Sherrilyn, the last to cross the ladder, jumped off its last rung, turned, and pushed it down into the street. Covering her, Donald fired his shotgun at the distant belvedere, jacked another round into the chamber, jerked his head at the knotted line running down the front of the church. “You first,” he said.
“No: it’s my-”
“Sherrilyn, you’ve been first in and last out the whole way. Now give it a rest: git.” He fired another round at the belvedere; a short scream suggested that his shot had found its mark.
Sherrilyn started down the rope, feeling like some target at the country fair: Step right up and try your luck! Shoot the teacher off the rope! Three tries a dollar!
George, just below her, had stopped in mid-descent, looking-no, staring-down the street that ran the length of the western edge of the insula Mattei. The cords stood out on his suddenly flushed neck as he screamed, “Juliet! Juliet! ”
Sherrilyn turned, looked up the street, caught sight of a Spanish horseman, the scattering rioters, the litter of bodies, the distant but approaching Spanish infantry-and somehow, framed by it all, she saw the Spanish cavalryman who had shot Juliet gather his horse carefully and then spur it straight at her. He was smiling as he came. Smiling. Smiling as he rode her under, the hooves crushing and splitting and breaking the body that they churned through and over. And when she was a crumbled, barely moving lump of bloody flesh behind him, he turned in the saddle to look at her. And he was still smiling.
“JULIET!” screamed George, who slid down another ten feet, leaped from the rope, and landed off-center. He tumbled, came up like a gymnast and, loping badly, still sprinted in the direction of his stricken wife, screaming, again, “Juliet!”
Owen came out of the courtyard at a sprint, right behind the wounded Piero. He turned as he exited, grabbing a handful of what was left of the doors and pulled them shut: felt the thud as two musket balls hit them a moment later.
Owen turned-and found himself facing a cavalry charge.
Jayzus! “Fire what you have!” he shouted to the clustered Wild Geese. He raised his pistol and started squeezing off rounds. The sustained barrage from their pepperbox revolvers slowed the charge, the riders clearly baffled to encounter so steady a volume of fire from such a small group. But they came on, even so.
The next ten seconds seemed longer than most days Owen had lived through. Caught in a whirl of horses, blazing guns, and falling bodies, there was no time to give orders or even think. Owen dodged, fired, lost his grip on John, fired again, which sent a horse tumbling toward him. He scrambled away, saw a Spaniard loom out of the smoke and chaos, pistol raised, hammer falling. A flash, a boom-and Synnot, who was still close beside him, carrying John with one arm, went down with a bullet through his forehead. Owen brought his own gun to bear, fired back, and missed. But even so, the Spaniard spilled out of his saddle, albeit in the opposite direction from what Owen would have expected.
It made no sense, but Owen had no time to be puzzled; having spent the last three shots in the cylinder, he let the pistol fall on its lanyard, ready to draw steel. But, through the smoke, he saw the last three Spanish cavalrymen had already reversed, leaving five of their number behind. Only now did Owen register the more distant shots he had missed hearing during the melee, and which probably explained the mysterious demise of the last Spaniard he had faced. The rifles of the Hibernians and Harry had come to their aid like angels-angels of death, of course, but angels nonetheless.
He turned, looked for John, and discovered him pinned beneath a horse, inarguably dead. Probably had been from the first shotgun blast that had ripped down through his body. Only sheer animal vitality had kept him going after that.
Owen reached out, took a firm hold on the earl’s traveling cloak, just below the embroidered pattern of the Tyrones, and yanked hard. And again. On the third try, it came free, and clutching it as he waved his remaining men into their retreat, Owen wondered for whom have I taken this cloak? Who is left of the line of the O’Neills who might justly receive it? And if there are none such, then what good is it at all?
For more than a man named John O’Neill had died in Rome that night. Half the hopes of Ireland had expired with him.
Harry sighed, glad to have saved Owen-anyone-out of all this mess. He had just started thumbing fresh rounds into his empty rifle when the figure of a dark-cloaked man-not much more than a speck, since Lefferts was not using the scope-emerged from the ranks of the of the Spanish foot and walked up behind Juliet. For a moment, he stood very still, watching her drag her broken body away. Then, looking first toward George, who had been tackled by the rest of the Wrecking Crew, and next, vaguely in the direction of Harry himself, he took a step forward. The man drew a revolver, large enough to be the one that Lefferts had seen in Frank’s bar, and shot Juliet in the back of the head.
Then the dark-cloaked man stepped back into the ranks of his soldiers. For they were clearly his soldiers; they parted before, and then closed around, him like a sable tide making way for whatever power had conjured it in the first place.
Even as George screamed wordlessly at the now-steadily approaching Spanish infantry, Sherrilyn grabbed both his cheeks, hard, and pulled his face down to look at her. “We need you,” she shouted.
If it wasn’t for the two Hibernians with the lever actions, she was pretty sure they’d all be dead by now. But those long-range rounds had struck down so many of the foot soldiers’ lead rank that they had scattered into the lee of the buildings for cover. Facing this fire immediately after watching their cavalry cut apart by the revolvers of the Wild Geese, the renowned Spanish infantry had apparently decided against making any headlong rushes. Yet.
“George, listen. You have to carry Felix,” she lied. “You’re the only one strong enough. He needs you.”
“Juliet needs me, she-”
“No. She doesn’t. Not anymore. Here’s Felix: carry him.”
Harry stared at the ruin of the plan that he thought, at first, had come together. But instead, it had come apart. The Wild Geese were leap-frogging to the rear in fire teams of three. Sherrilyn had hoisted Felix onto George’s back, who seemed bowed, like a tired draft horse about to drop in its traces. Piero was keeping what was left of the lefferti moving together along the streets that lay between the Spanish and the Crew’s main line of retreat, thereby serving as a flanking screen.
The boy that Harry had sent with Benito to spread the withdrawal orders came pounding back up the stairs. “Signor Lefferts?”
“Yes?”
“You must go.”
“Yeah, I was just about to stroll on home. Where’s Benito?”
The boy made a face. “He got shot. Not killed, though. Not yet, anyway.”
Harry’s jaws tightened.
“Any orders?” the boy asked.
“Orders? For who?”
“Why, for me, sir.”
“Yes. Here are my orders: run like hell. Then get lost. And don’t get found.”
Thomas North looked over at Sean Connal for the fourth time in as many minutes. “That’s too much gunfire,” he opined. “Too much, for too long.”
“So you’ve said. And so I’ve agreed.”
North stood. “Then I’m retasking this force to provide a base of covering fire for a retreat.”
“We need a diversion. If Borja has any forces waiting here in the Trastevere, we’ll need to draw them away from the Crew’s path of retreat. We’ll also need to keep them busy long enough so that they miss detecting and following these boats-or we will never get out of Italy alive.”
“Excellent points. I hope you have an equally excellent plan.”
“It just so happens I do.” North turned to the one lefferto who had been left with them. “You. Are there abandoned houses in the north side of Trastevere?”
“ Si. Many. I know of one near the Via Aurelia-”
“Fine. Now take this. It is an explosive. You understand that? No? Hmm, let’s try a new approach: this box goes BOOM! Now do you understand? Excellent. Take this to the house you mentioned. Light this fuse, like so. And then run away as fast as you can. Do not stop until you hear the boom. Then find a hiding spot, get rid of all your
