Halfway down the balcony a huge brass telescope was mounted on a heavy iron tripod. Sharpe walked to it and pushed open a lattice door next to the instrument and saw, as he had guessed, that it pointed toward the night’s battlefield. The wasteland was pale in the moonlight, the fortresses dark, and Sharpe could see the ravine clearly that ran between the San Vincente and the smaller forts. There was the glow of fire tingeing the roofline of the San Vincente’s courtyard and he knew the French were celebrating their victory around the flames, but fearing, too, the next assault. There were other fires, small torches that were hand-held in the wasteland where men searched for the wounded and dead. The French ignored them. Sharpe suddenly shivered. For no reason he remembered the burning of the dead after the assault on Badajoz just a few weeks before. There had been too many bodies to bury so they had been stacked in layers, timber between the stripped corpses, and the fires had burned darkly and he remembered how the corpses on the top layer had sat up in the heat, almost as if they were alive and begging for rescue, and then the corpses below had also begun to bend in the great fire and, as if to blot out the vision, he pulled shut the lattice door with a loud click.
“What are you thinking?” Her voice was husky. He turned and La Marquesa was standing by the table, by a door that had opened silently, and a woman servant was in the doorway offering a shawl. La Marquesa shook her head and the servant disappeared, shutting the door as noiselessly as it had opened. La Marquesa was light in the darkness. Her golden hair seemed glowing to Sharpe, spun with gossamer fine radiance, and her dress was a brilliant white. It left her shoulders and arms bare and he could see the shadows of her collarbones and he wanted to put his hands on that fine, pale skin because she was, in a Palacio of priceless and beautiful objects, the most perfect of them all. He felt clumsy.
“I was told to compliment you on your frock.“
“My dress? I suppose that was Jack Spears?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“He never saw me.” She leaned over the table and Sharpe saw her light a small cigar from the candle. He was amazed. He was used to the women of the army smoking their short clay pipes, but he had never seen a woman with a cigar before. She blew a plume of smoke that drifted up to the lattice. “I saw you, though, both of you. You were glowering at the ballroom, hating it all, and he was wondering where he could find an empty bedroom to take that silly girl. Do you smoke?”
“Sometimes. Not now, thank you.” Sharpe gestured at the spyholes. “Did you see through those?”
She shook her head. “The palace is full of spyholes, Captain. Riddled with secret passages.” She walked towards him, her feet quite silent on the rugs. Her voice seemed different to Sharpe, this was not the same woman who had been excited and enthusiastic at San Christobal. Tonight she spoke crisply, with a confident authority, and all traces of wide-eyed naivete had gone. She sat on a cushioned bench. “My husband’s great-great-grandfather built the Palacio and he was a suspicious man. He married a younger wife, like me, and he feared she would be unfaithful so he built the passages and the peepholes. He would follow her round the building, she in light and he in darkness, and everything she did, he watched.” She told the story as if it was a much-told tale, of interest to the listener, but holding boredom for herself. She shrugged, blew smoke upwards, and looked at him. “That’s the story.”
“Did he see anything he shouldn’t have?”
She smiled. “It’s said she discovered about the passages and that she hired two masons. One day she waited until her husband was in a long tunnel that bends round the library. It has only one entrance.” Her eyes were huge in the dimness. Sharpe watched her, entranced by the line of her throat, the shadows on her skin above the low white dress, by the wide mouth. She chopped down with the cigar. “She gave a signal and the masons nailed the entrance shut and then they laid stones over it. After that she made the servants pleasure her, one by one, two by two, and all the time they could hear the husband screaming and scrabbling beyond the wall. She told them it was rats and told them to keep going.” She shrugged. “It’s just a nonsense, of course, not true. The pride of this house would not allow it, but the people of Salamanca tell the story and certainly the passages exist.”
“It’s a harsh story.”
“Yes. It goes on that she died, strangled by the ghost of her husband, and that will be the fate of any mistress of this house who is unfaithful to her husband.” She glanced up at Sharpe as she said the last words and there was a curious hostility in her expression, a challenge perhaps.
“You say the story isn’t true?”
She gave a crooked, secret smile. “How very indelicate of you, Captain Sharpe.” She drew on the cigar, hardening the red point of the tobacco. “What did Lord Spears tell you about me?”
He was startled by the directness of her question, by the inference that she was commanding him to answer. He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“How very unlike Jack.” She drew on the cigar again. “Did he tell you that I asked him to make you come here?”
“No.”
“I did. Aren’t you curious why?”
Heleaned against the frameof the lattice. “I’m curious, yes.”
“Thank God for that! I was beginning to think there wasn’t a human feeling in your body.” Her voice was harsh. Sharpe wondered what game she was playing. He watched as she tossed the cigar onto the flagstones of the balcony and, as it landed, it showered sparks like a musket pan fired at night. “Why do you think, Captain?”
“I don’t know why I’m here, Ma’am.”
“Oh!” Her voice was mocking now. “You find me on my own, ignoring all my guests, not to mention the proprieties, and there’s a table set with wine, and you think nothing?”
Sharpe did not like being toyed with. “I’m only a humble soldier, Ma’am, unused to the ways of my betters.”
She laughed, and her face suddenly softened. “You said that with such delicious arrogance. Do I make you uncomfortable?”
“If it pleases you to, yes.”
She nodded. “It pleases me. So tell me what Jack Spears whispered to you?” The inflection of command was back in her voice, as if she talked to her postilion.
Sharpe was tired of her games. He let his own voice be as harsh as hers. “That you had low tastes, Ma’am.”
She went very still and tense. She was leaning forward on the bench, her hands gripping its edge, and Sharpe wondered if she was about to shout for her servants and have him thrown out. Then she leaned back, relaxed, and waved a hand at the elegant balcony. “I thought I had rather high tastes. Poor Jack thinks everyone is like him.” Her voice had changed again, this time she had spoken with a soft sadness. She stood up and walked to the lattice, pushing open one of the doors. “That business tonight was a shambles.”
The previous subject seemed to have been forgotten, as if it had never existed. Sharpe turned to look at her. “Yes.”
“Why did the Peer order the attack? It seemed hopeless.”
Sharpe was tempted to say that she had wanted a battle, almost pleaded with Wellington for one, but this new, crisp woman was not someone he wanted to annoy, not at this moment. “He’s always impetuous at sieges. He likes to get them done.”