`Carry on, Sergeant.’ The words came out as a croak.
The crowd gasped, then cheered.
The Provosts pulled the ladder from beneath the doomed man.
For a second the booted feet stayed on the falling rung, then they, slipped off, he dropped, and the rope jerked tight. He bounced, dropped again, and then was swaying and turning from the high hook. His body seemed to arch as he dangled. His feet flailed the air, kicked the wall, and he twisted so that his unhooded face stared at the packed plaza.
The eyes bulged, the tongue pushed at the lips, the neck was grotesquely stretched to the tilted head. The Spanish watched in fascination. He jerked again, fighting upwards as if for air, and then the English Sergeant jumped up, caught one of the man’s ankles, and jerked his weight down.
The extra weight snapped his neck. The Sergeant let go of the man’s ankles and slowly, as the body swung, the legs drew themselves up a few inches. He was dead.
A coffin waited on the wagon bed; pine boards, rough planed, nailed together. The body was cut down. The hair had been smeared white by the limewash as the body thrashed in death.
They took the boots from the corpse, but nothing else was worth saving. They lifted him into the coffin, but he was too tall for the box and so the Sergeant took a musket from one of his men and smashed the butt down, sweating and grunting, smashed again, and the broken shinbones let the legs be forced inside. The lid was nailed shut.
Wellington stared at the whole thing with distaste. When it was done, when the Spanish Battalions were being marched from the plaza and the pine box was being carried away, he turned his cold eyes on the assembled officers `That’s over, gentlemen. Perhaps we can now get on with this war?’
They filed silently from the room. The murder of the Marques had failed to split the British and Spanish. The Generalissimo had made his blood sacrifice to keep the alliance alive and now there was a war to fight.
By a roadside, beneath the high mountains where the wolves roamed between grey rocks, they buried the broken-legged corpse. The Provosts heaped rocks over the shallow grave to stop predators digging up the body, and then they left it without any marker. That night a peasant put a nailed cross on the spot, not out of reverence, but to frighten the protestant spirit and keep it underground. The Inquisitor and El Matarife, riding north and east, passed the grave. The Slaughterman reined in. `I should have watched him die.’
`It was better that no one saw you, Juan.’
The Slaughterman shrugged. `I’ve never seen a man hanged.’
The Inquisitor looked incredulous. `Never?’
`Never.’ El Matarife sounded ashamed.
`Then find one and hang him.’
`I will.’
`But first look after our next business.’ The priest put spurs to his horse. `And hurry!’
They carried papers that would pass them through the British and French lines, and they carried news that would end this war and restore Spain to its old glory. The Inquisitor gave thanks to God and hurried on.
CHAPTER 8
The valley was a pass through the mountains. It was high. From its western rim, where it spilt down to a river far, far beneath, a man could see into Portugal. The hills of the Tras os Montes, the `land beyond the mountains’, looked like purple-blue ridges that became dimmer and more indistinct until the horizon was a mere blur like a smear of dark water colour on a painter’s canvas.
The sides of the valley were thick with thorn. The blossoms were white in the sunlight. The road, that climbed the steep pass and went through the high valley, was edged with yellow ragwort that the Spanish called St James’s grass. The pasture at the valley bottom was close cropped by sheep and rabbits. Ravens nested on stone ledges, foxes hunted the thorn’s margins, while wolves roamed the rock strewn hills that barred the sky in a jagged barrier.
There was a village in the high valley, but it was deserted. The doors of the cottages had been torn from their hinges and burned by one of the armies that fought in Spain.