Read Online Send Me Safely Back Again by Adrian Goldsworthy - Free Book Online Page B

opened again and he was presented to the Doña Margarita, he bowed low. She gave him a smile which won his heart. Her mantilla had slipped back alittle to show her round, pretty face and the coils of her long black hair fastened up in braids. Although the black dress of mourning was modest, it nevertheless betrayed the line of a full bosom.
    Her French was also excellent and completed her overwhelming conquest of the light cavalry officer’s admiration. She spoke lightly of the savages of the new world, and presented him with a little leather pouch, decorated with beadwork.
    ‘The women of the tribes make them for the bravest warriors to carry their musket balls,’ she explained.
    After twenty minutes they left, and were escorted by a dozen chasseurs until they reached the inn two leagues away.
    ‘That lady’s a cool one,’ said Dobson as the carriage sped along at a good trot. ‘Pretty too.’
    ‘And you a newly married man!’ joked Williams, who suspected that the veteran was right, although he had yet to enjoy a very clear view of La Doña Margarita. At least her condition ought to prevent any misbehaviour by Wickham.
    ‘Don’t mean you stop looking.’ Dobson’s wife of many years had died at Christmas, crushed underneath the wheels of a wagon during the retreat. For a while the veteran had been shattered. Williams did not see it, but Hanley and Pringle had a haunted look when they told him of what had happened. Yet he recovered, and in the army way had taken a new bride when they were on board ship sailing away from Spain. The new Mrs Dobson was herself the widow of a sergeant, and a very religious and proper woman. It was an unlikely combination, and yet they seemed happy. The veteran had quit drinking on his new wife’s insistence. In the past, he had been repeatedly promoted and broken for drunkenness. Pringle had risked raising him to corporal immediately, and Williams suspected that sergeant’s rank would soon follow. No man was more capable when sober.
    ‘No, she’s a good lass.’ Williams assumed Dobson still meant the Spanish aristocrat. ‘Wouldn’t trust her an inch,’ he added. ‘Nor our major, of course, or them other two that sent us off.’
    ‘I see no reason to doubt Colonel D’Urban as anything other than a gallant officer,’ said the shocked Williams.
    ‘They can be the worst, sir.’ The veteran laughed. ‘But if this cart is carrying only news then I’m a Dutchman. Look how low it hangs on the springs.’
    Williams did not know what to say or think, but experience taught him that the old soldier’s suspicions were usually sound.
    Dobson looked around at the French cavalrymen riding as escort. He glanced at Williams and then smiled happily. ‘Still, I will say it makes a change from marching!’

5
     
    H anley had never seen so much death. For as far as he could see in any direction there were bodies. Last May he had fled the massacre in Madrid. In August he fought at Roliça and Vimeiro and had been spattered with the blood, brains and flesh of men ripped to pieces by cannonballs. During the winter’s retreat he had seen the frozen corpses lying in the snow, many with trickles of wine still dribbling from their lips from when they had drunk themselves senseless and let the cold claim them.
    He had seen nothing on this scale.
    ‘There’s Jacques,’ said a lean-faced hussar with pigtails on either side of his forehead and his dirty brown hair tied back with a black ribbon. ‘He’ll not have to worry about finding wine any more.’ Four troopers in the brown and sky blue of the Chamborant Hussars escorted the thirty prisoners back across the plains of Medellín. A man in the same uniform lay stretched on the ground with a great stain of almost black blood on his chest. His eyes stared blankly up at the evening sky.
    The vultures were the worst. Scruffy, thin, and more grey than black, they had come from nowhere and now there seemed to be at least one for every corpse. He