Whose Business Is to Die (12 page)

Baynes refilled their glasses and they drank in silence.

‘Foul,’ the merchant muttered after a while and then drained the glass. ‘Quite foul.’

‘I wonder whether the best guide to that might be to consider what we would least like them to do,’ Hanley began. ‘They are spreading money like water, purchasing support. Is that to ease the path of a new attack, perhaps at Elvas?’

Baynes rubbed his chin, and then slid his fingers inside his collar to scratch.

‘That would be a blow without a doubt,’ he said. ‘It would give them the southern road and permit them to attack again either in the north or south or even both. They still have six or seven times as many soldiers as us and if they had the sense to give up parts of the country and concentrate even a third of those men to move against us then no fortifications in the world would stop them. Even if they do not do that then they keep us boxed in. England will not indefinitely spend so much gold simply to preserve Portugal while Spain is lost.’

‘Bertrand as an engineer may well have known of designs on Elvas, and perhaps that was what he planned to sell us?’ Hanley wondered.

‘Or perhaps they have designs much deeper into Portugal?
Either way, we need to find out anything we can. Do you think the girl knows more?’

Hanley nodded. ‘Probably more than she has said, though I doubt too much more.’ He thought for a while, and then decided that his vague idea was worth explaining. The thoughts ordered themselves as he spoke and Baynes listened.

‘Well, it could be arranged,’ the merchant said at the end of it all. ‘May I presume that your acquaintances who form part of this scheme remain wholly ignorant of it all? Yes, I thought so. I can arrange it, and it may have considerable merit. It will take a while, but then so will this war. Yet the whole business begs one obvious question.’

‘Many, I should have thought,’ Hanley said, pleased at Baynes’ acceptance.

‘Perhaps, but one should come first. Do you trust the girl?’ The merchant was studying him intently.

‘Jenny Dobson is clever,’ Hanley said. ‘She has supplied us with a good deal of useful information.’

‘And appears to have been caught – perhaps not for the first time given what happened to you last year. Anyway, are you answering a different question to the one I asked?’

‘I believe she has some loyalty to her country, but ultimately her efforts are directed at making her own fortune.’

‘A whore, then, in every respect,’ Baynes said, his tone flat. ‘That at least lends a degree of predictability. Sad to say that agents who work for their own gain are often more reliable than the idealists, unless their ideals are consistent and wholly in agreement with our own aims. Yet it does pose the danger that we may be outbid.’

‘As you say, that ought to be predictable.’

‘My dear William,’ Baynes said, ‘it does appear a worthy experiment and so I will do what I can.’ He refilled his own glass and raised the bottle in Hanley’s direction.

‘No, thank you. I ought to be going.’

‘Yes. Well, there is one last question, and I do not expect an answer because the words would mean very little. I speak merely
as a friend.’ He drank again, licking his lips. ‘It is simply this. In this matter, my dear boy, do you trust yourself? No, as I said, do not bother to answer.’

Jenny sat on a chair beside the fire, a blanket wrapped tightly round her shoulders. She was reading and that surprised him. In the past he had received written reports from her, so knew that she could write a fair round hand, but for some reason Hanley had never thought of the soldier’s daughter as even vaguely interested in books.

The girl looked up and glared at him. ‘Took your bleedin’ time.’

‘My humblest apologies,’ Hanley said. He nudged the door shut behind him and walked over to the table. Apart from another chair and the simple bed it represented all of the furniture in this attic room with its steeply slanting ceiling. They were in the house Baynes had taken, and Jenny had been left here on her own for more than two hours. ‘How are you?’

‘Hungry and cold.’

Hanley put a basket down on the table. ‘There is some food here, although we will need to cook it.’

Jenny snorted. ‘When a man says that he means I’ll need to cook it for him.’

‘It might be better. There are also some clothes.’ He gently put a laundry bag down. ‘All I could get for the moment. There will be more and better when we reach Elvas.’

‘Bloody well hope so,’ she murmured, but did not get up or even look up from the book.

‘I have something else which you may like to have returned.’

Jenny slammed the heavily bound book shut and laid it on the floor. The blanket came loose, showing a couple of the buttons on her hussar jacket glinting red in the firelight before she pulled the covering tightly around herself again.

‘An interesting read?’ he asked.

‘Bloody awful. Some old French fart talking about fish, but
there was nothing else here and I like to practise.’ The boldness faded, and Jenny looked shy after making the admission.

Hanley felt fresh surprise at this reminder that the girl spoke and read French, still more at this desire to learn. He opened the basket and took out an envelope which he gave to the girl.

‘I tried to keep it as flat as I could.’

Jenny frowned in suspicion, but took it and pulled out the single sheet of paper. She looked at it for a while and said nothing. ‘That’s me,’ she said, and began to cry.

Nothing surprised him any more. It was the sketch he had drawn of her back in England before the regiment went to Portugal in ‘08. It had been a present to mark the girl’s wedding, and Jenny had slipped it to him while he was unconscious and a prisoner of the French. He had kept it ever since, not quite sure why.

‘Don’t cry, Jenny,’ he said for want of anything better. He was unsure whether the girl was acting or genuinely moved.

‘Is Da all right?’ she asked, eyes and cheeks still moist. ‘And the others?’ Jenny never mentioned her abandoned son, Jacob, who was being raised by Major MacAndrews and his wife.

‘Yes, when I last saw them. The battalion is camped outside the town if you want to see your father.’

‘No.’ Jenny seemed to have hunched down and for once looked small. ‘Doubt he’d want to see me.’ She raised the picture again and stared at it in silence for a long while.

‘You were very pretty, even then,’ Hanley said.

Jenny swayed her head a little from side to side, as if considering. ‘Too skinny,’ she concluded, and stood up, letting the blanket drop down in a fluid motion. That, at least, was certainly a practised gesture. He thought of Cleopatra coming before Caesar, but did not think of it for long.

‘Don’t you think I look better now?’

Her figure was certainly fuller, something made very clear by the snug-fitting hussar uniform. She was a little taller as well, certainly straighter in her carriage, and a good deal more confident.

‘Those clothes must be damp,’ he said. ‘I am surprised that you have not removed them.’

‘Oh yes,’ she snorted. ‘And what was I supposed to wear? You have only just turned up.’ She came over to the table, close to him now, and her hair brushed against him as she inspected the contents of the laundry bag. There was another snort.

‘It was the best I could obtain at short notice.’

Jenny looked up at him, her eyes big. ‘I’ll need help.’

‘Thought you were a big girl now,’ Hanley said.

She turned around, leaning against the table, and ran a finger along the middle of the three rows of pewter buttons on the front of her tight dolman jacket. Hanley watched. He had not been with a woman for a long time and her performance was a good one.

‘This get-up was Bertrand’s idea. The Prince up north had his mistress dressed up like a young officer.’

‘I know.’ The stories about the elderly Marshal Masséna and the young wife of one of his staff had reached the British many months ago. It was said that officers were offended, and the wife of General Junot outraged by her presence.

‘Bertrand and a few of his friends wanted the same. I only chose the colour.’

‘It was a good choice.’

‘Bloody uncomfortable.’ She unfastened the top button. ‘The breeches are the worst. Every time I had to wear them Bertrand would get his philistine to sew me into them. Couldn’t put them on otherwise.’

‘I’ll wager he enjoyed that.’

‘Henri? No, not him. Don’t think he cared much for women, but the bugger was a dab hand with a needle.’

A second button was undone, then a third. Jenny held his gaze and then flicked her eyes down. ‘You’ll need to help with the breeches,’ she said softly. ‘The seams have to be cut and I can’t reach.’

Hanley gently brought his hands up to the girl’s shoulders. She quivered at the touch, looking up again.

‘Why do they call them philistines? It’s from the Bible, isn’t it?’

He nodded and said nothing. French officers used the nickname for their servants, but he did not care why they did so.

Hanley moved quickly, hands grabbing the sides of her jacket and tugging it open with all the force he could muster. There was a soft sound of tearing and the next three buttons snapped from their threads and fell away. The girl was right, the stitching was good, for he had hoped to rip the jacket open. He tried again, but it took a third violent rip to complete the job.

‘I said I needed help with the breeches.’ There was challenge in her eyes and a smile on her lips.

‘No wonder you are cold,’ Hanley said, for Jenny was bare underneath.

‘There is no room to wear anything. At least, that’s what Bertrand said, but I think he just liked it that way.’ She noticed him glance down at her breeches and her smile broadened. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or rather, no, there isn’t.’

Hanley peeled the jacket off and then lifted her in his arms. Left in only breeches and boots, she clung to him and responded when he kissed her. He felt strong and alive, a thrill akin, if not quite the same, to the exhilaration of riding in the cavalry charge. With one hand he started to fumble with the buttons on her breeches. They were stiff and hard to move. He gave up, contenting himself with letting his hand feel her shape through the material, and still they kissed.

They went over to the bed.

‘’Bout time,’ she said.

9

I
t took a long time for the ensign to dry out, so it was just as well that it took another seven trips to ferry the rest of the battalion and its baggage over the river. Samuel Truscott sat by a fire lit by soldiers of the Light Company, while his uniform was stretched over a triangle of branches to make the most of the heat. It was one of several fires as the two companies of the 106th made themselves comfortable and waited.

‘How on earth did it happen?’ Williams asked.

Pringle shrugged. ‘Goodness knows, although it would not surprise me if my young fool was not part of it. A wager, probably – see whether they could walk along the side of the pontoon without falling in.’

‘Well, I suppose at least we know the answer to that question.’

They were on the east bank of the River Guadiana, almost two hundred yards wide at this spot and at least chest deep after the recent rains. Marshal Beresford wanted to surround Badajoz, which meant getting across the river, but there were not enough pontoons to build a bridge. Instead the engineers had rigged up a system of ropes and pulleys so that a single boat went back and forth, carrying about one hundred men on each trip.

‘We came across yesterday morning,’ Williams said. ‘Wholly dry,’ he added with a smile.

‘If Dobson and Evans had not acted so fast to fish him out then we would not all have got across at all,’ Pringle said sourly. ‘Poor Truscott is worrying himself half to death about the lad.’

‘Hard, I should imagine. Still, if Sergeant Evans thought he was worth saving then that is a good sign.’ Williams had served with
the Light Company at Barrosa and knew Evans to be a good soldier, but an angry, ill-disposed man. ‘Dobson would bother regardless of who it was, but Evans …’

Only the first boatload of the 106th had crossed, carrying all of the Light Company and most of the Grenadier Company, both sadly depleted after the desperate fighting at Barrosa. Williams was waiting for the next load to arrive, for he needed to cross back to the far bank.

‘Some of our ammunition mules have gone astray,’ he explained. ‘I expect it is those rascals in the Fourth Division, thieving again!’

‘No doubt about it,’ Pringle replied cheerfully. ‘Rogues to a man. I am sure that we will fit in.’ The 106th had joined the Fusilier Brigade, the senior brigade of the Fourth Division under Sir Lowry Cole. There were two other battalions, the 1/7th or Royal Fusiliers and the 1/23rd or Royal Welch Fusiliers.

‘How do you find your new comrades?’ This was the first time Williams had seen his own battalion, or any of his particular friends, apart from Hanley, in the ten days since the 106th had reached the rest of the army.

‘A little sullied by the introduction of a mere battalion of the line into their august company.’ A century earlier fusiliers had been the first regiments in the army to carry flintlock muskets instead of the old matchlock, and they clung jealously to this ancient distinction. All companies wore shoulder wings like the flank companies of other battalions, and on parade in England the men sported fur caps like old-fashioned grenadiers.

‘There is the usual more or less concealed and mutual suspicion,’ Pringle continued, ‘with occasional acts of open hostility. I do not recall ever having served alongside other corps without much the same things happening. In this case one might feel that their own self-esteem ought to have been punctured by the simple truth that when we joined neither of the other battalions possessed a single pair of shoes to their name. Now they have ugly local ones, of dull buff leather and with seams on the inside. Poor devils have enough to worry about hobbling along in those without bickering with us. I remember a few of the Seventh
from Talavera, so acquaintances have been resumed and some introductions made.’

They watched the pontoon coming closer to this eastern bank.