Castobert saw the movement of his hand but made no effort to rise. Instead he tilted his chair, clasped his hands behind his head and regarded the Englishman with benevolence.
“You would fight for her, for a camp drab? And you barely old enough to need a woman?”
“I would fight if it was necessary,” Graham said, “and my men also. The woman is on the strength of a British regiment, and when we march she marches!”
“So?” Castobert kept his eyes on Graham’s hand. “But up here we do not settle our differences with firearms and you would have to make good such a claim with a blade! You, my friend, not your men!” And suddenly he let his chair fall forward and hoisted himself to his feet. “There is still sufficient light, I will tell the men to make the circle!”
“It would be wiser, m’sieur, to find out what has happened to Pedrillo!”
Gwyneth was speaking from the door, and both men swung around to face her. She had crossed the threshold unobserved and was now standing with her hands resting on her plump hips, looking directly at Castobert. She was neither angry nor defiant and clearly in no way intimidated by him. Her voice had the same lilting quality that Graham had noted when he had listened to her explaining her presence to the file in the church.
For the first time the renegade showed active interest in the discussion, but even now he seemed supremely sure of himself and he said, as his lips moved in a surly smile, “What do you know of Pedrillo?” Graham realized that he had been dismissed from the contest, that it was now a duel between the woman and the partisan.
“You will be a man short when you call your muster rolls,” she said. “That is, if you brigands have muster rolls, which is unlikely, I think, for there is nothing I see here to tell me I am among soldiers! As for Pedrillo, he is now well on his way south with a message for General Crauford, the kinsman of the officer you are threatening, but I do not think you will do more than threaten, because although you are a dirty ruffian you are not as stupid as the men outside!”
Castobert took a single step toward her and when she did not give ground but continued to look directly at him Graham drew his pistol and cocked it. The click of the hammer was the only sound in the cabin as they remained facing one another on three sides of the table.
Then Gwyneth went on. “I chose Pedrillo because he seemed to me the least stupid of the band, having just enough brains to desert with a gold guinea in his pocket and the promise of four more when he reports the whereabouts of this detachment. Perhaps they will have an interpreter at General Crauford’s headquarters and perhaps the General will ask Pedrillo about a partisan leader who decoys British soldiers into the mountains because they have with them a drab for the generalissimo’s bed and half a dozen new British muskets for his armory! If Pedrillo talks as freely to the British as he talked to me there should be a sizeable price on your head, and if Pedrillo will do this for one gold piece, what will the rest of your rabble do for a hundred?”
Graham thought he had never seen a man look so astounded. By the time Gwyneth had finished, Castobert’s jaw was agape and his several chins writhed under the stress of words he was unable to utter. There was a large vein on his temple and about it a pulse beat, causing him to put up his hand and touch it and then, as his brain absorbed the implication of her elaborate threat, a rage that was almost visible seemed to storm through his body. For what seemed a long time they remained like this, Castobert gaping at Gwyneth, Graham leveling his cocked pistol across the table, and the woman regarding the partisan with the hint of a smile puckering the corners of her mouth.
“You play chess, Capitano?” she said at length, when Castobert stopped struggling for words that would not come. “This is checkmate, but you will think of a move sooner or later and it will be our business to be gone from here before you do! You will spend the whole night thinking about it, Capitano, whether or not Pedrillo will be encouraged by the promise of four more guineas to keep his bargain, or how likely are the French to catch him and string him up when he tries to pass their lines. It is an even chance, I would say, for Pedrillo knows the country and the French do not, but one thing is quite certain, you yourself will never catch Pedrillo now. He has had several hours’ start and the woods are very thick down in the valleys.” She turned abruptly to Graham. “You can put up your pistol, Mr. Graham. He will not dare attack us yet, he is far too uncertain of his men to risk his life for a woman and half a dozen rifled muskets!” When Graham uncocked the weapon and thrust it back into his belt she seemed to dismiss the partisan altogether and busied herself scooping up the remains of the bread that lay beside Castobert’s empty plate. “Come,” she said, turning on her heel, “the file will have eaten now and the Capitano has plenty to engage him until morning.” And she went out with Graham following, and still Castobert continued to stare, the pulse in his forehead winking like a small beacon under the flush on his broad suntanned face.
They exchanged no word as they went down the bank and crossed the stream to the British bivouac, but after Lockhart had challenged them in the gloom, and Graham had stepped over the sleeping forms of Watson and Croyde, he said gently, “How much of that was bluff, Gwyneth? You had no money to give to that deserter Pedrillo.”
“No,” she said, “but Croyde has money. He took Lickspittle’s
belt before he buried him and carries it round his belly. It was I who told you to contact this scum and it was bad advice, for they are not local men but carrion who have come over the mountains from Spain thinking of nothing but loot. That man Castobert is a brigand and he fights the French only because he owes them a grudge. I saw him looking at me and I saw his men fingering our muskets and it was enough to tell me we are in bad company, Mr. Graham. They would not crucify us perhaps, but they would shoot us down for the cartridges we carry. This I told Croyde to persuade him to give me the guinea, but even that was a foolish thing to do, for if any one of those scoundrels saw his money belt they would kill us at once and then fight among themselves for what Croyde has about him!”
“I told Castobert we would march in the morning with or without his guide.”
“Yes,” she said, “and you were willing to fight him on my account and that is something I shall not easily forget, Mr. Graham. It is a long time since any man paid me such a compliment! He would have run you through, however, for he is almost certainly an expert swordsman. All the French emigrés are good swordsmen. It is their one accomplishment.”
Her instinctive awareness of the situation at any one moment still had the power to astonish him. It was as though she had lived a thousand years in these circumstances, alone in the company of men who were almost children, threading the hills and valleys of a strange land where death was the price of a single misjudgment. Her mind was an encyclopedia of the knowledge required to survive and at each turn of the road she was ready with a clear-cut decision representing the difference between survival and disaster. He felt like an eager student in the presence of an old and infallible teacher.
“Should we leave during the night?” he asked earnestly. “Should we not go at once? I have examined the path and once we were on it Lockhart could pick them off one by one if they tried to stop us!”
“It would be safer to wait for daylight,” she said. “We will go if they make a move, but I do not think they will until that brigand can discuss Pedrillo’s desertion with the others and guess if the boy is likely to risk his life for the promise of a larger reward. Besides, the men need sleep and you too need rest before climbing more mountains. Lie down, then, and I will watch with Lockhart and in an hour or so I will wake one of the others. They have all eaten their fill and we have something left over for tomorrow.” She looked up at the sky and sniffed like a hound. “It will rain during the night and there will be no moonlight worth having. No, we must wait for daylight, Mr. Graham!” And she took a musket from the piled arms near the fire and turned her back on him, resting the long weapon across the crook of her arm like Lockhart and staring dow
n at the pattern of fires where the partisans were gathered in little groups.
Graham took out his cloak and wrapped it around him, blanketwise. As he stretched himself on the ground someone in the valley began to strum a mandolin and the clear, tinkling notes drifted across the encampment to the bivouac. He drew up his knees and slept.
Tam Strawbridge was the sixth child of a Kentish farm laborer who had never earned more than eight shillings a week, from which total a sum was deducted for milk, potatoes and the rent of the two-roomed hovel in which the family lived on the edge of the Weald. As a child Tam had watched soldiers march over the Downs to their camps at Hythe and Rye and had envied them their scarlet coats and bright, jingling accouterments. When he was sixteen and already approaching six foot in height, he received a thrashing from an irate farmer for stealing beans. The next day he ran off and enlisted, and now, at the age of twenty-one, he was a veteran. He had never regretted his decision. The life was hard, but no harder than that of his father or brothers, and whereas his kin wielded nothing more lethal than a billhook Tam never went anywhere without his shining musket, which he carried as an idle boy carries a hazel stick he uses to swipe at hedgerows. Strawbridge was wedded to his musket, and few men took such care of their wives or lavished upon them the tender thoughts that Strawbridge entertained for his Brown Bess. At nights, in bivouac, he would sit for an hour crooning over her while he cleaned and oiled and polished, rubbing away at invisible stains and testing the mechanism over and over again, making trebly sure that the hammer came back with a soft, pleasing snick and that the long ramrod slotted neatly into its furrow and did not have to be coaxed to bed down alongside the barrel. He could find his musket in pitch darkness, plucking it unerringly from a pile of stacked arms, and when he lay down to sleep he wrapped the lock in a piece of flannel and hugged the weapon to his body. He had treated his original musket with the same tenderness and had wept when they withdrew it at Lisbon, replacing it with the new-type weapon fitted with the rifled barrel and giving far greater accuracy and range, but he soon got used to his new love and forgot all about her predecessor. Officers who knew him paused for a split second in front of Strawbridge when they were carrying out arms inspection, then passed him by and concentrated on the weapons of men like Croyde and Lickspittle to whom a musket was just another piece of baggage. Apart from the meticulous care of his arms Tam Strawbridge was an excellent soldier, strong, uncomplaining and obedient to the last order. He seldom had any thoughts of his own, unless it was how to satisfy his periodic hunger, or what small service he could tender little Watson, his file companion over the last two years. Next to his musket Strawbridge loved Watson, admiring the little man’s incredible flow of words and broad, sooty grin, and listening with rapt attention to the Cockney’s interminable tales of London life as a chimney-sweep. When Watson had finished a story his friend would reward the narrator with a great bellow of laughter. He would have died for Watson, but as it happened he was not called upon to do so; instead he died for his musket.
After Lockhart and the woman had watched for more than an hour they awoke Strawbridge and Watson, and the ex-gamekeeper posted them about twenty yards apart on the very edge of the tiny plateau formed by the fall of rock under the wood. From here, half screened by scrub, they could look down on both ends of the valley and had every campfire under survey. The mandolin player was asleep now and the encampment was silent. As far as Strawbridge could judge, the Portuguese posted no sentries, and after half an hour’s uneventful duty Strawbridge began to feel lonely and longed to hear the familiar sound of Watson’s voice. He was aware, however, that it would be wrong to desert his post and for several minutes he battled with his boredom. Then Watson hailed him from the bushes, asking if he had a screw of baccy about him, and Strawbridge replied delightedly that he had, just enough for a single pipe if Watson would wait until he foraged in his tunic pocket for loose shreds. Strawbridge did not smoke himself but he hoarded tobacco for his friend, and the half-handful in his tunic dated from their spell of hospital guard at Coimbra. He stood his bayoneted musket against a rock and turned to face Watson, whom he could sense rather than see against the dark mass of the pines. Holding the bottom of his tunic with one hand, he groped in the pocket with the other and marshaled a shred here and a shred there until he had enough for a thin pipeful. Then he moved forward a few strides, found his friend and pressed it carefully into Watson’s outstretched hand.
Watson said, “Thankee, mate,” and returned to his post farther along the plateau.
When Strawbridge went back to his beat and bent over the rock to retrieve his musket, his hand swept the empty air. Musket and bayonet had gone.
For the space of about a minute Strawbridge was incredulous. Barely sixty seconds had elapsed since he had laid his musket against the rock, and for at least two thirds of that period, while he was groping for the tobacco, he had been standing within two or three feet of the grounded stock. He scratched his head, grunted with dismay and then moved around to the other side of the rock, thinking it must have fallen into the scrub. Going down on hands and knees, he struck his flint, but as he did so he heard the sound of a dislodged pebble farther down the slope and the rattle told him what had happened to the musket. In the few seconds that it had taken him to hand Watson the tobacco one of the partisans must have crept up to the rock, reached over and whipped musket and bayonet into the bushes.
A shudder of rage ran through Strawbridge. Even before the outrageous theft had been perpetrated he had entertained a sour dislike for the irregulars. Watson distrusted them, and all the opinions of Strawbridge stemmed from Watson. Watson had said only that afternoon that Portuguese irregulars were worse than the French, adding his opinion that if Old Beaky would patch up his quarrel with Boney and declare war on the Portuguese and Spaniards it would be a fine thing for all of them. Now Strawbridge realized what lay behind Watson’s far-seeing remark. Obviously the Portuguese were utterly devoid of morality, for men who could creep up on an ally in the night and steal his musket were capable of any enormity. Suddenly he began to gibber with rage, running about in the scrub and calling the Portuguese all the names that occurred to him—”bliddy snakes,” “double-dyed magpies” and “prowling, yeller-bellied crabs.” His vocabulary was limited and Watson could have introduced far more variety into the flow of invective, but for a mild and very amiable man Strawbridge acquitted himself well.
He was still prancing about in the bushes, bellowing at the top of his voice, when Watson appeared, demanding to know what all the noise was about, but by this time Strawbridge was so enraged and excited that he was incoherent. It was only when he kept pointing at Watson’s musket that the Cockney suddenly realized what had occurred and at once expressed his opinion of all foreigners in a stream of blasphemy that gave his friend a moment or two to calm down, so that he clutched Watson by the sleeve and roared, “I’m agoin’ arter un, Billy! I’m agoin’ down there arter un an’ if they’ve ’armed ’er with their clumsy gurt fingers I’ll ’ave the blood out o’ their bellies, so help me God!” And before Watson could utter a word of caution he was gone, plunging down the slope with great, loping strides and splashing across the stream into the heart of the sleeping encampment.
Watson screamed after him, telling him to wait, but he paid no heed to the warning. When Lockhart, roused by the uproar, descended from the wood Watson gabbled the story and Lockhart added his shouts. Within a few moments the others were there, standing in a group on the edge of the rock platform, all shouting to Strawbridge to return to the bivouac.
They shouted in vain. Strawbridge, still bellowing abuse, headed straight into the circle of banked-up fires, stumbling over sleeping men and plucking at every firearm he spied, only to fling each of them down the moment he was satisfied it was not his incomparable Bess. Rage and excitement dulled his perceptions. Ordinarily he could have seen at a glance, even by firelight, that the clumsy fowling pieces and blunderbusses piled beside the campfires were no
thing like his own polished weapon, but his bull-like progress through the camp aroused sleeper after sleeper, each of whom struggled to his feet and made a grab at his arms under the impression that the camp was being attacked by the French. Then, by pure chance, Strawbridge stumbled upon the thief, identifying him instantly by the furtive speed with which he tossed the musket across to a comrade who came running out of a hut. The swift exchange was made just as the Englishman rounded the corner of the cabin into a circle of firelight, and this time Strawbridge did not need to identify his weapon by handling it but recognized it at once as a gleam of firelight caught its highly polished stock. He rushed upon the man in the doorway like a maddened elephant, grabbing the long barrel with one hand and a handful of the thief’s tunic with the other so that they both pitched sideways, striking the doorpost with such violence that the flimsy structure shook along its entire length. Now men were up and running in all directions, adding to the chorus from the edge of the wood by a cacophony of yells and shouts.
In the course of the brief struggle in the doorway Strawbridge managed to wrest the musket from the man by lifting him clear of the ground and thumping his head against the doorpost until he was limp, but as he flung him down and rushed back into the circle of firelight two other men leaped at him, one brandishing a knife, the other swinging a fowling piece by the barrel. Strawbridge arrested the sweep of the knife by holding his musket across his body so that the long blade rasped along the barrel and caught momentarily in his sleeve, but the man with the fowling piece had his wits about him and, crouching low, swung his weapon in a wide arc so that its heavy stock struck Strawbridge across the shins, buckling his knees and bringing him down on the edge of the fire.
At the same moment the struggle enlarged itself as more and more men, most of them convinced that they were engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the French, plunged into the fray, and when Strawbridge rose to his feet he was the center of more than a dozen partisans, all getting in one another’s way and every man among them screaming at the top of his voice. Considering that the blow from the fowling piece had all but broken his leg, and that he was now assailed on all sides by men hacking at him with knives, swords and billets of wood snatched from the fuel pile, the countryman gave a notable account of himself. With the butt of his beloved musket he knocked one man into the fire, and when the stock parted from the barrel under the impact he retained his grasp on the metal and broke the arm of a man jabbing him with a bayonet. Then somebody leaped upon his back and he went down again, carrying two men with him and rolling right across the fire at the feet of another group of men who had come up at a run and who flung themselves bodily upon the trio struggling in the embers, jabbing with their knives and calling to one another to stand clear and give them room to use their weapons.
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