‘And if I was a French officer’ – Sharpe was thinking out loud -‘the first place I would look for anything hidden -guns, food, anything – is a good fresh grave.’
Harper nodded. He was no longer smiling. ‘And if you found the corpse of a British officer, sir? What would you do then?’
The Sergeant had gone way ahead of Sharpe’s thinking and he let the idea thread itself into his suspicions. Where the hell was Hardy? If the French found a British officer in a grave they would not disturb it; they would replace the earth, even say a prayer. He whistled softly. ‘But -‘
‘I know, sir.’ Harper interrupted him. This was the Sergeant’s theory, well thought over, and he raced ahead with it. ‘There’s the funny thing. They won’t bury you heathen English in holy ground in case you spoil it for us good Catholics. But would you think sixteen thousand gold coins might overcome their fear of eternal perdition, sir? I’d be tempted. And you can always move the body when you dig up the gold, and with two Hail Marys you’re back on the golden ladder.’ Harper nodded in satisfaction with his theory. ‘Did you talk, sir, with the girl’s father?’
‘Yes, but he knew nothing.’ Which was not true, Sharpe reflected. He had talked with Cesar Moreno, in the burnt courtyard of the widower’s house, and the grey head bowed when Sharpe had asked what had happened to Captain Hardy. ‘I don’t know.’ Moreno had looked up, almost pleading with Sharpe not to go on.
‘And the gold, sir?’
Teresa’s father had jerked away from Sharpe. ‘The gold! Always the gold! I wanted it to go to Lisbon. El Catolico wants it to go by road! The French have it! If your cavalry had not blundered, Captain, it would be on its way to Cadiz. There is no gold any more.’
There had been a note of desperation in the man’s voice that had made Sharpe want to go on prying, to let the gentle questions release Moreno’s honesty, but El Catolico, Teresa with him, had appeared at the gate and the chance had gone. Yet now Harper was offering a new thought, one that Sharpe would never have found for himself: that the grave in the walled cemetery held the treasure, and, like the mysterious old mounds in the British countryside, the body was surrounded by gold. There was another superstition attached to those mounds, one Sharpe remembered well, that each was guarded by a sleeping dragon, a dragon that would wake at the first scrape of a thieving pickaxe. The dragon would have to be risked.
Sharpe let the idea take wings, spin itself into the air, a fragile sequence of possibilities on which to suspend the hope of victory. Could the gold be in Casatejada? So easy? That the gold was in the graveyard, sitting there till the armies had moved on, and El Catolico could dig it up without fear of French patrols or zealous exploring officers. Then why had El Catolico encouraged Kearsey to stay on with the Partisans? Or, he remembered, invited Sharpe to stay with his rifles? Yet if Harper were right, if his own suspicions were right, then the grave had been dug on a Sunday, which was against the law of the Church, and in it were the gold and the body of Josefina’s lover. And perhaps El Catolico had invited them to stay with the Partisans because that only lessened their suspicions, and because El Catolico had all the time in the world and was in no particular hurry to dig up the coins. It was all too fantastic, a delicate web of frail surmise, but he knew that if he did not take a decision, then all would be irrevocably lost. He laughed out loud, at the absurdity of it all, at his worries that he might cause himself trouble if he were in the wrong, as if that mattered against the outcome of the summer’s campaign. Jose looked round, startled by the sudden laugh.
‘Captain?’
‘We must take a rest. Ten minutes.’
The men sat down gratefully, stripped off their packs, and lay full length on the ground. Sharpe walked back along the line to talk to the wounded men who were being helped by their comrades. He heard Batten grumbling and stopped.