daylight and he had assumed there would be a man there at night, but suppose that man was still in the cathedral? Or was he just keeping dry and warm inside the house? Sharpe had planned to drop the smoke balls down the chimneys. The smoke would drive whoever was inside the building out to the street. Then Sharpe would drop the shells down to wreak what damage they could. The idea of using the chimneys had come to him when he saw the firewood being carried through the city’s streets, but suppose he could get inside Nunez’s house?
“When this is done, sir,” Hagman asked, “do we go back to battalion?”
“I hope so,” Sharpe said.
“I wonder who’s commanding the company now, sir. Poor Mister Bullen isn’t.”
“Lieutenant Knowles, I should think.”
“He’ll be glad to see us back, sir.”
“I shall be glad to see him. And it won’t be long, Dan. There!” Sharpe had seen a glimmer of light immediately beneath the tower. It showed for a second, then vanished, but told Sharpe that Harper had found a way onto the roof. “Down we go.”
“How’s your head, sir?”
“I’ll live, Dan.”
Sharpe reckoned the flat roofs were a thief’s dream. A man could walk all around Cadiz four stories above the streets, and few of those streets were too wide to be jumped. The storm was just as big a help. The rain and wind would drown any noise, though he still told his men to take off their boots. “Carry them,” he said. Even with the storm the boots would make too much noise on the roofs of the houses between the watchtower and the newspaper.
There were low walls between the roofs, but it took less than a minute to cross them and so discover that there was no sentry on Nunez’s house. There was a trapdoor, but it was firmly bolted on the inside. Sharpe had seen the ladder climbing from the balcony on his first reconnaissance. He gave Perkins his boots, slung his rifle, and climbed down. The ladder went to the side of the balcony so the big wooden shutters covering the door had room to open. The shutters were closed and latched now. Sharpe groped for the place they joined, then put his knife between them. The blade slid easily because the wood had rotted. He found the latch, pushed it up, and one of the shutters caught the wind and swung violently, banging against the wall. The shutters had protected a half- glazed door that began to rattle in the wind. Sharpe put his knife into the gap between the doors, but this wood was solid. The shutter banged again. Break the glass, he thought. Easy. But suppose there were bolts at the foot of the door?
He was about to crouch and push against the foot of the door when he saw a glimmer of light from inside the room. For a heartbeat he thought he had imagined it, then wondered whether it was the reflection of distant lightning on the glass, but the glimmer showed again. It was a spark. He stepped to one side. The light vanished a second time, reappeared, and he reckoned someone inside had been sleeping. They had been woken by the banging of the shutter and now they used a tinderbox to light a candle. The flame burned bright suddenly, then steadied as the candle was lit.
Sharpe waited, knife in hand. The rain was loud on his hat, the same hat he had bought from the beggar. He heard the bolts being drawn. Three bolts. Then the door opened and a man appeared in a nightshirt. He was an older man, in his forties or fifties, and had tousled hair and a bad-tempered face. He reached for the swinging shutter as the candle flickered in the wind behind him. Then he saw Sharpe and opened his mouth to shout. The blade touched his throat. “Silencio,” Sharpe hissed. He pushed the man inside. There was a rumpled bed, clothes heaped on a chair, a chamber pot, and nothing else. “Pat! Bring ’em down!”
The riflemen filled the room. They were dark figures, soaking wet, who now pulled on their boots. Sharpe closed the shutters and latched them. Harris, who spoke the best Spanish, was talking to the prisoner who gesticulated wildly as he spoke. “He’s called Nunez, sir,” Harris said, “and he says there’s two men on the ground floor.”
“Where are the others?” Sharpe knew that there had to be more than two guards.
There was a flurry of Spanish. “He says they went out, sir,” Harris said.
So Montseny had stripped the place of sentries in hope of making an ungodly profit. “Ask him where the letters are.”
“The letters, sir?”
“Just ask him. He’ll know.”
A sly look flickered on Nunez’s face, then an expression of pure alarm as Sharpe turned on him with the knife. He stared into Sharpe’s face and his courage fled. He spoke fast. “He says they’re downstairs, sir,” Harris translated, “with the writer. Does that make sense?”
“It makes sense. Tell him to be quiet now. Perkins, you’re going to stay here and watch him.”
“Tie him up, sir?” Harris suggested.
“And stop his mouth up too.”
Sharpe lit a second candle and carried it into the next room where he saw a flight of stairs going up to the bolted trapdoor. Another flight went down to the second floor where there was a small kitchen and a parlor. A door opened onto the next stairway, which led to one huge storeroom, piled with paper. Light showed from the ground floor. Sharpe, leaving the candle on the stairs, went to the top of the open staircase and saw the press vast and black beneath him, and next to it a table on which playing cards had been discarded. A man was sleeping on the floor, while another, with a musket over his knees, was slouched in a chair. A huge pile of newly printed newspapers was stacked against the wall.
Henry Wellesley had been insistent that Sharpe should do nothing to upset the Spanish. They were prickly allies, he had explained, resentful that the defense of Cadiz needed British troops. “They must be handled with a very light rein,” the ambassador had said. There must be no violence, Wellesley had declared. “Bugger that,” Sharpe said aloud, and hauled back the flint of the rifle. The sound of it made the man in the chair start.
The man began to lift his musket, then saw Sharpe’s face. He put it down and his hands trembled.
“You can come down, lads,” Sharpe called back up the stairs. It was all so easy. Too easy? Except fifteen hundred guineas was a powerful incentive to carelessness and Father Montseny was doubtless still trying to explain the wreckage in the cathedral.
The two men were disarmed. Harper discovered two apprentice printers sleeping in the cellar and they were brought up and put into a corner with the guards while the writer, a wreck of a man with an unkempt beard, was dragged out of a smaller room. “Harris,” Sharpe said, “tell that miserable bugger he’s got two minutes to live unless he gives me the letters.”
Benito Chavez yelped as Harris put a sword bayonet to his throat. Harris forced the wretched man against a wall and started questioning him as Sharpe explored the room. The door that led to the street was blocked up with rough masonry while the back door, which presumably led to the courtyard, was locked with big iron bolts. This meant that Sharpe and his men had the place to themselves. “Sergeant? All that paper on the first floor, throw it down here. Slattery? Keep one of those newspapers”—he pointed to the newly printed editions stacked against the blocked front door—“and scatter the rest. And I want the shells.”
Sharpe put the shells on the bed of the press, then screwed down the platen so they were held as though in a vice. Harper and Hagman were chucking the paper onto the floor and Sharpe pushed crumpled sheets into the gaps between the shells so that the burning paper would light their fuses. “Tell Perkins to bring Nunez down,” Sharpe said.
Nunez came down the stairs and immediately understood what Sharpe intended. He began pleading. “Tell him to be quiet,” Sharpe told Harris.
“These are the letters, sir.” Harris held out a sheaf of papers that Sharpe thrust into a pocket. “And he says there are more.”
“More? So get them!”
“No, sir, he says the girl must have them still.” Harris jerked a thumb at Chavez who was fumbling as he lit a cigar. “And he says he wants a drink, sir.”
There was a half-empty bottle of brandy on the table with the playing cards. Sharpe gave it to the writer, who sucked on it desperately. Hagman was pouring the mix of brandy and lamp oil onto the paper covering the floor. The two remaining smoke balls were by the back door, ready to fill the house with smoke and impede any attempt to extinguish the blaze. The fire, Sharpe reckoned, would gut the whole house. The lead letters, carefully racked in their tall cases, would melt, the shells would destroy the press, and the fire would climb the stairs. The
