The Captains put down their wine cups, buttoned their jackets and pulled their belts into place. One, a plump young man, frowned because the Colonel had shouted at them in front of the grinning privates.
The Colonel let his horse walk two steps closer to the pair of Captains. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Here, sir?’ The taller, thinner Captain smiled. ‘Just visiting, sir.’
‘Just visiting, eh?’ The face twitched again. The Colonel had a strangely long neck hidden by a cravat that he pinned high on his throat. ‘Just the two of you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Lady Farthingdale, sir,’ added the plump one.
‘And Lady Farthingdale, eh?’ The Colonel mimicked the Captain’s plummy voice, then he screamed at them in sudden vehemence. ‘You’re a bloody disgrace, that’s what you are! I hate you! Christ’s belly, I hate you!’
The street was suddenly silent in the winter sunshine. The soldiers that had gathered either side of the Colonel’s horse grinned at the two Captains.
The taller Captain wiped the spittle flung from the Colonel’s mouth offhis red jacket. ‘I must protest, sir.’
‘Protest! You puking horror! Smithers!’
‘Colonel?’
‘Shoot him!’
The plump Captain grinned, as if a joke had been made, but the other flung an arm up, flinched, and as Smithers, grinning, levelled and fired his musket so did the Colonel bring out an ornate chased pistol and shoot the plump Captain in the head. The shots echoed in the street, the smoke drifted in two distinct clouds above the fallen bodies, and the Colonel laughed before standing in his stirrups. ‘Now, lads, now!’
They cleared the inn first, stepping over the corpses whose blood was spattered on the lintel of the door, and the muskets crashed in the building, bayonets hunted the men into corners and killed them, and the Colonel waved the hundred men who had been waiting at the eastern end of the village into the street. He had not wanted to start this quickly, he had wanted to get half his men up to the Convent first, but these bloody Captains had forced his hand and the Colonel screamed at them, urged them on, and led half his force towards the big, square, blank-walled Convent.
The women in the Convent had not heard the shots fired five hundred yards to the east. The women were crowded in the upper cloister, waiting their turn to shuffle into the chapel on their knees, and the first they knew that the war had at last come in its horror to Adrados was when the red-coated men appeared in the gateway, bayonets levelled, and the screaming began.
Other men were clearing the village houses, one by one, while yet more streamed across the valley towards the castle. The Spanish garrison had been drinking in the village, only a handful were at their posts, and they assumed that British uniforms belonged to their allies and further assumed that these British soldiers could explain the uproar in the village. The Spaniards watched the redcoats come across the rubble of the castle’s fallen east wall, shouted questions at them, and then the muskets fired, the bayonets came, and the garrison died in the mediaeval ramparts. One Lieutenant killed two of the redcoats. He fought with skill and fury, drove more of the invaders back, and he escaped over the fallen wall and ran through the thorn bushes to the watchtower on its hill to the east. He hoped he would find a handful of his men there, but he died in the thorns, shot by a hidden marksman, and the Spanish Lieutenant never knew that the men who had captured the watchtower were dressed not in British red, but in French blue. His body rolled under a thorn bush, crushing the old brittle bones of a raven left by a fox.
There were screams in the street. Men died who tried to protect their homes, children screamed as their fathers died, as their homes were forced open. The musket shots dotted the breeze with small white clouds.
More men came from the east, men in uniforms as varied as the Battalions that had fought for Portugal and Spain in the four years of war in the Peninsula. With the men came women and it was the women who killed children in the village, shooting them, knifing them, keeping only those who could work. The women squabbled over the cottages, arguing who would have what, sometimes crossing themselves as they passed a crucifix nailed on the low stone walls. It did not take long to destroy Adrados.