Whose Business Is to Die (16 page)

‘I want half of each platoon extended as a chain,’ he told the captains waiting with the supports. ‘I will lead them. Be prepared to commit the rest as soon as the assaulting party begins to advance. We must give them all the support we can.’ The men, stiff from waiting for so long, stood up, and half of each reserve line doubled forward and spread out in pairs.

‘March on, boys!’ he called cheerfully, and strode off.

The French saw them coming, and a few bobbed up to fire at long range. MacAndrews saw a puff of dust flicked up by a ball striking a few yards ahead of him, but nothing came closer. The appearance of the Frenchmen on the wall prompted a great flurry of firing from his own skirmishers. A heavy shot from the breaching battery thrummed through the air over his head.

MacAndrews stopped after about fifty yards. ‘Edge as far forward as you can, boys, but take care to find what cover you may.’ There was no need to say more, for the men knew what to do. He saw that rogue Sergeant Evans jogging forward with his number two, heading for a clump of bushes.

Then a little figure in a scarlet jacket popped up from cover among the skirmishers and started capering in the open, waving
his curved sword and his hat in the air. The lad was shrieking in excitement, and MacAndrews could not catch the words.

‘Get down, you damned fool!’ Captain Headley shouted from his station with the remaining supports.

The boy did not hear or did not care, and began to advance towards the wall. Frenchmen appeared, fired and ducked down. Young Truscott danced through it all, little fountains of dust thrown up as bullets hit the ground around him. An arm reached up to pull him down, but the boy kicked it away.

‘Mr Truscott, get back into cover!’ MacAndrews called the words as an order, hoping that habit might make the idiot respond in spite of his elation. He wondered whether the boy was drunk. The other subalterns had filled him with puggle one night back in Lisbon, but otherwise he seemed a sober fellow.

The ensign continued his caper, shaking his sword at the French. A bluecoated infantryman rose above the parapet, taking careful aim, but a rifle cracked and the man was pitched back before he could fire.

‘Down, you fool, down!’ Headley was shouting, and Mac-Andrews glanced back to see the captain running forward, moving slowly and awkwardly because his leg was still not right after the wound he had taken back in Portugal in ’08.

‘Oh, hell,’ MacAndrews said, and set off through his chain of skirmishers.

There were shouts from the wall, as more Frenchmen appeared. A few fired at the ensign, but a tall man in scarlet coat with the gold epaulettes of a field officer was a far more tempting target. MacAndrews felt the first ball whizz past inches from his cheek. He held his sword high to stop the scabbard from tangling up his legs, and ran as fast as he could, breathing hard because he had not expected this exertion. In a desperate attempt to make himself a more difficult mark, he zigzagged as he went.

His hat was plucked off, the long tails of his coat twitched by another ball, and then there was a blow to his hip and dampness spreading. His legs were still working and there was no pain so
he kept going and with his hand he felt the moist material and realised that his water bottle had been shot through.

MacAndrews ran on, dodged to the side and felt the wind of another ball which would most surely have struck him if he had not changed direction. The ensign was close now, the young idiot spinning as he danced a jig.

‘Oh, sir, is it not glorious!’ The boy was grinning from ear to ear, his eyes wide with enthusiasm.

MacAndrews saw the boulders and the hollow in the ground behind them. He ran at the ensign, hit him at waist height, prompting a satisfying gasp, and flung them both down into cover.

A minute later, the Allied guns fell silent, but the French muskets on the wall did not. His men replied now and again. Ten minutes later – or so MacAndrews’ watch told him, although he could have sworn that it had been hours – his own men stopped shooting. After a last flurry of shots around their little shelter, the defenders also stopped. Both officers were covered in dust, for they were little more than a pistol shot from the stretch of wall worked on by the breaching battery.

They waited, and MacAndrews tried to think of any words which might actually sink in to the boy’s empty head. He and his wife had buried three children as infants, and he wondered how he would feel if one of the boys had survived and gone into the army. How would you tell a young lad to act with a sense few possessed at such an age? He worried enough about Jane, the only survivor, and now come of age. At least in her case there was no fear of shot and shell, but this business with Pringle’s brother was concerning. As far as he could tell there was sympathy on her part, without deep affection. Now Esther wrote to say that she and Jane were travelling to Elvas to be nearer him, and ‘to do their duty’. The phrase had puzzled him ever since he first read her letter.

Young Truscott’s eyes were closed and with a shock Mac-Andrews realised that the boy was sleeping. There was no trace of liquor on his breath, and at least the fool had stopped moving.

It was a while before MacAndrews dared to peer over the top of the boulders. No one fired, but there was movement through the thinning cloud of smoke and dust around the breach. Figures were coming down. For a moment he thought they were French, come to kill or capture the officers hiding so close to the wall. Then he saw that they were civilians, carrying bundles of possessions.

Well, at least the breach was practical – the engineer’s term for when the artillery had knocked a hole in a wall and brought down enough rubble to create a ramp the infantry could climb into the fortress. The civilians seemed to be picking their way down without any trouble, which suggested that it was as easy as any breach could ever be.

A trumpet sounded from within Olivenza, and MacAndrews dared to raise himself further and glance around. The French were on the parapet, leaning in comfort and showing no signs of hostility. His formed supports had come up and were standing around in a similarly casual manner.

‘They have surrendered!’ Captain Headley had cupped his hands around his mouth to shout the news. ‘We are to secure the town.’

MacAndrews shook the ensign awake and stood up, waving to acknowledge that he understood.

‘I’ll take the Seventh and the Owls up the breach,’ he called back, using the nickname the redcoats had given the Brunswickers. ‘Lead the rest in by the main gate.’

The ensign stood beside him, yawning like a cat, his face burned almost as red by the sun as the violent heads of the spots infesting it. MacAndrews sought for some words of reason that might teach the lad wisdom.

‘Do that again, and I shall shoot you myself,’ he said, and cuffed the boy’s curly hair. ‘Now, Mr Truscott, go off to your company.’

Olivenza had fallen, and on the whole MacAndrews felt that the civilians inside had been spared for there was little damage to the houses and they had not had to face a storm when even
the most disciplined soldiers were likely to run riot. He watched as the garrison paraded, and counted fewer than five hundred men, including the wounded. Up on the walls, most of the cannon were propped up on rotten carriages or none at all, incapable of firing with any sort of useful charge. The garrison had managed to keep the entire Fourth Division, almost ten times their numbers, occupied for well over a week when they might have been doing something useful. MacAndrews felt that the French colonel could feel well pleased with himself, and no doubt Marshal Soult would be delighted.

Two hours later, as he was posting sentries at the gates, on public buildings and to guard the prisoners, Ensign Truscott came running up.

‘Beg to report, sir, but Captain Wachholtz of the Owls has been taken prisoner by the Portuguese, and says could you come at once to sort it out?’

MacAndrews sighed. Von Wachholtz was proud of his uniform, but had before now complained that British and Portuguese alike seemed incapable of telling it apart from the French. Somehow going to release a man arrested by his own side was a fitting end to this whole pointless business.

‘Lead on, then, Mr Truscott,’ he said wearily.

12

H
anley shifted slightly to bed the butt of the rifle more firmly into the fold of his shoulder, waited to steady himself and let his breath out halfway. He pulled the hammer up to full cock, waited again, and only when he was ready squeezed the trigger. The flint struck down, the sparks set off the powder in the pan and he felt a fleck of it on his cheek. He made himself keep still for that little delay before the main charge went off and the rifle pushed hard against his shoulder. A cloud of dirty smoke blotted out the target. He let out the rest of his breath and lowered the rifle, walking forward through the smoke.

‘You are getting better, sir,’ said Corporal Scott from the 5/60th Foot, who was tutoring him.

Hanley looked at the fresh hole, off centre, but only by an inch and within the smallest of the concentric rings on the circular target.

The corporal stuck his little finger through the hole in the pasteboard and grinned. ‘Another year, and you might be half decent, sir.’ In spite of his name Scott was English, a very rare thing in a battalion recruited mainly from Germans, and he was in the hospital in Elvas rather than with his company because a wagon wheel had run over his foot and broken a bone. It was healing well and in a few weeks he might be able to march and catch up with his company. For the moment, he was happy to receive sixpence for each day the officer was in the fortress and wanted to practise firing the rifle.

It was the one the turncoat Brandt had dropped, and Hanley had decided that it would be no bad thing to learn to use such
an effective long arm. His duties often took him off on his own or with only a small escort, so it made sense to take more care to be well able to defend himself. That at least was what he told anyone who asked, including Pringle when he spotted his friend with a rifle on his back. The truth was that he enjoyed learning something new, and a secret part of him liked the idea of being able to take a life from two hundred yards away. Hanley remembered the expression of the dragoon he had killed, and the terrified face of the trumpeter he had knocked down, the images coming to his mind again and again with a surprising, even disturbing, amount of pleasure. He also remembered coming face to face with Sinclair in the woods near Barrosa Hill, and the fear he had felt as the Irishman raised his pistol. A rifle might not have helped in the circumstances, but he doubted that carrying one could do any harm.

An hour later Hanley met Baynes for the second time in the day.

‘We were right,’ the merchant began, after a servant had left them coffee and then departed. ‘Gutiérrez is passing information to the French.’ They were in a comfortably furnished room in a big house just behind one of the great bastions in the wall. It belonged to another of Baynes’ connections, and in this case came with a full staff.

‘You are certain?’ Hanley had met the man twice, and rather liked him. Gutiérrez owned a small estate and kept cattle. He had sold some to the French, and never concealed it, but for the last year and a half the grey-haired little man had brought regular reports of what he had seen of French numbers and dispositions, and useful gossip about the community of French sympathisers in Estremadura and even large parts of Andalusia. The man lived near Olivenza, but knew Seville well.

‘There can be no doubt.’ Baynes handed him a captured dispatch. ‘This was in the packet that arrived at noon.’ A bundle of documents acquired by the partisans along this stretch of the border had not arrived in time for their meeting earlier in the
day. ‘The source is not named, but you will see that it repeats our message word for word.’

The British wish to discover how much is known about their forces in Cadiz and Gibraltar. These are to be reinforced, with the intention of exploiting their recent success by launching a much larger attack in the south
.

Doubts had grown about Gutiérrez, whose recent information was proving of little or no use. At the same time it was clear that the French were better informed. Instead of reinforcing the south the Allies were drawing troops away and bringing them north. Two Spanish divisions had sailed from Cadiz, landing on the coast and marching overland to link up with Marshal Beresford’s army. The French did not know, and the hope had been to trap several regiments between the two forces, but the enemy were warned in time and escaped. In that case Gutiérrez was not their source, for the man was ignorant of the whole affair. Several messages were intercepted before they reached the French, which gave some idea of how many agents and informers they possessed. At least one must have reached them.

Gutiérrez was not to blame, but he was false. That was now clear. Baynes had come up with the idea of testing the man with this misleading request, which he had written and Hanley had delivered several weeks ago.

‘I am sorry that we were right,’ Hanley said.

‘And how often can we say that? From what I have learned, he has taken some money from the French, but that is unlikely to be the chief reason for his change of allegiance. The man’s daughter was taken and is held in Badajoz. An officer and a soldier came and took the girl, who is only seventeen and his only remaining child since both his sons were killed in battle. Gossip claims the girl is in love with the French officer, but expresses surprise at the speed of the seduction as he had not visited Olivenza before – at least to anyone’s knowledge.’

‘The gossips appear well informed.’

‘They usually are in a small country town, even if they are not always accurate.’

‘I trust your investigations have been discreet,’ Hanley asked, for the slightest hint that Gutiérrez’s activities were known by the Allies would render that knowledge useless – apart from any consequences it had for the man and his child.

‘My dear boy,’ Baynes’ lips parted in his usual great smile, ‘I am not a raw hand at this game, allow me some credit. There is also one more thing, and I doubt that it will come as too much of a surprise.’