand and appeared genuinely delighted to encounter him. ‘Come, you must dine with my officers tonight.’
Espinosa was not invited, and Lasalle barely acknowledged the man. ‘No soldier,’ he said quietly to Hanley. At the start of the evening the general was in high spirits. Entertainment was prepared for his ADCs and officers in what was clearly a well-practised drill for him. By the time they arrived at the inn the food was almost ready, long tables laid in the main room, and the serried ranks of wine, brandy and champagne awaiting their onslaught. So were half a dozen women, better dressed and more polished than the whores normally to be expected in a coaching inn.
‘The general likes his officers to live in a proper style,’ explained an ADC with sabre scars on his cheek and forehead and a carefully waxed moustache. ‘I made arrangements with an establishment in Madrid for the women and they were sent here to wait for us. One is French and a couple are Italians so we are assured of civilised company. I’m not sure about the blonde, as I haven’t seen her before.’ A woman in a pale pink dress with a plunging neckline had a mound of dyed golden hair piled high on top of her head. ‘Pretty, though, if you like them pale.’
Lasalle placed Hanley beside him at the table. The wine flowed freely, and Hanley found his glass refilled almost as soon as he set it down. The general drank much less than his officers, but even so remained in the highest of spirits.
‘I’m going to Paris to see my family and give my wife another baby. Then off to Vienna to a decent war against the Austrians. They are brave men who fight cleanly. Best of all we always beat them! Now drink with me a toast to the women of Vienna!’
Hanley found the spirit infectious. It was like being surrounded by a horde of bounding puppies, brimming over with excitement and joy.
‘Who has my heart?’ called out the general as the main courses were complete.
‘Your wife!’ chorused his officers in what was obviously a familiar ritual.
‘My blood?’
‘The Emperor!’
‘My life.’
‘Honour!’
Officers began to disappear in turn upstairs, taking one of the women with them. Others began to drink even more heavily, or lit their pipes and smoked. Lasalle stayed with Hanley, a captain of the 2
ieme
Hussars and the scarred ADC sitting around the table. They played cards, gambling with piles of dollars the general had generously provided.
‘Go and have fun, Robert,’ Lasalle said to his ADC. ‘You’re having no luck tonight.’ The general had just won again.
‘I’ll try another hand, sir. Plenty of time for the battlefield of Venus later on.’
‘How old are you, Mr Hanley?’ asked the hussar captain.
‘Twenty-four.’
‘You should be more than a lieutenant by now,’ said the hussar. ‘You should have been born a Frenchman!’
‘Everyone should have been born a Frenchman,’ said Lasalle. ‘Although then we would have no one to fight and life would scarcely be worth living. How could you enjoy peace without war?’
‘But do we need hate to know love?’ Hanley suggested. He had already drunk far more wine than was his habit and thought was beginning to become an effort.
One of the girls came past, supporting a chasseur lieutenant who was struggling to walk. It was the blonde in the pink dress. She let the man slump into a chair, bending down to lower him with her back to the scarred ADC. The temptation proved too much.
‘I know love!’ he yelled, and both hands grabbed the woman’s bottom through her flimsy dress.
She screamed, turning round in outrage that was more than half serious.
‘Saucy bugger!’ she yelled, and Hanley wondered why she spoke in English. There was something vaguely familiar about the girl’s face as she glared at the ADC and slapped him with just enough vigour to arouse him even more by joining the game.
‘Go, Robert,’ said the general, and the ADC almost sprang to his feet, and then grabbed the blonde and lifted her in his arms. She stared at Hanley for a moment as she was borne away, and his fuzzy thoughts tried to pierce the heavy powder and dyed hair, but could not.
‘I wish I was so young,’ said the general. ‘To be twenty-four again like you, Englishman – or younger still like Robert.’
‘I have always wanted to be older,’ said Hanley. ‘To be experienced and wise.’
‘Hussars need to be clever, not wise,’ said the captain, and the general nodded.
‘Winning the experience is a greater joy than having it,’ he said with an overwhelming melancholy. Hanley did not think that the general had drunk enough for this to be the brandy talking.
‘I should be dead,’ said Lasalle. ‘So many times I should be dead. A man should not live as I live and survive so long.’
‘A hussar who isn’t dead by thirty is a
jean-foutre
,’ said the captain in a tone that suggested a quote. Seeing Hanley’s puzzlement, he added, ‘A nothing, a scoundrel, a pile of horse dung, but worse than all of those.’
Lasalle drew deeply on his immense pipe. ‘Yes, I said that, and have tried to live up to it.’
‘I am twenty-nine.’ The captain’s words were solemn.
Lasalle blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘And I shall be thirty-four come summer. My luck should already have run out.’
‘A man makes his own luck,’ suggested Hanley, his mind too clouded to come up with anything original. In truth he was finding the sombre tone deeply oppressive. Penniless, he was now a prisoner too, cut off from his friends and facing what
might be years of captivity. Then there was the strange purpose of Espinosa. He drank from his refilled brandy glass.
They were sitting in silence when the ADC returned.
‘You need to learn patience, my boy,’ said the general with just a hint of his earlier liveliness.
‘I knew I shouldn’t have left,’ muttered Robert under his breath so that Hanley barely caught the words. ‘Go with her, Englishmen,’ he said loudly. ‘You may disappoint after a Frenchman, but she knows her business. Take him,
cherie
.’ His hand darted back and pinched the blonde again. She yelped, hissed a string of Spanish, French and English oaths at him, but then dutifully put her arm around Hanley’s shoulder and began to lift him. He stood unsteadily. As they climbed slowly up the stairs, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the ADC with the landlord, supervising a couple of the inn’s staff who were hanging a big mirror back up on the wall.
‘General!’ shouted the ADC. ‘You must show us again!’ The officers bellowed their approval.
Lasalle’s face changed, the desire to entertain his officers wrenching him from his own thoughts. ‘Gaston, my pistols,’ he called, and turned to find his orderly holding the weapons ready. ‘Robert, set up the glasses.’
Hanley stopped the girl, and made her wait. One of her hands began to smooth his chest in a way that was soon taking more and more of his attention, but he was still curious to see what was about to happen.
Empty glasses were lined up on a bench lifted on top of one of the tables. Lasalle stood with his back to them at the far end of the room, looking into the mirror. He raised a pistol in his left hand and then rested the barrel pointing back over his shoulder and took aim.
The bang resounded through the room as the pistol sparked and the first glass shattered into fragments.
The officers cheered, and the general was handed his second pistol.
‘He’s a mad ’un,’ said the girl, and Hanley was no longer capable of puzzling that she spoke English.
They walked on up the stairs and came to a door that lay ajar. Another shot rang out and there were more cheers. Hanley’s body now demanded that he give attention to the girl and he began a clumsy fumble.
‘Wait a minute, Mr Hanley,’ she said. ‘We’re nearly there.’
They went into the room, and he sank down on to the bed. His energy was fading, but he grabbed the blonde around the waist and tried to wrestle her down.
She slipped from his grasp and took a glass from the table. ‘Here, have this. It’ll do you good.’ He did as he was told. It tasted bitter, and then he flung the glass down and pulled the girl on top of him in spite of a squeal of protest.
In moments he was asleep, snoring loudly, and one arm flopped out of the bed on to the floor. The blonde disentangled herself, pulled at her dress to cover her bosom once again and refastened the buttons his eager hands had undone. She got up and stared down at him for a while, a thoughtful expression on her face.
‘Pity,’ said Jenny Dobson, and then managed to shift his dead weight enough so that there was sufficient of the bed for her to sleep. Half an hour would be about right before she should reappear and meet her next client.
B
y the fourth day, Williams’ frame ached from the jolting of the carriage and his skin itched from the bites of the lice infesting his clothing. Apart from one night at Cáceres, they stayed at rustic coaching inns. There was always a good room for the Doña Margarita, and a smaller but decent one for Wickham the confessor. The aristocrat brought her own linen with her to ensure a clean bed and Ramón strictly supervised the inn’s maids to ensure the lady’s bed was decently made.
He and the other ‘servants’ found space in the stables on dirty straw alive with vermin, and surrounded by the horses, mules and the other folk unable to afford or demand a room. Williams and Dobson slept in their clothes, both because it was still cold during the nights and to keep their red jackets concealed. Apart from that, it would, as Dobson said, ‘Stop any thieving hound from making off with them.’
They made good progress, and the Doña Margarita’s fine name and even finer letters of recommendation carried them through every check. Each French officer they met was treated to a warm smile, elegant flattery and the gift of another Indian purse.
‘A man in the market at Seville makes them,’ the lady replied when Williams heard Wickham express surprise that she carried so many mementoes of her years in the New World.
‘Smart girl, as I said,’ whispered Dobson to the ensign.
They overheard little conversation from the inside of the carriage. Sometimes this was because the noise of the wheels and creaks of the springs and harness muffled the sound, but
more often it was simply that there was no talk. La Doña Margarita appeared to prefer silence. At the beginning Wickham had constantly attempted to strike up a conversation, but his persistence met with little encouragement and no real success. Williams had no opportunity at all to converse with the lady, and indeed rarely saw her, since he was on the far side of the carriage. At night, the Doña Margarita pulled her thickly laced mantilla down over her face before leaving the carriage. After all these days, Williams doubted that he could have picked her face out in a crowd. There was a distinctive badge sewn on to the sleeve of her black travelling dress, which had an embroidered figure of the Madonna surrounded by a wreath.
‘Saragossa,’ said Ramón the driver, as if that explained everything. ‘We were there in the siege.’ He spoke slowly and haltingly in English, although Williams suspected that he concealed a better knowledge of the language. ‘A big fire in the hospital. My lady go in. She pull out
tres
. All alive, but she burn her arms. My poor lady. Very brave.’
They got no more from him, and the servant was otherwise as resolutely silent as the mistress. Williams had heard a little of the heroines of Saragossa, who had helped the city repel the French last year. The most famous was Augustina, whose lover had fallen, but who nevertheless fired the cannon he had loaded and so shattered a French attack. Ramón’s story made Williams regret all the more the lack of opportunity to converse with so brave a lady.
At dawn on the fifth day they crossed the Tagus by ferry – the signature and seal of King Joseph once again speeding their way. Then they went north-west along a good road, which ate up the miles.
Williams struggled to maintain his sense of where they were. He wondered about Pringle and the detachment of the 106th and whether or not they would be waiting at the rendezvous. It was hard to believe that men could march as fast as the carriage, even if their route was more direct. On this, at least, he was willing to
share some of Dobson’s doubts about the hearty assurances of the colonel and Baynes.
He missed Pringle and the familiar faces of the grenadiers. Even more he missed Hanley, and wondered where he was. Wickham had admitted that he saw the lieutenant fall, but did not see him wounded or killed. Williams wanted to believe that his friend was alive, although that increased his sense of guilt that he had done nothing to find him. The explanations readily came to mind. The Spanish had lost the field to the French and it was impossible to return. As importantly, he had almost immediately been ordered away as escort to the Doña Margarita. Reason might be satisfied, but in his heart he wondered whether the affair would have happened differently if he had been with Hanley instead of escorting Baynes.
The carriage rolled on. Another night was spent in the out-house of an inn, heavily populated with vermin of all kinds, stinking of decaying meat and resonating to the snores of a dozen pedlars on their way south.
The next morning they turned off the main road and struggled along a track where the mud was deep and sucked at the wheels. Ramón, who seemed to have excellent eyesight, spotted movement in the trees edging the road and called a warning. The former hussar pulled the blanket away to uncover his loaded blunderbuss. Dobson brandished his own heavy firelock and Williams very obviously readied his pistol. They caught a glimpse of a villainous face with a red headscarf lurking behind a low wall, but no one dared to challenge them. Ramón drove the team on as fast as the mud permitted. The horses were tired, since they had had no opportunity to change them and this meant that they had to rest the team more and more often.