Absolute Honour

by C. C. Humphreys

  Jack turned to see the main wave of cavalry, Burgoyne at their head, begin to sweep through the gate.

  The Colonel reined in beside him. ‘All to order, Absolute?’

  ‘Yes, sir. The men are holding the streets here. The Dagoes were asleep.’ He grinned. ‘But they’re awake now.’

  Burgoyne smiled back. ‘Well, let’s see how they like our lullabies.’ He turned to Hugh Somerville at his side. ‘Major, sixth troop to secure the gate. And send all spare horses back to Onslow, so he can bring the Grenadiers up smartly.’ He faced forward. ‘According to our hirsute Portuguese friend, the town square is dead ahead and where the main barracks lie. Coming, Absolute?’

  Lucky was being held nearby. Swiftly unlinking, Jack mounted in a moment. ‘Gladly, sir.’

  He was not quite so glad a few moments later when, on the street they cantered down, shutters were thrown back and ball began to thrum around them. It seemed that, as in the British Army, men were billeted all over the town. Men who had their muskets with them.

  ‘Fourth and fifth troop to dismount by divisions when fired upon and engage the enemy,’ Burgoyne bellowed. ‘The rest with me.’

  There were no niceties of drill, just a harum-scarum half-gallop down the narrow, curving streets, men spilling from horses when guns were discharged at them, carbines aimed up at shutters, wooden gates in arched doorways battered in to root out the sniping enemy. Jack pushed on with all the others, now ahead of Burgoyne, now behind him. Occasionally there would be figures standing beyond a sweeping corner. Powder would flash, bullets pass near or ricochet off walls, and then Jack, like all the others, would crouch behind his horse’s neck, sword thrust ahead, using the weight of speeding beast and the sharpness of metal to scatter the enemy. More than once he felt his blade clash with metal, wood, or bone. But there was no time to note wound or death, the impetus was forward, the nearness of the square indicated by an increasing resistance. And then they were in it, the open space acting like air sucked in after too long spent under water. The three troops, one hundred and fifty men, spread out fast, driving those who opposed them into doorways and back down the streets and alleys that radiated outwards.

  Jack had become separated from Burgoyne, but Puxley was still to his left and Worsley, whom Jack had not seen since before the charge, had suddenly appeared on his right. ‘Westward ho!’ yelled the Devonian, sweeping his sword over the Cornishman and the Welshman, causing Jack to duck. He was about to curse the fool when he noticed something else. Before the biggest house on the square – three storeys high, with huge oak doors, a red-tiled archway and elegant iron balconies – stood a man wearing a nightgown, which was not that unusual, and a huge tricorn hat, which was. It was of a similar kind to their Major Gonzalo’s but had twice the quantity of gold emblems and silver lace. Jack had no doubt that he was looking at a colonel at the least, a guess confirmed by the man’s apoplectic yelling at all around him.

  ‘With me, lads,’ Jack cried, kicking Lucky into his stride. The three horses scattered the knot of men around the officer, bumping some to the ground, the others fleeing to the house’s porch. The General – for that’s what Jack thought him now – had somehow stood his ground, a younger officer guarding him with a heavy sabre. In a moment, Jack was off his horse; in another, he’d attacked. The young man’s curved weapon was cumbersome in comparison to Jack’s straight English blade and was dislodged at the third pass, the officer staggering back. He looked as if he would reach for it again but his commander said something sharp, something Jack caught but did not understand. On these words, the young Spaniard turned and sprinted into the house.

  The General had a sword, too, but he did not level it. Instead he reversed it, held it out to Jack, said something that, to Jack’s ears, sounded vaguely Italian but he presumed was Spanish.

  ‘I am not the one to give your sword to, sir,’ Jack said slowly.

  The man, his tight-cropped beard as grey as his hair, considered then said, ‘To whom, please?’ The English phrasing was slow and precise.

  ‘Him,’ Jack replied. His own commander had suddenly appeared from the throng, leading a party that had subdued the last resistance upon the porch. ‘Colonel,’ Jack yelled and, in a moment, Burgoyne was there.

  ‘Absolute. What have we here?’

  ‘Someone who has something for you, I believe.’

  ‘General Ignacio de Irunibeni.’ The man bowed stiffly. ‘And your captive, sir.’

  The sword was offered again, and this time taken. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel John Burgoyne.’ He bowed, returned the sword. ‘I assume the obligation, General.’ He smiled. ‘Do you think we could persuade your men to be so obliging?’

  ‘I can try. But I must warn you, sir, the regiment of Seville has never surrendered,’ the General replied, his accent full of lisps.

  ‘Well, I wonder if we can persuade them to this day? For the town is ours, and further sacrifice needless.’

  Jack looked beyond this vacuum of politeness to the mayhem beyond. The square had largely been taken but, judging by the explosions and shouts in the neighbouring streets, Burgoyne’s declaration was premature. He was just about to call Puxley to help him rally the rest of their troop, when he noticed the officer’s sabre, the one who’d dashed off, upon the ground. As he bent slowly to it, he realized the General was staring at him, concern in his eyes, calculation, as if he were attempting to gauge Jack’s mind and precede him to a conclusion. When their gazes held, the Spaniard stepped forward, spoke. ‘I wonder, sir, if this gallant officer would be my escort.’

  ‘Absolute? I’m sure he would. Why?’

  And suddenly Jack knew. The General was trying to remove him from the board. If war was chess, as Burgoyne had said earlier, then the Spaniard was still playing a game.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, I think I know why. Puxley, Worsley, with me.’

  The General actually tried to grab his sleeve as he passed but neither that, nor Burgoyne’s shouted question, halted him. The porch of the house was cleared, men in scarlet coats had already begun to venture cautiously into the hall. But if Jack was right, this was not time for caution. He took the stairs two at a time, ran onto the first floor landing. The house was designed around a courtyard, four corridors thus in a square. Running left, Jack realized he had been fortunate in his guess when he saw two men standing outside a door, both with muskets at port.

  He could not hesitate. ‘Charge,’ he cried, as the startled soldiers fired and missed. ‘Take them,’ he yelled, and ran between the two men – defending themselves with bayonet and gun stock against his companions’ sword thrusts – into the room.

  It was as he suspected it would be. The young officer was crouched before the fireplace, desperately trying to fan a small flame onto a piece of paper in his hand. The pistol however, hastily snatched up by the Spaniard, was more unexpected.

  ‘Hijo de puta!’ hissed the man, but the room was small and Jack was already running. He was across it just before the barrel levelled. Then his hand was upon the gun, forcing it up as it flashed. He felt his palm and fingers burn, heard the smash of glass exploding. He still had his sword in his hand but he was too close to use its point so he used the guard instead, driving it into the man’s jaw. The Spaniard flew back, lay still upon the floor. Jack bent, snatched the paper from his hand, snuffed the flame that had caught upon its side. Then, clutching it, he sank onto a chair.

  ‘What was that all about, sir?’

  Jack looked to the young man in the doorway, Puxley behind him, sword resting on the shoulder of one of the Spanish guards. Jack could see the soles of a pair of boots just poking round the doorframe. He shuddered. ‘Spanish, Worsley.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘There’s a distinct similarity to Italian.’

  ‘Is there indeed?’ Worsley gave the sort of humouring laugh one man gives to another who’s succumbed to battle madness.

  Jack sighed. He was suddenly too tired to explain. But, as something of a linguist, he was rath
er pleased to realize that the first Spanish phrase he had learned was because of time spent in a Roman prison. In Italy, the General would have ordered his officer to ‘Distruggi il documento.’ In Valencia de Alcántara what he did say was: ‘Destruye el documento.’ But in England his command would have been: ‘Destroy the document.’

  – EIGHT –

  A Different Game

  Jack threw down the pencil, closed his eyes. The dots, however, continued to crash around behind his lids like billiard balls on baize. The more he looked the more muddled he became.

  He left the paper on the desk, crossed to the open window and looked down onto the town. It had grown quiet in the hour after midnight. Until then, the soldiers of the 16th had been out upon the streets, celebrating their return to their quarters at Castelo de Vide with the food they had seized from the defeated Spaniards, washed down with wine they could purchase now in abundance in exchange for what they’d looted. There was more than wine on offer, however, and that, Jack realized, accounted for the relative silence. There was a curfew, the troopers back in their billets to rest before the morning’s planned departure. But they did not have to rest in their billets alone …

  He would have liked to be down there, celebrating their victory. Drink a lot of wine and, depending on how much, find a pretty enough señora to bed down with for the night. It had been a long time since that garden in Bath. Jocasta, ever attached to Worsley’s arm, would wink at him whenever he looked; though, to be honest, he wasn’t sure if that were not some condition of her eye.

  Damn him! Did not other men manage perfectly well with whores? Were not many of his brother officers down there tonight? He just never seemed to have found the knack. Too romantic to be practical. Perhaps it was just as well that Burgoyne had ordered him to work on the only booty he’d taken in Valencia de Alcántara – the paper the young officer had been trying to burn.

  ‘Why me, sir?’ he’d asked.

  Burgoyne had smiled. ‘You are the only one with experience, Absolute. You are Turnville’s man, after all.’

  His protest that his talents lay in tracking, disguise and perhaps killing but not in codes had gone unheard. He was the spy among them, he must have the answers.

  Not tonight, Jack thought as he sat, stared again at the dots, letters and numbers in three lines. They had to be words, but they did not form themselves into anything resembling a readable pattern:

  Jack had only figured out two things and neither really helped. Firstly, that since there were two ‘L’s’ in the second line, what he’d taken to be a small ‘l’ was actually the number ‘one’. Secondly, he could only hope Spanish was like English in the order of its most common letters because then ‘2 dot’ that appeared five times would be the letter ‘E’.

  Numbers one to four were repeated, as were the same four letters: H, L, R, N. He’d tried separating them out, remixing them in a different order, scattering them at random over a page. Nothing leapt out at him. He’d found three handkerchiefs in the room where he’d found the code, a different shape cut out of each of them – a wine bottle, a cross, an hourglass – but these masks, laid upon the charred paper, illuminated nothing.

  He tried one again, just in case, then threw it aside. Temptation arose. The Spanish officer who he’d caught trying to burn this page first – thus testifying to its primary importance, Jack felt – was their prisoner. He could not speak because Jack’s blow had broken his jaw, but some felt – Major Gonzalo prominent among them – that he could be ‘coerced’ into writing answers to questions. Burgoyne, supported by Jack, had disagreed. Leaving distaste aside, the man was obviously a proud Castilian and would probably be hard to break down. He was also clever enough, presumably, to give answers that would appear to elucidate but would, in fact, confuse.

  No, it was down to him. He laid out a fresh sheet of paper. Four numbers. Four winds? Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Seasons? Four corners, as on a billiard table? He wrote them as corners of a square. Then he copied the four letters in a line in the middle and stared at the result. What was it about the letters that seemed odd? ‘H’ was number eight in the alphabet, ‘L’ number twelve, a gap of four. ‘N’ was just two away, ‘R’ four on again.

  Did they have to be written on the same line?

  He drew them in a cross instead …

  He leaned in, his face flushing, another idea occurring. Swiftly, he drew a grid, filled in the letters of the alphabet beside the ones he had and suddenly the whole alphabet was there before him in five rows of five, only the ‘Z’ missing. Then he placed the numbers at each of the grid’s corners.

  He looked again at the coded message.

  What did the dots mean?

  It was luck, when he saw it; or perhaps the patterns were just clearer now in his head. But, having decided that 2 . must be ‘E’, he put one dot in the E box – corner 2 – then a single dot in each of the other corner boxes. Then he began a frantic dotting, counting down from the top numbers, up from the bottom ones, until all the boxes had both letters and one, two or three dots in them, all except the ones that could not be reached directly from a number, vertically, horizontally or diagonally – H, L, N, R:

  He looked at the grid again, then took another single number and dot that occurred in the code – 1. – which had to be ‘A’, and, taking the ‘l’ diagonal he saw that 1.. would be ‘I’. So if a single number led to a diagonal, a double digit would give the horizontal or vertical …

  By God, he had it! Chuckling, he matched the code on the burnt paper to his grid and wrote out the words:

  Hijo de Hibern

  Galilee

  Velha

  ‘Hijo’ he knew meant ‘son’ because he had asked Major Gonzalo what he’d been called by the Spanish officer just before he’d hit him – ‘Hijo de puta’ or ‘Son of a whore’. So this was ‘Son of Hibern?’ A place in Spain? Like Galilee was a place in the Holy Land and Velha sounded like a place in Portugal?

  Then he saw it, at first in complete shock, then with a slowly widening smile. He picked up his almost untouched wine glass, drained it in one, then reached for his red coat.

  Burgoyne was not asleep, but he had company. It took some minutes after his most reluctant adjutant went in before his door opened and a large, dark-haired lady of middling years scurried out, a dressing gown clutched at the neck and, without looking at Jack, went into a room opposite. It seemed that his commander had not merely commandeered the largest house in Castelo de Vide but its owner as well.

  The Colonel sat at a small writing table. He wore a shirt and breeches though Jack noticed that the latter were not fully buttoned up. ‘Is this vengeance, young man, for keeping you from the celebrations?’ he said, an eyebrow raised.

  ‘Not at all, sir.’ Jack was careful not to smile. ‘But your orders were to inform you the first moment I cracked the code.’

  ‘I believe I said first thing in the morning,’ came the muttered reply. ‘Very well, show me.’

  Jack took both the original, singed page and his reworking, and laid them on the table. ‘I believe, sir,’ he said eagerly, ‘that this type of code is known as a “pigpen”. I was able to deduce that it all fitted on a grid and that letters, numbers and dots combined to—’

  ‘Absolute!’ Burgoyne put a hand to his head. ‘One of the reasons I bought my promotions so swiftly was precisely so I would not have to learn about such things but could instead assign to them bright young fellows like yourself.’ He smiled. ‘Précis, sir. Précis.’

  ‘Sir.’ Jack pointed to his decoding. ‘Perhaps you would just read it.’

  ‘ “Hijo”, I know, means “son”. Lady of the house has three, apparently, and she’d be so grateful if I’d take one on my staff.’ He looked up. ‘Gratitude’s a marvellous thing. So’s hope.’ He looked down, mumbled the other words. ‘Not much other sense. Biblical reference, you think? What the devil’s “Hibern”?

  ‘Short for “Hibernia”, perhaps?’

  ‘Ireland. So, “
son of Ireland”.’ But “Velha” and “Galilee”?’

  ‘The first I can tell you, sir. I ran into Major Gonzalo,’ “Ran into” was not quite right. Stumbled over his legs where he lay drunk in a doorway, ‘and he said that Velha was probably Villa Velha, an area to the west.’

  Burgoyne reached for a map of Portugal, spread it out. ‘There,’ he pointed, ‘back towards Lisbon.’ He pursed his lips. ‘The plain of Villa Velha’s on this side of the River Tagus. When the Spanish recover from our raid on Valencia de Alcántara and finally invade Portugal – they are massing here, here and here,’ he jabbed his finger down three times, ‘we shall retire to the opposite bank to hold them.’ He looked again to Jack’s scrawl. ‘I am still at a loss as to the inland sea.’

  ‘I, too, sir.’ Jack allowed himself a smile. ‘But I do know a son of Ireland.’

  Burgoyne tipped his head. ‘What? Your Jacobite fellow? Wouldn’t that be too much of a coincidence?’

  ‘Possibly. But why would a Spanish general, poised to invade Portugal, order his adjutant to destroy this document first? Unless it was of great import?’

  ‘Hmm. We could ask him if he wasn’t on his way to prison in England.’ Burgoyne was staring at the map again. ‘Well, all will become clearer reasonably soon. Within a month anyway. Because our line of retirement to the Tagus will take us very close to the plain of Villa Velha, if not directly across it. And since all British forces will be doing the same, we should finally be able to contact those two Irish regiments – Armstrong’s and Traherne’s.’ He looked up. ‘Perhaps then, young Absolute, you truly will have to keep your eyes swivelled in both directions.’

  There had been many times on this campaign when he’d dreamed of plunging into water, but those torrid August days were long gone. Besides, the river before him presented no cool green waves rushing to a Cornish beach, but an expanse of dullest brown, swirling with uprooted bushes and the other detritus of autumn. Jack was sure he’d spent colder Octobers in Canada. But he’d never been this wet for this long. The fighting retreat before the Spanish Army had admitted only the briefest of pauses, occupied with the feeding of horses and of men. They’d had the meagrest of shelters for nearly a week now. And it had been raining, without let-up, for three.