honey and drink cold, cold wine on hot, hot days.’
He smiled. ‘Which is why you want your wagons?’
‘Which is why I want my wagons.’
‘And that’s why the Church arrested you?’
She nodded. She closed her eyes again. ‘They arranged it all. Luis had no one to leave his money to but me, and they found the bloody will and the clause which said they’d get it all if I became a nun. Simple.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘It’s rather clever of them.’
‘So why did you write the letter?’
She waved a hand airily. ‘Oh, Richard!’ She looked at him and sighed impatiently. ‘They had to have Luis dead, didn’t they? They told me they wanted him punished, I don’t know why. I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t think you’d mind killing him. He never was much use to anyone.’ She smiled at him. ‘I never thought it would get you into trouble darling. Truly! I’ll write you a letter for Arthur, telling him you’re innocent. What a lot of trouble you went to!’ She frowned again, scratching at the grey shift.
‘Helene.’
She looked at him, struck by the seriousness in his voice. She hoped that he was not going to question her lies, she was too tired. ‘Richard?’
‘It isn’t the wool.’
‘What isn’t the wool?’
‘Your scratching.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
He gestured at the discarded fur cloak she had taken from the dead Partisan. ‘You’ve got guests.’
She stared at him suspiciously. ‘Guests?’
‘Fleas.’
‘Christ!’ She sat up with sudden energy and hauled the shift above her knees. She frowned at her bared skin. ‘Fleas?’
‘Probably.’ He looked at her thighs, wondering why she had lied to him. He was sure that she had, he was certain that there was more to the letter she had written to her husband than the mere request of a church that wanted her riches, yet he sensed that he would have to accept her explanation because he was not clever enough to get the real truth from her.
She twitched the shift higher, peering at her legs. ‘God and hell and damnation! Fleas? I can’t see any.’
‘You won’t.’
She pushed the shift down. ‘I’ll never get rid of them!’
‘You will.’
‘How?’
‘The same as the rest of us. A piece of soap.’
‘Just wash them away?’
He grinned. ‘No.’
Someone knocked on the trapdoor that was the entrance to the room. Sharpe unbolted it, hauled it up, and the innkeeper’s wife pushed a great tin bath towards him. He took it from her and saw the buckets of water steaming at the ladder’s foot. ‘You have towels?’
‘Si, senor.’
Sharpe saw Angel by the fire at the end of the inn’s main room. The boy stared forlornly at Sharpe, jealous that the Rifle officer was in La Marquesa’s room. ‘And I want soap.’
‘Si, senor.’
La Marquesa was sitting, legs apart, on the edge of the bed. ‘What do I do with the soap?’
‘You dampen a corner, chase the fleas and dab them with it. They stick to the soap. It’s twenty times faster than trying to catch them with your fingers.’ He pulled up the first bucket and poured it into the tin bath.
She stared at him in disbelief. ‘What if they go to my back?’
Sharpe laughed. ‘The innkeeper’s wife will help you. She doesn’t want fleas in the bed.’ Privately he would be surprised if there weren’t fleas already in the bed, though it was possible, this being the inn’s only proper bedroom, that it was clean.
‘That woman?’
‘Why not?’
‘Christ, Richard! I don’t want her to know I’ve got fleas! You’ll have to do it.’ She shrugged. ‘You’ve seen it often enough before.’
He poured another bucket. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? A rescuer’s reward? Isn’t that why knights rode around rescuing maidens? Only they called it the Holy Grail which is a nicer name than some I’ve heard.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
She laughed at his smile. ‘I missed you. I often wondered what you were doing. I imagined you scowling through life, scaring all the rich young officers.’ She made a face at him. ‘I don’t even have a comb, let alone a brush! Is that all the water they’re giving me?’
‘There’s more coming.’
‘Thank God for that.’ She leaned back on the bed. ‘I could sleep for a month. I never want to see a bloody horse again:‘
Sharpe lifted more buckets into the room. ‘You’ll have to ride one tomorrow.’
‘No I don’t!’
‘I could leave you for El Matarife.’
‘He couldn’t make me more sore than this.’ She turned her head and watched him through the billows of steam. ‘I was sorry about your wife, Richard.’
‘Yes.’ He did not know what else to say to such abrupt sympathy.
She shrugged. ‘I can’t say I’m sorry about Luis. It doesn’t seem real, somehow, being a widow.’ She laughed softly. ‘A rich widow, if that bastard doesn’t steal everything.’
‘The Inquisitor?’
‘The bloody Inquisitor. Father Hacha. Is it ready?’
‘Just the towels.’
He took the thin linen cloths from the woman downstairs and closed the trapdoor. ‘Your bath, ma’am.’
‘You make a bloody awful lady’s maid, Richard.’
‘I think I’m relieved to hear that.’
‘Let it cool a bit. I don’t fancy being scalded as well as flea-bitten and sore.’ She sat on the side of the bed, her chin cupped in her hands, and looked at him. ‘What do we do now, Richard?’
‘What do you want to do.’
‘I want to go to Burgos.’
He felt disappointed. He had somehow, and he knew stupidly, hoped that she would come back to the army with him. ‘If the French are still there,’ he said dubiously.
She shrugged. ‘Wherever they are, that’s where I want to be. Because wherever they are, that’s where the wagons are.’
‘Won’t they arrest you again?’
She shook her head. ‘The Church can’t do it twice.’ She was thinking of General Verigny. ‘I won’t let the bastards do it twice.’ She reached over and put a hand in the water. ‘You’ve got the soap?’
‘Ready and willing, ma’am.’
She grinned, then crossed her arms to draw the shift over her head. She laughed at his expression, then pulled the grey wool up and over her head. ‘I’m cold.’
‘Nonsense. Just stand in the bath.’
For ten minutes, to unseemly laughter, he hunted her skin. She complained that it tickled as he explored for the fleas, dabbed them onto the soap, then pinched them between his fingernails, and by the time the last flea had been found she insisted on searching him for fleas and by the time she had done that she was on the bed, cursing the raw skin of her thighs, and his face was in her hair and her arms were on the’ scars where he had been flogged so long ago. She kissed his cheek. ‘Poor Richard, poor Richard.’
