An Act Of Courage

They had been dark days since the taking-prisoner of Hervey. He had seen off the Miguelistas’ half-hearted attempt to overawe the garrison at Elvas. It had been extraordinarily easy, indeed: no more than a display of the gunpowder at his disposal – proving the guns in the bastions, and feux de joie from the walls by the pe do castelo. The Miguelistas and their Spanish friends had not stayed long after that. They had had no siege train: had they truly believed the garrison would desert to them as soon as they showed themselves? Dom Mateo’s chief of staff believed it to have been only a reconnaissance in force, but Dom Mateo himself was more sanguine: he was sure their ruse de guerre, although it had been exposed as one (and Hervey was paying the price), had fatally unnerved the invader. And now that British troops were actually making their way here, he was certain there could be no usurpation from within Elvas or from without. He would have Hervey back in the fortress by the time they arrived, and there would be no diplomatic embarrassment, for the Spaniards could hardly protest against the rescue of a British officer taken on Portuguese soil. Not that he cared one jot about ruffling the feathers of diplomatists; but he did care for the reputation of his friend.

Dom Mateo felt content as he turned the pages of General Folque’s manual. It had been great good fortune indeed that he and Hervey had spent the morning together, a month past, with the Corpo Telegrafico. But then, he had always been of a mind that good soldiers made their own fortune.

When he read the courier’s despatch, half an hour later, Dom Mateo was at once bewildered. Indeed, he was quite dismayed, throwing his arms about in extravagant gestures. ‘There is nothing – nothing but a page observing the habits of the birds in the garden at Badajoz! Is Hervey suffering some derangement, you suppose? Where is the parole? He says nothing at all!’

Laming was engrossed in his own letter.

‘What say you, Colonel?’

‘I . . . I beg your pardon, General: I did not hear.’

‘I said, why is there no parole? No code, nothing!’

Laming smiled wryly. ‘Then his letter to me is all the clearer. Hear, General: he writes, “I am very well treated here and await my release agreeably, although I am not able to read and write as I should wish.” Evidently the code-book has been taken from him.’

‘Then how are we to learn the parole?’

‘Hervey tells me, General. And unless the censor in Badajoz has both a perfect grasp of English and Greek, then he tells me in a code every bit as clever as Folque’s. The password is Napoleon.’

‘Here, let me see.’ Dom Mateo almost seized the letter. He read, his brow furrowing deeper with every line. ‘Where? Where is this code?’

‘There, General,’ replied Laming, pointing to the sentence, and smiling still.

‘ “The word is thus: with but one remove, Joshua, the destroyer of whole cities, was the lion of his people”. What is Joshua to do with it?’

Laming shook his head. ‘Joshua is merely the . . . decoy. You understand “decoy”, General?’

‘Yes, yes, I understand the word right enough. But how is it decoy here?’

‘General, remember that Hervey had to write in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. Talking of Joshua is commonplace enough, I surmise. The code is an acrostic – the term, I imagine, is the same in Portuguese? When we were cornets, we played these games. The true phrase is “Napoleon, the destroyer of whole cities, was the lion of his people”. When Hervey writes “with but one remove, Joshua” he means me to substitute Napoleon for Joshua!’

‘You are certain of this?’

‘I am, General.’

‘But how do you know it is Napoleon who replaces Joshua? I have never read of it! Whose is the saying?’

‘General, I beg your pardon. I did not say: it is a clever play on Greek words.’ He picked up a pen and wrote carefully. ‘Here, sir. You see, by writing “Napoleon”, and then removing the initial letter for each successive word, the sentence is made: Napoleon, the destroyer of whole cities, was the lion of his people.’

NA?O?E?N A??E?N ?O?E?N O?E?N AE?N E?N ?N

Dom Mateo shook his head, quite diverted by the acrostic’s simplicity. A man did not have to be a Greek scholar to appreciate it. ‘Ingenious, Colonel Laming; quite ingenious. My compliments to you, and of course to Major Hervey.’

‘It is schoolboy conceit, General; but then, we were very lately out of school.’ Laming paused, and then pressed home. ‘It is settled, then? Two of your men, Dona Isabella, the corporal and me.’

Dom Mateo looked more resigned than content. ‘It goes hard with me, Colonel Laming, but I must concede you are right. It would indeed be an embarrassment for your government as well as mine if I were discovered in Spain. You will have one of my couriers, and a captain of my own regiment – he was with the Corps of Guides, a proud, excellent fellow.’

Laming was relieved. In truth, the embarrassment might be the greater if he himself were to be discovered, but although he would own that he knew the country not one tenth as well as did Dom Mateo, he still fancied he knew better how to spirit his old friend from the castle at Badajoz. That had been the way of things in the Sixth. ‘Very well, General. And you will give me a man who knows the unguarded crossing?’

‘You may depend on it, Colonel. It is little more than a mule track. We use it frequently. The Spanish cannot watch every mile of the border, even if they have a mind to. The road has never been used by them.’

‘And the courier’s papers are all that will be needed to pass within the town?’

‘I am assured of it. And Dona Isabella has Spanish enough to deal with any official. You will be especially careful of her safety?’

‘I shall have the very highest regard for her safety, General. I should not for one moment contemplate her accompanying us if I believed we might do this without her.’

‘I understand perfectly, Colonel. The Spaniards will be disarmed by her sex, for all that their experience ought to put them on their guard instead.’

‘Deo volente.’

Dom Mateo nodded, and made the sign of the Cross. ‘Deo volente.’

They assembled at two o’clock. Laming was by no means certain that the plan could work with Isabella, let alone without her. There were just too many points at which they could be challenged, and at any one, despite official papers and Isabella’s Spanish, there would be no escape following discovery – not without a deal of bloodshed at least. And if they had to negotiate all these points of challenge on the way to Hervey’s quarters, they would have to do so by return – and with a fugitive. They had their diplomatic papers, and they travelled in plain clothes (borrowed, and strangelooking as these were), but at root it was a plan reliant as much on Spanish ineptness as clever Greek wordplay; Laming had seen enough in the Peninsula to know that ineptness was not a quality which could be relied on. But he perforce wore the mask of command, and he now smiled and waved confidently as they rode out of the headquarters.

They walked for a quarter of an hour, breaking into a trot once they were out of the east gate of the fortress. Dom Mateo’s captain led, then came Laming with Isabella at his side, then the courier – who did not know of the plan, but who would be recognized by the Spanish authorities and therefore assist their progress – and at the rear Corporal Wainwright led a packhorse, its burden less than it appeared, for the animal was the means by which Hervey was to escape. Laming worried that a suspicious sentry might think it too fine an animal to be bearing a load instead of a rider, and might remove the baggage and see a riding- rather than a packsaddle. But he worried too much, he told himself: why should a sentry be suspicious, for a party of travellers must be accompanied by some baggage, and if they could afford to engage a decent packhorse then why should they not? Indeed, he would tell them that it was a spare riding-horse! These were little things, he knew, but they were of the essence: they properly occupied the mind of a man charged with such an adventure – especially when it had been so many years since he had taken to the field.

But no one spoke. The captain of Dom Mateo’s own regiment had some French but little English, in spite of his proud lineage with the Corps of Guides. The courier had nothing but Portuguese and a little Spanish, and Wainwright waited only to be given an order. Isabella seemed wholly absorbed in thoughts of her own. Laming’s thoughts, left to themselves therefore, were becoming increasingly ill composed. What was troubling him now was