Around midmorning a priest came out of the alley door. He was tall and lantern-jawed. He dropped a coin in Sharpe’s bowl and at the same time gave a command that Sharpe did not understand, but the priest pointed to the church and Sharpe assumed he had been ordered to move out of the alleyway. He picked up his bowl and shuffled toward the church, and there saw trouble waiting.
Three beggars had taken his place on the steps. All were men. At least half the male beggars in Cádiz were cripples, survivors of battles against the British or the French. They were limbless, scarred, and ulcerous. Some wore placards with the names of the battles where they had been wounded, while others proudly wore the remnants of their uniforms, but none of the three waiting men was crippled or wore uniforms, and all three were watching Sharpe.
He had trespassed. The beggars in London were as organized as any battalion. If a man took post where other beggars had their usual pitches, then the man would be warned, and if he did not heed the warning, the beggar-lords would be summoned from their lairs. Stinking Moses had always worked the church of St. Martins in the Fields, and he had once been robbed by two sailors who had kicked him across the street to the door of the workhouse, where they had taken his coins, then taken his place on the church steps. Next morning Stinking Moses was back at the church and two corpses were found in Moons Yard.
These three men were on a similar mission. They said nothing as Sharpe emerged from the alley, but just surrounded him. One took his bowl and the remaining two held his elbows and hurried him westward until they reached a shadowed archway. “Madre de Dios,” Sharpe mumbled. He was still crouching as though he had a wounded spine.
The man holding the bowl demanded to know who Sharpe was. Sharpe did not understand the man’s fast and colloquial Spanish, but guessed that was what the man wanted to know, just as he guessed what was coming next. It was a knife that came from under the man’s ragged cloak and flashed up toward Sharpe’s throat. At that moment the apparently crippled beggar turned into a soldier. Sharpe seized the man’s wrist and kept the knife moving upward, but now toward its owner, and Sharpe was smiling as the blade slid easily into the soft flesh under the man’s chin. He gave the wrist one last jerk so that the knife went through the man’s tongue into his palate. The man made a mewling noise as blood spilled from his lips. Sharpe, who had easily freed his right arm, now pulled his left free as the man on that side launched a massive kick and Sharpe seized the boot and pushed it upward so that the man flew back, to fall hard on the cobbles, his skull making a sound like a musket butt dropped on stone. Sharpe elbowed the third man between the eyes. It had taken seconds. The first man was staring with wide eyes at Sharpe, who now drew his pistol. The man who had fallen was now on his knees, groggy. The second man had blood pouring from his nose and the pistol was pointing at the leader’s groin. Sharpe cocked the gun and, in the archway, the sound was ominous.
The man, with his own knife still pinning his mouth shut, put down the bowl. He held his hands out as if to ward off trouble. “Bugger off,” Sharpe said in English and, though they did not understand, they obeyed. They backed away slowly until Sharpe leveled the pistol, and then they ran.
“Bugger,” Sharpe said. His head was throbbing. He touched the bandage and flinched from the pain. He crouched and scooped up the coins. When he stood, there was a heartbeat and he felt faint, so he leaned at the archway’s side and looked up, because that seemed to alleviate the pain. There was a cross incised into the keystone of the arch. He stared at it until the pain receded. He put away the pistol, which, carelessly, he was still holding, though the arch was deep enough to hide him from the few pedestrians who passed. He noticed weeds growing at the foot of the gates, which were secured by a big old-fashioned ball padlock, like the one that had guarded the Marquesa’s boathouse. This padlock was rusted. He went out into the street and saw that the building’s windows were shuttered and barred. A watchtower rose above the building, and more weeds grew between the tower’s stones. The building was abandoned and no more than forty paces from Nuñez’s house. “Perfect,” he said aloud, and a woman leading a goat on a length of rope made the sign of the cross because she thought he was mad.
It was close to midday. He spent a long time searching the streets for the merchant he wanted, and had to bundle the filthy cloak and hat under his arm before going into the shop, where he bought a new padlock. The lock had been made in Britain and had wards inside the steel case to protect the levers from picks. The shopkeeper charged him too much, probably because his customer was English, but Sharpe did not argue. The money was not his, but had been given him by Lord Pumphrey from the embassy’s cash box.
He went back to the miraculous crucifix and settled on the steps under its stone canopy. He knew the three men would be back, or two of them would be back, but not until they had rousted up reinforcements, and he reckoned that gave him an hour or two. A dog investigated the interesting smells of his borrowed cloak, then pissed against the wall. Women came and went to the church and most dropped small coins into his bowl. Another beggar, a woman, whined at the far side of the steps. She tried to engage Sharpe in conversation, but all he would say was “Mother of God,” and she abandoned her attempts. He just watched the house and wondered how he could ever hope to steal anything from inside, if indeed, the letters were even there. The place was plainly well guarded, and he suspected that the front door and the ground-floor windows had been blocked. A monk had been calling house to house, probably collecting for charity, and the man had hammered unavailingly on the door until the lantern-jawed priest had appeared from the alleyway. He shouted at the monk to go away. So the front door could not be opened, and that suggested it had been barricaded, as had the two barred windows. The French mortars fired twice more, but neither of the shells came anywhere near the street where Sharpe was waiting. He sat on the steps until the streets emptied as folk went for their siesta, then he shuffled back to the abandoned building where the three men had tried to rob him. He cracked the ball padlock with a loose cobblestone, unthreaded the chain, and went inside.
He found himself in a small cloistered courtyard. One part of the cloisters had collapsed and the stonework of the rest was scorched. There was a small chapel to one side and something had plunged through its roof and burned everything inside. A French mortar shell? Except, as far as Sharpe could see, the big French mortars did not have the range to reach this far into the city and, besides, this damage was old. There was mold growing on the scorch marks and weeds between the flagstones of the chapel floor.
He climbed the watchtower steps. The city’s skyline was punctuated by the towers, close to two hundred of them, and Sharpe supposed they had been built so merchants could watch for their ships beating in from the Atlantic. Or perhaps the first of them had been built when Cádiz was young, when the Romans had garrisoned the peninsula and watched for Carthaginian pirates. Then the Moors had taken Cádiz and they had watched for Christian raiders, and when the Spaniards at last took the city for themselves they had watched for English buccaneers. They had called Sir Francis Drake el Draco, and the dragon had come to Cádiz and burned most of the old city, and so the towers had been rebuilt, tower after tower, because Cádiz was never short of enemies.