The Marquis of Bolibar (3 page)

Lieutenant von Rohn's regimental commander had dispatched him to Marshal Soult's headquarters at Forgosa with some important papers, to wit, the
feuilles d'appel
or muster rolls of the Hanoverian Chasseurs, because the assistant paymaster had refused to disburse any monies without them. The area between Marshal Soult's Fourth Corps and General d'Hilliers' brigade, to which the Hanoverian Chasseurs belonged, was temporarily controlled by the insurgents who also held La Bisbal and its environs, so Lieutenant von Röhn was compelled to avoid the more convenient highroad and use the winding forest tracks that led through the mountains to Forgosa.

At this stage in his account Lieutenant von Röhn inveighed bitterly against the army's book-keepers. He wished he could dig all the quartermasters and planners and pen-pushers out of their comfortable chairs at headquarters and transplant them to the rugged Spanish highlands;
that
would soon teach them to treat honest soldiers in a fitting manner. His regiment was always short of something, be it boots or cartridges, and they had once been obliged to use garden tubs instead of gabions. Here he went off at a tangent and began to speak of pay, fiercely complaining that a lieutenant earned twenty-two thalers a month at home but only eighteen on campaign. "Junot is insane!" he cried, half delirious with fever. "How can an utter lunatic continue to command an army corps! He's a brave man, mark you. In battle he has been known to borrow a private soldier's musket and blaze away ..."

Eglofstein broke in with a question, whereupon the lieutenant grew calmer and returned to the subject in hand.

On the evening of the second day he traversed the wood near Bascaras escorted by his soldier servant. While picking their way through the dense undergrowth - their horses were more of a hindrance than a help in such difficult terrain — they heard musket-fire and the din of the battle in progress between us and the guerrillas on the highroad not far away. Röhn at once changed direction and set off uphill, seeking safety in the recesses of the wood. A few minutes later he was hit in the chest by a stray bullet. He fell to the ground and briefly lost consciousness.

On regaining his senses he found that the servant had lashed him to his saddle with two thongs. They had almost reached the summit of the hill, but the din of battle was far louder than before. Individual voices and words of command could now be distinguished, together with oaths and the cries of wounded men.

In a clearing on the brow of the hill stood a ruined chapel once dedicated to St Rochus but now employed as a barn. Here the servant reined in, for the wounded lieutenant had lost so much blood that he feared he would die on him. They would be bound to fall into the Spaniards' hands unless something were done quickly, he said, so he lifted the lieutenant off his horse and carried him into the chapel. Röhn, who was in severe pain and weakened by loss of blood, made no demur. The servant carried him up a ladder to the loft, where he wrapped him in his cloak and covered him with bales of straw. Then he gave him his canteen, put two loaded pistols where Röhn could reach them, and covered those, too, with straw. That done, he went off with the horses, but not before he had urged Röhn to lie still, promising to remain close at hand and not to desert him under any circumstances.

Meantime, night had fallen and the firing and shouting had died away. For a while all remained quiet. The lieutenant was just about to put his head out of a skylight and call his servant back, thinking the danger past, when he heard voices and saw lanterns and torches approaching the chapel.

Perceiving at once that the men were guerrillas, he hurriedly concealed himself once more beneath the bales of straw. The holes and chinks in the floor on which he lay enabled him to observe the Spaniards as they carried their wounded into the chapel. One of them climbed the ladder and threw down some bales of straw to his companions while the lieutenant held his breath for fear he should be discovered and butchered on the spot.

But the Spaniard failed to notice him and descended the ladder with his lantern to bandage the wounded. He went from one to another with his instruments, but never before had the lieutenant seen a surgeon ply his trade in such a sullen and surly manner.

"Why are you sitting there like Job the Jew on his dunghill?" he railed at one of the wounded, and poured scorn on another who groaned that he felt he would soon be entering the realms of eternal bliss.

"You fool!" he jeered. "Eternal bliss costs more than you think. Do you really imagine that all you need to get you to heaven is a hole in the belly?"

"What do you have for me in that medicine chest of yours?" cried another man. "Monkey's fat? Bear's grease? Raven's dung?"

"All I have for you is a Paternoster," the surgeon snapped.

"You've too many holes to mend." And, as he busied himself with the next man, he growled, "Yes, Death is a heathen — he never takes a holiday. Wars make hummocky churchyards, that's what I always say."

"How soon will you come to me?" called a wounded man lying in a corner.

"Wait your turn, damn you!" the surgeon cried angrily. "I know you of old — you want a plaster on every little gnat-bite. A pity the bullet didn't fly up the Devil's backside, then I'd not be having to trouble with you now."

The guerrillas had meanwhile kindled a fire outside the chapel. Sentries had been posted on the edge of the woods and an orderly officer was going the rounds. The insurgents, who numbered upwards of a hundred and fifty, lay sprawled around the fire, many of them asleep and some smoking tobacco rolled in paper. They were armed and clothed with what they had taken from the French: infantrymen's gaiters, long cuirassiers' swords, heavy German riding boots. Near the chapel stood a cork oak with an effigy of the Virgin and Child affixed to its trunk, and before this two Spaniards knelt in prayer. A British officer, a captain in the Northumberland Fusiliers, stood leaning on his sword and gazing into the fire. His scarlet cloak and the white panache in his cap made him look, beside the ragged guerrillas, like a gold ducat among copper stivers. (From Rohn's description, this officer could only have been Captain William O'Callaghan, whom General Blake, as we already knew, had sent to instil order and discipline into the guerrilla bands of the district.)

The surgeon, having completed his work in the chapel, came out and limped over to the fire. An exceedingly stout little man, he wore a brown jacket, short trousers, and torn blue hose, but his collar was adorned with colonel's insignia. As soon as the firelight fell upon his face, Lieutenant von Röhn perceived that it was Saracho himself that had bandaged the wounded in the chapel and, spiteful as a monkey, dispensed such poor consolation. On his head he wore a velvet cap embroidered with gold thread. This the lieutenant recognized at once as Marshal Lefebvre's nightcap, which was renowned throughout the army because, when it fell into the insurgents' hands together with some other baggage belonging to Lefebvre, the furious marshal's aides-de-camp and all the other officers in the baggage train had been placed under arrest.

The Tanner's Tub held his hands to the fire to warm them. For a while all was quiet save for the groans of the wounded, a man cursing in his sleep, and the murmured prayers of the two Spaniards on their knees before the Madonna.

At this stage Lieutenant von Rohn's fatigue was so extreme that he would have fallen asleep, despite his thirst and the proximity of his enemies, had he not been suddenly roused by a shout from one of the sentries. He peered through the skylight and caught sight of the Marquis of Bolibar, who was just emerging from the dark wood into the glow of the fire.

Röhn described him as a tall, elderly man whose hair was as white as the moustache beneath his aquiline nose. There was something fierce and awe-inspiring about his features, although, try as he would, Röhn could not define it.

"There he is!" cried the Tanner's Tub, and withdrew his hands from the fire. "The Marquis of Bolibar," he said, turning to the British officer. "Señor Marques, a thousand pardons for having disturbed your night's rest" — here he made a clumsy obeisance - "but I shall doubtless have quit this district by tomorrow, and I have to acquaint you with certain information of great importance. It relates to your family."

The Marquis abruptly turned his head and looked Saracho in the eye. All the blood had left his face, but the firelight suffused his cheeks with a reddish glow. The British captain addressed him in a courteous tone.

"Are you, My Lord Marquis, a kinsman of the LieutenantGeneral de Bolibar who commanded the Spanish Second Corps two years ago?"

"The lieutenant-general is my brother," replied the Marquis, without taking his eyes off Saracho.

"An officer of your name saw service in the British Army, too. He captured the French artillery depot at Acre."

"That was my cousin," said the Marquis. He continued to stare at the Tanner's Tub, almost as if he were awaiting a surprise attack from that quarter and had to meet it with a steadfast gaze.

"The family of the Señor Marques has provided many an army with outstanding officers," said Saracho. "One of his nephews served until lately in the French Army."

The Marquis shut his eyes.

"Is he dead?" he asked quietly.

"He had a fine career," the Tanner's Tub replied with a laugh. "He became a French lieutenant despite his seventeen years. I myself have a son and would gladly have made a soldier of him, but he's a hunchback and fit only for a monastery."

"Is he dead?" asked the Marquis. He stood there unmoving, but his shadow leapt wildly about in the fire's fitful light. It was as if the old man's shadow, not the old man himself, were awaiting Saracho's tidings in fear and uncertainty.

"Men of many nations fight with the French Army," Saracho said, shrugging his shoulders. "Germans and Dutchmen, Neapolitans and Poles. Why should a Spaniard not serve with the French for once?"

"Is he dead?" cried the Marquis.

"Dead? Yes!" Saracho blurted out, and he laughed with such fierce and delighted abandon that the grisly sound reverberated among the trees of the forest. "Yes, and now he's racing the Devil to hell!"

"I was there when his mother bore him," the Marquis said in a low, choking voice. "It was I that carried him to his christening, but he was as inconstant from his earliest childhood as a shadow on the wall. God grant him eternal rest."

"May the Devil grant him eternal rest in Hades," cried Saracho with mingled anger and contempt.

"Amen," said the British captain, but it was uncertain whether his amen related to Bolibar's prayer or Saracho's curse.

The Marquis walked over to the shrine and bowed down before the Madonna. The Spaniards who had been praying there rose and made room for him.

"For myself," Saracho remarked to the captain, "I cannot boast of any noble kinsmen. My mother was a maidservant and my father a cobbler, that is why I serve my king and Holy Mother Church. We cannot all be noblemen."

"Lord," prayed the Marquis, kneeling before the image of the Mother of Heaven, "you know that we wretched mortals cannot live without sin."

"And
you
should know, Captain," Saracho said with a scornful, bitter laugh, "that our high-born noblemen — the Duke of Infantado and the Marquis of Villafanca, the two Counts of Orgaz, father and son, and the Duke of Albuquerque — all went to Bayonne to pay homage to Joseph, the new king."

"You cannot have forgotten, O Lord," the Marquis of Bolibar cried to the Madonna, "that one of your own twelve Apostles was a perjurer and a scoundrel!"

"Yes," Saracho pursued, "our proud grandees were the first to go to Bayonne and sell their vows for money, and why not? Are French louis-d'or of baser gold than Spanish doubloons?"

"St Augustine was a heretic, yet you forgave him," the Marquis cried with a fervour born of despair. "Do you hear me, Lord? Paul was a persecutor of the Church, Matthew a miser and a devotee of money, and Peter forswore himself, yet you forgave them one and all. Do you hear me, Lord?"

"But they'll never escape eternal damnation!" Saracho roared triumphantly. "They're doomed, and hell awaits them. Flames, fire and sparks, fire above and below, fire on every side, fire in perpetuity!" And he stared enraptured into the nocturnal gloom as if he could see the flames of hell blazing far away beyond the dark woods.

"Have mercy on him, have mercy, Lord, and let your everlasting light shine upon him!"

Lieutenant von Röhn, listening to this strange prayer in his hiding place, was smitten with surprise and consternation, for the Marquis's tone was far from that of a humble suppliant. He bellowed at the Almighty, sometimes angrily, sometimes threateningly, and sometimes as if striving to bully Him into doing his, Bolibar's, will.

At last the Marquis rose and went over to Saracho with knitted brow, twitching lips, and eyes alight with anger. The Tanner's Tub affected to be surprised to see him still there.

"Señor Marques," he said, "the hour grows late, and if you wish to pay your respects to the French commander early in the morning —"

"Enough!" cried the Marquis, and his face looked more fearsome than ever. Saracho broke off at once. The two men stood facing one another, mute and motionless. Only their shadows flitted back and forth in the fire's restless light, crouching and leaping, retreating and lunging, and it seemed to Röhn in the heat of his fever that their hatred and belligerence had silently entered into those darting shadows.

All at once, however, the sentries shouted their challenge once more and a man came running out of the trees toward the fire. As soon as Saracho caught sight of him, he forgot his quarrel with the Marquis of Bolibar.

"Ave
Maria purissima!"
panted the messenger, this being the customary Spanish greeting, and one that can be heard a hundred times a day in street or tavern.

"Amen, she conceived without sin," Saracho replied impatiently. "You came alone? Where's the priest?"

"His Reverence got the colic from a hot blood sausage —"

"A curse on his soul, his body and eyes!" roared Saracho. "That man has less heart than a tripe-cook would sell you for half a quarto. Fear, that's his sickness!"