Sharpe looked at Hogan. ‘You’ve brought my sword?’

‘Yes.’

‘And more ammunition?’ Hogan had sent him north with only his rifle.

‘Yes.’

‘So what do I do with your horse and Angel?’

‘You go and solve my mystery.’ Hogan put snuff onto his hand, sniffed it, paused, then sneezed. For once he did not swear after the sneeze. ‘I could have sent one of my own people, but you have one advantage.’

‘Which is?’

Hogan looked at Sharpe, ‘You know Helene. I just hope to God she’ll want to see you again, and that she’ll talk to you. Find her, curl up with her, find out what the hell is happening, and save your miserable career.’

Frederickson laughed. Sharpe squirted wine from the skin into his mouth.

Hogan nodded at Angel. ‘Angel’s your spy. Don’t worry that he looks young, he’s been working for me since he was thirteen. He can go where you can’t go. And you have one other advantage. Helene is rather noticeable. If the two of you get within twenty miles of her, you’ll hear about it. You know what the Spanish call her?’

‘La Puta Dorada.’ Sharpe said it softly It was a just enough nickname, yet its use always offended him. ‘Will the Partisans help me?’

‘Who knows? They think you’re dead, so use another name.’ He smiled mockingly. ‘Don’t call yourself Major Hogan, please? I suppose you’ll have to look for the Partisans, but they don’t have any love for the Marquesa. Still, they might help you.’

‘Where would you start looking?’

‘Burgos or Vitoria,’ Hogan said decisively. ‘Burgos because it’s the crossroads of the French armies and if she’s in Spain then she’ll have passed through, and Vitoria because that’s where the Inquisitor comes from. It’s not much, God knows, but it’s better than nothing.’ Hogan frowned up at the sky, as if angry with the rain. ‘There’s one other thing.’

Sharpe grinned. ‘You’re saving the bad news till last?’

‘If the French capture you, Richard, they’ll crow their victory from every housetop in Europe. They’ll prove that we cheated the Spanish with an execution, they’ll parade you like a captive bear to prove Britain’s perfidy. Or, if they don’t do that, they’ll simply kill you. You’re officially dead, after all, so they’ve nothing to lose.’ He stared at the Rifleman, ‘So don’t get captured.’ Hogan said it with a seething intensity and, to drive the message home, repeated the words. ‘Don’t get captured.’

That was Hogan’s fear. It had been Wellington’s fear, too, when Hogan had suggested that Sharpe be sent to solve the mystery. The General had bristled at Sharpe’s name. ‘What if the fool gets caught, Hogan? Good God! The French will make hay of us! No. It won’t do, It won’t do.’

‘He won’t get caught, my Lord.’ Hogan had already sent Sharpe to the Gateway of God, and was praying that no stray enemy cavalry patrol had already found the Rifleman.

It had taken Hogan two days to persuade the General, his only argument that no one but Sharpe could safely approach La Marquesa. The General had reluctantly agreed. He had wanted to send Sharpe back to England with orders never to show his face in the army again. ‘If this goes wrong, Hogan, it’ll be your hide as well as his.’

‘It won’t go wrong, my Lord, I promise you.’

Wellington had looked mockingly at his chief of intelligence. ‘One man against an army?’

‘Yes, my Lord.’ And that man would win, Hogan fervently believed, because losing was not part of Richard Sharpe’s world.

He watched Sharpe now, his face lit by the flames in the Gateway of God, and he wondered if Sharpe would live to come back to the army. He was sending him with just one boy deep behind the enemy lines, to find a woman who was as treacherous as she was beautiful, yet Hogan had no choice. This summer the General planned a campaign that could destroy French power in Spain, but the French knew how potent was the threat and they would be fighting back, using every weapon of treachery and subtlety that came to hand. Hogan, with an instinct for trouble far off, had fought to let Sharpe go into enemy territory. There was a mystery to be solved, and only Sharpe knew the woman whose letter had revealed that mystery. And the only hope of success was in Sharpe’s belief, that Hogan knew could be utterly false, that La Marquesa had become fond of the Rifleman when they were lovers.

Yet, Hogan thought, Sharpe could be right. The Rifleman provoked great loyalty from all sorts of men and women. From generals and whores to sergeants and frightened recruits. He was a soldier’s soldier, but his friends and lovers saw the vulnerability in him and it made them fond of him. Yet Hogan wondered how much fondness the Golden Whore had in her soul.

The wind gusted, shrieking like a tormented soul in the shattered cloister, and bringing a slapping, rattling burden of rain to lash the broken tiles and seethe in the embers. Hogan shivered beneath his cloak. This was a place of ghosts, the unseen Shee were riding the winds of storm, and he was sending a friend into the unknown to fight an unequal battle.

Richard Sharpe lay on thin, wiry grass and propped his telescope on his pack. He slid the brass shutter aside from the eyepiece, adjusted the tubes, and stared in awed amazement.

He watched an army marching.

He had seen the smear of dust in the sky, rising higher as the morning moved towards midday’s heat, and the dust had looked like the haze of a great grass fire in the far south.

He had ridden towards the haze, going slowly for fear of enemy cavalry patrols, and now, in the early afternoon, he lay on the low summit of a small hill and stared at the men and animals that had smudged the great plume of dust across the heavens.

The French were marching eastwards. They were marching towards Burgos, towards France.

The road itself was left for the heavy traffic, for the wagons and the guns and the carriages of the generals. Beside the road, trampling the scanty crops, marched the infantry. He moved the telescope right, the far uniforms a blur of colour in his eye, and steadied it where the road came from a small village. Tumbrils and caissons, limbers and ambulances, wagons and more wagons, the horses and oxen dipping their heads with the effort of hauling their loads under the hot Spanish sun. In the village was the tower of an old castle, its grey stone broken by spreading ivy, and Sharpe saw white smoke rising from the tower, mingling with the dust, and knew that the French had looted and now burned the tower. They were abandoning this countryside, going eastward, retreating.

He pushed the telescope left, turning it to look as far to the east as he could see, to where, like a tiny grey blur on the horizon the topmost stones of Burgos’ fortress showed above some trees, and everywhere the road was crammed with men and horses. The infantry moved slowly, like men who hated to retreat. Their women and children slogged along beside them. Cavalry walked beside their steeds, under orders to save their horses’ strength, while only a few squadrons, lancers mostly, whose pennants were stained white with dust, trotted on the flanks of the huge column to protect it against Spanish sharpshooters.

Sharpe rested the telescope. Without the benefit of the fine glass the French army looked like a black snake winding across the valley. He knew he saw a retreat, but he did not know why the enemy retreated. He had heard no guns like thunder in the distance that would have told him of a great battle that Wellington had won. He just watched the great beast snake in the valley, smearing the sky white, and he had no idea why it was here, 6r where it went, or where his own forces were.

He wriggled back from the skyline, snapped the telescope shut, and turned to the horse which he had tethered to a stone field marker. Hogan had lent him a fine, strong, patient stallion called Carbine, who now watched Sharpe and. twitched his long, black, undocked tail. He was a lucky horse, Sharpe thought, because the rule in the British army was that all horses Should have their tails cut short, but Carbine had been left his intact so that, at a distance, he would seem to the French to be one of their own. He had been corn fed too, strengthened through the winter to carry one of Hogan’s men who would spy deep behind French lines. Now he carried Sharpe to find a lady.