The Marquis of Bolibar (11 page)

I strove to explain that the beggars had merely come for their Sunday alms, but he did not hear me out. Instead, he began to lay about a peasant who, half hidden behind a mule laden with firewood, had been gazing into his face with mingled curiosity and fear.

"What are you doing here, you stubborn rogue?"

Trembling all over, the peasant put a hand to his brow, lips and breast in turn.

"Leave me be, Jew," he entreated. "Acknowledge the Cross!"

We laughed despite ourselves on hearing the captain called a Jew, but Salignac seemed not to have heard. He fixed the man with a menacing, suspicious gaze.

"Who are you? What's your business here? Who sent for you?

"I bring firewood from the forest for the Seiïor Marques, Your Eternity," the peasant said haltingly, crossing himself again and again as he bestowed this singular title on the captain.

"Take your firewood and go to the Devil - let him stoke the fires of hell with it!" Salignac roared, and the peasant turned and ran off down the street, terrified out of his wits, with the mule cavorting madly after him.

Salignac drew a deep breath and rejoined us.

"An arduous spell of duty, this. It has been the same since daybreak. You, Eglofstein, sitting snug in your orderly-room, can count yourself lucky —"

He broke off, for just then a peasant drove up with a waggon- load of maize straw, and Salignac, suspecting him to be another Marquis of Bolibar in disguise, showered the unfortunate man with curses and imprecations.

We left them to it and set off up the stairs.

In the dining-room above we found Donop in conversation with the priest and the alcalde, who had likewise been invited to dinner. Donop was dressed to the nines: he wore his best breeches, his boots were carefully polished, and the black stock at his throat was knotted in keeping with the latest fashion.

"She will be at table," he announced, walking over to us with an air of mystery.

"I doubt it," Günther retorted. "Our Colonel Vinegar-Jug keeps her tethered like a nanny-goat."

"I met her on the stairs," said Donop, "and she was wearing a gown of Françoise-Marie's, the white muslin
'à la Minerve'.
I felt I was looking at a tombstone come to life."

"She wears Françoise-Marie's clothes every day," Eglofstein told us. "The colonel wishes her to resemble his first wife in each and every respect. Believe it or not, she has had to learn to distinguish between all the
vins de
liqueur
-
to tell a Rosalis from a St Laurens, for example. Now he's busy teaching her to play cards:
ombre, piquet, petite prime,
summa
summarum."

"I can think of other games I should like to teach her," said Günther. He began to laugh, but at that moment the door opened and Monjita herself came in with the colonel at her heels.

We fell silent and bowed - all save the priest and the alcalde, who were standing at the window with their backs to the door, unaware of the colonel's arrival. They continued their conversation, and the alcalde's voice could plainly be heard in the general hush.

"My grandfather met him here in this very town, fifty years ago, and he's just as the old man described him: for ever vehement and choleric, his face the colour of death and his brow encircled by a bandage that conceals the fiery cross."

"His portrait hangs in the cathedral at Cordoba," said the priest, "and beneath it are the words:
Tu
enim, stulte
Hebrœe,
tuum deum
non
cognovisti,
which is to say, 'Thou foolish Jew, thou didst not —'"

He, too, became aware of the colonel's presence and fell silent. After a general exchange of salutations we all took our places at table, I between Donop and the priest.

Monjita, recognizing Captain Brockendorf as the man with whom she had spoken that morning, smiled at him, and I, as I watched her sitting beside the colonel in the white, high- necked muslin gown we all knew so well, was truly tempted to believe, if only for a moment, that she was the Françoise-Marie whose memory I had never been able to banish.

Donop seemed to feel as I did, for he left his plate untouched and never took his eyes off her.

"Donop," the colonel called across the table as he tempered his Chambertin with water, "you or Eglofstein must play us something on the pianoforte after dinner. Your health, Señor Cura!"

"Donop," I whispered to my day-dreaming table companion, "the colonel was addressing you." He gave a start and sighed.

"Ah, Boethius!" he said softly. "Ah, Seneca! Great philosophers though you were, how little have all your writings availed me!"

The meal proceeded, and I remember its course as if it were yesterday. The lofty windows facing me afforded an extensive view of snow-mantled hills on which isolated bushes stood out like dark shadows. Jackdaws and ravens fluttered across the fields, and in the distance a peasant woman rode her donkey toward the town, a basket on her head and a child on her lap. None of us guessed what a transformation would overtake the peaceful countryside that very day, nor could we know that we were enjoying the last harmonious hour we were ever to be granted within the walls of La Bisbal.

Günther, seated beside the alcalde, regaled him with a loud and boastful account of his feats of arms and his travels in France and Spain. My neighbour on the right, the priest, while applying himself with alacrity to the food and wine, lectured me on matters of which he assumed me to be ignorant — for instance, that the region was very hot in summer, that the countryside abounded in figs and grapes, and that fish, too, were plentiful by reason of the sea's proximity.

All of a sudden Brockendorf sniffed the air several times, smote the table with his hand, and let out an exultant cry.

"The dish has conceived and brought forth a roast goose — I can smell it from here!"

"Damnation," said the colonel, "you guessed it. Very perceptive of you."

"It comes at a blessed hour, does the goose," Brockendorf declared, brandishing his fork. "Let us greet it with a
Con quibus
or a
Salue regi
na! "

"Hush, Brockendorf," said Donop, as embarrassed on the priest's account as the rest of us. "Forms of worship are no fit subject for mockery."

"Keep your homilies to yourself, Donop," Brockendorf growled. "You're no theologian, God knows." The priest, however, had understood none of this but "
Salue
regina
".

"The Bishop of Plasencia," he said, helping himself to a drumstick from the dish, "the Most Reverend Don Juan Manrique de Lara, grants forty days' worth of indulgences to all who say a
Salue
regina
before Our Lady's statue."

"Don't stint yourself, sir," Brockendorf benevolently urged the alcalde. "When one dish is empty, another will be brought."

"Our beloved Maria del Pilar," pursued the priest, "is admired and revered throughout the world, having accomplished as many miracles as the Maria de Guadalupe or the Virgin of Montserrat. Why, only last year ..."

The words stuck in his throat, together with a morsel of roast goose, and his startled eyes sought those of the alcalde.

Both men stared in alarm at the door. Following the direction of their gaze, I gathered that the cause of their sudden consternation was Captain de Salignac, who had just entered the room.

Salignac removed his cloak, bowed to the colonel and Monjita, and regretted that the importance of his guard duties had been such as to delay him. Then he sat down at table, and I saw for the first time that his tunic was adorned with the cross of the Légion d'Honneur.

"You won your cross at Eylau, I believe?" said the colonel. He signed to Monjita to serve him, and we all marvelled at her slender hands and graceful movements.

"Yes, at Eylau the Emperor himself pinned it to my chest," the captain replied, and the eyes beneath his bushy eyebrows shone. "I had returned from delivering a dispatch to find the Emperor at breakfast, hurriedly drinking his chocolate.
'Grognard,'
he said to me, 'bravely ridden, my old
grognard.
How fares your horse?' I may be an old soldier, Colonel, but I swear my eyes grew moist at the thought that the Emperor could still find time, in the hurly-burly of battle, to inquire after my horse."

"All I fail to understand about your story," said Brockendorf, wiping his mouth, "is that the Emperor should have taken chocolate with his breakfast. Chocolate tastes of syrup and is sticky as pitch. It also leaves grounds between the teeth."

"I've spent two years in the field and taken part in seventeen battles and engagements, among them the assault on the Lines of Torres Vedras," Günther said resentfully, "but I've yet to be awarded the Légion d'Honneur because I wasn't serving in the Guards."

"Lieutenant Günther," Salignac replied with a frown, "you have been at war for two years and seen action seventeen times. Can you guess how many battlefields
I
have trodden — battlefields unknown to you even by name? Can you guess how many years before your birth I first wielded this sabre?"

"You heard that?" the alcalde whispered to the priest, and he drew the sign of the cross on his forehead with trembling fingers.

"Lord have mercy on the luckless man," said the priest, casting his eyes up to heaven.

"What foolishness to drink chocolate!" Brockendorf persisted. "A good beer soup, a brace of sausages well stewed in gravy, and a tankard of ale to go with them — that's
my
favourite breakfast."

"Have you often seen the Emperor at close quarters, Salignac?" asked the colonel.

"I have seen him at work in a hundred guises. I have seen him dictating letters to his secretaries while pacing his room. I have seen him studying maps and engaged in geographical computations. I have seen him dismount from his charger and lay a gun with his own hands. I have seen him listening to petitioners with knitted brow and galloping across the battlefield, head bowed and grim-visaged, but I was never so filled with a sense of his greatness as when I once entered his tent and saw him lying exhausted on his bearskin, stirring restlessly in his sleep as he dreamed with twitching lips of battles to come. He seemed to me then to resemble none of the generals or conquerors of our own day. I was reminded by his awesome appearance of that murderous old monarch —"

"Herod!" exclaimed the vicar. "Herod!" groaned the alcalde, and they both stared at Captain de Salignac with horror written on their distracted faces.

"Herod, yes," said Salignac, "or Caligula." And he poured himself some wine.

"The Emperor," Donop said slowly and thoughtfully, "is leading us along a road that traverses vales of misery and rivers of blood, but its destination is liberty and human happiness. We must follow him for want of any other road to take. Having been born into an ill-starred age and denied peace on earth, we can only hope for peace in heaven."

"There you go again, Donop," said Brockendorf, who was peeling himself an apple. "That's as pretty a speech as any uttered by a mendicant nun after Confession."

"What do I care for peace?" Salignac exclaimed with sudden vehemence. "War has been my lifelong element. Heaven and its perpetual peace are not for me."

"I know it," wailed the alcalde.

"We know it," groaned the vicar.
"Deus in adjutorium meum intende!"
he added in a low voice, folding his hands and composing his tremulous lips.

The colonel had meanwhile declared the meal at an end, so we all rose to our feet. Salignac threw on his cloak and strode downstairs with a jingling of spurs. The priest and the alcalde gazed fearfully after him until he was lost to view. Then the former tugged at my sleeve and drew me aside.

"That officer who took his leave a moment ago," he said, "— ask him if he was ever in La Bisbal before."

"In La Bisbal?" I replied. "When would that have been?"

"Fifty years ago in my grandfather's time, when the great plague was raging," the alcalde interposed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

I burst out laughing at this nonsense, at a loss to know how to answer. The alcalde raised his arms in entreaty and the priest, with a terrified gesture, urged me to be silent.

Donop, who was conversing with Günther, never took his eyes off Monjita.

"Never have I seen such a resemblance. Her figure, her hair, those movements ..."

"The resemblance will not be perfect," Günther interrupted him in his arrogant way, "until I've taught her to whisper 'Till tonight, my dearest' when she bids me adieu."

"Günther!" the colonel called suddenly from the other end of the room.

"Here, sir," Günther called back, going over to him. "What may I do for you?"

I saw the two of them exchange a few words. A moment later Günther returned, his lips set in a stubborn line and his face as white as the wall.

"I am to hand over my command to you," he hissed at me, "and ride this very day to Terra Molina with letters from the colonel to General d'Hilliers. So
that
is Eglofstein's ace of trumps!"

"You may be sure the letters are extremely urgent," I said, glad that the colonel's choice had not fallen on me. "I'll lend you my Polish galloper. You'll be back within five days."

"And tomorrow you'll call on Monjita in my place, eh? You're in league with Eglofstein, just as I suspected. You and Eglofstein: rancid butter on mouldy bread!"

I did not answer, but Brockendorf stepped in.

"I have your measure, Günther," he sneered. "You're afraid - you can already hear musket balls whistling past your ears."

"Afraid? I would charge a battery of howitzers head-on, and you know it."

"The colonel respects your fine horsemanship," said Donop.

"Enough of your parrot's chatter!" Günther burst out. "Do you imagine I didn't see Eglofstein at table with the colonel, whispering in that furtive way? He wants me a hundred miles from here on Monjita's account, and I won't forget it — be damned if I will! Eglofstein is for ever spying. If two people stand talking together, he sidles up behind them like a customs inspector."