02 - Keane's Challenge (5 page)

Grant took him to one side and moving across to another end of the large room, spoke in hushed tones. ‘You met our Major Cavanagh then?’

‘He spoke to me, sir, yes.’

‘And?’

‘He attempted to persuade me to go against the commander-in-chief’s orders, sir, and contrive some means by which we should engage the French at once.’

Grant laughed. ‘Did he, by God. The man’s a sly one, right enough. And you said… ?’

‘I replied merely that it was clearly vital that we should have a battle and that personally I would lose no opportunity to engage the enemy.’

Grant laughed again. ‘By God, Keane, we’ll make a diplomat of you. Well done, my boy, and thank you for warning us. We’ll need to keep an eye on the major. But you’d best be off now. You will find Captain Morris in his quarters. I know he is anxious to see you.’

Keane nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Morris will know the colonel’s ways better than I, should anything go amiss.

‘You’ll need a few men, Keane. Take the provosts. Morris will find them. They know him well enough.’ He patted Keane on the shoulder and turned to Major Cavanagh.

‘Ah, Major Cavanagh. What news from the court? The general cannot wait to see you.’

*

Walking away from the headquarters building, past the lines of redcoats being drilled on the square, Keane smiled to himself to think that he had duped Cavanagh. The man was an ass to suppose that he could persuade him to turn on Wellington for the sake of patronage. Mind you, he thought, there was something to be said for such a patron, and he worried for an instant whether if he were found out that things might go badly for him were he ever to present himself at court. But he dismissed the
thought. He was a soldier and his business was here, helping to defeat the French in whatever way his commander-in-chief saw fit. He was Wellington’s man, come hell or high water, or the prince regent and his toadies. Besides, he had more pressing matters on his mind.

Pritchard must be taken. It had long been known to the commander-in-chief and others that the man was a spy. In truth they might have outed him long ago, but Grant had thought that it might be useful to play him until there was more damning evidence. Who knew how many men’s deaths he might have taken the blame for? One thing was certain: Pritchard would die. After he had given account of himself to Wellington.

He found Morris at his lodging, a tawdry little house, deserted by its owners, down a close near to the church of Santa Maria, which was acting as a hospital. Even from the street, Keane could smell the faint stench of putrefaction that haunted the place, which was home to cases of disease and sunstroke for the most part. He pushed open the door to Morris’s billet and found his friend seated at a table.

‘Tom. How good to see you, friend.’

Morris stood and clasped Keane by the shoulder. ‘And it’s good to see you, James. Thank heavens. I wondered when you might return. You have news?’

‘I come from Wellington. We’ve to fetch Pritchard. This instant. Have you any men?’

‘My orderly. But the provosts have a post close by.’ He smiled. ‘Thank God. I cannot tell you the agony it has been to have this role these few months. Now at last to be relieved.’

‘He gave you no cause before now.’

‘It was almost as if he knew.’

‘Perhaps he did. For all we know, there are others like him.’

‘Surely not, James. One man such as Pritchard I can stomach, but not to think that our staff might be a nest of vipers.’

‘I hardly think so. I wonder merely if he has an accomplice. One thing is certain in this war, Tom, that we can be certain of nothing.’

He moved quickly towards the door. ‘Come on. We must arrest him before he hears of his fate.’

With Morris leading the way, they left the house and were once again enveloped in the stink of the place. They hurried past the church, across the main road and along the narrow back streets of the town, back in the direction of the headquarters building. Morris stopped. ‘This is the provosts’ post, James.’

The door was half open and from within they heard the sound of English voices. They entered the small single-storey house and disturbed a half-dozen men of the Blues and Royals who were seated around a small table, playing cards. Seeing the two officers enter, one of the men, a sergeant, snapped to his feet. ‘Officers present.’

Instantly the men rose and returned the salutes offered by Keane and Morris.

‘Sarn’t Baynes,’ Morris said, ‘we have need of your men. It is a rather delicate matter. Don’t ask any questions, if you will. Merely come with us.’

The sergeant nodded. He was a lean man who had twenty years’ service with the regiment, the last two with the provosts, for which duty his unit had been selected for its reliability and courtesy as well as its prowess at arms. He knew better than to ask questions of an officer and had in his time seen some things that were best forgotten. Nor would he have expected to have asked questions when that officer was Lieutenant Morris. He knew that the artilleryman had been taken on to the duke’s
staff some months back and no one was quite sure what he did, but the sergeant held his own ideas about that. Now, though, was not the time to delay.

He turned to his men. ‘Right, you heard the staff officer. We’re needed. Boots and spurs, all of you.’ He turned to Morris and Keane. ‘Shall we bring our mounts, sir?’

Keane spoke this time. ‘No, sarn’t. No horses. It’s only you that we need, just in case. Best bring your carbines.’

Keane and Morris left the room, followed by the six troopers, each of whom as they emerged put on his crested helmet, which served to emphasize their already remarkable height and build, and collected his carbine from the pile in the corner. With this formidable force behind them, led by Morris they made their way towards Pritchard’s billet.

They rounded the corner of the street. Two children playing in the gutter stopped and stared at the sight of so many tall, finely dressed soldiers, so unlike the red-coated men they were used to seeing here, or even the officers who came and went from the only house that was anything other than a hovel. Further down the street a man in a long coat and broad-brimmed hat walked out and stared at them for a moment before turning sharply and returning the way he had come. They did not see him.

As they approached the house Keane stopped for a moment and turned to the sergeant. ‘I should tell you, sarn’t, we’ve come to arrest Colonel Pritchard.’

Baynes said nothing and his unchanging, poker-faced countenance gave no hint as to what his thoughts might be. He simply grunted. ‘Sir.’

‘I’m not at liberty to disclose the reason. You might want to post two of your men at the rear of the house. Lieutenant Morris will show them where to go.’

Baynes pointed at two of the troopers. ‘Fletcher, Johnson, go with the officer.’

Morris led them off down an alley to the rear and Keane walked with the others towards the front of Pritchard’s billet.

They were scarcely a hundred yards away when, without warning, there was a huge explosion. It came from within the house, smashing the walls and throwing the windows out into the street. Masonry flew in all directions.

Instantly, instinctively, Keane turned and ducked, protecting his head. The blast picked him up and threw him against the door of a house on the opposite side of the street. A man of lesser stature might have been bowled over, but Keane manage to stand and, recovering, he shook his head and looked about. The sergeant and most of his men had done the same. One man, though, had been unlucky and as he had begun to turn had been hit on the head by a flying block of stone, which had killed him just as if it had been a roundshot, taking away half of his cheek and a portion of his skull and spattering another of their number with his brains.

His dead body lay close to Keane among the shards of tile and pieces of masonry that now littered the street. Keane stared down at him and thought it ironic that such a man not have met his end on the field of battle, even though it had been done in the same way. Then, feeling that his own mouth was cut, he brushed away fragments that had been blown on to his face, spitting the dust from his caked lips. The air was filled with powdered stone and Keane spat again to clear his mouth. He wiped his eyes and turned towards the sergeant. Baynes, like Keane, was covered in white dust and rubbed at his eyes before brushing off his blue coat.

‘God, sir. What in the name of all that’s holy was that?’

Keane looked across the street and stared. ‘That, sarn’t, was Colonel Pritchard’s lodging being blown to smithereens.’

The sergeant followed Keane’s gaze and saw that where the house had stood there now lay only an empty space with, sticking up like some painful jagged tooth, the ruins of its ground floor. Of the upper floors, where Pritchard had had his rooms, nothing remained. He looked around and, seeing the near-decapitated body of the trooper, managed only, ‘That’s Briggs. Poor bugger.’

Keane looked down the street and saw that one of the urchin children too had been hit, her leg gashed and broken, it seemed, by a piece of flying masonry. She was screaming and her shrieks filled the street, giving human expression to the catastrophe. But Keane could not hear them. His ears were ringing with the noise of a hundred bells; the blast had rendered him half deaf.

Keane thought of Morris and the two others. He shouted at the sergeant and in his deafness, just made out his own words. ‘Christ, come on.’ Together the two of them, followed by the remaining two troopers, walked towards the ruined building. The smell of burning wracked their throats and grew more acrid the closer they came to the site of the explosion.

Keane reached the house first and punched at the door, which remarkably was still standing. It fell in at his touch. Smoke and dust were rising in a cloud and as Keane looked inside he could see tongues of flame licking up at what had been the staircase.

He pushed past the shattered door and entered, picking his way across the steaming stones. ‘Tom, Tom?’

There was no answer, or if there was, Keane did not hear it.

Surely, he thought, his friend had not perished like the unfortunate trooper, or even been blown to atoms so that nothing of him remained. He called his name again and, walking towards the rear of the house, noticed a pair of legs protruding from
beneath a huge block of stone, which must have crushed the owner to a pulp. For a moment he paused, frozen. But then he saw that the legs wore bloodied top-boots, cavalryman’s boots, and realized that they were not his friend’s. There was a faint cry ahead of him and he found Morris sitting on the ground, cradling his bleeding head in his hands. Keane could see that a single buttress wall had shielded him from the force of the blast, although he had clearly been hit on the head and arms.

Morris looked up. ‘James. You’re alive.’ Looking past Keane he saw the boots of the crushed man. ‘Where’s the other fellow?’

Keane shook his head, but as he did so there was an answering shout from behind Morris. ‘Here, sir, I was out in the street.’

The man came tottering towards him, blood streaming from a gash on his shoulder.

Keane looked at the smoking ruins. ‘Our friend Pritchard’s been blown to pieces, I imagine. Unless he did it himself and escaped.’

‘You think that likely?’

‘Anything is likely.’

‘A bomb?’

‘Without a doubt.’

With some effort, Morris pushed himself to his feet, blood coursing down his leg. ‘If there was a bomb, then there must be evidence. A fuse or some such. A fragment.’

Keane nodded. ‘We should at least find Pritchard’s body.’

The two upper levels of the little house had collapsed in on the ground floor and sticks of wooden furniture lay mingled with orange roof tiles and blasted rubble. Morris began to kick at the smoking remains.

Keane picked up a long piece of wood and poked it into the masonry. ‘Damn your fuse, Tom. I need a body.’

Morris was moving through the house now, rubbing at his injured thigh, looking for some trace of the device. ‘This is bad work, James. It’s a bomb, I would say. Smells like it, and the way the explosion worked – could only be. Where’s Pritchard, dammit?’

They had reached the very back of the house now and as they walked on, amid the dusty pallor, a patch of vivid bright red caught Keane’s eye and looking more closely he recognized that it was an arm. He was not sure at first whether it was still attached to a body but, looking more closely, he saw that it did not protrude from a block of stone, but lay quite separate.

Keane had a desire to turn away and retch but suppressed it and went on. For all they knew, this might well be all that was now left of Colonel Ambrose Pritchard. He moved to it and looked more closely. Apart from the patch of red uniform, the rest of the arm had been scorched black by the explosion. At what had been the shoulder, close to where it had been torn off by the blast, he saw something else. Traces of the strands of gold bullion that would have hung from an epaulette. The gold epaulette of a senior officer. He called to Morris. ‘Tom, look here.’

Morris, though, was otherwise occupied. Bending down, he had retrieved something and, bearing it before him, walked across to Keane. His smile revealed a sense of triumph. ‘There, James. What did I say? A bomb, as sure as I’d know one.’

He held out a still-hot fragment of blackened iron. A piece of spherical shell casing and, in it, in the semicircle where the aperture had been, Keane could make out a blackened stump of fuse.

Keane spoke again. ‘Look over there.’

Morris looked and instantly the smile fell from his face, as he caught sight of the severed arm.

‘Good God. Pritchard, d’you think?’

‘So it would seem. It’s the arm of an officer, certainly.’

‘Where’s the rest of him, d’you suppose?’

‘You, of all men, know better than to ask that, Tom. You know the effect of a shell and gunpowder upon the human body. How frail is our flesh.’

‘My guess is that anything more that’s left of the colonel, if it is him, is scattered in fragments in there.’ He gestured to the smoking ruins.’ ‘Who did it? The French, d’you think? Were they wise to us? Got to him before we were able?’