Fortune's Bride (39 page)

Thus, he brought the man, under guard, to Sir John and
related the story. Having added a few questions of his own, to determine from
which principality in the Germanies Joseph had come, Sir John promptly sent to
the King’s Own German Legion to obtain a translator from the same area, if
possible. Fortunately, a sergeant from a neighboring town was available. At
hearing his own language, Joseph let loose a torrent of words, occasionally
bursting into tears, but the story was essentially the same except for some
details and the added information about his having fallen ill, during which
time he had become separated from his beloved Bertha. Robert howled when he
heard the name, “Bear-ta” as Joseph pronounced it. No wonder Bear had answered
so happily to Esmeralda’s designation. Sir John laughed too, and then ordered
that Joseph be taken away by his compatriot and fed, but kept under guard.

When the man was gone, Sir John said to Robert, “I tend to
agree with you. I think the fellow was telling the truth and does hate the
French.” Then he paused and added thoughtfully, “These roving performers are to
be found everywhere. I wonder if the man might be useful to us. Let him stay in
Sergeant Landsheit’s company for a day or two. Then we need only see what the
sergeant thinks and whether he can convince Joseph to serve us. We could give
him some money and let him go, promising to return his animal to him if he will
bring us information about the French. He wouldn’t have to go near them, just
transmit word of what the Spanish are saying. Probably it will be a waste of
good money, but there is a chance… And intelligence is so bad that even lies
may help.”

Robert nodded. It was, indeed, very difficult to obtain
information. Town officials who should have passed along word of French
foraging parties or units moving in their area either did not do so at all or
sent word by couriers who seemed to think they were overworked if they traveled
ten miles a day. However small the chance that Joseph would even try to spy for
them, it was worth a few guineas and a few hours of Landsheit’s time. Robert
passed along the word to the sergeant and was not surprised to hear two days later
that Joseph had agreed. What would surprise him was seeing the man return with
anything but a string of lies and excuses.

What Robert had not expected was that Joseph would not
return at all. He might even have reported this to Sir John had his mind not
been taken up with more important matters. Even before they had discussed what
their action could do to assist those defending Madrid, the city had fallen
into French hands. The news was discussed with groans of dismay, but to the
ADCs’ surprise, Sir John did not change his plans or mention retreat again.
Although it was the capital, it was only a city, he said. No Spanish army had
been inside it, and the central junta had also escaped—except for those who had
traitorously opened the gates to the French. Spanish resistance was not
entirely dead, and he was determined to give it what assistance he could.

Thus, the army began to move. The cavalry, under Lord Paget,
was already out forming a screen behind which, on December 11, the infantry
marched. On December 13, Moore and his staff reached Alaejos. Robert’s
contingent—now much increased from the single baggage mule with which he had
started—included M’Guire leading Robert’s horses, Carlos leading Luisa and
Bear, and Molly leading a second mule, which Esmeralda had purchased for her so
she could ride if she tired.

Nonetheless, this march had been less pleasant. The warm
spell that had briefly touched the end of November had given way not only to
cold but to heavy rain. Nor was Alaejos as large a town as Salamanca, so that
quarters were necessarily more cramped and less elegant. Esmeralda valiantly
did her best, but the room was still cold, damp, and rather dirty when Robert
came in. He was filthy himself, soaked by the thin mud splashed up by his own
and other horses’ hooves, but he did not complain when Esmeralda offered only a
small pot of hot water. It was the best their little hearth would do, and a
minor miracle at that, considering that the firewood was soaked.

However, when there was a knock on the door only moments
after he had stripped off his clothing and begun to wash, he did mutter
imprecations. Esmeralda ran down to tell the orderly that Robert would come as
soon as he had got some clothing on, but instead she cried out, “Joseph!”

The guard, who had the juggler in an unkind grip, relaxed it
somewhat. “You
do
know the man, Mrs. Moreton?”

“Yes, he’s Bear’s owner,” Esmeralda replied.

Involuntarily the guard smiled, and his grip relaxed even
more. Almost every man in the whole army knew Bear. Carlos, with the excuse of
exercising the animal, had shown her off all over the camp. The guard shook
Joseph, but not too hard, and asked why he didn’t explain himself instead of
just saying Captain Moreton’s name over and over.

“He can’t explain himself, Sergeant,” Esmeralda interposed
quickly. “He can’t even understand you. He only speaks German, and a few words
of Spanish and French. You can leave him with me.” She saw at once that the
suggestion had made the guard uneasy, and added, “Captain Moreton’s above-stairs,
and M’Guire is just behind the stable, but come up if you wish. Yes, perhaps
you had better. Captain Moreton will want to know when and where Joseph
appeared.”

Joseph had not understood a word of what had been said,
except for the various names, but he realized that he had been recognized and
accepted because of the difference in the way the sergeant was gripping him.
Thus, he went up the stairs most readily, and as soon as he saw Robert, he tore
open the hem of his ragged coat, fumbled within, and withdrew a packet of
papers, which he thrust into Robert’s hand. Robert glanced down at them,
started to say something to Joseph, and then drew his breath in sharply.

“Get the man something to eat and drink if he wants it,” he
said to Esmeralda, “and try to explain to him that we will keep our word. He
may leave with Bear tomorrow if he wishes, or he may remain with us. I wish I
knew where the Second Dragoons were so we could get hold of Landsheit.
Sergeant, do you know anyone who can speak German?”

The sergeant had seen Robert’s reaction to the documents he
held, and he said, “I’ll try to find someone, sir.”

“If you do, bring him to headquarters. I’ll be there.”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant saluted, then sketched another
salute, the kind one comrade gives another, to Joseph, and added, “Sorry, mate,
I didn’t know you was on our side,” as he left.

Robert then tried to shrug into a dry coat, but he needed
Esmeralda’s help because he refused to put down the packet he was holding. His
mind was so full of hopes of what it might contain that he went out the door
without another word and had to return to ask Esmeralda if she was afraid to be
left alone with Joseph. She smiled and shook her head no and began by signs and
a few words to suggest that the man eat and try to dry his clothing in front of
the small fire.

Joseph had begun to look alarmed when Robert was so
obviously startled by the documents he had brought, but he had relaxed again
when the sergeant left, and now he smiled at Esmeralda. He seemed to understand
that it was a mark of trust to have been left alone with her, and he tried hard
to show that he was respectful and would not approach too near or threaten her.
Esmeralda found it difficult to get him to understand what Robert had said, but
even though that took considerable time Robert had not returned. It was growing
very late, and Esmeralda had not the faintest idea what to do with the man. She
had just about decided to take him to the stable and allow him to sleep there
with Bear, when there was a knocking at the door again.

It was the sergeant who had brought Joseph, this time
accompanied by the German translator Robert had sent him to find. They had come
to take Joseph to headquarters, the sergeant said, but he was smiling, and the
explanation offered Joseph in German seemed to satisfy him. When they were
gone, Esmeralda undressed slowly and went to bed, but she could not sleep, and
Robert found her, when he returned near dawn, sitting beside the fire.

“What are you doing awake?” he asked, and then, without for
a reply, went on. “Picking up Bear was the best day’s work I’ve ever done, I
think. Do you know what Joseph brought? It was a dispatch to Soult, and it
contained all kinds of plans and orders and details about men and guns—a gold
mine of information. They
do
think we’re back in Portugal, and Soult was
ordered to overrun Léon with two infantry divisions and four cavalry regiments.
Oh, Lord, this is a piece of luck. We know pretty well where every part of the
French army is, how strong it is, and where it’s going—and they don’t even know
we exist.”

“My goodness,” Esmeralda exclaimed, “however did Joseph lay
his hands on such a thing?”

“By a miraculous accident. Oh, we would have gotten it
anyway, but probably three weeks from now when it would not have been the
slightest use. Let me tell it in order. Joseph was making his way—”

“What have you done with him, Robert?” Esmeralda
interrupted. “He seems like a very gentle, almost innocent person, perhaps not
too clever—”

Robert’s laugh cut her off. “You’re quite right. I would say
he was downright simple.” Then he frowned. “In fact, I think the other members
of the troupe sort of took care of him. I tried to convince him to stay with
us, but he refused.”

“Couldn’t you make him understand that it would be safer,
that he wouldn’t have to fight or anything like that?”

“Oh, he understood that, but he seems to be afraid of so
large a concentration of armed men. You see, the troupe he was with was
entertaining the French, and most of the soldiers were very good to them, paid
them well, and enjoyed their performances. Then they ran into a group of
bullies who teased Bear, mistreated the two women, beat up the men when they
protested, and wouldn’t let them go. My guess is that they let Joseph go into
the woods only because they thought he wasn’t bright enough to do anything on
his own. He’s afraid of running into the same thing in this army and, of
course, he has been roughed up a bit twice. Braun and Landsheit tried to
explain to him, but…he’s just frightened.”

“But what will happen to him and to Bear?”

“He has either friends or relatives not too far from here,”
Robert soothed. “He wouldn’t say where. Maybe he’s afraid we’ll come and get
him or… I don’t know. Anyway, that’s what the troupe he was with was doing in
Spain, visiting these people and paying their way by traveling around and
performing during the summer. I guess they didn’t expect to get caught up in a
war.”

“Do you think it’s true, Robert?” Esmeralda asked anxiously.
“I mean, that he has somewhere to go? Could he have said it just so you’d allow
him to leave?”

Robert shook his head. “It’s true enough. We didn’t really
press him, of course. Why should we? Anyway, he can certainly take advantage of
a situation—which was how he got the dispatches.” He smiled into her worried
eyes. “You’ll feel better when I tell you.”

“I hope so. Frankly, I don’t feel Joseph is any more fit to
be on his own than Carlos.”

“Oh, yes he is,” Robert insisted. “At least Joseph doesn’t
look for trouble unless it’s forced on him.” Then he grinned. “But he
is
simple. It never occurred to him to lie low and come back to us with a pack of
lies that he could blame on bad information others had given him—which is what
I expected. He went off toward, of all places, Madrid, to find something to
tell us.”

“Oh my God,” Esmeralda cried.

“Well, he apparently had been there before, and he had no
way of knowing the French had taken the city. After all, we didn’t know
ourselves when he was here. He said it was the biggest city he had ever seen,
and he decided, logically enough, that it would be the best place to get
information.” Robert paused and laughed. “I guess it’s true that God takes care
of babes and idiots. Apparently he got rides quite easily from people who
pitied him. Anyway, he had been dropped at a posthouse at Valdestillos just
when a mob of peasants recognized some poor French ADC, set on him, and
murdered him. Joseph seems to have understood that all right because he hung
around close by. The Spaniards put the dispatches aside while they were arguing
about what to do with the body and dividing up the money, so Joseph just helped
himself to them.”

“But how did he know they were important?” Esmeralda asked
in a wondering voice.

Robert laughed again. “It was the seals. To him, any paper
with seals is important. My God, it could have been a deed to property or a
list of promotions.” He sighed and stretched. “Can you make some good strong
tea for me, Merry? I’ve got to go out again. Everything’s been changed around,
of course. Sir John and Colborne are writing as fast as they can drive their
pens, and the rest of us will be riding all over the landscape with new
orders.”

On December 14, loaded with gifts of food, money, and a
sturdy mule, Joseph and Bear took their leave. Carlos wept bitterly into Bear’s
fur, and Esmeralda sniffled a trifle herself, as she scratched behind Bear’s
ears for the last time. However, she was as relieved as she was worried. Bear
had been growing more and more sluggish as the year advanced into winter, and
she knew it would not have been long before they could not rouse the animal and
induce her to travel with them. Then they would have faced the agonizing choice
of killing her or leaving her to fend for herself, possibly to be found and
mistreated. All in all, letting Joseph go off seemed the least of the evils,
particularly since he appeared happy and confident.

The next day they themselves set out toward their new
destination. At first everything went very well. The weather had changed. The
rain had stopped, though it was bitterly cold. For the army, the drop in
temperature was mostly advantageous, as the roads, which had previously been
sloughs of mud, hardened to a good marching surface. By December 20, they had
gone as far north as Mayorga and connected with Baird’s column. In addition,
the cavalry had a series of minor successes, cutting off several detachments of
French dragoons, capturing a colonel and more than one hundred men, even
raiding into Valladolid itself, where a hundred hussars of the Eighteenth
carried off the intendant of the province and three hundred thousand
reals
from the treasury.