02 - Keane's Challenge (34 page)

Ross had tried to coax him out of his depression. ‘I know what it’s like, sir. I was the same when my woman ran off. Course you’re not like that, not like me, and you wouldn’t be so mad as I was, nor do what I did, neither.’

Keane looked at him. ‘Thank you, sarn’t.’

But Ross went away with a heavy heart and knew that it would take something more than sympathy to make his officer see sense.

*

On the fifth day, just as Keane was preparing to write another report on the quantity of ration required for Sanchez’s lancers which would have to come out of their allowance, he was aware of a commotion outside his tent. Martin seemed, along with Silver, to be attempting to prevent someone from entering. And
their actions did not surprise Keane when he saw who that person was.

Tom Morris pushed past the tent flap. ‘James. This is nonsense. Major Grant has been to see me, alerted by your sergeant. This is folly.’

‘Well, it’s no folly of my making, Tom.’

‘You must understand, James. We did not do it to deliberately spite you.’

‘Why then? Why on earth would you even contemplate doing it?’

‘I cannot explain. I only know that she is the dearest thing to me.’

‘As she was to me.’ He turned away, unable to look at Morris. ‘I should call you out.’

‘James, you and I both know that would solve nothing. Surely we can be sensible about this?’

‘Were you sensible with her?’

‘That’s stupid. You’ve lost your reason.’

‘Perhaps I have. I have lost my oldest friend and I have lost the woman I love. Did you not think of loyalty? To a friend? You might at least have told me first and not let me know of it from Major Grant.’

‘James. I cannot undo what has been done. It is too late.’

Keane shook his head. ‘Come back and join us. It can be as it was, Tom.’

Now it was Morris’s turn to refuse. ‘No, James. It can never be as it was, and you know that. I intend to rejoin my regiment. I yearn for the battlefield. Staff work and any amount of spying are not for me, James.’

Keane smiled to himself. ‘Of course I know that. I knew it the moment that I signed you up.’ He paused and said nothing for
some time but seemed to stare into emptiness. Then he turned to Morris. ‘If Kitty wants you, then so be it. Take her with my blessing. I’m old enough to know that when a woman’s mind is made up there is no moving it.’

Morris smiled and clapped Keane on the shoulder. ‘Thank you, dear friend. I cannot tell you how happy that makes me. I have been troubled by this since I first saw her and since she declared her love for me. You may be certain of one thing too: I shall never reveal to her who it was killed her brother.’

‘Thank you.’

Morris spoke again. ‘There is one more thing, though, James. In fact, I would have come to tell you of it even if Grant had not persuaded me.’

‘What is it? Tell me.’

‘It’s Pritchard, James. He’s alive. I’ve seen him.’

‘You have? Alive?’

‘As alive as you or I. I could not get word to you. You are elusive, James.’

‘That is the nature of my position.’

‘He goes by another name.’

Keane sighed. ‘Macnab.’

‘You knew? How?’

‘How stupid I am. How very obvious. Of course. Pritchard is Macnab.’

‘He has died his hair a frightful shade of ginger and adopted spectacles. But it is Pritchard. Of that I have no doubt. In fact, he’s neither Pritchard nor Macnab. He’s as Irish as you, James. His real name’s O’Callaghan.’

At this, Sergeant Ross, who had been standing guard at the tent flap, peered inside.

‘Sorry, sir, but did I hear you mention O’Callaghan?’

‘If you did, Sarn’t Ross, then you ought not to have done. But what of it?’

‘If it’s the same O’Callaghan I knew, he’s a proper bastard, sir. Fought for Boney in Egypt. That’s where I came across him. He led a company of free Irishmen, and what they did doesn’t bear speaking of.’

‘Nevertheless, Ross, do so.’

‘Hate the English, sir, and worse still any good Scots Presbyterian. Jourdan took some of our lads prisoner after Acre and they fell into O’Callaghan’s hands.’ He paused.

‘Go on.’

‘Terrible cruel, sir, he is. General Jourdan had them ready for release back to our lines. Exchange for the same number of Frenchies. O’Callaghan released them all right. Minus their tongues, all of them. Cut them out. Poor buggers.’ He turned to Morris. ‘What’s he look like, sir?’

‘He’s tall, though not as tall as the captain, and he has most distinctive hair. Curly. A great mane.’ He smiled. ‘Of course. He has a scar. You remember, James. Did you ever see him? Running across his cheek. Here.’ He pointed to his own right cheek.

Ross nodded. ‘That’s him, sir. I’d swear it.’

‘What else do you know of him, Ross?’

‘Only that his family is Irish and loyal to the Stuarts. His grandfather served France in what they call the Wild Geese. The Irish brigade. He had family butchered in the rebellion. Back in ninety-eight.’

Keane nodded. ‘Well, if that’s the case, I can see how he might be cruel.’ His own suspicions, it seemed, had been confirmed. ‘Thank you, sarn’t. That’s most useful. Now we know our man.’

Ross left.

‘Well done, Tom. You should reconsider staying with the intelligencers.’

Morris shook his head. ‘I told you, James. I have no future but with the guns.’

‘Well, we must inform Grant of O’Connell’s true identity at once, and the duke of course.’

They left the tent, and as they did so heard a long drum roll. It was close on 6 a.m. Reveille had come and gone and Keane looked about him. The mist had come in thick through the night and lay heavy all around Coimbra and up the road to Bussaco. And in the haze the area of the camp where the guides had made their bivouac, where the ordnance had their park, was in commotion, with orders being shouted from all directions and tents being dropped and stowed. But Keane had the tune now. The drummers were beating ‘to arms’.

‘Sarn’t Ross, what’s this? Where is the army?’

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to say to you these past two days, sir. The army’s gone, sir. Gone up to that ridge to meet the French.’

‘This is it.’ Keane turned to Morris. ‘Too late to inform on Pritchard now. Come on.’

‘But where to, James? We have no fighting unit to join.’

‘Maybe not, but we can still fight, can’t we? I am a soldier. What else can I do when the drums call? We’ll find Craufurd.’

The Ordenanza had gone, led by Pereira and under orders from General Beresford to join a battalion of Portuguese regulars. Von Krokenburgh too had ridden off with his men, to attach the hussars to the 16th Light Dragoons.

So it was merely his own company, his bunch of talented ne’er-do-wells, that Keane assembled now, as the camp disintegrated around them. He set off, on horseback, with Morris at
his side, through the mist, back the way they had only recently come. To Wellington’s chosen ground at Bussaco.

*

It did not take them long to reach the ridge, but by the time they did the mist was clearing. They climbed from the village of Cacemas and soon found themselves on Wellington’s new road running along the reverse slope of the ridge. Keane wondered where Craufurd might be and then, glimpsing a body of green-jacketed troops away to the left flank, he waved the men across behind him.

Entering the little village of Sula they saw a party of staff officers gathered around windmill and Keane trotted over, followed by the others.

Craufurd had seen him coming. ‘Ah, Captain Keane, welcome. I had thought that your work was done for the moment. Should you not be off “exploring” with your friend Colonel Sanchez, over to the south?’ There was a chortle from some of the officers, but Craufurd glared at them. His joke, though dry, had not been intended as a mockery.

Keane shook his head. ‘No, sir. We intend to fight here, sir. Exploring can wait for a day.’

‘Where will you go? You have no regiment.’

‘I was rather hoping that we might be able to join you, sir.’

‘I’m sorry, Keane, I have no place here for scouts. Try the cavalry. Good day to you.’

Keane nodded and turned away. Where, he wondered, could they find a position on the battlefield? How were they to play a part in what was sure to be a decisive battle? A decisive victory.

They turned and began to climb their horses steadily to the top of the ridge. The surface was covered with gorse bushes, rocks and boulders. It was perfect defensive terrain.

*

Keane looked east over the valley and saw nothing but haze. But as it slowly disappeared objects were beginning to come into view, like ghostly ships sailing out of a sea fog. He gasped. For there, where there had been fields and farms, were thousands upon thousands of men. The dust clouds said it all. Together with the glinting steel of fifty thousand bayonets catching the morning sun. It was clear that, while Keane had been sunk in his dark mood, the allied army had been making its way gradually up to the ridge for some days and the crest was topped in both directions by an irregular line of human figures in red, blue, green and brown.

He supposed that he might, on Craufurd’s advice, join von Krokenburgh with the 16th, but Keane had no wish to fight alongside Blackwood’s old regiment.

Better to be among the guerrillas.

Then, struck by sudden inspiration, he turned to Morris. ‘That’s it. We’ll attach ourselves to Sanchez.’

‘Can we do that, d’you suppose, James? I mean, have a proper scrap?’

‘Not strictly speaking. It’s not our role. But if you look at the men on this battlefield, it’s not exactly what you might call a regular army, is it?’ He was right. Wellington’s army was a hodgepodge of nations and calibres of men.

The Guards – 3rd and Coldstream – were there along with some thirty battalions of British redcoats, four from the KGL, sixteen companies of greenjackets, kilted Highlanders and the Portuguese in their thousands. Wellington had cleverly mixed them in with each other so that in one division there would be a brigade of Portuguese and an element of riflemen. It was not a pretty arrangement and the sticklers among the staff had
tut-tutted at it, but in the field Keane knew it would be effective, the stronger, battle-hardened troops stiffening the resolve of the greenshanks to stand their ground under cannon fire as their comrades were blown to shreds beside them.

As Craufurd had told him, Sanchez and his guerrillas had originally been positioned in the south, lest the French should make another attack to flank the army. But, impatient for a proper battle, he had led his cavalry up to the allied right wing, close to the Portuguese, where the duke had been unable to place any horse, and it was here that Keane, having ridden the length of the allied line, finally found them.

Sanchez looked resplendent. Mounted on Massena’s pale grey mare, badges and buckles polished to a sheen, he was a parody of a French officer and the perfect statement of the Spanish contempt for their oppressors.

‘Captain Keane, have you come to join us?’

‘If we may, colonel. It’s a good day for a fight. Wouldn’t want to miss out on this one.’

‘I am pleased to have you. It has been a pleaseure to command your lancers. And we shall meet the French together, just as we promised we would.’

Scanning Keane and his men as he always did, he noticed instantly that it was Martin and not Keane who was carrying the much prized gun. ‘Your boy has your gun, captain. How is this?’

‘It’s of better use to us in his hands. As you have seen for yourself, colonel.’

‘But on the second shot he missed, captain.’

‘There’s a first time for everything, colonel.’

Sanchez laughed and rode across to his men, in their gloriously
various uniforms, for the most part stripped from the bodies of dead Frenchmen.

*

Drums and bugle calls filled the valley below them now. The French were preparing to attack and the pop of musketry told him that the enemy skirmishers had engaged their own. They came up the hill out of the last strands of the mist, towards the centre of the allied line.

The French laboured up the steep hillside, knocking their feet against boulders, dropping muskets, bent double with the effort. And all the time the allied artillery, sixty guns, tore at them with ball, scything down the ranks. But still they came until at last they were at the top. The columns came to a halt and as best they could, across the rocks and gorse, sergeants moved the ranks to form line.

But most of them never competed the manoeuvre. For as they stopped, as Keane watched with pride, the muskets of two brigades were ordered to the present and opened up on them. Smoke blurred the view and then, within seconds, the blue mass had turned tail and was fleeing pell-mell back down the slope.

And as they watched, a single red-coated battalion, led by their colonel, and judging by their colours the 88th, charged with bayonets fixed, downhill into the rear of the French column, turning defeat into disaster.

It was the finest example Keane had ever seen of the use of the tactics taught to the British infantry. The classic method of seeing off an attack by the French. And he had seen enough of them in twenty years. He cheered and the men took it up. And soon the whole field around him rang with cheers as Boney’s bluecoats legged it down the hill and back to their lines.

But, as any general will admit, though a victory might be yours on one part of a battlefield, the battle itself is often very far from won.

The allied guns on the far left wing had opened up now, and looking across the valley Keane saw another mass of men advancing from the French lines towards the ridge. He turned to Morris. ‘Christ, they’re trying another attack. That was only a diversion. Come on, let’s take a look.’

They began to move to the north with the rest of the men and Sanchez’s cavalry behind him. And as they did so, a figure in blue on a dark bay horse galloped past them all fast along the ridge towards the new attack, pursued by a horde of mounted red-coated officers.

Silver spoke up. ‘That’s Nosey, sir. Look. He’s off to direct them hisself. You can bet old Massena won’t do that.’

Sanchez rode up to them. ‘Come on. What are you waiting for? That’s your General Wellington, isn’t it? Don’t you want to join the action?’