“What are your orders, General?”

“I’m asking for orders,” Zayas insisted.

“Your orders,” Lapeña said, “are to guard the bridge, and that is your duty that you will do best by remaining in your present position.”

So the Spanish troops stayed near the Rio Sancti Petri while the curricle sped southward. Its driver was Brigadier Moon who had hired the carriage from the posthouse stables just outside the city. He would have preferred to ride a horse, but his broken leg made that exquisitely painful. The curricle was only slightly more comfortable. Its springs were hard and, even though he had his broken leg propped on the dashboard that stopped most of the sand from the horses’ hooves flying into his face, the mending bone still hurt. He saw a track slanting away from the beach into the pinewoods and he took it, hoping that the road would provide better footing for his horses. It did, and he bowled along smartly in the shade of the trees. His fiancée clung to the curricle’s side and to the brigadier’s arm. She called herself the Marquesa de San Augustin, the widowed Marquesa. “I won’t take you where the bullets fly, my dear,” Moon said.

“You disappoint me,” she said. She wore a black hat from which a thin veil hung over her face.

“Battle’s no place for a woman. Certainly no place for a beautiful woman.”

She smiled. “I would like to see a battle.”

“And so you shall, so you shall, but from a safe distance. I may limp up and lend a hand”—Moon slapped the crutches propped beside him—“but you’re to stay with the curricle. Stay safe.”

“I am safe with you,” the Marquesa said. After marriage, the brigadier had told her, she would be Lady Moon. “La Doña Luna,” she said, squeezing his elbow, “will always be safe with you.” The brigadier responded to her affectionate gesture with a guffaw of laughter. “What is that for?” La Marquesa asked, offended.

“I was thinking of Henry Wellesley’s face when I introduced you last night!” the brigadier said. “He looked like a full moon!”

“He seemed very nice,” the Marquesa said.

“Jealous, he was! I could tell! I didn’t know he liked women. I thought that was why his wife bolted, but it was plain as a pikestaff that he liked you. Maybe I’ve got the fellow wrong?”

“He was most polite.”

“He’s a bloody ambassador, he bloody well ought to be polite. That’s what he’s for.” The brigadier went silent. He had seen a track branching east through the wood and the turn was tight, but he could drive horses like a coachman and he took the bend in masterly fashion. The noise of battle was loud now, and not far ahead, so he gently pulled the reins to slow the horses. There were wounded men on either side of the track. “Don’t look, my dear,” he said. There was a man without trousers, writhing, his crotch a mass of blood. “Shouldn’t have brought you,” he said curtly.

“I want to know your world,” she said, squeezing his elbow.

“Then you must forgive me its horrors,” he said gallantly, and then pulled the reins again because he had emerged from the trees and the line of redcoats under their bullet-torn colors was only a hundred paces ahead. The ground between the curricle and the redcoats was a mess of dead men, injured men, discarded weapons, and scorched grass. “Far enough,” the brigadier said.

The French had replaced the wheel of one twelve-pounder and now hauled the cannon back to its original position, but the battery commander knew he could not stay because the enemy guns had targeted him. He had been forced to abandon his one howitzer at the forward position, but he would not lose his last gun that was loaded with shell. He ordered the gun commander to fire the shell at the redcoats, then to retire smartly. The linstock touched the priming tube, the flame flashed to the breech, and the gun fired to leave a cloud of obscuring smoke behind which the battery commander could drag his last weapon to a safer position.

The shell crashed into the ranks of the 67th, where it disemboweled a corporal, took the left hand off a private, then fell to earth twenty paces behind the Hampshire men. The fuse smoked crazily as the shell spun on toward the pine trees. Moon saw it coming and urged the horses to their right, away from the missile. He put the reins into his right hand, which already held the whip, and placed his left arm around the Marquesa, sheltering her. Just then the shell exploded. Pieces of casing whipped over their heads, and one scrap drove bloodily into the belly of the nearside horse that took off as though the devil himself was under its hooves. The offside horse caught the panic and they both bolted. The brigadier hauled on the reins, but the noise and the pain and the stink of smoke were too much for the horses that ran obliquely right, white-eyed and desperate. They saw a gap in the British line and took it in a frantic gallop. The light curricle bounced alarmingly so that both the brigadier and the marquesa had to hold on for dear life. They shot through the gap. Ahead were smoke and bodies and open air beyond the smoke. The brigadier hauled again, using all his strength; the offside wheel struck a corpse and the curricle tipped. They were notorious vehicles for accidents; the Marquesa was spilled onto the ground and the brigadier followed, screaming abruptly as his splinted leg was struck by the curricle’s rear rail. His crutches flew as the horses bolted on to disappear in the heath with the curricle breaking apart behind them. Moon and the woman he hoped would become the Doña Luna were left on the ground close beside the abandoned howitzer on the flank of the French column.

Which lurched forward and shouted, “Vive l’empereur!”

SIR THOMAS GRAHAM BLAMED himself. If he had put three British battalions on the summit of the Cerro del Puerca, then it would never have fallen to the French. Now it had, and he had to trust Colonel Wheatley to hold the long line of the pinewood while Dilkes’s men corrected Sir Thomas’s mistake. If they failed, and if the French division came down the hill and swept northward, then they would be in Wheatley’s rear and a massacre would follow. The French had to be driven off the hill.

General Ruffin had four battalions at the crest of the hill and held two specialist battalions of grenadiers in reserve. Those men no longer carried grenades; instead they were among the biggest men in the infantry and renowned for their fighting savagery. Marshal Victor, who knew as well as Sir Thomas Graham that the hill was the key to victory, had ridden to join Ruffin; from the summit, beside the ruined chapel, Victor could see Leval’s division edging forward toward the pinewood. Good. He would let them fight on their own and bring Ruffin’s men down to help them. The beach was mostly empty. A brigade of Spanish infantry was resting not far from the village, but for some reason, they were taking no part in the fight while the rest of the Spanish army was a long way to the north and, as far as the marshal could see through his telescope, not bothering to stir themselves.

Ruffin’s front line of four battalions numbered just over two thousand men. Like the Frenchmen on the heath they were in columns of divisions while beneath them on the hill were hundreds of bodies, the remnants of Major Browne’s battalion. Beyond those corpses were redcoats who had evidently come to retake the Cerro del Puerco. “Fifteen hundred Goddamns?” Victor estimated the newcomers.

“I reckon so, yes,” Ruffin said. He was a huge man, well over six feet tall.

“I do believe those are the English guards,” Victor said. He was gazing at Dilkes’s brigade through his telescope and could clearly see the blue regimental color of the First Foot Guards. “They’re sacrificing their best,” the marshal added cheerfully, “so let’s oblige them. We’ll sweep the bastards away!”