“Can you fire a pistol?”
“Aye.”
“Can you wield a blade?”
“Not at the same time.”
“There’s not many who can,” Hawkwood said. “But you know
“This sounds suspiciously as if it might be a private skirmish.”
“Not entirely, but I need someone who won’t get squeamish if it does turn rough. We’ll be looking for a man and a girl. It’s likely the girl wants to be found. The man will not. There’ll be people who’ll want to stop us.”
“People?”
“Hard men with hard reputations. It’s unlikely quarter will be given.”
“How many?”
“Seven possibly.”
“You said we’d have help?”
“Friends of mine. Few in number, but they won’t shy away.”
“Sounds intriguing. Do I get time to think it over and make my decision?”
“You’ll have as long as it takes me to finish my drink.”
Lomax sat back. “God Almighty. You’ve got a bloody nerve!”
“One other thing,” Hawkwood said, nodding at Lomax’s blue coat and scarlet waistcoat. “You won’t need the uniform.”
There was a long silence. Finally Lomax leaned over and cast his good eye into Hawkwood’s glass.
“Best drink up, then,” he said.
18
Sawney, nursing a mug of grog, was re-living his black dream. He was in the Dog, on his own, seated in his usual booth. The pub was moderately full, but Sawney was oblivious to the activity going on around him. He was in the dark cellar again and in his mind’s eye he could see the figures in their beds and he could smell the stench of them and see the fear in their eyes, which, in his dream, had been his own eyes staring back at him. The image faded. He looked down and found that his hand was clenched tightly around the waist of the mug. Beneath the skin, his knuckles gleamed white in the candlelight.
It had been in the Peninsula, close to a village, the name of which escaped him; a sad, dusty little hamlet, hardly deserving of the description. A field hospital had been established in a local monastery. Sawney, as a wagon driver, had been tasked to transport the wounded from the battlefield to the surgeon’s operating table. Thomas Butler, his coconspirator in the resurrection trade, had been working as an orderly, tending to the wounded and preparing them for the ordeal of surgery. It had been Butler who, with contacts back in England, had secured buyers for the teeth and trinkets that Sawney and others prised from the bodies of the dead and dying that lay strewn across the bloodied terrain like discarded pieces of offal. Sawney had been better at it than anyone and because of that it had been Sawney whom Butler had approached with a proposition that went beyond the scavenging of canines and molars. Butler wanted more than teeth recovered, he wanted the bodies of French soldiers; wounded ones, not dead. Sawney was to ask no questions. That way, if anyone were to intervene, Sawney could legitimately say they were being transported to the surgeon for treatment; in the same spirit that French army surgeons tended to British wounded.
Only Sawney hadn’t delivered the bodies to the main hospital wards. Under Butler’s direction, he’d taken them to one of the distant outbuildings, the monastery’s winery.
Sawney wasn’t sure how many French casualties he’d delivered into Butler’s hands. Perhaps a couple of dozen, all told, roughly half of whom had been in a very bad way, with a slim chance of survival.
He had never set foot in the outbuilding; never had reason to. All he did was transport the bodies. That was as far as his responsibilities went. Until the day his curiosity got the better of him.
The heat had been oppressive and the brackish water in Sawney’s canteen had failed to alleviate the dryness in his parched throat. Racking his brain for ways to quench his thirst, it occurred to Sawney that the answer was staring him in the face. The winery.
It stood to reason there’d be booze around somewhere; be it wine or brandy. Probably cellars full of the stuff, wall-to-wall barrels, just waiting to be liberated. Bloody officers had probably been helping themselves already, but the buggers couldn’t have drunk it all. Hell, Sawney thought, even the dregs at the bottom of those barrels would be more palatable than the stuff in his canteen. So he had stepped down from his wagon to explore.
Avoiding the main entrance, he had approached the rear of the building. There, he had found what looked to be a long-disused doorway. At the base of an adjacent wall, there had been a set of wooden trapdoors embedded in a stone surround. They’d reminded Sawney of the kind found outside pubs back home, through which the delivery of ale and spirits were made. Old, bleached by the sun and half-hidden beneath overhanging weeds, they hadn’t looked very promising – indeed, the buildings themselves didn’t look as if they’d been in use for a while – but Sawney, sly and greedy and drawn by the possible proximity of a hidden trove, had pressed on. When he came across the stone stairway his excitement had soared.
He’d chanced upon a stub of candle and the light had given him added confidence. It had taken him a while and it had involved a lot of stumbling around, but Sawney’s suspicions had eventually been proved correct. The winery did have cellars, though what with all the winding passages, dead-ends and stairways the place had seemed more reminiscent of an underground maze than a bodega.
It had been through accident rather than design that he’d finally found himself in the main cellar, after what seemed like hours of wandering in the dark. Drawn down a side passage by a faintly flickering light, he’d emerged from the gloom, thinking he’d struck gold at last, only to discover the place was stocked with neither casks nor corks. In fact, there hadn’t been a barrel in sight, only makeshift beds. And they had all been occupied.
Sawney had become inured to death and corpses and the wounded. Or so he had thought. He’d certainly grown used to the scenes outside the surgeons’ tents, where it wasn’t unknown for men to wait in line for days to receive treatment. That view never altered: blood-spattered uniforms, listless faces, sunken eyes and bloated limbs, all marinated in the sweet, sickly smell of gangrene that hung as heavy as a blanket in the fetid air around them. He remembered the surgeons, stripped down to shirt and breeches, arms and clothing caked with gore as they worked on the laid-out bodies, on tables that were no more than wooden doors supported by wine casks.
He remembered sounds too; the continuous creaking of the wagon wheels, the whimpering of the men as they were transported over terrain that would have tested the agility of a goat, and the constant drone of the flies feasting upon the open sores in swarms as black as coal.
This time it had been different. In that underground room, it hadn’t been the sight of the beds’ occupants, the blood or the nature of their wounds that had unnerved him, or even the low moans of discomfort. At least, not at first. It had been the scream.
It had not been uttered by a man. No human throat could have produced that sound or anything like it. It had been more like the screech of an animal, a fox caught in a snare or some kind of ape. Sawney had seen apes and monkeys in his travels. He’d heard the animals shrieking and clamouring, usually in tussles over food, and the noise in the cellar had been remarkably similar in tone and volume. But even as his mind tried to grapple with that unlikely possibility, he had known deep down that he was fooling himself and that even the most vociferous ape could not have made the ghastly cry.
He had never seen the face of the person holding the knife. All he had seen had been the shape of him, the curve of his shoulder, but the image and that piercing scream, allied to the things he had seen, or thought he had seen, in the other pallets further down the cellar had been enough to make him turn tail and run from the cellar as if the hounds of Hell had been snapping at his heels. Sawney had never referred to the incident, not even to Butler. He’d never returned to that hospital. He’d been assigned other duties, transporting equipment on the long journey to Badajoz. It was only after Hyde had revealed his true identity the previous evening that Sawney realized who the man in the cellar must have been and why he’d had that flashback when Hyde had introduced himself as Dodd. Only in the dream had the figure’s face been revealed. Now he’d seen it for real. Sawney’s life had come full circle.
Sawney raised the mug to his lips and took a sip. It tasted like gunpowder on his tongue. He looked about
