“I must see the letters!” Lord Pumphrey called, his voice high.
“You may look at the letters. Come out, my lord. All of you! Come out, bring the gold, and inspect the letters.”
Harper pushed the half-stunned man out into the light. He staggered there, then hurried across the chamber into one of the far passageways. Sharpe was crouching beside Pumphrey. “You don’t move, my lord,” Sharpe said. “Pat, smoke balls.”
“What are you doing?” Pumphrey asked in alarm.
“Getting you the letters,” Sharpe said. He slung the rifle and cocked the captured musket instead.
“My lord!” Montseny called.
“I’m here!”
“Hurry, my lord!”
“Tell him to show himself first,” Sharpe whispered.
“Show yourself!” Lord Pumphrey called.
Sharpe had gone back to the dark passage leading around the outer rim of the chambers. Nothing moved there. He heard the click of Harper’s tinderbox, saw the flame spring up, then the sparking of the fuse of the first smoke ball.
“It is you who want the letters, my lord,” Montseny called, “so come for them!”
The second, third, and fourth fuses were lit. The worms of fire vanished into the perforated balls, but then nothing seemed to happen. Harper edged away from them, as if fearing they would explode.
“You wish me to come and fetch the gold?” Montseny shouted, and his voice reverberated around the crypt.
“Why don’t you?” Sharpe shouted. There was no answer.
Smoke began leaking from the four balls. It started thinly, but suddenly one of them gave a fizzing sound and the smoke thickened with surprising speed. Sharpe picked it up, feeling the warmth through the papier-mache case.
“My lord!” Montseny shouted angrily.
“We’re coming now!” Sharpe called, and he rolled the first ball into the big chamber. The other three balls were spewing foul-smelling smoke now and Harper tossed them after the first, and suddenly the big central crypt was no longer a well-lit place, but a dark cavern filling with a writhing, choking smoke that obliterated the light of the dozen candles. “Pat!” Sharpe said. “Take His Lordship up the stairs. Now!”
Sharpe held his breath, ran to the crypt’s center, and scooped up the package. He turned back to the steps just as a man came through the smoke with musket in hand. Sharpe swept his own musket at him, ramming the muzzle into the man’s eyes. The man fell away as Sharpe ran to the steps. Harper was near the top, holding Pumphrey’s elbow. A musket fired in the crypt and the multiple echo made it sound like a batallion volley. The ball clipped the ceiling over Sharpe’s head, striking off a chip of stone, and then Sharpe was up the steps and Harper was there, waiting for Sharpe, and there were two men with muskets halfway down the nave. Sharpe knew Harper was wondering whether to attack them and so escape out of the cathedral’s main doors.
“Ladder, Pat!” Sharpe said. To go down the nave would be to allow Montseny and his men to fire at them from behind. “Go!” He pushed Pumphrey toward the nearest ladder. “Take him up, Pat! Go! Go!”
A musket fired from the nave. The shot went past Sharpe and buried itself in a pile of purple cloths waiting to decorate the cathedral’s altars during the coming season of Lent. Sharpe ignored the man who had fired, shooting his captured musket down the crypt stairs. Then he took the rifle off his shoulder and fired that as well. He heard men scrambling in the smoke below, heard them coughing. They expected a third shot, but none came because Sharpe had run for the scaffold and was climbing for his life.
CHAPTER 7
SHARPE SCRAMBLED UP THE ladder. A musket fired from the nave, its sound magnified by the cathedral walls. He heard the ball crack on stone and whine off into the transept. Then an enormous crash prompted a shout of alarm from his pursuers. Harper had thrown a block of building stone into the crossing and the limestone shattered there, skittering shards across the floor.
“Another ladder, sir!” Harper called from above and Sharpe saw the second ladder climbing into the upper gloom. Each of the massive pillars at the corners of the crossing supported a tower of scaffolding, but once the four flimsy towers reached the arches spanning the pillars the scaffolding branched and joined to encompass the walls climbing to the base of the dome. Another musket fired and the ball buried itself in a plank, starting dust that half choked Sharpe as he climbed the second ladder that swayed alarmingly. “Here, sir!” Harper reached out a hand. The Irishman and Lord Pumphrey were on the wide stone ledge of the tambour, a decorative shelf running around the middle of the pillar. Sharpe guessed he was forty feet above the cathedral floor now, and the pillar climbed that far again before the scaffolding spread out beneath the dome. There was a window high in the gloom. He could not see it, but he remembered it.
“What have you done?” Lord Pumphrey asked angrily. “We should have negotiated! We didn’t even see the letters!”
“You can see them now,” Sharpe said, and he thrust the packet into Pumphrey’s hands.
“Do you know what offense this will cause the Spaniards?” Lord Pumphrey’s anger was unassuaged by the gift of the packet. “This is a cathedral! They’ll have soldiers here at any moment!”
Sharpe gave his opinion of that statement, then peered over the tambour’s edge as he reloaded the rifle. They were safe enough for the moment because the stone ledge was wide and it protected them from any shots fired from the crossing’s floor, but he guessed their enemies would soon try to climb the scaffold and attack them from the flanks. He could hear men talking below, but he could also hear something odd, something that sounded like battle. It was a booming sound like cannon fire. It crackled, rose, and fell, and Sharpe realized it was the wind tearing at the tarpaulins covering the unfinished roof. A louder grumble overlaid the booming, and that was thunder. Any noise of guns in the cathedral would be drowned by the storm and besides, Montseny had bolted the doors. The priest would send for no soldiers. He wanted the gold.
A volley of musketry cracked and echoed and the balls spattered all around the tambour. Sharpe guessed the shots must have been fired to protect someone climbing a ladder. He looked, saw the shadow on the opposite pillar, aimed the rifle, and pulled the trigger. The man was hurled sideways off the rungs and fell to the floor before crawling into the nave’s choir stalls and so out of sight.
“You have a knife?” Pumphrey asked.
Sharpe gave him his pocketknife. He heard the string being cut, then the rustle of papers. “You want Sergeant Harper to strike a light?” he offered.
“No need,” Pumphrey said sadly. He unfolded a large sheet of paper. Even in the semidarkness above the tambour, Sharpe could see the package had not contained letters, but a newspaper. Presumably El Correo de Cadiz. “You were right, Sharpe,” Pumphrey said.
“Fifteen hundred beans,” Sharpe said, “one thousand five hundred and seventy-five pounds. A man could retire on that. You and me, Pat, we could take the money”—Sharpe paused to bite off the end of a cartridge—“we could sail off to America, open a tavern, live well forever.”
“Wouldn’t need a tavern, sir, not with fifteen hundred guineas.”
“Be nice though, wouldn’t it?” Sharpe said. “A tavern in a town by the sea? We could call it the Lord Pumphrey.” He took a leather patch from his cartridge pouch, wrapped the bullet, and rammed it down the barrel. “But they don’t have lords in America, do they?”
“They don’t,” Lord Pumphrey said.
“So maybe we’ll call it the Ambassador and the Whore instead,” Sharpe said, sliding the ramrod back into place beneath the barrel. He primed and cocked the rifle. No one was moving below, which suggested Montseny was considering his tactics. He and his men had learned to fear the firepower above them, but that would not deter them for long, not when there were fifteen hundred golden English guineas to be won.
“You wouldn’t do that, Sharpe, would you?” Pumphrey asked nervously. “I mean, you’re not planning on taking the money?”
