CHAPTER 11
It could have been winter, so cold and misty was the plateau. At this height the mist was low cloud that threatened rain. Only the dripping leaves of the few stunted birches witnessed that summer had some to this high, strange, chilling place.
Sharpe had not slept. He had planned the fight he knew he would face once El Matarife discovered that he had not passed his sentinels at the two bridges. In the dawn he had scouted the plateau’s edge, peering through the mist down the tumbled, precipitous slopes of the great hill.
Sharpe had not brought Angel all the way to the flat summit of the great hill. He had left the boy on the track with both rifles and careful, painstaking instructions.
Angel had been worried. `It’s a holy place, sehor.’
`Trust me, Angel, just trust me.’
Sharpe had climbed to the plateau with the two horses, and with the fear that this dreadful, desperate deed that he planned could all be for nothing. He would fight Partisans, he would offend the Church, and ail for a woman who might not have the answers to save his career and solve Hogan’s mystery.
Angel had wished him luck, but the boy had been distressed. `We have to fight them, senor?’ He spoke of the Partisans.
`To defeat France, yes.’ It was a lie, or at the very least Sharpe did not know if it was a truth. Yet Angel, who trusted the English, had believed him.
Now, as the dawn showed the grass wet on the plateau, and as the grey clouds sifted through the small trees, Sharpe galloped towards the convent. He was alone in the high place.
The Convent of the Heavens deserved its name. It was built at the highest point of this steep range of hills, a building that clung alarmingly to the edge of a precipice. It had been built in the days when the Muslims hunted the Christians north, when the prayers of Christians had to be offered in high places that could be defended by Christian swords. The walls of the convent showed no windows. They were grey like the rocks, stained by the rain, a fortress of women. There was only one door in its prison-like walls.
Sharpe knocked and waited. He knocked again, then hammered the door with a stone, making sparks fly from the square-headed iron nails that studded the great planks of wood. He could hear the sound reverberating within the building, but no answer came.
He waited. The mist drifted over the plateau. The two horses, tethered to a great stone, watched him. Their saddles were beaded with moisture.
He kicked the door, cursing, then found a larger stone that he smashed onto the timber, smashed again, until the hollow echoes were like the sound of a battery of field artillery in full fight. There was a click.
In one of the door’s two leaves was a small shutter, protected by a rusted iron grille, and the shutter had slid back. He could see an eye staring at him. He smiled and spoke in his most polite voice. `I have come to see La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba.’ The eye blinked, the shutter slid shut, then nothing. He waited.
There was silence from the great building. No bolts were shot back on the door, no footsteps or voices sounded from the far side. For a moment he wondered if the eye beyond the shutter had been a dream, so silent was the grey building. It seemed to have slept here for a thousand empty years and his knocking was an offence against eternity.
He found himself an even larger rock, one that he needed to lift with both hands, and he carried it to the door, measured his swing, and thumped it at the place where the two leaves met. He swung it again and again, seeing the right hand leaf jar back a fraction with each blow, and the noise was huge again, echoing from the hallway within, and he wondered what Patrick Harper would think if he knew that his friend was breaking into a convent. Sharpe could almost hear the Ulster voice. `God save Ireland.’