by Mary Nichols
She laughed. ‘You are plausible, I give you that.’
‘But do you belive me?’ He turned and pulled aside the canvas of the wagon to shout to Jeanne. ‘You are dropping behind again, woman. Do you want those wild Portuguese to swoop down on us? Get a move on.’
‘It would help if you got off,’ she shouted back, whipping up the mules. ‘And the girl. Walk a bit, can’t you?’
He looked at Olivia. She seemed relaxed and at ease, friendly almost, and he was inclined to trust her, especially after what he had told her. ‘Do you want to walk?’
‘Can’t I ride Pegasus?’ She reached out and pulled a grey ear affectionately and was rewarded with a whinny. ‘He needs exercise.’
‘Then I shall exercise him later.’ He laughed. ‘Do you think I am a fool?’
‘Very well, let us walk.’
He untied her and threw the rope into the back of the wagon before leaping down and holding out his hands to help her. She jumped down unaided but had not realised how cramped she had been; her knees buckled and he had to hold her upright.
He did not immediately release her. ‘You know,’ he said softly, looking down at the brown cotton dress, ‘beneath that grimy garment there lurks a very beautiful woman.’ He pushed aside the collar of the dress, revealing the depth of her throat and a little of the curving white flesh which promised paradise for the man who could plunder it. ‘But this time I do not have to envy the Honourable Robert; I have you and he does not.’
‘Let me go!’
He laughed. ‘What can you do if I do not?’
‘I shall scream. I shall denounce you as a British agent.’
‘Would that be a patriotic thing to do, my dear?’ He held her shoulders in his hands, caressing them with his thumbs, gradually moving aside the thin cloth which covered them. ‘We should both die and then the Peer would not receive his intelligence.’
She stood rigidly to attention, neither submitting nor fighting him off, knowing that in a physical battle she was almost bound to lose. She could not understand how the British commander-in-chief could trust such a man; he was too smooth, too cocksure, too conceited for words. But did such things matter in war, if he was the best man for the task in hand? And he was right; betraying him would be betraying her country. She had to think of something else.
She glanced at Pegasus. Could she reach him? How far would she get before someone put a bullet in her back? Not far, she decided; the road was narrow and the ground on either side was steep and afforded little cover except rocks and gorse bushes, enough to hide someone on foot but not a galloping horse and rider.
‘You said once that I could help you,’ she said, then added quickly, ‘With your work.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Never more so.’
‘I will think about it.’ He looked up to see the wagon disappearing over the brow of a hill. He grabbed her hand and dragged her after it. ‘Why didn’t she shout?’ he demanded, referring to Jeanne. ‘We could have been left behind.’ Being left behind was almost as good as a death sentence to the French columns; they always kept nose to tail the whole way, for fear of ambush.
They caught up with the wagon on the next incline and the big woman pulled the mules up and waited for them to climb aboard. Rufus felt confident enough of Olivia not to tie her up again, but they were still some way behind the rest of the column and he clambered forward to take the reins and hurry the beasts. Jeanne settled herself in the back on a pile of clothing and sat puffing at her pipe, regarding Olivia through the smoke.
‘Decided to come round, eh?’ she said. ‘Thought you might. He’s not so bad as long as you do as he says. He pays me well.’
‘To look after his loot.’
‘That, and other things. Letters and things…’
‘Are you an agent too?’ Olivia asked in surprise. She had heared about spies who disguised themselves so that even their own mothers would not know them but, as far as she knew, the woman had been with the regiment for years; it was the only home she had.
Jeanne’s answer was a cackling laugh and a tap on the side of the nose with a dirty fingernail. ‘That would be telling.’
The more Olivia learned, the more confused she became. It was no good trying to unravel it, she decided; there were too many people who were experts at deception. She had to escape. If she could find her way back to the British lines, she could ask Wellington himself for the truth, and maybe she could tell him a thing or two he did not know himself. Did he, for instance, know the French were coming from Viseu, the worst road in the whole kingdom, according to Colonel Clavier? Did he know they were expecting the army of the south under Marshal Soult to join up with them and that the whole might of the French army was poised for a decisive push to rid the Peninsula of him and his leopards?
If Whitely was truly a British agent, then he did know, but if Whitely was a traitor, if he was sending false information, as Robert had said he was, then she had to do something about it herself. Robert either would not or could not help and, besides, she had no idea where he was.
She listened to the quiet rumble of the cart’s wheels, the clip-clop of the mules’ tread on the hard road, the soft breathing of the two horses trotting side by side at the rear and wondered exactly where they were. How close behind the column were they? Where was the nearest village? Most important of all, where were the British and Portuguese forces?
The answer to her last question seemed to be ‘very close at hand’ because the silence was suddenly shattered by musket fire.
‘Ordenanza!’ Whitely shouted, whipping the mules in a frenzy. ‘Hold on!’
The mules set off in a crazy gallop, dragging the loaded wagon all over the road. It careered from side to side, threatening to topple over, as he endeavoured to catch up with the rear of the column where there was safety in numbers. The two horses at the back were pulled willy-nilly this way and that and whinnied their protests. Olivia crawled to the tailboard to try and release them.
Now, she told herself, now is the time. If you are going, go now. She reached out to untie the horses but Jeanne, who had gone to the front to look over Whitely’s shoulder, came back and saw what she was doing. She slapped her face and dragged her back into the wagon. ‘No, you don’t, my beauty. That horse is mine and I’m not about to let you take it.’
A bullet whistled through the canvas, leaving a neat little hole on each side of the wagon. Both women flung themselves to the floor. More bullets splattered round them, some hitting the woodwork and others breaking the wine bottles. The red liquid ran out and dripped between the floorboards. A mirror shattered. Jeanne’s ability to curse was as legendary as her strength and she gave vent to her feelings with a string of oaths which went on, without her once repeating herself, for several minutes. The main thrust of her annoyance was not that she might be killed, though that seemed very likely, but that she was losing her valuable stock.
She scrambled up and made her way forward in the swaying vehicle to take over the reins. ‘I’ll drive,’ she said. ‘You shoot back; at least that might keep their heads down until we get in among the other wagons.’
‘I am unarmed,’ he said, bringing his whip crashing down on the lead mule. ‘I came to court a lady, not make war.’
‘Fool!’ she screamed at him. ‘Fool!’
A sound made her turn back. Olivia had succeeded in untying both horses. She had let Thor run loose, but she was using all her strength to hang on to the reins of Pegasus. She stood on the furthest part of the tailboard, ready to jump. With a scream of fury, Jeanne hurtled towards her, just as she managed to haul the horse alongside and launch herself into the air.
The crazed animal galloped past the wagon and on up the road, with Olivia struggling to pull herself into the saddle. The gunfire was being returned by the voltigeurs who defended the supply wagons, now halted and grouped in a defensive circle a little ahead of her. Pegasus had his head; she could neither steer him nor stop him. She could hear th
e attackers whooping as they ran from cover to cover, firing as they went, but strangely the bullets seemed to pass her by. Even while she struggled — she had one foot in a stirrup now and was at least in the saddle — she recalled Robert’s comment about her guardian angel. Stay with me, she commanded it; the Ordenanza could not know she was their friend.
The horse took an enormous leap over a makeshift barricade and she found herself inside the circle. There was nowhere else to go; he shuddered to a halt, breathing heavily and covered in a lather of sweat. ‘Get down!’ someone shouted at her. ‘Do you want to make dead meat?’
She slid to the ground and turned to look for cover. All around her, defenders were crouching behind the barricades, firing at the rocky hillside where a flash or a puff of smoke told them where their attackers were hidden. Rufus had turned Jeanne’s wagon and now it was careering back down the hill it had toiled so hard to climb. Was that the action of a brave Englishman? she wondered. The Ordenanza were his allies, not his enemies; he could surely convince them who he was. A voltigeur thrust a musket into her hand. ‘You know how to load?’
‘I think so.’ She did not want to help them defeat the Portuguese partisans; she fumbled with the powder and dropped the shot. When he found her on her knees, pretending to look for it, he grabbed the weapon back from her. ‘Women!’ he said, making her smile. ‘You would at least expect them to learn how to load a gun.’
She looked about her. The wagons were all canteens or food and clothing carts, none held ammunition, and the French were suffering heavy casualties; she knew they could not hold out much longer. The partisans, firing from the rocky hillside which rose on either side of the road, must have realised this too; they stormed from their hiding places and advanced pell-mell down the steep incline, while others behind them kept up the fusillade to cover them. The voltigeurs, out of ammunition, threw down their arms.
More Ordenanza appeared from nowhere with blackened faces and wide grins. They herded the survivors into a tight group and waited for their leader to tell them what to do next.
One of them had decided that Robert’s loose horse was a prize worth catching and was walking towards it, arm outstretched. He was exceptionally tall and well-built for a partisan, most of whom were small, undernourished men, and there was something about his bearing which was familiar to Olivia — more than familiar, loved. In a dream she moved away from the huddled circle of prisoners, waiting in terror to learn their fate, and walked slowly out on to the road to meet him. He had not gone to Salamanca. He had not gone home either. He was here.
He had succeeded in catching the horse and was leading it towards her. Except that he was dressed in the rough clothing of the Ordenanza and had a thin red scar running from his left eye to his ear, he looked no different from the man with whom she had galloped out of Viseu. She stopped and waited for him to come up to her, wondering if he had known she was with the column.
He walked slowly, uncertain what to say to her. For days he had watched her being pleasant to that snake Whitely, while the wagons rolled on behind the French army. He told himself he could have forgiven her anyone but Whitely. She must be convinced by now that the man was a traitor and not the agent he had said he was. Did she care?
He had laughed when she’d left him, laughed to cover up his hurt that she could doubt him. Go to Salamanca indeed! He would not travel half a yard to go to the Spanish whore; surely she knew that? Olivia would come back, for had she not always said he needed her? She had been right about other things too. He had to go home; it was where he belonged. He could make his father understand, especially with Olivia beside him to support him.
He had waited in the same place in the wood for several minutes, not daring to move in case she returned and missed him in the dark, but the minutes had stretched into half an hour and the silence around him had deepened. If she were hiding near at hand to punish him, he would at least have heard the horse. She had gone further than she had intended and was lost. For the first time in his life he had panicked. In the pitch-darkness of the wood he had blundered about, going round in circles, calling her name. His head had ached abominably and the trees into which he kept colliding had made his wound bleed again. He had stumbled, somehow regained his balance, taken a step and then — nothing.
When he had regained his senses, he had found himself lying on a couch in the home of the leader of the local Ordenanza in a village called São Jorge, a few miles north of Viseu. He had been surrounded by brown-clad partisans who, judging by his uniform, thought they had captured an important French leader and were debating what to do with him. Some had been advocating exchanging him for some of their own people, though they knew few were kept as prisoners, and others had been in favour of shooting him, after they had tortured him and found out all he knew. One or two had expressed doubts. They had known he was being pursued and they wanted to know why. What had he done that his own people should chase him? Had he deserted? And why was he wearing a red coat under his blue one?
His command of the Portuguese language was poor and the local schoolteacher had been fetched to translate into Spanish, their only common language. He had lost no time in explaining who he was and why he was there. His story had caused more heated debate, but in the end he had convinced them he was telling the truth, mainly because of the faded red coat and because he could describe Viscount Wellington — what the great man looked like, his big nose and cocked hat, worn fore and aft, his plain grey coat, his barking laugh, his victories. They could not get enough of his victories and, unlike the Spaniards, they believed in him.
‘We will spare you,’ their leader had pronounced at last. He was an olive-skinned, black-eyed man called Martin Davaco, fanatical to a degree and not a man to be trifled with. ‘Join us; we need good men who can handle a gun. You can teach us as the General Wellington teaches our brothers, the Cacadores. But make no mistake, you are on trial.’
‘My wife?’ He had hoped to enrol them to help find Olivia. At the time he had been convinced she was lost in the forest.
‘They say there was no one within a league of you when they found you,’ the schoolmaster had translated. ‘And they covered the ground well.’
‘They are sure?’
‘Yes. And they do not risk men and guns looking for a woman,’ he had added. ‘Women are changeable and unreliable. Women they leave at home when they go to war. It is where they belong.’
He had been allowed to return to the spot where they had found him and had searched in a wide circle, beating at the undergrowth with a stick, unwilling to admit he might be looking for a body. But in the end he had come to realise that Olivia’s usual resourcefulness had probably come to her aid and she had found her own way out; she was not the kind of person to be beaten by a forest of trees.
He had gone back to the village and thrown himself wholeheartedly into their private war against the long columns that rumbled, day after day, through their countryside, crushing the wild flowers beneath their wheels, disturbing the animals that provided them with food, cutting down their trees, setting fire to the brush with their camp fires. Every ammunition wagon destroyed, every gun captured, every sack of flour spilled aided the war effort and helped to defeat the tyrant, and that was the creed by which they lived. It had pleased him to be involved, though his mind was constantly on Olivia, wondering where she was, if she was safe.
He had been with them as they watched the passing of Masséna’s army from their hiding places among the rocks and scrub of the hillside. It had been far too big a target for their small force to attack, but their patience had been rewarded when a group of a dozen or so supply wagons had begun to straggle. He had been shocked to the core when he had borrowed Martin Davaco’s spyglass and seen Whitely and Olivia sitting companionably side by side on the tailboard of the last wagon.
She had been laughing. That had hurt more than anything — that she could ride a French wagon with a traitor like Rufus Whitely and laugh. He had been forced to contain
his impulse to rush down the hill and strangle the man there and then; it would have been a senseless thing to do and Martin Davaco would have justifiably thrown a knife into his back if he had tried it.
He had been forced to watch, with growing bitterness, as Olivia walked beside an enemy even more dangerous than the French troops who marched ahead of her. She had allowed the man to hold her in his arms, not only allowed it, but seemed to enjoy it. In that case, what else had happened between them? Shades of Juana’s treachery tormented him. If Martin had not given the command to attack at that moment, he would have thrown caution to the winds and let off a shot at the traitorous Englishman.
Now he stopped within a few feet of her. She was wearing a thin brown dress, a rag of a dress, but he did not see that; he saw her as he often liked to imagine her — fresh from a bath, dressed in a blue silk dressing-gown, with her hair newly washed and curling closely to her head. And smiling.
She was smiling now. Neither heard the nearby sounds of the Portuguese men barking commands at their prisoners, the braying of mules, the clash of metal as weapons were thrown down in a heap, nor saw anything but each other. The silence stretched out between them like an accusation, unspeakable, unbearable.
‘Olivia,’ he said, and managed a crooked grin. ‘Another chance encounter, eh?’ It was about the most senseless thing he could have said.
CHAPTER NINE
IF ROBERT had given any indication that he was pleased to see her, Olivia would have run into his arms and confessed her love for him. Instead she stood on the dusty road, her feet a little apart, and stared at him. Was he blind? Could he not see how delighted she was to see him? Had nothing changed? He had not altered in looks and was as handsome as ever; his hazel eyes looked straight into hers, but where before there had been humour, now there was mistrust, and where before his mouth had smiled, now it was set in a hard line of intransigence. His temple, close to the thin red scar on his forehead, twitched a little and she wondered if the injury gave him any pain. She laughed shakily when he spoke her name. ‘So you do remember me.’
